1500 Posts About SWTOR

I used to make a celebratory post on this blog every time I'd published another 100 posts, but I got out of the habit after hitting 1000, probably because "1100 posts!" and so on just doesn't sound as good. However, I also simply forgot about the whole thing after a while, as that last celebratory post was over six years ago now, back in 2020. At the time, I was publishing over 100 posts per year and - as I noted in the comments - expected to hit 2000 in 2028. That's clearly not happening now, considering it's already the end of 2026 and I only just hit 1500. Still, at least I noticed this milestone in time to dedicate a post to it!

I always like to use these occasions to talk about something related to the blog's usage stats, such as popular or funny search terms that led people to find it, or which posts have been the most viewed. For this particular milestone, I've decided to go for a bit of a medley of all of the above.

Google Search Console doesn't provide a lot of historical data nowadays and won't let me go back further than sixteen months, so that limits what I can say about the most popular search terms that led people to click on this blog, but it's better than nothing.

The most popular term by quite a margin (it has more than twice the number of clicks than second place) is swtor private server, which made me raise an eyebrow because that's actually not a subject I've ever written about. However, it wasn't hard to track down the culprit - it's the post "SWTOR Classic - an Attempt at a Realistic Assessment" from last year, in which I make some comparisons to WoW Classic and mentioned private servers in the context of how that game's real classic experience ended up being quite different from what private server users had come to expect.

The fact that such a loose connection of the two terms has resulted in as many clicks as it has should tell you that there isn't much real content on the subject out there. I did do some research on this at some point, just out of curiosity, and while I found a few instances of people talking about wanting to set up a private server for SWTOR, they never actually seemed to get anywhere. I think the fact that there's very little SWTOR content that you can't just replay on the live servers right now and the fact that it has a free-to-play option means there's not as much of an incentive for anyone to put a lot of work into a project like this. Plus I imagine that SWTOR's unique hybrid of MMO and immersive RPG experience would make such an undertaking even more challenging than usual, because while setting up the environment, NPCs and basic quest functionality would be one thing, the personalised cut scenes and voice lines would be a whole extra project on top of it.

The second most popular search term leading people to this blog was swtor classic, which makes more sense as that's what the post I linked above is actually about. I still don't think it's ever going to happen as a whole separate server thing, but the introduction of the overland difficulty toggle should allow for combat and levelling to feel closer to the old school experience once 8.0 releases.

Speaking of 8.0, swtor 8.0 is my third most popular search term that resulted in clicks, and again one that makes sense to me, as the question of whether we were ever even going to get an 8.0 was something I already explored back in 2024. Even after it was finally confirmed, Broadsword continued to release additional information only in tiny pieces for several months, with the official name of the expansion not getting announced until last month.

But enough about search terms - let's look at what people actually enjoy reading around here, based on Blogger's stats for my most popular posts of all time. I'll include the view numbers as points of reference, but don't necessarily expect them to have a strong correlation with reality:

1. The Best Classes to Take into KotFE / KotET - 19k views
2. KotFE & KotET Veteran & Master Mode Chapters Tips & Resources - 13.6k views
3. The Best Classes to Take into Onslaught - 12.9k views
4. Which Healing Class Should I Choose? - 12.7k views
5. Back in My Day: Datacrons - 11.8k views
6. KotFE Chapter by Chapter - Chapter 16: The Battle of Odessen - 10.7k views
7. KotFE Chapter by Chapter - Chapter 7: Lady of Sorrows - 10.1k views
8. How to Successfully LFG in SWTOR - 9.3k views
9. The REAL Differences Between KOTOR and SWTOR - 9k views
10. KotFE Chapter by Chapter - Chapter 15: The Gemini Deception - 8.9k views

The first four of these are all actually helpful posts which I'm happy to see at the top here. I think it helped that Swtorista linked to them as useful resources as well at some point.

