A Good Start to the Season

You may find it hard to believe after my outrage at how gutted the Esseles and the Black Talon feel without cut scenes, but I've actually had a pretty good start to Galactic Season 9 in spite of that. Patch day was a bit rough, with my game crashing to desktop something like seven times, but once I learned that this was caused by hovering over one specific UI element, I was once again too amazed by just how weird MMO bugs can be sometimes to really be mad about that. (Plus, once I knew what was causing it, it was easy to avoid. They then patched the issue a couple days later.)

The flashpoint theme has actually felt surprisingly invigorating. I've long said that I'm a big fan of flashpoints, but I'm not immune to incentives, and the fact that there's literally been nothing to earn for me in flashpoints for a couple of years now has admittedly discouraged me from running them. I would rarely go for the seasons objectives that required you to run two specific flashpoints because they were just too time-consuming and felt inefficient. The dedicated weekly objective for this season only requiring a single quick veteran mode run makes a world of a difference, and I was genuinely surprised that I actually had fun blitzing through Athiss six times this past week.

My favourite run was the one with my husband on our home server, where he actually bothered to go into one of the side alcoves to use his scavenging to repair the broken combat droid there, something I hadn't done in so long that I'd genuinely forgotten that it was even a thing. One of the guildies in our group then kept casting a heal over time on it to keep it alive, to the point that the temporary pet was actually still alive when we got to the last boss. This is where we learned that the living fire debuff can go on non-player characters! The poor droid didn't manage to survive that one, but it was good for a laugh. 

The other weekly objectives for the first two weeks were pretty good too, with some nice softballs that didn't take too much time to complete on multiple servers while also earning me new achievements.

My personal biggest delight last week though was that there was also an objective to run any random master mode flashpoint, which I did on five out of six servers. (Sadly I couldn't get the queue to pop on Shae Vizla even while queueing as a tank.)

Even better, not a single one of them was Hammer Station, even though I had queued for the full selection. I had the expectation that most people would use the new feature that allows you to exclude a few flashpoints without losing your random bonus to primarily veto long or difficult ones, but maybe there are more fellow Spammer Station haters out there than expected who are actually excluding that one instead.

Either way, the random master mode flashpoints I got put into were Assault on Tython (twice), Battle of Rishi, Lost Island and Crisis on Umbara. The latter must have been nerfed a lot since I last did it, as my group completed it successfully without wiping despite feeling pretty mid in terms of skill. I know there's been some gear inflation since 7.0, but the first two bosses barely even seemed to do any damage, and we pulled the bonus boss by accident with a bunch of trash and still killed that successfully too. Not that I'm complaining!

Battle of Rishi had me busting out my Shadow's tank spec on Satele Shan, which I had actually set up some time ago but then never ended up using. I was very pleased with myself for how I guided the rest of the group through the run after someone expressed that it had been a while and they weren't sure they remembered what to do. Trying to model good tank behaviour!

Lost Island was the most memorable one though, as that was what I got on the Leviathan server while queueing on my Sage as a healer. It quickly became obvious that the tank and one of the damage dealers knew basically nothing about the flashpoint, while the other damage dealer gave the vibes of someone who had done it before and generally knew how to play but couldn't fully remember all the tactics properly. It was pretty funny to read the chat and try to make sense of it, as my knowledge of French is very limited. I think I could generally get the vibe/general topic, but not necessarily what exactly people were trying to say.

Unsurprisingly we wiped something like five times on the second boss as everyone but me kept getting knocked off the platform. I tried to use Google Translate to explain where people needed to stand, but either the translation made no sense or they intentionally decided to ignore me because I sounded too weird, as they didn't appear to listen to my advice. Fortunately they eventually seemingly managed to figure it out on their own and we were victorious. The remaining two bosses after that were comparatively easy, but I still felt like I was carrying pretty hard, healing people through some significant amounts of "standing in bad".

I felt properly giddy after we finished, both excited and relieved that we'd succeeded despite our difficulties, but also a bit amused by how ridiculous the whole experience had felt. The dps who'd given me vibes of having some idea of what to do whispered me afterwards to... I don't know, I'm guessing it was something like "we're queueing again" though it might have meant something completely different; I genuinely had no clue. I just logged off because I'd definitely had enough for that evening.

I'm hoping to see that objective pop up more often though.

Flashpoints: Why Are We Here?

I've been having fun with the new season so far and will probably talk about that at some point, but the removal of cut scenes and group conversations from the group finder continues to weigh heavily on my mind. While my initial reaction was skewing towards slightly negative, I was telling myself that this is probably one of those cases where I'm just a weird outlier for liking something (group conversations in pug flashpoints) that many people don't like, and that I'll see the benefits of this change soon enough. I still remember when the Czerka flashpoints first came out back in 2013, I was actually somewhat disappointed at first that they were so streamlined without any interactive cut scenes, but I got over that pretty quickly.

One of the seasons objectives this week was to run either the Black Talon or the Esseles on veteran mode via the group finder, and with me doing Galactic Seasons on all servers I had plenty of opportunity to see the new change in action. For the most part, the experience was... fine. I'm not going to pretend that I would have had so much more fun if I'd gotten the full cut scene experience six times instead of the new fade to black thing. Primarily, it was all just kind of weird, with a lot of running back and forth with no discernible purpose when you don't actually have the story cut scenes to tell you what is happening.

There was one run that really annoyed me though. I got into an Esseles on a level 80 healer, and the other three members of the group were a level 80 dps, a level 10 and a level 14. I don't know if the two lowbies were new players or just alts, but either way they were subject to certain limitations at their low level, such as slower speed and lacking strong AoE abilities or defensives. Yet the level 80 was constantly mounting up and driving ahead, aggroing absolutely everything to pull it into a corner at the end, while the rest of us slowly jogged after them on foot. (I would've been able to keep up more but I felt it was my duty to protect the lowbies, who would've died several times if I hadn't healed them.)

