Total Galactic War: A Challenge over Taris

If it seemed like I fell off the face of the earth about a week ago and you were maybe wondering why I wasn't posting about recent events about which I should surely have something to say, such as last week's dev livestream or the new WoW expansion, it's because it was Total Galactic War in SWTOR again, and it ended up being another very intense one. I don't mean for these things to swallow up my entire free time, but sometimes it just happens!

As the last TGW had occurred only about a month ago, I wasn't exactly itching for a particularly tough or involved competition, but unfortunately it doesn't matter how much care I take in selecting an invasion target and avoiding the mega guilds, it seems to be becoming a trend that some relatively unknown guild likes to muscle in on our territory, and it's always one that is both very determined to win while also not really knowing what they signed themselves up for. (Twin Suns Squadron has won every single planet it invaded during Total Galactic War since at least 2022. We're not easy prey for newcomers.)

I had chosen for us to invade Taris since a couple of our members still needed the achievement for that one, and it's often one of the easier options as it's split by faction, meaning we'd only have to go up against other Republic guilds, with any Imperial competitors completely out of the picture. On top of that, the guild that was in the lead when we invaded didn't have a very high score, nor did they look particularly threatening.

Trouble on the horizon (or scoreboard) 

However, we'd barely claimed our spot when another contender appeared, a guild called "Sequels are trash". Now, I'm not going to lie: that guild name immediately made me want to beat them more than our average opponents. While I'm no fan of the sequel trilogy myself, I'm very wary of people who make disliking a certain piece of media their primary flag to fly online. (That said, it was amusing to me how whenever I wanted to check what they were up to during the event, I had to type "/who trash" and their guild name gave me an excuse to refer to them as "Trashies" when discussing the competition with my guildies.)

Initially, I thought that beating them should be easy enough. They were not a known entity in the Conquest scene, and the only achievement they had to their name was conquering Balmorra in the previous TGW, but with a relatively low score and against no real competition. So my guildies and I didn't really fret too much about it for the first couple of days. We made a point of taking part in some dedicated activities to earn Conquest points like we always do, but without too much pressure.

When my ops team didn't have a good group for master mode Dread Fortress on Wednesday for example, we decided to do MM Explosive Conflict instead "for the Conquest points". While we did complete it, we made quite a mess of it and it took us all evening to clear, which meant that it didn't really make for a very effective method of Conquest point acquisition. However, we weren't really worried yet at this point, as our competition didn't seem super organised yet either, even if they were initially ahead of us in terms of points. Like us, they visibly had some people working on Conquest but no large-scale efforts were in progress whenever we checked.

However, as we ramped up our efforts in order to catch up to and overtake them, so did they in order to stay in first place, seemingly always just a little bit ahead of us, no matter how hard we tried. When we did more uprisings for points, they also started doing more uprisings, and they always had just a few more people online - not so many that they were unbeatable, but just enough to always stay that little bit ahead.

By Saturday morning I decided to post a call to action on Discord, asking more guildies to take part in our Conquest shenanigans, as clearly more numbers were needed. That same evening, we decided to go rampaging across the galaxy as a group to mass-generate points. (I explained this concept before.) We thought that this was going to be a sure-fire way to overtake the Trashies, but lo and behold, two hours after we started, they suddenly had twenty people online rampaging across the galaxy too. We couldn't help but wonder what was going on in that guild, for them to be able to spontaneously get so many people online to grind points late on a Saturday evening (since the rampage clearly seemed to be a response to our own). Did none of them have anything else going on in their lives? Either way we had at least briefly overtaken them by this point, though somehow they always seemed to be able to pull another million out of thin air at the end of the day.

A strange proposition

Things took a strange turn on Sunday evening. We had just set out to start rampaging again when a member of the guild brought to our attention that someone from the Trashies with whom he had sometimes interacted in PvP and pugs had messaged him about Total Galactic War. Specifically, the person had asked whether we were saving our Personal Conquest Requisitions for the end, as he had heard from someone else that we had "cheated" our way to victory that way in the past. (I bet that was someone from Ace of Saints!) Specifically, he stated that if we were planning to do that again, they might as well give up now and not waste their time.

We were on voice chat when we were told about this and weren't quite sure what to make of it - it sounded almost too good to be true! Sure, we'd enjoyed the competition well enough until then, but we hadn't really intended for it to be quite so tough this time around, so being handed a win a few days in advance certainly seemed appealing, though there were also concerns that it might be some kind of trick or trap.

Either way, we advised our guildie that it was okay to answer honestly and confirm that yes, this was usually our MO during Total Galactic War. He also hinted that we'd made up pretty big discrepancies via the use of PQRs in the past, without giving away any exact numbers or what we had in store this time. For a brief while we were very cheerful at the idea that we'd practically won already.

However, not long afterwards, the Trashies once again formed up to start rampaging again too. I'm still not sure what happened there exactly, considering the guy seemed so close to understanding the situation - whether his offer to surrender had never been genuine and he'd simply been fishing for information, whether there was some kind of miscommunication or what - either way they were once again back to fighting harder than ever. We initially just shrugged it off as an oddity and continued our grinding for points as before.

Another twist and - a spy?

However, things took an even stranger turn less than twenty-four hours later, as the guy from the Trashies whispered our guildie again, this time to tell him that someone from his guild had transferred in Personal Conquest Requisitions worth thirty million points from other servers, and while he didn't exactly approve of winning that way, he could hardly stop him now, could he?

This 180 degree turn from seemingly being ready to give up to "no, you should probably give up" was very surprising, and to be honest, not very believable from our point of view. Only the day before, he'd been very incredulous at just how many points worth of tokens my guild had saved up in previous Total Galactic Wars, questioning whether that was even possible without exploiting, just to suddenly find a guildie of his own who'd had millions worth of tokens in his back pocket all along?

We had first-hand experience with what it meant to use thirty million points worth of PQRs in a single event, and while it's very much possible, it takes a lot of time and considerable effort to accumulate that many of them. In our case, it had been years in the making, after we'd missed out on our chance to conquer Belsavis again and again, and had reached a point where we were basically willing to do whatever it took to win it. The idea that someone in a guild that hadn't really been interested in Conquest before would just suddenly be able to conjure up 200+ PQRs on a whim seemed highly unlikely.

We'd barely had time to discuss this when another twist occurred - another guildie who isn't actually very involved in guild business and doesn't care about Conquest (but had taken note of all the chatter about it this week) piped up to say that he was on a lot of different Discord servers, including the one for Sequels are trash, and that someone there had just posted a screenshot of a character with a whole cargo bay full of Personal Conquest Requisitions, which he then went on to share with us.

One reason this was startling was that someone had been joking off-handedly about how we might have a "spy" in the guild, and now it turned out that we kind of did. Since the guildie in question doesn't care about Conquest either way, I doubt he was intentionally leaking secrets to the Trashies, but he might well have thrown some off-hand comments about our strategy their way, just like he'd now shared their screenshot with us.

