Armour Sale Time!

Like last year, SWTOR is running a number of themed sales this summer. I like these themed sales because they make it much easier to know in advance whether something relevant to you might be included or not, but I didn't mention the whole thing this time, because to be honest it wasn't as exciting the second time around, at least at first.

When they put a whole bunch of mounts on sale at the end of July, I basically ended up buying exactly one mount that I had regretted not grabbing last year, and that was kind of it - pretty much everything else I either already had or wasn't really interested in. They don't add a lot of new mounts to the Cartel Market nowadays, do they? It's mostly weapons and armour sets.

Then the next two sales were about weapons and modifications and I was very eh about those too. However, this week we got armour sets, and that's one area where they keep adding a lot of interesting stuff, so I found this one much more intriguing to revisit. As it happened, I had just created two new alts as well, for whom I hadn't decided on outfits yet, so going shopping for those quickly became my primary objective.

I ended up making a very shiny Twi'lek. She's wearing the Secret Agent's Armor Set with that shiny dye from Galactic Season 6.

Anyway, why am I posting this? Because I think that this is a cool sale and wanted to make a PSA to my readers to not miss out in case anything interests them. If you want to browse the goods without being logged into the game, Swtorista has a handy page that lets you see all the different sets while also allowing you to sort them alphabetically, by base price or by discount, to make it easy to find the best deals or specific sets you might be looking for. Just remember my advice on how to shop responsibly (that post was about mounts but really, the principle's the same regardless of what items you're looking at)!

Also worth noting: From the 16th of September, the theme is supposed to switch to decorations, another one where I personally expect to spend some coins. They really don't let me hoard that free CC like they used to!

May the Fourth Be With You

Happy Star Wars Day! It's that day when even people who aren't superfans are suddenly reminded of Star Wars, resulting in a bit of an activity bump for SWTOR every year (at least if Twitch stats are anything to go by).

It's also commonly a time when the devs are particularly generous with giveaways and freebies, and this year is no exception. The free pet and 50% off collections sale are pretty much expected at this point, but no less welcome for it. There's also a double XP event running until May 16th, which has never really been my jam but I do know plenty of people love levelling during double XP.

The thing they really got me with this time was additional sales on various Cartel Market items. I'd been keeping an eye on the Gothic Master set for a while now since I wanted it for a specific character but didn't want to pay full price, and I didn't like the credit price it was commonly going for on the GTN either. At 40% off I finally picked it up, as well as copies of the Coruscant and Dromund Kaas utility decoration bundles on every server. (I'd bought both on Darth Malgus for full price, and decided that I was going to get them on the other servers eventually, once there was a sale. They are also 40% off right now, so I went for it.)

This resulted in me dropping below 1000 Cartel Coins for the first time in what must be more than a decade at this point. I have this post from 2014 as a record of me buying Cartel Coins, but after that I was more than sustained by the refer-a-friend program for a long time. (In this post from 2018 I mention casually that I was close to hitting 50k Coins from this passive income "again".) Once the RAF system was shut down, my virtual wealth slowly started to decrease, but my subscriber stipend and Galactic Seasons were still bringing in plenty since I didn't spend CC very often.

Now, however... I might actually have to think about giving Broadsword some extra money if there's anything I want soon! Though since I rarely do, odds are good that my balance will be topped up with more free coins soon enough before it becomes an issue.

A Season of Uprisings... And?

Yesterday evening it was time for the SWTOR dev stream about 7.6.1, the patch that will bring with it the start of Galactic Season 8. I've been finding the lull in interesting activity recently noticeable, so I was hyped for some news - perhaps too much so, as I actually ended up feeling somewhat disappointed. I could tell that other people were also keen to hear about Galactic Season 8, as my post speculating about what its theme might be from back in December has been my most popular post for several weeks now.

The big reveal came and... *drumroll* it's uprisings. No massive surprise there, as this was one of the activities people had been throwing around as the season's potential focus during the speculation. I just didn't think it was going to be uprisings myself because I didn't think Broadsword would want to make a season entirely focused on a type of group content.

To be fair, they didn't explicitly say it, but it kind of sounded like at least some modes might become easily soloable during the season. To mix things up, we'll be given some special gadgets from Kai Zykken that will do things like call little droid swarms to come to our assistance or cause explosions. Uprisings will also no longer be limited to subscribers, and will become accessible from level ten.

I'm curious to see how they'll hold up as levelling content, and whether newer or more casual players will find them confusing. They don't have much in the way of a narrative, but they're technically set after Knights of the Eternal Throne's base story, with Lana and Theron sending you out to fight people on both Republic and Empire side that are conspiring against the Eternal Alliance, which doesn't really make any sense at level ten.

Some of the rewards that were showcased look quite good too - I really liked the Coruscant and Dromund Kaas themed decorations and can see myself finding a lot of good uses for those.

That said... I've got to admit I was the opposite of excited when all this was announced. In my review of GS7 back in December, I noted that it had been a rather "meh" experience for me, as I felt the season was kind of lacking in flavour and newness. Annnd, unfortunately GS8 looks like it's going to be more or less the same. From the sounds of it, there is once again not going to be a grand reward that everything's centred around, such as a companion, stronghold, or side story.

As for uprisings as an activity... let's just say that of all the things people speculated could be the theme of the season, I would have preferred almost anything else. I don't hate them, but they are very low down on the list of activities I'm happy to take part in, so having a whole season centred around them fills me more with dread than anticipation. I want to believe that the changes will make them more interesting! But I'm not sure the devs can pull it off.

When this was followed up by an announcement that they were going to add more achievements to the existing dynamic encounters on Hoth and Tatooine, as well as some new Bessi customisations to grind out exactly the same way as you ground out Bessi's unlocks, it just added to the feeling that all we have to look forward to is replaying more of the same content that we've just done. I think I wouldn't have minded these so much on any other day, but as a direct follow-up to the uprising season they felt deflating.

Then Eric got to the headline "Cartel Market Storefront Updates" and my ears perked up, because I think parts of the Cartel Market interface are pretty poor to use and I think that making a number of small key changes here could really improve the experience of using it. So Eric was like: "As an example you go: I wanna buy a blaster pistol. And so you go and look at weapons and there's just a lot of them." I was quietly nodding along. "And so one of the things we're looking at doing is... putting things across the market into retirement."

To which my mental reaction was something along the lines of: Jesus Christ, what?! That is not how that sentence was supposed to continue! The Cartel Market isn't overwhelming because there are too many items on it, it's because there are no freaking filters! If you want to buy a blaster pistol, there's no way for you to just see the blaster pistols, you have to wade through all these other weapon types that your character can't actually use just to find the odd pistol here or there; that's where the pain point is! You don't need a FOMO sale, you need bloody filters!

Ahem. This one may have kind of pushed my buttons because I work in e-commerce in real life and am part of the UI/UX team at my job. So I was suffering professional outrage at the fact that I can't remember the last time anything a dev said missed the mark for me by a mile like that. I guess consider this your public service announcement that there'll be a weapon sale for the next two weeks, and all those weapons that are on sale will then be removed from the Cartel Market afterwards. Then they'll do the same for another category and so on. This isn't an entirely new thing, as there are a lot of things that aren't available on the CM at any given moment. I just wish they hadn't led with making it sound like they were actually going to improve the user interface instead of making a FOMO push.

