Shintar's Galactic Season 6 Diary, Week 7

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

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

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

Day 1 - Tuesday

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

Day 2 - Wednesday

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

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

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

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

Day 3 - Thursday

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

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

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

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

Day 4 - Friday

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

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

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

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

Day 5 - Saturday

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

Day 6 - Sunday

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

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

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

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

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

Day 7 - Monday

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

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

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

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

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

Week 7 Thoughts 

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

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

Drop In: Nar Shaddaa

This past week's seasonal objective to visit other people's strongholds directed us towards Nar Shaddaa... and was honestly a bit disappointing to me, as an awkward part of strongholds' past reared its ugly head. More on that in a bit.

I once again toured strongholds on five out of six servers, skipping Darth Malgus once more as I easily got to 7/7 weeklies completed doing other things I enjoyed.

The first Nar Shaddaa stronghold I visited was on Leviathan, where I took a trip to Rhodania's Jedi Academy, mostly because the name intrigued me. Alderaan may have been a popular place for Jedi-themed strongholds, but Nar Shaddaa didn't strike me as a location that naturally leant itself to that, so I was curious to see what the owner had done with that theme.

Sadly, the answer was "not much". I'm honestly not sure why they chose the "Jedi Academy" moniker for their Sky Palace, because there didn't seem to be anything particularly Jedi about it.

For the most part, the decorations were just a slightly random mix of basic furniture, plants and (presumably) favourite companions standing about. Plus the owner seemed to be fan of Valkorion:

Nothing wrong with that, I had just hoped for more based on the name. Also, this giant dead tree on the balcony struck me as a bit out of place:

Next I opted to travel to Teyla Yue's Lair of Shadows on Tulak Hord. The listing said it was 100% complete and that with over 1.5 million prestige! Yeah, I was today years old when I learned that that number has absolutely nothing to do with what you'll actually find inside the stronghold. I didn't think too much of it at first when I saw nothing but a bunch of utility decorations at the entrance - I figured it was someone being very practical and wanting to have them close at hand when zoning in - but I sure was baffled when I moved on to the next room and found it to be completely empty.

Then I turned into one of the side rooms and... oh.

For those who don't know, when strongholds were first added to the game, the Conquest point bonus they granted was based on stronghold completion percentage, not on how many strongholds you owned and whether they were fully expanded. This meant that in order to min-max, people who didn't care that much about decorating would fill their strongholds with cheap random decos just to maximise their Conquest bonus, and Nar Shaddaa was a popular target for this as all subscribers got it for free when Galactic Strongholds launched. I resisted initially but eventually gave in too and was glad when this system was changed in 2018. However, I never went back to undo the mess in my Sky Palace either, so its walls are still plastered with boss kill posters to this day, and I'm not surprised that other strongholds of this type are still around... just that the owner thought this was worthy of being made into a public listing.

I guess I was kind of surprised by how many rooms they managed to leave entirely empty while still getting to 100%. I went back to double-check my own Nar Shaddaa stronghold and it had to have posters on every single wall, plus a bunch of speeders and pets on various floors to get to 100% completion.

Fortunately Bubba's Game Room on Star Forge (pictured above) was a much nicer place to visit. It actually matched its theme, welcoming both Republic and Empire players (I liked how one of the dual stairways was Republic-themed and the other Imperial) while offering the kinds of amenities you'd expect in something called a "game room", such as a bar, slot machines and a dance floor.

However, my favourite stronghold of the week was undoubtedly Dalroti's Marketplace Cantina on Satele Shan. The owner really put some thought into what it would mean for something to be both a marketplace and a cantina, starting with the entrance featuring a receptionist on a red carpet, flanked by security.

Inside you'll find a Hutt with cronies, as well as tables with food laid out, plus of course the obligatory bar and dance floor.

Finally, I visited Gracey's Stronghold on Shae Vizla and... I guess it should've been a warning sign when there were once again nothing but utility decorations at the entrance. Just... why?

At least this "forest" of lightsaber displays managed to look kind of ominous in an abstract way:

The thing that gets me with this one is... it's on Shae Vizla, a server that only opened last year! While we have server transfers now, your stronghold's layout doesn't transfer with you, so this cannot possibly have anything to do with the way Conquest used to work back in the day. This was someone deciding in 2023/2024 that haphazardly stuffing their stronghold with chairs and benches to get it to 100% completion would be a good idea; I'm just not sure why.

Nightlife Disappointment

The Nar Shaddaa nightlife event and I don't have the best of histories. My initial impression of it when it was first introduced back in 2014 was a resounding "meh", and since then I've mostly alternated between not really caring or being mildly annoyed by some aspect of it. Last year my annoyance reached a new peak when I realised that the newly added Emperor's Grace slot machine resulted in more free Kingpin chips than any sane person could ever use, effectively turning use of the Kingpin slots into nothing but a grind where prizes were guaranteed if you just kept clicking for long enough. I honestly felt pretty burnt out after simply trying to get rid of all my free chips for a few days, even as new ones kept rolling in faster than I could spend them.

