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

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

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

The /getdown bug

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

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

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

The big PvP debacle on original Ilum

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

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

The original Rakghoul event

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

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

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

The Grand Acquisitions Race

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

The return of Revan

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

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

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

The launch of Knights of the Fallen Empire

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

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

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

Galactic Command

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

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

Theron's betrayal

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

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

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

Darth Malgus' return

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

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

Move to Broadsword

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

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

Runner-ups:

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

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

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

Reaping the Spoils of War

I'm a bit hesitant to pass judgement on a new gearing system after less than a week of dealing with it, mostly because I actually remember my first week of Galactic Command being decent fun too, even if my enjoyment dropped off rapidly after that. That "new feature glow" combined with the generally happy buzz surrounding the release of a new expansion probably does a good job of covering up many flaws in the beginning.

That said... I do feel confident in saying that Spoils of War already feels a lot less scary and confusing than I thought it was on the PTS.

Basically, the first step you have to take is to work on very straightforward vertical progression up to item rating 306, which is the current maximum. It feels safe to say that there's no reason to care about amplifiers at all before you get there, and if you happen to pick up any set bonus gear, just stow it away for later.

Almost everything seems to be personal loot now, and yours is based on your character's average item rating, so your number one priority is to ensure that this is always as high as possible, regardless of whether the stats on said gear are actually good for you. (I shamefully wore a pair of bracers with defense on them for a few hours because they were higher level than what I was wearing at the time and it helped to boost my average.)

Work in progress.

So if your current item rating is 272 for example, your personal loot drops will all be in a narrow range around that, say 268 to 274. By equipping every 274 piece that drops you slowly raise your average item rating, meaning that the range for potential loot also slowly climbs upwards, and so on and so forth, until you reach the cap.

Then you can start mixing and matching the max-level gear you actually want to keep and start including items with set bonuses. (As set bonuses are now bound to armour shells again, you can save the ones you got with lower item ratings and then just replace the modifications in them with higher level ones.)

At that point you can start building sets for different purposes, and also have a think about what sort of amplifiers you would like to have on them. (While it's a bit like playing slot machine, you can always re-roll the amplifiers on a given piece of gear, if you do want to bother.) Theoretically. I'm not actually up to that stage myself yet.

One thing that Spoils of War has in common with Galactic Command is that you're meant to be able to gear up from "playing your way", by taking part in pretty much any activity in the game. Just like with Galactic Command, this is technically true, but doesn't feel very well-balanced yet at this point.

The first couple of days, when all I was doing were dailies and the new operation on story mode, progress felt pretty slow, but ever since I was tipped off that master mode flashpoints were the place to be right now, things have sped up a lot.

Flashpoint bosses are such loot piñatas at the moment that we've already got used to having a mini break after each one to sort out what loot to equip and which of the many gear drops to disintegrate - after all, raising your item rating now might already result in the next boss dropping something better. I'm not at 306 yet, but getting there, and some of my guildies have already achieved that particular milestone.

It does feel a bit grindy even so, and if I had to go through this whole shebang on every single one of my alts I wouldn't find it very appealing... but the nice thing is that since all loot is legacy-bound now, you only have to go through the grind in its entirety once - after that you can send your full set of 306 to your alt and let them run around in it for a while so they'll instantly be able to collect their own set of 306 gear without having to grind their way through 40 levels of item rating first.

I can't say I mind master mode flashpoints being the current flavour of the month to do this, seeing how I've always enjoyed them, but I very much expect Bioware to still do some rebalancing to make some of the other activities a bit more rewarding, just like they had to do in the early days of Galactic Command.

Looking Back on Three Years of KotET

Seeing how we only have six days left until the release of Onslaught, it's about time I wrote the post looking back on the current expansion that I've been meaning to write for a while. It's not exactly a tradition, but nothing about Knights of the Eternal Throne has been traditional!

In fact, it probably featured the biggest period of upheaval for the game since its launch year and the free-to-play transition, at least from a player perspective. Business-wise, I'm sure the first year was a much bigger deal, what with the many unmet expectations and resulting lay-offs. But from a player point of view, it wasn't actually such a bad time, considering the sheer amount of content that was being released.

Knights of the Eternal Throne on the other hand was a bit of a mess from the beginning. The story was solid, but it was originally meant to go on for much longer and was quickly cut short (for whatever reasons).

After the heavy single-player focus of KotFE, there seemed to be some renewed interest in releasing group content, but initially only in the form of uprisings, which were a bit awkward. I really wanted to like them, but ultimately I was not at all inspired to repeat them unless I was going for an achievement or something. I couldn't quite put my finger on why they just didn't grab me for the longest time, until a commenter described them as flashpoints with the interesting bosses taken out and more of the sort of trash pulls put in that everyone always wants to skip.

And of course there was Galactic Command. Not going to re-hash that story yet again! Let's just say that it was quite a disaster at launch; it was probably the period of time in which I was the most unsatisfied with SWTOR gameplay-wise that I've ever been, and it made several good people I knew leave the game for good. Boo!

The first couple of months after launch mostly seemed to be dedicated to damage control. We will be getting back to Republic vs. Empire, honest! And you'll get a new operation too, even if it's only one boss at a time!

The release of Iokath in April 2017 was true to this change in direction, but felt somewhat clumsily done. Yes, we were getting back to Republic vs. Empire, but the plot felt like it had been written with a single destination in mind and little concern for whether it made sense how we got there. Iokath also featured our first new daily area in years, yet it was awkward to navigate and initially released with several dailies actually costing you money instead of awarding it (yes, really).

In May, Keith Kanneg becoming the game's new Producer gave many of us new hope for improvements. And ultimately, I think he has been good for the game, but it's been a very slow process. I'm a bit hesitant to speculate ever since I read John Staats' WoW Diary - in which he proclaims that player speculation about what's going on inside video game development is pretty much always wrong, no matter how well thought-out - but what it felt like from the outside above all else was like Keith had to completely clean house and revamp a lot of things, which took up a lot of dev time that could otherwise have been used to create new content.

After he took charge, we basically got a slow trickle of new content alternating with systems updates: the second Gods from the Machine encounter was released a full three months after the first, then a month later we got a new flashpoint with some story, then another three months passed until a big round of server merges, and so on.

