A Week on Oricon

One of last week's weekly seasons objectives was "Seat of the Hutts Daily Sweeps", which requires you to either do the Oricon weekly twice or the Ossus weekly once. I've always thought this was a strange equivalence because since 7.0 the Ossus weekly takes less than ten minutes to complete (depending on your choice of dailies you don't even have to fight any mobs for it), while a single run of Oricon can require slogging through a full 100 mobs or so if you don't have stealth or someone else happened to come through just before you to clear things out already. And then you're asking me to do the one that's already longer twice?

I guess the one thing that Oricon has going for it is that it's more accessible since you unlock access to the area earlier in the story. On my secondary legacies on the other servers I didn't used to have access to Ossus, so I did some Oricon runs for seasons there in the past - though less so recently, precisely because of how tedious the whole affair tended to be. Since the release of the Bessi venture made daily access fully account-wide (meaning it applies cross-server), I could've just gone to Ossus to make my life easier, but I still feel a bit bad about "skipping ahead", even if it's just to do dailies.

This week I happened to have a few days off around Easter, so I thought why not take a few alts through Oricon since I have a bit of time? Only a couple of them had done the story before, so by the end of the week I had taken four new characters through the storyline, two on Republic side and two of my Imperials. I didn't do this all at once but staggered progress over the course of several days, and it occurred to me that I probably hadn't spent this many hours on Oricon since it first came out and I was farming reputation on all my original (then) max-level alts.

I did feel like the craziness was rubbing off on me a bit after a few days, but overall it wasn't a bad experience. Lord Hargrev's voice acting still holds up as top notch over a decade later, and I always love the bit where he goes: "Knives! They can't even resist carving one another like roasts!" Though it's distracting nowadays how much his assistant sounds exactly like Lana, not just because it's the same voice actress but also because she uses the exact same kind of voice/tone that would later become Lana's.

Being able to combine the storyline with the dailies and weekly these days is a peculiar experience that I already talked about about one and a half years ago, when I first went through Oricon that way on my Shae Vizla main. Back then I did find it a bit frustrating how all the missions tended to bug out one way or another since they had clearly never been designed to be done at the same time - this wasn't something that was impossible to overcome, but it still required me to backtrack and redo things several times.

Since I already knew what to expect this time, I was able to take some notes on the best way to circumvent the bugs tied to each mission, and I thought I might share my learnings here as well, even if it's an extremely niche topic.

[DAILY] Fallen Forces

For this one, the objectives for the story and daily quest are exactly the same and there are no issues, both progress at the same time. 

[DAILY] False Paradise

For this one, unfortunately there seems to be no way to avoid doing the phased bit twice. The story mission requires you to loot ten bioenergy enhancers while the daily requires only five. The problem is that interacting with the quest items will only progress one mission while still locking you out of progressing the other one if they were both at the same step. So the best way I found of doing this was to loot five items for the daily, use them, and then go ahead and do the phased bit for the daily mission. After exiting, any spare bioenergy enhancers you may have already collected towards the other quest will have been deleted from your inventory so you'll need to collect a full ten again, but at least you'll be able to do so straight away without resetting anything.

[DAILY] Dread Engines

Funnily enough, this quest is the exact opposite of the above. You need to destroy three/five terraforming devices, but if you enter the phased bit while one mission is done with that step and the other one isn't, both of them will bug out. Bad! Instead you have to make sure to destroy the full five terraforming devices for the story mission before entering the cave. You should then be able to progress both the daily and the story at the same time inside. 

[DAILY] The Tower’s Core

This one is probably the trickiest one to get right. The first thing to note is that when you enter the control room at the top of the tower, only the daily mission will update to the next step, so you'll want to instantly head back out of the phase and walk back in a second time, which will then cause the story mission to update as well. Inside you can disable the defences and fight Commander Zaoron for both missions at the same time with no issues. When finishing up, it's important to click the cube for the daily mission first, then interact with the panel for the story mission. If you click the panel first, you won't be able to pick up the holocron for the daily afterwards and a reset will be required.

Another thing that's worth mentioning here is that both missions require you to pick up the same unique quest item at the end, which the game doesn't allow, so what will happen once you complete the story conversation is that you'll get a pop-up saying that your inventory was full and that you got an item in the mail. Exit the phase to complete the daily (which will remove the associated item from your inventory), then pick the holocron out of the mailbox back at base before handing in the story mission. Important: You won't be able to hand in the story mission without it! In one of my earlier attempts I made the mistake of just deleting the item in the mail, thinking it was a glitch that I had been mailed a second copy. However, if you don't have this in your mission inventory, you won't be able to start the follow-up story conversation! When this happened to me, I had to reset the story mission and redo the whole tower part a second time. Don't be me. 

[HEROIC 2+] Preemptive Strike 

This is another mission that simply progresses for both story and daily mission at the same time. Phew. 

10 Moments in SWTOR's History for Which You Had to Be There

Star Wars: The Old Republic is primarily know for its developer-crafted stories, but any player who's engaged with the social side of the game for any length of time knows that there are also community-driven stories and dramas, and moments when you simply had to be there to know what made them so exciting, even if some of the related content is still available in the game today. As someone who's been a subscriber since early access and never stopped playing, I thought it would be fun to share some of the most interesting moments I remember with my readers, especially with newer ones who may not have been playing as long.

Note: If you've never played through some of the expansion storylines, some of the later items on this list will contain story spoilers.

The /getdown bug

Going chronologically, let's start with a story with which I amused my guildies one night. Back when the game launched, you could apparently do dance emotes in combat, and someone quickly discovered that doing /getdown would suddenly prevent opponents from attacking. This was actually picked up by several gaming news sites at the time, both because SWTOR was the newest hotness in town and because the mere idea of enemies being stunned into inaction by your dancing skills was a very funny thing to write headlines about.

I never saw this bug in action myself, but I did come across this comic on social media at the time which made me laugh so much that I saved it:

Click to enlarge and read properly. I wish I could credit the original artist (Minicrit?) with a link, but alas, RIP Google Plus.

The big PvP debacle on original Ilum

Another thing that made headlines around launch was the planet Ilum and the PvP taking place there. You see, the western ice shelf where the Gree visit nowadays used to be a dedicated PvP area. This brief video by Force Gaming should give you an idea of how it was supposed to work. It was released about two weeks after launch, and the video notes that at the time, people were just flipping objectives and not much PvP was going on. This was "fixed" with a patch... that in turn broke the area in a whole bunch of other ways. The result were crazy AoE fests that the game's engine couldn't deal with very well, which caused people to gain valour way too fast, even as they were just dying over and over in the mayhem. It was just chaos and caused endless complaints.

