Another PvP Season Under My Belt

PvP Season Seven has a few weeks left to run, but I completed my last achievement last week, so things are going to be kind of quiet for me in game for the next few weeks. At least we can expect to get some information about the next patch in the livestream next week.

The pacing change that came with the additional levels introduced last season still felt odd, as I once again finished all the bonus achievements before actually completing the seasonal reward track. If anything, it was even more pronounced this season, as I didn't make an effort to make the maximum progress of one thousand points a week this time around, which meant that I needed an extra week to complete the track. The track being the last thing to get finished remains slightly strange to me.

My most stand-out experiences this season were all in arenas, interestingly enough. The best match I had was without a doubt when the plasmatech Vanguard that I'm levelling dinged upwards into the midbie bracket. I actually don't like doing PvP at the lower end of a bracket, because you usually feel very obviously underpowered compared to the characters at the upper end, and sometimes people even get shirty about having low-level team mates. As it was though, I still had a PvP weekly I wanted to complete, and in this arena, fortunately nobody complained. And we ended up having an insanely good match, which we won 2-1, with me actually doing crazy amounts of damage with my DoTs despite my low level. The last round also came down to a 1v1 between me and an enemy, which I won. That felt pretty great.

My worst arena experience of the season were several days when the midbie queue was made unbearable by a premade, which was kind of ironic as people complained about premades a lot in past seasons and many seemed to think that discontinuing 8-person queues for warzones would solve that problem. Yet I rarely had problems with premades in previous seasons, while they were a really noticeable nuisance this time around.

Even so, I'd still argue that the real problem isn't the existence of premades in itself - I see nothing wrong with friends or guildies wanting to queue together. The problem is population (yes, I'm beating that drum again). When you only have about ten people or so queueing for midbie arenas on a given evening, and four of them are in a group together, it's obvious that everyone else is doomed to have a bad time. I very rarely quit matches, but when I got put up against the same premade for the third time in a row, I apologised to the one person on my team who had already loaded in, explained that I was getting tired of getting stomped by these guys over and over and left, followed by me logging off and doing something else for an hour or two. When I logged back in I thought I'd give queueing another try - and was immediately put up against the same premade yet again. It was absolutely infuriating.

The generally most interesting arena experience I had, with a mix of good and bad, was when I was doing a midbie arena on my Juggernaut, and the second person to load in on my team immediately said something like "oops, I meant to queue for warzones". Sensing that he was about to quit, I quickly teased "you've got to stay for this match though", which at least worked to engage the guy in conversation. He groused that he wasn't that good etc. and I simply said I'd still rather have him here than go up against the three people on the enemy team by myself, which oddly seemed to convince him.

I can't actually remember whether we ended up with properly balanced teams in the end, but I do recall that there were only three people on our team and that both I and my reluctant arena buddy actually put up a pretty good fight. The third person however was a Scoundrel that did nothing but use their basic attack and throw grenades every now and then. Didn't even use stealth from what I remember. There was one particularly odd moment when I and the warzone guy had both died, and the only two players remaining were our Scoundrel and a Powertech on the enemy team. And the Scoundrel just stood there, plinking away at the PT with their basic attack so uselessly, that the Powertech actually stopped fighting for a bit and just watched in confusion. Was that Scoundrel really not even going to try anything else? Eventually the PT got bored though and killed them (easily, of course).

This caused warzone guy to get mad and start insulting the Scoundrel, which in turn resulted in me trying to calm him down. He said things like "don't queue for PvP if you're not even going to try" and I tried to argue that the Scoundrel may well be a newer player and just not know how to play very well. Sure, they were above level fifty, but I'm pretty sure you can make it to that level by using nothing but two buttons nowadays if you want.

The whole thing just made me feel very conflicted because I've been converted to the benefits of accessibility and agree that the story doesn't need to be hard to be enjoyable, but at the same time putting obstacles in the player's way that force them to learn to press more than two buttons is one of the main ways in which you can teach someone to play better. I guess in an ideal world there'd be enough people queueing that two-button-pressers could go up against other two-button-pressers, but unfortunately that's not the world we live in and as it stands, encountering someone in PvP who is still on such a basic level of gameplay when they are more than halfway towards the level cap is definitely a shock to the system.

10 Types of Annoying PvP Match

PvP Season 7 is in full swing and I'm taking part in it as usual. I wouldn't do so if I didn't enjoy PvP, but even with the best will in the world, PvP can also be filled with frustrations sometimes. Inspired by some of those feelings, I bring you a list of ten different types of annoying PvP match that I regularly come across in my journeys.

Note that this is not a top ten list because the severity of annoyance with each of these types of match can vary a lot depending on the exact circumstances of the situation, and you can have both mild cases and ones that are really bloody annoying in each category.

The one that's doomed from the start due to numbers

By that I mean the number of people on each team, not dps numbers. This is more likely to happen in arenas than in warzones and mostly happens in lower level PvP, though it can technically happen in any mode depending on your luck. If the difference is only one person and the skill difference between the teams is big enough, you can still have an interesting match sometimes, but there's nothing quite like starting an arena with only one other person on your team vs. a full group of four, or the game pitting you against three enemies all by yourself. You just know it's not gonna happen no matter what. (Though the other day I was put into an arena by myself vs. three opponents and actually managed to kill one of them before they killed me - I considered that a win on a personal level.)

The one where desync keeps screwing you over

Mostly this happens in Huttball. I've written about desync in the past, and I remember they even took two of the Huttball maps out of the game for a while to "fix" them, though I don't think that ultimately went anywhere. It's not always equally bad, but there are definitely times when you desperately want to intercept the ball carrier but the game just can't decide what floor they are even on until after they've already scored.

The one where your whole team is just clueless

Everyone's got to start learning at some point, and I can't hold it against anyone if they don't know the rules and objectives of each warzone on day one. Nonetheless, being saddled with a whole team of players like that at once can be frustrating. The prime example I always think of for this was an Odessen Proving Grounds match that started with the southern and middle nodes active... and the moment the spawn point opened, everyone but me ran north, where there was... nothing. I just knew right then that I wasn't in for a good time. I mean, I couldn't even be mad, but it sure is deflating to be literally the only person in a team of eight going for the objective while the other seven bumble around in the middle of nowhere.

The one where you're just getting completely steamrolled

Whether it's because you're up against a premade or the matchmaker is just doing its usual thing of not giving a damn, it's not very fun to be in a match where you basically get murdered the moment you come out of the spawn point. If you're lucky, at least it'll be over quickly, but if you're unlucky, you might end up against a premade that intentionally tries to draw things out so they can farm more numbers before finishing you off.

The one where your team is trying but just not good enough

This is a very peculiar kind of annoyance because when both teams are trying but one is just a bit better, that should make for a good match, right? Even if you lose in the end, at least you had a chance? Well... I'd say that's true in principle, but there' a certain point where it can in fact make the match extra annoying, when you can tell that everyone is really trying but then you always get foiled at the last moment anyway, and still lose the Huttball match 0-6 or whatever. It's like you get your hopes up over and over again just to have them dashed repeatedly. This kind of match doesn't so much leave you mad at your team mates, but more like you're going insane from a terrible itch that you just can't scratch.

The one where people are going crazy with the insults

Honestly, I never quite got the idea of "smack talk" in PvP. I get that it's a thing that some people like, but I'm more in camp "good sportsmanship" where you try to not take it personally and treat everyone involved with respect, which is kind of the opposite really. Anyway, usually the sorts of comments I'm thinking of here wouldn't even remotely qualify for friendly banter anyway and just involve people outright yelling insults at each other. I'm not so thin-skinned that I consider a match immediately ruined if someone starts ranting, but depending on the intensity and how many people are doing it, it can definitely bring the vibe down. Though I've learned that /ignore really does help here.

