Back in My Day: Datacrons

 "Back in My Day" is a (very) irregular series in which I muse about how certain aspects and features of Star Wars: The Old Republic have changed over time. After writing my post about Kessan's Landing last month, I really wanted to talk a bit more about datacrons.

Datacrons are a funny subject to consider for this series, because in some fundamental ways they haven't changed at all. That +2 presence datacron you might stumble upon on Coruscant or Dromund Kaas is still in exactly the same place it was in 2011, and you still interact with it in the same way: click on it and you'll get a stat boost. However, some things have changed:

Most notably, credit for datacrons wasn't legacy-wide until Knights of the Fallen Empire, so if you wanted certain stat boosts, you had to pick them up on every single one of your characters. However, the degree to which datacrons affected your character's power level was also somewhat different. Last but not least, as the devs added more datacrons to the game, their approach to what kind of experience players hunting for those new datacrons should have clearly changed.

The Power of the 'cron

I think it's safe to say that datacrons were always considered optional content, but what that meant at launch was a bit different compared to what it means now. +2 endurance grants you about 20-26 extra points of health from what I understand (my own quick testing in game showed about 10 HP per stat point but I saw claims on the forums that it was 13), which was never a huge number... but relatively speaking, it was worth more when your total health pool at max level was 20k as opposed to the 400k or so we're seeing nowadays. I never heard anyone say that it was mandatory to get all datacrons relevant to your class to get into raiding... but it was certainly recommended, especially if you were planning to push into higher difficulties.

There was also the matter of matrix shards. At launch, getting gear for your relic slots was not a trivial matter, and one way to get a really good one was to assemble a "matrix cube" out of three matrix shards, which would form a basic relic with some useful stats on it. The first time I took an active interest in datacrons back in the day was precisely for that reason. As far as I'm aware, this functionality is actually still in the game, it's just that nobody bothers with it anymore because the devs never made an update that would've allowed you to build better matrix cubes than those original level 50 ones.

Hope you like jumping

Because credit for datacrons was character-specific and you needed to physically collect matrix shards on each one, you had to revisit some of them a lot. It is worth noting though that you didn't need all datacrons on every character. Before KotFE introduced the mastery stat, each advanced class had a proprietary stat to themselves (aim for troopers/bounty hunters, cunning for smugglers and agents, strength for knights and warriors, and willpower for consulars and inquisitors), so anything that granted a stat that didn't really do anything for you could safely be ignored.

I actually didn't bother with datacrons for the most part while levelling up my first few characters, and I didn't find more than a couple organically, but the longer I played, the more often I found myself grouping with other people who felt the urge to share their knowledge about datacrons close to our position, so I started to learn more about them over time in a pretty organic way. Things kind of reached a peak when I started regular questing with my pet tank, as he knew all of their locations and wanted to pick all of them up as part of the levelling journey on every character.

When Bioware first announced that datacrons were going to become legacy-wide, I actually wasn't that thrilled, because they were a form of content to me that made playing alts more entertaining, and I didn't like the thought of that going away. I will say that nearly a decade and several dozen alts later, I feel that it was probably the right decision... though part of my enjoyment of playing on other servers has definitely been having a reason to revisit some of those datacrons for the first time in many years.

Datacron gameplay

Unless I miscounted, the game offered 90 datacrons to collect at launch. I would say the ways to acquire them fell into four basic categories (with some overlap between them): simply finding them in hidden locations somewhat out of the way, requiring completion of a jumping puzzle, requiring some sort of item interaction (e.g. picking up the MGGS from the vendor and taking it to the right place), or riding some sort of lift or floating device to a specific location. God knows how many hours in total I spent riding the Jawa balloon on Tatooine... but in hindsight, none of these were overly demanding. If you set out on a fresh character to pick up all of them, it would take several hours of your time, but considering how many of them there are, it wasn't unreasonable (unless you were really bad at jumping I guess).

However, once the devs started adding new datacrons with expansions and patches... they started to get more inventive. The Makeb presence datacron was still in line with what had come before, but the endurance one was an insanely long jumping puzzle that would send you all the way back to the start every time you failed. And then the Rishi one involved an item farm that required a silly amount of grinding - not something you would reasonably want to do on every character. Though at least both of those datacrons were shareable, so that one person who completed the whole journey was then able to summon others to get credit without them having to go through the whole ordeal themselves.

After KotFE we didn't get any datacrons for a while, but once we got to Ossus, I thought it became quite clear that the devs had decided to take a different approach now that datacrons were legacy-wide. If you weren't expected to get to a datacron more than once, they could make it pretty hard and time-consuming the first time around without that feeling entirely unreasonable. Two of the three Ossus datacrons were still pretty "old-school" in the amount of effort required, but the third required you to both jump and puzzle in a personal phase where you couldn't get any help.

We saw a similar pattern with Onslaught, where the Mek-Sha datacrons and one of the ones on Onderon were pretty standard jump or ride puzzles (though I thought the jumping ones were fiendishly hard, if not punishingly long like the Makeb Endurance one) and then the Onderon Mastery datacron was a brutal combo of jumping and puzzling on a timer, making it one of the hardest datacrons in the game so far. Ruhnuk and Kessan's Landing haven't been as harsh in terms of skill requirements, but once again involve a personal phase and completion of a long quest chain beforehand, which to me makes it pretty clear that the devs are trying to make each datacron more of an experience now, knowing that you probably won't be visiting it more than once.

I have no particularly strong feelings about this. I think it makes sense with the way the game has evolved, but it does also mean that datacrons have changed from being more of a collectible power-up that usually supported and sometimes even required grouping in the early days to having more of a solo skill challenge focus now.

Kessan's Landing

I've settled into a kind of routine when it comes to writing about SWTOR's major patches: write a first impressions post, put together a detailed review of the new story content, sum up how I feel about the new planet/flashpoint/operation/whatever the main new gameplay feature of the patch is, followed by a couple of additional posts for any other business, such as UI updates or other minor changes.

As far as 7.4 goes, I covered most of that, but the one thing I was still missing was a rundown of the new planetary map on Ord Mantell, Kessan's Landing. To be honest, I think the main reason I've been putting off writing about it is that it's been... fine. Good, even! I have no major complaints. At the same time I didn't exactly feel blown away by its awesomeness, so... I've just kind of struggled to find a lot to say about it.

I suppose the one thing I'm not too fond of is that it's night time there. I guess the devs opted for that to strengthen the slightly oppressive mood that hangs over the town, plus to create additional visual distinction between Kessan's Landing and "old" Ord Mantell, as the two areas use a lot of the same general "building blocks" otherwise, such as sandy beaches, rocky cliffs and glowing lava flows. Night time is never great for taking screenshots of your character though.

Doesn't mean there aren't any nice vistas to look at.

I also thought it was interesting how much bigger Kessan's Landing is compared to many older in-game towns. All the villages on the starter planets tend to consist of like, five buildings, which is quite video-gamey and not very realistic. I liked that Kessan's Landing felt more like a real place where people could actually live.

