The Blog's 14th Year Was a Bit of a Dud

Last year I made a big song and dance about how prolific I'd been on the blog (more than 100 posts written for the first time since 2019!), so it makes me a bit sad to have to admit that this year has been the complete opposite, with my posting frequency hitting a new low of around five posts per month, for an annual total of just over sixty.

This puts me a fair bit behind even the second least active year of this blog, 2022, when a last-minute delay to the launch of Legacy of the Sith completely sapped me of motivation in January, and then I had a major funk towards the end of the year due to the bad state operations were in (one of my top three worst times in SWTOR for sure).

It's kind of weird because I didn't really feel particularly bad about SWTOR this year at all. It was still my most played game of the year by a mile, and I don't really recall any periods during which I was having a bad time. The voice actors' strike and lack of story updates just made it less interesting to talk about, somehow. Doing dynamic encounters all year was fine but simply didn't inspire me to do a lot of writing about the game, good or bad. It's almost as if my enjoyment of SWTOR doesn't correlate to my urge to write about it in a linear way:

• When I'm having a great time with it, I definitely want to write about it all the time. I have so many thoughts and I want to get them all on the page while the going is hot!
• When I'm having a really bad time (rare, but it has happened), it also makes sense that I don't feel like writing very much. Maybe I'll make one or two posts to vent but then I'd rather focus on other things that I actually enjoy.
• However, when I'm having a mostly okay time, like I had for most of this year, it's also kind of killer for my inspiration. I may have some fun playing in the moment, but it doesn't leave me with a lot to say about the experience.
• Conversely, when I'm having a slightly annoying time, this is another motivator for me to write a lot, because there are still things I like but they are just being dragged down by all these flaws, and I feel like I basically have to cry out for the devs to fix them so things can be good again. (I suspect the "Knights of" expansions were a prime example of this, as there's no other expansion that I've talked about as much.)

That said, as much as I enjoy psychoanalysing myself, I was also stressed in real life for quite a few months, and played a fair amount of WoW, so those things also took away from this blog in terms of both free time and motivation.

Regardless! Enough of the general yapping, let's look at some of the things I actually did write:

January and February saw the last two installments of my "Around the SWTOR-sphere" column before I dropped it. I still think it's a great concept and there absolutely is lots of community activity that deserves highlighting, but what with my general lack of energy, a project that very much required loads of it was naturally the first thing to go.

I also started the year by writing a wishlist for features I'd like to see in 2025, none of which became reality. Don't worry, I'm used to it. As I was still somewhat energised from patch 7.6 in December, I wrote top ten lists about the new dynamic encounters on Hoth and Tatooine. Even though I waited with writing them to make sure that I had sufficient experience with all the encounters under my belt, I've got to say that a year later, I'd definitely change some of my rankings anyway.

I also wrote a post called "SWTOR Classic - an Attempt at a Realistic Assessment", which surprisingly turned into one of my most popular posts in terms of random Google traffic. Or maybe it shouldn't be a surprise, considering that it's a very niche topic that not a lot of people talk about but that would definitely cross the minds of at least a small subset of players. Lest you think that it being popular in terms of Google must mean that SWTOR Classic is something the masses are secretly craving, we're still talking about fewer than one hundred hits per month here.

By February I was already struggling for inspiration a bit, reaching for subjects like my pet peeves in PvP or whether the newest Cartel Market bundle was good value. When Galactic Season 8's theme was announced to be uprisings, I was not thrilled. In March I also had reason to be sad when the OotiniCast shut down. By April I was talking openly about how unmotivated I was feeling. 

In May I tried to rank all previous Galactic Seasons by how much I enjoyed them. Patch 7.7 dropped and like I said above, I had some fun but it felt lacking without a story update.

At least June was a good month for me, as I got to celebrate earning the Dread Master title from completing the timed run for Dread Palace master mode and my guild conquered Belsavis during Total Galactic War (in a rather degenerate way), finally earning me the legacy title "The Galaxy Conqueror".

I made people come and pose with me on FA-1 Command Walkers to commemorate the occasion. 

In July I had a decent time with the Night Life event after the devs finally made casino chips a legacy-wide currency, and I had a lot of fun joining the New Outriders for a guild event on Star Forge.

August saw me completing the timed run in master mode Scum & Villainy, and Galactic Season 9 launched, bringing with it the removal of cut scenes in the group finder, which I was not too happy about, even if I understood the devs' motivation. Nonetheless, I enjoyed this season's theme a lot more than the previous one and felt that it was off to a good start.

September saw me hitting a few more personal milestones, such as completing all the hidden achievements related to the dynamic encounter "Trial by Fire" on Hoth and hitting legacy level 50 on the Shae Vizla server. (Yes, I'm still there!) I also wrote the super-nostalgic post "10 Moments in SWTOR's History for Which You Had to Be There", which I'm still pretty proud of.

In October I talked about how people shouldn't be too freaked out about the EA buyout just yet, the success of date nights, and how I thought the special Czerka stims used in the last two Galactic Seasons weren't working out so great.

November mostly consisted of more talk about running flashpoints for GS9, until December finally gave us patch 7.8 and the story update we were originally meant to get a year ago. I also got to round out the year by defeating Dread Master Brontes on master mode, which has probably made 2025 one of my most successful years in terms of ticking off challenging old ops achievements.

We'll see how I'll do in terms of blogging in 2026. After this year's low, I'd imagine that the only way is up!

My 13th Year of SWTOR Blogging

With SWTOR's birthday comes this blog's 13th birthday! And it's been a good year for the blog as well - I think I might actually manage to hit 100 posts by the end of the year, which would be a feat I haven't achieved since 2019. And yes, nobody is setting me any targets, but it does feel nice to know that it's not simply a matter of my activity always going downhill over time. 

In fact, I thought it would be fun to create a little table showing the number of posts I've made across both this and my other gaming blogs over the years. If you just count SWTOR and WoW, 2024 was actually my third most prolific year since I started posting! Then I remembered that I also maintained a blog about Neverwinter Online for a few years, and while those posts tended to be very short (and I'm not sure they should be given the same weight to be honest), it skewed the numbers into a whole different direction. Apparently my busiest year altogether was 2016, for some reason...? 2020 coming in second at least makes some sense, what with the pandemic and all that.

Year	Total Blog Posts	about SWTOR	about WoW	about NWO
2009	87		87
2010	181		181
2011	115	5	110
2012	155	149	6
2013	116	109	7
2014	163	115	20	28
2015	190	107	17	66
2016	229	146	32	51
2017	164	113	12	39
2018	185	103	9	73
2019	156	103	39	14
2020	213	96	64	53
2021	154	76	57	21
2022	139	75	62	2
2023	159	94	65
2024 (so far)	168	98	70

Anyway, coming back to this blog in specific, it feels to me like it's been a good year. I felt like I was engaged with the game pretty consistently, which was reflected in an urge to write about it pretty consistently as well.

