Where Has All the (Manic)Time Gone?

Having completed every last one of my Galactic Season 10 goals, and having made the decision to dial things back for Season 11, I've been feeling strangely liberated over the last couple of weeks. I can actually come up with my own goals again - goals that I can start and stop at any time, instead of merely trying to figure out how to get through a massive in-game checklist efficiently enough that I can still catch a full night's sleep by the end of it.

As a result of this, I've been playing less but have been enjoying it more, which led my mind down a weird path: Have I involuntarily been reducing my own enjoyment of the game by trying to do too much? If only there was a way to track my play time... oh wait.

More than seven years ago I made a post about how I'd installed an app called ManicTime to track my gaming habits - and then promptly went on to never mention it again. I've referred to it occasionally when writing the end-of-year round-ups for my WoW blog, to figure out whether I'd spent more time playing the modern version of the game or Classic, but I never really looked at anything in great detail. However, I'm still using the same PC I had back then, and I've allowed the app to gather data all this time. Time to have a look!

It didn't take long to tickle the following graph out of ManicTime, showing my SWTOR play hours from February 2019 to June 2026, grouped by month:

So uh... it's a lot! You can see that my play time definitely increased after I started doing seasons on all servers, but there's a lot going on there in terms of ups and downs, so I decided to look more closely at what exactly happened when.

As I already mentioned, my first point of reference was February 2019, which I talked about in the post I linked a few paragraphs up, where I was slightly embarrassed about having accumulated about 130 hours of gaming time in a single month, split between SWTOR and Elder Scrolls Online. Ironically, those 66 hours played ended up being one of the lower data points for SWTOR in the chart.

Over the next few months, my monthly play time only increased, hitting a peak of about 120 hours per month played throughout May and June, which I can only chuck up to me feeling energised with excitement about the (then upcoming) Onslaught expansion at the time, which is something I did write about.

However, this excitement didn't last and my play time started to drop again soon after, hitting the chart's third lowest point in September 2019, a month in which I played less than thirty hours of SWTOR. This makes sense in so far as WoW Classic launched at the end of August, which had me super excited and hogged all my attention for a while, to the point that I was probably only logging into SWTOR for scheduled group content. In a normal week I generally attend three ops nights with my guild which last about two hours each, which in turn adds up to 24 hours of play time in a month even if I do nothing else, so that maths checks out.

My play time increased again when Onslaught actually launched, though that peak did not rise as high as the one for the pre-expansion excitement. The chart's second biggest peak comes in the first half of 2020, which makes sense as this was when the UK went into lockdown because of Covid. While I was still working more or less as normal, just from home, I did have more time to play due to no longer having to commute, and many guildies who were unable to engage in their usual in-person socialising activities were constantly online, making my SWTOR experience feel as alive as it has ever been.

Things dropped off for me in the second half of the year, because while Covid was still a thing, I'd been recruited into a guild in WoW Classic (after having hit a bit of a lull in that game before) and became super active there, once again at the expense of SWTOR. Basically that whole "slump" period from August 2020 to August 2021 was caused by my WoW Classic focus.

There was a brief activity spike in September 2021, though I'm not entirely sure what the reason for that was. There was a Total Galactic War during that month which had me binging on SWTOR for at least a week, and I did also write about being excited for Legacy of the Sith.

Again that pre-expansion excitement didn't last, however, as I got pre-occupied with WoW Classic once more (which had reached the Burning Crusade by that point), though my big investment in that would eventually peter out a few months after that for a number of different reasons.

This leads us to the lowest point on the chart in November 2021, where I apparently played fewer than 20 hours of SWTOR, meaning I likely didn't even do all my usual group activities that month. This makes sense though, as we usually take a bit of a break from ops in the weeks immediately leading up to an expansion, and at the time, Legacy of the Sith was supposed to come out in early December, until it was suddenly delayed until February.

When LotS finally launched in February, I did get active again and my activity continued to rise all the way until May, which I think I can definitely "blame" on Galactic Season 2 and my project to progress the seasonal track on all servers, as the expansion itself infamously launched with not that much content and wouldn't have kept me that busy for that long.

Once my goals were achieved, activity dropped again, with patch 7.1 only producing a tiny bump - I was not happy with the game at the time. But then Galactic Season 3 arrived and I was off to the races once again! And played even more when I decided to also do the meta objective to complete 100 weeklies on all servers.

I'm not going to keep talking about every single peak and drop after that, but I do think it's clear from the patterns on the chart that a new season always increases my time investment. The biggest peak on the entire chart was March 2024 when I launched myself into doing a Galactic Season on six servers at once for the first time, apparently spending close to 220 hours in game that month. That's seven hours per day, every day. How I pulled this off while also working and sleeping, I don't know, but that's what it says.

Anyway, I do think the chart shows that doing Galactic Seasons across multiple servers has indeed massively increased my hours spent in the game. (Compare this to the first season, which just resulted in a more or less horizontal line at the sixty hour mark for four months.) The part of the graph that shows my activity pre-Legacy of the Sith has some peaks and troughs, but most of the time my activity levels hover between 50 and 100 hours of play each month. And I have really fond memories of those times!

Yet ever since Legacy of the Sith, the average seems to have shifted closer to being between 100 and 150 hours, meaning I've spent almost twice as much time on the game, without necessarily having twice as much fun. I often wonder why I feel like I don't have as much time to blog and make videos as I used to and um... yeah, that looks like a big culprit of that to be honest! And I definitely do think that I want to reclaim some of that time to do other things.

I'm not saying I regret spending all that time on Galactic Seasons. I do think in the earlier seasons in particular, the spikiness of the graph shows some real excitement on my part, getting super hyped and binging hard, with a matching drop-off in activity and recovery period afterwards. But I think the graph for the last two years also tells a slightly different story, with the peaks getting smaller and the drops between them more shallow. I've just been playing and grinding consistently because that's what I do now I guess. I think I'd like to move away from viewing the game like that for sure.