I have no idea why "Back in My Day: Datacrons" is so high up, because while I am quite proud of the effort that has gone into some of the posts in that series, I don't see why e.g. generic searches about datacrons would end up here over one of the many guides on how to get them.

The three KotFE chapter breakdowns are high up I think due to people either googling certain story choices ("koth or senya" for chapter seven is a popular one which I do answer in that post) or I assume they are looking for gameplay help with a tricky boss fight, which is my guess for chapter sixteen's ranking, though my post provides less useful information on that.

"How to Successfully LFG in SWTOR" was a huge hit in the game's early days but also saw a massive drop-off once SWTOR made its pivot towards even more of a single-player focus, and twelve years later it's obviously no longer relevant. It just got so many views back in the day that it still appears in my overall top ten.

The post about the differences between KOTOR and SWTOR is another one I'm quite happy with, as I think there's been a lot of debate on whether SWTOR is effectively a KOTOR sequel or not, but at least I never came across any attempts to actually break it down in detail the way I did.

My 700 posts celebration is an interesting point of comparison for this list as it also included my top ten blog posts of all time, as they were in 2017. "How to Successfully LFG" was my number one back then, with only about 200 views less than it has now, nine years later. "The Best Classes to Take into KotFE / KotET" was very new back then, having only been published a few months earlier, but was already in ninth place. All the others were posts that are now outdated/no longer relevant.

And now, the top ten from the last twelve months in specific:

1. SWTOR Classic - an Attempt at a Realistic Assessment - 4.2k views
2. The REAL Differences Between KOTOR and SWTOR - 3.5k views
3. Wedding Bells - 3.1k views 
4. KotFE Chapter by Chapter - Chapter 16: The Battle of Odessen - 3k views
5. The Best Classes to Take into Onslaught - 2.5k views
6. KotFE & KotET Veteran & Master Mode Chapters Tips & Resources - 2.4k views
7. KotET Chapter by Chapter - Chapter 9: The Eternal Throne - 2.4k views
8. The Best Classes to Take into KotFE / KotET - 2.4k views
9. All SWTOR Planets, Ranked from Best to Worst - 2.4k views
10. A History of Story Mode Ops Difficulty - 2.3k views

There's some overlap with the top ten of all time, which is to be expected, though I'm surprised that the KOTOR vs SWTOR post has apparently gotten this much attention in the past year alone, considering that I originally wrote it in 2016. SWTOR Classic is up there since retro MMO servers have been very en vogue in recent years, plus it includes the mistaken private server searches, and there isn't really much else available on either subject in regards to SWTOR.

I'm a little disturbed by the post about my wedding being in third place, because while it was obviously a big event at the time, that was more than seven years ago now and I have no idea why the subject would suddenly draw attention this year.

The SWTOR planetary ranking was me having some fun with essentially making the written equivalent of one of those tier list videos, and I like that it found an audience, though again I'm wondering why it got attention now when I originally wrote it back in 2023.

Finally, the history of story mode ops difficulty was basically me having a rant shortly after the release of R-4 Anomaly about how this was something the SWTOR devs kept messing up, and how difficult could it really be?! Again, I'm not sure why this would suddenly gain traction in 2026, but my imagined reason is that with the return of a dedicated ops developer some people on the team were doing research on the subject and pushing my numbers up. Let me have my dream.

Now to see if I make it to 2000 posts in time for SWTOR's twentieth birthday!

The Legacy of Legacy of the Sith's Story

What made me happiest about the release of Legacy Reborn, beyond the fact that I thought it was a very good story update on its own merits, was that it finally brought the era of Legacy of the Sith to a conclusion, something that has been a looong time coming.

Two years ago, I wrote a post about my favourite patch/expansion storylines in SWTOR, and even at the time, unsure of where it was ultimately going to go, I ranked Legacy of the Sith in sixth place. Now that I've played through it in its entirety multiple times, I'd definitely move it higher up, probably in third or fourth place.