Once again, this is something I didn't actually get to experience directly, as I took my time levelling and didn't get to Ilum until about three months later, by which time all the craziness had already died down. In January 2013, I actually wrote a post called "The strangeness of Ilum a year later", but in those first weeks after launch, it was seemingly all people would talk about on forums and news sites, about how this newly launched MMO clearly didn't know how to deal with PvP and was therefore already failing horribly.

The original Rakghoul event

The recurring Rakghoul Resurgence event is probably old hat to most of you at this point - just another world event that comes around every so often and which has been around for what feels like forever. The very first Rakghoul event in April 2012 though... that was something else. The activities it came with weren't really any more exciting than what we have in the repeating event, but the vibe was very different and unique, mainly because we had no idea it was coming.

The game was still very new at the time, had a lot going on and we were getting patches and updates about more patches all the time... but this came as a complete surprise, and the experience of everyone being confused about what was going on and slowly figuring things out over the course of the first day was unique and exciting in a way that I think is hard to convey nowadays. You can read the blog post I wrote about it at the time to get an idea though. (I also wrote two follow-ups.)

Ultimately the fact that it was a time-limited one-off was also one of the biggest criticisms Bioware received, which is why they eventually swapped to making new events recurring. The Rakghouls would eventually join the rotation in early 2014.

The Grand Acquisitions Race

The Grand Acquisitions Race (sometimes also referred to as "the Chevin event") was SWTOR's second one-time world event, and a lot less exciting than the original Rakghoul incursion on Tatooine. One reason for this was that we actually knew that it was coming, even if we didn't know the details. The second reason however was that it was simply a lot less exciting in terms of activities, as all there was to do was a time-gated puzzle quest chain and farming currency crates on Nar Shaddaa. I have to chuckle a bit when I occasionally see people say that this event should be brought back. People didn't even care about it that much when the game was still in its heyday and a limited-time world event was something exciting! Still, I guess my point is you had to be there to know just how underwhelming it really was.

The return of Revan

I think this one might be a bit hard to parse for anyone who started playing after 2014. We all know Revan is in the game, right? There's a whole expansion called "Shadow of Revan", no? Well, for a moment, try to imagine that there wasn't. Revan is in the game, but only in this weird side quest that you'll only see if you like doing group content, and he's a prisoner one moment and a genocidal maniac the next, and if you blink you'll miss him dying as well. Also note that you had to have levelled through and done group content on both factions to be able to make sense of this brief cameo, something which fans of the original KotOR were not at all happy about.

Then it's 2014 - we've been level 55 for a bit over a year, got several new daily areas and raids, everything's kind of chugging along nicely if you're not dying for your character's personal story to be continued... and then we start getting a new series of flashpoints that's being promoted as a new story arc called "Forged Alliances". That Theron guy is kinda cute, but aside from that it's all a bit mysterious. Who are these new troublemakers in the shadows? The answer came in September, in a post in which I felt the need to give a spoiler warning.

Whoa, Revan is back? Revan is alive? Is it really him though? And then a whole expansion with his name! It was exciting times for a while, showing once again that Revan's name still attracted the crowds. I think reception of the expansion storyline was ultimately a bit mixed - it gave the character a better send-off than the base game had for sure, but it was still a bit awkward in the eyes of some.

The launch of Knights of the Fallen Empire

Did you realise that we're less than a month away from the KotFE expansion turning ten years old? I'm sure I'm not the only long-time player who still thinks of everything pre-KotFE as the good old days, and everything that came after it as "the new stuff". It is after all a fact that it changed the game in bigger ways than perhaps anything that came afterwards, with the introduction of features like level sync or its complete overhaul of the companion system.

Still, I'm not even talking about all of that. What made KotFE's launch a "you had to be there" moment was just how absolutely insane the hype was. A new CGI trailer for the first time since launch! Accidental leaks with announcements that could be interpreted in multiple possible ways! General Star Wars hype as we were all looking forward to the sequel trilogy! (Oops.) Absolute mayhem!

And when it came out, people (including me) did indeed love it! Mainstream gaming sites were like "hey, this game still exists and is good"! It felt like we were all set for a big SWTOR renaissance... except it all fizzled out within a couple of months. People thought the story was neat, but they didn't want to hang around to wait for one new chapter per month. They felt there wasn't enough to do at endgame. And those of us who did stick around quickly found out how tedious the new story was to play through on alts, never mind the plot going in directions that became more and more aggravating. For the second time in its life, SWTOR had released (something) with a lot of hype and then failed to live up to it.

Galactic Command

For anyone who might not know, Galactic Command was a new gearing/endgame progression system introduced with the Knights of the Eternal Throne expansion, and in its original iteration, it was the worst system of its kind that I've personally ever seen. To add insult to injury, people (including me) were telling them from the moment it was announced that it was a bad idea, but the devs were all "nah, it'll work and be fun, you'll see".

It didn't and it wasn't. For me, the early days of Galactic Command were one of my all-time low points with the game. Fortunately the devs scrambled to fix it immediately after launch, but it took about six months to get it into what could be described as an "acceptable" state and many players held a grudge long after. It's another one of those things that in hindsight makes you wonder what could've been sooo bad about it, but if you were there, you know.

Theron's betrayal

I did say there were spoilers in here, didn't I? I think looking at the game's storylines as a whole, the Fractured Alliances story (consisting of the three flashpoints Crisis on Umbara, Traitor Among the Chiss and The Nathema Conspiracy) is probably not among many people's favourites. The writing definitely felt like it had dug itself into a bit of a hole with Knights of the Eternal Throne, and it wasn't clear how it was going to get out of it.

I actually think that Fractured Alliances ultimately succeeded in what it set out to do, but it's fair to say that it was a bumpy ride. One thing I really did enjoy about it though was the community interactions it created. Theron's betrayal in Crisis on Umbara was not well-received for a variety of reasons, but it was interesting to watch the conversation around it evolve as more people started to believe that the whole thing was just a ruse. In hindsight, there are some hints towards this from the beginning, but they were easy to overlook at first.

People just didn't want their love interest to betray them, and there was even a hashtag called #believeintheron making the rounds on Twitter. I remember seeing screenshots of people assembling on Odessen with all their Therons out and forming a heart-shape or something. I just thought that was very cool, and actually kind of made me more invested in the final outcome than the story itself would have been able to do on its own.