The other surprise was that the screenshot seemed to provide proof that the mysterious Trashy with his thirty million points worth of tokens appeared to be real - though doubt remained of course, because no character or guild name were visible in the screenshot, so it really could have been anyone, or it could have been photo-shopped, or... well, you get the idea.

I'm not gonna lie: in the moment, seeing all of that was a bit disheartening. I was willing to believe that we were unlucky enough for the story to be true, and thirty million points is a lot to overcome. I was pretty sure that we didn't have that many PQRs lying around at that moment ourselves. Did that mean we had already lost?

No, giving up over mere words was not the Twin Suns way. I quickly pulled myself together and told the other officers that while I'd acknowledged the risk of losing, we weren't just going to hand victory to the Trashies without them still having to work for it. I did a tally of our biggest token holders and decided that all was not lost yet, though there was a potential chance that things could still go very wrong for us.

The final countdown

On Monday things seemed to be fairly quiet in Sequels are trash, which certainly aligned with the idea that they were confident in their victory now that this one guy had an additional thirty million points in his back pocket. I'd shared my plans with my guildies on voice chat, and they agreed that we weren't just going to lie down and give up, though we considered not bothering with a rampage that evening to give ourselves a bit of a break.

However, not much later the Trashies suddenly surged in activity again and were back to rampaging themselves - which was odd and seemed to contradict the idea that they were sure of their impending victory. We decided to follow their lead at least for a couple of hours so as not to fall too far behind, and for once, we actually had more people online than they did. We were slowly but surely catching up again - until, like clockwork, they always seemed to gain another 200k points from somewhere. This made it very obvious that for all the questioning of how legit it was to be using Personal Conquest Requisitions at the end, they clearly had no qualms about popping them like candy to stay in first place at all times - something that people had already suspected, but which to me hadn't been fully proven until that night.

There was one funny moment when both guilds ended up running into each other in the heroic area on Oricon, and things were extremely manic for a minute or two as people were surging all over the place and both friendly and hostile emotes were flying left and right. Personally I just kept yelling "follow the star" as I was worried about some of my more easily confused guildies running after the other ops group by accident.

We finished the night being somewhat behind yet again, but only by a few million. Just as I was about to log off, I saw someone from Sequels are trash walk up to me on the fleet and recognised the same guy that had been talking to our guildie. He soon whispered me too, to ask about our token stockpile once again, and happily chattered away about how it had been a fun competition but surely there was no point in either of us wasting our resources on a big token battle tomorrow. I gave a few polite but non-committal replies and then logged off. For someone who seemingly wanted us to just fold, he still seemed quite uncertain of his own guild's position.

The next morning a small number of us ground out a few more points the normal way and then gathered round just before Conquest's end. The worst case scenario I could think of was that the enemy's big PQR holder just decided to pop them all to ensure the Trashies' victory, but on the plus side, since 200+ tokens which are subject to the global cooldown actually take more than ten minutes to click, we'd be able to see it coming.

What I considered the more likely scenario, since they did have a "natural" lead of several million points and based on the previous night's whispers showing a reluctance to go all out and "waste" resources, was that they'd be at the ready to use some Personal Conquest Requisitions if we showed any sign of fighting but would probably prefer not to use too many, if any at all. This seemed confirmed when they used a few tokens to increase their lead back up to about five million and then stopped.

Meanwhile I'd instructed the guildies online with me to "play dead" and wait. Based on some of our previous token clicking wars, I had a pretty good idea of how long personal point gains took to be added first to the guild total and then to the global scoreboard, so I waited until the Conquest timer had nearly run out and then told everyone to go (as well as clicking my own Personal Conquest Requisitions). About a minute later, our guild score jumped, and with less than a minute to go on Total Galactic War, our new, massively increased total appeared on the board and we leap-frogged the Trashies' score by about ten million points. Seconds later, Twin Suns Squadron had officially conquered Taris, without our opponents having had any real chance to react. We did not get any more messages about what a great competition it had been after that.

Ultimate thoughts

And thus another epic tale of Conquest victory was added to the annals of the Twin Suns. It definitely was a bit of a weird one though and provided some interesting food for thought. I find it interesting for example that everyone is fine with Personal Conquest Requisitions being used at the start or over the course of the event, but if you save them for the end, some people consider it "cheating".

All the conversations with what I can only assume was an officer or even the GM of Sequels are trash definitely added a strange new dimension to things as well. It made me realise that I definitely prefer to not get interpersonally involved with our opponents in Conquest. "Psychological warfare" via the scoreboard is one thing (such as by pushing your score up strategically to demotivate your opponent), but trying to talk them into or out of things one to one is a bit too awkward for my personal taste. I just want to compete based on the rules of the game, and maybe do the virtual equivalent of a polite handshake at the end to pay respect to a good competition.

With all the messages we got... I still don't quite know what to make of them even now. Was it all part of a grand game of deception/trying to get us to give up? The kindest interpretation I can think of is that the guy kind of thought of a stash of Conquest Requisitions as something like a pile of nukes - better used for deterrence than actually deployed - and that it genuinely pained him to think of seeing it all get burned up. But this is just a game; nobody gets hurt in Total Galactic War and the resources are there to be used.

I do think it was ultimately ironic that the Trashies had more information about us than most of our recent opponents, that we explicitly told them what our strategy was going to be - and yet they still fought until the very end just to lose to us doing exactly what we said we were going to do. If you read this, man, I hope your guildies didn't end up being too cranky, and I do still agree that it was a fun contest.

A Farewell to FibroJedi's Website

If you're very old school, you may remember a SWTOR content creator called FibroJedi. About ten years ago, he was in the official content creator programme and everything! He took his name from the fact that he was suffering from fibromyalgia, a chronic health condition that mostly causes people a lot of pain for no physically apparent reason. (I had not heard about it before meeting him, a good example of how talking to different kinds of people can broaden your horizons.)

FibroJedi's website logo includes a depiction of Yoda wielding a giant spoon, a reference to spoon theory

He really opened my eyes to what life could be like if you approached SWTOR more casually, as he kind of had to do so by necessity. I used to very much be a proponent of how some challenge in MMOs makes everything more fun, but seeing his writings about the ways he sometimes struggled even with supposedly easy story content due to his disability really opened my eyes to a different perspective on that. I still think that challenge can be fun and that not everything needs to necessarily be for everyone, but his insights definitely showed me the value of having an easy story mode, especially in a game with as much focus on the narrative as SWTOR has.

Anyway, around 2020 he stepped down from the content creator programme and also more or less stopped playing SWTOR altogether because he found it too exhausting after the launch of Onslaught. He continued to create content about other MMOs though, primarily Lord of the Rings Online. Except - this week he announced that he's decided to step away from that as well (the content creation part that is) to focus on other things, and that his website will go away soon. He's arranged for this LOTRO and Final Fantasy XIV content to be moved to other platforms, but he noted that "[a]ll other content - that is to say, SWTOR and Fibromyalgia posts, will just disappear. Much of the stuff for SWTOR is out of date anyway."