In January I was still busy dissecting some of the content that had come with December's 7.4 patch, such as graphics updates made to the starter planets, the new GTN or our continued research into Basilisk droids. I was also still heavily into playing on the Shae Vizla server, which had launched only two months prior. In an effort to do better by my fellow content creators, I started my "Around the SWTOR-sphere" column at the end of the month, which I've been able to keep up with pretty consistently over the course of the year and which was (to me) surprisingly well-received.

In February, I still wrote about some adventures on Shae Vizla, such as me replaying the Sith warrior class story for the first time in ages and musing about the server's decreasing activity levels. I also wrote about more evergreen topics such as missing Kuat Drive Yards or being very impressed by the Republic saboteur choices on Dantooine and Manaan. A dev stream gave us a preview of patch 7.4.1 and beyond, and I gave my opinions on it.

The patch actually arrived in March, which saw me checking out two of the new date nights and going all in with Galactic Season 6. I started a series where I documented my various visits of public strongholds for the weekly seasons objective, which ended up being unexpectedly popular with a a certain segment of my readership, and I decided to revive the weekly Galactic Seasons diary I'd kept in Season 1.

The next two months were pretty much entirely consumed by these diary entries plus more stronghold drop-ins, with the only deviations being a tale of a crazy Conquest adventure in April, and thoughts on the 7.5 dev livestream in May as well as the situation on the Shae Vizla server after six months.

In June, my Galactic Seasons activities slowly wound down (though not before hitting legacy level 50 on Star Forge, which was a notable milestone to me) and patch 7.5 launched. I had fun with the new Spring Abundance Festival and really enjoyed the latest story update, though I also expressed some concerns about the state of PvP.

July was a wild grab bag including another dev livestream, me quitting Twitter, mount sale shopping tips and my first impressions of the new venture system. I also put a bit more thought into pieces about my favourite post-launch story updates and my strange relationship with playing male characters.

August brought with it the return of the Nar Shaddaa Nightlife event, and I mused on some evergreen topics such as achievements I would add to old content and how flashpoints could become a bigger part of SWTOR's endgame again. At the end of the month, Galactic 7 started. And that's still going on until February! That's one long season.

In September I was already hit my the mid-season doldrums, so I instead spent time on game-adjacent things like Twitch drops, going on a podcast, or musing about the next expansion.

October got me more excited again with the return of the Best View in SWTOR contest and a surprise teaser video for 7.6 generating hype. I also had fun revisiting the Feast of Prosperity and grinding currency for flower pots (no, really).

November saw another dev stream about 7.6 as well as me visiting and commenting on content on the PTS several times. I also raised my glass to the Shae Vizla server's first birthday.

And this month of course we got patch 7.6 as well as all that entails, and I'll have more posts about different aspects of it to come. Also, I had another crazy Conquest adventure with my guild...

Thanks for another year of reading along, whether you're currently playing SWTOR yourself or not, whether you're an old-timer or someone who only just found the blog recently, whether you just read along quietly or leave comments sometimes. My interactions with other players through this blog are definitely an important part of what keeps the game fun for me.

Brief PSA: Shintar No Longer on Twitter

Almost twelve years ago, I made a post on here to announce that I had made a Twitter account. It only seems fair to also make a note today that I no longer have a Twitter account. Or rather, it technically still exists, but I've been locked out of it.

Twitter had been pestering me for a while now to add my date of birth to my account. I'm usually not the kind of privacy nut to refuse giving any personal data to anyone, but Twitter under the leadership of Elon Musk? No, thanks. Plus I'd been using the site just fine for over a decade without giving them that, so I didn't see the need. I figured they just wanted it to have an excuse to shove porn down by throat, since that seems to be their latest thing.

At one point they decided to set me a deadline. If I wasn't going to add my birth date by July 8th, I was going to lose access to my account! That day came and went and nothing happened. Figures that it was just a bluff. But then yesterday...

So I guess that's it. I mean, the site had got a lot worse since Elon took over and I've been wanting to move away from it anyway, but I've got to admit I didn't expect it to quit on me first. And despite myself, I'm a little annoyed and upset.

I won't miss Twitter as a whole... the random browsing experience got so much worse once they made the change the verification, as the top replies to any post would just be blue checks saying horrible and/or stupid things. But for some reason most of the SWTOR community (including the official account!) seem to pretty much live on Twitter, and I feel that I'm going to miss out on a lot of things now.

Like that mount sale I posted about the other week? Was only announced on Twitter. Yesterday, a friend told me that the official account had announced a livestream for this Tuesday. If he hadn't told me, I wouldn't know because there certainly hasn't been any sign of that announcement on any of their other socials, including the official forums!

In the past it made sense to focus on announcing things on Twitter because unlike most social media sites it was open to be viewed by anyone, whether they had an account or not, but Elon Musk changed that! I wonder whether people even realise that all their "public" posts are no longer truly public. Like, if you go to the official SWTOR account's page without being logged into Twitter, the newest non-pinned post that you can see is from May 2022. Why do you think only Twitter users are worthy of knowing about what's happening with the game, huh? It's not even such a big platform anymore!

And of course many of my fellow content creators are the same. I wonder how long it'll take for anyone to even notice that I'm gone. Maybe in a month or so, someone will go "huh, I haven't seen Shintar post anything in a while; wonder whatever happened to her".

Anyway, that's that rant out of the way. I'll just have to live with less news about the game and community involvement going forward I guess.

Twelve Years of SWTOR Blogging

This blog is only a few days younger than SWTOR itself, so I always get to celebrate its birthday shortly after the game's. It hit me recently that twelve years of doing this means that I've been maintaining this blog for about a third of my life, or half of my adult life. That's pretty huge! Other people raise kids in that time... I have no regrets though.

In fact, this past year has been the best year for the blog in quite a while, as it was the first time in several years that my annual post count went up instead of down. I didn't quite manage to surpass one hundred posts (which I last did in 2019), but I nearly reached the same number I published in 2020, which makes me happy.

I think the reasons for this are a mix of the reinvigoration of my interest in the game that I mentioned in my last post and the fact that I cut back on my play time in WoW Classic. Some people might say it's already quite a lot to be playing two MMOs at the same time, but I also raided in both for a couple of years, and that really cut down on my free time for blogging as I had some sort of commitment in either one game or the other almost every evening. It's been nice to go down to being a bit more casual again in that regard, and apparently writing more about SWTOR has been what I really wanted to do with that extra time. Let's look at just what I had to say throughout the year:

In January, I was still busy thinking about the 7.2 patch that had come out in December, giving more detailed thoughts on its story update and grousing a bit about the UI changes that were made to the map system (they actually added the red dots for enemies to the overlay map since then, so it's better now than it used to be). With eight weeks left of Galactic Season 3, I set myself the stretch goal of also getting the "complete 100 weekly objectives" achievement on all servers. And in a bit of a throwback to Shadow of Revan, I hunted down three not-so-little grophets for the first time.