Darth Malgus' return

Back in 2017, I wrote a post called "11 NPCs That Died Before Their Time" and Darth Malgus was second on my list. I just couldn't believe that they put him in all the cinematic trailers and then simply had him get killed off in one of the first endgame flashpoints! I'm not sure I was aware at the time that there was a supposedly deleted scene from the KotFE trailer that showed Malgus being delivered to Valkorion, frozen in a block of carbonite. Even if I was, it seemed obvious at the time that they'd deleted it for a reason and for all intents and purposes, Malgus was still considered dead.

When he really did come back with the Ossus update at the end of 2018, I absolutely loved it. It was a really well-presented surprise, and while I don't think it was as big as the return of Revan, for me personally it was actually more meaningful than that had been. It's hard to think that it's already been seven years since then - at this point it feels like it should be obvious to everyone playing the game in any capacity at all that Darth Malgus is alive. However, that moment when we first found out was definitely special. (Cue some comment about how he's unfortunately outstayed his welcome since then.)

Move to Broadsword

Two years ago, when IGN leaked the news that Star Wars: The Old Republic was going to be transferred from Bioware to some largely unknown studio called Broadsword Entertainment, all hell broke loose in the community for a few weeks. I think dedicated SWTOR players are quite used to endless doom-saying about the game and are well-practised at ignoring it by this point, but this sounded serious, and it was not at all clear what the consequences were going to be.

To me it was probably more worrying than even the original free-to-play announcement had been, and I found myself seeking solace in spending a lot more time than usual talking to fellow content creators. I also felt compelled to try and do my own part by practising something vaguely resembling journalism, which meant assembling information from different sources and trying to put it into context for people. In hindsight it seems almost silly how much we worried, considering how little changed from a player perspective after the studio transition, but at the time it was big news.

Runner-ups:

I could've tried to come up with even more stories, but I thought that 10 was a good number to stop at. Nonetheless, here are three more events that I considered mentioning but decided against because they were mostly negative but also ultimately not that interesting to talk about in detail in my opinion:

• The original free-to-play transition
• The Legacy of the Sith expansion launch
• The whole character texture update drama

Which of all of these events were you personally around for? Do you agree with my characterisation of how things went down? Are there any other major events in the game's history that you would've included on this list?

A Good Start to the Season

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ranking the 7.7 Dynamic Encounter Planets

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

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

Going from best to worst, I would start with: 

1. Dromund Kaas

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Coruscant 

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

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

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

3. Tython 

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

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

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

4. Hutta

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

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

5. Ord Mantell

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

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

6. Korriban

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

7. Ilum 

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

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

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

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

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

Season Launch

Sooo... since I expressed my disappointment about the last dev stream, I've been feeling a little demotivated. However, the actual launch date for the new season followed soon after, and I'm not so disenchanted that I won't take part in it! I might do less if I don't find it that fun, but that's not a foregone conclusion (sometimes things turn out to be more or less fun than I originally expected).

It was certainly interesting to get some more details over the past few days that hadn't been revealed on the stream yet. I was kind of fascinated by how many people I saw going nuts over the thigh high boots reward for example... always makes me feel a bit alienated from the rest of the player base when I'm reminded that I don't care nearly as much about the Space Barbie aspect as a lot of others apparently do. I mean, I like my characters to look nice too, but I really don't have much of an eye for detail in that particular area. There was also a patch note about moving parts on helmets in cinematics that I saw some people get excited about and I didn't even know what they were talking about.

The main thing that caught my eye was that the DvL bosses are making a return for Season 8, both as weekly objectives and for the meta achievement, which made me scream a little on the inside. Don't get me wrong, I was all in favour of bringing them back in GS7, but after months of death zergs on Hoth I'd had more than enough of them. Learning that I'd be back to revisit them every week for this season as well made me wish the meta achievement would've been to just run 40 uprisings instead or whatever, even though I'm not a fan of those either. Just strikes me as a classic case of "be careful what you wish for" - things could get worse!

Yesterday the patch actually dropped, and the first thing I heard about it was a guildie complaining that he wasn't earning any Conquest points. A forum thread on the matter narrowed it down to the affected people being players who still owned multiples of any strongholds from the server merges years ago (such as two copies of the Coruscant apartment). This included me.

It was kind of a mix of funny and sad, as I believe this was the second patch in a row where they tried to fix something Conquest-related and then broke something else instead. At least last time my points were only reduced, not completely zeroed out...

As someone whose gameplay is very much driven by Conquest, I decided to just not play on Darth Malgus that evening and focus on dusting off my legacies on the other servers instead (where I didn't have any duplicate strongholds and therefore wasn't affected by the bug). I'll say that I like the new weekly objective to do dynamic encounters, as that's easy to do on multiple servers without feeling repetitive. Also, since dynamic encounters still count as missions, it also has nice synergy with another objective this week to complete 15 missions as a smuggler or bounty hunter.

I was a bit unsure before going to bed whether I should just go and deactivate my duplicate strongholds as some people had done. It apparently worked as a bug fix, and I hadn't actually used them much in ages, but at the same time they're something unique that you probably can't get back once deactivated. I decided to hedge my bets and hope for a hotfix overnight, and in this instance the devs did not disappoint, as I woke up to the problem having been fixed, meaning I was able to earn some Conquest points and complete the first daily objective of the season the next morning before the reset.

The Best and Worst Dynamic Encounters on Hoth

I've had a lot of fun running dynamic encounters over the Christmas holidays, and after reaching 100% achievement completion on Hoth, I thought it would be fun to rank the different encounters by best and worst (not all of them though, there are too many of them for that).

The Top 10 Best Dynamic Encounters on Hoth

1. The "Ice Kitten Trilogy": Wire You Doing That/Wire Consequences/Wire You So Cute

Could there have been any doubt about this coming in first place? Who'd have thought that Republic power relay in Whiterock Wastes would ever become such a popular destination?

These three encounters loosely tell a story, though you can do them in any order. In the first one, Wire You Doing That, local ice kittens have been chewing on generator wires, leaving you to make repairs and shoo them away. In part two, Wire Consequences, the kittens are still around but grumpy, so your job is to soothe them and put them inside cat carriers. Finally, in Wire You So Cute you assemble some pet supplies and try to get random cantina patrons to adopt the kittens. A noble sentiment, though I'm not sure we're really doing a good thing here considering these are still wild animals and likely to grow a lot bigger... I feel more like someone trying to sell tiger cubs out of a car boot rather than a kind soul taking care of lost pets. Still, as long as you don't think too hard about it, these are very cute missions with virtually no combat (the first one has a chance to summon an "upset momma cat" that needs subduing, but even then there's no killing involved), and of course each one has a chance to reward you with the rare freckled Loth-cat Kitten pet. What's not to love?