The 80 repeatedly told them off for fighting things and said they should just mount up as well. I got the impression that at least one of them got a bit flustered by that and tried to overcompensate by mounting up and rushing ahead even of the level 80 at one point, just to then be told off because not everyone had made it up the elevator yet when we were put into combat as a result of that (which was technically correct but also must've been confusing in terms of mixed messages).

I got really annoyed with that level 80's attitude but didn't say anything because frankly I was quite busy just keeping up with their constant running myself, as well as just keeping everyone else alive. I simply did what I could to support the lowbies, such as when one of them veered off towards the bonus boss while the 80 was just trying to go straight to the end. I just kept hoping that neither of the little guys were genuinely new players because if I had been a newbie in that situation, I would have been so put off from running flashpoints ever again.

Now, to be clear, all of this technically has nothing to do with the cut scene change, because people could act like that while the group conversations were still a thing. However, at least the cut scenes would put the brakes on things a little bit. They were a reminder that this flashpoint wasn't designed to be rushed like that. And I feel that the removal of the cut scenes does the opposite now, vindicating people like that level 80 in the sense that yes, the devs agree with you that flashpoints are something to get over and done with as quickly as possible. I feel like my opinion was validated by a thread on the SWTOR subreddit posted this week about how this kind of behaviour seemed to be worse than ever since the patch. In a comment thread there, someone who commented that "games are meant to be fun" also received the reply: "It's a season objective. Literally not meant to be fun. Just a way to progress."

I just kept thinking to myself: What are we doing here? Why are we optimising content for people who don't like it? And I realised that I'm worried about SWTOR flashpoints going down the way of World of Warcraft dungeons.

WoW was my first MMO as well as my introduction to doing group content with random players, and I loved it. The first time I did the Deadmines? Amazing. I got yelled at for ninja-looting a chest because I didn't know any better, but I apologised, learned from it and we moved on. For about three or four years, dungeons were easily one of my favourite things to do in the game. However, somewhere along the line, things changed. Blizzard wanted players to run dungeons in greater numbers and more often, so they became increasingly incentivised for endless replay, and people's attitudes changed accordingly.

I still play WoW almost twenty years later, but I rarely do dungeons in its modern incarnation now. Every now and then some reward will lure me into queueing up for a pug dungeon again, just for me to instantly be reminded of why I no longer find them fun. Everything is just an insane rush to the end to pick up the reward and it's a casual or new player's absolute nightmare.

When I started playing SWTOR, I instantly fell in love with the game's flashpoints too. The Esseles and Black Talon are absolutely amazing experiences that have no real equivalent in other games when you play through them in a group for the first time and as intended (which is to say, actually paying attention to the story and listening to the group conversations). They are also clearly not intended to be re-run on a daily basis. Sure, they can be fun to re-play every now and then, to see what different conversation choices do and so on, but it's clearly not something you're supposed to do all the time. The game won't stop you from running it multiple times a day if you want to, but I think it's fair to say that you were effectively "doing it wrong" in that case and couldn't really complain if it wasn't super fun. The idea with SWTOR flashpoints was that they were still meant to be a bit of an adventure every time you entered one, something you can only really consume in moderation.

With this change... I don't really know anymore. I can even defend the removal of cut scenes as a temporary measure for the Galactic Season, mostly because it benefits me personally, but people like me, who do Galactic Seasons on every server, can hardly make up a significant chunk of the player base. Clearly the intent is to get more players into flashpoints that haven't done them before, but I'm not sure this whole exercise is going to show them anything appealing enough to want to come back. Endless running along corridors with no rhyme or reason about what is going on? What's appealing about that?

I also saw someone comment somewhere that Final Fantasy XIV used to have a similar problem with new players having a bad experience in the group finder due to issues with cut scene skipping, and Square Enix's solution to that was to make the cut scenes unskippable for everyone and increase the reward payout to make sure veterans were being suitably compensated for the fact that the run was taking longer to accommodate the newbies. Now, I don't play FFXIV myself, so I can't tell you how well that worked out for everyone, but I think it shows that "whelp, we've got to cater to the people who are in a hurry" is not an inevitability. SWTOR and FF have a lot in common in terms of their focus on story, so it's actually kind of odd to me now to see the SWTOR devs choose speed-running over story in this instance.

At this point, after thinking about it some more, I feel like instead of removing cut scenes all over the place they should've gone back and reconsidered what flashpoints are all about and why people are funnelled into them the way they are. Why do people ask to skip cut scenes? Because they're in a flashpoint they don't really want to be in. Why are they in this flashpoint? Because we give extra rewards for queueing for a random flashpoint. Why do we give rewards for that? So people who want to run specific flashpoints can get groups for them. But why would people run the Esseles in a group these days when there is a solo mode available anyway? Maybe the devs should've just taken it out of the group finder like they did Kuat and Colicoid War Games. Leaving it in but taking out everything that actually made it unique and insteresting just feels like extremely muddled game design to me. It just doesn't make sense in my head.

A Farewell to Pug Cut Scenes

I said in my post about the dev live stream last month that the most impactful announcement to me was that patch 7.1.1 was going to remove all cut scenes and group conversations from group finder flashpoints. While this was widely welcomed, I'm personally not convinced that it's the right decision for the devs to give in to the worst impulses of people who are always in a hurry, but we'll see how things play out. The patch went live this week, and either way it's done for now.

I just wanted to pay my own little tribute to all these cut scenes that I will no longer get to see, because I used to love taking screenshots of those group moments in pugs, so I dug through my screenshot folder archive and compiled some for this post. 

I was kind of surprised that the oldest screenshot of this kind I could find was the above scene from Battle of Ilum from 2016, but then I remembered that I was mostly unable to take screenshots during cut scenes for the game's first two years (not sure they ever fixed that bug) and yeah, I guess that checks out. You can tell that it's an older screenshot because everyone's outfits are relatively old school, with the Jedi in Thexan's robes being the most "modern" looking.