There were a couple of other (to me) minor things like that they are still working on improving the character texture updates, but I was kind of starting to tune out towards the end. So much so that I missed the casual mention of 7.7 bringing dynamic encounters to more planets and XR-53 getting a master mode. I would have missed that entirely if a guildie hadn't pointed it out to me afterwards! I think those things sound really cool actually, even if I'm personally unlikely to beat an XR-53 master mode. I just think the fight is well-tuned for story and veteran mode and has room for a master mode on top to challenge high-end players.

However, all that still feels kind of far away, and in the meantime I feel like I don't have a lot to look forward to, which is disappointing to me. And most importantly to me, there was no comment on the still missing story update that was originally meant to come with 7.6. Back in November I summarised what they said about this on the 7.6 dev stream as such: "[...] they had to delay the story update part of it because they "currently don't have all the elements [they] need to complete this story", which I've seen people interpret as having to do with the voice actors' strike, though I don't know whether that's just speculation or backed by anything that was said elsewhere."

Back then, I wasn't sure how strong the suspicion about the voice actor's strike was, as people can be quite wrong sometimes when it comes to making guesses about what's going on inside a studio, but it seems to be quite cemented in at this point, as other games have released updates with bits that would usually be voiced missing, and I think I saw a comment from dataminers that the 7.6 story content looks largely complete in the game files except for the missing voice lines.

Someone pointed me at this video about the voice actors' strike, which I think explains the whole situation pretty well. To be clear, I'm 100% in support of the union and their demands here, and I'm not holding it against Broadsword either that they are unable to proceed in the meantime. However, considering that it's now been more than three months since the 7.6 dev stream and nine months since the last story update, I really just wanted them to say something, to acknowledge that this situation sucks, that they don't have an ETA yet but that they'll release all the built up story content at once as soon as the strike ends. Or something. 

And you know, I realise it's quite possible that they are simply not able to do that, as there may well be some kind of ruling from above to not talk about the strike to players/customers. But that doesn't make it any less frustrating to be presented with this front of "nothing's wrong" while there's a freaking elephant in the room. They also mentioned in this stream that there would be a new date night in 7.6.1, just to then say absolutely nothing else about it, seemingly acknowledging that while they've probably indeed built this content, we still won't actually be getting it with the patch due to missing voice work, despite their announcement.

I'm kind of reminded of when we didn't get a story update for over a year during 2020, but there were two important differences there: one was that the global pandemic was a very obvious obstacle to a lot of work in a sense that people could generally understand. While the SAG-AFTRA strike is obviously also a public thing, it's nowhere near on the same level, and without any public acknowledgement of what's going on, SWTOR players will just assume the worst as usual about how the game is now dying because it's no longer releasing story content or whatever.

The other difference is that SWTOR had just released the Onslaught expansion at the end of 2019, which was rich with new content and goals to chase, meaning the game was able to coast on that momentum for a bit. The current situation feels more like the opposite, in the sense that we went from getting a new planet in 7.2 at the end of 2022 to a smaller new daily zone in 7.4, to an even smaller new planetary area without anything to do in it in 7.5. The current storyline feels to many like it's overstayed its welcome a bit, and people are desperate for something fresh, so to me this feels like the worst possible time to suddenly have to stop releasing major updates.

I think I'm a pretty patient person and I always roll my eyes a little at the people who complain about two story updates with full voice acting, cinematics and story choices per year as if they were nothing, because I think the team is doing a great job putting out high-quality content with the resources they have. However, I hate feeling like I have nothing to really look forward to at the moment, as the new season doesn't particularly excite me and who knows when the voice actors strike will end. It's been going on for more than seven months! According to Wikipedia the longest SAG-AFTRA strike in history lasted close to a year, so I guess unless they are going for a new record we can hope for an agreement before July at least?

I don't know, man, that's just a long time to feel like I should be focusing on other games.

Is the Remote Trading Outpost Bundle Good Value?

I'm not the biggest fan of the Cartel Market, but it helps to keep the game alive and is relatively inoffensive when compared to the monetisation efforts of many other MMOs. While I can't recall buying Cartel coins for real money more than once in the past decade, I do occasionally buy things with the CC I get through subscribing and completing Galactic Seasons. One item that caught my interest when it was announced was the Remote Trading Outpost Bundle first presented during the dev livestream for 7.6.

I'll admit that the fact that the devs who talked about it were super funny certainly helped to pique my interest, but primarily I was curious about the concept of a decoration bundle that came with a built-in quest. I think we haven't had to buy anything story-related from the Cartel Market since those cubes with the Shroud diaries. (I'm not counting the HK-55 chapter since subscribers originally earned access to that as part of the normal content release cadence.)

Now if you're worried about "having" to buy this bundle for the story... don't. There's no voice acting and nothing's tied to any existing story content, it's just a little side mission utilising the new comlink interface and tied to the bundle itself.

However, I did think that this made for a nice bit of "added value" to the decorations, which was the primary reason that I bought it - curiosity about just what was going to be included. So I'm writing this post for anyone else who might be wondering.

On opening the bundle, you are given 82 decorations of various types and sizes, plus an item that starts a quest. If you do so it will instruct you to place the Neglected Spire Basin decoration, which is basically a broken fountain, in one of your strongholds and to interact with it. As you identify it as damaged, you're given the option to contact the manufacturer about the problem, which leads you to a terminal on Mek-Sha, where after going through some of the expected red tape, you're eventually being assigned a repair droid to fix the basin (and seemingly everything else).

When you complete this quest, you're rewarded with another 86 decorations, a pet, and another quest item. This follow-up quest starts from the same Neglected Spire Basin, as even after it's been repaired, it turns out to have a baby dianoga stuck in the pipework. The new mission asks you to learn more about dianogas on the fleet, again using the comlink interface, followed by a trip to Hutta to gather some items to lure the dianoga out. Once you've successfully done so, the second mission is completed and the baby dianoga also becomes your pet.

As with many virtual items, it can be hard to assess whether something is good value or not, and if that wasn't tricky enough, decoration bundles are even tougher to judge because they are pretty much guaranteed to contain some items that you don't care that much about. Still, just by comparing the Remote Trading Outpost Bundle to other items on the Cartel Market, at least some conclusions can be drawn.

At 2500 Cartel Coins, it's a bit pricier than most decoration bundles, which more commonly run between 1300 and 1800 Coins. However, those other bundles also usually contain only around 10-30 decos, so the fact that you get more than five times as many decorations for a price increase of less than 40% is insane. And that's without even attaching any value to the little quests or the two pets. (Pets are usually another 240 CC each.)

The only caveat as per Swtorista (I didn't think to check this myself) is that all the items are bound and can't be sold on the GTN. The quest also isn't a legacy unlock, so while you can move the quest starter item around between characters of your legacy, once it's completed it's done, and you can't repeat it on another character, though the two pets themselves can be unlocked in Collections.

So in my opinion at least, this bundle is great value for money if you're into decorating at all and have some CC to spare. You can see a full list of all the decorations on Swtorista's site, but I particularly like the fountains/basins and different types of lamps.