2. Imperial/Republic/Pirate Attack

I'm lumping all the different "attack on base" encounters together here, because even though there are slight differences in the tools you're given to help with the defense, the basic concept is the same. I can see why an example of these was how the devs first promoted the concept of dynamic encounters to us, because it does still feel cool to me every time I land at a base and there's an attack happening. Seeing the shared progress counter tick up as an indication that someone else is already working on defending is almost guaranteed to make me want to join in to get credit too and it always feels quite satisfying.

3. Ice Fishing 

After being initially somewhat confused by this encounter on the PTS, now that it makes sense to me I'm really loving it. It's basically the seeker droid mini game with a different name, but the area you have to work in is quite small so it's very quick and pleasant. The fish "death sounds" crack me up and there's no combat involved except for the occasional hungry ice cat making an appearance. The only downside is that it's a bit out of the way for Republic players.

4. Taun Fawn Fun

This one seems to be many people's favourite and I think I would have had a riot on my hands if it wasn't included on this list! (I imagine some players would argue it should be number one.) Another very cute encounter, this one has you carrying taun fawns up a slope so they can slide down. Very simple, and another creative example of a non-combat encounter. The reason I rank it a little lower than e.g. the ice kittens is that it's almost a bit too cutesy for me - with the ice cats, you at least still have the context of looking after Republic infrastructure, but with the taun fawns you're really just pausing to play with some cute animals for no real reason. Also, the fact that only one fawn can be on the slide at a time can cause some annoyance with queue-jumping when multiple people try to do this encounter at once.

5. Fur, Fur Away 

This was one of my favourite encounters on the PTS and I still love it on live because of how simple it is: get three fur samples from non-hostile ice trompers and done! If you're lucky, you can finish in literal seconds, though the animals have a chance to resist by knocking you away. This can get a little annoying if you're suffering from a string of particularly bad RNG and get knocked about for several minutes, but even then I don't mind too much because the animation for being knocked back always amuses me. It makes you fly so high that you'd think you would take fall damage on landing, but the devs were generous in that regard, so you don't take any and can immediately get back into the action to try again. 

6. Under Fire!

This Imperial-only encounter is one of the ones that has a chance of dropping the Everglade Zakkeg mount, and probably the best one at that, as unlike the Loth-cat Kitten, the mount isn't a reward for completing the encounter but a random drop from the Talz mobs you fight. This event has you jumping in to save a beleaguered team of Imperial soldiers from an ambush, so you get a whole bunch of Talz popping out of the snow in easily AoE-able groups, which makes for an encounter that doesn't take a lot of time and also gives you many chances at the mount drop.

7. Snipers!

Another Imperial encounter vs. the Talz, this one can be a bit confusing the first time you try it - and it can also kill you! Once you understand what's going on, it's not hard to avoid dying though, and I find it quite satisfying to flush the snipers out of their hiding spots. If only snipers in PvP were this easy to kill and didn't constantly self-heal and run away...

8. Snow Capped Delicacies

This encounter has you climbing a mountain to pick some flowers for an Ortolan hermit, another pretty creative idea for an encounter in my opinion. It also has a chance to reward a flower decoration (this one still eludes me personally). The slightly lower ranking mostly comes from the fact that the mountain being a "fake exhaustion zone" can be a bit confusing (and you can die if you accidentally cross over into the real exhaustion zone), plus the VFX for the snow storm on the mountain are not easy on the eyes.

9. Trial by Fire

This is a fun little encounter that has you testing an experimental heat resistance suit in the local mini-volcanoes. I was rather amused that when I tried to look up a guide for what the different buttons do, both pages I found were basically like "I'm not really sure what you're supposed to do here, lol" and you can indeed "win" by just mashing random buttons. However, if you do it "right" for a given degree of right, you also complete a bonus mission and get credit for two dynamic encounters in one, which I think is cool. I also feel like there's definitely more to how the suit works that we just haven't quite figured out yet, which intrigues me.

10. Volcanic Rumblings

Speaking of volcanoes, another encounter in the area that I quite like is to take heat readings from volcanic fissures, which is a simple matter of running in circles for two minutes to find some clickies. Very simple and straightforward.

The Top 5 Worst Dynamic Encounters on Hoth

Boring disclaimer: I don't actually think that any dynamic encounters we've seen so far are truly "bad". At worst they're not that creative and feel a little generic, but that's still not exactly a huge issue considering their intended purpose as filler content. The main reason some encounters stood out to me as unpleasant was mainly due to bugs, and I expect that these won't seem so bad once said bugs are addressed.

1. Unnecessary Repairs

The simple reason I rate this as the worst encounter on Hoth right now is that it's currently bugged in something like three different ways, with the most important one being that the things you need to click on don't respawn once someone has used them, which means that if you ever want to complete this encounter, you basically need to be there when it spawns so you can get it done before anyone else arrives. That one was quite a nuisance to get credit for.

2. Pirate Problem

This is another encounter that suffers from a very annoying bug. This encounter is a shared one with three stages: kill lots of mobs, click on some stuff, then kill two named mobs. The problem is that one of the named mobs doesn't respawn right now (it can be either of the two, it's like the game just can't allow more than one of them to be alive at any given point after the encounter spawns). This means once again that you can only complete this encounter if you're there to take part in stage one right after it spawns - if you arrive any later, the whole thing will inevitably get stuck on stage three, since that one can't be completed without the missing mob, and you'll feel like you just wasted your time.

3. Snow Grift

This encounter has no bugs that I'm aware of, but is just a bit annoying in my opinion. An NPC sells you a treasure finding device which you then use to find the treasure/complete the encounter. There's no rhyme or reason to the treasure finding, you just have to keep spending credits until you get lucky. Other players can also "steal" the snow mounds you spawned with the device you paid for, leaving you with nothing. Very quick to do if you're lucky and don't mind spending the credits, but very annoying if you're unlucky and/or other players keep sniping your snow mounds before you can loot them yourself.

4. Wampa Hunt

This should be an easy and fun enough encounter on the surface, as you just need to kill three wampas in the area. The annoyance comes from the fact that the area has both a top level and a bottom level, and for some reason the bottom level doesn't count as part of the encounter area, meaning you're limited to a very small number of wampas on the top level, which can be annoying when there are multiple people hunting.

5. Lost Inventory

This is another encounter that is relatively inoffensive on the surface, but it has three stages, which can be a bit of an unpleasant surprise if you don't know what's coming up and can cause you to kill a lot of unnecessary extra mobs if you're fighting your way in the wrong direction compared to where the later stages want you to go. Also, it takes place in what used to be a heroic area, and while that has been nerfed a lot compared to how it was at launch, it feels like you still end up with a higher density of strong and gold mobs than in most encounters.

