Season Launch

Sooo... since I expressed my disappointment about the last dev stream, I've been feeling a little demotivated. However, the actual launch date for the new season followed soon after, and I'm not so disenchanted that I won't take part in it! I might do less if I don't find it that fun, but that's not a foregone conclusion (sometimes things turn out to be more or less fun than I originally expected).

It was certainly interesting to get some more details over the past few days that hadn't been revealed on the stream yet. I was kind of fascinated by how many people I saw going nuts over the thigh high boots reward for example... always makes me feel a bit alienated from the rest of the player base when I'm reminded that I don't care nearly as much about the Space Barbie aspect as a lot of others apparently do. I mean, I like my characters to look nice too, but I really don't have much of an eye for detail in that particular area. There was also a patch note about moving parts on helmets in cinematics that I saw some people get excited about and I didn't even know what they were talking about.

The main thing that caught my eye was that the DvL bosses are making a return for Season 8, both as weekly objectives and for the meta achievement, which made me scream a little on the inside. Don't get me wrong, I was all in favour of bringing them back in GS7, but after months of death zergs on Hoth I'd had more than enough of them. Learning that I'd be back to revisit them every week for this season as well made me wish the meta achievement would've been to just run 40 uprisings instead or whatever, even though I'm not a fan of those either. Just strikes me as a classic case of "be careful what you wish for" - things could get worse!

Yesterday the patch actually dropped, and the first thing I heard about it was a guildie complaining that he wasn't earning any Conquest points. A forum thread on the matter narrowed it down to the affected people being players who still owned multiples of any strongholds from the server merges years ago (such as two copies of the Coruscant apartment). This included me.

It was kind of a mix of funny and sad, as I believe this was the second patch in a row where they tried to fix something Conquest-related and then broke something else instead. At least last time my points were only reduced, not completely zeroed out...

As someone whose gameplay is very much driven by Conquest, I decided to just not play on Darth Malgus that evening and focus on dusting off my legacies on the other servers instead (where I didn't have any duplicate strongholds and therefore wasn't affected by the bug). I'll say that I like the new weekly objective to do dynamic encounters, as that's easy to do on multiple servers without feeling repetitive. Also, since dynamic encounters still count as missions, it also has nice synergy with another objective this week to complete 15 missions as a smuggler or bounty hunter.

I was a bit unsure before going to bed whether I should just go and deactivate my duplicate strongholds as some people had done. It apparently worked as a bug fix, and I hadn't actually used them much in ages, but at the same time they're something unique that you probably can't get back once deactivated. I decided to hedge my bets and hope for a hotfix overnight, and in this instance the devs did not disappoint, as I woke up to the problem having been fixed, meaning I was able to earn some Conquest points and complete the first daily objective of the season the next morning before the reset.