If you have to spend real money to get the required CC, I'd be a bit more hesitant, simply because I don't like that the pricing of 2500 CC is just a bit more than you get with the 20 dollar Cartel coin bundle (which buys 2400 CC) and I'm not a fan of those kinds of upsell tactics. 

Still, I consider that a relatively minor niggle, and overall I've got to give this one a major thumbs up. I've only used some of the decos so far, but the pets have certainly gotten some comments! I'd be happy to see more "value-added" bundles like this in the future.

7.6 Dev Stream Reactions

After watching the big Warcraft Direct stream yesterday, it was quite a contrast to spend time on SWTOR's 7.6 dev stream tonight. Smaller studio, fewer viewers, but also a much more relaxed atmosphere and lots of laughs. I was immediately overcome with an urge to make a bunch of gifs of the interactions between Eric Musco and Papa Keith, intending to post them on Bluesky, but it couldn't cope with me uploading any images at the time (I later learned it wasn't just me), so I'll be inserting them into this blog post instead, even if that may seem a bit random!

As usual, if you want the full rundown of every little detail, I recommend watching the recording of the stream yourself or reading a detailed summary elsewhere - Kal already has one up here for example. Over here I'm more choosy with what I talk about and won't mention everything, but I'll add some commentary to make it more interesting. Let's get on with it!

Topical and time-sensitive things first: There's a new Twitch drop for the next 14 days, an Ilum poster deco with a purple border. Handily livestream viewers were able to earn it right away simply by watching the stream as it only requires one hour of watch time. There'll also be another Twitch drop, a purple Vulptilla mount, once 7.6 launches. We weren't given an exact date for that, but from what they did say on the stream it sounds like it will be early December.

Also, effective immediately, there's a big 50% off sale on dyes going on! The interesting thing related to this was that they mentioned that they're planning to make changes to how dyes work soon... I'm sure I'm not the only one whose mind immediately jumped to the notion of making them unlockable in Collections, something I've seen people request more than once. I don't think that will happen though - dye sales have got to be too much of a money-maker for that - but I'm still curious to hear what they've got in mind once the time comes.

We got some info about the 7.6 story, and I tend to not go into too much detail about story previews in these posts, but I did want to note that Imperials will finally get to see Major Anri again, almost three years after Manaan, and that the story is supposedly going to be structured a bit differently, consisting of four threads you can advance in any order, about Shae Vizla, Darth Malgus, the Hidden Chain and Darth Nul's holocron respectively. I'm curious to see how that'll pan out - it could mean more content, but I've got to admit that personally I'm a little worried that "you can do them in any order" means that each "thread" will contain a lot of exposition/cut-scene watching and fewer interesting choices - but we'll see.

Unfortunately after all that talk about how interesting the new story is going to be, we won't actually get to see it at 7.6's release, because while the patch itself will still land as planned, they had to delay the story update part of it because they "currently don't have all the elements [they] need to complete this story", which I've seen people interpret as having to do with the voice actors' strike, though I don't know whether that's just speculation or backed by anything that was said elsewhere.

There was some talk about dynamic encounters and the new lair boss, but I won't go into that here as I already covered those topics in my post about the PTS from last week. They just confirmed that dynamic encounters will only exist on Hoth and Tatooine at launch, with the possible exception of Hidden Chain invasions, which might also happen on other planets from the sounds of it.

The new lair boss is also going to drop crafting materials for new augments, something that people had already caught on to some time ago but that hadn't been officially announced. These new augments will be better than the current gold augments. I guess this will offer a sort of gear progression without further raising overall item rating, though it does make me wonder whether the next gear reset perhaps isn't as far away as I thought.

There was some talk about new Cartel Market items, which I usually don't go into here either, but there was one thing that piqued my interest: there'll be a new decoration bundle called the Remote Outpost Bundle, and it'll come with a small amount of story/gameplay attached from the sounds of it. I was immediately reminded of the encrypted datacubes from back in the day and how people were not happy with those, though I guess a big part of that was that they came from inside Cartel packs, while this will be a direct purchase. I'll make sure to get it when it comes out and will let you know whether it's worth the money or not.

In terms of gameplay, there'll be a new UI feature called comlink to interact with terminals and characters in a more organic way without having to always resort to KOTOR-style cut scenes. They emphasised that this isn't meant to replace cinematics and proper conversations but should simply serve as another option for interactions where appropriate. The example they showed was of someone using a terminal and being given a prompt to enter a password, where in the current system that would bring up the KOTOR-style black bars and mute dialogue options like "enter code" or "walk away". They explained that they could also see this working for characters "texting" you.

PvP Season 7 will still start with the launch of 7.6 and bring an end to 8-man premades, as they'll once again be limited to four people max, and the devs are also disabling the old level 75 set bonuses in PvP to reduce the power of twinks. Not what I personally consider PvP's biggest problems right now, but better than nothing. What did stand out to me was that one of the new season rewards is actually going to be a proper emote instead of the previous "text-only" one, which might actually be something to look forward to for me.

As the stream was getting close to wrapping up, Eric and Keith dropped a few more surprises on us at the end. First off, we'll get a new mount as a free subscriber reward that introduces something new: the ability to have your (humanoid) companion ride in a sidecar beside you and a non-combat pet in the luggage rack. The preview looked hilarious and made me laugh out loud. I'm not sure how much I'll use it but it'll be fun for a little while if nothing else. Plus I appreciate that they decided to make it a sub reward instead of a Cartel Market item. There'll also be two new mounts from dynamic encounter-related achievements that won't show your companion but will include your active mini pet.

Next they announced that they'll do a character name purge for the first time in a long time. If you're a subscriber, all your characters are safe, but if not, you'll want to log into any toons that haven't been logged into since January 1st of this year, else they will be flagged for a rename. I wonder if that'll give me a chance to claim Shintar without the funny i on Tulak Hord, the one server where I don't currently own the name... they also mentioned that they'll try to remember to do this a bit more often in the future to not have all these names taken up by inactive characters.

Finally, a big surprise at the very end: they're working on more art modernisation for planetary environments, but also for player characters. Musco immediately assured everyone that their number one priority was to not change the overall feel of the characters. The examples they showed looked really good, with just more detail on the facial textures and more gloss on the eyes. (When I tried to explain this to Mr Commando afterwards, he said that talking about shiny hair and eyes made me sound like I was trying to sell him a dog!)

All in all, a fun stream with lots of news and some interesting things to look forward to, though the story update being delayed with no clear ETA was a bit of a bummer. What was your favourite part of this stream?

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.

Mount Sale Shopping Tips

Yesterday SWTOR surprised us by launching a surprise "Cartel Market Summer Mount Sale", with more than 48 pages of mounts (back) on the Cartel Market and most of them at around half price, though some have even steeper discounts. See, this is exactly what I meant when I said that they were experimenting more with different kinds of sales!

This is definitely something I welcome, because I'm not a fan of enforced scarcity for virtual items, and it's actually kind of mind-boggling how many hundreds of items the SWTOR team has created for the Cartel Market over the last decade and how many of them are not even available for purchase a lot of the time. So bringing them back and with a discount on top is definitely something I approve of. The sale runs until July 16th according to Twitter.

I feel like spending money on cosmetic items you like is one of the better ways of supporting an MMO that you enjoy, so I can only recommend that everyone takes a look at the sale section themselves to see whether there's anything there that interests you. However, I also advocate spending your hard-earned cash responsibly, so here are some tips to make the most out of this sale!