February was the quietest month on the blog, probably because I was too busy grinding out those extra seasons objectives everywhere. I summarised my thoughts on the season as a whole as well as on the first ever PvP season. It being about a year since the launch of Legacy of the Sith, I also mused on how I still missed at least some of the abilities that I'd lost in the big pruning.

As March rolled around, I finished my GS3 adventures on the other servers, which meant I had time for non-season-related things for a little while. I finally killed the first boss in the R-4 operation on veteran mode, had a blast during Total Galactic War, and goofed around with guildies during the Rakghoul Resurgence event.

However, April and with it the start of Galactic Season 4 were just around the corner. I felt somewhat ambivalent about getting another season quite so quickly. I did like the pacifist theme though and it gave me an excuse to get my pacifist character out of retirement.

May saw me muse about the introduction of a credit cost for quick travel and delighted by the removal of the daily commendation currency. I was also excited to share my participation in Today in TOR's Galactic Championship... which was fun while it lasted, but at this rate I think we're unfortunately unlikely to ever see the final episodes as they got stuck in something like "production hell" it seems (after everything was filmed). In Galactic Season news, I was amused to find that the chapter objectives had managed to coax me into taking another one of my alts through KotFE. We were also well into the second PvP season and I had thoughts on that too. Finally, we got our first glimpse of patch 7.3.

June of course was the month when the news about the move to Broadsword broke. I had thoughts, and I shared every bit of semi-official news or insider comments I could find. It was also the launch of the 7.3 patch though, and I wrote an in-depth review of the new story.

I continued to share more thoughts on the patch's features in July, when I talked about the new flashpoint as well as the new area on Voss, which also inspired me to muse on which other existing planets I'd like to revisit in a similar fashion. I also regaled everyone with the legendary tale of Savanna Vorantikus, gave a review of Galactic Season 4 and made inroads into playing through Onslaught and beyond as a Republic saboteur for the first time.

August was a more quiet month in some ways, so I wrote about evergreen topics such as my thoughts on the base game romances for female characters or why you should care about Conquest. TOR Fashion was also slated to shut down unexpectedly, and I wrote about Swtorista's project to save it.

In September I got to kill Dread Master Brontes on master mode for the first time and experienced some strange Conquest drama. Galactic Season 5 arrived, and so did the third iteration of the Best View in SWTOR contest, plus after months of careful testing, SWTOR finally made the move to the cloud. I also shared some thoughts on my PvP experiences in Season 3.

Galactic Season 5 came with more story than any previous season, which prompted me to write about it in October. The livestream preview for 7.4 stoked some hype, and I mused a bit about the strange state of master mode operations.

November brought more than one surprise as the devs sent out an email survey to players for the first time in years and dropped the news about the launch of the new APAC server on us with little warning. I enjoyed writing about my early impressions.

Finally December rolled around and with it patch 7.4 and a new story update. The New Overlords Podcast also dropped a very insightful interview with the devs and of course, SWTOR celebrated its 12th birthday. To another year of playing and blogging about it!

A Long, Slow Goodbye to Twitter

I created my Twitter account almost eleven years ago. The site was still smaller back then, a kind of nerdy place for bloggers to hang out. It wasn't something I ever felt I needed in my life, but I was curious enough to check it out and see what the fuss was all about.

And I kept using it, even though I never loved it. In 2015 I wrote about what I saw as some of the pros and cons of Twitter. I will say that it grew on me over time though. As I became more active within the SWTOR community on Twitter, I had more positive interactions. Also, when I finally got a smartphone, I could verify that there was indeed more of an appeal to scrolling through Twitter on the train (for example) than to looking at it on my desktop PC.

And then all that Elon Musk drama happened last year. I kept hearing worse and worse things about him, but was still hopeful that even if he was a big jerk, that didn't necessarily mean that Twitter couldn't continue to do its thing (lots of tech billionaires are not among the nicest people, but that doesn't necessarily make their products unusable). Oh boy, did I have no idea.

Look, I'm not going to rehash all the nonsense he's inflicted on the site since then - there are hundreds of articles and videos out there laying it all out in detail. If you're a Twitter user and you feel that his buyout hasn't really impacted your experience, I'm not here to tell you that you should feel otherwise... but for many of us, the site has become increasingly less usable and just generally less enjoyable to hang out on.

I've seen a lot of people talk about leaving, just to then come back a week later because despite everything, they missed it too much, and I didn't want to be one of them. However, I also have very different motivations from many Twitter users. For me, Twitter was always meant to be an extension of the blog, and so my first reaction to Musk firing 80% of the site's staff was one of annoyance. At the time, I honestly wouldn't have been surprised if the site had just outright crashed within two weeks, and I was seething at the thought that I'd put ten years of myself into a website that might just disappear one day due to the whims of a random billionaire. I mean, we often joke about how Google might shut down Blogger any day now, but at least they are usually professional about these things, giving you notice and plenty of time to export your data.

So I came away from the whole Twitter debacle with two main resolutions: firstly, to slowly wean myself off using Twitter as much (though I was going to continue using it while there were still interesting things to read there), and secondly, to extract everything I had ever posted there, review it for things I wanted to keep and remember, and incorporate them into this blog.

Point one was relatively easy to action: I completely stopped using my secondary account, and cut down on posting on my main account, no longer offering up random thoughts or anything like that, but purely limiting myself to promoting the blog and posting the occasional reply to someone else. I also started to look for other places that would provide a similar sort of entertainment and/or could be used to promote my writings. (For example I've taken to making a post on the official SWTOR forums every month.)

Point two meant requesting a copy of my stored data while that service was still functional, and starting work on sorting and categorising it. The latter is still ongoing, because it turns out that manually reviewing almost 5000 Tweets and pasting them into blog posts takes some time, and to be honest it's a bit boring - the kind of task for which I have to be in the right mindset. I am however close to being done, and what will happen then is that I will start making a series of posts on here called "Tales from Twitter" which will reproduce old Tweets of mine that I'd like to remember and preserve. I don't know how many parts this series will have yet, and since it's not time-sensitive, my plan is to intersperse it with "normal" posts. I don't know how interesting these will be to you as readers... I think some of them, like the random pug/PvP stories, are pretty amusing and timeless, but others might not be. Still, it's something I'd like to do for myself above all else, to have all this content in one place.

As for what will happen to Twitter... to be honest, at this point I think it will slowly fade away for me. As of now, there are still a few people there for whose content I check in every day, but the number of posts on my timeline is constantly decreasing as people leave and the weird crap that's been done to the algorithms makes it harder to find interesting new people to follow. I'm trying out Bluesky as a "Twitter replacement" (it's not the same but to me personally it does seem to be the competitor most likely to be able to serve a similar purpose right now) but regardless of how things go there, I feel like I'm going to make more conscious decisions going forward about where to post anything on the web.

