New Player Meets Old Player Meets Endgame

I have absolutely no clue about the actual numbers, but my general impression has long been that for an MMO that's approaching its 15th birthday this year, SWTOR still does pretty well as far as attracting new players goes. Despite what some may say, Star Wars is still quite an active franchise, so new people have a reason to find and try out a free Star Wars game all the time.

Getting those new players into endgame is trickier, because the general public has been dismissive of SWTOR's raiding pretty much from launch, and over time the devs have also supported this kind of content less and less. It's not like World of Warcraft, which has a reputation for being a game that's very much worth playing purely for its endgame (even if it has other problems as far as new players are concerned). I'm not sure anyone has started playing SWTOR in the last decade with endgame being a primary driver of their interest. (If you have, or know someone else who has, shout out in the comments!)

As a result, I'm always delighted when a new player ends up joining our guild and it turns out they are interested in operations. That makes them such a precious find, I just want to accommodate them and make them happy, but at the same time without overwhelming them. It doesn't always work.

At some point last year, a new player joined our guild whom I shall call Bob. Bob turned out to be the son-in-law of an older member of the guild who'd also just returned after a bit of a hiatus. Yes, we're training the next generation of MMO players here! Bob originally started levelling with his significant other, but she lost interest after a while, something that easily could have spelled death for Bob's engagement as well. However, he really seemed to enjoy attending our social nights, whether his girlfriend and father-in-law were there or not, and quickly became a valued member.

As far as I could tell at least, Bob wasn't terribly bothered about his performance, and I loved that for him. (Disclaimer: He did later do a few runs with one of our progression teams and I don't know if the subject came up in that context, but that would be outside my purview.) He upgraded his gear over time, sure, but despite being surrounded by a lot of people who care about min-maxing their stats and rotations, it didn't seem to rub off on him. I always hear people complain about how every MMORPG is solved these days and how new players supposedly get crap all the time for not following the meta, so it was nice to see someone being this carefree still.

The one thing I did push him on a bit was levelling an Imperial character, if for no other reason than that we sometimes like to do activities on our Imp side alt guild, and without a max-level character, there were some of them he couldn't join for. At first I simply tried to minimise our activity on Imp side during social nights, but after a while I felt a bit bad that we apparently all couldn't go there just because of him, so I kept egging him on to finally get those last few levels on his Imperial Scoundrel.

The day he finally dinged 80 on his second character felt glorious - and as one of that week's seasons objectives was to do a flashpoint, we made him jump right into that (I don't remember whether the objective specifically required a master mode flashpoint or whether we just decided to do one of the featured flashpoints on master mode). Sure, his dps wasn't great and he was undergeared, but we should be alright to carry him through most master modes, right? We ended up in Battle of Ilum of all places, which is one of the oldest and easiest master modes nowadays.

About halfway through the flashpoint, I noticed that he was seemingly just spamming Lacerating Blast (the Scoundrel's AoE with no cooldown) on every pull. "If you want to do more dps, you'll have to do use some of your other abilities occasionally," I teased, to which he responded "I know, but this one's just so fun". Can't really argue with that, can you?

And everything seemed fine. Perhaps we weren't proceeding as fast as we could, but we weren't having any problems either - until we wiped on the last boss due to nobody interrupting his Force explosion.

Now, I can't blame that one on Bob, because there were after all three other people in the group who could've done it. My excuse was that I was healing and more focused on the group's health bars than on enemy cast bars. The tank was one of our progression raiders on a Juggernaut/Guardian alt with not so great gear - I don't remember all the details, just that he'd been unable to procure a better weapon in the moment and had been joking about how he was using some random green lightsaber ever since. The second dps was another long-time guildie on a Sniper alt. She used to raid with us as a healer a long time ago but (like me) had never been much of a dpser.

Anyway, we laughed about the fact that this ability still did enough damage to kill us at this point in the game, dusted ourselves off and went again. We wiped a second time for the same reason, by which point I decided that healing or no, I needed to watch Darth Serevin's cast bar like a hawk.

On the next attempt, Force explosion finally got interrupted - and then we wiped due to the boss's enrage. Again, us old-timers were stunned. We didn't even know this guy still had an enrage!

Our tank started to feel embarrassed about his green lightsaber and went off to get a better one. It also wasn't until this point that it really sunk in for us just how low the gear rating of Bob's newest alt was. The max item level right now is 343 and I think he sat at around 200. We sent him to the fleet to buy a few higher-level greens from the vendor there, but he ran out of credits before he was able to upgrade his full set. Still, it didn't matter. Newly armoured and more determined than ever we went at it one more time and finally beat Darth Serevin on the fourth attempt.

This was a few months ago now, and I still haven't been able to get that run out of my head, because even though there was definitely a part of me that was kind of annoyed to be wiping in Battle of Ilum repeatedly, another part of me was honestly kind of amazed by the experience because I didn't think it was possible for a new player to still have this kind of organic learning experience in the game in 2026. Once upon a time, this is how we learned how to beat a boss fight ourselves of course, by trying and failing and then trying to improve on the next attempt. But these days, all the content is so much easier, it's almost impossible to fail, right? Never mind that everyone will know what to do.

Well, it turns out you can still fail even with three experienced players, if - despite knowing better - they are careless and silly enough. And for some reason that made me happy.