The dailies were decent fun. As I've said many times before, I'm not a huge fan of dailies, but I do like doing them sometimes, and they are one of the better types of content for me and Mr Commando to do together nowadays, considering that the story is a purely solo affair. After the troubles we had with Ruhnuk, it was nice to return to a mode of running dailies that felt more relaxed and less punishing. The map is reasonably open for the most part, meaning you don't have to fight every single mob you encounter, except for the narrow tunnels leading up to and inside of Fort Ronning, but that's okay because it adds flavour by making that particular area feel more dangerous.

Mr Commando soon figured out a path that took us through a full round of both normal and heroic dailies in good time, and we faithfully did that every week until we maxed out the reputation track. I thought it was interesting that while most of the dailies come from the terminal in town, there are a couple that have to be "found" and picked up from NPCs around the area, something that reminded me of Yavin IV and Ziost. I was just a bit disappointed that the missions seemed to be exactly the same for Republic and Imperial players - with exactly one exception, oddly, in that Republic players have to save grazers while Imperials capture an asharl panther.

The heroics were decent fun to duo as well, and the [Heroic 4] is proper hard without feeling like a slog, as you basically just have to fight one mob with a lot of health that also has some hard-hitting mechanics. Ironically, the open world boss FR3-D0M felt relatively easy in comparison, though at least it has some bad stuff you actually need to step out of - as opposed to Kithrawl on Ruhnuk who's basically a big sack of potatoes that you just need to wear down.

Kessan's Landing also has a new datacron, which... honestly, maybe I should just make a whole post about the evolution of datacrons at some point. However, for this post it's enough to say that the most recent trend with them has been to force players to do the work themselves, ensuring that people can't just get summoned to the datacron location on day one and get their stat buff without even knowing what was involved in unlocking it.

The Ruhnuk datacron also required you to do a lengthy relic hunt quest chain first, which I didn't mind - my issue with that was more that it also felt like it was meant to benefit your daily-running, and completing it for that purpose on every alt felt tedious to me. In that regard I have to give the devs props for making the relic hunt equivalent for Kessan's Landing irrelevant to the dailies and only required for the datacron, so you only really need to do it once. As it was, I thought it was a fun little quest chain that sent you traipsing around the galaxy (and that featured another cute gonk droid). Fun fact: during the part on Quesh I got the codex entry for "lobel" on my main... only took me thirteen years. I might even repeat the quest chain on an alt at some point, but I'm happy knowing that I don't have to in order to be able to do the dailies efficiently on alts.

Completing the chain unlocks access to a secret cave where you then have to go through some puzzles to get to the datacron. I initially got a bit frustrated by the part inside the cave because it felt quite lengthy, yet any failure would send you back to the very start and force you start over from scratch. On my first visit I eventually gave up after dying to the hidden droids in the lava one too many times, but funnily enough, when I came back a couple weeks later I simply changed one utility to boost my speed and easily made it through that same lava bit on my first try. Gotta use that brain!

After that I was extremely paranoid though as I didn't want to get sent back to the start yet again, so I only progressed very slowly and with a guide on hand. I was in fact so slow that the door you're meant to unshield and blow up had re-shielded itself by the time I reached it. Fortunately I only had to backtrack a little bit to unshield it again. Ultimately it was far from the hardest datacron I've ever done, though I definitely would have appreciated a couple of check points along the way.

Most of all though, I'm really happy with the way the dev team has managed to deliver a new planetary zone three major patches in a row now, and with any luck we'll get another one in 7.5. This is something I love and definitely don't take for granted. And as I said previously, I'm more than happy to revisit existing planets, so I don't mind at all if it's not entirely new environments.

Ruhnuk - Six Months Later

When Ruhnuk was added as a new planet almost six months ago now, I quickly went from excited to confused. It had looked beautiful in the previews, and the story update set there featured some amazing cinematic cut scenes, but my feelings about the story as a whole were... complicated, and my first experience with Ruhnuk as a daily area was a bit of a nightmare. However, I did wonder even at the time whether it would grow on me over time, the way Iokath did after not making a particularly stellar impression at first.

My feelings on Ruhnuk have indeed become more nuanced since then... though I'll say right away that I'm still not a fan of doing the dailies.

The Planetary Story

I realised that in my original posts about Ruhnuk, I never said much about the optional planetary storyline that unlocks after the main story, which seems like quite a big thing to leave out, especially considering that it's actually quite good. After the endless alien gibberish on Manaan, I definitely appreciated all the characters speaking Basic this time around, and it was just an enjoyable storyline in general (with one "bug"/flaw I ran into early on, where Lane chastises you for supposedly making a certain choice at a point where you're not actually given any choices). I especially liked how when you find the little Basilisk droid at the end, it's implied that it could join you as a companion or pet later on... we'll see whether Bioware ever follows up on that.

Relic Hunts

There's also this other "side quest" to unlock three minor buffs to help you with your questing. I have mixed feelings about this one. As an optional side mission, by itself, it works okay, even if the last part goes on a bit and features several bait-and-switch scenarios where it seems like you should be done after the next step but then yet another obstacle appears. However, in terms of how helpful these buffs actually are for everyday play, I'm not entirely convinced.

I liked the way this was done on Manaan, where you organically earned three temporary abilities as part of the optional storyline, and they were really useful ones as well, such as stealth for non-stealth characters or a reflective shield. With the Ruhnuk Relic Hunts, the abilities are both less powerful and require waaay more running around to acquire, to the point where if you don't strictly focus on completing the long mission chain as a priority, you might well max out your planetary reputation before you've actually earned the tools that were supposed to help you with making questing easier. That felt a bit misjudged to me in terms of effort vs. reward.

Datacron & World Boss(es)

First off, I generally really appreciate that Bioware took the time to add these things to Ruhnuk to make the planet feel more "worldly" and to ensure that there are some things to do beyond just doing dailies. I didn't actually bother with getting the datacron until today, but I liked that it felt interesting to get without being too challenging. I've kind of had enough of the fiendishly hard jumping puzzles to be honest...

The summonable wraid boss is a nice idea but somewhat hampered by not having any purpose beyond a one-time achievement and the fact that one of the drops required to summon him seems to have a stupidly low drop rate. The "regular" world boss, Kithrawl, was kind of disappointing to me in that his mechanics are extremely basic yet he has a ridiculous number of hitpoints, meaning that he's both quite boring to fight but also takes a long time to die unless you bring an absolutely massive group - not the best combination in my opinion.

Navigation & Obstacles

All that said, the main reason that I still don't like Ruhnuk all that much remains that it's just a chore to get anywhere. After six months and visiting the place on several alts, I kinda know my way around by now, but it remains easy to get lost by taking a wrong turn inside a tunnel. Still, there are other planets that are hard to navigate, and that alone hasn't been a reason for me to dislike them, so what's the problem?

I realised that what makes Ruhnuk such a pain to traverse is that a lot of the map consists of narrow ravines and tunnels stuffed with mobs, which means that assuming you don't have stealth, getting anywhere requires fighting every single step of the way (which makes it feel all the more punishing if you accidentally end up taking a wrong turn and then have to backtrack). I didn't like the endless tunnels of skytroopers in the KotFE chapters, and there's definitely a bit of that vibe here.

