SWTOR Does Currencies Well

The other week I saw this post on the World of Warcraft subreddit complaining about how the new expansion, which has been out for less than three months, already has people collecting over 20 different currencies. I thought this was a valid sentiment, but I'm not here to complain about WoW - instead thinking about the subject actually made me appreciate how well Star Wars: The Old Republic has been handling currencies over the years.

Doing a quick count of my in-game currencies, leaving out credits and Cartel Coins, I counted 35 of them. If that makes you go "that's still a lot, and more than 20", let me highlight that the above post was about new currencies introduced over the course of two months. In the context of SWTOR, I'm counting overall currencies, in a game that is approaching its 15th birthday. That's fewer than three currencies introduced per year! Though that's of course just a made-up average and not really how any of this works.

 

From my point of view, there have been two keys to SWTOR's good handling of currencies over the years:

1. They have not been afraid to remove currencies after some time when they became obsolete. (This is something WoW could learn from I think.)
2. Whenever a currency does get removed, the conversion of anything you've got left is simple and painless (usually it just turns into credits). This has never been a problem in WoW as far as I'm aware, but I had some nightmarish experiences related to the subject in Neverwinter, where they'd usually make you manually trade the old currency for a new one at an obscure vendor, you'd end up with a small leftover number clogging up your currency tab forever anyway, and worst case there'd be some kind of trap where you'd end up being misled into being wasteful.

Going back to the first point though, SWTOR has probably removed more currencies from the game than it has left right now. Back at launch, every planet had its own planetary commendation for example (Coruscant commendation, Taris commendation, Nar Shaddaa commendation etc.) which could be traded in on the fleet for level-appropriate gear pieces. To be honest, this never worked great, because even if you spent enough time on the planet to accumulate enough commendations to buy a piece of gear, it was probably already a bit low level for you by the time you had enough to buy it. Later they were all converted to a single currency simply called "planetary commendation", which worked better, but eventually they got rid of that too - the vendors that used to take them still exist, but now simply sell you their gear for credits. Wasn't that hard, was it?

That's not to say that I don't think there isn't still some room for improvement. Wait, was that a triple negative just now? I think there are things that can still be improved is what I meant to say. I'm not convinced Bessi needed five new currencies for example. There are also some old currencies that I think are pretty unnecessary and were never very useful to begin with, such as Eternal Championship Trophies and Ziost Memory Holographs, because they are so extremely limited both in how you earn them and in what you can use them for. I do get that it might not be worth going back to change them now, however.

Still, overall SWTOR has done a great job at keeping currency bloat in check, so that the number of them in the currency tab shouldn't be as overwhelming as it is in other MMOs of a similar age.