With that knowledge in mind, I knew I had to approach things more carefully this time and not let myself get lured into some sort of self-inflicted sense of having to use all the chips. Occasionally clicking away on one monitor while watching a video on the second was fine, but only in moderation.

However, Bioware managed to throw a spanner in the works for me by adding a new prize that I actually really liked - a shiny visor.

Promotional image from the website article about Soovada. Not my own screenshot, obviously.

This one came from the Emperor's Grace machine, and since acquisition of those chips was much more limited, I figured that simply using whatever chips I earned in pursuit of some new shades shouldn't be an issue. And it wasn't, not in that way anyway.

Within days of the event going live, my Twitter feed was full of people proudly showing off their new visors and I figured that I should be able to join their ranks soon enough. Since Emperor's Grace chips can't be bought - unlike the other two types - this wasn't like prizes from previous years where you could assume that someone who showed off having won the jackpot within days of the event going live had likely poured several millions of credits into buying chips. Emperor's Grace chips had to come "naturally", so if people saw success so quickly, it couldn't be that bad, right?

Wrong.

I just kept playing normally, only going to use up my Emperor's Grace chips on whichever character had earned them as I went, but luck was simply not with me. I won a mount and the new droid pet, sure - but neither of those were items I was after.

With less than two weeks to go on the event I started to get a bit nervous. What else could I do to earn more chips? I knew that you could get them as prizes from playing the Kingpin machines, and I did have thousands of chips for those... so I started another round of click spam, to little avail. It felt like I could go through hundreds of Kingpin chips while barely getting a return of two or three Emperor's Grace chips. That's not a great return on investment for so many hours of clicking.

Eventually I decided to take to Twitter for advice - after all it was full of winners - and this was interesting in so far as it resulted in what's been my most replied-to tweet in a long time:

Those of you who got some of the new prizes from this year's casino event - how long did it take you and do you have any tips for farming Emperor's chips? It seems I can burn 100s of Kingpins to maybe get 3 Emps, which then don't win me anything except more Kingpins... 😅 #SWTOR

— Shintar (@ShintarCommando) August 4, 2021

As it turns out, trying to get chips from the Kingpin machines is apparently the worst thing to do, and the generally agreed upon recommendation was to do content instead, especially anything that involved killing lots of mobs. I was more than happy to be told to get out of the casino, though the most emphatic advice I'd been given, to simply AoE down mobs by the dozen on the starter planets, didn't sit quite right with me either.

So I spent the last week of the event playing the game "normally" again. Ops nights were pretty good for earning chips, but other content honestly didn't feel that much better than playing the slots, with me often finishing the evening with only one or two chips gained. Still, at least it was more fun than clicking slot machines all night.

Still, today the event concluded without me having won my desired prize. I didn't actually count how many Emperor's Grace chips I went through in the end, but it must have been several dozen. I guess such is the nature of anything RNG though. 

Fortunately I'm a patient person - the event will likely come around again next year, and if Bioware follows their previous track record, the shades might end up being added to the Kingpin prize pool or to one of the vendors at that point, which would make them much easier to get. I can only hope - but so far my streak of not getting along with Nar Shaddaa Nightlife seems to be doomed to continue.

From Gamble to Grind

Looking back at this blog's archives, I seem to write about the Nar Shaddaa Nightlife event about once every three years. It's not one of my favourites, as people's weird flexing about who can manage to lose the most credits in the shortest amount of time always weirds me out, and I just don't consider watching my character stand at a console clicking things to be particularly riveting gameplay.

Still, it's been three years now since Bioware introduced casino chips as world drops to encourage greater participation, and ever since then I've at least tried to make use of the free chips the game keeps giving me - I say tried because I remember two years ago I meant to use them all up just before the event ended, but got the time wrong so that I actually showed up too late. Last year I think something similar happened, except then it occurred when I finally wanted to see the prize vendors about what to buy with my certificates. The fact that I can barely even remember what happened kind of speaks for itself really.

This year though, Bioware added a new, third slot machine called the Emperor's Grace, and a lot of the chips that drop from content were the type to use on this new machine. It was bugged initially, but the last patch fixed it, so I thought I'd stop by quickly to use up the seven or eight chips I'd earned through drops so far. I figured it was going to be a quick affair, and it being the newest and shiniest machine, the prizes had to be good, right? That's one of the big appeals of gambling: the chance to win big with minimal effort.

I therefore felt a mix of delight and horror when I realised that the most common prize for a win at the Emperor's Grace machine actually consists of fifty tokens a pop for the Kingpin's Bounty machines - which meant that within minutes I had racked up several hundred of the things.