Even worse though, for some reason there are way too many silver and gold mobs sprinkled throughout the area, which makes everything take even longer. More specifically, the areas for the heroic missions are not clearly delineated but instead kind of "bleed into" the regular questing areas, which means that you might just be following an arrow towards a story quest objective when you turn a corner and suddenly find yourself in combat with a large group of golds and silvers.

I had one particularly memorable encounter of this kind which was exacerbated even more by the fact that two groups of mobs appeared to be linked in some way that didn't make sense, so I'd not just get one group, but another heroic-level group of mobs would instantly come sprinting around the corner the moment I pulled, which caused me to get overwhelmed and defeated in the same spot about three times before I could proceed to my quest objective. I like heroics as optional, more challenging content, but the way Ruhnuk has these unavoidable heroic-level mob groups blocking your path everywhere is just tedious.

I hope that Bioware will continue adding new areas like this; I'd just prefer them to be more open, to not have so many unavoidable mobs, and for side content to either be more rewarding or less tedious. Ruhnuk's planetary storyline and the datacron both hit a pretty sweet spot in my opinion; there's just too much other stuff that detracts from the experience for me to want to spend much time hanging around.

Three Not So Little Grophets

The datacron on Rishi is definitely one of the more memorable ones for me. Back in the day before datacrons gave legacy-wide credit, I got it on quite a few alts... usually by someone else offering to summon people there whenever it was uncovered. I also got trapped under the rock that usually hides it at least once:

However, beyond the whole vanishing rock thing, I had no idea what was involved in revealing it, other than that I had overheard some talk about farming grophets, and that the special drops from them were easy to mistake for vendor trash (might be that they were even grey items originally, but I'm not sure about that one).

Then during a guild datacron hunt in 2021, we did the whole sequence to unlock the datacron in Raider's Cove, and I was the lucky one who won the roll to reveal the datacron and get the achievement using data packets that someone else had farmed.

I didn't really think about it again until a day in September when I was questing in Rishi's PvP instance on one of my alts. I don't generally use the PvP instance most of the time, but sometimes I switch my focus to PvP when I'm dealing with some sort of quest objective that's overfarmed, and then I often forget to switch back until I actually run into an enemy player. Anyway, on this occasion I didn't run into an enemy player... but while making my way to the pirate ship west of Raider's Cove, I came across a ginormous grophet with a name.

I instantly twigged that I must have run into one of the rare grophets related to the Rishi datacron, and like any good MMO player who discovers a rare and strange creature, I immediately went to kill it. I was surprised to actually see an achievement pop up too because I didn't know that there were any related to this.

Now I was intrigued. I'd always heard that getting the rare grophets to spawn was a horrible grind, but apparently you could just... randomly come across them in the world now? So I consulted the old Dulfy guide on the matter to learn where they spawn, just so I could, you know... check in on them if I happened to be in the area. I quickly decided that even if I didn't find them in their dedicated spots, I was at least going to kill the "placeholder grophets" from now on whenever I passed them, just to at least give the rares a chance to spawn, even if it was ultimately for someone else.

And what do you know, the other week I came across both Wudd and Breck on different characters. There was a bit of a hiccup with Breck as on re-checking the guide I realised that I'd actually read the map wrong and had been killing the wrong group of grophets the entire time (d'oh), but I got lucky after relocating to the correct place and got Breck to spawn after only a couple of visits. I was on my Sorc when I once again killed the placeholders, got a warzone pop and took it, and when I reappeared on Rishi after the match, there was Breck.

So now, more than eight years after it was added, I've finally seen every part of the Rishi datacron journey (not to mention that I earned a bunch of new achievements and the "Wolf of Rishi" legacy title). I really like it when old content still reveals new secrets to me. And I'm going to hold on to those data packets so that I can pay it forward and let someone else get the achievement for handing them in whenever a guild datacron hunt visits Rishi again.

Day 8: Memorable Moments

IntPiPoMo may be over for this year, but my 10 days of SWTOR screenshots aren't finished, and I'm still planning to do that. The theme for day eight was "memorable moments".

First off we have a shot of guildies grouping up to kill the R8-X8 world boss on Ossus. I chose this one not because that particular kill was memorable, but to represent that whole era of Ossus being endgame. I loved it so much and I repeated all the related activities a stupid amount of times... I've often joked that had there been an achievement for killing each world boss a hundred times, I'd probably have gotten it.

I do miss those days somewhat. I really did like the importance of the world bosses, and that they were epic fights for maximum-size ops groups, but unfortunately they haven't aged well for that same reason, because now that the player base's focus is elsewhere, you can't easily go back and knock them out with just a few friends.

This shot was from Jedi Under Siege launch night. It may not be particularly immersive, but I do always enjoy seeing the masses pour in to enjoy the new story.

I wrote a whole post about it at the time, but I thought it was worth calling out again that spending my 37th birthday turning into a robotic deity and rampaging across Iokath with my guildies was an incredibly unique and fun experience.

This is a screenshot of me getting the achievement for completing the Trial and Error uprising on master mode in February 2020. I don't actually remember that evening in specific being that memorable, but basically that uprising seemed to be incredibly overtuned on its release and we spent a lot of time wiping in there the first couple of years. When we finally gave it another try during Onslaught and were able to beat it at last, it felt like quite an achievement. I think they definitely changed the tuning as well though, because it wasn't nearly the same level of crazy anymore.

This shot is from one of our datacron hunts from earlier in the year and was memorable to me in two ways: First off, I finally got to see how the Rishi datacron is done "properly", because back in the day I'd just been summoned to it after the whole process had already been completed and therefore I stayed completely oblivious to what was actually involved in unlocking it. (This is the reason I no longer accept well-intended summons to new datacrons, by the way. I want to actually see and understand how they work.) The second reason it was memorable to me was that someone else had pre-farmed the required materials so that we could quickly get it done on the night... but we rolled for who'd be the one to actually activate it, and since I won I got to do it and got an extra achievement to boot. That was nice.

Datacron Hunt on Mek-Sha and Onderon

Ah, datacrons - I have such an interesting history with them. Originally I was pretty oblivious to them while levelling, to the point that I'm not sure I came across even a single one organically (the one simply lying on the ground on Coruscant perhaps...), but then other players started showing them to me and datacron hunting became both a fun social activity and something I liked doing on my alts. Then they were made account-wide with KotFE and that whole avenue of play kind of fell off a cliff... especially as Bioware didn't add any new ones either - until Ossus that is, and I wrote about my experience with those datacrons in this post.

Onderon and Mek-Sha were similar to Ossus in that guildies were offering summons to the new datacrons within days, but like on Ossus I refused because simply accepting a summon to an unknown location, clicking a cube and leaving again kind of seemed to defeat the purpose of the whole thing to me. I told myself that I'd go back to get them later, but to be completely honest I mostly forgot about them again after that. So I was delighted when my guild decided to host a guild datacron hunt for the first time in literal years and that Onderon and Mek-Sha were supposed to be the first destinations. 

