PvP Season 10 Ponderings

I haven't talked about PvP seasons in a while, mostly because the devs haven't changed anything about them since stretching out the reward track back in season six and the objectives are always the same, so there isn't really much to talk about from my point of view.

I also still have the same concerns about the state of PvP that I elaborated on in this post from two years ago, primarily as far as the state of queues is concerned. I guess things have at least remained stable, as it's been two years and I'm still managing to get both my warzone and my arena weeklies done, though the lowbie queues still feel like they take forever. It's particularly bad when I'm approaching the top end of the lowbie bracket and have to make sure to not accidentally out-level it before I'm ready, meaning I have to twiddle my thumbs while waiting for matches to pop instead of at least doing some quests in the meantime.

It makes me wonder whether I wouldn't enjoy the PvP season more if I just stopped trying to go for the arena achievement, like I did in a few of the early PvP seasons... but I do kind of like the gameplay (in the lowbie brackets at least) and the extra rewards for completing the meta achievement are so massive it really feels like leaving money on the table to skip just this one part of it.

In general, PvP is just suffering from feeling a bit stale at this point in my opinion. Did you know that it's been close to eight years since we last got a new warzone map? The last time we got a new PvP gameplay mode was with the Proving Grounds over ten years ago. Even the introduction of PvP seasons happened three and a half years ago at this point - and yes, I still miss my MVP votes. I get that the SWTOR team is small and that they have a lot on their plate as it is, but still... I also have a lot of things to spend my time on as a player, and PvP with nothing new happening is definitely getting a bit boring. I wonder if 8.0 will include anything interesting for PvPers?

Anyway, so as not to sound all doom and gloom, jumping into PvP again for the start of the season has also been a reminder of what I do still love about it. Like pugging, it's a bit of a window into the server community, showing you which guilds are very active, who's that one guy that seems to play absolutely every single day, and so on and so forth. (Back in the day, PvP was how I found the guild that Mr Commando and I now lead together, so don't underestimate the ways in which it can bring people together.)

I particularly love seeing all the "meme" characters with ridiculous names or looks - I'm not always a fan of that kind of thing, but in the context of PvP I do tend to find it funny. Try telling anyone to focus fire the guy with the below name for example:

I was also amused to see "Agent Mako" looking exactly like the bounty hunter companion, and chuckled at "Caterina de'medic" the Commando healer. Only today I faced off against Spiderman in Huttball. Sometimes that kind of thing manages to take the sting out of even a bad loss.

And of course, there are the matches that are just super memorable. Like the one I dubbed "closest Novare Coast win ever", which we won with only 2% integrity left on our own bunker, and when the enemy's bunker hit zero they had just killed off our last defender and were already three quarters of the way into flipping one of our turrets. They were just seconds too slow!

Or the Voidstar I played on my Merc healer alt where in a highly unusual turn of events, the enemy left me almost completely alone for most of the match. That practically never happens, and I remember thinking "I wonder what kinds of healing numbers I'll end up doing when left to my own devices like this" and the answer was over fifteen million. I was pretty chuffed! (And we won.)

Legacy Reborn's Potential Gameplay Implications

I'm really keen to do a full review of Legacy Reborn's story, but I think I'll need a few more playthroughs for that, so in the meantime I'd like to talk about another topic related to 7.9's story update. I originally meant to post this after the review, but it's much easier to write so I'll do it first.

Note that this will still contain spoilers for Legacy Reborn's ending, so don't read on if that's something you want to avoid!

So the story ends with Malgus activating Heta Kol's machine to call out to the galaxy's Force users whether we like it or not, which will surely have a major impact on 8.0's primary narrative. However, as someone with a trooper main there was a detail in the final cut scene that I found very interesting: our previously purely tech using classes are affected by the machine's call as well and suddenly feel the Force, which is reflected in our character reflexively holding back a rock that's about to fall down on our heads.

I didn't manage to take a screenshot on my main, but here's the equivalent moment on my agent alt. 

Now, I didn't think that was too big a deal initially - while I've always been adamant that I don't want my main to be a Force user and disliked the way KotFE treated all player characters largely as if they were, that storyline did also leave us with every character displaying at least a bit of Force sensitivity in the story, as evidenced by things like the extra action button in KotFE chapter 12 that lets you tame an animal companion for part of your journey, or the way you reflexively shield yourself against Arcann's attacks in the final confrontation with him at the end of chapter 16.

I don't think it's ever been made explicitly clear whether that was just Valkorion using his powers while he was possessing us or whether he left us with a degree of "residual" Force sensitivity anyway even after being expelled. Either way, our character holding back a rock was definitely a step up in power levels (lifting rocks isn't easy, just ask Flingeld) but still, it's not like we're suddenly all Jedi or Sith now. I do trust the devs enough that I'm pretty sure we won't suddenly be shoehorned into that in 8.0, though I can imagine our sudden enhanced abilities coming up in conversation.

I did find myself wondering how having a stronger sense of the Force would affect my character's combat abilities, concluding that she'd still be using her weapon primarily but could maybe learn a few Force tricks to help her out along the way. And she would just be one of many in the same predicament.

Which then got me thinking about combat styles! We know that we're never going to get a new origin story, but since 7.0 split classes into origin stories and combat styles, a new combat style seemed a lot more doable. Most of the time I've seen people talk about how they'd like to have a tech class with a blade, similar to how some companions already work (e.g. Tanno Vik or Broonmark), but I realised that Legacy Reborn instead feels like the perfect setup for a tech combat style with some Force abilities.

The great thing about that would be that unlike giving tech users a blade, it would still be fully compatible with the existing story cut scenes since you'd still have the same weapon, the Force abilities would just be an extra thing to use outside cut scenes.