It took almost a full year for all five bosses in Gods from the Machine to be put live, and the traitor story arc, consisting of three bits of story tied to an equal number of new flashpoints, took a full nine months from start to finish. It wasn't bad content, it was just coming out so, so... slowly.

The traitor story arc did also mark an interesting turning point from my point of view though. While the first chapter, Crisis on Umbara, continued in a similarly awkward vein to Iokath, part two was a marked improvement, and part three was all-around enjoyable again. It was also an interesting time to be playing and engaging with the community, as there was a lot of discussion about what to make of the traitor's actions, which was the kind of thing you only get to experience right at the release of such new story content.

After that we had to deal with another relative drought of content for several months, until Bioware revealed that a new, bigger piece of content was coming in December, which would eventually be followed by a whole expansion. It's kind of weird to think that this was a year ago now and said expansion is only launching now.

Three years is a long time for any MMO to go without an expansion, but it has been even more so in SWTOR's case, which was pumping them out mere months apart before that (even if they were smaller in scope than what many other MMOs call expansions). It kind of felt like Bioware just completely lost the plot for a little while after KotET's launch, with everything a bit of a mess and no clear plan in terms of how to proceed.

I don't have a citation at hand, but I even remember Keith saying at one point that he wasn't that keen on expansions and preferred smaller content updates himself, which may have contributed to no moves being made towards working on another big content drop for a long time. I'm glad that the cries for a new expansion eventually won out though, even if it took a while. I'm looking forward to playing it in a few days!

As for what comes after... who knows? I remain eternally optimistic that things are maybe back on track now and the next big update won't take three years, but I honestly don't know. It's a persistent rumour that the team working on SWTOR is much smaller than those working on comparable MMOs, which would obviously limit their resources if true. But I take heart from how passionate they seem to be and that - raw quantity of output aside - I've felt that they've been taking steps in the right direction for the past two years, both in terms of story and in terms of how they interact with the community. For me, Jedi Under Siege has easily been the most enjoyable addition to the game in years. Ultimately, those are things that matter more to me than the sheer frequency of new patches.

Points and Pointlessness

Sooner than expected, Tuesday's patch brought the return of the Conquest point change about which I expressed concerns two weeks ago, and which crashed the servers last Tuesday. This time it "only" caused the game to crash whenever you looked at the mission or Conquest tabs, which was still something to behold. (Seriously, I don't think my game had crashed this much since 2012.) A server restart took care of that particular issue quickly enough, but the game remains somewhat laggy during busy times, as it's now trying to assign Conquest points to every little action.

The reports from guildies who had briefly seen the way this worked a week ago, before the change had to be temporarily reverted, were not exaggerated. The Conquest point gains assigned based on normal experience earned are absolutely insane at level 70. Yes, I know it's also double XP week right now, but still. After less than two days of playing, my main was "accidentally" sitting on a personal score of about 80k points, without even trying... with your personal "target" for the week still set at 15k.

And I know this is not going to be a popular opinion, but I find that kind of sad.

More than anything the current situation actually reminds me of what was done to levelling heroics in 4.0: They used to be casual, open world group content, and I loved them. Then Bioware changed them into basically another form of solo daily quests, and all the people who like dailies and who didn't care for the old heroics went: "Yes! Best change ever!"

And because there are apparently a lot of people who like dailies, this was seen as the popular opinion, and the end result was that people who liked dailies now had more of them than before, with two different names (the ones actually called dailies and the ones called heroics), and people who liked casual, open world group content (like me) had no content of that type to play anymore.

Conquest has always been an objective-based endgame system. While you could technically also participate at lower levels, the general idea was quite obviously for it to be something to keep you busy at max level. The different objectives gave you goals to work on, and the changing weekly events provided variety in what kind of goals were available.

I think Galactic Command caused a bit of an identity crisis for Conquest, because the two systems were filling somewhat similar niches, giving you a bar to fill via a variety of activities to earn rewards. At least that was my theory as to why, when Bioware revamped Conquest in 5.8, they narrowed down the objectives a bit and emphasised the collaborative aspect more heavily than previously.

The initial version of the updated system was probably a bit too stingy with objectives, but this was rectified relatively quickly, leaving the new Conquest in a very good place in my opinion. I've been participating in it almost every single week since then, much longer than the original iteration of Conquest ever managed to keep me engaged.

After this week's patch though, Conquest objectives have suddenly and decisively become utterly pointless, because the amount of "passive" points you automatically earn for the simplest of tasks, from killing a group of mobs to completing a single daily quest, is so insanely high that pursuing any particular objective for its comparatively piddly Conquest point reward is pretty much a futile endeavour with no real benefit. From what I've seen, the most efficient way to fill your Conquest point bar now is to simply do dailies/heroics or grind mobs.

It doesn't really matter though, because you'll get points no matter what you do. You'll get enough points to hit your target if you've never even heard of Conquest. I'm pretty sure that there's a significant number of casual players out there who'll be very surprised this week to suddenly get a random quest-like pop-up that suddenly gives them free stuff for nothing in particular (as far as they can tell).

And in my opinion, that sucks. Like with the heroics, a type of gameplay that was one thing has suddenly been turned into something completely different. And since that "something different" is "get free stuff for whatever you were going to do anyway", forums and blogs are full of praise for this change. But all I'm seeing when I read "I love the new Conquest" is: "I didn't care for Conquest before, so thanks for turning it into something different now that gives me free stuff for doing my dailies".

Meanwhile my own gameplay experience is diminished, because Conquest goals feel like a thing of the past now, as my Conquest bar just fills itself in parallel to my CXP bar, with no notable difference between the two other than different rewards when the bar is full.

Make no mistake: I'm not saying that Conquest needed to be hard, before anyone accuses me of some kind of elitism. In fact I just praised the Pirate Incursion event for its variety of new and rewarding objectives only a week ago. I'm saying it should have remained something that requires deliberation and conscious decision-making about which activities to do or not do. We already had a system that rewarded you for playing any way you like, and I don't see why we needed another that works more or less the same way.