That immediately made me - as someone who likes hoarding and preserving things, including digitally - go "nooo". I mean, okay, I guess some of his old guides and opinion pieces are probably outdated, but surely there were at least some posts that were still relevant. I immediately recalled his very detailed guides to the GSI daily missions for example.

So I trawled through his SWTOR content archive for a look, and was pleased to find that if nothing else, everything but a few fan fiction pieces had been captured on the Internet Archive (and I was able to capture the missing pages today). Not a place where things are necessarily obvious and easy to find, but they are still accessible if you want to look at them, even if not all the images are present and the formatting can be a bit wonky. I decided to compile a list of all of FJ's SWTOR-related posts on the Wayback Machine for easier finding in the future, after the original site goes down:

General SWTOR category:

• SWTOR: Gaming as Distraction from Fibromyalgia 
• SWTOR: Introducing Cor-Jhan Arcturus
• SWTOR: Connecting To My Characters
• SWTOR Neutral Alignment (Updated for LvD State)
• SWTOR (KotFE) Core World Changes
• SWTOR Level Sync - A Blessing and a Curse? 
• SWTOR: Obtaining the HK-51 Droid
• KOTFE Review - My Initial Thoughts 
• Companions in Knights of the Fallen Empire (KotFE)
• Should PvE Players Be Forced to PvP in SWTOR? 
• KotFE: Star Fortresses - A Division of Opinion?
• SWTOR C2-N2 Quest: Inflicting Comfort Mission on Odessen
• KotFE: Unanswered Questions by Chapter IX
• What Happens If You Kneel to Valkorion in KotFE?
• KotFE: Upcoming Subscriber Rewards
• Religions and Faith Systems in SWTOR
• KotFE Alliance Crates Missions - A Backwards Step?
• Anarchy in Paradise - SWTOR KotFE: Chapter X
• What Should You Do Before Starting KotFE?
• Battle of Ilum (Solo) Flashpoint Walkthrough
• SWTOR Little Boss - Alliance Recruitment Mission for Blizz
• KotFE Chapter 11: Disavowed (with Aric Jorgan)
• SWTOR Bugs and Launch Day Disruption: Give the Developers a Break
• To Find a Findsman - KotFE Alliance Recruitment: Yu'un
• SWTOR: The Death and Rebirth of a Jedi Battlemaster
• Visions in the Dark - KotFE chapter 12
• Profit and Plunder - KotFE Chapter 13 
• 4 Steps to Sharper, Clearer Screenshots in SWTOR (for Free)
• SWTOR Wallpapers for Desktop or Mobile - Free Downloads For All
• Mandalore's Revenge - KotFE Chapter 14: An Alliance of Mistrust 
• Open Letter to Bioware From a Chronic Pain Gamer
• Common Data Crystals - How To Spend Them
• Why Makeb is Swiftly Becoming my Favourite Planet
• The GEMINI Deception - KotFE Chapter 15
• The Battle of Odessen - KotFE Chapter 16
• Slow Levelling in SWTOR: A Gaming and Fibromyalgia Experiment
• KotET Without Playing KotFE - You Can, but Should You?
• Thorough Assessment Achievement in Arma Rasa with HK-55
• Let Arcann and Senya Go or Shoot them Down? - KotFE Chapter 16 - Battle of Odessen
• SWTOR Tatooine GSI Missions
• Altoholism: Is it Bad for Your Credit Balance?
• The Ghiran Legacy on SWTOR
• #SWTORfamily: What Should SWTOR Be About? Community.
• Fibro Jedi YouTube Channel Plan
• 19 Ways to Save Credits in SWTOR - Start Saving Today!
• SWTOR vs LOTRO (Part 1) - What SWTOR Could Learn from LOTRO
• SWTOR vs LotRO (Part 2) - What LotRO Could Learn from SWTOR
• Credit-Selling Mail Spam in SWTOR - What Should Be Done About It?
• How to Take Stunning Aerial Screenshots in SWTOR
• Fibromyalgia: The Reason My SWTOR Content Has Slowed Down
• Crisis on Umbara - What's Theron Shan Really Up to?
• SWTOR Manaan Stronghold Tour - Video and Pictorial Guide!
• 14 Ways to Enjoy SWTOR With Little or No Combat
• Traitor Among the Chiss on Copero - Solo Flashpoint Walkthrough
• SWTOR Artwork Commissions by Fiona Eaton aka Glorfinniell
• SWTOR Companion Influence
• SWTOR Alderaan GSI Missions Guide
• SWTOR Hoth GSI Missions Guide
• SWTOR Jedi Under Siege - How I Chose Who to Support
• SWTOR Gearing: A Beginners Guide
• How To Make Outfits in SWTOR: A Guide for Beginners
• SWTOR Free-to-play (F2P) Review
• Why Do Men Play Female Characters in MMOs? Why Do I and Does it Really Matter?
• SWTOR's New Gear Preview Window
• SWTOR Level Sync 2 - Digging into the Current System for Improvements
• The Black-Clad Warrior - SWTOR Outfit
• SWTOR Play Your Way - My Accessibility Hopes for Spoils of War
• Golden Gun - SWTOR Chiss Bounty Hunter Outfit
• SWTOR Character Combat Stats Guide
• Defender of the Free - SWTOR Jedi Shadow Outfit
• SWTOR Security Key - How to Set It Up With Authy
• SWTOR Imperial and Republic Fleet Maps
• How to Make Mara Jade Skywalker in SWTOR
• Force Alignment in SWTOR: What is it and How Do You Influence it?
• 24 Positive Life Lessons from Gaming in MMOs
• How to Make the Most of the SWTOR Character Panel
• Sage in the Dark - Black and Red Jedi Consular SWTOR Outfit
• Making Sense of Nautolan and Twi'lek Skin Colours in SWTOR
• SWTOR Onslaught Expansion Review - Galactic War Ignites
• SWTOR Gathering Guide - How & Where to Gather Crafting Materials by CelynTheRaven
• The Possession Obsession
• SWTOR Makeb GSI Missions Guide
• How To Make Gaming Emote Animated GIFs for Free
• SWTOR Rakghoul Resurgence Event Guide
• SWTOR Bounty Contract Week Event Guide (Part 1)
• Is End-Game in SWTOR Game Over for the Solo Player?
• Personal Conquest in SWTOR: Get Rewarded Simply by Playing the Game!
• SWTOR Beginners Guide by FJ
• I Don't Have Three Hands
• SWTOR Jedi Consular Companions
• SWTOR Life Day Event - Your Celebration Guide 

Knights of the Eternal Throne category (if not already included in the above list):