The one where you're in a warzone with damage farmers

Look, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with just wanting to beat up the enemy, but there's arenas for that, right? Warzones have objectives for a reason, and it's very frustrating when the majority of your team is not on board with that. In fact, it's quite ironic how sometimes being in a warzone with a bunch of elite damage farmers is almost indistinguishable from being in one with a bunch of complete noobs. The only difference is that when you look at the scoreboard at the end, the veterans will have some big numbers and will presumably pat each other on the back about how well they did spamming AoE at the spawn for the entire duration of the match. However, you yourself will still end up just as frustrated being literally the only person going for the objective and ending up easily foiled by the enemy. The rare amusing exception to this is if both teams are damage farmers, and you can do objectives pretty much undisturbed while they all brawl in mid.

The one where you meet "that one guy"

Who's "that one guy", you might ask? The answer is: your nemesis, at least for the duration of the match. It doesn't matter what else is going on, you keep running into that one person and they piss you off every time! The prime example I always remember when thinking of this was a Huttball match where a Shadow was pretty much solo-running the ball for the enemy and would always have the perfect counter to every attempt of mine to stop him. It was so frustrating! More recently, I played a few matches on Star Forge where this one tank seemed to be absolutely intent on spending the entirety of each match crawling up my rear, no matter where on the map I went. I was healing, and to a certain degree getting focused as a healer is normal, but there were other healers on my team and yet that person was always on me. It's not even that I got killed all the time or anything, but it got very annoying rather quickly to be the target of seemingly every single stun and interrupt of that guy for the entire match.

The one where people give up and go AFK the moment the enemy gets ahead

I tend to think of AFKers in PvP as the bane of my existence, and a couple of seasons ago I ran into them quite frequently, but recently things have fortunately been better on that front and I haven't encountered that nearly as often. Interestingly, often when I hear people talk about AFKers, the blame gets (rightly or wrongly) put on people who actually don't like PvP and just queue up for certain rewards, hoping they'll get by just sitting in stealth for the entire match. I mention this because while I have no doubt that this does happen sometimes, my personal experience has been almost the opposite, that AFKers are often very much into PvP in general and may even be skilled players, but they just absolutely cannot deal with losing and will stop trying the moment their team falls behind, and then just stand in a corner while complaining about how much everyone but them sucks. In arenas this is often even worse, where you'll see certain people kill themselves with /stuck in the spawn at the start of the second round if their team lost the first round.

The one where you just need that one win or have been waiting forever

I think I've occasionally mentioned before how the way daily and weekly missions reset since 7.0 has made me feel more pressured for time when it comes to completing them, and that I actually often have more fun PvPing when I'm not trying to tick any boxes. As it is though, spending a lot of time in the queue and running out of time to, say, complete a daily, really ramps up the pressure for the match to be good when it finally pops, and there's nothing quite like the despair you feel when you've waited half an hour or longer to get into a game and then it just goes sideways immediately and you know it's going to be a waste of time.

PvP: Queues, Rewards & Healer Power

I originally planned to name this post "PvP Ponderings", but a quick search on the blog revealed that I already made a post with that exact same title back in 2012. That post was mostly about how unexpectedly enjoyable SWTOR's PvP had turned out to be for me (and others).

The last time I really spoke about PvP on the blog was back at the start of PvP Season 5 in March. My lofty ambitions to progress through the PvP season track on more than one server didn't really end up going anywhere, since Galactic Season 6 ended up eating most of my time soon afterwards and had no overlap with PvP at all for its first five weeks. As a result, I only completed the PvP season on Darth Malgus this time... though I did get all the achievements again, and was actually fully done (even with the medals achievement) a couple of weeks before the end of the season. I think most of that was due to the crazy Total Galactic War we had in April, as I did something like nine PvP weeklies during that week, which obviously gave me a major leg up in terms of achievement progress early on.

At the time of me writing this, we're already into the fourth week of PvP Season 6... and while I'm having fun, I'm honestly also a little concerned. I've previously written about how my experiences PvPing on different servers have heightened my awareness of how different these places can be in terms of activity levels and queue times, and to be honest I've always viewed the Darth Malgus server as a good place to be in that regards. Sure, pops might be marginally quicker on Star Forge, but at that point you're just splitting hairs.

However, this season so far, things have felt different somehow. Like during the last two seasons, I'm trying to get my arena credits done in the lowbie bracket, but I don't remember having to wait quite so long between matches before. I know the lowbie bracket isn't the most active, and I haven't exactly pulled out a stop watch while sitting in the queue, but fifteen to twenty minutes between arena matches seems quite normal now even during prime time, which means that if (like me) you lose a bunch of those matches, it can take up to two hours to just get the daily "play arenas" mission done, which means that completing a whole arena weekly (which basically requires four dailies worth of play) is turning into a considerable time investment. I'm thinking about switching to the midbie bracket this week just to see if that's any better. Still, I probably wouldn't even have commented on this if I hadn't noticed my queue times at max-level increasing as well. I remember when I used to boast about unranked PvP pops being near-instant on my server, while now it can sometimes take ten minutes to get into a warzone even at level 80 during prime time.

I'm trying to tell myself that it's not a big deal, or even that I'm just imagining these queue times being longer than they used to be, but I can't help but worry. Back in 2017, shortly before the last big set of server merges, I wrote a post called "The Curse of Queues", in which I pondered the way automated queueing systems shape our gameplay expectations and how the more of them you add to your MMO, the bigger your population needs to be to appear somewhat lively. Accordingly, when the devs decided to split the unranked queue into warzones and arenas, I was a little worried about what that might mean for wait times, since you'd now need more players queueing to keep both modes active at the same time. I didn't notice any negative effects immediately - but now I wonder whether the consequences of this split might be starting to catch up with reality.

My first thought once I considered the subject of queues "drying up" was something along the lines of: Okay, for whatever reason not enough people are queueing for PvP. Could the devs offer some incentives to make more people join in? However, the more I thought about it, the more I realised that unranked PvP has probably never offered more rewards than it does now. I don't remember the details of all the PvP gearing systems throughout the years, but it was basically always a matter of completing daily and weekly missions to work towards some gear upgrades and that was mostly it. Oh, and you'd gain valour ranks for titles I guess. But otherwise, people just kind of had to PvP for fun, because there wasn't much else in it.

Nowadays on the other hand, we still have all that other stuff, plus seasons rewarding things like cosmetic armours and stronghold decorations. Shouldn't PvP be more popular than ever? Then I remembered that there's this thing called the Overjustification Effect (I had to look up the exact name), which basically means that things that we find inherently enjoyable become less so once we start doing them for extrinsic rewards. And then I wondered whether there isn't some of that at play here, especially as the requirements in terms of when and how to play (in order to earn those rewards) are much more stringent now than they used to be.

What I mean by that is that before 7.0, to earn rewards from PvP, you just had to pick up the daily and weekly mission from the PvP terminal, press the queue button, and that was it. Progress might be faster or slower depending on your win-loss ratio, but you could always take a break and pick up where you left off at a later point without losing anything.

Since the devs changed it so that dailies and weeklies reset every day/week, you need to keep playing to get them done within the specified time frame or lose all your progress. I used to hop around between alts a lot more, playing a warzone here or there as different roles or specs, but nowadays I'm much more focused on sticking with the same small number of characters, because else I can't complete my weeklies, which would mean progress towards tech fragments and seasonal achievements going to waste.

I also no longer get warzones and arenas served at random, with both giving me equal credit towards my goals, but I need to queue for them separately, and complete a certain number of matches in both modes if I want to get full rewards - all within the week of course. It's kind of strangely demanding, and I actually noticed that it makes me more cranky when I have a losing streak. Obviously I never liked losing all the time, but at least in the past I could decide to take a break and come back later. Nowadays though there's always that feeling of, "Grr, I need to complete this today, why can't I get one bloody win? I don't have all evening for this!" I've definitely noticed that the matches during which I'm most relaxed and enjoying myself the most are those with the lowest "reward stakes", for example when my weekly is already at 15/16 and I literally just need to complete one more match regardless of outcome.