I will keep participating in Conquest of course, because there literally isn't a way not to anymore, unless all you do is roleplay on the fleet. But mindlessly showering me with rewards is not the same as actually giving me something interesting to do.

XP, CXP & Conquest

I mentioned in my post about the Onslaught gearing stream that I had a few things to say about XP and Conquest, so here goes.

First off, Charles and Eric said that once Galactic Command becomes Galactic Renown, CRXP will simply be based off the regular XP numbers you would gain if you were still levelling at max level. This may not sound like much but is actually a pretty big deal in my eyes because of how different the two systems are right now.

Basically, Command XP is heavily focused on rewarding you for doing what you could call endgame content, which generally means repeatable activities, a lot of which involve other players. I mean, SWTOR doesn't draw as strict a line between levelling and endgame as some MMOs, and technically you can quest, run flashpoints or play GSF at any level, but you probably know what I mean.

As a reminder of just how skewed the ratio between XP and CXP is right now, I decided to do a couple of simple tasks on both a level 70 character (to earn CXP) and on a level 60 character (to earn XP):

- Do a side quest (I chose Explosive Discontent in Kaas City)
- Do a warzone (OK, I had to do a couple to get comparable results, as you get more for a win than a loss and more for an 8v8 than for an arena, but you get the idea)
- Kill a few outdoor mobs (possessed people in front of the Dark Temple)

Killing a level 15 possessed Sith initiate (strong) netted me 3,456 XP on the 60, and 15 Command points on the 70, which is only 0.4% of the regular XP number. The quest gave my level 60 76,208 experience points, and my level 70 227 Command experience points - and that last one was with a boost applied! This made it worse in terms of CXP than the mob killing, as it was less than 0.3% of the number I got in experience points ten levels earlier... but OK, just because the number is smaller that doesn't have to be a problem if it scales down the same way across all content, right? This is not so, however.

Losing an 8v8 warzone for example got me 84,187 XP on the 60, and 4,986 CXP on the 70. So here the max-level number was actually almost 6% of the levelling number, meaning that participating in actively promoted endgame content rewarded 20 times as much CXP as just continuing to play as you would have while levelling by doing quests and killing mobs. Or in other words (and this is more what it feels like in practice): if you continue questing and killing mobs at max level like you did while levelling, you suddenly get bugger all XP for it.

Now, in fairness Bioware did have grounds to nerf mob CXP at least - remember the guy who hit Command rank 100 three days into KotET due to farming a heroic area on Tatooine in an ops group? Basically, with Galactic Command being the only way to gear up, and mob killing being the fastest way to do so if you did it right, the game suddenly turned into a mob farming simulator, which is not something it was ever meant to be.

The result was a massive nerf to CXP gained from kills... but they did ease up on that again after a while, as Galactic Command was improved upon and actually gave you a bit more freedom to actually make some progress by playing your own way.

Still, the spectre of the crazy power-leveller hasn't been banished entirely. Whenever there's a double XP event for example, "bug farming groups" will sometimes form in Bugtown on Balmorra, an area that's very densely packed with mobs that are easy to kill, where a certain type of player likes to power-level their umpteenth alt by simply grinding mobs in a group for a couple of hours.

I don't see this as a problem as long as it remains a niche style of play - but I think if Renown experience is meant to scale the same way as normal experience, Bioware will have to keep an eye out to make sure farming bugs won't suddenly turn into the new best way to get endgame gear.

That said, I do look forward to the transition from normal levelling to "endless levelling" at the level cap becoming a bit more organic. Right now doing any sort of quest content at max level feels extremely unrewarding if you're not doing it primarily to see the story.

Now the other matter is Conquest, which will also be tied to XP gains to some degree in the future, in fact already starting with tomorrow's patch. Now, this won't be a 1:1 conversion, as you'll only get a small percentage of XP as Conquest points, but still... in 6.0 it will also start to reward gear.

I have to admit that my first instinct was to not be happy about this one, even though I should also benefit from it becoming yet another little bit easier to hit my personal Conquest target on any given character. I also don't inherently dislike the idea of getting gear rewards from Conquest... but there are two issues I have with this general direction:

The first is simply that I think Conquest should remain its own, distinctive thing. In fact I talked about this back when the system was first revamped in April last year and people were complaining that it was suddenly much harder to hit their personal target by just doing whatever. If both Galactic Command/Renown and Conquest fill a bar based on your XP and give you a box of rewards for it, what's the point of having two different systems doing the same thing?

The other fear I have concerns competition between guilds. Several times now my guild has managed to beat guilds that were much bigger in terms of active members than ours (we figured this out via the /who Command) but whose members clearly weren't particularly interested in Conquest, with a lot of them just logging on to play through the story or whatever. Yes, I'm biased here: I want my guild to keep winning!

I like that an interest in how Conquest works and making an effort to participate in specific activities that reward Conquest points can currently beat raw numbers (to some degree). Anything that makes Conquest more "passive" means moving away from that and more towards favouring whichever guild can simply get the most members to log on and play in some fashion, regardless of what they do and whether they are making any effort to work together.

I guess I'll find out about just how much of an effect that will have tomorrow.

Onslaught Gearing Stream Thoughts

I've said often enough that I'm a grumpy old fogey when it comes to streaming (it's not for me), but that didn't stop me from staying up late last night to watch the planned dev livestream about gearing in Onslaught. 10pm wasn't that late even for a work night, and to be honest I was just way too curious about what Charles and Eric would have to say about the new gearing system, feeling a mix of positive excitement and slight trepidation. I've never doubted Bioware's good intentions, but I do remember that there was a time when they genuinely thought that Galactic Command was a great idea, and any arguments brought forth by the community about why this wasn't so just resulted in us being told to wait, and that we'd be sure to love it once we saw it. (We all know how that turned out.)

I needn't have worried this time though. The stream was highly informative and entertaining, and the tl;dr version of this post is basically that I thought most of it sounded good. I'm sure there'll be things that need tweaking, and there'll be something that doesn't work out as intended, simply because MMOs are complicated and that's how these things always go, but you could tell that a great deal of thought went into their plans for the new system and they made sure to avoid any obvious pitfalls.