Character Modernisation Panic on the PTS

I mentioned in my post about the 7.6 livestream that the devs revealed that they're also working on updating NPCs and player characters with new textures, shaders and more. They emphasised that they were aware of how important it was that your character still felt like your character afterwards, and the examples they showed in their previews looked very good.

I didn't expect them to also push this update onto the PTS immediately afterwards, but they did... and I found out about it because there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth about it. Well, actually, the first time I heard about it was when Intisar showed me a before and after screenshot of his main and commented that his Jedi suddenly looked old enough to be her own mother, which just made me laugh. However, as I heard more reports and saw a couple of honestly kind of appalling-looking screenshots, I got curious - something was clearly wrong here.

So I updated the PTS myself to have a look and... honestly, at first I didn't get what the fuss was about, as both my Republic and Imperial main (who are a body type four cyborg/human respectively) pretty much looked fine to me. But then I loaded up some alts and yeah, I could see that things looked rough. Doing my own before and after shots for my Chiss agent and Mirialan smuggler, they both appeared to have aged about twenty years each.

I figured that obviously couldn't be right, considering that it went completely against what had been said and shown on the livestream, so I was still more amused than worried. I posted some feedback on the PTS forums, but in what I thought was a kind of playful tone - you might want to review some settings on these, guys! I also took further heart from seeing posts like this one from someone who has some knowledge about 3D models and textures and showed that a lot of the issues people were seeing could indeed feasibly just be caused by one slider basically being set to the wrong number.

However, the SWTOR community loves a good freak-out and I still saw many posts that weren't just pointing out that something was wrong, but whose authors were seriously upset, threatening to unsubscribe forever over this, and so on and so forth. As someone who's 41 in real life, I was honestly a bit offended by some of the comments that claimed that the changes made their characters look 70 years old. Have you ever seen a 70-year-old in real life, kiddo?! I'll admit that some of the memes people came up with were amusing, but all in all I found the whole thing a bit tiring, considering that it seemed so obvious to me that it was simply a bug on the PTS, which exists specifically so people can find bugs before go-live.

Fortunately the latest PTS update has improved things and the worst of the panic seems to have subsided... though I'm still seeing some criticisms in the new PTS feedback thread, the most poignant of which to me was the one pointing out that the new faces look a lot worse on low graphics settings than the old faces, which I agree is definitely something that should be looked into.

I also had a kind of strange experience when checking out the new update myself, as I basically logged into the PTS, clicked through my characters on the character selection screen one by one and thought "yep, these all look great". However, after I took a few more screenshots for comparison purposes, I lined them up next to the "buggy" faces and they... actually didn't look all that different? As in, there are still some pretty noticeable differences compared to the old faces, and I can still see more wrinkles than I'd necessarily like to on my idealised video game heroines, but at the same time - it didn't bother me at all while in game, only when staring intensely at the close-up shots, which is not something I would usually do while playing.

Bugged PTS vs. updated PTS

Live vs. updated PTS

Bugged PTS vs. updated PTS

Live vs. updated PTS

My conclusion for now is that I'll be fine and will be happy with my characters getting updated, but I also feel like I have no clue how the majority of players will react to these changes. As mentioned, there are still plenty of complaints being raised in the feedback thread, some of which I can kind of see, but others just make me feel like Pam from The Office, going "They're the same picture" (meaning I honestly don't see what all the fuss is about).

And maybe that makes you think that my eyesight is lacking and obviously everyone will still hate this update, to which I'd respond: Will they though? Because I've also spoken to people who saw that very first, bugged update and genuinely thought it was fine too, going "sure, my character looks a bit older than before, but so what". My hunch is that most players will probably be fine, because even if you do notice differences between old and new that you don't like in the direct comparison shots, I reckon most players don't actually spend that much time staring intently at their character's nostrils in everyday play if you get what I mean. I don't think the differences will be as noticeable when you're actually playing the game normally and not glaring at your character like they're about to have their police mugshot taken.

All in all, I guess this goes to prove once again that player character updates in MMOs are a tricky thing. I remember when I briefly resubbed to World of Warcraft in late 2013 after having been away from the game for more than a year, the low-resolution old character models that I'd always liked before suddenly appalled me, as I'd gotten too used to SWTOR's much better-looking avatars. When WoW then updated its models in 2014, I logged in once just to check out my characters' new looks, and while I thought Blizzard did a decent job with the upgrades overall, I also noted at the time that many characters looked older and angrier than before, and ten years later I'm still not over what they did to female tauren. So this kind of thing is always a bit of a gamble, but remembering my own reaction to WoW's old character models in 2013, it's probably also a necessary one if the game is supposed to continue attracting new players.

If you have any doubts about this update yourself, I can only recommend downloading the PTS, copying over some of your characters, and giving feedback in the relevant forum thread. If you've already seen your characters' updated looks, how do you feel about them?

Impressions from the 7.6 PTS

A combination of PTS incentives and curiosity about the new dynamic encounter system got me to spend some time on the public test server this past week.

My aging PC doesn't have enough disk space to support having two versions of SWTOR installed nowadays, so I had to put the PTS on my laptop, but that actually worked out quite well this time around as I was travelling last week and had the laptop with me for evening entertainment anyway.

Only two planets have dynamic encounters on the PTS right now: Hoth and Tatooine. It's currently not clear whether that's all 7.6 will launch with or whether these planets were picked for focused testing and we'll be surprised with some more content once the patch goes live. There were some indicators on the PTS galaxy map hinting at dynamic events on other planets like Alderaan and Belsavis, but with no actual content available there so far.

One thing I originally wondered after seeing the sneak peek trailer was whether dynamic encounters would be more like World of Warcraft's world quests (as in, personal to you) or dynamic events in other MMOs (shared and the same for everyone). Interestingly, the answer turned out to be "both". There are two types of events, designated as either "group shared" or "encounter shared". In the former, your progress is personal, and the encounter continues to exist for other players on the map even after you've completed it. In the latter, everyone doing stuff contributes to the event's progression, and once the encounter completes, everyone gets their reward at the same time and it disappears from the map. The shared encounters are generally rarer and can still be soloed if nobody else is around, but they tend to require killing more mobs and can therefore feel like a bit of a slog if you're the only person in the area. On the other hand it's a lot of fun (in my opinion) if there are other players around and you can see things progress really quickly as everybody does their part.

In general gameplay terms, the encounters are about what you'd expect: a lot of kill x mobs and some clicking on shiny things, though there are some standouts where the devs clearly tried to be creative and come up with more varied activities. 