I can obviously only speak for myself, but the requirements for progress really do feel quite different from a casual PvPers point of view compared to how it used to be, and I wouldn't be surprised if that affected more people's enjoyment.

Of course, when it comes to PvP, everyone tends to have their own pet issue that they think is ruining it at any given point - usually certain classes being over- or under-powered - but I honestly feel like I don't have enough knowledge about that area of the game to have strong opinions on the current state of class balance. I'd argue that things have never been perfectly balanced though and that the game has weathered all kinds of "flavours of the month" throughout the years.

One thing that was interesting to me on that subject though was when I watched a PvPer's "react" video the other day and he mentioned that he thought healers were actually kind of weak right now, since a good dps could easily beat a good healer one on one. This made my ears perk up because I did mention at the end of Season 4 that I had found myself surprised by how much more I enjoyed dpsing in PvP nowadays when healing had been my passion for over a decade. I didn't think to blame anything systematic for that; I figured it was just me, but now it seems likely that those two things are related, because that feeling of powerlessness has definitely contributed to me being turned off healing in PvP for the past year or so.

It's weird because I can't off the top of my head remember another era of the game when healers in general were quite so weak in PvP (as opposed to one specific class being over- or underpowered). More often the complaint has been that they are too powerful, and that this made matches tedious when it's too hard to kill anyone. With that in mind, I funnily enough can't even claim that the current situation has necessarily been bad for the quality of matches as a whole - it definitely seems to be that, going in as a dps, I see far fewer of those "slug fests" where people just hammer each other in a big pile around an objective forever without anyone actually going down. Ball carriers in Huttball actually need to be fast or good at passing now; you can't just brute force your way through a wall of enemies with some heals behind you. And those are not bad things! So I wouldn't blame the weakness of healers for a decline in interest in PvP, even if it has affected my personal enjoyment somewhat. It's just another interesting thing that I've observed.

This has turned out to be quite rambly, but these are just some of the things that have been going through my mind in regards to PvP lately. What are your personal experiences with this game mode recently? Do you think I'm completely wrong about declining participation and that queues are fine? I'm happy to hear other points of view.

PvP Season 4, Arenas & PvP on Shae Vizla

PvP Season 4 ends in five days, and I managed to do something this season that I've never done before: for once, I didn't just complete the main reward track, but I also completed all the seasonal achievements. And I didn't stop there either! Not only did I do all this on Darth Malgus, but I did so on Shae Vizla as well, which is a huge jump from never even getting all the achievements in the first place.

There was no tangible reward for doing this, I just kind of happened to get about 80% of the way there (on both servers) without really trying, and then I figured I might as well put in the extra effort to push myself over the finish line.

Loyal readers may recall that the reason I never bothered with completing all the seasonal PvP achievements before was that I didn't like queuing for arenas. I don't mind them from a gameplay perspective, and I was quite content with having them pop up every now and then when unranked arenas and warzones shared the same queue, but when they were split out with the launch of PvP Season 1, I found the dedicated arena queue to be way too toxic for my taste. The repeated personal insults were just too upsetting, and I certainly wasn't having enough fun to make up for that, so I decided to simply nope out of that part of the game.

What happened to make me change my mind? Well, the Shae Vizla server happened, and as I mentioned in my first impressions post, doing PvP over there was an absolute blast during launch week. I actually dared to queue for both modes again for the first time in ages because I figured, we're all level ten with a hundred credits to our name, how could anyone possibly find a reason to take things too seriously and be toxic in that environment? And people were indeed pretty good-natured for the most part. I encountered exactly one guy being toxic in an arena during those days, and that was after he lost a drawn-out one-on-one against an opponent. The way he yelled insults at that person was still unnecessary and stupid, but it was also such an obvious case of someone just being a sore loser that even I couldn't take it too seriously.

I was having so much fun in that environment that I earned the maximum number of PvP season points during the first two weeks of the server's life without even paying attention. Once I noticed, I thought to myself: Hey, if it's going to be that easy and fun, I might as well complete the PvP seasons track here too. It didn't remain that easy once queue pops started to slow down, but for a while they were still consistent enough that I could complete multiple weekly missions for both game modes across my stable of alts.

Meanwhile, I was working on completing the PvP season track on Darth Malgus as well, by following my usual modus operandi of doing nothing but warzones. However, the experience on Shae Vizla made me reconsider my stance on arenas. I'd also heard some other players who weren't exactly PvP gods mention that they were doing arenas for the season on their home server and that things weren't so bad in the lowbie and midbie brackets since you were less likely to run into toxic try-hards there. So I decided to start queuing for arenas in the lower brackets on Darth Malgus as well and... it was actually decent fun. I didn't encounter any toxicity, and mixing things up with the occasional arena weekly made my seasonal progress easier as well (since sticking to only one mode makes it harder to max out your points every week).

After I completed the main reward track on both servers and thought about writing a post about that, I had a quick look at my achievement progress and was surprised to find that on Shae Vizla, I had in fact completed everything bar the 2000 medals achievement, and even for that one I was already most of the way there. It seemed like a no-brainer that I should continue playing until the end of the season to get that ticked off as well.

Then I checked my progress on Darth Malgus for comparison and found that I was even closer to completing the medals achievement there, though I was only on six out of twelve arena weeklies completed. After a bit of deliberation, I decided that it might be worth trying to push that to completion as well.

At first, things seemed to go well enough, but then I got into an arena with my midbie Scoundrel where someone went off on me big time after we lost the first round, spamming "shit healer" in chat over and over, to the point that another person on our team actually told him to chill the hell out. In that moment I felt that familiar surge of adrenaline caused by a mix of embarrassment and anger and immediately thought to myself: Here we go again, this is why I stay out of fucking arenas. I thought that was going to be the end of that particular experiment.

But for some reason, I pressed on anyway. I think it was due a mix of factors. While I was initially very flustered by the guy's insults (I knew I hadn't done great in the first round and was already feeling bad about that, which is when I'm particularly susceptible to insults making me feel even worse), I thought I actually played quite well in the second round, and while we still lost, I thought it was very obvious that it wasn't due to me being a "shit healer" but due to the fact that our dps was doing way, way less damage than the enemy team and I could only compensate for that for so long. The fact that another member of our team spoke up to... well, not exactly defend me, but to agree that the mean guy was way out of line, also helped a little.

Around that time I also happened to come across this old blog post of mine, in which I told the story of being intimidated by a PvP bully and then encountering him in a different context. In that story, we actually ended up getting along in the end and he apologised for having been an ass before. I don't expect the guy from my most recent encounter to ever get to that point (though it was a character name I recognised from previous matches), but I did find an odd kind of comfort in the idea that like my old nemesis back then, he might actually feel kind of embarrassed if he realised that people will remember him for this kind of behaviour and that it may well give him a bad reputation.

Either way, I pressed on and fortunately didn't have any more encounters like that, though I'll say that ticking the boxes for six more arena weeklies still wasn't the most fun thing I've ever done. Arenas may technically be shorter than warzones in terms of match duration, but their queues aren't necessarily any faster, so I spent a lot of time waiting for pops. The resulting matches were often only partially filled and hideously imbalanced, and losing a 3v4 game while getting zero medals for your efforts feels worse than losing normally. I was very glad when I was finally done, and grinding out the remaining medals in warzones was much more pleasant, not just because I prefer warzones, but because medal acquisition is much smoother there. Unlike when you're getting stomped in an arena and finish with zero medals, you pretty much always earn some medals in a warzone even if it's a loss.