1. Avoid impulse purchases

I know sales are exciting, but seriously, there are 48 pages of mounts here. Unless you're a completionist and there's no limit on the number of Cartel Coins you're willing to spend, take a good look at everything that's available first and have a think about what you really want. That Hoverchair might look kind of nifty on the preview picture, but do you really want to be seen around the fleet on that thing? You don't want to splurge on something on page two just to be out of money when you see something that you actually would've liked much more.

2. Check that you're buying the right thing

What do I mean by that? Well, someone on Twitter pointed out for example that for some reason the Dune Sea Bantha is currently listed twice, at different prices. Obviously you don't want to buy the more expensive one! I think this is just a bug, but still something to watch out for. Likewise, while browsing I noticed that a couple of mounts seemed to have wrong images representing them - for example the Frostcrest Devourer is displayed as brown on the store image, but when you actually preview the item, it's grey and blue. I don't think there are many items affected by stuff like this, but you want to be on the safe side, so look closely. If there are multiple colour variants of a type of mount, you'll want to make sure to grab the one you like the most! This is really just an extension of point one.

3. Compare prices on the GTN

Just because something is on sale on the Cartel Market, that doesn't mean it can't still be cheaper elsewhere! Before hitting that "buy now" button, take a look at the GTN to see whether your mount of choice has any listings there as well, and if so, how much they're going for. There's no universal answer to the question of whether it's better to spend credits or CC because it'll depend on your individual situation, but as an example, there were four mounts I checked out that are going for 750 CC in the sale, and when I looked on the GTN, three of them were only 5-20 million credits there, so I opted to go down that route instead. The fourth one however was going for a hundred million, which I thought was a bit pricey, so I opted to purchase that one with CC instead, especially since I wanted it on a secondary server, where I'm not as rich in-game.

4. Check your cargo holds

Because people are doing the above, now may also be a good time to sell off any spare mounts that you might have stashed away in your Cargo hold. This may not be true for every mount, and there may be a dip in price as some people buy them off the CM specifically to re-sell on the GTN, but it's something worth looking at at least. On Leviathan, I'd been trying to sell a medium-rare mount that I got out of a free Cartel pack for many weeks now, and the moment the CM sale started, it finally sold.

5. Consider buying to re-sell yourself

If you'd like to turn some CC into credits, grabbing a couple of rare mounts while they are on discount may not be a bad idea either. Kal points out that the TF-4 Rampage and Walkhar Trickster are very rare for example. They obviously won't be as rare after this sale, but it's still something to consider, especially if you're willing to play the long game.

Anyone remember when mounts were called "vehicles" in game by the way? It's still the name of the relevant post category on this blog, because at launch we only had speeders and no animal mounts. I think the first animal mount was the tauntaun added with patch 2.3? I don't remember when they changed the actual in-game ability list to say "mounts" instead of "vehicles" though...

7.4.1 Dev Stream Highlights & Thoughts

Last night we were treated to SWTOR's first dev stream of 2024, centred around patch 7.4.1. This was actually unusual, as the pattern in the recent past has been to only have livestreams in the run-up to a major patch, not for the minor ones. Interestingly, Jackie noted right at the beginning that they are planning to do more of this kind of thing going forward, which is nice in terms of communication, though I think at least in the short-term, it also confused some players who don't necessarily pay super close attention to how the game's patch cycle has been shaking out in the recent past.

What I mean by that is that I saw more than a couple of comments from people who seemed to simply equal "dev stream" with "next major update" and who then expressed disappointment that the stream didn't show off any new major additions. To be clear, everyone, 7.5 is still coming and will have more in it! In fact, they did tease a little bit about that, but more on that closer to the end of this post. This stream simply talked about the launch of the next Galactic Season, something that wouldn't have received its own stream in the past.

Galactic Season 6 & Other Bits

We haven't been given a date for Galactic Season 6's launch yet, but they stated that they're targeting a March release, which makes me expect that it'll come out in three to four weeks. They're continuing in a similar vein to Season 5, with some lightweight story missions and no new companion. Instead, this season's big reward will be a new stronghold on Copero of all places, and the seasonal quest givers will meet you inside it. You'll unlock basic access right away, with more rooms being added via the subscriber reward track, and the three final rooms apparently requiring Cartel Coins to unlock. This seemed to stir some controversy, much to my surprise, considering that the seasons track usually also contains some CC anyway, so I'd expect it to finance those final rooms more or less automatically.

Hearing about the return to Copero was a pleasant surprise, and I like that they're continuing to experiment with different rewards. From the screenshots, there's maybe a small risk that the Copero stronghold might end up feeling a little similar to Rishi, what with the beach front property with palm trees and all, but it's definitely different enough to still be interesting. I'm also happy that we'll be getting another seasonal storyline.

We also learned that PvP Season 5 will start in two weeks, and that character transfers to the Shae Vizla server will open up with patch 7.4.1, but I'll talk more about that in a different post. There was also the usual promotion of new Cartel Market stuff, though none of it vowed me like the original reveal of the shiny new dyes did last time. Maybe the Gothic Master armour set for one of my Sith warriors...

Date Night's Here!

The big and unexpected reveal of the stream was the release of "date nights" coming with 7.4.1. Now, these have some history already, as they were first data-mined about a year ago and people have been going nuts about the idea ever since. I even saw someone ask on the official forums how to get the mission to go on a date with Arcann, just to be told that this content wasn't actually in the game. This is why I always say not to put too much stock into data-mining!

However, they really are coming with 7.4.1: Alliance alerts that let you hang out with your romanced companion for a bit. Why did they promote this as a new feature instead of simply a bunch of new alerts? Because they will apparently be weekly repeatable, which I thought is quite neat. I remember reading a comment somewhere once where someone bemoaned that once the story was done, you could never ever talk to your companions again, even if one of them was officially your spouse. That person said that they wished that they could at least have some repeatable conversations like at the campfire in Dragon Age. And this sounds pretty close!

Before you get too excited though, we only get four to begin with: Lana, Koth, Theron and Arcann. The devs' desire is to eventually include something for all romanceable companions, but considering just how many of them there are, even the most optimistic timescale I've seen quoted would require more than five years to get to those last few companions.

Personally, I'm not a huge romance fanatic (my main never romanced anyone in my twelve years of playing for example), but I have dabbled in it on different alts, and I do like the idea of adding a bit more depth to companion relationships this way. I've never romanced Lana or Koth myself, but maybe this will give me an incentive to do so! More reasons to get characters to the other side of KotFE and KotET are always welcome.

Finally, in regards to 7.5, they confirmed that it will take place on Hutta and that you could indeed tell so from the current loading screen. The update will be called "Desperate Defiance" and will also feature the final part of the Lane Vizla storyline as well as a new spring-themed world event. That last part was actually the most intriguing to me because based on previous releases, I wouldn't have expected 7.5 to land before June. However, that's almost summer and would be very late to launch a spring-themed event, which makes you wonder whether this patch might actually launch earlier, and if so, what else that might mean for the game's patch cadence in the future. Most curious!