We started with the endurance datacron on Mek-Sha, which follows in the footsteps of similar datacrons from the base game such as the mastery ones on Imperial Nar Shaddaa and Corellia, which both require you to jump on a small kiosk/carrier as it floats past and ride it (close) to the datacron location. I would rate the Mek-Sha one as slightly less fun than either of those though, as part of the path you ride along is a bit buggy, which is disorienting (the environment around you goes all crazy, the platform appears to disappear under your feet etc.), and after successfully jumping both on and off the floating "sign" you then still have to make another couple of (admittedly not very difficult) jumps before reaching the datacron.

My guildies and I spent some time chatting while repeatedly falling to our deaths here, but our guide for the evening made it to the finish line very quickly and was able to offer limited assistance for some classes with a Sage pull (we also found that with some skill and/or luck a Scoundrel could jump to them with Trick Move.). After a given time limit we simply used a guild flagship summon for anyone who was still struggling... but I refused to accept it, as - despite of my repeated failures - the whole thing felt very doable and I figured that I'd be able to do it the "proper" way if I just gave myself a bit more time.

Still, for the time being we moved on to the endurance datacron, which was a more straightforward jumping puzzle in a fairly small area. I actually did pretty okay with this one except for one really far jump near the end. Here we sort of moved along as a group, initially falling down and re-trying all the jumps on our own, but I wasn't the only one struggling with that one particular jump, so we eventually started to "pool" around that one and once a couple of people got across they helped others with pulls and such. I was not too ashamed to accept a little help there myself, as getting a bit of a leg up with one jump in a row of about a dozen jumps isn't on the same scale to me as simply getting a summon to the final destination. In the end we all managed to get this datacron without having to use the guild flagship summon at all.

After that we were off to Onderon, first to deal with the endurance datacron there. This was another jumping puzzle but with a deadly edge, as missing one of the first three jumps meant falling to your death. Fortunately a medical droid wasn't far away, but it was still quite silly how many times I fell to my death here. Otherwise it was a similar affair to Mek-Sha in that I eventually managed all the jumps by myself except the very last one, for which I accepted a pull since I was the only person who hadn't made it yet and people wanted to move on. We took a little group photo next to the datacron since the backdrop was quite nice up there.

Finally, there was the mastery datacron, which was introduced as "the Indiana Jones datacron" to the group and it sure lived up to its name. This one lives in a personal phase and requires you to leap across a bridge with invisible holes by following a certain pattern (in what is undoubtedly meant to be an Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade reference), followed by dodging a bunch of floor spikes in the dark that insta-kill you if you step on them. This is already tricky enough one way, but then you finally get to the datacron, a little cut scene plays and some sort of electric/force field gets unleashed, forcing you to make it back the same way with the additional pressure of a timer or you die. I must have died a hundred times to that thing and was once again one of the last people to get it (cheaty Sages and their Phase Walks...) but it didn't really feel impossible at any time... it was just a matter of mastering the sequence to the point that I was able to execute it both flawlessly and quickly enough.

At this point some of my guildies moved on to Ossus, but since I already had those 'crons, I instead opted to return to Mek-Sha and went back to practising riding the sign. It took me another half-dozen attempts or so and then I made it to that datacron as well.

I'm glad that I originally decided to save getting these datacrons for a more opportune time, as getting them with my guildies was much more fun than it would have been to simply get a summon or even to follow a guide on my own.

The Indiana Jones datacron was probably my favourite, despite of being sequestered in a personal phase and causing me to die a hundred times. It was just a very fun idea, and restarting after a death was extremely fast so the failures didn't feel too punishing. Though I guess the time pressure at the end could be considered a bit harsh for the rather casual player base that the game has cultivated over the years. Sure, casual players don't "need" the stats from it either, but I just think it's a pretty fun experience to have regardless, for all kinds of players.

The endurance datacron on Mek-Sha was the sort of mini adventure that I usually like with datacrons, but I was a bit let down by the bugginess of its implementation. Also, considering that there are follow-up jumps after the sign ride that you can fail, having to wait about two minutes for the sign to come around again after each try was a bit annoying.

The two jumping 'crons were both alright - they both featured at least one pretty fiendish jump, which always strikes me as a bit frustrating when it's part of a whole series of jumps that you have to restart if you fail, but at least the run back wasn't long in either case. The Onderon one also had what you could call "save points" in the sense that if you fell off at a later point, you only had to redo the last couple of jumps and didn't have to start over from the very beginning. That was good.

I wonder if there'll be datacrons on Manaan?

PS: It's the first of August, which once again heralds the return of Blaugust! Whether you enjoy discovering new blogs, would like to promote your own writing or are maybe only just thinking about starting your own blog, I can definitely recommend checking out this community event.

Shintar's Galactic Seasons Diary, Week 6

Day 1:

We were back to week one objectives, and I got flashpoints and GSF for my weeklies. I decided to keep the flashpoints this time, since three of them are part of the Shadow of Revan prelude and I have a lot of alts that are somewhere on that step of the story (I don't like doing these on solo mode very much). So I figured this could be a good opportunity to progress their personal stories a bit.

My dailies were heroics and conveniently, more GSF. I returned to playing the latter on my Assassin tank, and I felt that I actually did incredibly well for once... I ended up being at the top of scoreboard in that match somehow, with most kills and the highest hit percentage. Sadly, we still lost by quite a margin, but at least I had fun. This also completed the character's first ever GSF weekly, which finished her Conquest three times over, so I knew that I'd want to do the remaining GSF matches for the week on another alt.

For the heroics I decided to return to Corellia, but this time on my Shadow tank to avoid having to kill too many mobs. However, this did not work as well as expected, as I'd forgotten that two of the three heroics I chose were full of mobs with super stealth detection, meaning that going into stealth didn't just not make me inconspicuous, but rather the opposite, sometimes causing mobs to come running from the other side of the room. This was quite amusing but fortunately didn't cause me to lose too much time (to some degree I could still get away with stealthing if I was fast enough running past the mobs with the detection skill).

Day 2:

This was kind of the ultimate test for my interest in Seasons as it was the day after the release of WoW's Burning Crusade Classic, which I was very excited about and therefore distracted by. I actually logged on extremely late at night to check out my objectives, re-rolled insectoid killing once again, but then decided that I couldn't be bothered anyway. However, in the end the FOMO won out and I logged back in the next morning to quickly get my objectives in before the reset after all.

One was to play a warzone, which I did on my lowbie Merc, and once again got into an arena. Now, this one definitely felt depressingly unbalanced in terms of levels - my team all in the thirties and the opposition between 65 and 74 except for one guy. I didn't expect us to stand a chance and we didn't, though I was surprised that I did manage to stay alive at least for a little while.

The re-rolled objective was to kill 75 mobs on a core world and I was unhappy to see from my spreadsheet that only a single one of my characters had any story quests there, and it was my little squid Sorc whom I'd specifically made to PvP and on whom I didn't care about doing the story anyway. Still, I logged into her anyway and flew to Balmorra. For a change of pace I also picked up all the other quests in Sobrik and then just went on a rampage in the nearby area. It was actually interesting to see those side quests again as it had been so long that I'd done some of them that they actually felt vaguely fresh again. I also "found" a datacron containing a green matrix shard and that required two people to unlock, again something I'd completely forgotten about... there was another person there clearly interested in getting it so I helped them out.