My 11th Year of SWTOR Blogging and Happy Life Day

This blog celebrates its anniversary two days after the launch of Star Wars: The Old Republic, and I always use that as an opportunity to review my blogging activity for the past year and how it reflected on my relationship with the game. While I just called out certain rough spots in the game's release schedule last year, it's honestly been doing better than the blog, as my output in terms of posts dropped for the third year in a row (though I should only be a couple of posts down on last year by the end of December).

I don't really have an excuse. As I've said previously, I'm simply not as focused as I used to be, what with splitting my free time between multiple MMOs and also blogging about WoW again.

The most quiet time on the blog this year was January, as I was honestly in a bit of a funk after the Legacy of the Sith delay and didn't feel terribly motivated to play. I think I did some Conquest or something? The only things I wrote about were SWTOR being featured in an issue of Star Wars Insider (an experience that taught me something about the challenges of hunting down a physical magazine in 2022) and how I'd come to quite enjoy the Iokath dailies.

Then in February, it was finally expansion time! The launch felt very exciting, though my overall first impressions were less so. Nonetheless I spent the next few weeks happily reporting on all the new content I was having fun with, such as the newest story and Galactic Season 2.

This continued into March, when I mused about the (to me) somewhat strange changes to repeatable content that limited which flashpoints and daily zones would grant rewards each week (which were fortunately reverted soon after) and the complexity of the new gearing system. I wrote about how the introduction of combat styles made the game feel different even as I personally refused to pick up an additional combat style on any of my characters for the time being, and I tried to evaluate the changes to the new player experience but found it difficult to distinguish between what was truly new in 7.0 and what had already been changed earlier and I just couldn't remember. I also had fun in the retuned operations and found it quite funny that even places like Eternity Vault were suddenly somewhat challenging again.

By April my excitement started to wane a little, however. I had to do some soul-searching in regards to the fact that the change to combat logging that was also implemented with 7.0 meant that I couldn't hide how bad I was at dps anymore. The tight tuning of the operations made gold augments more relevant than they had been before and gave them an uncomfortable air of pay-to-win. I was looking forward to the expansion's first patch, even if it was only a minor one. Most of my fun came from the fact that I'd found Season 2 so easy to complete that I decided to follow in the footsteps of one my guildies and attempt to complete it on the game's other servers too, something that led to some interesting new experiences.

At the start of May I had to admit that things weren't looking good on the ops front at all, as initial amusement about hitting the enrage on the first boss in EV had made way for frustration with how overtuned everything was, plus class balance issues were adding additional aggravation. In other news, I finally picked a second combat style for my Commando main, and had some good times in PvP. I confidently declared that SWTOR's endgame was all about alts instead of gear, and continued to have fun working my way through the Season 2 track on multiple servers. I also started to document my post-KotET experiences as an Imperial saboteur.

By June I was noticeably running out of steam again. I continued my saboteur's adventures and completed Season 2 on Star Forge, but otherwise I didn't feel terribly motivated and was kind of holding out for patch 7.1.

In July I completed Season 2 on the remaining servers, talked about Josh Strife Hayes' take on SWTOR, and was mostly very glad when we finally got a launch date for 7.1.

August came, and with it 7.1, which brought with it excitement about the new daily zone and an unexpected story update. And of course there was the new operation R-4 Anomaly... which made it a struggle for me to say anything positive about it since Bioware had once again decided that actually, they didn't need story mode to be accessible and that ops were now primarily catering to the top 1%. I tried to drown my sorrow in gambling (just kidding... though I did take part in the Nightlife event with more enthusiasm than I had in a while).

Seriously though, the problems with R-4 Anomaly really hit me hard. I did write a bit about the issues it presented for me at the beginning of September, but to be honest things were even worse than I admitted in that post. Basically it pushed me to a point where I was ready to step away from raiding altogether. So Bioware doesn't want people like me to raid anymore? Well fuck it; guess I won't then. Considering that I've been running operations in SWTOR pretty consistently almost since launch, that was a pretty big deal.

The reason this ultimately didn't happen was Mr Commando. This was a surprise in so far as he'd been moaning at me for years about how he doesn't really enjoy the game the way he used to, and that he's just "locked in" by our shared raiding habit, so I thought he'd be delighted by an opportunity to just drop the whole thing altogether. However, in a move that surprised even himself, he stuck with it even when I stopped and eventually managed to mellow me down to just "taking a break". I alluded to this in a post at the end of the month, where I wrote about the strange hoops people had to jump through to kill bosses in R-4 veteran mode.

I kind of avoided talking about the whole situation in more detail by posting less and mostly sticking to subjects that were kind of peripheral to the game instead of talking about actual gameplay, such as websites for combat logging, the update to the official forums, or the second "Best View in SWTOR" contest. This continued into October until it was time for the launch of Galactic Season 3, which somewhat invigorated my interest in the game and writing about everything a new season entailed.

As I spent more time playing again, I realised that I had warmed up to combat styles a bit and actually made use of the feature on a couple of alts. On a related subject, I complained a bit about how levelling and gearing alts was quite awkward this expansion, but I also celebrated finally finishing off the last achievement for the Feast of Prosperity. We got our first glimpse of 7.2 and it looked really good. It actually launched before the end of the year too, bringing with it a very cinematic story update and a new daily zone.

All in all, I think you can see that it hasn't just been a year of ups and down for the game, but also for my relationship with it. I was hyped for the expansion, but then it launched with many issues (though I still had fun with 7.0). I had a lot of hopes for patch 7.1, but instead it broke my spirit and tested my ties to the game in a way that had never happened before. It feels like brighter days might finally be ahead with 7.2, but I've also got to admit that I'm not entirely "over" my disappointment with R-4, and my interest in raiding remains a little precarious. I know it's just a game, but it's a game that has been my virtual home for more than a decade now, so these kinds of things can still hit hard.

For now I'll be AFK for a few days to take part in a family Christmas for the first time since the pandemic and I hope y'all have a good holiday period, whether you celebrate Christmas or do something else. Maybe you'll even find a tauntaun under your Christmas tree like I did.

Difficult Decisions

Blaugust has come and gone, and has left me feeling rather down. I've never been into the whole "daily posting" aspect of the event, but the badges on my sidebar (only visible on desktop, sorry) are a testament to my consistency when it comes to participation, as I've been able to proudly show off my silver award (earned by making 15+ posts throughout the month, in my case spread out across multiple blogs) four years in a row.