Freebies & Links

As usual, there's a free stronghold deco you can claim, using the code LotSKrovos (not case-sensitive). Just don't get tripped up when trying to claim it, as the old link to redeem codes from the main user interface appears to go to dead page right now. Make sure to log in, go to your new account page, and scroll down to the "redeem code" button there instead.

Also, not exactly a freebie, but they also announced a major Cartel Market sale for the armour and decoration categories running until the end of February. There are some good deals to be had there if either of those things interest you. Swtorista has some recommendations and screenshots of everything, while Kal offers a full written list of everything included in the sale, which is handy if you just wanna do a quick Ctrl+F to check whether something specific is reduced.

Finally, if you want to see or read more details about the stream for yourself, you can watch the Twitch VOD, the YouTube upload, or read detailed written breakdowns on the official website, at Swtorista, Vulkk or Today in TOR.

7.4 First Impressions

I was surprised how nice it felt to be able to upgrade my gear again. I had enough tech fragments saved up across alts that I could raise both of my implants to item level 340 right away, merely requiring a few relogs to claim more fragments on different characters. Getting back into full max-level Rakata gear is going to be my next goal, and any spare tech fragments can go towards upgrading the implants of alts. SWTOR demands so little of players in terms of grind that it's actually nice to have something like this to work on again every now and then.

I was excited when they announced the new shiny dyes, so I immediately bought some to try out. I also really liked the new Suppression Trooper armour, so I bought that too. It's funny to me how I'm earning more free Cartel Coins than ever from doing Galactic Seasons on multiple servers, but the devs are also getting better at luring me into buying things, so my huge stash of free CC is actually starting to diminish for the first time in ages. Of course, simply making all the new items expensive also helps.

I remember when Treek came out back in the day, a dev commented on Twitter that this made them huge amounts of money... Note that the Chrome White/Metallic Gold dye bundle costs as much as two and a half Treeks, and it's a one-time consumable. Well, I hope it makes them good money and that Broadsword will invest it back into the game.

Pictured below, from left to right: my trooper's Rakata gear dyed Chrome White and Metallic Gold, the Battlefield Commander set dyed the reverse way (Metallic Gold and Chrome White) and the new Suppression Trooper armour with a secondary light orange dye applied.

There were some bugs. It's kind of funny to me at this point that as a long-time player, I should really know that there are always going to be some bugs on patch day. The devs certainly do, which is why they're always on standby to implement hotfixes after pushing a major patch out. And yet... it's still always a little disappointing to run into an issue that stops you dead in your tracks. Then again, if they fix it quickly enough, hardly anyone even remembers a month later - though I do immortalise some bugs by posting about them I guess. It's a funny cycle.

It didn't help that one of the issues this time around has been game performance, which by its very nature affects a lot of people. It wasn't too bad for me, though I did suffer from abnormal lag and stuttering the first evening, which eventually resulted in a full game crash. The rest of the time I was fine though. Others have had it worse, struggling to even get the game running. The devs are still investigating.

A more harmless bug manifested itself in the new storyline on Republic side, where you're supposed to click on an object in the open world that's somewhat slow to respawn. I say "somewhat" because it must've been one, two minutes tops, which isn't that long in the grand scheme of things, but of course it's a nightmare when there are fifteen players stacked on top of each other, all wanting to click first. Musco was actually spurred on to make another one of his rare forum appearances to clarify that this happened because the tool they use to build these kinds of quests sets this long-ish default timer and they forgot to manually fix it in this instance. They'll look at adjusting the default as well to avoid the problem recurring in the future. Interesting to know!

At the time of writing this, I've played through the main storyline once on both factions; I haven't looked into the Lane Vizla story yet. Still, I've got lots of thoughts already, which I'll save for a long story review post as usual. The only thing I'll say for now is that I appreciated the faction flavour. 7.2 and 7.3 have been exactly the same regardless of what faction you play, so it's nice to be reminded that the Republic and Empire exist. While the overall storyline is the same in 7.4 too, it's similar to Secrets of the Enclave in the sense that you work with different people on both sides and that makes all the difference to the experience.

Savanna Vorantikus Returns!

Did you ever hear the tragedy of Savanna Vorantikus? OK, it wasn't really a tragedy, more of a comedy.

You see, SWTOR's Cartel Market has a daily flash sale, where an item will be half price for 24 hours only. Usually it's something that's not super popular, but the reduced price can make it a good deal regardless.

Last year, on the 30th of September, the featured CM item of the day was a mount called Savanna Vorantikus: only 750 Cartel Coins instead of the usual 1500! Sure, whatever. The next day, it changed to the Swamp Rancor, another mount.

However, on the 2nd of October, the Savanna Vorantikus was back. How odd! They don't usually discount the same item twice in such quick succession. Oh well.

The next four days featured an assortment of different items as you'd expect: two weapons, an armour set and a speeder. But on the 7th of October, the Savanna Vorantikus returned yet again. And then again the next day. And then again the day after. And then the next two days after that.

People on the forums, on reddit and on other social media went nuts. What was going on? Just how many of these beasts did they have to get rid of? I mean, it was pretty obvious that something was bugged, or perhaps the person that usually populates the flash sale schedule had unexpectedly taken sick, but those were boring explanations. It was much more fun to meme.

As someone who doesn't usually pay that much attention to the Cartel Market, I didn't immediately notice the repetition, but let's just say that by the fifth day, so many people were talking about it, it was hard to miss. Just as I was starting to think that I should really buy one for myself just to get in on the silly fun, they finally fixed the schedule. The flash sale still "hiccuped" a little as it repeated the exact same four items that had been featured in early October plus the Swamp Rancor, but it didn't revert to the Vorantikus after that, so we were out of the woods. And I always kind of regretted missing out! I even checked the GTN at some point but ultimately decided against buying it from there.

Needless to say, when I saw the Savanna Vorantikus on sale again today, I pounced on the opportunity to get my own. At last, I am in on the joke! Now the question is just whether that will be it or whether the Savanna Vorantikus will once again make a return tomorrow or the day after...

Season 3 Halftime Thoughts

We're slowly approaching Galactic Season 3's halfway point, and I've been doing very well for myself! On Darth Malgus I'm up to season level 88, and on all the other servers I'm somewhere between the mid-sixties to low seventies.

That's basically me confessing that I haven't really been able to ease up on my slightly obsessive play on the other servers, even though it can be a bit overwhelming sometimes. It's not that I don't enjoy playing there, but my brain doesn't quite seem to be able to comprehend that you can't just multiply the effort for something like the PvP weekly by five without feeling a dramatic increase in play time required to achieve that goal. And by the time it starts to drag I've usually progressed enough that I kind of don't want to give up on the weekly so close to the finish line... c'est la vie. At least being close to finishing the season on Darth Malgus means that there'll soon be one server less to consider when it comes to weekly objectives.

Aside from chasing objectives, I've kind of enjoyed rounding out my legacies on the other servers a bit. At the start of the season I was able to buy both of the fleet strongholds on every server, which gave my Conquest point bonus a crazy boost compared to what it used to be.

The clone of my main that I made on Tulak Hord hit 80 the other day, as did my Shadow on Satele Shan, which leaves Leviathan as the only server where I don't have a max-level character, though my knight there only has three more levels to go as well.