I don't think dynamic events are intended to be a new "main" gameplay mode, though depending on how many planets will get them when 7.6 launches, I'd be curious to see how much levelling you could get done by just doing dynamic encounters - as an experiment if nothing else! Realistically though, I think they are meant to be similar to side missions, just without all the picking up and handing in required. At max level they currently award a tiny number of tech fragments and Conquest commendations, small enough that they wouldn't make for a great primary source of either currency.

One thing that made me wonder a little was how much focus there is on highlighting these new dynamic encounters on the map. The galaxy map highlights planets that have them active, and on the planetary map they show up as big glowy diamonds. There's nothing wrong with that in principle, but it does seem an odd choice when the devs took multiple steps in the past to hide away exploration missions and/or make them less prominent because they were apparently confusing/distracting people. Surely new levellers will get a lot more distracted by all these big glowy indicators on their maps? I dunno.

I'm still a bit torn on whether to try the new lair boss on the PTS as well or not. On the one hand I prefer not to spoil myself when it comes to content like that and would rather see things for the first time on live, but on the other hand every bit of feedback might help with making the Propagator Core a better raid.

The initial round of forum feedback certainly hasn't looked too good. Players were asked what they thought of the fight's different phases, and everyone basically replied "what phases?" because by all accounts, it was just an extremely long slog against an enemy with a lot of hitpoints while trying to manage some bad stuff dropping on the floor.

There has since been another dev post on the forums that basically admitted that almost nothing about the fight was working correctly and that it will see massive changes with the next PTS update. Which is good in the sense that it means the tedious version people experienced in the first week wasn't at all final, though it also makes you wonder why and how an operations boss ended up being put on the PTS in that state in the first place (since you'd expect the devs to be able to verify that at least the very basics are functioning before asking people to play test). I guess I'll have a few more weeks to see how things develop and whether I want to have a go myself.

Adventures on Oricon

I don't really have anything too deep or meaningful to say this week, but just wanted to ramble a bit about doing dailies on Oricon. The change the devs made to daily areas with the Bessi patch still kind of fascinates me. It was very much a footnote to the actual venture, but dailies used to be one of the few endgame activities that were still largely gated behind a character's story progression, so seeing them get opened up account-wide with so little fuss just surprised me.

And it does seem a bit like... things weren't exactly optimised for this change in some ways, as I found out while questing on Oricon this past week. One of the weekly seasons objectives was to do exploration or repeatable missions in Empire space, and Oricon was one of the eligible planets.

I hadn't unlocked it at all on Shae Vizla yet, so I took my Sith warrior there to start the story. As I arrived in the base, I saw the daily mission terminal all lit up with quests and a little light went on in my head as well.

For those who don't know, the Oricon story requires you to do four simple missions as part of a storyline that eventually cumulates in you being sent into the Dread Fortress operation, and the dailies didn't used to unlock until you'd done the first three of those story missions. These dailies would then also be similar to the original one-time story quests, for example requiring you to destroy three terraforming devices when the storyline originally asked you to destroy five.

So I thought to myself: Wait, if I can pick up the dailies from the start, do I get a two-for-one? I picked up the first story mission to rescue Republic soldiers from escape pods, grabbed the daily mission with the same objective and indeed: every pod I opened gave me credit towards both! I love it when I get to make use of synergies like that.

Unfortunately, the smooth experience didn't last. I first started to run into problems when I got to the quest that requires you to locate a dark energy source by collecting "bioenergy enhancers" from the local mobs (ten for the one-time mission, five for the daily). I collected a whole bunch and then clicked on them to do the locating. One of the quests updated, but the other one didn't. I tried to use the item again, but it wouldn't let me because it kept saying that I'd already done that bit.

Somewhat annoyed, I proceeded into the phase for the quest and completed the one that was on the correct step. When I looked into my bags afterwards to try and use the bioenergy enhancers again for the second quest, they had disappeared, clearly "cleaned up" automatically due to me completing one of the missions. So I had to farm up another set, locate the dark energy source again, and repeat the encounter in the phase. Alright.

Things got worse in the watchtower. I defeated the various droids inside the control room, clicked on the final panel that's supposed to spawn Commander Zaoron and... nothing happened. This was when I noticed that only one of the two missions had updated correctly while the other one wasn't even on the right step. So I exited the phase again, reset the one that had progressed ahead of the other one and went through the whole rigmarole a second time. This time both missions updated successfully.

I watched the cut scene for the one-time mission and then... couldn't click on the holocron to complete the quest. I sighed and went back out once again, but at least one of the missions completed as I did so. I just reset the phase this time (instead of the whole mission) and went back in yet again, hoping that the game would be less confused now with only one quest left, and indeed, the holocron finally became clickable.

All in all, it wasn't the worst thing in the world, and I did get a lot of quests done in one run, but there was also a lot of trial and error with various resets involved. This is unfortunately the kind of thing that makes the game feel somewhat unpolished at times but at the same time isn't likely to get fixed because it's not a hard blocker and you can eventually push through with enough persistence.

Have you had any interesting experiences with the new daily zone unlocks for characters that haven't actually done that planet's story yet?

Flying Robots, Account-Wide Surprises, Decoration Sale

One thing I keep thinking about in regards to my blogging is that I used to be much better at making shorter, more random posts. I do still love writing long and thoughtful treatises on all kinds of topics, but sometimes it's also nice to just... talk about a funny thing I saw for a few paragraphs? It's always really interesting to look back on those posts years later, plus I would guess that they make for an easier entry point for new readers as well.

So without further ado... some random thoughts on a Friday:

Flying Robots

You know how your class companions will sometimes want to chat with you on your ship or in a cantina? The conversations that can be held in a cantina can also take place in a stronghold. The other day I accidentally clicked on a talkative M1-4X while in my Copero Villa on an alt and the view went absolutely wild. I only took a few screenshots of my faithful droid companion floating in space (see below) but there were other crazy views, such as an extreme close-up of his shoulder, a giant rock wall stretching into infinity, and a view of my character from below with nothing but sky above her.

I was like "surely they didn't forget to test the companion conversation feature in this stronghold" and indeed, when I tried to have a conversation with another companion later, the cut scene took place at the entrance normally, with the kinds of views you'd expect. I wonder if M1-4X is buggy in a unique way or whether it was just a random glitch.

Account-Wide Surprises

The introduction of Bessi came with a change to the way daily areas work, as the patch notes stated that each one would now be accessible to all characters within your legacy as long as at least one of them had unlocked the area. The other day while using the activity finder on one of my secondary servers, I was shocked and surprised to see that apparently those patch notes had been slightly incorrect: the new unlock is not legacy-wide, but account-wide. Meaning that my alternative legacies on the other servers, where none of my characters have progressed through a lot of content, now have access to all the daily areas in the game.