I thought it was going to be a given that I'd earn it again this year, but I stalled out at thirteen posts. During the last days of the month I kept trying to think of ways in which I could still squeeze in another couple of posts to hit my usual milestone, but in the end I just couldn't muster the enthusiasm for it.

I expected the month of August to provide a lot of positive inspiration for posts in the form of SWTOR's patch 7.1, but that didn't really pan out the way I expected either. The story update and new daily area were okay, but the new operation was honestly just a shock for me.

Back in March I actually gave the new tuning for operations introduced with Legacy of the Sith a thumbs-up. Things seemed a bit on the tough side, but Bioware had been clear about their long-term gearing plan for this expansion and I had faith that they would come through and eventually give us access to better gear that would make things easier.

However, the more 7.1 got pushed back, the more we started to feel the squeeze. I wrote about class imbalances and how my ops team was increasingly running up against a wall, unable to find any more bosses that we could kill with our skill and gear level. I was looking more and more towards patch 7.1 as the source of our salvation, seeing how it was supposed to both give us our first new operation in almost three years as well as give us access to better gear. Unfortunately, the reality of that has turned out to be nothing like I imagined.

I've expressed some of my annoyances with R-4 Anomaly already, but really, it's not just the new operation itself, but also the fact that Bioware back-pedalled on the whole gear upgrades thing at the last minute - on the PTS, Rakata gear was upgradeable beyond 330, giving raiders a chance to improve their gear even if they couldn't immediately kill anything in the new operation on veteran mode, but for some reason they decided not to go with that for live, only allowing daily and flashpoint runners to increase their item level to 330 but not letting raiders have any progress outside R-4 veteran mode.

So my ops team is basically no better off than it was before 7.1, just that we now also have a new and horribly overtuned operation to wipe in.

I don't like writing posts like this because it's a game and I generally try to focus on the positive aspects of the hobby - if I don't like something, I prefer to just avoid that part of the game instead of whinging too much about it. The problem is that running operations has been such an integral part of my SWTOR experience for over a decade now that it's impossible to ignore all this. My ops team consists of people I've known and played with for years, and since we hang out multiple times a week they're one of my primary social circles.

And here we are, stuck with nowhere to go in terms of progression, basically because Bioware has decided that after ten years of raiding some of us are not good enough for their game anymore. This stinks! We've been trying to find some sort of solution, but it's difficult because outside of our shared interest in progression raiding, people have very different gameplay preferences. I eventually had to say last week that I need to step down and at least take a break from all that progression stuff because it was just depressing me. That's not how a game should make you feel.

Because of how integral running ops is to my experience, it's been a long time since I felt so down on SWTOR as a whole. The last time I wrote about hitting a wall in operations to this degree was proabably back during Shadow of Revan - but that was a different time, with much faster patches, and we got the announcement that the Knights of the Fallen Empire expansion was coming up only two months after I wrote that post. There is no such relief in sight right now.

I also find myself thinking back to the early days of Galactic Command and how it made me not want to play. That one didn't have anything to do with difficulty, but instead was tied to a bad gearing system that made a lot of our efforts feel futile, which again sounds somewhat familiar - but again, at least there was some relief in sight back then as Bioware was already working on tweaking the system.

This time I'm finding it much harder to be optimistic. The other day there was a dev post that said that they "continue to look at Operation difficulty. The team continues to tweak and adjust R4 and other Operations to ensure a fair balance", but I'm not hopeful that this may result in useful action any time soon. Even if Bioware does end up nerfing the operation or changing the way gearing works in a few months, things have already been out of whack for so long that any changes may well end up coming too late for my ops team.

Happy Life Day and Another Blog Anniversary

I'd like to take this moment to wish all my readers a merry Christmas or whatever other holidays you may be celebrating around this time of year. In most European countries Christmas is being celebrated today, something I actually had to actively remind myself of... after eleven years of living in the UK (which I realised - somewhat to my shock - equals more than half of my adult life at this point) I've gotten so used to the way things are done here that I sometimes forget about how it's supposed to be done "properly" back home.

My last post was about SWTOR's tenth anniversary, and this blog celebrates its own birthday two days after the game. Usually I like to commemorate this with a post on the 22nd, but this year I let it slide because I got my third Covid jab that day and some side effects combined with other issues meant that I've been feeling pretty under the weather since then. But hey, Christmas is a good time for reflection too, so I might as well make that post today.

Sadly the last year hasn't exactly been a triumphant one for the blog, as my annual output declined further from it's previous average of more than a hundred posts. Last year I fell just below that for the first time, and this year I'm only up to 74 posts at the time of writing this. It would be easy to blame the lack of major in-game content milestones that I also brought up in my last post for a shortage of things to write about, but while that may have factored into things, it's not really the main issue. I still believe in my own advice when it comes to MMO writing, which is that as long as your game is alive and kicking, there's always something to write about. Sometimes you're just not that interested in what's happening at the moment, or maybe you're more interested in just playing the game without writing about it.

And really, it's mostly been those two factors that have limited my writing. I mean, there's interesting stuff happening on the SWTOR PTS right now, but I'm just not that invested in playing on there more than once in a blue moon. (No, not even when there are rewards on offer - I struggle enough to get all my alts through the story content on live!) When I'm playing, it's mostly got to do with my guild and Conquest - which I do write about sometimes, but it's not that interesting to me to write about all the time - so I'd rather spend more time just playing, even if it's something else.

Anyway, let's have a look at what I did write about in the past year:

With farming tech fragments to gear up no longer being a concern, I wrote about wasting my tech fragments gambling at Kai's back in January. Incidentally, I never stopped doing that as I'm still missing lots of set pieces and Tacticals for the achievements. I just stopped keeping track of the millions and millions of credits I was pouring into it... I probably don't want to know. On one of those occasions when I did talk about Conquest, I also summed up the reason Bioware was making changes to the way new players contribute to guild Conquest scores, apparently inspired by some strange happenings on my very own home, the Darth Malgus server.

There was more Conquest talk in February, as Bioware unleashed a Total Galactic War for the first time in nearly a year. I also started watching Star Wars: Rebels. In general, those first few months of the year were very quiet on the blog though, as I didn't feel I had much to comment on other than the patch 6.3. preview in March. In line with what I said above though, I was however very busy playing WoW Classic during that period, as my guild was trying to finish up Naxx before the release of Classic Burning Crusade. It's telling that I made a post called "Too Much To Do" on my WoW blog during that same time...

When 6.3 actually released at the end of April, I got busy again though... especially with Galactic Seasons, which prompted me to keep a diary of my activities while I was working my way through its 100 levels of rewards. These diary entries made up a lot of my blog content for the next three months... aside from that, I talked about finally beating Dread Master Styrak on master mode without being over-levelled for it, watching the rest of Rebels and finally getting caught up with the Mandalorian craze. We also had to say goodbye to SWTOR's refer-a-friend system.