Also worth noting was that they started the stream by stating that they were very dedicated to gathering feedback in a timely manner this time around (which is again, a nice contrast to Galactic Command, which was dropped on us as a done deal). There will be several rounds of PTS testing for which they are even planning to bring back the old reward titles, there'll be reddit AMAs, and they'll even send out surveys!

Keith also made an appearance early on and said that the game had subjected us to a veritable rollercoaster of emotions over the years when it came to gearing: "whether to get data crystals, not get data crystals, whether to use Galactic Command, not use Galactic Command" etc. and that he wanted the team to go back to the drawing board and learn from all this. Honestly, that was just incredibly heartening to me and once again made me appreciate just how great it is to now have a Game Producer who both knows and loves the game and understands where its problems lie. [/end Keith fangirling]

Also, the way he just sort of slid into the frame during the stream was kind of funny, as captured in gif form by Snave.

Anyway, if you just want a factual summary of what was said, you can find one in this forum post and a proper official blog is still supposed to be forthcoming as well. I'm not going to repeat it all in detail; I'm just going to pick out some parts to share my opinion on.

They went into some more detail about the new set bonuses and tactical items, which didn't really reveal anything drastically new in my opinion, just expanded on what had already been said. The only thing that was noteworthy to me here was that they explicitly stated that tactical items are meant to be rare, at least initially. They also listed some examples of item effects they've come up with so far, most of which made chat go "whoa, that sounds OP". Trying to balance all this is going to be fun...

The one entirely new thing they brought up was that the new gear is also supposed to have a new thing called "amplifiers" on them (apologies for saying "new" three times in a row there), which is basically a chance at that item having some random extra secondary stats such as "increased dot damage" or "faster gathering". I initially had a moment of panic there, thinking that this sounded a lot like one of the things that WoW players have been complaining about in recent years, but Eric was quick to clarify that while the original stat assignment is random, you can "recalibrate" amps to change their stats to something else. Okay.

Mostly I wasn't sure what to think of this one. Did we really need another stat slot on top of armourings, mods, enhancements and augments? Is this the sort of thing that excites people? At the same time it almost sounded as if they didn't want us to worry about it too much, as apparently amps won't be taken into consideration for PvE boss tuning and will only have a relatively small impact. It's like they want us to care and not care about them at the same time. Gonna file these away under "wait and see".

The second half of the stream focused on how we will acquire gear in Onslaught and that's where things got interesting. Basically they did still want to realise the original idea behind Galactic Command, to let people earn gear from pretty much anything, but it sounds like they also wanted to give us back the feeling of actually getting rewarded with items for completing specific tasks. As Charles and Eric put it: "Gear drops from enemies, hey!" - "Wild concept!" I do have to admit the thought of actually getting useful loot drops from flashpoints again really excited me, as that's something we haven't had in many years.

There will still be vertical progression, with harder content rewarding better gear, but mainly the focus seems to be on getting us to collect armour with different set bonuses and tactical items. Everything will be legacy bound and they fully expect us to trade things around between different characters. This brought up the issue of storage space, which led to Eric dropping the almost off-hand comment of: "What if you didn't have to store any of your crafting materials in any of your inventories? Hopefully that'll clear up some space for ya!" - which made the chat go wild (including me). Right now I only have a couple of free slots in my legacy cargo hold, and about three and a half of my six tabs are taken up by crafting mats, so yes, this change will make a big difference.

Useless gear drops are supposed to be drastically reduced via RNG protection and the gear level of rewards scaling with what you're already wearing. I'm not sure if that means that everything will be personal loot going forward? Waiting on clarification on that...

Galactic Command will become Galactic Renown, intended to be purely supplementary and with no more tiers, so that you can theoretically get the best gear out of your very first crate (depending on what you're already wearing). Levels will become pointless and basically just a cosmetic thing to raise for bragging rights, and they will also reset every so often in what will now be considered seasons. Not sure what's going to happen to the other stuff that currently comes from Command crates, such as cosmetic gear and pets - some open questions here. Also, apparently Conquest will start to give gear too?! I'll save my thoughts on that as well as on the changes to (C/R)XP for a separate post I think, as it's something quite near and dear to my heart.

Now, with the sheer number of new gear faucets, we'll still end up with lots of stuff we don't want or need, or that one slot for which we can't quite get the right thing. This is where the new currency comes in! It doesn't have an official name yet, so they jokingly referred to it on the stream as Charles Points / Chuck Bucks.

Twitter user Greyias even drew a picture of one. You know you've done well when your stream inspires people to do fan art.

You can deconstruct unwanted gear (which is going to be similar to reverse engineering but doesn't require you to be a crafter) to turn it into crafting materials and this new currency, and then use that to craft or buy what you actually want from a vendor.  (You'll also be getting more of the new currency as an activity reward.) I guess this is not dissimilar to the way unassembled components work now, but I guess the balancing will be different as you will also get the new currency from PvE and other activities.

So basically what you'll be doing is: run specific content you like for (somewhat but not completely random) rewards, then convert any unwanted rewards into materials or currency that you can use to acquire what you're missing and optimise what you already have.

Pretty much like they illustrated on the slides. Don't mind the not so happy expressions I somehow managed to capture here.

It didn't occur to me immediately after watching the stream, but now that I'm spelling it all out to myself a second time, this does feel like a system that tries to learn from the past and take all the parts of previous gearing systems that worked best:

- Making it rewarding to do actual content (e.g. getting set bonus items from flashpoints, something that was something that I loved in the base game)
- Allowing more than one avenue to acquire gear with the best item level (like we had with the final iteration of Galactic Command, before Ossus)
- Allowing people to simply go to a vendor for what they're missing (as has been the case throughout several iterations of the game pre-Galactic Command)
- Allowing unwanted gear to be turned into currency too (like you can currently do with Command crate drops)

The big unknowns are mostly the new factors:
- Everything being legacy-bound sounds great in principle but there might still be some unintended side effects. For example I personally prefer to get each character their own gear set - will I feel pressured to send my main's gear around to all my alts going forward purely so that their rewards will scale higher?
- Just how well will this loot scaling thing work? (See above.)
- Inventory management (even with the additional storage, the new focus on collecting different set bonuses might result in overcrowded cargo bays)
- Various unknowns, such as how exactly you'll be rewarded for doing PvP or GSF. Will you just get a box with a random item?