• KotET: What We Know About Knights of the Eternal Throne
• KotET SWTOR Producer Livestream
• Crafting in Knights of the Eternal Throne (KotET)
• Wrath and Ruin - KotET Chapter 1 on Voss
• Run For The Shadows - SWTOR KotET Chapter 2
• Dark Reunions - SWTOR KotET Chapter 3
• Where Dreams Die - SWTOR KotET Chapter 4 on Iokath
• Ascension - SWTOR KotET Chapter 5
• The Dragon's Maw - SWTOR KotET Chapter 6
• Into the Void - KotET Chapter 7: Vayilin - Nature or Nurture?
• End Times - SWTOR KotET Chapter 8 Walk-Through
• The Eternal Throne - SWTOR KotET Chapter 9 - Finally Defeat Valkorion 

SWTOR fan fiction:

• Prelude: Child of the Sacking 
• Prelude: Sjani: Heiress of the Skies
• Chapter 1: Devoted to Destruction 
• Part 2: Sanctuary
• Chapter 1 - Sjani: The Diversion 
• SWTOR: Introducing Sjani Arcturus
• Sjani: The Unplanned Journey
• Introduction: Sith Healer Talitha'koum 
• Sjani Arcturus - The Misinformation
• Prelude: A Light in the Darkness
• Intersecting Vectors
• Survival of the Sithest
• The Cost of Victory 
• A New Dawn for the Jedi 
• Sjani Arcturus: A Family Divided
• A Moment's Respite
• The Art of Deception
• Putting the Shadow back into the Jedi Shadow 
• The Need for Allies
• Introduction: Master Conspirator Pakarius (Imperial Agent)
• The Weapon of the Healer
• Trial by Ice on Ilum 
• You Cannot Hide Your Light Forever
• The Ascendance of the Slave
• Acolyte No More
• The Battle for Survival
• Interlude: Seeking Answers and Searching Feelings
• Testing Times on Tython: Cor-Jhan Arcturus
• Episode 2: The Darth's Downfall. Part 1: City Girl 
• Dark Investigation
• Echoes of the Past - Talitha'koum
• Cor-Jhan Arcturus: Time to Grow Up 
• Killer in the Shadows
• Facing the Madness - Talitha'koum SWTOR Fan Fiction
• To the Heart of Darkness - Talitha'koum SWTOR Fan Fiction
• Finding Herself - SWTOR KotET Fan Fiction
• The Rogue's SithLost and Found - Andronikos Revel and Talitha'koum Fan Fiction
• Running the Gauntlet to the Dark Temple - Talitha'koum Fan Fiction
• SWTOR Andronikos Revel Reunion
• Dark Mind Games - Talitha'koum Fan Fiction
• Blades and Shadows
• Escape to the Unknown
• The Twi'lek Captain - SWTOR Fan Fiction - Talitha'koum
• The Restless Flight
• Space Debris - Sjani - SWTOR Fan Fiction 
• The Heart of the Order - SWTOR Fan Fiction - Talitha'koum
• The Sickness Conundrum

I'm guessing you just scrolled past that huge list of links and you know what? Fair enough. I'm not going to pretend that I just re-read all of them myself today, though I did re-read some and enjoyed the nostalgia trip that came with that. I know from a usability perspective, people always want guides to be up-to-date, but from a historic perspective it can also be interesting to see what a guide on a certain topic said ten years ago. Not that long ago I found myself ruminating about how I actually remembered very little about the way endgame gearing worked back in Knights of the Fallen Empire (before KotET added the dreaded Galactic Command), and what do you know? FJ had a guide for that! His older opinion pieces were also a fond reminder of when the SWTOR blogosphere used to be a lot more lively and people were always exchanging thoughts and opinions on the latest content drops.

While this link list should be good enough for the purposes of someone specifically wanting to go back to find some of FJ's old posts, it won't make them easy to find on Google - which should be fine for the vaguely outdated stuff, but I think I might repost his GSI guides on here in full (with his permission of course), because they are still the most comprehensive content on the subject many years later. Yes, Swtorista has a page about how GSI works in general, but that won't necessarily help you when you're struggling to find Big Red on Alderaan.

Anyway, thank you, FJ, for your contributions to the SWTOR community, and for giving us a heads-up about your intentions with the website!

Patch 7.8 Ramblings

Patch 7.8 with the long-awaited story update and more landed this week, and for the first time in a while I felt like there were so many things going on in SWTOR at once, I hardly knew where to start. And I loved it!

I finished my last Galactic Seasons achievement on Darth Malgus last week (which means I should probably write my usual season review soon) but on the other servers I still need a few more weeklies for the last meta achievement, and I didn't want to abandon them completely this week, even if there was new content to explore on my main.

Mostly I just ran the featured flashpoint on each server, which was Legacy of the Rakata this week. And oh my god, the skips! Fortunately there's not too much annoying jumping going on in this one, but I was continually surprised by the number of trash pulls for which I learned that you can literally walk right through them without aggroing anything as long as you walk down a certain narrow line between two specific mobs. I always wondered who was the first person to figure that out and how it spread.

Primarily I wanted to check out the new story of course, but on launch night I saw a few people talking about bugs so I decided to hold off at first, because with the level of anticipation I was feeling, I figured I really couldn't deal with the disappointment of then running into a blocker. Fortunately the aforementioned issues were fixed quickly, and as of the time I'm writing this, I've played through the Galactic Threads story once. I can tell you that my first impression was very positive, but before I write my full review I need to see it a few more times on different classes. It seems like the kind of story that's mostly the same for everyone, but at least one part of it is gonna be different for Imperials, and there were a few other small moments where I found myself thinking "I wonder if you get a different line here if you have a different origin story". I've got to know!

One thing that was very obvious was that this update was originally meant to be part of patch 7.6, which also brought us the XR-53 lair boss on Ilum and the first batch of dynamic encounters on Tatooine and Hoth. Because the story has us going to all these places and there would've been some very obvious synergy there, discovering dynamic encounters for the first time as you're also cruising around Tatooine for the story. As it was, I was like "nope, I don't want to help promote your band right now, I'm 100% on Tatooine encounter achievements, bye". Though I did pause to help out the Weary Travellers at the taxi spot, because I can never ignore those. And on Hoth I helped rehome an ice cat, because I can rarely resist that either. I could just tell that it probably would've been an even better experience if it had come out as originally planned.

One tiny thing I'll comment on in terms of the story - and I guess this could be considered a spoiler if you're a purist, but it's only a small thing that happens literally in the first five minutes - is that I took the opportunity to flirt with Rass Ordo, and for a moment it looked like it was gonna go somewhere, but then he wasn't in the mood. It just made me realise I'm so ready for my trooper to finally kiss someone. Since her creation almost fourteen years ago, she's taken some flirt options here and there, but has never taken it all the way! I sure hope Rass is around in the next update as well.

Next to the story, the other big addition that came with the patch was of course the new dynamic encounter zone on Dantooine. Again, I'll have to make a longer post about that later on, but first impressions are once again positive, even if I had some issues with bugs on day one.