July of course brought the excitement of the Legacy of the Sith expansion announcement, though this was soon marred somewhat by the opening of the PTS causing a lot of confusion and asking us to test changes that hadn't previously been mentioned at all. My Galactic Seasons grind came to an end and I wrote a series of three posts to summarise the whole experience.

August featured a wild mix of content, from me finally writing down all my thoughts about the Secrets of the Enclave flashpoint released in April, to my experiences with datacron hunting on Mek-Sha and Onderon, to grumbling about the Nightlife event once again to loving the first season of Bad Batch.

In September I had to say goodbye to being able to master loot and picked up levelling my pacifist again. I also mused about how rich the current expansion has made me and how to prepare for the next one.

In October, Star Wars: Visions challenged my ideas about what it means for content to be canon, and my achievements challenged my notion that I didn't like GSF all that much. I also hit max level on my pacifist, something I was very proud of, looked back on Onslaught as an expansion, and attempted to split the whole of SWTOR's ten years of history into distinct time periods.

November was relatively light on content again after that, as I mostly dedicated it to themed posts for IntPiPoMo. We also got a December launch date for Legacy of the Sith, just to have that changed to February only three weeks later. And now the end of the year is the usual time to reminisce and take stock.

Talking about how I haven't blogged as much this year as I would have liked to always feels a little strange, because on the one hand, a hobby blogger primarily writes for themselves - so if you don't feel like it at some point, you just don't feel like it, and that should be that! But realistically, I also feel a certain pride in having maintained somewhat regular updates on the blog for a whole decade by now, plus I enjoy getting comments and interacting with them, so letting people down by not posting for longer periods of time feels bad.

One thing I can promise you is that I haven't lost interest in blogging or the game - at any given point I've got at least several blog post ideas bouncing around in my head, it's just that when push comes to shove, sometimes I find myself prioritising something else in the end. And even if the blog topic wasn't time sensitive and you write it down for later, the spark that made you want to write about it doesn't always last, so if you miss your original chance to write down your thoughts, it often doesn't end up happening at all.

My point is, I can't promise that I'll be back to writing a hundred posts next year... but there'll be new SWTOR content for sure, and you can bet that I'll be covering it.

Coming Up: Lots of Pictures! #IntPiPoMo

November is National Novel Writing Month, and a few years ago someone came up with the idea of International Picture Posting Month to go along with it, as a picture is worth a thousand words, right? I've taken part in this cute little initiative several times in the past; it was just on break last year.

Chestnut of Gamer Girl Confessions has more information about the event here, including a link to a sign-up form where you can officially join in to have your efforts recognised.

Since I'm not someone who always includes a lot of pictures in her posts organically, I'll also revive the tradition from past years to go through my themed 10 days of SWTOR screenshots over the course of the month, in which I'll post a selection of screenshots centred around a certain topic every few days and tell whatever little stories go along with them.

My self-imposed rule for selecting the screenshots has always been that anything's eligible that I've taken since the last time I did the challenge (minus any images that I already included in other posts, as per IntPiPoMo rules), which means that I can go as far back as November 2018 for my screenies this time! We'll see what I'll dig up...

This Blog Also Turns Nine

As is traditional, this blog celebrates its own birthday two days after SWTOR's, and I always like to use this opportunity to look back on what I've written over the course of the past year.

It's not been the best year ever for the blog as my output has been the lowest it's ever been, falling under 100 posts a year for the first time. (Technically there are a few days left in the year but I'm not going to write six more posts in that time frame.) I can't even blame real life or work for that, because not only have I been lucky enough to retain my job during the pandemic, I got to work from home for most of the year, which eliminated my commute and resulted in about twelve hours per week of extra time to do fun things of my choosing. As it happened I just ended up branching out in terms of my MMO play and spending more time in WoW Classic, which then also resulted in some of my creative energy going towards writing about that instead. (Consider this a plug for my other blog by the way if you're interested in that game at all. It's kind of funny to me now how my WoW blog used to be the most-visited of my sites while this one got almost no traffic and now it's the other way round.)

Anyway, I still haven't exactly been idle here either. In January, my latest round of levelling solely through flashpoints to assess the viability of that play style was still going strong and I was sharing all about my pug experiences. Mostly I was going on about how much I hated getting Hammer Station half the time, until I actively started excluding it from my selection before queueing. I also reviewed how I felt about the Onslaught expansion three months in, and celebrated my guild getting the last boss of the new Nature of Progress operation down on veteran mode. (At the time that was the hardest difficulty.)

In February I celebrated my guild hitting guild level 200 (we're into the 300s by now but I've stopped paying attention to it). My pacifist leveller explored Taris, and I wrote about how I got into the habit of using crew skills to level my companion influence. (On my main I'm up to nine companions at level 50 now thanks to this!) My flashpoint levelling also continued, and I wrote about how the removal of the Veteran's Edge buff from master mode operations unexpectedly messed with guild progression. Ten months later and Bioware hasn't really made any significant changes to this, sadly. It's been a tough year for maintaining motivation to progress for an ops group that finds master modes with capped stats to be a struggle.

March saw my flashpoint levelling experiment come to an end, and as COVID panic became more widespread, I wondered about the effect this would have on MMOs. (In terms of finances, all indications seem to be that it's been a win for the gaming industry. The whole "do we really want to deal with deadly pandemics in our entertainment too" angle surprisingly turned out to be a complete non-issue.) As I found myself holed up at home for a (then) unprecedented amount of time, I expressed love for my guildies and how their companionship was keeping me sane.

This continued in April as I talked about some of my favourite guild videos and reported on our first ever virtual guild meet-up. I used a (free) character boost for the first time and was surprisingly pleased with the result. (That said, I haven't played that character very much since then!) I also wrote a bit of a rant about how some of my guildies were driving me crazy when I was tanking flashpoints for them (clearly the novelty of spending time with them every day was starting to wear off, haha), which resonated with a surprising number of people.

In May I told the story of how I came to be Benevolent Empress (aka guild leader) of our Imperial alt guild and celebrated completing a hard-to-get gear set. I revisited what is for me an evergreen topic on this blog: how levelling is just way too fast these days and can you please give us at least the option to slow down (Bioware says no). I also liked this post in which I compared the experience of getting a first kill on the same boss (but re-scaled) six years apart.

My pacifist's explorations continued in June and I got to celebrate with Swtorista as she hit 100k subscribers on YouTube! (Last year I predicted that this would happen in March... I guess being three months off isn't too bad. 150k subs in 2021?) I was ecstatic to get the achievement for defeating all the Dark vs. Light world bosses, and celebrated my birthday with a guild event that involved making use of those control modules that drop in the Gods from the Machine operation that nobody ever uses. Oh yeah, and Bioware added a new "welcome window" that everybody instantly hated. I think we've got used to it since then, and I'm not going to lie, it's drawn my attention to a Cartel market deal I liked once or twice. Still, I also find that it keeps re-opening itself after being minimised and at this point I kind of treat it like one of those pop-ups you get on some sites that you just automatically close without even looking at them...

