Treading Water

I feel like that's what I'm currently doing in SWTOR, which is why things have been a bit quiet on this blog. I wanted to reflect a bit on why that is.

Primarily, there are two things going on: The first is simply that I'm spending less time in SWTOR in general, just because there are other things I'd rather be doing at the moment. People who also follow my WoW blog will have seen that I've still been active there for example.

I hate comparing those two MMOs because they do very different things on a very different scale and appeal to me in different ways, but it's hard to deny that WoW simply has a lot on offer right now, and if you like at least some of the new content they're currently releasing (which I do), there are plenty of reasons to log in.

Comparatively, I'm in a bit of a lull with SWTOR. Galactic Season 10 is going on of course, but as I already hinted at in a previous post, I've been less enthused by that than I expected. Every week I look at the available objectives and every week there's little that excites me (unless the master mode flashpoint objective is up). Mostly I've been running a lot of dailies, which is not one of my favourite activities and can be quite dull and time-consuming across multiple servers.

I've been really surprised by just how much this season's objective structure has been bothering me. I think it's because I'd kind of settled into a pattern of progressing the season - on the other servers in particular - in a way that wasn't necessarily optimal but allowed me to advance unrelated personal goals at the same time.

To give an example of what I'm talking about, if there were weekly objectives to do fifteen missions as a smuggler, kill one hundred mobs with a healer companion and do fifteen dynamic encounters, the "optimal" way to tackle this in the least amount of time would've been to do fifteen dynamic encounters as a smuggler with a healer companion. However, I still had the freedom to go, "nah, I don't feel like doing DEs this week" and just progress a smuggler character's class story instead. That choice was slower and I'd only get two out of the three objectives done, but it was more enjoyable to me that way.

The strict focus on Altuur and PH4-LNX this season really locks me into doing activities that work with those two (as I already bemoaned in the post linked above), and there just aren't as many options, which is simply a bit of a drain on me. I've repeatedly found myself wondering whether I really want to keep at this on multiple servers, but then I look at my progress and see that I'm already past the halfway mark everywhere and surely I can just hang in there a little longer... not wanting to break a streak can be one hell of a drug.

The sad irony is that I actually thought that Master's Enigma, the last story update, was really great and I still haven't written a post about it because I've only played through it once. I've got a draft which I meant to finish after playing through it another two or three times, but... seasons objectives need doing now! 

I thought a patch with both a story update and a new season launching at the same time would be a cool thing, but in practice it's kind of stopped me from enjoying the story as fully as I would've liked, as I have only so many hours a week I want to devote to SWTOR and the FOMO aspect of Galactic Seasons has led me to prioritise that over replaying the story, even if it's less fun, which is just a weird situation to be in.

I expect that I'll push through at my current pace until the end of the season, but whenever GS11 comes around I'll need to have a long, hard think about whether I want to continue bothering with it beyond my home server.