I've also enjoyed adding to my legacies on the other servers with the creation of some Imperial alts. Occasionally there are some easy season objectives that require you to have characters of both factions, such as the one this week that asks you to kill a few named mobs on Quesh on both Republic and Imperial side, and it annoyed me a bit that I couldn't do those. So I've been using the weekly objectives to do x number of quests on a character with a specific origin story to create alts on servers where I didn't yet have anything that matched the requirements. Specifically that has resulted in a new Sith inquisitor on Tulak Hord and my ancient lowbie agent on Satele Shan finally getting to level ten. Fun fact: while Conquest and Galactic Seasons officially don't unlock until level ten, you already get credit towards seasons objectives before that, which meant that my Sniper got the one to complete fifteen quests as an agent at a mere level nine.

Another thing to note is that I've been loving the change to the prize tracks that replaced some Cartel Coins with Cartel packs instead. I know there was some moaning about this at the start of the season from people who primarily do them for the free CC, but I've got to admit as someone who's never short on CC I've unexpectedly been loving this change! It means I get to open some boxes without having to spend money of either kind, and I've liked some of the prizes enough to just keep them. For example I got a set called "Berserker" out of one of my free Cartel packs on Satele Shan, which is apparently a fairly common set from a really old pack, but I didn't recall ever seeing it before. I really dig the "cybernetic suit" look it sports though and decided that it was a great fit for my new agent.

And the stuff that doesn't appeal to me personally? Gets claimed and thrown onto the GTN once the bind timer runs out, which means that this is also a great time for people who prefer to buy their Cartel items with credits, as the free crates from seasons provide an additional supply of items that wouldn't otherwise be there.

A Season for Everything

I mentioned over a month ago that after completing Season 2 on my main server Darth Malgus, I started engaging with the whole season concept on other servers. What started with making characters just to log in and score free points, gradually progressed into actually playing them regularly and has now become a personal obsession of mine. Last week I actually completed all daily objectives plus the maximum amount of weekly objectives on all servers.

Truth be told, it's becoming a bit stressful to keep up with, which is kind of ironic, because one feedback I had about Season 1 was that while it was kind of fun, it was also a bit much to keep up with all the daily and weekly objectives next to my "normal" gameplay and I definitely felt like I needed a break after three months of that. I greatly welcomed the changes introduced with Season 2 and how they eased the pressure to play in a very specific way every single day.

However, I guess in a way it ended up being almost too easy for me, which led to the notion that making some additional progress on other servers might be a nice challenge. In this roundabout way I've taken myself almost back to where I was in Season 1, where trying to keep up with my objectives every day was actually a bit much. I guess I'm a glutton for punishment.

It is fun though. It's been enjoyable to revisit some low-level content that I haven't played through in a while, and playing on Leviathan and Tulak Hord in specific quickly highlighted how many of the weekly objectives expect you to have a higher-level character or else you can't even access the relevant content. Because of this, hitting level fifty on my characters there has felt like a huge milestone, as that's where you unlock access to the reputation objective which is good for earning a huge chunk of Conquest points quickly, and it's also when you're first able to access some sort of endgame content, since level fifty was the game's level cap at launch (those were the days, am I right).

When I first started investing into seasons progress on other servers I said that "I won't get close to completing the season on any of these servers", but at my current rate, reaching the end of the track doesn't actually seem completely out of reach anymore. On Star Forge in specific I might actually get there naturally (since I had a high-level character there from the beginning, my progress was faster than on the other servers), but even on the others it doesn't seem completely unfeasible that I might be able to get close, and buying out a few levels with credits could do the rest.

Now, the credit buyouts get stupidly expensive very quickly, and I don't have a lot of money on any of these servers, but as noted previously, the Cartel Market effectively allows access to a lot of credits quickly if you know what to buy for re-selling. It's not something I felt comfortable doing in order to buy gold augments, but financing a few levels of season buyout is a different matter - you can do that by using Cartel Coins directly anyway; buying and selling Cartel Market items in order to then go the credit route just makes it a lot cheaper in terms of real money value.

A few weeks ago a guildie highlighted that the black/black dye module was the daily Cartel Market deal of the day, which meant that it was on sale for half price (500 CC), and noted that this item is something that both sells well and is valued at up to a billion credits. So I took that opportunity to buy one module on each server, and assuming that I can sell them, even if it's for less than a billion, that should finance any amount of credit buyout I want to invest in, and without spending the thousands of Cartel Coins the direct buyout would require.

At the time of writing this, there are 36 days left until the end of Season 2, and my progress looks as follows:

• Star Forge: season level 73
  
• Satele Shan: season level 60
  
• Tulak Hord: season level 53
  
• Leviathan: season level 51
  

I know I'll miss some days at the end of June as I'm going on holiday for a bit, but with the credit buyout serving as a backup plan I'm not too worried about that causing any issues. Fingers crossed!

Gold Augments and a Brush with Pay-to-win

Last year I wrote a post about how I'd been making a lot of money in SWTOR by simply selling stuff on the GTN that I'd earned through normal gameplay. I also concluded that people's concerns about inflation were a bit overblown in my opinion, because there are ridiculously few situations in game that require you to spend an amount of credits that you'll even notice.

In recent weeks, a couple of things happened. Roger from Contains Moderate Peril wrote a few posts about being back in SWTOR, and one of them expressed annoyance about how he'd lost some money from going over the hardcoded credit cap (which is over four billion) without noticing. I was utterly baffled that this was an issue for him (and said as much in a comment) because as far as I can tell, Roger's relationship with the game is very casual (as in: he spends some time playing solo through the story once and that's it) and yet I, as an extremely invested player of more than a decade, have never run into the issue of having more money than the game is technically capable of letting you hold even once, never mind accidentally! He confirmed in a response to my comment that he'd merely purchased a few things from the Cartel Market and then sold them on the GTN.

On a similar note, Mr Commando was moaning recently that he was soon going to run out of money to pay for his repairs. Being a good wife, I told him that this was ridiculous because repairs are not expensive at all, and that he could solve the problem in mere minutes by simply selling some of the items he's been hoarding in his cargo bay and material storage for years. However, he considered that "work" and scoffed at the idea.

One of the other tanks in our ops progression team had different advice for him though. "Just do what I do," he said, "I buy a Hypercrate from the Cartel Market every so often and then just sell the contents. Covers everything easily." Mr Commando liked this idea since he had plenty of complementary coins to spare anyway, so he followed this advice and it pretty much worked as advertised. In fact, when he was done, he had about the same amount of credits as I'd slowly worked my way up to over the course of several years of GTN trading.

Now, I hesitate to call that "pay to win" because paying for repairs is actually not at all expensive, and most of those extra credits seemed pretty superfluous for both of us either way. But my pride was certainly a little stung, considering just how stark the contrast was between the amount of time I'd put in vs. his single Cartel Market purchase leading to more or less the same results.

I really don't like talking about pay-to-win in MMOs though, because it's one of those areas where people can never agree on a definition and will happily contradict even themselves. Not to mention that I've seen many a self-righteous commentator preach about the evils of pay-to-win just to be perfectly fine with partaking in such systems when it suits them.

Fortunately SWTOR has only really had light brushes with the subject in the past, such as when some of the earliest Cartel Market items had stats on them (even if they weren't particularly good), or when Galactic Command boosters were purchasable for real money back in 2016. However, none of these things lasted long in their original iterations, probably because Bioware saw that they were generating a lot of bad vibes for little profit.