This shot on the other hand was from 2020, when I documented levelling a character purely through flashpoints for the second time and found that Battle of Ilum was a surprisingly common one to get randomly (if you excluded Hammer Station like I did). Gotta love the Twi'lek barely covering her privates on the ice planet. (No, I don't. I mostly dislike those kinds of outfits and in the cut scenes I found them quite immersion-breaking to be honest.)

The flashpoint I loved the most for group cut scenes was, ironically, one that only had a single one: Czerka Corporate Labs. However, it does have this brief moment at the end where your group enters the final boss room in this really cinematic looking way and I always loved capturing that one. I'm not kidding, I have so many shots of this scene. Here, have some more:

If you want to play a little game, you can try to pick out which character is mine in each shot! Or just generally let me know which character out of all the ones pictured you think looks the best. Or which group looks the most cohesive as a team. There are just so many things to ogle.

I almost forgot that Czerka Core Meltdown has a similar cut scene because it just doesn't work nearly as well. The above screenshot is cropped to focus more on the characters, because the camera is quite zoomed out if you look at the whole screen.

After Corporate Labs, I remember I kind of waited for Bioware to recreate that group cut scene magic in any of the flashpoints that followed but they never quite got there. The above shot from the end of Battle of Rishi is about as close as it got, and that, too required some cropping/zooming in.

A shot from Korriban Incursion. "Everyone with their weapons drawn" is another classic in terms of moments that looked great in screenshots.

Ah, Directive 7, one of the most interesting side stories from the base game that was never ever mentioned again anywhere. And another flashpoint with lots of little cut scenes (and even more trash mobs) that many hated for taking too long. But again, I quite enjoyed seeing my pug groups look cool and kick ass while facing off against Mentor.

Let's finish up with another screenshot from Battle of Ilum that stands for something else I'll miss: the dark side/light side choices. The image doesn't actually show the choice, but I saved it under the name "light side pug" - so the fact that I had ended up in a group of all light side characters on Imperial side stood out to me. I loved it when I found my people! And when someone disagreed about what the "right" choice was in a certain scenario, there was usually some friendly banter to be had. No more.

(Just as a disclaimer so nobody gets the wrong idea: I didn't "force" any of these pugs to wait for me while I was watching cut scenes. My attitude was always to skip if people wanted to skip, and watch if people wanted to watch, but you could easily get some great shots of certain moments even while space-barring through most of the conversation.)

Another One for the Books: Scum Speed Run

Back in June I wrote about successfully completing the Dread Palace timed run achievement with my guildies. Our next destination after that ended up being Scum and Villainy, which also has a timed run achievement... but I initially hardly dared to hope that we might be capable of accomplishing that, mostly because of the last boss. I still remembered from when we worked on the Styrak fight during Onslaught, how we literally spent months wiping on him, and how even the final kill - satisfying as it was - took us over 20 minutes, something I found difficult to mentally reconcile with the idea of a speed run.

However, things went better than I'd expected as we started working our way through the ops without the timer. I didn't actually keep track, but I think I would've been able to count the number of attempts it took us to kill Styrak on my fingers if I'd wanted to. Clearly what had held us back those years ago had truly just been the bad group composition above all else, and going in with the knowledge that we needed certain combat styles and preparing accordingly turned that into a complete non-issue.

A guildie who's a much better player than me encouraged me: "You've done the DP timed run, and that's much harder! This should be very doable." And indeed, where in Dread Palace you only have one hour to beat five encounters, in Scum you have two hours to defeat seven of them. Everyone agreed that it was both a realistic and a worthy goal to pursue.

Nonetheless, progression still wasn't all as smooth as that. Most fights in Scum master mode are much easier than in Dread Palace, and I'd say at least four of the fights became more or less guaranteed one-shots pretty quickly. Thrasher, the third boss, could sometimes be a random road block if something was even slightly off with the group, as there's a lot of damage thrown at random targets, requiring strong burst healing, people to use their cooldowns correctly, and dps to be very responsive to the add spawns.

The worst fight by far though were the Cartel Warlords, primarily because Sunder, the boss that needs kiting, has been suffering from terrible desync for years, meaning that he'd often appear on the other side of the room from where he actually was, which is not a good thing when you have to stay away from him or else risk being one-shot. It could be very hit and miss whether our tank could kite him long enough without anything going horribly wrong. And that's without even mentioning that it can be very easy to already wipe in the first phase, when the pressure on the healers is the highest and there are once again a lot of randomly targeted damage abilities going around that could cause someone to fall over if they just so happened to be hit by a lot of things in a row.

Styrak himself turned out to be a comparatively mild obstacle, with the biggest problem being just how long the fight still was. With better dps we could now take him down in less than twenty minutes, but that's still pretty long for a boss fight, and a single wipe at a late stage of the encounter could be massively costly in terms of time.

Once again progression was very much not linear, with us getting hard stuck on Thrasher one week, then breezing through all bosses until Styrak the next, just to keep wiping to silly mistakes; followed by us getting stuck on Cartel Warlords again on the next run.

That said, this Wednesday the stars finally aligned: we one-shot Thrasher, and got Cartel Warlords down on the third attempt. It was a pretty epic victory too, with only one person still alive to deliver the final killing blow to the last warlord. And Styrak was once again super-smooth, with us finishing the speed run achievement with plenty of time left on the clock.

Even better: the next evening we did it again, for the one member of the team who still needed the achievement and hadn't been there the previous night. This time we one-shot both Thrasher and Cartel Warlords and only had a silly wipe in Oasis City that was completely my fault. However, we did lose some time to real life interruptions, and then wiped on Styrak four times. Fortunately, fifth time was the charm and we got him down mere minutes before the timer was about to run out.