Meanwhile I encountered a different problem on Shae Vizla: that of the lowbie and midbie queues suddenly dying. I'd previously enjoyed mixing things up by playing different characters, but I was at a point where I had only ten days left to earn a little less than 300 medals, and spending hours in queues that might never pop just seemed like a waste of time in that situation. (Never mind that if I did actually get into an arena, it might end up being another one of those zero-medal matches, basically making them worthless for my purposes.)

So I had to ditch my alts and focus entirely on playing my level 80 Juggernaut. Even on Shae Vizla I still preferred to give the max-level arena queue a wide berth, so I focused on warzones only. They were still popping reasonably often, but considering that there are only a few specific hours in the day when my play time overlaps with APAC activity, I was starting to worry that I might fail due to a lack of pops just short of crossing the finish line. The maths told me that with an average of about eight medals per warzone, I only needed to play four per day until the end of the season, which is quite reasonable, but again, considering that some days I might not get to play at all... to be on the safe side, I decided to pour all my efforts into binging PvP on the weekend and ground out 150+ medals over the course of those two days (much to the amusement of Mr Commando), ensuring that I only had a few matches left to do afterwards.

Doing max-level warzones on Shae Vizla was very fun in a different way and strangely nostalgic by the way. Because the population is relatively small, you see a lot of the same names over and over again, and you soon learn who the PvP guilds are, who the healers are, and what general weirdness to expect. (For example there was this one guy who liked yelling in all caps in a foreign language(?) in general chat during warzone matches. No idea why.) It kind of reminded me of the game's early days and the kind of community-building I got to witness in the days before mega servers.

Is there a moral to all this rambling? I'd say the main takeaway for me was that I was reminded that I do actually enjoy arenas in moderation. There's a particular kind of fun to the mayhem that is picking who you should go for first, trying to focus an opponent down quickly, switching targets, kiting enemies and all that jazz. Doing them while levelling probably also teaches you how to use your class toolkit better than anything else in the game, because you'll be actively eager for every new button that helps you deal with various problems you'll encounter, such as using defensive cooldowns to not die, interrupting healers, or gaining counters to knockbacks and roots. Almost more importantly, you then get to practice using these skills over and over again, making sure that you'll actually remember that they're there. In solo PvE you just don't need those things nowadays and it's easy to forget parts of your toolkit if you don't use them often enough.

I also started to be a bit more liberal with the ignore feature this season than I've been in the past if people are being horrible, and I wonder just how much chatter this is actually blocking out now. There's been more than one occasion where I saw interactions in warzone chat that made it clear that I was missing something due to having someone on ignore. It's something I do remain conflicted about, because while not having to listen to certain types of people definitely improves one's gameplay experience, it also seems like a bit of a shame to remove any chance of reconciliation, especially if the infraction wasn't that egregious.

Finally, it's worth noting that I spent a significant percentage - if not the majority - of my time PvPing this season not as a healer, but as a dps, most frequently as a Juggernaut, and I've got to admit that for the first time ever, I'm kind of finding myself doubting my commitment to healing. I still love it in general, but in PvP it's often just so... unsatisfying. You can heal for millions and yet feel like you've achieved nothing, all while being more likely to get crap from team mates and enemies alike regardless of what you do. Yet playing as a Jugg, seemingly nobody cares how good or bad you are, and even if I die ten times during a match, I rarely feel too bad about it because I hit hard and still feel powerful in defeat when it takes multiple enemies half a minute to take me down. Just something to think about.

Either way, it's been a ride, and while it's been fun, I also think this is one experience I'm unlikely to repeat (100%-ing the PvP season on two servers that is). I don't think I'll ever be able to complain about the 2000 medal achievement being too much again though, considering I effectively earned more than double that number this season.

My Thoughts on PvP Season 1

You might think it's a bit early to review the new PvP season concept, considering that Season 1 still lasts for another four weeks, but I hit level 25 on the rewards track today and I consider myself close to done, so I thought I might as well write down my thoughts now while they're still fresh.

When I first wrote about the new PvP season setup, I noted that I was worried that the incentivisation of arenas might cause me to burn out on those, considering that I was never a huge fan of them to begin with (though I didn't really mind them either). This did indeed happen pretty quickly: I'm a lot less good at playing arenas than I am at warzones, and if you combine that with the fact that the new arena weekly requires you to play twice as many matches, I just grew tired of the whole thing by week three.

Then I realised that a lot of the new PvP currency was tied to the meta achievements that require you to complete weekly PvP quests, and I wondered whether I should give it another go for the sake of the rewards. A guildie also shared a neat "trick" he'd discovered: picking up the levelling version of the PvP weekly on an alt sitting at level 79, levelling up, picking up the level 80 version of the same mission, and then proceeding to complete two weeklies at once. This does require you to have an alt at the right level, and you can only do it once per character, but as I mentioned previously, I've actually struggled to level my whole stable of alts from 75 to 80, so I had plenty of characters available. I decided to give working on the arena weeklies another go, first on my Assassin tank and then on my Operative healer. Neither are characters on whom I'd really done many arenas before, but it was just going to be one weekly worth of arenas on each, right? So who cares if I wasn't going to be great at playing them in that mode?

As it turns out, there are people in the arena queue that care a lot, almost as if they didn't get the memo that ranking is no longer a thing. Completing the arena weekly with those two alts, I'm pretty sure I had more toxicity thrown my way than I've encountered in the game for the last five years. I'm usually pretty good at not caring when people in warzones start ranting about how everybody but them sucks, because it's usually such generic venting, I don't really feel affected by it. However, I learned that in arenas, people hone in on someone to blame and will call you out by name, sometimes seemingly at random (as in, you can tell from the scoreboard that you weren't even the worst player on the team by far so I'm not sure by what criteria people get chosen), and that really took me aback.

I tried not to engage with the insults, but they still made me feel kind of anxious, so that when I queued again, I soon started watching team formation nervously, afraid of encountering those same people again. I also saw others get raked over the coals in similar ways, and would then be torn between feeling bad for those players and being secretly relieved that at least it wasn't me this match. It didn't take long for me to decide that no amount of virtual currency is worth being made to feel like that and that I was going to stay away from arenas from now on. Which is kind of a shame, because while I was never a huge fan of the game mode, I didn't used to mind getting into the occasional arena match at random, and sometimes they would even be pretty fun. Being called useless, terrible etc. just because my random alt apparently isn't "worthy" enough to try out arenas is not fun though.

I do wonder whether this is a common experience or whether I was just unlucky. I haven't heard a lot of complaining about it, but I did see a commenter on the forums express that they thought arenas were effectively becoming the new ranked (in terms of how people behaved), even with no ranking in place... and that would be a shame.

Anyway, the takeaway from this is that the main thing PvP Season 1 did was turn me off arenas, even though that's not directly tied to the season, just a change that was released at the same time. Making my way through the seasonal reward track itself was easy enough once I started ignoring the arena objectives, though I will say that I don't think it was a good idea on Bioware's part to make it so that Galactic Season 3 and PvP Season 1 would end at the same time. While both work fine on their own, I'll have to admit that trying to wrap up my remaining GS3 goals on the other servers while also keeping up with PvP on Darth Malgus felt a bit stressful at times.

That aside though, I have to admit I'm mostly left with a slight feeling of "meh". While I like both warzones and filling up bars, something about the PvP Season just left me cold. What appeals to me about Galactic Seasons is that they encourage me to play a bit differently from my normal routine for a limited amount of time, but the PvP Season doesn't really do that... or rather, I guess it tried with the arenas but that just backfired massively. And I already like warzones; the season concept just pushed me into playing a few more matches each week than I usually would, which is kind of... shrug?

So my overall verdict is that I would take part again, but probably without being very excited about it, and I'd prefer it not happening at the same time as a Galactic Season. We'll see what Bioware has in store for Season 2 (whenever that's meant to happen).