All that said, overall I'm feeling optimistic about everything I've heard, and especially about Bioware's renewed dedication to gathering and listening to feedback. I actually went and posted some questions in the forum threads currently dedicated to feedback about what was said on the stream, and I'll definitely also fill out any surveys they'll send me. Plus I should probably check out the PTS when they put it live! I haven't been back there since checking out the Rishi stronghold and the big PvP changes last summer, but this sounds like something that would really benefit from as many people as possible playing around with it, and the return of the title rewards sounds great too. (I currently only own one of them, First Line of Defense).

I'll definitely be keeping a close eye on more news about this as it gets released. Is there anything that stood out to you about this news drop above anything else?

Ossus And Gear

One of the main things people have criticised about Ossus (beside the bugs) has been its gear grind. To me this has honestly been somewhat surprising, because I have to admit that I've been quite excited to be gaining gear the old-fashioned way again (as in by getting it as a reward for specific tasks) for the first time in years. After the overwhelmingly negative response people had to my post about Galactic Command being in a decent state now, I would have expected more players to agree!

I guess most of the unhappiness stems from one of two things: First off, for all of Galactic Command's flaws, people have got very used to being able to gain gear from absolutely anything, so the thought of "having" to do something they don't like that much to earn rewards (such as a round of dailies) rankles for some.

The other complaint is about the process taking too long/being too grindy, which I guess is just one of those matters of opinion. A lot of MMO players these days seem to think that everyone should be able to acquire best-in-slot gear quickly and easily, else the game is "gating" things or being unfair. They're not technically wrong, but to me getting more rewards if you are able to put more time in is one of an MMORPG's core features, so to me complaining about that just makes no sense.

If anything the main thing I would criticise about Ossus' gearing system is that it adds another complication on top of an already incredibly complicated system. It's hard to fathom at this point that the introduction of Galactic Command was originally intended to simplify gearing. Even as someone who's neck-deep into the game and plays it nearly every day I still sometimes run to the wrong vendor, what with how many different currencies and trade-ins there are now. I'm convinced that one of Bioware's biggest challenges for 6.0 will be to completely revamp the gearing system to go back to something simpler without completely losing the benefits of Galactic Command as it is now.

That said, I also find what Bioware has done with 252 and 258 gear quite fascinating. It feels very much like an experiment in gauging the players' preferences for gear acquisition. Basically there are currently four roads to 252 gear for people not raiding Gods from the Machine master mode, and to then upgrade it to 258 gear, for which you need to already have 252 and the new currency, masterwork data crystals or MDCs for short.

1. Dailies / weeklies: This is the only way to directly acquire a piece of gear - all the other options only reward one MDC each, and you need more than one for each piece of 252 gear you want to buy directly from the vendor. It's usually also the quickest and easiest option, as all you need to do is complete the weekly mission to do ten dailies. Unlike on Iokath, the dailies are also back to not being on a rotation, so this can be done in a single day if desired, like in the older daily areas.

There is one catch however: You cannot choose the exact piece of gear that you will receive. You get to choose among three different boxes that are assigned to different gear slots (for example there's one that will contain a main hand, off-hand, head or ear item) but which piece of gear exactly it contains is random. I suppose this could feel infuriating (especially with the box that contains relics, chances of getting something rubbish are fairly high), but knowing in the back of your head that you can always buy that last missing piece from the vendor instead if you really want to makes it seem not so bad. Instead its feels more like a bonus that you have a chance to get a piece of gear outright instead of having to buy them all from the vendor.

2. Killing the two Ossus world bosses or earning 50 ranked PvP points: For me it's pretty much a no-brainer that the former is the superior way of completing this quest to earn one MDC a week, due to being faster and more fun, but I guess they felt the need to acknowledge dedicated PvPers here. While getting those ranked points undoubtedly takes longer, if you're already playing ranked anyway you'll basically get the quest done "automatically" as you go along. I wonder what the distribution of people taking option one vs. option two looks like. Either way this is also the option closest to the traditional model of rewarding players for participating in a group-centric endgame, even if both world bosses are easily puggable.

3. Trading unassembled components: There is a smuggler in both the Republic and Imperial bases that will trade 500 unassembled components, Galactic Command's more important currency that can only be acquired through PvP, GSF, killing MM bosses or disintegrating loot, for one MDC every week. If you have components to spare, you can also buy a second MDC for double the price (1000 components), but that's the weekly maximum. I started off by buying two per character every week but soon found that this caused me to burn through my stacks of components too quickly and had to stop. Still, I find it fascinating that the option even exists, because this is basically Bioware offering you a way to completely bypass Ossus' endgame content and just upgrade your gear by doing more of what you're already doing. Keep earning those Galactic Command levels and eventually you'll be able to buy the gear without doing all the stuff on Ossus.

4. Time-limited missions: Finally, there is a single quest in the base that changes every week and that, depending on the week, will reward you a single MDC for performing a certain task in PvE or PvP. I haven't seen all the options yet at the time of writing this, but from what I understand the focus can be on warzones, master mode flashpoints, GSF or story mode operations. This feels like an experimental extension of the daily activity bonus for Galactic Command, which keeps the idea of rewarding you for doing old content but tries to nudge people into doing specific kinds of content every week instead of just doing the same thing every day.

Unfortunately there's been a number of issues with this. First off, it's not been clear whether it's supposed to be randomised or not. So far, the current "rotation" has been two weeks of warzones, two weeks of flashpoints and two weeks of GSF, which feels too rigid to be random but also awkward if it was set this way intentionally as it really doesn't give you as much variety as it could. Secondly, there's been a huge discrepancy in the effort required to complete the quest. The PvP version was just to earn eight medals in a warzone, which was a matter of maybe fifteen minutes. Then flashpoint week rolled around and we were asked to run four master mode flashpoints to complete the mission, something that takes anywhere from two to four hours! And people complain about PvP supposedly getting the short end of the stick... Then GSF week rolled around and the mission to win three matches was just outright bugged and literally impossible to complete as you simply don't get credit for your wins. It's just been a mess.