Day 3:

Once again I logged on extremely late at night and was therefore glad to see that neither of my daily objectives were group content, as PvP or GSF pops would likely have been non-existent at that time of night. Instead I was asked to do three core world heroics and kill insectoids on Balmorra... which I decided not to to re-roll for once, as the previous day's adventures had reminded me that this was actually quite a viable combo in more than one way, even if I was sick and tired of the Republic heroics featuring Colicoids.

So I logged my Sniper instead and picked up three heroics on Balmorra, two of which I was sure contained Colicoids, the third one I wasn't sure about (and it didn't). Still, after doing those three, I was most of the way towards being finished with the insectoid objective as well, so I just went to Bug Town and AoE-d down a couple of pulls of weak mobs there to finish off.

Day 4:

This time I logged in earlier in the evening and was presented with more generic core world killing and being asked to do a warzone. I played the latter on my Merc again and got into a Quesh Huttball. It was another loss, but I couldn't blame that one on levels; my team was sadly just a lot less co-ordinated than the enemy. Also, in a classic display, the one guy on my team who I could tell was really trying and of whom I thought positively early on in the match, then went on to be abusive in chat and AFK-ed out at the end. Because of course.

For the mob killing I returned to my little Sorc to do some more questing on Balmorra, even though she was long done with her Conquest, but I had no other characters that had anything useful to do on any of the highlighted planets. So I guess a lesson I learned about myself there was that while I generally like to spread out my activity to reach my Conquest target on as many characters as possible, when it comes to Seasons I'll prioritise making actual character progress over spreading out those Conquest points at all costs.

Day 5:

After three days of counting mob kills I was relieved to be presented with Black Hole dailies and a GSF match as my objectives for a change. The GSF match was one of those in which I played pretty abysmally, but everyone else somehow managed to be even worse, so it was no surprise that we lost.

For the Black Hole I decided to go on my Gunslinger, after having done the dailies on Imperial side every time they came up as an objective so far. I generally prefer to go Imp side for these things since our Imperial alt guild sometimes needs a bit of a push to reach the large Conquest yield, but for some reason I find the Imperial side of the Black Hole a bit irritating. I can't quite put my finger on it as I don't think it takes longer exactly, but it just doesn't seem to flow very well. Maybe it's just because I got so much more practice on Republic side back in the day when this zone first came out. On Imp side it always feels like I spend entirely too much time running back and forth to find a few more droids to kill.

Day 6:

My favourite combo of GSF and a warzone at last, woohoo! This GSF match went quite a bit better, and at the start it even looked like it might end up being an easy win, but somehow the enemy managed to turn things around and we ended up losing after all. It was pretty close though, and a good match overall.

The warzone I did on my healing Sage ended up being an Ancient Hypergates. That was another good match, despite of us losing - we were only four points behind, which is an absolutely minuscule difference in that game mode.

As it was Sunday and I had yet to even start on my flashpoint weekly objective, I also decided to run two flashpoints. First I did Depths of Manaan on my Powertech tank. The queue pop showed another tank and I hesitated for a moment as I tend to avoid double tank or double healer team-ups in veteran mode, but I decided to risk it. In the end it went fine, though the other tank was a bit odd. They were unusually chatty by flashpoint standards and seemed friendly enough, but they also bragged about their dps, seemed to pay little attention to any of our damage dealers lagging behind, and felt the need to quiz one of them about why their gear was so bad (not that this person responded).

On my second run I queued for Assault on Tython on my Shadow tank, again because she was on that step in the Shadow of Revan prelude (that had been my reason for choosing the Powertech as well). Funnily enough I ended up in a group with a guildie who was also trying to get his weekly done. I stealthily positioned myself to pull the first group but was instantly reminded that Tython is another one of those flashpoints where people will run all around the houses to skip as much trash as possible. I rolled my eyes a little but decided to let the "lead skipper" take point from then on and it all went very quickly and smoothly.

Day 7:

My last daily objectives for the week were to kill 75 mobs again and to play a warzone. I tried to re-roll the mob killing in hopes of getting a GSF match to synergise with my weekly but got bug killing on Alderaan instead.

I decided to finish my weeklies first and played one last GSF match, which we actually won decisively! First victory I had all week. Then I did Depths of Manaan with my Juggernaut tank and it was quite smooth. I liked that we had this one dps who pulled a couple of times but then actually apologised for it.

With just the dailies left, I joined a warzone on my Shadow, but it was a Hypergate that was less than a minute from ending, and my team was behind. Unsurprisingly, I didn't manage to pull off some miracle move to make us win after all, but at least it was quick completion credit. For the bugs, I couldn't be bothered to try and figure out some interesting activity that would maybe coincide with bug killing anymore, so I just grabbed my dps Sorc and did a round randomly AoE-ing down Killiks just outside the Imperial spaceport.

Week 6 thoughts:

Well, I kind of surprised myself with my persistence in this one, since this would have been the perfect time to end my perfect streak of doing all the objectives, but even in the throes of Burning Crusade hype I found the time to log on at least briefly every day and knock out my dailies. I'm just too much of a sucker for a routine I guess.

Having done the flashpoint weekly two weeks in a row now, I think I'll likely avoid it going forward as it just takes too long compared to anything else and has no synergy with any of the dailies. Like I said last week, it would be nice if there was a daily objective for flashpoints of some sort, but since there isn't it sadly doesn't line up with anything else.

Otherwise this week was kind of dominated by mob killing dailies, giving me a chance to grow tired of those. I'm generally somewhat ambivalent about this sort of objective, because on the one hand it gives you options and you can tie it into some other activity, such as doing story missions or heroics on that planet, but on the other hand it can be seen as a cue to just mindlessly AoE everything in sight for quick completion, which is not the sort of thing I'm fond of.

Finishing Up Ossus

Despite of how many posts I've written singing its praises, I don't think I've sufficiently conveyed just how much I freaking love Ossus. It's now been six months since its release and I'm still doing those dailies and killing those world bosses. Part of me is a little disappointed that the achievement for killing Kil'Cik and R8-X8 repeatedly only goes up to 25, because at this point I'm pretty sure that I must have killed both of them about a hundred times.

The fact that both Masterwork Crystals and the gear earned from them will become redundant in a few months hasn't really been a deterrent to me either. One person's grind is another one's fun gameplay, and I've just been enjoying slowly chipping away at my goal of getting all my characters on Ossus into full 258 gear (sans weapons on Imp side, because there's no way I'm pugging the queen on hardmode). Three out of the six recently reached that goal, and the other three shouldn't have much further left to go.

Last night I also finally sat down and tackled those "miscellaneous" bits of content that I initially put off at launch, such as the datacrons and achievements. I'd had multiple offers from guildies to summon me to some of the datacrons previously, but I wanted to see for myself what they were all about.

I started with tracking down the Ossus Cipher, which was only added with the Dantooine patch last month. I actually really liked the way this particular "find the clickies" achievement worked, because while I used a guide to find all the locations, the items weren't always in the exact same spot. For example the guide would show a screenshot of volume four lying on top of a crate inside a tent, but for me there was nothing there. So I roamed around the camp a little, and eventually discovered that for me it was lying behind a whole stack of crates on a raised platform off to the left. I like that this meant that consulting a guide didn't completely rob me of the fun of finding things for myself; it just made it a lot easier to know the general area each volume was going to be placed in.