Nowadays the devs are quite happy to focus on getting people to subscribe and buying cosmetics, and I'm fine with that myself. Speaking of cosmetics though, these also tend to be among the most expensive things to buy on the GTN, because the resale prices can be through the roof, which is something that critics of the game's economy often like to point to as evidence of inflation being a problem. For me this has always been kind of "meh" because there are plenty of good-looking and affordable outfits in the game, so who cares if there are some that are expensive? I don't really feel like I'm losing anything by not wearing the most expensive set of robes. Now, things that actually affect your stats are a different matter...

Which brings us to the subject of gold augments. I mentioned them very briefly in the post I linked at the start of this one, but brushed them off as pretty irrelevant at the time. With the way almost all max-level content was scaled and the stats on your gear were capped during Onslaught, trying to invest billions into tiny stat increases seemed like something for bored min-maxers with too much money on their hands and with nothing else to do.

Since 7.0, operations don't scale you down anymore though, yay! This means that you can actually see the effects of improving your gear, including augments, which means that gold augments - despite of being a relic from the last expansion since crafting hasn't received an update with 7.0 - are suddenly of a lot more interest now than they ever were when they were first introduced. Seriously, back then I didn't even look into what was required to get them. Everyone just said they were both ridiculously expensive to make and nearly useless, and that was enough for me to feel that I didn't need to know any more.

So imagine my shock when I actually looked into what's required to make a single one of these augments the other day: seven of a material that drops once per nightmare mode ops boss, and 14 of another material that comes from ranked PvP. Disregarding the chance of a lucky crit which can allow you to get multiple results from one craft, you need a set of these for every single augment, and a single player has fourteen item slots to augment. At the moment my guild's also not really killing any NiM bosses other than Nefra and sometimes Dash'roode, and I don't know anyone who regularly does ranked PvP. In short: It's hella expensive, and while augment prices on the GTN aren't the highest they've ever been, I still wouldn't be able to buy more than a couple of these even if I spent all of my hard-earned wealth at once.

Meaning of course that I thought of the whole "just sell Cartel items on the GTN" thing and how that would allow me to kit myself out in gold augments within days, which immediately made me uncomfortable. I didn't do it because I rather dislike this kind of thing, but if I'm being honest also because I don't think me as a healer not having full gold augments is what's holding our progression back at the moment. But it sure reminded me of SWTOR's previous brushes with pay-to-win and how this may very well be the closest yet, seeing how better augments don't make you "win" but provide a more tangible benefit than anything else ever did.

Of course, the funny thing is that where e.g. Galactic Command boosts were a clear attempt to make players spend money on the Cartel Market, this... doesn't seem like it was ever meant to be. After all, there is nothing about gold augments that can be acquired from the Cartel Market - each and every part of them needs to be earned by players actually playing the game. It's just that the primary sources of these materials are quite inaccessible to the average player, so people value them highly - and there's nothing else you can earn through gameplay that would make you rich enough to actually be able to pay that price, because the only other thing that players rate as similarly valuable is Cartel Market fashion. It's really a pretty bizarre situation if you think about it.

With that said, I'm glad that Bioware is planning to make changes to this system in the next patch, both by reducing the material requirements for gold augment crafting and by moving the rare materials from master mode operations and ranked PvP onto a vendor where they can be bought with tech fragments. (Note that the vendor is actually already an option right now, but much more expensive than it will be.) With that, these augments will still require a lot of effort to get, but I do expect the prices to go down with the increased accessibility, considering that tech fragments are something that anyone can earn over time, whether it's from Conquest or even dailies.

12 Things That Are Very Different in SWTOR after 10 Years

The other week I was having a chat with some WoW players I know and the subject of SWTOR came up. Knowing that I play it as my main game, one of them said something along the lines of: "I tried it at launch but it didn't really stick with me. I assume it's a much better game now?" To which I probably should have replied with a simple "Yes, of course!" but since I'm both rubbish at being an ambassador for my favourite MMOs and always have to complicate everything, my answer was some muttered deflection about how I was clearly too biased to make that judgement. Truth is, there are some things that I liked better about the way the game was at launch, which is something I worked through in this post from a few years ago.

But it did get me thinking about what the experience would be like for someone deciding to return now who only played for a little while at launch, or who has at least been absent from the game for more than a few years. With SWTOR's ten year anniversary coming up, I wouldn't be surprised if more people were thinking of checking it out again just to see how it's doing! So I tried to think of some major aspects of the game that have changed since then and compile them in the form of a blog post. Maybe this will alleviate some returning players' confusion... or encourage others to come back if they were on the edge and find out this way that something that put them off back in the day is no longer an issue. Without further ado: Twelve things that make SWTOR very different now compared to how it was at launch.

1. There've been a lot of server merges.

If you still remember the name of the server you played on back in the day... it won't be there anymore. SWTOR launched with a huge amount of servers, just to have to merge them together again and again as the game's population declined. We seem to have settled on there being only five, though that's not as dire as it sounds as they are all "mega servers" and considerably bigger than the average server used to be back in the day. There are three European ones for each of the supported languages (English, German and French), and two US ones for the east and west coast respectively. Note that while the Satele Shan server is nominally considered the west coast server, in terms of physical location, both servers are located on the east coast now.

If you used to or want to play on an RP or pure PvP server, you're out of luck now as neither exists anymore. The RP community just doesn't get much love, period, and world PvP was changed to a purely optional thing on all servers. Basically you have the option to switch to a "PvP instance" on any planet accessible to both factions, in which all players are flagged. There are no special rewards for it though other than sometimes having reduced competition for mob spawns.

2. The game has a free-to-play/freemium business model now.

I know this is a change that happened in SWTOR's very first year, but if you really quit within the first few months, I guess you never would have seen even that get implemented. It's kind of weird to think back to what a drama that was back then, when being subscription-only was considered the gold standard and dropping the mandatory subscription was considered a sign of a failed game. I feel like people have become a lot more chill about that nowadays and seem to consider the business model less important as long as the game is fun and no particular monetisation scheme is too annoying.

The way SWTOR's free-to-play model works is that it gives you access to a huge amount of content for free, but then tries to make you vaguely uncomfortable in terms of quality of life at every opportunity to get you to pony up for the optional subscription. If that sort of thing bothers you, I always suggest subscribing for at least a month if you think you're having any fun at all, as that immediately removes all of the restrictions and unlocks even more content.

The cash shop is fairly inoffensive unless you're a fashionista who needs to own all the outfits as that'll set you back by quite a lot. Note that everything from the Cartel Market can be traded and sold in game though, so if you've got enough credits you can get most things from other players via the Galactic Trade Network.

Aside from cosmetics the Cartel Market only contains a few unlocks that make life as a free/preferred (lapsed sub) player marginally less annoying, but really, if that's your goal it's much easier and better value for money to just subscribe. I wrote a post comparing SWTOR's and ESO's business models a couple of years ago if you find that kind of thing interesting.