On top of all that, it was the start of a new PvP season, so I once again jumped back into warzones and some lower-level arenas. Within the same evening, I had one Voidstar match that was absolutely beautiful, with amazing, objective-focused teamwork that I see so rarely in a pug, and an Ancient Hypergate where someone yelled insults and ALL CAPS at me after I failed to defend a pylon. I put them on ignore as I've had to do with others before them, but it still always gives me an unpleasant adrenaline rush in the moment to be attacked like that, and no matter how much I tell myself that I don't need to care about the opinions of some random internet stranger, it can be really hard not to dwell on it. Always reminds me of why so many people avoid PvP.

Finally, the devs once again made some minor changes to the user interface this patch. They keep doing that and I'm sure they have their reasons, but it's honestly always a bit jarring and strange from a player perspective. Did we really have to devote development time to making the quest tracker ALL CAPS for example? However, I will say that in this particular case, all was forgiven on my part the moment I noticed that they also added a scroll bar to the quest tracker at last, which is something that filled me with delight. I always hated how that feature always just kind of "gave up" after five missions or whatever the previous limit was and simply added "X additional missions tracked" at the bottom. It's not really helping me to say I'm tracking these missions if I can't actually see any details about them, is it? Well, with the addition of the scroll bar, I finally can. Thanks, Broadsword!

Tulak Hord Talk

After eight seasons and almost four years of playing on multiple servers, I'm pretty well settled in everywhere, with a growing roster of alts on each server and most of my characters in stable guilds. The one server where I was still feeling a bit "unsafe" though was Tulak Hord, mainly because I hadn't really found a guild that truly covered all my needs and made me feel like it was going to stick around.

You may recall from this post last year that after more than two years of staying in a two-person guild, my attempt to find something a bit more suitable for someone interested in playing alts and doing Conquest led me to a guild that turned out to run an old-fashioned guild website that nobody actually used. I was a bit put out by that but stuck around.

Over time, things got more quiet in said guild. I never actually got to know my guildies really, but I was under the impression that there had been a core group of people that did operations together, and it looked like that had eventually fallen apart. The guild wasn't strictly dead, but going by the numbers on the weekly Conquest board, it at one point looked like I was one of a maximum of five people that were still playing.

I had almost resigned myself to potentially inheriting the guild eventually once the last of the other players stopped logging in, but after several months of this state of relative inactivity, I noticed that things started picking up again, not because the gang was back together, but because the person that the GM title had defaulted to had seemingly decided to go on a recruiting spree. Which was fine by me, but I didn't give it too much thought either.

Tonight though, something funny happened. I was just doing a few more quests on an alt (on Tulak Hord, obviously) to finish off one last weekly seasons objective when someone said "hey Shin" in guild chat. I said hi back but didn't pay it any further mind as I hadn't really had a lot of interaction with anyone in the guild.

I continued to focus on my questing, until the same person said something along the lines of "I'll just go back to DM now" and I swear for a moment my brain was short circuiting. Why was someone speaking English in guild chat on Tulak Hord? And why were they telling me about going back to Darth Malgus? What server was I on again? What the heck was even going on?

I opened the guild panel and looked at the only other person online. Their legacy name didn't sound familiar, but the character name vaguely rang a bell. It sounded kind of like one of my guildies from Darth Malgus, the one who'd inspired me to try doing Galactic Seasons on multiple servers in the first place.

"Xen?!" I typed incredulously, and with my mind still spinning. How could he be here? Had I ever gotten him invited into this guild? No, even I couldn't be that forgetful, surely? What was happening?

He proceeded to tell me that he'd been invited the other day via a random recruitment message, after his last guild on Tulak Hord had kicked him for inactivity. I mean, what are the freaking odds? I just thought that was absolutely wild. Tulak Hord isn't the biggest server, but it's still got a good number of guilds, and the one we are now both in is relatively small, so that was some crazy serendipity alright. 

On an unrelated note, another thing that bothered me about playing on Tulak Hord until recently was that this guild didn't have an Imperial counterpart, so my Imperial alts were still homeless and lost in space. I'd done a bit of research about where I could take them but hadn't come up with anything enticing enough for me to make the effort of actively applying.

Well, the other night I was just about to log off on my Sith inquisitor when someone offered me a random invite to their guild. I checked that the guild name wasn't anything offensive or utterly ridiculous and accepted. So now I'm a pirate on Imp side, and my characters have the guild rank "fish food". We'll see where that goes! 

Flashpointing on Different Servers

One of the major reasons I've really been enjoying the current Galactic Season is that it's gotten me back into pugging. I've enjoyed doing group content in SWTOR with strangers for as long as I can remember, but over the last few years I've kind of fallen out of the habit on my home server Darth Malgus. I think it's mainly because I spend so much time on organising and running things with my guild that my "weekly group content quota" feels more than filled by the time that's all done.

On the other servers though, it's a different story. While most of my characters are guilded at this point, due to time zones I rarely find myself with an opportunity to join my guildies there for group content, so most of the time I'm at the mercy of random strangers who happen to be online at the same time as me. And it's been surprisingly fun!

What's been really interesting about the whole experience though is that doing at least one flashpoint per week on every server, one can really feel the different vibes. I briefly toyed with the idea of taking detailed notes and trying to come up with some sort of objective ranking but quickly discarded that notion, both because it would've been a lot of work but also because things like whether you had a nice group or why you may have liked one pug more than another are really hard to objectively quantify. I decided it was fine to limit myself to subjective observations and let people make their own judgements about that.

To begin with, I'll say that the differences between the servers are actually not dramatic in my opinion. It's not like you'll always have good runs on one server and bad ones on another. So far this season, every single flashpoint I got into was completed successfully, with the exception of a master mode Ruins of Nul where we called it quits on Regnant. However, that particular boss is very tough, we'd given it several decent tries, and it just didn't look like we were getting even close to succeeding. Everyone was very polite about collectively admitting defeat at that point.

I also haven't seen a single hostile vote-kick initiated anywhere, which was interesting to me compared to World of Warcraft, where people will boot you for the most frivolous of reasons. In my SWTOR flashpoints this season, I once initiated a kick for someone who'd been disconnected for a while when we couldn't proceed any further at a checkpoint that required everyone in the group to be present and click, and in another run an individual who'd been kind of toxic themselves actively begged to be kicked to get away from the rest of the group. But that was entirely it.

That's not to say that all players in my flashpoints have been perfect angels, but if there's conflict, people would seemingly rather have a verbal fight about it than simply try to give their opponent the boot, which I find interesting. I could imagine that some might prefer being quietly removed over being insulted in what's supposed to be just a game, but personally I kind of appreciate that this shows that even when things get heated, SWTOR players have an unspoken attitude of "we're in this together, so let's all just get to the end, OK?" where they don't want to deprive someone else of their flashpoint credit even if they find the other person annoying.

Generally, most of my runs have been what I'd call pleasant and quiet: not much conversation and we just get on with things without too much friction. Usually at least one person will aim for every possible shortcut there is, but at the same time nobody bats an eyelid if someone fails to be sneaky and pulls an extra group - you just help to clean up and get on with it.

