The Blog's 14th Year Was a Bit of a Dud

Last year I made a big song and dance about how prolific I'd been on the blog (more than 100 posts written for the first time since 2019!), so it makes me a bit sad to have to admit that this year has been the complete opposite, with my posting frequency hitting a new low of around five posts per month, for an annual total of just over sixty.

This puts me a fair bit behind even the second least active year of this blog, 2022, when a last-minute delay to the launch of Legacy of the Sith completely sapped me of motivation in January, and then I had a major funk towards the end of the year due to the bad state operations were in (one of my top three worst times in SWTOR for sure).

It's kind of weird because I didn't really feel particularly bad about SWTOR this year at all. It was still my most played game of the year by a mile, and I don't really recall any periods during which I was having a bad time. The voice actors' strike and lack of story updates just made it less interesting to talk about, somehow. Doing dynamic encounters all year was fine but simply didn't inspire me to do a lot of writing about the game, good or bad. It's almost as if my enjoyment of SWTOR doesn't correlate to my urge to write about it in a linear way:

• When I'm having a great time with it, I definitely want to write about it all the time. I have so many thoughts and I want to get them all on the page while the going is hot!
• When I'm having a really bad time (rare, but it has happened), it also makes sense that I don't feel like writing very much. Maybe I'll make one or two posts to vent but then I'd rather focus on other things that I actually enjoy.
• However, when I'm having a mostly okay time, like I had for most of this year, it's also kind of killer for my inspiration. I may have some fun playing in the moment, but it doesn't leave me with a lot to say about the experience.
• Conversely, when I'm having a slightly annoying time, this is another motivator for me to write a lot, because there are still things I like but they are just being dragged down by all these flaws, and I feel like I basically have to cry out for the devs to fix them so things can be good again. (I suspect the "Knights of" expansions were a prime example of this, as there's no other expansion that I've talked about as much.)

That said, as much as I enjoy psychoanalysing myself, I was also stressed in real life for quite a few months, and played a fair amount of WoW, so those things also took away from this blog in terms of both free time and motivation.

Regardless! Enough of the general yapping, let's look at some of the things I actually did write:

January and February saw the last two installments of my "Around the SWTOR-sphere" column before I dropped it. I still think it's a great concept and there absolutely is lots of community activity that deserves highlighting, but what with my general lack of energy, a project that very much required loads of it was naturally the first thing to go.

I also started the year by writing a wishlist for features I'd like to see in 2025, none of which became reality. Don't worry, I'm used to it. As I was still somewhat energised from patch 7.6 in December, I wrote top ten lists about the new dynamic encounters on Hoth and Tatooine. Even though I waited with writing them to make sure that I had sufficient experience with all the encounters under my belt, I've got to say that a year later, I'd definitely change some of my rankings anyway.

I also wrote a post called "SWTOR Classic - an Attempt at a Realistic Assessment", which surprisingly turned into one of my most popular posts in terms of random Google traffic. Or maybe it shouldn't be a surprise, considering that it's a very niche topic that not a lot of people talk about but that would definitely cross the minds of at least a small subset of players. Lest you think that it being popular in terms of Google must mean that SWTOR Classic is something the masses are secretly craving, we're still talking about fewer than one hundred hits per month here.

By February I was already struggling for inspiration a bit, reaching for subjects like my pet peeves in PvP or whether the newest Cartel Market bundle was good value. When Galactic Season 8's theme was announced to be uprisings, I was not thrilled. In March I also had reason to be sad when the OotiniCast shut down. By April I was talking openly about how unmotivated I was feeling. 

In May I tried to rank all previous Galactic Seasons by how much I enjoyed them. Patch 7.7 dropped and like I said above, I had some fun but it felt lacking without a story update.

At least June was a good month for me, as I got to celebrate earning the Dread Master title from completing the timed run for Dread Palace master mode and my guild conquered Belsavis during Total Galactic War (in a rather degenerate way), finally earning me the legacy title "The Galaxy Conqueror".

I made people come and pose with me on FA-1 Command Walkers to commemorate the occasion. 

In July I had a decent time with the Night Life event after the devs finally made casino chips a legacy-wide currency, and I had a lot of fun joining the New Outriders for a guild event on Star Forge.

August saw me completing the timed run in master mode Scum & Villainy, and Galactic Season 9 launched, bringing with it the removal of cut scenes in the group finder, which I was not too happy about, even if I understood the devs' motivation. Nonetheless, I enjoyed this season's theme a lot more than the previous one and felt that it was off to a good start.

September saw me hitting a few more personal milestones, such as completing all the hidden achievements related to the dynamic encounter "Trial by Fire" on Hoth and hitting legacy level 50 on the Shae Vizla server. (Yes, I'm still there!) I also wrote the super-nostalgic post "10 Moments in SWTOR's History for Which You Had to Be There", which I'm still pretty proud of.

In October I talked about how people shouldn't be too freaked out about the EA buyout just yet, the success of date nights, and how I thought the special Czerka stims used in the last two Galactic Seasons weren't working out so great.

November mostly consisted of more talk about running flashpoints for GS9, until December finally gave us patch 7.8 and the story update we were originally meant to get a year ago. I also got to round out the year by defeating Dread Master Brontes on master mode, which has probably made 2025 one of my most successful years in terms of ticking off challenging old ops achievements.

We'll see how I'll do in terms of blogging in 2026. After this year's low, I'd imagine that the only way is up!