However, even though I've always thought that LotS' writing was good overall, the speed at which the story progressed in-game was always a problem. In the devs' defense, the 2024-25 voice actors' strike threw a spanner in the works that they couldn't have foreseen, but even if we assumed a normal six-month gap between Desperate Defiance and Galactic Threads instead of the eighteen months it actually ended up being, the storyline still would've taken almost three and a half years to conclude. And I'm sorry, but that's just too long, especially considering the amount of stuff that actually happens in that time frame (which is not that much, compared to other eras of SWTOR).

I've been wondering why the devs could've possibly thought that this wouldn't bother people - after all, most of them have been around long enough to know about KotFE's reception, which was Bioware's original attempt to convert SWTOR into a game that would sell story in installments. Yet even when that was at its best pace, releasing a new chapter once a month, people thought that was way too slow and got bored. How could anyone possibly have thought that doing the same thing again, but this time with six months between "chapters", would be popular with players?

As I thought about this, I came to a surprising realisation, and it startled me that I'd gone so long without noticing it at all: that Legacy of the Sith has been the first expansion storyline/era that attempted to be as ambitious as the original class stories in the sense of having both a smaller, self-contained story for each update and an overarching meta plot.

What I mean by that is that if you look at any of the original class stories, they always have a larger plot in each chapter that is advanced only a little bit with each planetary mission as you work your way through it, but said planetary missions have (minor, but coherent) stories of their own.

For example, the Jedi consular's chapter one is all about the question of who is causing the mysterious plague that is afflicting various Jedi Masters, but each planet has its own story and "villain" to overcome. On Taris you need to track down master Cin Tykan while trying to deal with the various types of destruction he's left in his wake, all while different characters are chewing your ear off about how you should deal with him once you find him. On Nar Shaddaa you befriend Theran Cedrax, who helps you infiltrate a gang to get to Duras Fain, who has pretty relatable beef with the Hutts even if the plague is affecting his judgement. On Tatooine you learn more about the native people of the planet while following the steps of Master Eriz. On Alderaan you get entangled with the political machinations of House Teral in order to gain access to Master Sedonie. Each of these is a satisfying little story on its own that also slowly reveals more about the mysterious plague master with each step along the way.

I'd never really thought about this before, but none of the expansion stories ever tried to do that again; they are pretty much always just a sequence of major events that are tied together by "and then". I suppose you could argue that KotFE's larger plot was about building an Alliance to defeat Arcann for a while, with smaller stories about how you end up recruiting new allies, but I'd say that only applies to maybe four chapters. Otherwise it's still mostly a matter of one main event simply leading directly to another.

I'm wondering whether the writers thought that they'd be able to pull off Legacy of the Sith by having each update be a story that's engaging enough on its own, with the meta plot basically being a bonus.

Let's have a look at how that worked out with each installment in terms of how strong its "standalone" story was vs. what it contributed to the larger plot. The larger plot being the question of what's up with Darth Nul and her inventions, as well as what Darth Malgus and Heta Hol want with them (plus our attempts to foil them).

7.0 - Legacy of the Sith

Standalone story: The fight over Manaan was a solid piece of story, even if I thought the narrative on Republic side was a bit less interesting than that on Imp side.

Larger plot: In the Elom flashpoint, you investigate a mystery, run into Darth Malgus and capture him.

Overall vibe: Both aspects of the story were served in this update, but in a super weird way, as the Manaan plot had basically zero connection to anything else, unless you want to count the introduction of Admiral Rava on Republic side, who would later return as an extremely minor character. The events on Elom seem like a decent enough starting point for a larger plot when looked at in isolation, but as I noted in my review at the time, we'd already spent time wondering about Malgus' plans for over three years of real time by that point, so to once again be back at the point of "huh, I'm wondering what Malgus was up to" was extremely unsatisfying.

7.1 - Digging Deeper

Standalone story: You meet people and look at some rocks.