So that's what's been the same on all servers. Now let's talk about those subtle differences I mentioned:

I feel like on Leviathan and Tulak Hord, you can really tell that these are smaller communities as everything's just a little bit more friendly and relaxed. People are a bit more chatty than average, with everyone always saying hi and bye at the start and end of a run and actually pausing to discuss tactics if there are any questions or hiccups. I wouldn't say these chats are necessarily "nicer" than on other servers (the chattiness can also include rudeness or complaints) but there is a clear acknowledgement of the other players being there and attempts at communication.

You'll run into people with a range of skills, from the one who's never done the instance before to the experienced raider, with most probably sitting somewhere in-between. These servers are small but still healthy communities, where you'll learn to recognise the names of some of the bigger guilds after a while.

This is somewhat of a contrast to Star Forge, whose mega server status has only been increasing over the past couple of years, as people from smaller servers with an interest in high-end or queued content are increasingly transferring off the smaller servers in order to have a larger pool of players to work with and shorter queues. As a result of that, I feel like Star Forge is the server where you have the highest chance of having one or more super efficiency-obsessed players in your group who set a stiff pace because they're already planning their next activity afterwards and don't want to spend a second more inside this flashpoint than they have to. If there's some new degenerate trash skip, you'll probably learn it here. (Me in D7: What's this guy doing, running right through so many groups at once? Wait what, if we just stand here and wait, everything evades? WTF.)

I think this creates an interesting conundrum because in general we'd like to guide new players towards a server that's busy and where queues are popping, but I can't help but get the impression that at least as far as flashpoints are concerned, almost any other server is probably a more welcoming environment for someone's first run, as people are going at least marginally more slowly, so that chances of the newbie just being left behind and panicking over where everyone went are at least somewhat reduced.

To clarify though, I'm not claiming that Star Forge players are unfriendly or anything. I haven't seen that particular situation arise myself, but I imagine most would probably be perfectly fine with slowing down a bit if someone said that they're new and need a bit of help. It's just that the default assumption in group content seems to be that if you're on Star Forge, you're here because you're a veteran player who wants to maximise your efficiency in terms of play time, more so than anywhere else at least.

This is particularly striking when compared to Satele Shan, the other and now smaller US server. Am I saying that everything there is super slow? Not at all, SS players can also be in a hurry, but what has stood out to me there is how much personality players display in my runs there. Both my best and worst runs of the season (so far) have been on Satele Shan.

The worst was a run where one guy was always rushing ahead and ignoring that the rest of the group was still fighting things, while another player who was queued as tank was pulling things willy-nilly without actually tanking them. These two people could hardly have been more at odds with each other, they fought about it, and me and the remaining dps were awkwardly caught in the middle.

The good runs on the other hand were ones where people were chatting happily, asking to do the bonus boss and just generally goofing off in a way that's just such a contrast to the more business-like, in-and-out approach that I usually encounter on Star Forge (and many other servers). It's like everyone who wants a fast and easy ride has transferred off and what's left of the population has a much higher density of absolute maniacs (both good and bad).

Finally, we have Shae Vizla, the Oceanic server where queued content mostly died about three months after its release. The current and previous Galactic Season have been good at creating groups for the featured content at least, but I've got to admit the experience always feels a bit sad to me, because my impression is that you basically get only two kinds of people in these runs: complete newbies who decided to queue up for something for the first time, and seasoned veterans who are only here for Galactic Seasons (and are usually in one of three guilds). 

I'm being a bit hyperbolic of course, but it does feel markedly different from the vibes on Leviathan and Tulak Hord, where you still have this healthy mix of different player types. On Shae Vizla, the newbies presumably don't talk because they're unsure of what's going on, and the veterans don't talk because they're like Star Forge rushers on crack - gotta quickly finish this flashpoint here so I can do it five more times on the other servers!

I'm curious whether others who've done group content on more than one server have had similar experiences or see the situation completely differently. Even if you play on only one server, do you think my characterisation of the flashpoint-playing population matches up with your own experiences there?

A Farewell to the OotiniCast

According to the OotiniCast website, they posted their first episode on November 19, 2011, almost thirteen and a half years ago. I myself didn't find out about them until about two years later, with the first mention of them on the blog dating back to February 2014 and a post called "Some Podcast Recommendations". It's funny to me that even back then, more than eleven years ago, I described OotiniCast as "one of those SWTOR podcasts that have seemingly been around forever".

However, even "seemingly forever" eventually comes to an end, and I was slightly dismayed when I found out on Bluesky last week that they were going to record their very last episode this past Tuesday. I very rarely caught them live, as time zones meant that their recording time usually started around midnight in the UK, but as we're currently in the strange twilight zone of the US having changed to daylight savings while Europe hasn't done so yet, this particular show started an hour earlier for me than usual and I was able to stay up to tune in. It was a good and wholesome time, even if cried right along with Chill at the end when he wrapped things up, explained what was going to happen next and thanked everyone for their contributions over the years.

I'm not going to pretend that I was OotiniCast's number one loyal fan who listened to every single episode, because I didn't. I think I used to listen to them more frequently in the early days compared to later on, but even so my engagement was always a bit on and off from what I remember. It's not that the show wasn't interesting enough, but it never tried to promote itself as hard as other fan sites. They talked about the news, but they weren't your number one news source about SWTOR, and while their tip of the week could be insightful and useful, they weren't exactly aiming to teach you how to play the game either (a bit like me on the blog really). I reckon this was both a blessing and a curse.

I think it was clearly a blessing in so far as I don't think the show would've been able to keep going for as long as it did if it had tried to be something other than a couple of friends chatting about the game and inviting the community to join in. I watched so many other podcasts come and go over the years, and they often managed to entice me with catchy episode titles or in-depth discussions about specific topics - but two dozen episodes later they'd run out of interesting subjects to talk about at length, quickly followed by them burning out and/or losing interest.

I do however think that the more meandering nature of the podcast was a bit of a curse in the sense that it made it a lot harder to promote it in a way that grabbed people's attention. In the early days, they would at least have detailed show notes on the site that would give you a glimpse of what to expect from each episode, but at some point that was replaced by a simple copy and paste with just a bit of information about the show in general, including a link to their guild website which had stopped working years ago. I imagine that with every new episode announcement simply being summed up as some variation of "here's a new episode in which we talk about stuff", it became a lot harder to draw in new listeners.

That said, I feel like OotiniCast's influence on the community over the years should not be understated. I think due to its sheer longevity, pretty much anyone looking up anything about SWTOR online would stumble across it eventually. While most episodes were just the hosts chatting, over the years they also included interviews with devs, voice actors and other content creators, and I think you'll struggle to find people who've been involved in SWTOR fan spaces who haven't been touched by and/or involved with the OotiniCast at some point. (Checking my email, I found that I myself sent them some suggestions for questions for an interview with Charles Boyd back in 2020.)