I'm happy that I got the achievement (as well as the character title on both my main and main healing alt) but above all, I just feel extremely proud of how well the team got together to make this happen. I hardly want to think about how long this streak of good luck can possibly last because good times like these never last forever.

Fun fact: Even though this operation is over ten years old at this point, I was surprised to find that there are still certain mechanics for which it's hard to find hard data about how they work. The specific example that made us scratch our heads was the knockback add on Styrak. There seemed to be agreement that the healers needed to stand out and it would jump to them, but even though we made sure to do that, it would still leap into the melee group sometimes. Someone suggested having a third person stand out, a ranged dps - still no difference. The best we could work out eventually was that a Watchman Sentinel's group healing could cause the add to mistake them for a healer and leap to them, because the moment our own Sentinel changed to a different spec for this fight, the random leaps into melee stopped happening.

Skilling Those Crews

We're in that quiet time between Galactic Seasons - technically PvP Season 8 is still going on, but I got my last achievement for that the other week and didn't really have anything to say about the experience that I haven't already said after the last couple of PvP seasons (about how lowbie and midbie queues are increasingly anaemic even on Darth Malgus and it's something that worries me a lot in regards to the health of the game... but that's not the subject of this post).

Usually I'd stop playing on the other servers during this time, but this time around I've kept logging in... to work on crew skills. As a general rule, I like the crew skills system, but it hasn't had a meaningful update in forever at this point, and the devs giving us ever more powerful augments to craft recently is something I feel a bit meh about.

That said, I've done minimal work on my crew skills on the other servers, because I primarily play there for Galactic Seasons and Conquest, and raising a crew skill by one point gives a nice number of Conquest points for the mere seconds of interaction it requires. So I've always had it in my head that I'm better off not raising my crew skills on these characters, because capping them would mean losing this source of Conquest points.

There was just one problem with this: I kept getting "mission discovery" items from login rewards (consumables that grant you a one-time crew skill mission with a wealthy yield) and most of my characters weren't actually high enough to use them. Watching my legacy cargo bay slowly drown in these things started to give me flashbacks to when I first created my characters on Leviathan and Tulak Hord and just collected login rewards for a few weeks, until their inventories became so full that I felt I had to start actually levelling them, in order to get access to a cargo hold and legacy storage if nothing else. Like I said back then, other people feel motivated to play in order to earn free items; I feel driven to play in order to deal with all the free items that are being thrust upon me!

I also realised that with each character having three crew skills that cap out at 700 points each, raising them at a rate of one skill-up per day to maximise Conquest points would take almost six years per character. There really was no need for me to artificially try and slow things down.

So I've been logging into at least one character per server per day over the past few weeks to level up their crew skills. You can actually get most of the way towards your personal Conquest target by doing that every day, assuming that you'll also have a companion go up an influence level at least once or twice in the process.

It's felt kind of satisfying, but also made me realise just how slow of a process it is if you're just sitting there waiting for your companions to run missions or craft things, especially if your character isn't that progressed and therefore doesn't have that many companions yet and they aren't of particularly high influence. I haven't really felt the weight of that in a long time, considering how long most of my characters on Darth Malgus have been maxed out in everything.

Sadly my efforts haven't made much of a dent in the pile of mission discoveries yet since a lot of them require pretty high skills to use, but at least I'm making some progress. I think my main takeaway from the whole exercise is that next season I'll need to remember to run at least a couple of crew skills on the side during each "proper" play session to make sure I can get them levelled up more consistently.

Ranking the 7.7 Dynamic Encounter Planets

I've been meaning to write more about the dynamic encounters that were added with patch 7.7 for a while, but I struggled to make up my mind about what format I was going to use for the post. I had fun with the top ten lists I made for Hoth and Tatooine, but that format doesn't work so well when you're dealing with a larger number of planets, each of which has a much smaller number of dynamic encounters than those two.

I ultimately decided that I'm just going to rank the planets against each other instead, talking about each planet in more general terms instead of discussing too many individual encounters in detail.

Going from best to worst, I would start with: 

1. Dromund Kaas

If you split the seven planets that had dynamic encounters added in 7.7 into three groups - capital worlds, starter planets and Ilum - I think both of the capital worlds definitely came out on top. With more than twenty unique encounters per planet they offer the most variety of the bunch, as well as offering an easy way to grind Conquest points.

The encounters on Dromund Kaas are thematically very varied, mostly leaning into the different regional "themes" previously established in side missions, such as the spaceport being somewhat in disarray or the lightning spires being under attack. They mostly seem to be set in the same time period as those original exploration missions, though I noticed while dispersing unruly Imperial citizens in Kaas City that one of them yelled "What is Xarion hiding?", which I thought was an interesting detail that would place that one after Onslaught in the timeline.

In general, most of the encounters are quick and fun, and strategically placed in locations where people are bound to come through on their way to some other mission objective, making it very temping to allow yourself to be distracted for a moment to complete an encounter. Prime examples of this are doing "Bad Monkey" just after arriving at the spaceport, or hunting down the rogue bounty hunter while passing through Kaas City.

If I had to cite anything negative, I'd say that there are a couple of encounters with flaws. The Apex Predator in "Shock and Awe" feels way overtuned for levelling players (trying to solo it on a level thirty-something with a healer companion I was chunked to death within only a couple of hits), and the final boss for "Kubaz Incursion" can be a bit annoyingly hard to find. "Powder Keg" actually being possible to fail is a neat idea but the fact that it's the only encounter of this kind and that it's not obvious at all what is going on unless you're already in the know makes it a bit unpleasant in that regard.

Also, I wish they'd fix encounter voice lines sometimes playing when the encounter isn't even up, because every time my speeder rides past the lightning spires I get spammed with yells about multiple encounters that may not actually all be active.

Anyway, all in all it's still a fun romp, and the reason it's edging out Coruscant for first place in my opinion is that the map makes it both cheap and easy to get around if you want to do multiple encounters. Which brings us to...