There would be some kinks to work out - they'd have to make it possible to change combat styles for one thing, as currently you can only add a second one but then you're stuck, and many players probably already have two. Plus from a story point of view it would be weird for a new character to be a Force-using smuggler on Ord Mantell I guess, so maybe there'd need to be some kind of restriction on when you can start using this new combat style? Then again, it's probably no weirder than Jedi shooting lightning on Tython, which is also allowed now, so...

I don't know whether I'm just building castles in the sky thinking about this, but it just seems like such an obvious idea once you think about it, I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone else bring it up yet. I'm very curious to hear what else the devs officially announce for 8.0 now that 7.9's cat is out of the bag so to speak. 

Galactic Season 10 Review & GS 11 Plans

We've got a little less than two months left of Galactic Season 10, but I'm once again getting close to completing all my personal goals (I've got about 20 weekly objectives left to do for the meta on Darth Malgus, and the other servers are all 5-10 levels away from completing the basic track), so I wanted to take a look back at how things went.

Sadly there's no two ways about it: this has been my least favourite season for a while. I didn't think it was going to be this bad when it was announced, but the objective structure just did not work for me at all, as I originally discussed in my first impressions post. Galactic Seasons have always encouraged me to go out of my comfort zone a bit and I was fine with that, but this season in particular was so far out I could barely spot the borders of my comfort zone in the distance.

In the past, I'd usually complete at least one or two weekly objectives early in the week without even trying, just by being active and doing other things, but this season that just hasn't worked at all. I'd log in on Saturday morning to see where I'm at and find that I'd literally be on 0/7 with not even partial progress towards anything. To be clear, this might have been a me thing and others may have found this season's objectives a breeze to complete, but for this veteran player at least it was just no good.

(I also still can't believe they made me kill all the Dark vs Light bosses a fourth time. At the end of Season 8 I wrote: "And by god, if they ask us to kill all the DvL bosses a fourth time... I actually don't know how to finish this sentence, but I still hope they come up with something different for us to do next time." Then they gave us a one-season break from them, just to bring them back again for Season 10.)

Naturally, all this has meant that my cross-server play experience also got worse. I wasn't upset enough to stop, but only because I didn't really want to abandon the progress I'd already made. I did however resolve to not do the next season on multiple servers, since we already know that it's going to be very similar in terms of structure.

In some ways, this has been kind of difficult to admit to myself, because I've been doing this whole cross-server seasons thing for over four years at this point. I like habits and routines, which is why I can find it very difficult to break them once they are fully formed. And it wasn't just a habit, it was genuinely fun... at times.

I've come to realise that I've probably been a slowly boiling frog in regards to doing seasons on multiple servers for some time now. When I first started doing it back in 2022, it was just a silly and novel way to enjoy the game. I wasn't that serious about it; I was just delighted by how easy Galactic Season 2 had been to progress compared to Season 1, so it seemed nothing but logical to follow a guildie's example and do the whole thing again on another server. I was also prevented from going too crazy by the fact that I didn't have any max-level characters on many of the other servers, so objectives to run dailies and the like were not even an option yet. I needed to use the buyout option for several levels to actually complete the track everywhere.

During Season 3 I got really into it and even pushed myself towards completing 100 weeklies on every server, but basically realised immediately afterwards that this had been a bit too much and that I probably wouldn't want to do that again (until Season 9 that is). In general, I experienced a pattern of pushes and pulls as far as Galactic Seasons go, being excited and binging on them some weeks while approaching something close to burnout in others.

For a while I thought this was all on me and needing to be able to regulate my game time better, but I've realised there's also the fact that my legacies on the other servers have matured over the years. In my early days of playing there, the whole experience was very exciting, seasons or no seasons: learning the culture of different servers, restarting a new legacy from scratch - these were all new experiences, while by now, playing an alt on any server doesn't feel that different to me than playing any alt on Darth Malgus.

I do also think that over time, the devs have - very slowly and incrementally - made seasons a little harder to complete. I don't think that's a big deal and the system is still very forgiving overall, but when you're playing on multiple servers, everything has a multiplier, meaning that a change that makes things take five minutes longer on one server results in "needing" to play for half an hour longer overall for the same result on all servers.

The first of these changes was the release of the Shae Vizla server in 2023, which meant that the game went from five servers to six and I instantly needed 20% more time to do all my daily tasks on "all" servers. Then with Galactic Season 6 in 2024, they nerfed the daily reputation Conquest objective, which had been an easy way to get your seasons daily done quickly if you were short on time. Galactic Season 7 saw a shift from "flavour" themes to gameplay-centred ones, which meant that the seasonal weekly objective(s) suddenly took significantly more time. Sure, you could argue that doing one bounty contract mission or one uprising isn't that much of a time investment, but compared to say, getting eight season points for simply visiting another player's stronghold, it was a big difference. Remember when we'd get seasons points for literally sitting AFK for a couple of minutes?! Those were the days.

And then of course we have this season, which turned the "earn 200k Conquest points" weekly objective, which used to basically be a freebie if you did anything at all, into another thing you actively have to work for via grinding. So basically, I'm a bit tired.

I'm hoping that limiting myself to Darth Malgus for Galactic Season 11, which will require literally only a small fraction of the effort I've been putting into seasons for the past few years, will allow me to reclaim some of my time and get back on track in terms of my enjoyment of both seasons and the game in general. Including on the other servers! I mentioned previously that I'd really like to finish some more class stories over there, but that's not something that's been meshing well with spending all my time doing seasons objectives over and over. I'd like to be able to work on that on my own time, whenever I feel like it, without having to worry about hitting a certain content quota every day.