I'm not quite sure how I feel about this yet. On the one hand, I've kind of liked having to re-earn certain things on the other servers, so this feels a bit like cheating. On the other hand though, it's going to make certain weekly objectives so much easier when the next Galactic Season comes around. (Doing the weekly on Ossus once is so much faster than doing the Oricon weekly twice for example.)

Decoration Sale

After the big summer mount sale ended, the sale section in the Cartel Market transitioned straight into another big sale, this time for decorations, though I haven't seen any official announcement or even much community conversation about it. I guess because decorating is a bit more of a niche hobby compared to mounts, which are something everyone uses?

I considered making another "tips" post about it but didn't really have that much to say that was different. Stuff like "check the price on the GTN before committing to spending real money" applies to decorations just as much as mounts. But since at least one person mentioned finding it helpful that I gave the mount sale a shout-out last time, I wanted to bring up the decorations sale at least briefly as well.

Since there's been no official word about this particular sale, I don't know for how much longer it'll be going on, but I would expect the "stock" to switch over again on Tuesday the 30th. Personally I went for the Copero utility bundle to match the new stronghold, since it's available for 50% off in the sale for the first time. Also, ever since I found out about the fact that many "light" decorations don't actually emit light, I've felt quite vexed by it and there are several bundles in the sale that contain either standing or hanging lights that actually do illuminate a room. Look up the Corporate Retreat, Distant Worlds, Restored Jedi Enclave and Security Bureau decoration bundles (though again, check the GTN for the items you want first!) or see Swtorista's full list of proper lighting decorations here.

Shintar's Galactic Season 6 Diary, Week 7

This is being published a bit late since I wanted to get my April round-up and the dev stream highlights out on time, but I didn't forget! To clarify, this is about the period from 23rd to 30th of April.

I'd been pretty excited about doing Galactic Seasons objectives for the first six weeks, but week 7 was the first one where I looked at the weekly objectives and kind of thought "meh". I think this was mainly due to the fact that repetition was starting to become noticeable to me for the first time. Here's what I thought about each weekly objective:

• Earn 200k Conquest points: Yes, I'd do that one.
  
• Complete the GSI weekly mission: Somewhat time-consuming so I definitely wasn't going to do this everywhere, but I do like me a bit of GSI action every now and then, so I figured I was going to do this on some servers as least.
  
• Earn the seasonal currency: Will get done automatically, so yes.
  
• Blow up enemies with destructible barrels and the like: I was probably going to do this one one way or another because of how easy it is to complete.
  
• Do the Black Hole weekly twice or the Onderon weekly once: This was the first objective that made me sigh a little. Didn't we just have this one? Oh, apparently that was five weeks ago. Didn't feel that long ago, somehow.
  
• Complete 8 repeatable or side missions and kill 100 mobs on the Hutt Space planets Nar Shaddaa, Quesh, Voss, Makeb, Darvannis or Ossus: This one also felt like I'd done it before, but I triple-checked and it hadn't been featured yet this season. I can only guess it felt that way since I'd done a fair bit of questing on Nar Shaddaa while working on other objectives in previous weeks. Still, this wasn't too bad and I was definitely going to do it.
  
• Craft invasion forces and dark projects: As usual, yay for crafting on Darth Malgus but nowhere else.
  
• Complete four uprisings on veteran or master mode: Still not a huge fan of uprisings and I could still feel the after-effects of spamming them for Total Galactic War. I figured maybe I'd do this on Darth Malgus, but surely nowhere else.
  
• Complete 2 out of 4 selected flashpoints (Battle of Ilum, False Emperor, Legacy of the Rakata, Shrine of Silence): Now this one was definitely repetitive because these exact same flashpoints were featured only two weeks ago. I appreciated them then, but going through the exact same routine only two weeks later was definitely going to be a no from me.
  
• Earn 25 medals in Galactic Starfighter: And the more annoying one of the two GSF objectives again... I figured I probably wasn't going to bother with this one, except maybe on Darth Malgus.
  
• Karagga's Palace on story mode: Now this was one objective that made me happy, as I was pleased to see that like the vet mode ops objective in week two, it had been reduced to requiring only one run - instead of previously four! I was hopeful that I'd be able to get this done on multiple servers since I figured it shouldn't be too hard to find pugs for it.
  

Day 1 - Tuesday

I got home very late that day as I attended a memorial for the recently deceased co-worker after my shift at the office. I didn't really feel like playing games after getting home, so I just logged into each server briefly to collect my daily login reward and achieve my daily allotment of Conquest point via various clicky objectives.

Day 2 - Wednesday

I had a lot more free time that day but still didn't really feel much like playing SWTOR for most of the day. I did eventually log in late in the evening to do the rounds again. On Darth Malgus I just did some crafting, followed by some GSI dailies on Leviathan.

I've settled into a routine when it comes to doing the GSI weekly, which involves doing Buried in Time on Tatooine, followed by two of the missions on Alderaan, digging up ancient weapons near House Teral and toxic waste barrels near Outpost Luurdes just a short ride over. This is very quick and easy, and I just do it several days in a row. This time, I also did the heroic on Tatooine (since you need to do one for the weekly) and blew up the womp rats near the barrel in Anchorhead a couple of times while I was there.

I then logged over to Star Forge to see whether any ops pugs were advertising for KP story mode in general chat. It took a little while, but eventually I saw a group form on Imp side. It was a nice and smooth run that also got me some achievements, as I'd never done KP SM on Star Forge before.

On Shae Vizla, I did a bit of questing on Nar Shaddaa until I'd earned enough Conquest for the daily objective. By that point it was late though and I was tired, so I decided to leave the remaining two servers for the next day.

Day 3 - Thursday

In the morning, I logged into Satele Shan and did a round of GSI dailies mirroring what I'd done on Leviathan the night before.

After that, I logged into Tulak Hord and did the Nar Shaddaa bonus series, since I couldn't remember whether I'd completed it on that server before, just that I had all these issues with false starts and bugs. It's a shame that you pretty much have to do them in a single day now to make sure they don't bug out, and with that in mind I've found it best to be laser-focused on only the missions actually part of the chain, while making a note to come back for any heroics or unrelated exploration missions in the area another time. Either way, this completed my Hutt Space missions weekly.

In the evening, I spent some time on Darth Malgus doing stuff not strictly related to seasons, such as PvP, ops with my guild and a bit of questing (though this did also get my daily objective done).