PvP in 7.2 - Missing My MVPs

When Bioware announced that 7.2 was going to include the removal of ranked PvP, my initial reaction was to have sympathy for those who enjoyed that game mode, and when I sought out other people's opinions on the matter I was surprised by how many comments I saw that basically came down to "good riddance, it was nothing but a toxic cesspit anyway".

I then had a look at the official forums to see the reactions of actual ranked players and was amazed by just how much denial and deflection was going on there: Ranked wasn't toxic, but if it was, it was justified because of bad players daring to invade their space, and now all those totally not toxic ranked players are going to invade unranked and make people's lives hell there, but also unranked was already the most toxic game mode anyway and the game's going to die because the subscriptions of ranked players were all that was keeping it alive. Or something.

It's still a bit of a shame because I remember when the Bad Feeling Podcast (rest in peace) went through a phase of really wanting to make ranked a thing, and their angle was basically that ranked should be for everyone - after all, the point of the ranking system is that people of all skill levels will be sorted into the correct "bracket", and if only enough people queued then everyone should be able to take part and have fun being matched up against other players of similar skill level. Sadly it seems that this never came to pass and instead ranked turned into the home of a small elite that cannibalised itself until it was too late. Oh well.

So 7.2 brought us a brave new world where there is no more split between ranked and unranked, but separate queues for 8v8 warzones and 4v4 arenas, and we get to fill out a PvP reward track similar to Galactic Seasons.

The PvP season track is pretty bare-bones compared to the regular season, with only 25 levels, no separate subscriber vs. non-subscriber tracks, and no daily objectives. Instead there are six weeklies that are the same every week, and beyond those you can earn a small trickle of points by earning medals until you reach the weekly point cap of 1000. (Completing the track in its entirety requires 7000 points.)

The weekly objectives are split into three for warzones and three for arenas, which ironically meant that after thinking that the new queue split would mean no more arenas for me, I actually ended up queueing for more arenas than ever before, just to complete the weekly objectives during the first two weeks. While I've never really minded the occasional arena sprinkled into my random queue, I've got to admit that this particular experience has actually been kind of tiresome as the objectives require you to play twice as many arenas as warzones to get the same amount of credit.

Also, while it's not made very clear in the UI, the PvP season seems to have similar limitations on the weekly objectives as the regular season, meaning you can only get credit for four out of six each week. After spending several hours being a punching bag in arenas just to complete objectives that ultimately didn't award me any points (even though they weren't greyed out), I think I'll stick to the 8v8 objectives for the rest of the season... though I might still find myself playing arenas if I decide to go for the achievements tied to the season as well, as they require you to complete 25 warzone and 25 arena weeklies. Considering the season is only 12 weeks long, that's a lot though and I'm not sure I'll bother.

Another change that wasn't really advertised much has been a revamp of the scoreboard that you see at the end of the match, and to be honest... I'm not a fan. The primary tab now just shows a picture of your character and your personal stats - which are pretty meaningless without those of the rest of the team to put things in context. About the only thing I like here is that medals earned are listed in full instead of requiring you to hover over them to read what you got them for.

On the team score tabs, kills have been removed from the main view and are now only visible on hover - not sure if this is supposed to make people feel better about dying a lot? I used to find it helpful to be able to see them more easily in order to gauge everyone's ratio of kills vs. deaths at a glance.

However, the thing that irks me the most - and I was somewhat surprised by this myself - is the removal of MVP votes. When I first heard that this was also going to happen with 7.2, my reaction was something along the lines of "eh". I liked MVP votes, but I couldn't deny that they were an old system that didn't really seem to serve any purpose anymore, and in most PvP matches I played, most people didn't seem to bother casting votes anymore anyway.

However, what their removal made me realise was that MVP votes made me care about the rest of my team - not because I coveted their votes, but because the act of casting my own MVP vote made me pay attention to how much everyone else was contributing to the match. In this blog's first year I wrote a post called MVP Votes And You, in which I talked about the many ways in which someone could earn my MVP vote, and there were a lot of them! With their removal, I just don't feel like there's any point in paying much attention to the other players' performance unless I'm planning to PvP all evening and want to get a bit of an idea of who's a strong opponent that day and who isn't. If I notice anyone having played particularly well, there's no real way of showing appreciation for it, except for maybe typing it in chat, but they probably will have quit the match before I've finished typing anyway. Not to mention that it's much more effort than pressing a button.

Considering that Bioware said that an important reason for them making all these changes was to make PvP interactions more positive, it kind of galls me that they also removed something that was created specifically to be a positive interaction. I can only hope that they'll consider bringing the system back in some form eventually.

In the meantime, the jury's out on how well this new PvP season system is going to work, for me at least. For now it's got me doing more PvP than usual, but I also worry that with arenas being so heavily incentivised, I'll end up burning myself out on those. (Which - again - is incredibly ironic considering that we're able to completely banish arenas from our queue for the first time since their introduction.)

7.2 Livestream Thoughts and Impressions

I'm writing this shortly after having watched the official livestream about 7.2, because I'm actually excited by what I saw! I honestly went into this one with no real expectations, probably because both 7.0 and 7.1 have turned out to be somewhat disappointing to me, and I couldn't even think of anything to look forward to beyond the next story update (which is something that usually only gets touched on lightly in these streams to avoid spoilers). However, it turned out that based on what we were shown, 7.2 looks like it's actually going to be quite a meaty patch.

Story-wise, we'll be going to the planet Ruhnuk (pronounced "Roo-nik") to go after Heta Kol as hinted at the end of the previous story update, and that's all I'm going to say about that, even though there was some more talk about the characters we're going to meet there. Seek out additional information about that at your own discretion.

The first big surprise was that Ruhnuk is not just going to be a story location, but a proper open-world planet, with dailies, a new faction to earn reputation with, a world boss and even a new datacron! I've got to admit that this one completely blind-sided me, I guess because my thinking was that after they had to delay the release of the Manaan daily area, I wouldn't have thought that they'd already be working on another daily area at the same time, and one with more real estate than we got during what was supposed to be the main expansion patch 7.0.

I'm 100% here for a new planet though, even if I don't expect it to be very large. They showed a little flyby video which kind of gave me Athiss vibes.

Next they talked about changes coming to PvP, which started with Musco telling us that they're planning to abolish the ranked queue and that it's all just going to be the same thing now. My first thought was "Are we all going to be ranked all the time then?" but no, it seems they are simply getting rid of the whole concept of publicly ranking players and rewarding prizes based on ranking altogether. I mean, I can't claim to personally be sad about that, considering that I never really cared about ranked, but presumably there are people who do? Wonder how they're feeling about this...

Instead Bioware will introduce a PvP season track similar to the way Galactic Seasons work, where you "level up" through PvP and earn rewards within a limited time frame. I'm not really sure how I feel about that. Galactic Seasons have quickly grown on me, but I'm also quite content with having breaks between them. I'm not sure I really want another bar to fill for rewards running at the same time? I guess we'll see how compelling this turns out to be.

Other PvP changes included with the update will mean no more PvP restrictions for non-subscribers, and separate queues for 8v8 warzones and 4v4 arenas. Now, while I consider this a welcome change, it also cracks me up in a way because when arenas were first introduced nine years ago, I was quite unhappy with the fact that they were mixed in with the "regular" 8v8 warzones and not a separate queue, but then I quickly came to the conclusion that I didn't really mind them too much. I mean, if given the choice I'll probably only queue for 8v8 from now on, unless I know it's quiet and arenas give me a better chance of getting a pop, in which case I'd be fine with queueing for both. It's just not a huge deal for me at this point.

Finally, they'll also retune PvP medals a bit because they consider some of them too easy to get at the moment, and they'll add a new arena located on Onderon that looks like it should provide a lot of opportunities to play hide and seek.