I remember crying over nine years ago when Chill shared the story of his wife's death (which was absolutely heartbreaking), but there were also many more happy moments. OotiniCast was where I first heard about the notion of levelling from one to cap purely via GSF for example (yes, there was a time when you could queue for GSF at level one).

In recent years, Chill would always tell stories about wacky projects he'd start, such as farming Coruscant heroics on every single alt for Alliance crates, levelling without a companion, or levelling his newest alt named and dressed up based on another IP and the strange shenanigans they would get up to. In the last episode he talked about how he'd created a trooper called Zapp Brannigan (based on the character from Futurama), how he made him make all the worst choices, and how he was going to turn Yuun into his version of Kif. I always thought that was funny and fascinating, because it's not how I'd play myself but sounds really fun in its own way.

Chill didn't go into much detail about why they decided to end the show beyond mentioning changes in his real life and that he just didn't want to keep going with it. Considering that he was there from the beginning (unlike his co-hosts, who seemed to change every few years), I think he definitely earned the right to just go "I think I've done this for long enough; I want to do something else now." I appreciate that he did draw a clear line to end the show instead of letting it simply fade into oblivion, with updates just stopping with no further notice.

That said, I've got to admit I've been kind of surprised by how hard the news hit me, considering that I wasn't someone who listened to every single episode. I think it's because OotiniCast is the one SWTOR fan site I could think of that was actually older than mine and was still receiving regular updates. I feel kind of like when you've been employed somewhere for a while and find out that the last guy who's been there longer than you is leaving. Suddenly you're the most senior person in the room, and there's no longer anyone left who can reminisce with you about "the good old days". I mean, does anyone reading this in 2025 even remember Darth Hater, TORWars or TOROCast? I kind of feel like I'll be entering my "old lady yelling at clouds" era soon.

All that said, I salute Chill and the rest of the hosts for their dedication over the years (putting out more than 500 episodes of a single podcast over so many years is amazing) and I hope they can continue enjoying the game even without podcasting about it. Your contributions will be missed.

Around the SWTOR-sphere: February 2025

I'm a little late posting this due to real life reasons, but I certainly wasn't lacking in interesting material to share in February!

• First we have "I Soloed SWTOR's TOUGHEST Raid Bosses!" by Snoopster, which was posted on the 31st of January and therefore just missed getting into the January round-up, but which I loved so much that I just had to feature it here instead. For those who're not familiar with his work, Snoopster used to be known as SWTOR Snoopy and is an old-school content creator who's seemingly less concerned with maximising his view count and more with having fun, with many of his videos being goofy and silly. He just seemed to kind of lose interest in SWTOR at some point, so it was an unexpected (but welcome) surprise to suddenly see him coming out of the woodwork with a two-hour magnum opus unlike anything he'd done before. I know the length may be intimidating to some, but it's filled with his usual fast-paced editing throughout and at least to me, there wasn't a boring moment. As a bonus (for me) I unexpectedly got to see one of my guildies included, as Aregelle (who's featured in the section about Bonethrasher) is in my guild and ops team.
• It being a new year, it's time for a new round of "Is SWTOR worth playing this year" videos! Unfortunately the first one I saw in January was an utter disappointment (which is why it didn't get featured). I'd seen the creator's 2024 version and it looked like they hadn't even logged in during the past year. I (politely) queried this in the comment section, just for my comment to quietly disappear into the aether, which told me all I needed to know, really. "Is Star Wars the Old Republic Worth Playing in 2025?" by Emperor Bebop on the other hand was more to my liking, as even if it doesn't get everything 100% correct (I did leave a comment on the video about the point about inflation being outdated for example), he does show some knowledge about the game (including endgame, which is somewhat unusual for this type of video) and is pretty funny. The self-awareness at the start of the video sure made me chuckle.
  
  That said, if you're looking for something that's more factual and not aiming for five jokes a minute, Swtorista just released her own "Is SWTOR worth trying in 2025?" video a few days ago, which is still the gold standard for providing accurate and concise information for new players. Though I was a bit surprised that she apparently already forgot about the existence of the Shae Vizla server, as she talks about "all three English servers" at one point. Then again, she gave a warning that the population of Satele Shan isn't as high as it used to be, so maybe her not even mentioning Shae Vizla is meant to tell us something in its own way.
• Following the Bioware lay-offs in January (I shared some links on the subject last month), the Ask a Game Dev blog was asked "Why did SWTOR get shuffled to a different developer if it was apparently Bioware's most steady source of income for the better part of the last decade?" The answer isn't exactly going to shock and surprise anyone who's been following this blog and everything surrounding the move to Broadsword from the beginning, but it's nice to see someone else lay it out in even greater detail.
• Fellow SWTOR blogger Intisar continued his Pets of the Old Republic series (which I failed to give its proper due to when he first started it) with two new installments posted in February, about Dwedtoof and the Heartglow Mewvorr. I really like this series because I think there's generally not a lot of conversation about pets in SWTOR other than urgency to log in and grab them whenever they're being given away as subscriber rewards. Intisar's series goes into a lot of detail about the surrounding context for each creature, including lore from the wider Star Wars universe, and I always learn something new from each post.
• Speaking of learning new things, SWTOR content creator Illeva put out an updated companion customisation guide last month, which I took a look at because I was curious and wow, I didn't even know Treek and other Cartel Market companions had customisations! I used to not care about companion customisations that much because I generally quite like the default looks (plus some of them are quite iconic, let's be honest), but by the time you're levelling your tenth trooper it can be fun to make Aric look a bit different, you know?
• Getting in just under the wire, Chash Larol of the Old Republic Era blog posted about "The State of SWTOR's Economy Part 2" on the last day of the month, a subject that hasn't been getting enough exposure I think. What I mean is that people were crying endlessly when inflation was running rampant, yet ever since the devs actually fixed it, things have been conspicuously silent on the subject, so that I still see people talk about the economy being crazy (like in the video I linked above!) even when that hasn't been true in several years now. We need to be louder about the fact that this is no longer true. Many commodities and Cartel Market items on the GTN are probably the cheapest now that they've been in about eight years.

Got any SWTOR content of your own to recommend that was released in February? Feel free to leave a comment!

Around the SWTOR-sphere: January 2025

How are we already one month into 2025? Time gets weird as you get older. Anyway, here are some links to interesting, useful and/or fun SWTOR-related content that I came across over the past thirty days.