Larger plot: You get an exposition dump about Darth Nul, plus some cut scenes about what Sa'har has been up to.

Overall vibe: The standalone story was basically non-existent here; it was just a giant plot exposition dump.

7.2 - Showdown on Ruhnuk

Standalone story: Shae hunts down Heta Kol on Ruhnuk and they duel, plus you manage to hurt the Hidden Chain quite a bit. It's an interesting enough series of events, though the fact that Heta gets away again at the end is a bit unsatisfying.

Larger plot: Our character actually meets Sa'har for the first time, learns that she's with the Hidden Chain and that she has a brother there.

Overall vibe: ??? At the time, it wasn't at all clear that the Mandalorian plot thread would eventually tie into the main storyline, so it felt more like a detour from the Malgus/Nul plot than anything else.

7.3 - Old Wounds

Standalone story: We assist the Voss and Gormak in their restoration and unification efforts at the Interpreter's Retreat and put an end to some Czerka shenanigans.

Larger plot: We find out that Darth Nul was once a Jedi and that the Voss had a vision about Malgus doing something dramatic. Shae gets very angry.

Overall vibe: I'd argue that this was the first update where we got both a standalone story and a larger plot advancement, and they had a clear connection, which was a positive development. The problem was that the standalone story was the first time they inserted KOTOR style cut scenes into the main story, which immediately made some people hate it, and the storyline itself also wasn't the most exciting (floor sweeping). Combine that with the fact that the main plot advancement - while present - was still slow and vague, and story progression still felt lacking overall.

7.4 - Chains in the Dark

Standalone story: The Hidden Chain is abducting people for mysterious reasons. You go to Ord Mantell to stop that.

Larger plot: Sa'har comes out as wanting to defect and Shae Vizla goes missing.

Overall vibe: This was the first update where I thought things finally started to come together a bit. The story of helping the people of Ord Mantell was satisfying enough for me as a trooper main, but I understand that for someone who primarily plays Imperial, there might have been a sense of "why does my character care about this". Beating Tyrus Brokenblade is a pretty satisfying conclusion to the standalone part of the story though, because while our character doesn't know him, we as the player know that he's one of Heta's most important lieutenants. Sa'har taking a stand feels like it's finally moving things along a bit. It's just bad that it took us until the fifth LotS update to finally get a sense of where we're going.

7.5 - Desperate Defiance

Standalone story: As part of striking at the Hidden Chain, you help out a slave rebellion on Hutta and take out Yusinduu the Hutt.

Larger plot: Sa'har defects openly, and after stealing a Hidden Chain shuttle, you infiltrate one of Heta's ships and destroy the machine there. You finally get to understand what she wanted with it and why she was kidnapping people. Your faction expresses displeasure about the Mandalorian situation. At the end, Shae breaks Malgus out of his prison.

Overall vibe: This was another step up from Chains in the Dark. The slave rebellion on Hutta alone is a bit weak as the minor plot, but we do end up invading Heta's space and blowing up her machine at the end, which is a satisfying advancement of the meta plot. 

7.8 - Galactic Threads

Standalone story: You hunt down a Hidden Chain defector on Tatooine and end up helping her. You chase Greb Besrik through the snows of Hoth and deal with Rass' anger issues. We explore Darth Nul's secret lab on Elom. On Ilum with an i, we discover the remains of the Emperor's crashed space station.

Larger plot: From the above, you learn that Heta Kol is travelling through Sith space and that Shae and Malgus are working together towards different objectives. The section on Elom fleshes out Darth Nul's lore some more while also giving us a hint that someone is spying on us. Ilum answers the question of what actually happened to Nul. Darth Jadus reveals himself.

Overall vibe: I actually struggled a bit to split out the minor and major story beats for this one, but I think that was kind of the point of this update, to finally pull a number of different threads together. I think Galactic Threads really succeeded at telling stories that were both interesting in isolation and also advanced the greater plot in several repects. 