In July I made some very thoughtful posts that sparked good discussion in the comments as well, such as on the role of sexist NPCs in SWTOR and about how I struggle to make dark side decisions for the sake of seeing different story outcomes. Continuing the theme of deep thoughts, I wrote about experiencing confusion and discomfort with my pacifist character on Alderaan as some quests she picked up there didn't technically violate the rules of the challenge I had set myself but didn't seem to be in the spirit of being a pacifist. Also, SWTOR launched on Steam and I did switch to that version of the game soon after just for the sake of being able to show off how many hours a week I play... or something?

August was when my activity started to drop a bit, at the time at least partially because I didn't have the greatest of times with the Nightlife event. I picked up watching Clone Wars again (I've finished the last season now by the way... writing a final post about that is on my to-do list) and wrote about my experiences with trying to convert jawa junk into credits. Four months later that is still an ongoing project by the way! While I've managed to greatly reduce the number of junk stacks in my legacy cargo hold, I just keep earning new junk too quickly for the pace at which I'm selling goods and considering that I'm trying to not flood the market with my wares...

In September I mused about how my main was spending a lot of her time on the guild flagship these days and talked candidly about how my guild failed to kill two difficult bosses. We did get at least one of them down a bit later though.

October was the quietest month on the blog, and I only updated about my progress watching Clone Wars, my experiences with healing 16-man Revan on veteran mode, and the launch of the new Feast of Prosperity event.

I continued writing about my experiences with the event in November, and compared the inquisitor companion Ashara Zavros to Ahsoka from Clone Wars. I also had a bit of a freak-out when Bioware announced that SWTOR was going to introduce login rewards, which are something (maybe somewhat unintuitively) I'm not a fan of at all. Two weeks in, the new system doesn't seem too bad, though I'm not a fan of getting all these legacy-bound companion gifts that don't stack with my regular two cargo bays full of companion gifts. I have yet to decide how to handle that going forward...

I started December by musing about how the Conquest meta on Darth Malgus was in a very strange place, and then got all excited when we finally got our first big story update since Onslaught's launch. I also reviewed my predictions from earlier in the year and somewhat less than half of my expectations were met. Let's see what 2021 brings!

My 2020 Predictions Reviewed

Wilhelm reviewing his video game predictions for 2020 reminded me that I actually joined in the crystal ball fun last time and made a short post with SWTOR predictions for 2020 early in January this year. While the year isn't technically over yet, all my predictions centred around content additions for SWTOR and I don't expect Bioware to give us another surprise content patch in the next 12 days, so I think it's safe to rate my predictive capabilities somewhat ahead of time.

I made five predictions for the year ahead back then; let's see how they turned out:

1. The Emperor's Last Gruesome Weapon won't actually turn out to be that big of a deal, for all the time Scourge and Kira spent expositioning about it. I expect we'll get to see this story arc relatively late in the year, October at the earliest. It will be smaller than Ossus was, with no exciting new environments and largely the same storyline for both Republic and Empire players. Depending on some previous story choices, you'll get the option to kill Master Satele. Either way you stop the weird mind plague before it can actually bring the Emperor back or anything like that, and we can finally move on from this subject.

I'm not quite sure how to rate this prediction. A lot of it ended up being spot on, from the late release to the small environmental scope and it largely being the same for Republic and Empire. And while you don't actually get to kill Satele, you do get an option to try under certain circumstances. Still, me saying that it would all be not that big of a deal seems very wrong considering Echoes of Oblivion's story scope.

2. Darth Malgus will get in touch with Imperial players somehow and give you the option to ally with him like many of us always kind of wanted to on Ilum. The idea will be that you help him overthrow Acina/Vowrawn so that he can position himself as the new Emperor, not false this time! This might not actually happen yet in 2020 but there should at least be a smaller story snippet setting things up and having you meet with Malgus. I'm not sure what Republic players could get that's equally as interesting, mind you...

Nope, no Darth Malgus story progress at all this year except for that brief scene at the end of The Task at Hand. I still kind of hope that this prediction will end up coming true one day though (as nothing's happened to rule it out either).

3. GSF will get a nice amount of love mid-year, with more than just some balance changes and a new map. There might even be a new game mode and/or new ships in the cards!

Hahaha, no. Among all the updates and changes made this year, I don't think GSF got a single thing. Sorry starfighters; I was rooting for you!

4. PvP will also get a new warzone at some point, though it might "just" be a new map for an existing game mode. More importantly though, someone at Bioware will finally figure out what's up with the weird desync in Huttball and fix it, or at least make it better... Yeah okay, I don't really think that one's going to happen, but I really, really want it to!

Oh boy, where to even begin with this one? Not only did we not get a new warzone (map) this year, we now have two fewer than we started with! I was right that Bioware expressed a serious interest in fixing the performance and desync issues in warzones, but unfortunately part of this initiative included taking Quesh and Vandin out of the Huttball rotation for the "short term". This was back in July. Having had bad experiences with other MMO developers removing content from the game to "fix" it, I expressed concern back then that the whole thing might just end up being forgotten, and considering that it's December and we haven't heard a peep about those two maps making a comeback I fear that I may have been right about that.

5. We still won't get Zenith back in 2020. It's mind-blowing to me now that we thought his return was imminent back in 2016 and yet here we are nearly four years later and he's the very last of the original companions that's still unaccounted for. I really wish we could get him back already, not least because he's my favourite of the original consular companions... however, looking at how Bioware has handled companion returns in the last year and a half, I've really enjoyed the way they've worked them into the main story again, compared to the rather disappointing Alliance alerts from two years ago. So I'm happy to wait if that means he'll get a nicely integrated return later on, preferably something involving Balmorra, considering his strong attachment to his home world. I just can't see that fitting into what's coming up in the short term.

This one may have been an easy one to predict, but it still came true. Though now that the next story arc is dealing with Mandalorians (and considering that I can't really see Zenith having taken up the bounty hunting life) I still can't see a good place for his return in the near future. So not sure I'd hold my breath for his return in 2021 either...

But that's getting into 2021 territory, and I don't know yet whether I'll bother trying to make any predictions for next year. If I do, it'll probably be in about two weeks or so.

Did you have any predictions for 2020 that came true or turned out to be complete opposite?

1000 Posts!

I celebrate two types of milestones on this blog: the blog's birthday (which is shortly after SWTOR's birthday every year in December) and every time I've written another 100 posts. The 900 post milestone happened back in June last year, at which point I expected to hit the big thousand in April or May of 2020. I think it was mainly the lull I found myself in during the months just before the launch of Onslaught that led to me missing that target by a little bit - which is only a shame in so far as a commenter pointed out that it would have been cool if I could have timed it so that the 1000th post was published on the 4th of May.