Next up I visited Don the Exiled Knight and collected his journals. (By the way, I was so chuffed when I found out that this meme actually originated with fellow blogger Intisar of all people.) These I liked a bit less, mostly because the items weren't glowy the way lore objects and other interactables usually are, which made it very hard to tell them apart from the environment at times, even with a guide. That said, I actually enjoyed reading the short journal entries and finding out how Don's journey mirrored the player character's in parts.

Finally, the datacrons. Again, I went straight for a guide, considering that in six months of doing dailies I hadn't come across an obvious route to reach any of them.

The presence datacron with the grappling hook was decent fun, but it bothered me a bit how the point on which to use the grappling hook just appeared in thin air once you had found the tool. If they had made it part of the landscape / more obvious, it would have given players at least a hint in terms of what to look for.

The mastery one was the only one I could picture a player finding naturally if they are the type to investigate every nook and cranny, as it involved you climbing up a narrow shaft from inside a cave, and the point of exit is close enough to the datacron that you can hear it "twinkle" once you make it to the top. That said, I'd never noticed that crevice myself, or even the cave it resides in... in fact, this whole exercise with the achievements and datacrons caused me to find about five or six new caves that I hadn't even known existed - clearly I didn't get adventurous enough in my own exploration of the planet.

Finally, there was the endurance datacron, the most involved one of the lot, about which I had heard much complaining. In fact, I vividly remember one evening when I was busy doing my own thing (probably doing PvP or something) while a guildie was trying to get this datacron, and basically all that came out of him for hours was some swearing every ten to fifteen minutes. He really struggled with some of those jumps.

With that said, I was pleasantly surprised by how easy I personally found the whole thing. It sure is complicated and unintuitive in so far as it's hard to imagine anyone ever coming across it "naturally", but none of the jumps themselves were actually very challenging. The most challenging part was a section in the latter half which has you doing a jumping puzzle in a dark cave that's only illuminated by a small portable lamp you get and some glowing mushrooms that light the way for you. The limited visibility could be extremely disorienting sometimes, but as I said the jumps themselves were super easy as long as you could actually figure out where you were supposed to be going. I think I only fell down once early on during this entire section.

I also liked how the whole thing felt a bit like a story told without words. You actually go back to the same area where the big boss fight of the planetary storyline takes place, which seems strangely magical now that it's devoid of mobs, and after you've puzzled through all of that, you get to enter a personal instance to unlock the datacron's power where you meet a Jedi tree (no, really) called Ood Bnar. It's a Legends thing. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

What's really nice though is that completion also grants you a unique weapon tuning that doesn't bind, and this is repeatable once per character. So if you don't care for using the tunings yourself, you could make some decent money re-doing the datacron run on several characters and selling the rewards for several million credits each.

I'll say it again: The all-around awesomeness of Ossus really makes me extra hopeful and excited for Onslaught. Hopefully the dev team can stay on track.

When You (Can't) Go Back

Bhagpuss, MMORPG connoisseur extraordinaire, has decided to give SWTOR a try at long last and has been busy pushing out first impressions posts pretty much every day since. I've very much enjoyed reading them so far because Bhag's opinions are always well-articulated and often somewhat different from the mainstream, which makes them extra interesting. As an unabashed fan of the game, I've also been pleased by how much he's been enjoying it so far, especially as I didn't expect it to be his cup of tea at all. He himself has expressed surprise at how entertaining certain features have turned out to be when he didn't really expect to like them very much at all.

Seeing all this talk about and screenshots of starter planets made me wistful for my own days as a newbie. Of course you can't go back to that, but you can always roll up a new alt, right? Well... there's that "alt creation fatigue" I've been talking about in previous posts to consider though. What to do?

I eventually compromised by firing up the character selection screen of the Satele Shan server, where for some reason I have no less than four characters, none of which had even hit level ten or chosen an advanced class. There's Shintar the Mirialan trooper who I believe I originally created out of a desire to play with Redbeard, though I wouldn't swear that this was my motivation at the time. I tried to go dark side on her though and quickly found myself disliking the character (never good for an alt that shares your main's name).

Then there's a human Jedi consular, the only male character I ever created. I'm not sure now why I created him on an American server... maybe I knew that I'd struggle with connecting with a male character and didn't want this to "taint" my regular legacy?

Then there's the agent I created back in the day when Mr Commando and I were at the peak of our desire to level characters together and found that our regular server was down one evening, while a US server was up, so we decided to go there instead. We made it to level three (back when that took more than three minutes) before our regular server came back up and we dropped our new agents like hot potatoes, never to return.

And then there's the Togruta I talked about creating in this post from nearly four years ago - I levelled her to four and then never touched her again.

After carefully considering my options I decided that the Togruta knight would be the most fun to start up again... mostly because I had an outfit idea for her. (The outfit designer has made me so shallow.) I chose the option to turn her into a Guardian and off I went.

The best thing about playing on Satele Shan was that I had no legacy there; I only got to create it once I reached Coruscant. (In fact, I somehow managed to completely miss the legacy creation prompt; it was only because I found myself thinking "Shouldn't I have a legacy by now?" that I checked the icon in the top bar and there it was, flashing at me to choose my legacy name.) Legacy is a great system in many ways, but I have to admit that as a long-time player I also see it as a downside sometimes that you can't ever truly feel like you're starting over because thanks to your legacy you already own all the datacrons, all the class buffs and more, and have a bank full of materials at your disposal.

It feels like it's been forever since I bothered to hunt for the classic datacrons for example. The ones on Tython were easy enough to remember, as was the first one on Coruscant, but in the Black Sun territory something funny happened: I looked a the map and thought "I really can't remember where the datacron is here..." but then just set out to explore the map as I normally would. And what do you know, as I was picking up some archaeology crystals in a corner, I suddenly looked at the stack of containers next to me and knew that this was it. I couldn't remember where to go exactly; I just knew that I could and should continue climbing up those containers until I could reach a pipe, and then I just kept intuitively putting one foot in front of the other until the datacron was mine. The memories!

I also had fun working on my crew skills. I actually had a use for those rubat crystals and got excited to find gathering nodes around the district!

While on the fleet I purchased the Coruscant stronghold. It's still my favourite, but on Darth Malgus I've pretty much got it as I like it and have no particular desire to make any big changes. I was kind of surprised to find it only costing seven credits - to be honest that immediately made me think that this must have been a special put in place for the game's seventh birthday back in December and that nobody remembered to revert the price afterwards. Not that I minded or think that it should be particularly expensive, but seven credits felt like an insanely good (and oddly priced) bargain.

The one thing that put a bit of a downer on things again was the insane ease of combat and levelling speed. I found it very striking that Bhagpuss noted that he hadn't bothered to learn more than four skills on his smuggler because what was the point? I of course trained everything the game would let me, remembering the good old days when this was actually a useful if not required thing to do because enemies didn't all die in two hits. I also tried setting T7 to dps for a bit but eventually just sent him away entirely whenever I wasn't about to do a story cut scene. While on my own this allowed me to use a few abilities at least while fighting in a heroic area, even if the mobs still didn't manage to get me to half health before dying.