There was a short note about gearing changes, in that both the minium item level dropped from all sources as well as the maximum item level attainable from all sources (except R-4) will increase by four to six levels. I guess this is the belated opportunity for people to gear up for R-4 veteran mode without actually having to kill anything in R-4 veteran mode first, but I'm not sure how much of a difference it's going to make at this point.

The final major item was that they're continuing to make updates to the user interface. The most exciting thing they mentioned in this context was that they'll finally be adding a colour-blind mode! As Mr Commando is red-green colour-blind and has often complained about the challenges of seeing certain kinds of circle mechanics, that's great news.

They are also changing the map so that no part of a planet is ever fully hidden anymore even if you haven't explored it yet, but instead you can see all the terrain from the beginning and it's just kind of greyed out. I guess my tips for how to get the Galactic Explorer achievement will become a bit outdated whenever that goes live. You'll also be able to have a semi-transparent map up on screen all the time, which is fine but didn't seem that big a deal to me considering the current map already goes semi-transparent if you have it open and want to move. I remember that was hailed as a very useful feature at launch, since you could keep it open while moving around. But I guess the functionality is becoming more granular/customisable.

The deconstruct window is going to gain a delete section, which sounds just like an accident waiting to happen in my opinion. (Oh no, I just deleted all those things I meant to deconstruct!) However, apparently mass-delete is something people wanted? I can't say I've run into many situations where I had to delete a whole bunch of stuff at once. In fact the only one I can think of off the top of my head is when I opened a bunch of Alliance crates and got a lot of duplicate legacy armour pieces that I wanted to get rid of. Still, wouldn't it be better to come up with a workaround so we don't have to delete quite so much stuff instead of making it easier to delete a lot of things at once, e.g. by allowing more of them to be vendored for one credit? Just my own two centscredits on that one.

Finally on the UI front, they're unsticking a bunch of buttons from the mini map and instead letting you add them in a custom order to the top left or bottom right of your UI. I've got to admit that after just checking out the UI revamp in the latest World of Warcraft patch the other week the parallels to that game's pared-down mini map and tiny icons in the bottom right of the screen were striking. At least you should be able to increase the size of the things in SWTOR.

Last and (in my opinion) least, there are going to be some new rewards for Life Day and new Cartel Market items. Which is fine I guess, just not something I personally care about a great deal. I was just amazed that they featured someone with the job title of "Art Monetisation Director" on the stream as I figure that brandishing the word monetisation in front of players is a bit like waving a red flag in front of a bull. I hope he doesn't get any mean comments.

Anyway, it was a good stream overall, and they said that the PTS should go up soon, but I figure it's going to be a little while until we can actually play this update in the live game. While they proudly advertised it as "coming this winter" as if that's really soon, they don't have a good track record with releasing things in the run-up to Christmas (see the delay of Legacy of the Sith last year), so I personally wouldn't expect to see 7.2 until next year, either in late January or early February, even if that would mean that they'll have to split out the Life Day rewards to actually release them in time for the event.

P.S.: If you're reading this before November 16th, you can claim a free Colonel Gallo poster decoration for your stronghold by redeeming the code LotSGallore.

Galactic Season 2 Complete on The Leviathan

The last server on which I completed Season 2, just a couple of days before the season ended on Tuesday, was the French server The Leviathan.

The fact that my credit buyout for levels 83 to 93 on there came to only 25 million and was therefore slightly cheaper than on Tulak Hord is slightly deceptive, because in actuality, Leviathan was the server on which I was consistently the least progressed, and my Sage knight finished the season at level 62, which is five levels lower than my Commando on Tulak Hord.

The biggest obstacle to my progression were the PvP-related season objectives, which I generally liked and therefore wanted to do, but which I repeatedly failed to complete because I just couldn't get enough warzone pops. I did manage a few times, mostly when I was lucky enough to get into several successive arenas in the same play session, but this was rare. Throughout the season I queued in both the lowbie and midbie brackets, and would sometimes spend hours running around questing without ever seeing a pop. On the rare occasions when something did pop, it was usually an only partially filled arena. There was one single time when the server opened a midbie Novare Coast, which elicited gasps of surprise in warzone chat, but in reality it was still only a match of 3v5 or something like that and not very fun. This only affected ground PvP, interestingly enough - queueing for veteran flashpoints or GSF was usually fine, probably because those queues include max-level players as well.

In terms of solo play, I started by just breezing through the class story, as I'd just taken my Commando on Tulak Hord through all the planetary side missions and didn't want to do the exact same thing again, but I soon felt bad when it sunk in that this was after all my first and only character on Leviathan and she was hardly seeing anything of the galaxy. In addition, I made the mistake of playing too many knights this season (I also had lowbie knights on Star Forge and Satele Shan), so that at one point I was doing the same class mission three times within a single week, which just seemed silly and was actually more repetitive than doing a few more side quests. I eventually ended up going back to Tython and Coruscant to pick off exploration missions there in bits and pieces while my class story stalled on Nar Shaddaa. Once I crossed the level 50 threshold, my focus shifted towards more rewarding endgame activities, just like on the other servers.

However, the most fascinating aspect of playing on Leviathan for me was the language, or rather the way it affected my behaviour. I had several years of French in school over two decades ago, but even though I always liked languages in general, this one never really resonated with me and I was happy to forget most of it the moment I didn't have to deal with it anymore. The end result is that while I can still read and understand some very basic French nowadays, I felt too self-conscious to try and write anything in chat myself beyond the occasional "salut" and "merci".

This is kind of funny to me because I suspect that I wasn't the only "foreigner" moonlighting on Leviathan for the purpose of seasons, and I think others were a lot less shy about simply writing in English or perhaps running their messages through Google Translate. There was one arena I remember in particular where someone kept writing instructions about who to focus in French and even with my limited knowledge of the language I kept thinking: That doesn't sound grammatically correct... is this from Google Translate? 

Then again, it could just as well have been the French version of internet shorthand... I was greatly amused by the idea that laziness in regards to spelling and grammar online might accidentally be bringing native speakers and Google Translators closer together - I certainly had my doubts about which one I was dealing with when it came to some of the German I saw on Tulak Hord.

Equally amusing was the idea that I might well have ended up in an arena team where none of us really spoke French but assumed that everyone else was. To be on the safe side and in order not to make too much of a fool out of myself, I mostly restricted myself to using emotes, which I knew would show up correctly in whatever language client my team mates were using.

If any French-speaking players from Leviathan are reading this, I'd be curious to know your thoughts on the non-French-speaking "tourists" that appeared on the server for Season 2.

Day 7: Team #IntPiPoMo

I'm taking part in IntPiPoMo, and this is the seventh of ten screenshot posts I'm making as part of a series for this, each one themed around a certain topic. Today's topic is "team", which is about the people I play with.

A lot of my enjoyment of the game revolves around operations with my guild. I don't think I would do them much if I wasn't in a guild, but as it is they just provide this social activity for us to do multiple times a week, and it doesn't matter if the content stays basically the same, the people always make it a little different. Pictured here is my Scoundrel dancing up close with one of the other officers during a break on one of our "social" (read: easy mode) nights in TfB.

When it comes to harder content we have to be a bit more selective in terms of who to bring and when, but that only forges closer bonds. Here's my ops team sitting in front of Izax before we were getting ready to pull.

Operations aren't the only thing that my guild makes more fun though, running flashpoints with guildies is great too. This shows me healing Kaon Under Siege on my Operative on Imp side, standing on a bunch of pipes where a guildie had shown me that you could get away with not getting pounced on by the mobs as much.

There's also a small but dedicated group of us that really loves doing the Shroud and Dread Seed heroics at the end of their respective quest chains. We've all done them on so many alts by now but are always happy to do them again! Here's a shot of one such run (I'm the second one from the right, the Zabrak Sorceror in the red and black robe).