Those issues aside though, I really like this system of people being given different options to earn their rewards. It's a bit more rigid than Galactic Command as you can't just do anything at any time, but there is still a fair amount of choice. Also, you get rewarded more for participating in more parts of the game, which is how MMORPGs should work in my opinion - if you only ever want to do a single thing (such as PvP) there are plenty of other genres out there that will cater to your tastes in a much better way.

For me personally, it's also been great to have some more specific goals to work towards again beyond gaining Command levels, and having a reason to do the new content over the old at least for a while. I'm all in favour of keeping old content relevant, but before Ossus I hadn't realised just how difficult Galactic Command had made it to incentivise running new content. The other day my pet tank surprised me by telling me that he never even maxed out the Iokath-based reputation, but in hindsight it makes perfect sense - practical issues with the dailies aside, there was no reason to do them unless you were after any of the handful of cosmetic rewards. If you just wanted Command XP, pretty much any of the older content was easier and more rewarding.

I suppose there is a risk of burnout from doing the same thing over and over, and I'm certainly starting to feel the pressure now that I've got five characters caught up to Ossus. Doing the weekly on all five, doing the world bosses on all five etc. takes a lot of time - not to mention that I've got a couple of guildies who've been doing the whole rotation on a dozen or more characters! However, in the end that is just a problem of our own making. The new gear isn't really required for anything but Gods from the Machine MM (in which case the raid provides you with an additional avenue for gear acquisition anyway), and nobody is whipping our backs to make us upgrade the gear of all of our alts in the shortest time possible. It's just something to while the time away while we wait for 6.0, which is probably still many months away.

On Alts, Progression and Story

The other day I logged into SWTOR, delighted with the knowledge that I had a few hours to play, with no particular pressure to do anything specific, not even Conquest - I figured that I'd be able to do anything I wanted, finally able to work on some long-neglected character goals.

I stared at the character selection screen for several minutes and then logged off. It wasn't that I didn't want to play, or that I had nothing to do... but when it came to thinking of specific goals, I felt lost. I didn't even know where to start. On the plus side: This got me thinking on why that was, which is why you're getting this blog post.

In a level-based MMORPG with a narrative like SWTOR, progression basically consists of two parts: character progression and story. SWTOR puts more emphasis on the latter than most, but that doesn't mean that the former doesn't matter at all.

Ideally these two types of progression should work in tandem. You find yourself wanting to level up to see the next bit of the story or vice versa. When things align properly, level also serves as a sort of signpost to where you should be in the story, so in SWTOR's early days, if you hadn't played a character in a while, you could just glance at their level and get a pretty good idea of where you left off, e.g. "Hm, that one's in her thirties; must have left her somewhere on Alderaan."

Ever since 4.0 though, character and story progression have become utterly separated due to how much levelling has been sped up. The other day I even saw a F2P player - those who receive less XP than anyone else - complain that things were going to fast. "Why does it matter?" you might ask. "With level sync, you'll just continue to receive level-appropriate rewards anyway, even if you're over-levelled for the content you're doing." Well, it matters because with the way level sync is tuned, being overlevelled makes you way too powerful for combat to be much fun. (I received a stark reminder of this when I took a level 50 Sniper to Ilum this week and noted that the downlevelled players around me had several times more hitpoints as me.)

However, even if you leave that aside, you're still left with levels having become largely meaningless. Basically, you'd have to play in a very specific and self-limiting way to not overlevel content as you go along, so you never have reason to look forward to levelling up - it just kind of happens automatically. I actually find it alarming more than anything else when one of my few remaining sub-70 characters gains ten levels in a single play session these days. The only way to remain low level is to basically not play at all, which I've opted to do on a couple of characters whom I'm "saving" to continue to have access to the lowbie and midbie PvP brackets.

Aside from the characters mentioned above, almost my entire stable of alts has levelled up to 70 by now, more or less by accident and while still in hugely disparate places in the story, ranging from a few who are completely caught up with current content to those who've only just got their ship on Coruscant or Dromund Kaas. I do tend to always have a vague idea of where I left off - for example I've only taken a relatively small handful of characters through KotFE/KotET so far, so I do remember which ones those are, but if you were to put me on the spot and asked for example: "Hey, wanna level through Makeb with me?" I'd be staring at you like a deer in the headlights, because while I theoretically know that I've got quite a few characters who haven't done Makeb yet while technically being eligible for it, I'd have a hard time picking one on the spot.

And that's why I had such a tough time with that character selection screen, to bring us back to the beginning of this story. I like a good narrative, but I'm also a big fan of character progression, and there's not much left of that. I suppose Galactic Command provides an alternate progression system of sorts, but aside from the fact that I already have more 300s than I care to count, you'll note that this is also something you pretty much need a spreadsheet to keep track of, since the character selection screen certainly doesn't give you any indication of what Command level each character is at either.

Yet even if we ignore all of that and assume that I'd be happy to play my umpteenth alt just to see the story again, it's just a pain to keep track of where each character is at. And this is coming from someone who's been playing since launch and knows the game inside out. I dread to think how a returning player must feel when they go to their ship, see six different quests on their personal mission terminal and wonder what order these are even supposed to be in. It's not like their level is going to be any help.

A random page from my character selection screen with notes on some things that are very much not obvious.

 

So what can be done about this? Well, I suppose in my ideal world I'd like to see levelling slowed down again. We could keep level sync and just make it less OP. I know that's never going to happen though. I suppose a smaller thing that might help a little is if the character selection screen gave you the option to see more information about each character before logging in, such as what quests they are currently on or something. For now, I've settled on creating a spreadsheet to keep track of all my alts' mission progress. Just putting it together has already been quite informative and enlightening to be honest. (What? I can't believe I never did the Revan storyline on Shilu! Huh, I totally don't remember taking Tessal through Forged Alliances...) At the same time I feel that I shouldn't really need to have a spreadsheet for this kind of thing though.