And then there's the levelling speed... as I said the Guardian started at level four, but only a couple of hours of play later I was already in my thirties and still not even halfway through Coruscant. Originally you were meant to be around level twelve around this part of the story. I suppose I haven't been helping myself by choosing to do this thing just as Bioware launched another double XP event, but it still makes me itchy. How can you enjoy playing a lowbie if the game doesn't allow you to be a lowbie for more than a couple of hours?

Maybe this is another thing that's making me shy away from creating more alts: I'm actually not sure I would find the low-level gameplay engaging enough to hang around if I came to the game as a new player now, and seeing the sheer OP-ness of every new alt just reminds me of the unease I feel about current levelling and kind of makes me miss the way things used to be pre-4.0.

Ossus Is A Great Planet

Now that I've spent no less than three posts waffling about all the things I love about Jedi Under Siege's story, it only seems fair to also give the environmental artists and level designers their due, because Ossus is both beautiful and fun to spend time on.

It's not just pleasing to the eye (to be honest I feel that most of the planets added after launch have been), but it also has a very "vanilla" feel to it. I think the main reason for this is how vast and open it is. I'd say it's probably similar to Yavin IV in size, which isn't huge, but the quests are very widely distributed across the area. I can understand why this "larger than life" design might not be everyone's cup of tea, but personally I really like it because it kind of serves as a counterpoint to the game's "theme-park-ness", which is to say that while SWTOR likes to take us through very tightly directed stories, having large and open zones at least makes the planets feel like actual worlds instead of as if they were just designed to serve as set pieces for the quest narrative.

In practice this means that doing the daily quests requires quite a lot of running around, but unlike on Iokath the whole thing flows very well, so it doesn't feel annoying. The missions themselves are all fairly run-off-the-mill in their gameplay (kill X, click on Y), but again: that's fine. Personally I don't mind Bioware experimenting a bit now and then, like they did with the puzzle and vehicle sections in KotET, but these things can be divisive, whereas you can't really go wrong with simply giving people more of a thing they already like, which is to say an opportunity to use their beloved characters' skills. About the most annoying thing is that a lot of objectives are limited to a fairly small area or even to just one specific mob, and with the oodles of players all trying to get their quests done at the same time the amount of competition can be aggravating. Personally I've been dealing with that by questing in the PvP instance most of the time.

I also have to give a special shout-out to the new heroic missions on Ossus. I've found the [Heroic 2]s to be easily soloable, but the [Heroic 4] definitely requires you to bring a friend (or make one). I've actually done all of them in groups though, simply because it's so easy! With how busy it is on the planet you can just post a shout-out in general chat and usually get a response instantly, but even if it takes a couple of minutes you can simply do some of the solo missions while keeping an eye out for other people interested in grouping. The automatically granted quick travel item also comes in handy (and is the main reason I've also done the [Heroic 2]s in a group sometimes to be honest), because it allows everyone to instantly get to the right place and get going. This is the kind of thing I had been hoping for when Bioware added the existing heroics to the fleet in 4.0 and added those quick travel items in the first place... before I realised that they'd obsoleted any grouping requirements in the process as well.

Another great thing about Ossus is that it has content beyond just the main storyline and its associated dailies. For example there are some hidden achievements to be chased and new datacrons to be found. I haven't actually bothered with these myself yet - while I already had guildies offering summons to the datacrons during the first week, I politely declined those as I wanted to at least have a closer look at them myself first. I like the idea of there being some extra content for me to check out later at my leisure instead of everything being more or less done once I've completed the quests.

There are also random security chests hidden in certain spots that contain more of the relic currency and are therefore worth picking up.

Finally there are the world bosses, and I'm delighted every time I see people forming groups for them. The weekly mission for a masterwork crystal means that they are currently in high demand, so just like with the heroics it's super easy to find other people to do them with. You can basically bring up general chat at pretty much any time of day and find someone in the process of forming a group. (I joined one of these at something like 11pm on Christmas Eve and one of the group members complained about the slowness of the process because it took longer than five minutes to fill the group.) You just whisper the leader to ask for an invite and then you can pretty much continue with your business until the group is full as someone will usually throw out a guild ship summon anyway once you've hit the maximum amount of players.

Both bosses are good fun, which is to say they have fairly straightforward mechanics without being boring tank-and-spanks, and handily support a role distribution that seems to mesh well with players' natural preferences, which is to say that you only need 1-2 tanks, about 4 healers, and then you're best off filling the other available 18-19 slots with damage dealers as both bosses have a lot of health. This contributes to groups filling up quickly and hassle-free, though it does worry me a bit in terms of how viable it will be to revisit these bosses once Ossus isn't the new hotness anymore.

My only real gripe is that the game's engine doesn't deal well with such large numbers of players, and especially when fighting Kil'Cik (the bug boss), the large group size combined with his endless add summons tends to turn the experience into a slide show for me. On R8-X8 (the droid boss), pugs usually do a lot of dying and zerging (fortunately the respawn point isn't far away) but it feels like this is mostly due to us as a community still not really understanding the fight (yet). For example I still don't know how/when you can actually interrupt him. One of his buffs states that normal interrupts don't work, but as for what qualifies as special enough to interrupt him anyway, I've seen theories from needing a certain number of people to interrupt at the same time to the dedicated interrupter needing a special buff (but nobody could say what it is or how to get it). Likewise I've repeatedly seen the advice to avoid blowing up the fuel barrels, however my guild found that doing so is actually a good thing as it's easy to avoid the resulting explosion, and no fuel means that the droid can't re-fuel, and once he hits zero fuel he stops doing Incinerate (his most deadly ability) entirely.

Anyway, what I'm saying is that there are plenty of things going on on Ossus to keep players engaged, with a lair boss scheduled to be added in the next patch as well, and I've actually been enjoying taking multiple characters there to get my reputation up and earn new rewards in a way that I haven't done in years. Thanks, Bioware!

(Bonus: One of my first ever posts on this blog was about me being endlessly entertained by people falling to their deaths, and even on that front Ossus delivers, as there's this elevator in the Imperial base that inexplicably travels faster than falling speed, so if you step onto it at the wrong moment, you can watch it speed away from you right under your feet while you slowly fall after it, until you eventually get reunited at the bottom and go splat. This has happened to me about two or three times now and I've also had times where I was waiting at the bottom of the lift myself and suddenly saw someone else faceplant right in front of me. Pure hilarity.)

Multitasking

I don't know if it's just a side effect of having played this game for more than six years and therefore not finding everything quite as engaging anymore or also a function of the way modern life has generally shortened our attention spans, but I'm finding it hard these days to just be happy doing a single thing while playing.

I always want to watch or at least listen to something on my second monitor at the same time, or alternatively I want to at the very least feel that whatever it is I'm doing and focusing my attention on will kill three birds with one stone (no, two is not enough).

