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.