The Point of Conquest

One of the nice things about having a blog is that you get to look back on what you thought about events years ago without having to purely rely on your potentially fuzzy memory. Unlike the way our brain remembers things, the written word doesn't change over time. So when the recent Conquest changes were implemented, I went back to see what I had thought about the system when it was first introduced back in late 2014. (Gosh, has it really been that long?) I had completely forgotten that my first reaction could pretty much be summed up as: "This is quite fun but I'm not entirely sure what's the point."

Since then I've been trying to consider the Conquest changes from that angle: the system's purpose in the game and how the changes potentially reflect an attempt to change - or at least adjust - the reasons people might participate in Conquest.

For the record, I'm still having a pretty good time with it myself. My guild has hit its small yield target every week so far, and once we even went for medium yield and managed to hit that, though it took more than the normal effort to do so.

The way I see it, Conquest was always meant to fulfil two purposes:

1) To give people something to do, on an individual level. Some would call this a pointless grind, but I prefer to see it as an offer of structure for those who enjoy their time in the game in general but find it hard to regularly choose among all the different activities on offer. When in doubt, you can do something that will also earn you some Conquest points.

2) To give guilds as entities something to do beyond chatting and raiding, something that can be both collaborative and competitive (by inviting comparison with other guilds).

The thing that immediately struck me about point one the moment I thought about it is that this is one of the main purposes of Galactic Command as well. And I suspect that this probably presented a problem from a dev point of view: What's the point of having two systems that are so similar? The main difference is that Galactic Command doesn't become available until max level and is limited to subscribers, but aside from that they've both been largely about running X flashpoints or completing Y warzones to earn points to fill a bar that's worth a box of goodies at the end.

So now my theory is that this is part of why they reduced the points granted by repeatable activities so drastically: Galactic Command allows you to earn your points in whichever way you like, so in order to make Conquest different they had to change it so that you wouldn't just automatically hit your goal from doing the same activities you were already doing for Galactic Command. Instead you have to plan and/or mix it up a bit.

The new system doesn't actually make it hard to hit your target on your first character - in fact one of the recent events had me hit my target faster than I'd ever done it before, in a single night: Two operations were featured as one-time goals worth 7,500 points each (with maxed out stronghold bonus), so my guild ran both of those on story mode in one evening - and boom, that was my personal target of 15k points achieved. But you do have to actually look at which activities are featured that week and consider which ones are the most rewarding for your time investment.

That said, there are still similarities between GC and Conquest, and I think that's part of why I've been enjoying it as much as I have: I embraced Galactic Command after it had gone through a sufficient number of iterations and actually got loads of characters to 300... but I've reached a point now where I'm finding it hard to care because I have almost no level 70s left that aren't Command rank 300. Sure, I could always level up more, but... meh. Just then new Conquest arrived to save the day and provide me with something similar but different to hold my attention.

I feel like Conquest's purpose for guilds is a bit trickier to unpack. My first thought was that the removal of the invasion bonus has de-emphasised the importance of being in a guild to do Conquest, but there is more going on than that.

It seems to me that in the past, Conquest was always meant to be more competitive than collaborative, because while it required working together, all your hard work and team spirit would come to naught if you weren't competitive enough to make it into the top ten. On the surface, the introduction of small, medium and large yield planets should have supported the competitive aspects of the system by making the competition more "fair" by pitting guilds of similar size against each other, but that's clearly not working. (Seriously, everyone just seems to go for small yield except for some confused people whose guilds score like 20k points in total and I'm not sure what they were expecting to achieve by invading the large yield planet.)

You almost have to wonder whether Bioware themselves had doubts about whether this would work or not, because at the same time the yield system makes competition a lot less important and makes it all about collaboration instead. Oh well, so you didn't win first place, but at least everyone still got their prize, right?

However, looking at the personal targets again, a lot of the changes there seem to be geared towards making competition between guilds more fair. The big crafting nerf was one. As I already wrote three years ago, the previous iteration was just ridiculously overpowered. Logging in for five minutes a day to craft would earn you more points than actually playing the game all day, and that was just silly. More importantly though, it allowed guild members to make wildly different contributions to the shared goal. The last few times when my guild placed on the board under the old system were pretty much down to one or two people crafting goods worth several millions (!) of points each. And I'm not knocking their efforts - I was grateful for the free ride, but it wasn't exactly a case of everyone coming together in a big display of team spirit. It meant that for many guilds competing for first place on the board basically came down to how many selected members could burn the most credits on crafting in the shortest amount of time, which wasn't really meant to be the point.

I suspect that the changes to objectives, with their move away from repeatable activities towards more one-time objectives is also related to this, because it means that there are basically "diminishing returns" as you try to bring up more alts. It can be done, but for the sake of guild competitiveness it makes more sense to have as many individuals as possible contributing, instead of being able to rely on three guys who play all day and have an army of alts.

tl;dr:

The conquest changes make sense if the devs' goal was to distinguish the system more clearly from Galactic Command and to make it more about people successfully working together as a group instead of a few rich/dedicated individuals carrying everyone else to victory.

I think the main problem it has right now is that the competitive aspect is kind of standing on wobbly legs because the yield system is so not working out as a way to make competition more fair. That, and that some points values even for one-time objectives seem seriously out of whack in terms of effort vs. reward. I also agree with Intisar that they could add some more one-time objectives to give people more choice in terms of how to achieve their personal target without making it too easy to farm points on a dozen alts (I love operations but they feel a bit over-represented at the moment for example - need more one-time goals related to things like warzones, GSF etc.). I'm sure that all of these things are still being looked at, however.

Activity Bonuses

One of the things I've enjoyed about the introduction of Galactic Command are the changing activity and alignment bonuses that have come with it. The basic idea behind them is that while Galactic Command allows you to gain Command XP from almost anything, the game wants to gently nudge players towards doing more than just grind a single activity until they burn themselves out.

Of course, not everyone has the same ideas about gentle nudges. I was honestly shocked when during an episode of a podcast I was listening to, one of the hosts complained about the dark vs. light system, claiming that because the light side was victorious more often than the dark side on his server, he felt that playing his dark-side main was never worthwhile. This surprised me because he made it sound as if doing anything without benefitting from maximum bonuses was unacceptable, which is the sort of hardcore min-max attitude that you don't see in SWTOR players very often.