7.8.1 - Master's Engima

Standalone story: You meet with Darth Jadus, explore Darth Nul's old spaceship and get betrayed.

Larger plot: Your faction is really unhappy with you by this point, and you learn where you have to go to confront Heta, Malgus and Shae one last time.

Overall vibe: This was probably the strongest standalone story since 7.2, while still advancing the plot in a meaningful way, which made it feel like a great update.

7.9 - Legacy Reborn

This is where it finally all comes together and the meta plot effectively became the main plot.

In summary, Legacy of the Sith officially consisted of nine story updates (I mentioned previously that you could argue that its plot effectively already started earlier, but for simplicity's sake let's stick with the official labelling), and looking back at them, it took about five updates and more than two years of real time for the story to really find its feet, which is wild to me. The sheer length of the plot was always going to be a problem in an MMO format with six months between story updates, but I do think people probably would have been a little less negative about it if we hadn't spent so much time at the beginning seemingly meandering between story beats that felt completely disconnected and lore dumps that didn't really make it clear where any of this was meant to be going.

When I first started writing this, I thought that my conclusion at the end would be something along the lines of "please devs, never do anything like this again; future updates should all be mostly self-contained or at least resolved within two or three updates max" but now that I've looked at it in detail... I guess I wouldn't be completely opposed to having another longer story arc in the future (though nine parts is definitely too much, never mind that it could be considered even longer if you count all the Malgus stuff that came before). However, it would then be vital for each patch to always deliver both an interesting standalone story that has our characters going on a noteworthy adventure with meaningful results and some clear advancement of the overarching plot that isn't just a bit of lore or a vague prophecy. It's clear that the team has the ability to do that (as evidenced by the second half of LotS) but whether they can always apply that in practice remains to be seen.

How do you feel about Legacy of the Sith's story now that it's finally wrapped up? How has your perception of its narrative changed over time?

I Was Wrong About Levelling Difficulty

I'm now up to having spent a double-digit number of hours testing the overworld difficulty toggle on the PTS, space-barring my way through various starter experiences over and over while dying quite a lot at times. And it's not just because I want to be a helpful tester - it's because it's been fun.

When the difficulty toggle was first announced, I said this that I "wasn't that invested into the idea personally [because] I don't think the current difficulty is terrible". Who cares if nothing on the starter planets can really hurt you? More difficult content absolutely still exists in SWTOR, you just have to advance some way into the game before discovering it.

After actually playing through the starter and capital planets on veteran and master difficulty however, I've changed my mind about that. Not that challenging content still exists - obviously it does - but the experience reminded me of something that had been lost and that I'd honestly kind of forgotten about.

In SWTOR's first year, I often compared its gameplay to World of Warcraft's Burning Crusade era. In this post for example, I described the game as offering a combination of Dragon Age style storytelling with a multiplayer option and more enjoyable combat. In this one, I noted how much I enjoyed medpacs actually feeling useful when levelling up, something that had already been lost in WoW at the time. I'd genuinely forgotten that this was ever a selling point for me. (Which is amusing because that post was titled "Things You Didn't Know You Missed".)

The reason I fell as hard for SWTOR as I did back in 2012 wasn't just because of its story - it was the whole package, and that included engaging gameplay throughout the levelling journey. I've gotten so used to just speedrunning alts through each planet, only stopping at class story instances and nowhere else, that I'd forgotten what it used to be like to not do that.

The slower levelling via the veteran or master mode toggle just changes things so dramatically. You pick up side quests because you actually need more XP instead of being massively overlevelled almost from the start. As a side effect of that, you poke your head into every little corner of the map and take in so much more of your environment. You kill so many more mobs, and because they actually hurt, you pay attention to what type of mob you're fighting and which one should go down first. Your surroundings are no longer just a minor obstacle on your way to the next cut scene; they are engaging in their own right.