Finally, we also do casual PvP together sometimes, though I personally partake in that less often than the other activities. To be honest I sometimes prefer to fully pug my PvP because I don't want to feel angry at my guildies if they mess up. Here my lowbie Merc was teamed up with a guildie's Powertech though, waiting for a Corellia Square arena to start.

Finally, here I am with the same guildie on different characters, and my poor Squid Sorc ended up being the only non-stealther on her team. As if I needed even more of a target painted on my head... (I thought it was amusing though.)

IntPiPoMo count: 51

It's obvious at this point that I won't finish my "ten days" series by the end of November - I could have pushed harder but I had other things on my mind throughout the month and didn't want to force it. After all, the whole "ten days" theme is something of my own making, so there's no need to fret about completing it within a certain timeframe. I still managed to squeeze enough posts in to hit my IntPiPo count, and I'll simply post the remaining days throughout early December.

Shintar's Galactic Seasons Diary, Week 11

The final week!

Day 1

My weekly objectives - the last weeklies I was going to do this Season - came up as warzones and operations, which was fine by me. My daily objectives were to play a warzone and generic mob killing on core worlds.

For the former I played a Hypergates match on my healing Sage that was pretty fun and we won. For the latter I returned to my little squid Sorc and did some more questing on Balmorra, like I'd done in week 6.

Day 2

The same daily objectives as the day before! This time my Sage got into a Voidstar, which was another nice win. During the attacker round I felt like I just spent all my time being killed over and over again by a veritable mob of enemies, but every time I caught myself noticing this, someone else on the team managed to plant a bomb on the other side of where I was - so I guess I did my job by being distracting?

My little Sorc continued questing on Balmorra. I can recommend the Okara droid factory as a place where you can get some side quests done while also killing lots of mobs.

Day 3

Heroics and Black Hole dailies made for a welcome change of pace, even if there wasn't any synergy between them. It was late in the evening and I didn't feel like risking a re-roll. For the heroics I went to Alderaan on my Assassin, since I figured Imperial heroics on Alderaan was one particular combo I hadn't done yet since the Season started. My picks for things that were quick to do and where stealth would be useful were mostly good, except for this one heroic where you're supposed to kill some enemies while friendly droids help, and for some reason it was just super buggy and everything kept evading. Fortunately blowing up a nearby barrel managed to un-bug at least a few mobs enough that I could kill them and then the rest followed suit.

For the Black Hole dailies I went back to Republic side after my previous observations about how I just have issues with these on Imp side. My Guardian made quick work of them.

Day 4

First I got my operations weekly out of the way by running Nature of Progress with my guildies, then I tackled more Black Hole dailies on my Nautolan Shadow and played a GSF match on my Assassin tank. In the latter both teams were neck-on-neck throughout the whole thing, though my team eventually eked out a win. In this one I was actually the worst player on my team, which made me oddly happy (because I know that I'm pretty bad at GSF, and every time I see how many people still manage to be even worse than me it depresses me a little).

I also kept looking at my Seasons points to figure out just how many more objectives I'd have to do in order to finish and was temporarily overcome by paranoia that I'd miscalculated and would actually have to do another week. I'm apparently not good at doing maths on the fly.

Day 5

I saw heroics and insectoids and immediately re-rolled the latter, just to then slap myself on the forehead for doing that because I'd forgotten that during "core week", the insectoid killing actually has good synergy with doing heroics and I could have got both of them done at the same time by doing selected heroics on Alderaan or Balmorra. As it was, I'd instead saddled myself with yet another round of the Black Hole instead. I went on another stealth character, my DvL Shadow, to at least make things there as quick as possible.

For the heroics I also went stealth on Imp side on my Operative, and opted for picking three heroics on Balmorra. My choices were pretty good: one didn't require me to kill a single mob; in another I killed two but probably could have avoided doing so if I'd cloaked when they aggroed. Only the third one actually required a bit of killing, but it still wasn't too bad.

Day 6

As if the game wanted to give me a second chance, I got heroics and insectoids again, and managed to resist the urge to re-roll this time. I completed both by doing a round of the Killik heroics on Alderaan on my Vanguard tank.

That just left me to complete the PvP weekly for the final few points! I queued for a warzone on my lowbie Merc and got into an arena where I initially was completely by myself on my team while the opposition had a full four. I pondered whether it was worth taking the deserter penalty if I was still alone by the time the gates opened, but fortunately two more people got added before the match started - though that still meant that we were one man down, but then, the other team didn't have a healer! Amazingly, we managed to win within two rounds despite the numbers disadvantage, and no, I don't think it was because of my healing actually... it's just that both damage dealers on my team did really high damage, and the Sage found the time to throw some off-heals on me on top of that.

After doing a couple of quests to finish my Merc's Conquest, I relogged on my main to claim my final Seasons prizes. There doesn't seem to be an achievement for completing the Season, but I did get one for Altuur's last custom gift pushing him to influence fifty.

Week 11 thoughts:

I'll go into more detail about my final thoughts on the first Galactic Season in a separate post, but I will say that it feels really good to be done. I don't regret committing to completing it as soon as possible and without using any of the buyout options, but some days I definitely did feel a bit pressured (by my own resolution I mean) to log in just to keep up even though I didn't really feel like playing or didn't have much time. So I'm looking forward to not having to worry about POs anymore for the next few months until they release Season two with the expansion.

Shintar's Galactic Seasons Diary, Week 10

Day 1

On logging in, I found myself saddled with the flashpoint and operations weeklies, and decided to re-roll the former into warzones. One of my dailies was also to play a warzone, and the other to defeat 75 enemies in unknown or Wild Space. Since I'd just killed 150 mobs for my daily objectives the day before, I re-rolled that one as well and it turned into CZ-198 dailies.

Through the SWTOR community Discord I found out that there was some new bug with Seasons objectives not progressing, so I logged off again. They did fix that one within a couple of hours though.

When I logged back in I completed both of my daily objectives without problems, and the warzone also counted towards my weekly. I played an Ancient Hypergates on my Sage healer and somewhat to my surprise, we won pretty decisively. For the CZ dailies I got out my Operative healer again. She quested in the PvP instance, and apart from two people idling in the landing zone I didn't encounter another player of either faction during my entire round.

Day 2

On Wednesday I found that I had to jump into my ops group's progression run unexpectedly as one of the usual Wednesday healers couldn't make it, so I didn't get around to my Seasons objectives until later. They were warzones and galaxy-wide insecticide respectively, though the latter luckily re-rolled into GSF.

The GSF match was a domination that started out well but ended up being a pretty decisive loss. Looking at the scoreboard at the end, we had been hopelessly outgunned, but I didn't mind too much because I'd still had fun flying around and shooting things.

The PvP match landed my healing Sage in Quesh Huttball, and the moment we went to pick up the ball I spotted long-time PvP streamer Snave on the opposing team, presumably with one of his pre-mades. Unsurprisingly, someone called for us to just let them win and get it over with, but I got some satisfaction out of the rest of the team continuing to fight until the bitter 1-7 end. I did have some sympathy for the guy's frustration in this case though. Going up against a pre-made is rarely fun, but knowing that your loss will be broadcast to the public while someone on the other team trash-talks you makes it even more annoying.

Day 3

This was the day of the expansion livestream, which I missed due to being preoccupied with something else at the time, but I did go to watch the recording as soon as I was done and then continued to watch it on the side while knocking out my daily objectives, which were GSF and CZ-198 dailies again.

The GSF match was a domination game that was both an easy win and great fun - early on I ended up at a satellite with an enemy player who seemed to be as incompetent as me, so that we just ended up circling each other and shooting into space for what felt like several minutes. I got lucky in that my team was the first one to actually send some reinforcements, who then shot my opponent to pieces. Tough luck, bud!