• Intisar decided to pass on making silly predictions this year (even though that has kind of become a tradition for him) and instead gave some more serious thought to what the new year might bring for SWTOR. I'm not going to say much more than that, just go and read for yourself!
• Roger from Contains Moderate Peril, whom I also gave a shout-out last month, continued documenting his journeys in SWTOR with Revisiting Star Wars: The Old Republic Part 4, in which he hits legendary status among other things. While he expressed some interest in endgame, I'm really curious whether there's going to be a part five or not, as I suspect that the transition into endgame is a point where many players fall off.
• Kal from Today in TOR decided to ring in the new year with a guide called "How to Make Credits in SWTOR 2025". I tend to find credit-making guides interesting in the sense that the very idea of playing the game specifically to make credits has always been quite foreign to me, as I find that just looting everything and playing in ways that I enjoy tends to provide for all my needs and then some, but I guess I also don't spend a lot of credits (besides the repair bills during operations) and there'll always be players looking for shortcuts to have more money available while playing less. I do like that Kal tried to label and sort everything very clearly, so everyone can find something whether they are subscribed or not, and whether they play with friends or by themselves. He's also intending to keep the guide updated on a regular basis (since a lot of it is based on selling items on the GTN, where prices might vary).
• Swtorista maintained her recent focus on fashion by fully mapping all the rewards you get for playing through the KotFE/KotET chapters, including the different weapons and outfits for every combat style. I was kind of in awe of that simply because chapters are among my least favourite content in the game and I can't imagine replaying them so many times just for a project, but she told me it made for good content to do on stream, where she can't necessarily focus much on the gameplay anyway while chatting with viewers. Anyway, some of those Outlander armours don't look half bad!
• My favourite post from the SWTOR subreddit this month was a short one called "Smuggler bad ending" by user Lomakys. It's not long so I don't want to spoil it, but in short they experienced something unexpected during the end of chapter one of their class story and the whole description of the event and their response to it made me smile.
• As I was putting this together, a comment I saw on reddit reminded me of a YouTuber I've been meaning to give a shout-out for a while: TakesCooosh. He's made some guides I think, but the primary content on his channel are videos of him doing group content in pugs, usually master mode flashpoints. You might have seen him in your recommendations before if you've ever come across a thumbnail with a short title and a cute pink cartoon twi'lek making a face. The thing is, I'm a little bit conflicted about him to be totally honest - he seems like a nice guy in all the vids I've seen and can be pretty funny, but his mannerisms are also very... "stereotypical streamer" with the YELLING and the EXAGGERATED REACTIONS to everything; it honestly makes me feel very, very old just to watch (and even hurts my ears sometimes). That said, I realise the latter is more of a me problem than anything else, so I still wanted to give that shout-out, because I do think he definitely deserves more viewers than he's got. Here's an example video from last month, hand-picked by me, called "WE GOT SOME NEW GAMERS", in which he tanks a Czerka Core Meltdown and things go kind of wrong, because we all know that's more interesting to watch than a super smooth run, right?
  
• Finally, in news not directly related to SWTOR (anymore), Bioware announced another round of massive lay-offs the other day. There's been a fair amount of talk about it online, but here's the IGN article for reference. While this is sad news for all the affected devs, it does kind of strike me as ironic that after literally over a decade of people predicting SWTOR's imminent doom, it currently looks likely to outlive the studio that originally created it. In 2023, most voices seemed to view the game's move to Broadsword as a bad sign for The Old Republic, but it really does look like it was bad news for Bioware more than anyone else. Ask a Game Developer has a bit of commentary on the lay-offs and also mentions that 2024 was Bioware's first year without SWTOR and that this likely hurt their financial situation significantly.

Around the SWTOR-sphere: December 2024

It's the end of December, which means that I successfully made it through another year, and I was actually able to keep up with this series pretty well! Summer was a bit of a quiet season where I skipped a couple of months when I didn't really have much to share, but other than that I've managed to find some things to recommend pretty much every month.

• December seemed to be a month for more casual players to come back to SWTOR, whether it was because of the anniversary celebrations or because of the threat of the impending name purge for inactive characters. Roger from Contains Moderate Peril was inspired to return by the latter and wrote down some thoughts about his most recent experiences in "Revisiting Star Wars: The Old Republic Part 3". He also made a separate post about dynamic encounters. If the "part 3" in the title of the first post makes you wonder where parts one and two are, the answer is that those were made in 2022 and can be found here and here respectively.
• Another MMO blogger that gave the game another spin was Syp from Bio Break, who decided to make a new smuggler for what's probably the sixth time or so. I'm always kind of surprised he isn't more curious about all the class stories he's never seen before. Think I'm exaggerating his love for smugglers? Check out his blog's archive for the SWTOR tag.
• Speaking of personalities from the wider MMO space, if you haven't seen it yet, you'll definitely want to check out Josh Strife Hayes' magnum opus of a video called "The Ultimate MMO Tier List (Backed by SCIENCE) (sort of)". It's (obviously) not about SWTOR in specific, but SWTOR is included in the ranking. If you do want to know more about his thoughts about that game in specific, I did write about it when he gave it its own dedicated review back in 2022.
• Looking at SWTOR content creators in specific, Kal from Today in TOR posted a great dev interview with Ashley and Caitlin this month in which they talked about things like lore and their writing process, which was extremely insightful if you're interested in that kind of stuff at all. Full disclosure: part of why I was so pleased with this interview was that Kal collected questions from the public to submit for the interview, and literally half the questions they chose to answer were ones submitted by me. (Others may have proposed similar ones, I don't know, but the point stands that I apparently ask good questions.)
• Meanwhile Swtorista decided to go down the rabbit hole of Rare Blue and Purple World Drop Gear in SWTOR, which is such a convoluted and historically complicated system it makes my head spin, and I'm impressed that she was interested enough in the subject to actually do the research and put it all together. I know it's a meme that "fashion is the real endgame" but I'm not sure even World of Warcraft has as many content creators posting about how to collect outfits as SWTOR does.
• On the PvP front, Ivano 1337 caught my eye with his video "SWTOR 7.6 PVP TIER LIST | Best Classes for 8v8 Warzones". Now, tier lists can be entertaining content by themselves, but one thing I appreciate about Ivano's content (and I think I mentioned this before) is that as a more casual PvPer myself, I will often notice that something feels "off" somehow, but not being an expert in the field I can't quite put my finger on what exactly is wrong. In this specific case, I've been doing a lot of my PvP as Vigilance Guardian/Vengeance Juggernaut, which more recently just hasn't felt as good for some reason. Seeing Ivano put their current strengths and weaknesses into such clear terms while also ranking them as the weakest of the Guardian/Jug specs in the current environment was a real a-ha moment for me. Since then I've respecced to skank tank and while it hasn't suddenly improved my win rate (probably because I'm still figuring out what I'm doing) it's been really refreshing and a lot more fun. Not to say I necessarily encourage everyone to play whatever's the latest flavour of the month, but if you're struggling to make a particular spec work for you, understanding why that is and how you might have a better experience is really helpful I think.
• Finally, YouTuber /JawaFace got very excited about the introduction of the new companion mount with patch 7.6 - just for said excitement to turn into bitter disappointment when it turned out that his favourite Jawa Blizz doesn't fit into the sidecar for some reason. He expressed his feelings in a creative way with a short video simply called "Companion Mount", which gave me a good chuckle. Are you seeing this, devs?