To me at least, this also works to actually enhance the storytelling. Take Korriban as an example - it's supposed to be a dog-eat-dog environment that is harsh and deadly, but you don't really feel that when everything is a breeze and you're in and out within an hour. That soldier at the entrance to the Tomb of Ajunta Pall just looks like a massive wuss, complaining about k'lor'slugs when they don't seem to do anything to you and die as soon as you so much as sneeze at them. Turn the difficulty up to master, struggle to not get overwhelmed by the damn critters yourself on your very first quest, and suddenly he's much more relatable.

The same concept applies on the other starter planets: Hutta is so much more unpleasant when it hurts. You can tell that Ord Mantell is a warzone when fighting your way through a village actually takes some effort. The flesh raiders on Tython are a much more credible threat when they also threaten you.

I get that this isn't for everyone, and I'm not pretending that I myself would've enjoyed levelling every single one of my alts this way over the course of the last ten years. When I'm just looking to level another [insert origin story here] to see a different romance option, I don't necessarily need to linger too much along the way. However, at this point it has been so long since I last had to do more than the bare minimum while levelling up that being reminded of the fact that it doesn't have to be that way has been really refreshing.

I'm pretty sure that once Masters of the Force goes live, I'll be making liberal use of the difficulty toggle even outside of ventures. Sure, there'll be situations where story difficulty will remain my choice as well, especially if I want to get something done particularly quickly. However, I think I'll be happy to slow down just as often, and it'll be fun to actually have the option to do so.

Server Populations Based on Conquest Points

I mentioned in a previous post that I wasn't that busy during the last Total Galactic War, and as a result I ended up poking around on the other servers as well that week. Having a peek at the planetary leaderboards was interesting in terms of how incredibly different they looked on each server.

People often ask about server populations on reddit, which server is the best to play on etc., and I do have some information that addresses this on my State of SWTOR page, but it did occur to me that it's hard to find any kind of data to actually back up people's perceptions of each server's size. Over in WoW Classic, the most common metric is raid logs, which is already very limited because obviously there are plenty of players who don't raid and aren't counted, but in SWTOR we don't even have that. It's also been many years since we last had indicators of population size on the server selection screen.

The best bit of hard evidence about server size I've ever seen is probably this Today in TOR post from January 2023, which compared the number of Conquest points winning guilds had earned on each server throughout 2022. However, at this point that's several years old, and I have no doubt that server populations have shifted a little - plus the Shae Vizla server didn't exist yet, so it's not included at all.

I do think Conquest is about as good a measure of activity as you're ever going to get, as most things you do in game award Conquest points, so most guilded characters above level 10 will leave some kind of Conquest footprint if they are active at all. The problem is that in any given week the planetary leaderboards are very limited in how much they show us. Total Galactic War is a different beast, however...

So I spent a few hours logging through all servers on a Monday afternoon and manually recorded the full TGW leaderboards on all servers. The event wasn't over yet and scores were still updating all the time, but I didn't really care about that as I wasn't looking for precise numbers for this exercise; I just wanted the big picture. Let me share with you what I found:

First off, Total Galactic War includes 28 planets, with each one having ten spots on its visible leaderboard, so up to 280 guilds can make their presence known in this event. However, the only server on which all slots were actually taken was Star Forge.

This doesn't necessarily mean that the other servers don't have 280 guilds - the major gaps were pretty much always on the large yield planets, so the open slots on Darth Malgus (19), Satele Shan (32) and Tulak Hord (37) primarily indicated a lack of large guilds valuing visibility on the board over potentially conquering one of the smaller yield planets. In all three cases it seemed safe to assume that there were also extra guilds on the medium and small yield planets that had simply been pushed off the board. (The same was true for Star Forge, obviously.)