For the dailies I went stealth on Imperial side again, this time on my Assassin tank. It felt like I was done in no time, seeing how I was merely going through the motions while actually focusing on the stream recording.

Day 4

I was relieved on login to find that my dailies were a straightforward warzone and galactic insecticide, which was at least an obvious re-roll and handily turned into GSF. I played the GSF match first, on my Powertech tank, and it was an oddly enjoyable deathmatch where we didn't just win but I only died once, when we were already sitting on thirty points! Mostly I was sitting safely in my gunship at the back and it felt like people were always trying to make a beeline for me but got shot down by my team mates before they could reach me, which was nice.

For PvP I queued on my squid Sorc and got an insta-pop into an arena in progress. My team was already one point behind, but for some reason we were a full team of four while the opposition was one person short. Unsurprisingly we spanked them on the next round and evened the score. They still didn't get reinforcements during round three, but changed their strategy and ended up doing a lot of damage. I was actually a bit worried when they managed to kill one of my team mates, but we still ended up winning in the end. This completed both my daily and my weekly objective.

Day 5

My dailies were GSF and mob killing in unknown or Wild Space. I decided to risk a re-roll on the latter but it just turned into insectoid killing, which I then got done by having my Sniper go on a quick rampage among the Killiks just outside Rhu Caenus spaceport on Alderaan.

The GSF match I played on my Juggernaut tank for a change and while it was a good match and a win, it was also a reminder of why I try not to spread my GSF activity around too many alts... it's just way too much of a hassle to set up ships, components and so on for every new character.

Day 6

The day before, I'd seen a guildie complete the Iokath dailies PO and thought, "Hey, I'd quite like to get that one some time this week!" so I tried making sure to log into a level 75 character first, but I got warzones and CZ-198 daily missions as my objectives. I risked a re-roll on the dailies and it turned into insectoid killing again. Sigh. That meant another round of Killik killing for the Sniper.

For the warzone objective I queued up with my lowbie Merc and she got into a Mandalorian Battle Ring arena. Since the last patch, the sub-75 queue has been been split into lowbie and midbie again - initially we weren't sure whether this was intentional or an accident, but it was later confirmed on the forums that it was intended and they just forgot to include it in the patch notes. Since then I've been getting a lot more arenas again... anyway, this one was a solid win as I had two dpsers on my team that did absolute monster damage. I then played a second match, which also popped as an arena, just to complete the character's Conquest, though that one was a loss. Funnily enough, everybody on my team gave me their MVP votes regardless, which surprised me.

Day 7

I once again completed my second weekly objective on the last day of the SWTOR week, by doing a Gods from the Machine story mode run with my guildies. As if the game had read my mind about the previous day, my daily POs were Iokath dailies (yay) and CZ-198 again. I hadn't realised that you only need to do three (!) Iokath dailies for that objective, which is less than a third of the weekly mission, as opposed to four or five missions for most other daily quest-based objectives. They really want to sweeten people on Iokath I guess.

CZ I visited on my Sniper, not too fussed about skipping unnecessary trash kills, but it was so busy that I actually struggled to find anything to kill - I was barely halfway done with the mob killing daily by the time I'd finished all the other missions in the area.

Week 10 thoughts:

With the second full five-week cycle complete, I'm sitting on 734 Seasons points, which means that I just need 66 more to reach 800 next week, and then it'll be retrospective time! I'm currently thinking that I could get up to three different analysis posts out of this: one about how I played this Season (which objectives I did how often etc.), one with feedback about what I think could be improved in Season two, and one featuring tips and tricks I've learned from chatting about Seasons with other players. Stay tuned for that!

SWTOR's PvP Brackets Explained

I've been spending some time in all three PvP brackets recently and I have to say it's quite interesting how each of them has its own unique flavour.

Lowbie: 10-42

I freaking love the lowbie bracket and I'm clearly not alone. Just the other day I ended up in a lowbie arena with two people who both professed to have repeatedly created new characters just to play more lowbie PvP, even if it meant deleting higher level characters to make room in their roster.

What makes lowbie PvP so great is that it's relatively simple in terms of combat gameplay. If you want to interrupt someone, you can. If you want to knock someone off a raised platform, you can. At the higher levels there are often a variety of counters for pretty much every move you could think to make, which can be frustrating if you're not on top of it and end up doing things like wasting a knockback on someone who just used an ability that makes them immune to knockbacks.

This relative simplicity of combat seems to attract people who love to focus on objectives instead, which means that the bracket consists of this odd mix of utter newbies who are only just taking their first steps into PvP and don't have a clue what they're doing and hardened veterans who are on their umpteenth PvP alt just for the hell of it.

Huttball in particular can be amazing fun! I'm kind of lukewarm about it at max level, where I neither love nor hate it, but in the lowbie bracket you can actually have some really fantastic games. I think the reason for this is that the lack of cooldowns at this level makes it almost impossible for a single person to just grab the ball, run and score, as they are very vulnerable to being rooted and killed, and healing power is limited as well. This makes scoring a goal a proper achievement that requires teamwork and repeated passes, and you very rarely get one team just steam-rolling another - the character power to do so just isn't there.

Since there are fewer people queueing than for max-level PvP, there's also a bit more of a community feel, as you'll often see the same names over and over again - and since it's random whether they end up on your team or the enemy's, there are no hard feelings either. Mind you, the downside of this smaller community is that you'll get a higher proportion of arena pops than at max-level whenever there aren't enough people queueing, and during off-hours pops might stop altogether. Your mileage may vary on whether that really is a downside (maybe you really like arenas or only play during prime time anyway).

The one thing that's definitely a downside is that due to the nature of the lowbie bracket, you'll also run into the noobiest of noobs, so you need to have some patience with players who do really silly things such as run around without using their stealth on a stealth character, or are completely oblivious of what just happened when they end up catching the Huttball. They seem to make up only a minority in any case.

Midbie: 43-74

Midbie is a step up from lowbie in terms of combat as characters will have most of their abilities by now, but most will still be missing some of their cooldowns at least. There's a bit more pressure to know not just your own but other classes' abilities as well, in order to engage in proper counter-play.

Still, the more objective-oriented mindset from lowbie still continues in this bracket. If you just want to kill people, you can get faster and more frequent pops at max level after all. And with how quickly levelling is these days, you'll get there in no time simply by doing story quests, meaning that many people ending up in midbie PvP have usually made a conscious choice to be there instead of questing, similar to the lowbie PvPers.

Midbie also has to deal with the same double-edged sword of a smaller community, which means more name recognition but also slower pops and more arenas.

Max-level: 75

Max-level PvP contains both the best and the worst of SWTOR PvP. With the sheer number of abilities a level 75 character has, not to mention utilities and now also Tacticals and bonuses from different gear sets, there is a lot of room for skillful play. Most of my "I can't believe he just did that" moments in PvP have happened at max level, usually when I'm in awe of someone seemingly predicting my next move within barely a second and successfully countering it in that time. Unfortunately I myself am not that skilled at all this, despite of having all classes at max level, and I'm more likely to find myself frustrated at being outplayed in ways that are really hard to counter if you don't have sufficiently fast reflexes and intimate knowledge of every single ability in the game.

The large number of cooldowns, healing and self-healing also mean that you're more likely to end up in somewhat tedious stalemates, such as arenas going to acid, or nobody being able to cap the middle turret in Civil War.

Finally, you end up with all kinds of bored max-levels who don't really care about objectives and just want to pass the time killing each other with big numbers. I'm hardly surprised anymore when such matches are accompanied by one guy muttering to himself in a foreign language while another yells in all caps about how we're all terrible and should uninstall the game. The queue pops are fast, but basically you pay for the increased quantity with a decrease in quality as far as teamwork and community spirit go. Then again, sometimes a quick bout of face-smashing may well be all you're looking for that night.