2. Coruscant 

In general, Coruscant is one of my top three planets in the entire game, and most positive things I said about the dynamic encounters on Dromund Kaas above also apply to Coruscant. The reason I put it in second place is simply the fact that it's a bit of a pain to travel between dynamic encounters due to the planetary layout with the different sectors, which all count as being really far apart, which in turn means that moving between them always requires either a looong taxi ride or paying the maximum price for quick travel. Even if you do opt for quick travel though, the sectors are still laid out in such a way that it can be a pain to just travel from one dynamic encounter within the same sector to the next one.

The said, I adore most of the encounters in the Senate Plaza, which is where I'm always passing through when I exit my stronghold, and I basically never pass on an opportunity to set off some fireworks or to help clean up the party's aftermath.

Negatives are that some of the Black Sun and Justicar encounters don't have nearly enough clickies if there's even more than one person trying to do the encounter at the same time, the way Ugnaught Engineering was horrifically bugged when it first came out and made people get into fights about who was supposedly causing it to bug, stealing kills or whatever (regardless of whether it was true or not), and the one encounter on the Senate Plaza that I don't like, "Understaffed". Like with "Powder Keg", you can tell someone just wanted to try something different there, but the final result is just too undercooked, with a tutorial mode that teaches you to do things the wrong way, and people being able to ruin the encounter for each other - both intentionally and unintentionally - which is never a good thing.

3. Tython 

Next we have the starter planets, which I think are all pretty similar in quality, and I don't feel particularly strongly about the order in which I've ranked them against each other. The main reason I consider them worse than the capital planets it that there are very few encounters, so you'll run out of things to do pretty quickly if you're just trying to grind on a single planet, and that none of the DEs on the starter planets give Conquest points. I can see why the devs decided to have that limitation, but it still means that for someone who's very Conquest-focused like me, they tend to have a lot less replay value.

With that general preamble out of the way, Tython is definitely my favourite of the bunch, since it's my favourite of all the starter planets and I think all its dynamic encounters are very on point, whether you're doing simple chores at the Jedi Temple or beating back the flesh raiders.

The only thing I'll say is that I do wonder a little how having a dynamic encounter pop up the moment you leave your intro phase is going to affect new players' perception of the planet and the game as a whole, and whether it might make things come off as a bit "loud" and overwhelming to less experienced gamers. I would love to have insight into the devs' behavioural metrics on the starter planets for that one... 

4. Hutta

Hutta is actually one of my least favourite planets, generally speaking, but I think in terms of dynamic encounters it works well enough. Again, the themes of the encounters go very well with what's also conveyed via the existing side missions, from dangerous wildlife to rebellious evocii.

The only thing I'm not so sure about is having an encounter that is basically a vehicle quest right outside the spawn phase, because it makes me wonder whether that isn't a bit confusing/overwhelming for new players. Even if seeing a bunch of droids enter the gang wars right outside the Poison Pit does serve to drive home the point that the town is a bit of a mess. 

5. Ord Mantell

Ord Mantell is one of two planets where I actually feel like some of the encounters are slightly off in tone. This may very well be my personal bias speaking, as someone who mains a trooper and was instantly scarred by being blamed for the death of Bellis the informant at the hands of the separatists by multiple people, but I always perceived the whole setting with the separatists as very dark and desperate. Even the smuggler story with all its goofiness has a pretty dark turn here with Corso's parents being dead because of the separatists and him having that one moment where he wants to execute that random sep in cold blood.

With that said, I just feel like some of the encounters involving separatists feel a bit too silly. Like that mad scientist type sending you out to shoot separatists with one of his droids? It's one thing if there's a specific NPC that's bit ridiculous when you talk to them, that's clearly just that one character, but the fact that you hear the dynamic encounter yells repeated endlessly even when you're just driving by gives them a much stronger impact on the mood in my opinion. Might just be me.

6. Korriban

That's also the reason why I rate Korriban last of this batch, because again, several of the encounters just feel a bit too goofy to me personally. Don't get me wrong, both the Sith warrior and inquisitor stories have plenty of humorous moments even on Korriban, but I still always got the vibe that as a setting, the planet is clearly meant to be very grim, with all the racial purity nonsense and dog-eat-dog behaviour encouraged in the acolytes. Stuff like k'lor'slugs running wild around the academy feels more like the kind of hijinx you'd find in a young adult book series about a magic school. (That said, looking at how busy each planet is, this one actually seems to be very popular with people, so again, this might just be me.)

7. Ilum 

Finally, in last place - alas, poor Ilum. I really wanted the addition of dynamic encounters to this planet to feel like a revival for it. I have some fond memories of Ilum from the game's early days, even though it felt somewhat unfinished even then, but over time it's only ever declined in relevance. Sadly I can't say that I feel like dynamic encounters have put it back on people's radar, and based on the small number of other people I see doing encounters there, I get the impression that it didn't really land for the majority of the population either.

Good things first: the theming is once again spot-on on this one. They really leaned into the Republic vs. Empire conflict from the original storyline and even added some encounter achievements that are meant to encourage world PvP. (I'm 99% sure that almost nobody will bother with those, but I appreciate the effort.) On the Western Ice Shelf, they've expanded on the lore of the Tonvarr Pirates that were previously only really relevant during the Gree event. It all works.

The problem is simply that too many of the encounters are just not very fun. Too many of them have multiple stages and feature a large number of mobs - when sometimes mob-killing isn't even part of the main objective, which makes it feel like you're just endlessly wading back and forth through constantly respawning mobs to actually get to the next clicky you need. It just feels tedious to the point that my brain keeps trying to forget that Ilum is another planet that has dynamic encounters now and I very rarely even remember to go there.