Anyway, this is the 1000th post now! In the past I've used these milestones to look at something related to blog statistics: mostly funny search terms that led people to the blog, but more recently also items such as which posts have been the most popular over time. I thought that for this one I'd do something slightly different though, and talk about my blog tags or labels.

Tags or categories are among a healthy blog's best features in my opinion, and I always love it when other bloggers make good use of them, as it makes it much easier to find specific content that interests you. I use my own tags all the time as well when trying to find older posts that I've written on certain subjects.

They can also provide insights into just what a blogger writes about most often though, so that's the angle I've decided to take this time around. Let's look at and talk about the blog's twenty most frequently used tags:

1. screenshots (636)

Now this very first tag is a bit of a funny one, because you might very well ask: "Why is this even a thing? Don't most of your posts contain screenshots?" The answer is yes, and this tag is evidence of that, proving that apparently 63.6% of my posts do in fact contain screenshots. However, this wasn't always the case. To this day I remain the kind of blogger who's more focused on the written word than on fancy images, but I've certainly mellowed and use them a lot more often now than I did in the past.

Basically, when I started this blog, I used them rarely enough that whenever I did include one or more screenshots it felt like something that was worth noting, and I sometimes used the tag to quickly check back on whether I had used certain screenshots in a post before or not. At this point this has become somewhat of a moot point, both because most of my posts contain screenshots anyway and because a category with 636 entries in it is not something you can casually scan for what you've used before. But it's there, so I'll keep using it.

2. quests (183)

Considering that story content is the bread and butter of Star Wars: The Old Republic, it shouldn't be a surprise that "quests" is the second most used tag on this blog. After all, every new piece of story is delivered in the form of a quest - or missions as the game officially calls them, since it came out in the days of "we're trying to differentiate ourselves from WoW by using different terms for everything".

I only wish that I'd thought of coming up with a separate "story" tag early on, because sometimes I want to talk about wider story developments such as the Republic vs. Empire conflict and then it feels a bit weird to just tag that with "quests". However, considering it's what I've been using for more than eight years now, it would be weird to change things up at this point, unless I ever feel like going back through one thousand posts and retroactively tagging some of them "story" where appropriate. I can't even rule that out entirely, considering some of the ways in which I've been spending my time this year, but it's unlikely.

3. operations (152)

Speaking of using different terms for everything, here we have SWTOR's term for raids. I'm a raider, so I talk about them a lot. Makes sense. Then again, you could argue that considering how much of my time in game I spend running operations, it's actually kind of impressive that I "only" talk about them 15.2% of the time and don't mention them at all in the other 84.8% of posts.

4. swtor general (145)

This is a generic catch-all term for things that I find hard to categorise, such as the game's population, server merges, content cycles, comparisons between expansions etc. I'm actually kind of surprised that it's "only" in fourth place - clearly I manage to be specific about my subjects more often than not.

5. pvp (142)

I don't consider myself that much of a PvPer, but I guess PvP being the fifth most used tag on the blog paints a slightly different picture. It's not my number one way of passing the time, but it's clearly a fixed staple of my in-game diet.

6. flashpoints (126)

Flashpoints are in a similar boat as I enjoy doing them quite regularly, but considering just how much I love them I'm kind of surprised they rank below PvP in terms of how much I talk about them on the blog. Maybe I like thinking about them more than I actually spend time running them (which would make them sort of the opposite of my stance towards PvP I guess).

7. guild (126)

My guild is awesome so it deserves to be mentioned a lot! This seems appropriate.

8. community (124)

This is a tag that I like to use for a variety of community-related subjects, from how people behave in pugs to links to other fan sites or content creators. I've long known that I care about community a lot, so I guess it makes sense that it would come up in my blog posts reasonably often, but I was still kind of surprised to see it in the top ten. 

9. companions (121)

Another one of SWTOR's staples, so no surprise that the tag associated with them is in my top ten, even if my general impression has long been that I seem to worry/care less about my companions than the average player seemingly does.

10. patch (102)

My first thought on seeing this number was: "Has SWTOR even had 102 patches?!" So I checked the official patch notes page, and at the time of writing this it currently lists 276 numbered patches - huh. I'm sure I didn't actually cover most of them though, and most of these posts were probably about a small handful of larger patches... but still interesting, I guess.

11. gear (99)

I didn't think I cared that much about gear?! Am I that shallow? The blog says yes!

12. silly (93)

I often am, and so are my guildies, so this checks out.

13. grouping (90)

As a big fan of group content and someone who's very interested in all the dynamics surrounding it, it makes sense to me that this is a tag that I use a lot. Then again, we're talking 90 out of 1000 posts here... is 0.9% really a lot?

14. knights of the fallen empire (89)

Now this one I found really interesting because no other expansion tag has been used nearly as often. The next one in line would be Knights of the Eternal Throne with 49 uses, and that despite of that expansion lasting three times as long as KotFE. I think it's because I mainly use expansion tags when I'm specifically talking about an expansion's story content or new game-changing features that were a part of it. KotFE came with a huge amount of story content (it took me 17 posts just to cover all the story chapters) and the switch to monthly chapters, introduction of level sync and general side-lining of group content was a huge paradigm shift that caused a lot of friction at the time and made for a lot of good blogging material, even if it also caused players a fair amount of heartache.

15. pugs (85)

I like joining pick-up groups and talk about this often. Once again, this checks out.

16. levelling (83)

I also like levelling alts - maybe not as much as some, but it's certainly something that comes up every so often.

17. npcs (80)

This tag is kind of related to what I said about "quests" earlier and mostly focuses on notable characters and their roles in the story. Though sometimes it can also be a bit random.

18. warzones (80)

I gave warzones a separate tag to distinguish tales about specific matches from general PvP talk about things like class balance etc. but also from world PvP. Most of the time the two do still go together, but not all the time.

19. links (75)

I think I originally created this tag to mark posts where I was doing a lot of linking to other content creators or fan sites, but then I also started using it for posts that do a lot of interlinking within the blog itself. I'm not actually sure that's very useful at this point, but like the screenshots tag it's there so I might as well keep using it.

20. videos (74)

As much as I call myself a blogger rather than a YouTuber, videos are a thing I also create sometimes, and when I feature them I use this tag. It's not just for my own videos though, but also for videos from other people, official trailers etc.

Anyway, that's that. Just a little journey looking into the sort of subjects I like to write about the most. What about you, dear readers? Do you ever use tags to find things? Or am I just the sort of person that can be a bit obsessive about sorting/categorising things?

(By the way, I was going to tag this post with "blog" and all twenty labels featured in it, but Blogger won't let you have more than twenty tags and I didn't want to drop just one, so nothing but "blog" it is.)