For example, I'm enjoying another stint on the Ebon Hawk Star Forge right now, working on my Commando there. Those play sessions are satisfying because they tick a lot of boxes:

- I get to slowly chip away at my main goal of revisiting all the side quests on Republic side.
- If any of them catch my attention in particular, I can record them and add them to my "Favourite Side Quest" playlist (which is a sort of related side project).
- I get to complete the trooper story for a third time. Not a high priority, but might as well while I'm there...
- I get to play without the support of my max-level legacy. Intriguing!
- What's life like with Galactic Command when you don't have/use any of the boosts and just putter along doing quests every so often? Interesting to see.
- A low level legacy means that there are achievements to be had everywhere!
- ... and datacrons to hunt! I used to get my fix for that on the Progenitor but since that has been merged into Darth Malgus, doing them on yet another server is the only way to keep re-experiencing those jumping puzzles in a meaningful way.
- And with all that, I still get to watch things on my second monitor as well... I just pause the video every so often whenever I visit a quest hub, but I can continue watching while cruising around and killing ten womp rats.

Plus, every so often you get to relive fond memories, such as when running into this champion who actually still hits quite hard even to this day.

Now, it doesn't always have to be quite this much. Other times I will settle for something like PvPing on my agent because:

- PvP is fun.
- It gains her Command ranks and she's not 300 yet.
- It's PvP bonus day or we're in a light side victory state, so I'm feeling extra efficient.

Still, always wanting everything to be contributing towards several goals at once is quite a tall order. It's made me wonder whether this isn't the real reason I struggle so much with replaying KotFE & KotET. When I set myself the goal to complete veteran mode KotFE for example, I went through the entire sixteen chapters in a flash! Having more than one thing to work towards was fun. However, the rest of the time those chapters are pretty much the antithesis to my desire to multitask:

- The way combat and dialogue alternate quickly and frequently is very immersive the first time around but doesn't play so well with watching something else on my second screen because I need to start and stop all the time.
- Unless you're making a point of speed-running by skipping cut scenes etc., they aren't a great source of XP or CXP either.
- Beyond seeing the story and how different choices play out (which is fun two or three times) there just isn't... anything. You don't get any good loot, there is little to no room to go off the beaten path for a bit and do something else, there's no reputation to earn, no achievements for killing 100/500/1000 skytroopers... welp, I can't believe I just suggested that as an addition to make chapter replays a bit more interesting.

Don't tell me to go play something else instead though - I like my comfort food! I just really have an urge to be efficient about it at the same time.

Character or Legacy?

Last week, Keith announced on the forums that Bioware is planning to make a lot more currencies legacy-wide in the near future, which will even include credits. Ted and I talked about this on the podcast, and as I said there, my main reaction to this news was mostly curiosity because I'd quite like to find out just how many credits I have spread out across my legacy. But what was even more interesting to me was to read players' reactions to the announcement. Mostly they were positive, but a few people were grousing about losing another piece of their characters' individuality. Others immediately clamoured for Bioware to make even more things account- or legacy-wide, including social rank, valor rank and more.

I think it's interesting to ask why we want certain things to be legacy- or account-wide but not others. As a general rule, I'm probably more in favour of limiting a character's achievements to that one character than most.

First off, there is immersion. I can already hear some of you groan at the mere mention of the word. It seems to have fallen out of fashion to care about a virtual world's internal consistency unless you're a roleplayer, but I do. People always love to bring up random game features that aren't immersive while arguing that therefore nobody is allowed to care about anything being immersive. But immersion isn't a binary switch, it's a continuum, and just because there are aspects of any given game that work against feeling immersed, that doesn't mean that I don't care about having others that allow me to perceive the virtual world as more "real".

As a general rule, focusing on the player behind the keyboard instead of the characters works against immersion. Of course, everyone draws the line in different places. For example I've never had an issue with characters trading gear. SWTOR's legacy system in particular also supports this lore-wise because your characters are supposed to have a connection to each other. But when I last dipped my toes into World of Warcraft during its Mists of Pandaria expansion for example, I was rather put off by the way pets and mounts had been unified into account-wide UI panels. Being able to pull out the rare bear mount I had once earned on my troll priest on my almost newborn worgen just felt wrong.

But immersion aside, there is another important benefit to limiting certain things to individual characters: being able to start over. If I just had a ton of fun levelling a character to 70, I can go right back to the character creation screen and roll up another one, starting the journey all over again. Imagine if levels were legacy-wide, and once you'd hit max-level, any alts you created automatically started at max level too. I imagine some people would even like that idea! But I would find it abhorrent. Starting over from scratch is one of the great joys in an MMO for me, and immediately having things marked as "done" on every new character limits my options. To be honest that's also my only slight reservation about the legacy-wide credits: It means that if I ever want to feel like a nobody who has to earn every credit again, I basically need to re-roll on another server, because any new character in my existing legacy will automatically have a bulging wallet that will be hard to ignore.

With that in mind, I cannot help but read most requests to make this or that feature legacy-wide as the poster saying: "This might have been fun the first time, but like hell do I ever want to do it again." That's certainly the impression I got when datacrons were made legacy-wide for example. I kind of have mixed feelings about that to this day. On the one hand I can't deny that it's made it faster and easier to level alts without feeling like you need to detour for this kind of stuff or miss out on something important. On the other hand, I pretty much never do datacrons anymore. My guild used to host datacron hunting events fairly regularly, and they were interesting to both new and old players because even if you'd gotten them all on your main, there was almost always an alt or two that didn't have them yet and would benefit. Nowadays anyone who's been playing for any amount of time has got most datacrons at some point and - since they are legacy-wide - never needs to do them again. There is no incentive to help out those who are new to the game and might still need them. I find that kind of sad.

So most of the time when I read requests to make this or that legacy-wide, I can't help but read them like this: Make GSF legacy-wide please! - I hate it and I want to know that once I max out my ships once, I'm done and will never have to think about it again. Make social rank legacy-wide please! - I just want the social rewards on all my alts without ever having to run another flashpoint again. Make valor rank legacy-wide please! - I don't want to have to spend time PvPing on yet another character just to get that cool title; it's such a horrible grind. And so on and so forth. If you enjoy a given type of content, repeating it on alts is fun, and making it legacy-wide to discourage repetition is basically giving in to those who say they don't like it and don't want to feel like they "have to" ever do it again.

That said, there have definitely been times when I felt like making something legacy-wide has been a good thing. For example I really liked the way you could trade warzone commendations among characters pre-5.0. This wasn't about spending less time in PvP, but about redistributing resources from characters who had more than they knew what to do with to those who still needed to buy gear. Likewise, making the new Umbara currency that has been talked about by the devs legacy-wide sounds like a good thing to me because if you can use it to buy a stronghold and strongholds are legacy-wide anyway, why shouldn't different characters be able to pool their resources to work on it together?

Unfortunately, there is no single right answer here. For example I could see someone arguing that the requests to make GSF legacy-wide also fall into the second category, because it's about having your characters share their fully kitted-out ships. But I think that levelling up in GSF can be a fun activity by itself (though I'm sure many would disagree) and something that should be preserved for the individual character.

Where do you fall on the spectrum of wanting things to be bound to character vs. bound to legacy (or even account)?