However, Leviathan and Shae Vizla were a different matter. On Leviathan, only 149 guilds were visible, leaving 131 spots empty - nearly half. On Shae Vizla the picture was even more dire, with only 102 guilds making a showing, leaving 178 openings. Some planets remained completely unconquered, with not a single guild even trying to claim a spot. (That said, I'm almost certain someone out there will read this and go "I'm surprised Shae Vizla has over 100 guilds!")

OK, so guilds are one thing, but what about their actual scores? A guild showing up with 2000 points is not the same as one showing up with 200 million. So I tallied up all the scores visible on the board. In total, across all servers, I counted a little under 12 billion Conquest points. Across the different servers, they were distributed as follows:

• Star Forge: 4.2 billion (35% of total)
• Darth Malgus: 3.4 billion (29% of total)
• Satele Shan: 1.8 billion (15% of total)
• Tulak Hord: 1.5 billion (13% of total)
• Leviathan: 500 million (4% of total)
• Shae Vizla: 400 million (3% of total)

There are some interesting inferences you can make from these numbers. While it sometimes feels to me like I'm constantly hearing about players moving off the smaller servers to Star Forge, these numbers don't really back that up. In fact, 35% is exactly the same slice of the pie that Star Forge occupied on the Today in TOR graphic from 2023.

Today in TOR doughnut chart from 2023 

Satele Shan does seem to be the biggest loser, having gone from nearly twice the size of Tulak Hord to only marginally larger, but part of that is also that TH actually seems to have grown a little since 2022, contrary to what I personally would've expected. Again, anecdotally I have the impression that both German and French players have been moving off their dedicated language servers to Darth Malgus for the bigger population - I've seen them chatter away in general chat and get yelled at for not speaking English. Darth Malgus does indeed seem to have grown, but seemingly only at the expense of Leviathan. Still, overall the shifts in activity levels are a lot milder than I would've expected after nearly four years.

However, what these numbers do show for sure is that you can expect to have a drastically different experience on different servers. If we correlate Conquest points to active population, then Star Forge is more than twice as populated as Satele Shan, and literally more than ten times the size of Shae Vizla. That's going to make a difference to how busy the world feels and how often group content is popping.

As for how these numbers translate into actual player numbers... it's impossible to say, as people can generate wildly varying amounts of Conquest points. When I go all out during Total Galactic War, I can generate 10-15 million by myself, but more realistically a guild invading a large yield planet should probably have at least 10-20 active members to hit its target without too much difficulty. (I base this on my personal experience being a member of different guilds on different servers.) If we assume 20 players per 5 million points generated, then these scores would be evidence of at least 48,000 guilded players leaving a mark during Total Galactic War, but I'd honestly expect the total number of active players to be higher. (Though it'd also give those people a heart attack who think that the game only has 4,000 active players nowadays because that's the daily average recorded on Steam.)

Adventures on the PTS, Part Whatever

I continue to log into the public test server almost every day. I've never been this engaged with testing anything in SWTOR before; it's quite strange.

First there's the new ops boss. I won't spoil anything about the theme or detailed mechanics, don't worry, but I do want to talk a bit about the experience of testing itself. Back when I tried XR-53 on the PTS, I went in with a group where at least a few people already knew what to expect, we killed it after a relatively small number of tries, and then we got an achievement at the end. It wasn't that dissimilar to trying a boss on the live servers for the first time.

This time around, things have been very different. I mentioned in a previous post that the ops entrance is right at the Odessen spawn-in point, which I assume is not going to be how it's going to work when the operation is finalised. When you go through the portal, you get teleported right into a room with the boss - no trash, nothing. Additionally, there's a droid called M4R-TN (Martin, like the ops dev - get it?) who not only offers repairs, but also has a number of consoles next to him that allow you to tweak things about the boss fight, such as in- or decreasing its health and damage output - a true test environment.

If you wanted to, you could dial down the boss's health to next to nothing and one-shot it. But what for? There's no achievement at this stage, or loot. It's up to you, the player, to decide how easy or hard you want the fight to be, purely for the sake of fun, and that's surprisingly difficult.