I've certainly never let the bonuses prevent me from doing something I really wanted to do, nor have I ever felt compelled to do something that I don't really like doing. I do however love them for everything in-between, to the point where checking which activity is eligible for the daily bonus on any given day has pretty much become the first thing I do upon logging in.

If flashpoints or warzones are the activity of the day, it's very likely that said activity will take up most of my evening, because I really enjoy both of them anyway, and the bonus just makes them feel extra rewarding.

My Galactic Starfighter play has probably benefitted the most from the introduction of Galactic Command, because starfighting is something that I'm not massively fond of but that I do enjoy in small doses. The problem is that I've always struggled with finding reasons to choose GSF over other activities that I enjoy more regularly on any given day. (For a while I played on various alts for Conquest points, but as my interest in that waned, so did my enthusiasm for GSF.) Galactic Command has provided me with an easy solution: Just play whenever it's GSF bonus day! I won't necessarily go for it every time, nor do I usually spend all evening in a starfighter, but the recurring bonus has certainly managed to make it a more regular part of my gaming diet.

Operations is a bonus I usually ignore, because while I enjoy them, we have our guild runs scheduled on particular weekdays whether there is a bonus on or not, and I rarely feel the urge to join additional runs on top of that.

Chapters and planetary missions also don't particularly enthuse me, and either of them being the featured activity of the day will usually be my cue to go play a low-level alt instead. However if I do have an interest in doing either of those things for whatever reason (e.g. I made a plan to finally get an alt through KotET), I often wait until they are the featured activity of the day, so that I'll at least get the biggest benefit out of doing them.

Uprisings are a funny one. For a while I did do them occasionally - not too long after they first came out - but I just haven't found them nearly as compelling as flashpoints, lacking the latter's replay value, so I actually haven't done one in quite a while.

As far as the dark vs. light bonuses go, I actually pay very little attention to them unless I'm planning to pop a bunch of accumulated CXP packs (then I will save them until the "correct" alignment dominates). However, the state of the galaxy can be helpful when it comes to deciding which alt to play. If I'm torn between two characters of opposite alignments, it's an easy choice to go for the one that currently benefits from a bonus.

Fun fact: I was originally planning to write this post yesterday, but then I saw that it was flashpoint bonus day and I spent all evening running flashpoints with guildies. Just goes to show.

Do dark vs. light and the daily Command bonus influence the way you play at all?

What A Long, Strange Trip It's Been

On the day before the currently running double (C)XP event started, I hit Command rank 300 on my Operative. This made her my ninth character to reach that milestone, and the last class I needed for the Resolute Commander achievement (getting all eight base classes to 300).

It's funny to look back and think that a little over a year ago, something like that would have seemed like utter madness. Just getting even one character to Command rank 300 seemed like something that would take way too long for comfort. But the changes over the past year have really helped with making Galactic Command less of a grind and more fun. I wish we could have been at that point from the start and saved ourselves a lot of unpleasantness, but there's no point in wishing that the past had gone differently.

What's next? Probably levelling up yet again, this time my Juggernaut tank, for no other reason than that I enjoy playing her and she's not 300 yet. I've really embraced Command levelling as a sort of amusing goal of its own. It's not even about the gear, seeing how my play time on each character drops drastically once the numbers stop going up, and they are then mostly left in a mix of mid-level gear, depending on how kind or unkind the random drops have been to them.

It's really just more levelling, and seeing how ridiculously fast the base levelling game is these days, working on my "extra levels" has actually become a strangely decent substitute that I enjoy working on.

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.

A Farewell to the Galactic Command Window

Patch 5.6 didn't just revamp the group activity finder, it also got rid of the Galactic Command window. Unlike the former, the latter hadn't really been announced in advance but came as a bit of a surprise in the patch notes, though in hindsight it shouldn't really have been that surprising. Still, I kind of liked the Galactic Command window, so I didn't want to just let it go into the night without comment.

I'm glad now I took this screenshot.

I remember when Galactic Command was first announced and everyone was wringing their hands about how bad it sounded, the actual Galactic Command window was this tiny bright spot in a sea of chaos. "Well, at least the UI for it looks nice." I honestly loved all the little animated graphics for each activity. Look at the little raiders fighting a mini-version of Operator IX - too cute! Even if I knew that the warzone animation at least could also bug out and leave you stuck with unending lightsaber "whoosh whoosh" noises even after you'd closed the window.

The Galactic Command window was also tied into at least one exploit. I think I can talk about it now since it's long past... but basically you could click on "queue for warzone" from the GC window while you were already in a warzone, which had the bizarre effect of instantly adding another person to your team, letting you go above the maximum number of players you were supposed to have. I once did it by accident and was mortified.

This kind of ties into the window's biggest issue though: Its functionality was pretty much redundant from the start. It's as if when they first came up with the idea they had this grand plan to have it replace the regular group finder, but then when they were nearly done the designer broke down and went: "There's no way I can possibly fit all those options into this graphics-heavy UI" so they just added what they could and left the old group finder where it was.

The result was that I pretty much never used it for anything other than to check my Command rank. Whether it was flashpoints, operations or uprisings, you were still better off queueing for them through the group finder because it gave you more control. Only occasionally did I use the window to queue for GSF, since I'm not particularly fond of the GSF hangar.

The one thing you did want to do through the window however were dailies and heroics, since it was only by going through Galactic Command that you received an extra quest to complete a given daily area, which actually (initially) netted you more CXP than all the zone's regular missions put together. However, since you didn't need to do anything like that for any other activities, it was actually kind of confusing and easy to miss. I remember having a commenter on my blog complain that dailies were giving him virtually nothing - turns out he hadn't known to start them through the GC window. Baking the big bonus into the regular weekly instead has definitely been a smart change.

That said, I do kind of miss having a good place to check my Command rank and the current state of Dark vs. Light. The former feels a bit tacked on at the bottom of the new activity finder, and the latter even more so in the bottom right corner of the galaxy map. And if you don't have a ship yet, you can't check the current DvL status at all! It almost got me wondering whether they may be working on future plans to de-emphasise Galactic Command, if not remove it from the game entirely after all...