All that said, I wanted to also give a shout-out to a change to dynamic encounters in general that came with 7.7 but that I didn't see in the patch notes: When they released these new encounters, they changed it so that on staged DEs, you no longer need to complete every single stage by yourself to get credit, but rather you can join in at any time and still get completion. I feel that this has been a great change and has been most noticeable for me during encounters such as the base attacks on Tatooine and Hoth. It used to be that I felt that there was no point in joining in if people were already fighting the stage two walker, as it wouldn't give me anything and I'd just have to restart the encounter from scratch afterwards anyway. Now I'll gleefully jump in and help out because I'll actually be rewarded for it too, which I think has been a great change.

How many of the new encounters have you done at this point? And do you agree with my ranking of the planets or not? Let me know in the comments. 

Some Interesting News From SWTOR's 7.7.1 Dev Stream

I was somewhat disappointed by the last two dev streams, but the voice actors' strike ended a few weeks ago, so I was positive that we'd get some good news about the next story update this time, and I was also hopeful that whatever they were going to announce about Galactic Season 9 was going to be more appealing to me than Season 8's uprising focus had been. I did get both of those things, but as I always do, I have some nits to pick as well.

Story is coming... but later and perhaps less than we'd hoped

At least when talking with some of my friends, there had been a hope expressed that the next story patch would be one big "catch-up patch" giving us a bigger chunk of story than usual, kind of like how Echoes of Oblivion and Spirit of Vengeance (which were originally supposed to be separate pieces of content) were both released at the same time after delays caused by Covid.

This... is not going to be the case. 7.8, which will come out before Christmas, will have the "Galactic Threads" story that was originally meant to be included in patch 7.6 last Christmas, and then they'll speed up a little bit and add "Master's Engima", the story originally built for patch 7.7, with 7.8.1, which should then launch at some point early next year and would usually have included only the start of Galactic Season 10 and no story update.

While I'm glad to finally have something close to a date, having to wait another four months or so until the next story drop still hurts - by that point the game will have gone nearly 18 months without a story patch, which is unprecedented in this MMO's history.

The other thing that stuck out to me is that if we're getting the story that was meant to be in 7.6 in 7.8, what was meant to be in 7.8 before that? No story? Ultimately it feels like aside from the delays, we also lost one of the twice-a-year story installments due to the strike, which sucks.

Same thing with date nights by the way - they mentioned working on one back in the 7.6.1 stream, but now we won't even get one with 7.7.1, with the next expected release (Torian and Kira) coming with 7.8.1 next year. 

Galactic Season 9: Flashpoint Resurgence

As for GS9, its theme is flashpoints. Yippee! There will be Czerka buffs involved like there were for uprisings during GS8, which I don't really care about, but I'm good with running flashpoints with or without buffs. Unfortunately it sounded like the objectives will be veteran mode only, which is a bit disappointing to me personally and will not encourage my guildies to group up I reckon, but still, it's flashpoints.

The most interesting bit of the stream to me personally was the devs talking about how they were using the occasion of this seasonal focus on flashpoints to make some changes to the activity finder. A big quality of life improvement they will make is that you'll finally be able to queue as multiple roles again, change roles while queueing (so that you can e.g. do dailies in a dps spec while queueing for a flashpoint as healer) and it will take both of your combat styles into account, meaning you could queue as all three roles if you wanted and have the right combat styles for it. Now, to be clear, only the last bit of that is actually new - both the ability to queue for multiple roles and the ability to queue as a different role than you're currently playing were in the game before but got patched out at some point, I think because they were buggy or causing issues of some sort. Still, I'm very glad to see these features make a comeback at last.

They are also going to improve the loot you get in flashpoints while levelling, though it's not entirely clear what that will mean - I'm guessing more gear that is actually appropriate for your level and combat style, because getting drops that you can't even use or not use for another twenty levels was definitely a thing sometimes.

For the max levels, you'll no longer have to queue for all flashpoints to be eligible for additional daily/weekly rewards, but can exclude a few that you may want to avoid. You still won't be rewarded for just spamming Hammer Station and nothing else, but you can untick a couple you don't like, which I guess is nice. 

No more "spacebar plz"

The thing that kind of shocked me was that in connection to all these flashpoint changes, queued veteran and master mode flashpoints will no longer feature any cut scenes or group conversations; everything will just be auto-skipped and if there was some sort of decision to be made (such as whether to kill or spare the captain in the Black Talon) it will just do so automatically. If you want to see the conversations and cut scenes in the future, you'll need to do story mode (where available) or manually walk into the higher difficulty with some friends.

Now, I completely understand why they are doing this and I'm sure many people will consider this a major quality of life improvement. I made a whole compilation poking fun at people's urge to skip the cut scenes seven years ago. I've seen it all, from the guy who drops group the moment you zone into the Esseles or Black Talon, to endless arguments about who isn't hitting their space bar and why. It was a source of friction for sure.

AND YET. I myself have always loved the group conversations in flashpoints and was generally happy to watch cut scenes if other people wanted to do so too. I enjoy running flashpoints, but I never "spammed" them to the point where getting the Esseles again made me frustrated. (The only flashpoint that I've managed to get utterly sick of is Hammer Station, and that has nothing to do with cut scenes and everything to do with the community.)

I also felt that the group conversations often inspired fun little interactions, such as when a dark or light side choice got people chatting. My guildies have seen me express (not-entirely-serious) outrage at killing the engineers or leaving Asara behind in the Esseles more than a few times. And some of the cut scenes also just genuinely looked nice! I have a whole collection of screenshots of pugs in Czerka Corporate Labs, from that last cut scene that shows your group walking into the room looking heroic.

And all of that is just going to be... gone? Telling me that you can technically build a group manually and walk in to still see the cut scenes is a bit of a cold comfort because let's be real, how often do people do that? How often have you run Kuat Drive Yards since it was removed from the group finder? I just feel like this is going to be one of those things that will end up having negative ripple effects that people won't fully feel until later down the line. Or maybe I'm just a relic of ancient times for having actually enjoyed interacting with my pug mates in small ways, even if there was friction sometimes.