When I visited the other servers afterwards, I did another "round" of GSI dailies (meaning the eggs on Tatooine and the two dailies on Alderaan) on both Leviathan and Tulak Hord, followed by a round of the Black Hole on Satele Shan (since that's the only server where my main's a stealther) and a round of Ossus on Star Forge (the only secondary server where I have access to that planet). Finally, I continued doing non-class missions on Nar Shaddaa on Shae Vizla until my daily was done there as well.

Day 4 - Friday

I didn't log in until the evening again. Starting on Darth Malgus, I did a variety of activities there, including a GSF weekly. I'd originally planned to skip that particular objective, but our Imperial alt guild was a bit low on Conquest points, so doing the GSF weekly a couple of times seemed like a good way to boost our score. Winning two matches only got me to 7/25 medals however.

On Leviathan, I went out to Nar Shaddaa - I knew that I'd completed the bonus series before, but I could've sworn I had some other side missions left to do in the area. This turned out to be wrong as I couldn't find a single one - clearly my spreadsheets to track progression across different alts aren't detailed enough for this. I instead started questing on Quesh until I hit my daily Conquest.

On Tulak Hord, I did some more GSI dailies, after which I logged over to Shae Vizla since I thought a KP guild run might be about to start. However, when I double-checked the time it turned out that I was wrong and the actual start time was something like 2.30 am my time, so I went and did some more quests on Nar Shaddaa instead. (I was clearly not having the best day in terms of knowing WTF was going on.) It didn't take long for me to complete my Hutt Space objective, so I went and started another GSI weekly mission. The Imperial version of the heroic on Tatooine has a bugged spot so you always need to check there first to make sure RNG hasn't assigned it to you, else you need to come back the next day (some say resetting the mission can also work but I've had no success with that personally). Fortunately I was lucky that day and the bugged spawn was not included in my objectives. On Alderaan, I realised I'd forgotten how much more of a pain the Killik weapons are to dig up on Imp side, as the nearest location for Imperials requires going up a long and winding mountain path with lots of bugs in your way. I eventually got there, but I vaguely seemed to remember actually preferring a more distant location with less of a hassle to get there...

On Satele Shan I did another round of Black Hole, and on Star Forge a round of Onderon for the daily area objective.

Day 5 - Saturday

I only played for a couple of hours in the evening, and only on Darth Malgus. Not everything I did was about seasons either, though I did do Karagga's Palace on story mode with my guild, and another GSF weekly. I got it in two wins again, though this time they yielded ten medals, getting me to 17/25.

Day 6 - Sunday

I got up late but with enough time left before the reset to do the rounds on the other servers. On Leviathan and Tulak Hord, I completed my GSI weeklies, and on Star Forge I figured I had it in me to do one more of these this week, so I started it on my trooper (including the heroic on Tatooine and blowing up some womp rats). On Satele Shan, I did some side questing on Nar Shaddaa.

When it came to Shae Vizla, I only had twenty minutes left before reset, but I figured that should be enough for a quick round of the Black Hole, right? Even on a character that is a healer (my level 75 consular)? Even if their highest-level companion is only influence level 12? (I hope you can tell where this is going...) I started but quickly realised that things weren't going fast enough. I decided to skip ahead to the heroic, since I figured I could at least finish that, but it was going so. Slow. Just as I was starting to wonder what would happen to someone inside a mission phase if the reset happened while you were doing the quest, I actually managed to die on a pull and just gave up. I quickly relogged my warrior to get my last few Conquest points for the daily objective before reset, but even that took too long and reset arrived with me being only 150 Conquest points off the daily objective. I was so annoyed I just logged off.

I logged back in later in the evening, completed the partially done Black Hole weekly on my consular and then did some GSI dailies on my warrior again (opting to take a taxi to the more distant but less awkward location for Killik weapons this time), followed by some more of those on my trooper on Star Forge.

By then it was time for ops with my guild, which took up a good chunk of the evening. Afterwards I did another GSF weekly, which was done within two wins again, and yet I was still only on 23/25 medals after that. This is what makes this weekly so frustrating. It doesn't even matter if you play well/win, whether you get any medal credit feels like a complete roll of the dice. Like, how many weekly missions should a single seasons objective require? It's ridiculous. After that, it took two more matches to get those last two medals. Yes, two matches for just two more medals.

After a couple more warzones, I switched to the remaining servers where I hadn't done the daily yet and got my daily Conquest allocation done with some questing on all three.

Day 7 - Monday

In the morning I logged in on Darth Malgus and quickly knocked out two more weekly objectives by doing a round of Onderon dailies and blowing up some womp rats. I'd held off on my last two objectives until close to the end in case Mr Commando felt like doing flashpoints or uprisings over the weekend, but that didn't happen, so I had to get to 7/7 by myself.

I then logged in again in the evening to finish off my personal Conquest on a couple of alts and get my daily objective done that way. On Leviathan, I completed my bounty hunter's personal Conquest on Quesh (a good Hutt Space planet to jump ahead to, and I was kind Nar Shaddaa-ed out).

On Star Forge I did two heroics on Makeb to get some more Hutt Space kills - the Ossus dailies on Thursday had taken care of the mission part of that objective but I had barely killed any mobs. Makeb was good for achieving the opposite.

On Satele Shan, I'd left things off with several Conquest objectives partially completed so that I only had to do a single mission hand-in on my agent to be done for the day.

Finally, I finished my SWTOR week on Shae Vizla by doing one more round of Black Hole and completing my GSI weekly.

Week 7 Thoughts 

I started this season with a promise to myself that I wasn't going to burn myself out doing objectives I didn't enjoy, but then I was so excited that I did 7/7 weeklies on all servers for several weeks anyway. This week though, I could definitely feel my enthusiasm wane for the first time, with several days where I just didn't feel like playing much at all. I was still going to get 7/7 on Darth Malgus, but I quickly resigned myself to probably only getting three or four weeklies done on the other servers. In the end I still did a bit better than that, achieving 6/7 on Star Forge and Shae Vizla, and 5/7 on all the others.

I didn't even think that the objectives were particularly bad, but there was definitely little to no synergy, and the feeling of repetition got me more than anything else. This was the first time this season where I really felt the conflict between "wanting to do the thing because I want to have the thing completed" and just not feeling the actual gameplay in that moment. It's a pretty normal thing to feel, but also something I personally like to keep an eye on, as I'm quite capable of making things un-fun for myself by being too determined to get things done no matter what. With that in mind, I was glad that I was able to recognise that I was not really feeling it this week and say "oh well, not gonna go all out this week then" pretty easily and early on.