I'm guessing like most people, we initially tried to simply do the boss fight as presented, without tweaking anything. We also went in blind, because it's fun to discover things by ourselves. And that did work decently enough for story mode.

Veteran mode was a different matter though - so much damage! So much going on! Pure chaos. Trying to figure things out by yourself is fun for a while, but only until it isn't anymore. I've got to confess here that I've also learned over time that my ops team and I aren't actually very good at figuring out boss mechanics by ourselves. We have a tendency to completely misunderstand what's going on at times, and then coming up with ideas based on those misunderstandings that only make things worse. Myself, I just get completely overwhelmed at some point.

It made me realise that for how much I love operations in SWTOR, I'm a bit like the cliché of a WoW Classic raider - good at a 20-year-old fight that I've had opportunity to practice for literal years, but better not present me with anything new or even remotely difficult - as I'll just freeze up, even if I was actively asking for something new before. It's not entirely the same situation, but there are definitely parallels. I like the familiar, and SWTOR has given me plenty of opportunity to get used to things.

The other week I did multiple runs of Terror from Beyond, and it occurred to me that Operator IX on veteran mode is actually a pretty complex and hard to explain fight, what with everything that goes on with the colour mechanics. It doesn't seem so bad to me now after years of repetition, but the first people to figure out the encounter probably also had to spend quite a bit of time wiping, reading tooltips and experimenting in order to figure out exactly what to do at each stage and in what order. I've tried to take comfort in that thought at times when the new boss felt impossibly overwhelming to me - reminding myself that it won't seem half as bad once I've had time to properly understand and digest what's actually happening at each stage.

So after initially just dialling down the boss's damage a lot so we wouldn't die quite so quickly and had more time to actually figure out key mechanics, we did slowly get a grip on those.. but things were still messy and would quickly fall apart entirely. When I happened to come across a video from someone whose team had killed the boss on the PTS only the other day, I watched it, and it immediately taught us some things to improve.

This meant that the other night we finally realised that we'd hit a point where we understood what we were supposed to do; we just didn't have the numbers to execute it. We'd already reduced the default damage by half, but now we also had to reduce the boss's health, because we were hitting what's effectively the soft enrage with the boss still close to half health. (Mr Commando used to call that point "the 50% mechanic" - see my earlier point about us misunderstanding what's happening sometimes.)

On the next attempt we reduced the boss's health massively and he died with ease. So now the last exercise is going to be to dial the numbers up and down a bit more to see how much more we can take, but then I think we'll be done testing this particular fight for now. We've learned the mechanics and will be prepared in that regard. But if it goes live with the current default health and damage numbers, we won't kill it for a long time regardless.

The person who posted the kill video with the boss set to default values said the tuning felt good to them. In the video I could see that they were doing almost double my team's healing and about a third more damage. I mean, good for them, they are clearly good at the game - I just wish they were aware that what they are bringing to the table is not what the average group that attempts a veteran mode is going to have. I'm desperately hoping that the data we've provided by wiping over and over again is at least sending a signal in that regard, but I do still worry that it won't be enough. I suspect that not many who find the boss too hard in its current state will go through the process of wiping for hours to understand what's going on and fine-tune the numbers; most will probably just give up. And then the data set will just consist of the most elite NiM raiders killing it with ease, suggesting that everything is fine and dandy. I don't know. I can only keep trying.

The other thing that I've been spending time on is levelling lowbies with the new difficulty toggle set to veteran or master. I'll probably have another post about that in me at some point, but it's just so weirdly compelling to me. Since I'm playing so much and generating Conquest points, I've also set our PTS guild to invade a planet every week. Since there's no competition, we win every time. I know it's only temporary and doesn't mean anything, but I enjoy seeing "TSS PTS" being the conquerors of an increasing number of planets...