Be free, F2P-ers!

A big change for free-to-play players that's coming with the next patch is that the devs will be dropping a lot of the old restrictions on that type of account. You will now also get sprint at level 1, have all action bars unlocked, be able to hide your head slot  and equip random purples that you get while levelling. Honestly, with some of the things they mentioned I didn't even know there were restrictions for that: What, F2P players couldn't display legacy titles before? Or equip companion customisations? WTF?

Even as someone who's always been subscribed, I think this is great news. SWTOR has had a reputation for having extremely draconian F2P restrictions for a long time - I remember how the limited action bars were a source of ridicule across the entire MMO community when the game first went free-to-play. I think the devs did the right thing by being cautious when they first changed payment model back in the day (mostly because other MMOs that followed suit later and kept crowing about how much more generous their F2P model was in comparison, such as Rift and Wildstar, did ultimately not end up doing well).

However, all of that was over a decade ago, times have changed, and there's just no reason to be quite so brutal with all those restrictions on what's effectively the game's free trial mode. Annoying players with arbitrary feature locks before they've even left the starter planet was just never great, and I hope that these changes will give more people a chance to actually fall in love with what the game has to offer and then spend some money on it happily instead of feeling nagged from the get-go.

What about subscribers though?

So as not to leave subscribers feeling unappreciated, the game will run a new "subscriber login event" from September to December where you'll earn a special currency if you log in at least four times a week, which you can then use to buy some goodies. I kinda raised my eyebrow a bit at one of those goodies supposedly being "endgame gear" but we'll see. I really don't need more free stuff myself, but I can't blame them for trying to offer subscribers a bit more carrot while easing up on the F2P stick.

Say farewell to endless free CC

Speaking of carrots and sticks, regardless of your subscription status, you've long gained 100 free Cartel Coins per month if you've got a security key attached to your account. I often saw delighted comments from people who came back to the game after some time away to find that they'd accumulated thousands of free Cartel Coins while not playing. While that was nice, considering for how long the game has been running at this point, I can't blame the bean counters for concluding that someone coming back after years and immediately finding $40 worth of Cartel Coins in their account was maybe not so good for their bottom line. No, that free CC is not going to go away, but it will only be awarded going forward if your account was actually active in the last 30 days. 

Decos, Graphics, DirectX

Under "other topics about which I don't have that much to say", we have the Feast of Prosperity returning this autumn with some awesome new decos that I'll definitely want to grind for. (I actually broke my habit of ignoring Twitch chat to type "LOVE LAMP" when they showed the new ceiling lights.) 

The character customisation updates continue, with Rattataki getting updated textures next, and dark-side corruption getting a much-needed revamp so that it no longer turns every character into a pasty white dude regardless of their previous skin colour. (I might actually give showing it on my dark-siders a try once this goes live - I previously always disabled it precisely because it changed your skin colour so much and I didn't want to look like an albino axolotl.) Also, after they added all those skin colours for aliens in the last patch, they are expanding on this by adding more hair and montral colours with 7.7.1.

Finally, in technical news that I have to file under "I don't know enough about this to have an opinion but I guess it sounds good", they are making good progress on updating the game to DirectX 12 but there's still some work left to do. 

As usual, if you want ALL THE DEETS, including things I didn't mention here and images of various rewards, here are some other places you can look:

• VOD on YouTube (Twitch had some hiccups and split it into several parts) 
• Official recap article
• Swtorista
• Today in TOR 

Fun with the New Outriders

I've mentioned previously that aside from being an officer in Twin Suns Squadron, the guild on Darth Malgus that I've been a part of for over a decade at this point, I also joined some guilds on the other servers on a more casual basis. The standout among these is probably New Outriders, a multi-gaming guild/community that has its SWTOR branch on Star Forge and in which Intisar is an officer.

I don't get to actually interact with the people there that often because of time zones, but when I do it's always cordial, and on the rare occasion when they have an event in the afternoon in their time zone, meaning that I can join in as well, I'm always excited.

Yesterday was one such occasion, and it started off in a way that was very flattering to me, as Intisar instructed me to come online a bit early, declaring that a few people would help me get the last three DvL boss kills I was still missing on Star Forge. So we did that, and it wasn't actually too painful, even on Hoth! The GS8 achievement for the boss kills by itself doesn't actually give anything worthwhile, but it turns out the original achievement to kill all the bosses from back in Knights of the Eternal Throne is also still active, so that triggered as well and I got lots of banner decos for it, which was nice.

This was also a good example of one of the things I do love about joining events on Star Forge - there I'm just another member and can rely on other people to carry me a bit. I don't mind being an officer in Twin Suns Squadron, but it is also work sometimes, and only the day before I'd been making lists and parking summon alts all over the place to help my guildies there tick off their last few achievements, so it was a nice change of pace to have someone do the same for me, you know?

Anyway, once the event got started properly, a lot more people came online, including a couple of the officers from the wider community that clearly hadn't played SWTOR in a while. I got quite wide-eyed inspecting them, with one of their characters being level 55 and the other one 75. It was like looking at a time capsule! I think I must have gasped lines like "OMG, he's got an Oriconian ear piece" out loud at my screen at one point.

The event itself was a very casual-friendly affair open to all levels that involved travelling across various planets, killing world bosses, collecting datacrons and just generally having a bit of fun. I was pretty impressed by how even though there was never a dull moment, I couldn't quite tell how much of it had been planned and how much was spontaneous. The characters that had been parked next to difficult-to-reach datacrons had obviously been prepared with intent, but other times we'd arrive on the scene of a dynamic encounter and Intisar would just go "oh, this one is fun" and we'd all do it together and I figure that can't possibly have been planned that way? I don't know.