3. Levelling has been simplified and sped up massively.

Not that it was ever really hard... but you could die on some solo story missions, and you sometimes had to worry about upgrading your gear or doing some side content for extra XP. None of that is really the case anymore. In terms of combat, I found it quite striking that when Bhagpuss gave the game a try a couple of years ago, he described the levelling journey as such: "Games intended for very small children not excluded, TOR is by far the easiest MMORPG I have ever played." And he's played a lot of MMOs! It does ramp up a bit later on, which is a point I don't think Bhagpuss ever got to, but it's still a far cry from what it was like during the first couple of years, when you could even die on the starter planets if you didn't upgrade and use your skills appropriately.

The XP you get from main story missions has also been multiplied so many times that doing anything but the main storyline(s) is now redundant for levelling purposes and if you engage with things like side quests or group content at all, you'll be over-levelled for the story in no time.

4. Side quests are now hidden by default.

Speaking of side quests or "exploration missions" as they are now called, not only are they not needed anymore to fill your XP bar, someone at Bioware also decided at some point a few years ago that their mere presence was confusing and/or off-putting and decided to make them hidden by default. If you still want to find and do them, you have to open your map and tick the "show exploration missions" box on there to make quest markers appear over the relevant NPCs. You're welcome.

5. The game is fully level-scaled now.

On the subject of being over-levelled for the story, a few expansions ago SWTOR introduced level-scaling. The way it works in most cases is that each planet has a defined level range, and if you are within that range or below, you'll simply play as your current level, but if you exceed it, you'll be down-levelled to the highest "permitted" level for the planet, while keeping all your higher level abilities and secondary stats, meaning that you're still going to be pretty OP. But it does mean that you can't simply run around lower-level planets one-shotting everything, and that you do keep getting XP for doing quests no matter where you are (with the exception of some low-level areas on Coruscant and Dromund Kaas), so if you're enjoying the lower-level content you can do most of your levelling by simply doing that.

6. Travel around the galaxy is faster now.

Something I'd almost forgotten until I re-read the post by Wilhelm that I linked earlier is how annoying planetary travel used to be sometimes, what with having to go to your hangar, loading into your ship, picking your travel destination, getting off there, exiting the space station or spaceport, and so on and so forth. Nowadays, the only reason you'll have to do that is if you have a quest inside the hangar or on your ship while levelling, but otherwise you can open the galaxy map from (almost) anywhere, click on your desired planetary destination and simply go there instantly. You might just have to briefly navigate out of a spaceport or station after arriving.

There are also a lot of other convenient travel options. Planetary taxis are now all available without having to unlock them first. Both quick travel and the emergency fleet pass had their cooldowns shortened drastically, to the point where subscribers with legacy perks have no cooldown on either of them (when it used to be something like half an hour and... twenty hours? respectively).

Strongholds (more on them below) also offer a way to instantly travel to a safe place and back if you need it. And people in a guild with a guild ship can instantly summon a group from anywhere in the galaxy to their location. WoW used to have this as a guild perk called "Have Group, Will Travel" that they took out at some point because it was considered too overpowered or something. Not so in SWTOR! I've written about the evolution of travel in SWTOR in a bit more detail here.

7. There's housing now, called strongholds.

Housing is one of those things that I really don't care that much about in an MMORPG, but I know that there's a dedicated audience for it that considers it an absolute key feature. Again, this is something that's actually been in the game for quite a while now (since 2014 to be exact), but if you left in the first year you might not have known that. You can purchase various apartments and estates on a number of planets and decorate them to your heart's content.

The way decorations can be placed is hook-based (so not completely free-form) but at the same time not as restrictive as in other games that use similar systems, as you can change the layout of hooks you use (e.g. by choosing whether a room should contain a lot of small hooks, a couple of big ones, or a mix).

8. The way companions work has been changed quite a bit.

At launch every class could acquire a total of five unique companions by completing their class story. Each companion had likes and dislikes, and you could only progress their personal story if they liked you enough. They also required constant gear upgrades to remain effective (the same way as a player) and each companion was locked into only being able to perform one trinity role (tank, dps or healer).

With the launch of Knights of the Fallen Empire, everyone's class companions were taken away (once you start that part of the story), though you later get to re-unite with them as the story progresses. However, now all characters get access to (almost) all companions, plus a whole bunch of new ones.

Companion stories aren't locked behind whether they like you anymore, and instead unlock automatically once you've progressed far enough in the overall story. "Liking" you isn't that important anymore either, as affection has been replaced with influence, which also goes up if you make decisions that they hate. Gear also doesn't affect companion performance anymore; instead they simply get stronger as your influence increases.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, all companions can perform any trinity role now, so you're no longer locked into dragging a specific companion that you don't like around just because they're your only healer. They've also been boosted incredibly in terms of power and are much more effective at keeping you alive now, which also contributes to the whole levelling being much easier thing (see point three). Again, if you're interested in more detail, I've written more about the evolution of companions in SWTOR in this post.

9. The gear treadmill is minimal.

Speaking of gear affecting power levels, the gear treadmill in SWTOR is minimal nowadays. With the launch of the last expansion they added a new item level of gear but this has stayed the same throughout the whole expansion, even though it was really easy to max out within a couple of weeks after launch. You don't need to do the hardest content to acquire max-level gear either - people have the option to gear up through different activities depending on what they find fun. Additionally, most gear is bound to legacy, meaning that you can freely send it back and forth between your alts, so that a new alt can instantly wear a full kit of max-level gear once you've ground it out once. If you feel like other games are too demanding in terms of making you grind for gear as you'd really rather just chill and enjoy the story or whatever, SWTOR might be for you.

10. The easier group content is role-neutral now.

I thought about starting with "SWTOR has an automated group finder now" since strictly speaking that wasn't in at launch either, though it did get added very soon after. Still, I can imagine few players being surprised by this. What does throw people off more often is that the easier group content (veteran mode flashpoints and uprisings) has been tweaked to be role-neutral now, meaning that you can run it with four damage dealers if you want - no long queue times to wait for a tank. So if the game puts you into a group with no tank or healer, this is not an error but working as intended! The only thing to keep in mind here is that in somewhat of a contrast to the easy solo-levelling, group content without a tank or healer can actually be quite a challenge (depending on the instance and your group make-up), potentially forcing you to actually take care with pulls and use cooldowns to not die.

11. The post-launch content is not unique for your class.

Many hours of new story content have been added since launch, however due to the game not meeting expectations they had to lose the whole "eight parallel class stories" angle and unify the storyline. If this makes you wonder which character class might be best to return to to get the best experience out of the new content, I've got a post for you here!

Still, it's important to know that there's not as much replayability for alts as there used to be. There is some depending on the content - as there are references to your old class sprinkled in here or there, and some storylines are different for Republic and Empire at least. However, eight unique class stories it is not.

12. There are options to skip ahead now.

I'd always advise players not to skip story the first time around, but if you were stuck on something you really didn't enjoy, or on an alt that stalled out while progressing through a piece of content you found too repetitive to do again, there are options to skip ahead to different points in the story now. So for example if you've only been gone for a few years but got bogged down in the "Knights of" expansions because you really didn't enjoy them, you can skip right ahead to Jedi Under Siege, where the story returns to a more traditional Republic vs. Empire setup.

Are you someone who hasn't played SWTOR in a long time and thinking about returning? Got any other burning questions about what has changed since the last time you played? Feel free to leave them in the comments!