The most whimsical detour was when we got to Tython and Intisar beckoned everyone to join him at the planet's 0,0 coordinate to marvel at the strange floating orb of light there. It's funny how something that's clearly just a random bug has developed into a kind of mysterious attraction and people like to make up their own lore about how the Uxibeast next to the flame must be Force-sensitive or something.

Since there were no level requirements for the event, I took part using my little Sage alt who had only just earned her own ship (that part was required to be able to accept summons) and she gained no fewer than five levels from gallivanting around the galaxy and trying to take part in killing world bosses. Plus she got a lot of random creature codexes from when people around her decided to kill all the wildlife in the vicinity.

It was just very wholesome and I'm always kind of impressed by the joyful energy everyone in the guild still displays while playing the game, even when they're off to kill the Coruscant world boss for what must be the 100th time. It probably helps that they have a seemingly endless supply of in-jokes that sometimes make my head spin, including every boss and their abilities having special made-up names. (I've got to admit, FR3-D0M being introduced as "the Hamburglar who does cheese and tomatoes" broke me a little.)

Either way, it's refreshing to me because even though I obviously love my guild on Darth Malgus, I think it's fair to say that we have... a considerable number of members who are a bit jaded about the game at this point and are much harder to excite. It may not be possible to go back to being a wide-eyed noob, but I for one am still capable of having a lot of fun with even the more basic aspects of the game and it's nice to hang out with others who feel the same sometimes.

(This Year) I Love the Night Life

When Nar Shaddaa Nightlife was mentioned in May's dev stream, I was grousing that they didn't address the one thing I cared about in relation to that event - whether they were finally making the casino chips a legacy-wide currency. And to be honest... I still don't know why they weren't shouting this from the rooftops, but this past week, one day before the event began, they announced that the chips were becoming legacy-bound after all - halfway down the page in a pretty long article.

As it turns out, this change wasn't without hiccups: Immediately after launch, it turned out that acquisition of any new chips was apparently causing all your old chips to be deleted, which led to an emergency server shutdown and quick fix, but once that had been handled, I was excited to log in and cycle through all my characters to get a tally of how many chips I had. It took a while, mostly because once I got to logging through them all, I also felt the need to check their mail, claim the latest set of freebies they'd received etc. but in the end I was left with what I felt was a pretty decent amount.

Fortunately the days when too many free chips would just make me feel anxious are long gone (the max bet machines are a thing now after all), and I've been happy to just do a few spins per day for the Conquest points. I'm pleased that now that the chips are legacy-bound, this is much easier than it used to be, when I'd have to log back and forth between different characters all the time just to find who still had several different kinds of chips left.

There aren't any particular prizes I'm chasing this time around, but that doesn't mean I'm not happy to collect some new mounts and pets on different characters. 

Conquest Events That Are Good for Small Guilds

This post has been sitting in my drafts as a personal reference for me for a while, and I figured it was about time that I actually finish and publish it so that other people can benefit from this information too.

If you're the guild master or an officer in a smaller guild, you're probably familiar with the dilemma of which invasion target to choose for Conquest each week. On the one hand you want to go as large as your guild can manage, to maximise everyone's rewards, but on the other hand you want to make sure that you don't bite off more than you can chew, causing your guild to struggle or even fail to reach its cumulative target.

Also, raise your hand if you've ever been in a situation like the following: You go for small yield and then someone decides to randomly be super active that week, causing you to way overshoot the required score. So the following week you go for medium yield, thinking that there's clearly more activity going on than you expected, and suddenly it's totally dead again, so you find yourself personally grinding out the missing points on Sunday or Monday just to hit target. It's annoying!

Now, I can't tell you what your guildies are going to do from one week to the next either, but one thing I've learned over time is that there are some Conquest events that are much better at generating points than others, which is something to keep in mind.

Death Mark

First we have the event that is tied to Bounty Contract Week and therefore comes around as frequently as once a month. You'll definitely want to bookmark this one as it contains the following two objectives:

• Galactic Rampage 
• Missions: Supreme Taskmaster

The former requires you to kill 200 mobs anywhere in the galaxy (and yes, flashpoints and operations count) and gives a little less than 100k points if you have the full Conquest bonus from strongholds. After completion, it also turns into a daily repeatable that's good for another chunk of points every day.

Missions: Supreme Taskmaster requires you to complete 35 missions of any type, awards over 200k points on first completion and then also turns into an only slightly less rewarding repeatable version.

The key thing here is that there are very few activities in SWTOR that don't require you to kill mobs or complete missions, so if your guildies are active at all during the week, they'll be generating Conquest points whether they are actively trying to or not. As a result of this, I've found that during Death Mark weeks, it's generally safe to put your guild's Conquest target one size up compared to what it'd usually be, meaning that if you usually go for small yield, it should be safe to go for medium, and if you usually go medium, you can probably go large.

Revenge of the Revanites

This Conquest is event is much rarer but features the same rampage and taskmaster objectives as Death Mark, so the same rules apply.

Swoop Gang Mayhem

This event is not as "powerful" in terms of points but includes the following noteworthy objectives:

• Missions: Heroic Pinnacle
• Activity Finder: Pinnacle

These give a large chunk of points for completing ten heroics or ten group activities (flashpoints/operations/uprisings/PvP matches) respectively, and they also turn into slightly less rewarding repeatable versions on completion.

Now, I'm not a huge fan of heroics, but many people do like doing them, and if they do they'll be adding a lot more points than usual to your guild's tally.

Similarly, not everyone is into group content, but again, if you have guildies that take part in any type of it repeatedly over the course of the week, they'll be adding more points than they'd usually earn from the same activity.

So this is another candidate for potentially going for a bigger yield than usual, though somewhat dependent on your guildies' preferences. 

The Balance of Power

Like Revenge of the Revanites, this is a rarer event since it's not tied to any world events, but it features the same two objectives as Swoop Gang Mayhem above and may be worth your consideration before choosing your guild's invasion target for the week.