I briefly felt excited by the sheer monetary value of my winnings - at the vendor, one Kingpin's Bounty chip costs 75,000 credits, meaning that I had won more than 50 million credits worth of casino chips. Unfortunately you can't sell them back to the vendor at that price though.

Now, even without knowing the exact drop rates of the prizes coming from the Kingpin's Bounty machines, it's pretty obvious that having several hundreds of complementary tokens to spend on them is bound to result in a nice payout. Even if you don't win one of the rare "special" prizes, the more common certificates that can be traded for all kinds of decorations and cosmetics are pretty damn useful as well.

However, considering that each spin's most common outcome is to simply give you your chip back, getting rid of literally hundreds of the things takes absolute ages, and it was with this realisation that the feeling of dread set in.

I mean, this isn't even gambling anymore. There's zero financial investment required from my side, not even in virtual currency, because the game's just given me hundreds of tokens for free. There's no question about whether I'll even get anything from playing either - with so many chips, I'm guaranteed to receive a good number of prizes. However, we're not talking about a quick game of chance for a potentially big win anymore - instead I'd have to spend literal hours at the slots just clicking away to be able to claim my rewards. It's basically the worst sort of grind.

And while I don't mind some grinds, I'm not sure I'll be able to make myself go through with this one. Maybe if I an opportunity arises to watch something sufficiently engaging on my second monitor for long enough, but I don't know. I kind of find myself thinking: "If you just want to give me free stuff, Bioware, why can't you just give me the stuff? Why are you asking me to stupidly click on slot machines for hours first?"

It's a silly question of course, but in a way it was still enlightening that I found my thoughts even going down that road. I've noticed that in many modern MMOs, people complain a lot about randomness in all aspects of their games. And I've often considered that a bit weird, remembering my early days in WoW and recalling my delight at many random drops, and just generally not minding the randomness too much most of the time.

However, the thing back then was that I wasn't expecting to get every possible drop. The odds of many items dropping compared to how often you would realistically run the content were such that you knew that you were never going to get everything you'd potentially like, and everything you did get was therefore perceived as a treat.

The thing is, with content having become more and more accessible and infinitely repeatable to keep people busy, you're much more likely to hit a sort of "saturation point" where you've got everything you want/need and once you know that the game is designed to give you everything over time, you're essentially just grinding out the time to that saturation point. I guess at that point it's not that big of a jump to ask why you can't just cut to the chase, especially if the activities on offer don't provide a lot of inherent enjoyment.

I'm not really sure where I'm going with this. Just... damn slot machines.

War on Balmorra and Living the Nightlife

After completing her tour of Alderaan, it was time for Pacis the pacifist Jedi to move on to Balmorra. Funnily enough, that planet was the complete opposite of Alderaan in terms of expectations vs. reality: On peaceful Alderaan everyone kept asking me to kill people, and on war-torn Balmorra... there was a lot of talk about killing people, but the actual quest objectives were often surprisingly non-violent. I found it strangely funny when I accepted my first couple of missions that were seemingly all about helping to fight Imps, and then the actual objectives were just to destroy some cannons/collect some supplies. On hand-in the quest givers talked about how well I'd supposedly beaten up lots of Imperial soldiers, while I was just quietly amused in the knowledge that I had done no such thing.

There were three easy heroics too, one to recover crashed probe droids, another to sabotage some Imperial bombers, and somewhat to my surprise I was reminded that while my old friend Larindaz really likes the taste of Colicoid steak, collecting said steaks is actually only a bonus and the main mission just requires you to click on some consoles, which can be done without fighting anything.

In the comment section of previous posts in this series commenters have urged me to check out some recurring events with Pacis. My initial gut feeling had been to stay away from them (Pirates? Argh! Bounty hunting? No thanks!) but on reflection I realised that they were right and that there were some events that would undoubtedly offer employment opportunities for a pacifist. The currently running nightlife event was an obvious candidate, being all about slot machines - whatever else you may think of them, they're not violent.

I knew there were two introductory quests that granted free chips, but was pleased to find that Bioware added a few more dailies this year. The one to advertise for certain companies is delightfully ridiculous - handing out fliers makes sense, but promoting heavy metals by dancing and security services by singing? Yeah, right...

The one where you sort of play bouncer and ask difficult guests to leave was kind of hilarious, because being a pacifist I was patently the worst bouncer ever: if anyone refused to leave and got hostile I always ran away! Fortunately there are enough customers who are willing to leave peacefully to not make it too hard to actually complete the quest without fighting.

I haven't completed the one with the counterfeit chips because the conversation choice I made resulted in combat, forcing me to back out, and I haven't re-tried to see if you can complete it without fighting if you accept to be bribed or whatever. Also, I think I read somewhere that it's currently bugged? Something to check back on later I guess. Either way it's a good event to easily get the "Mission complete: Nar Shaddaa" Conquest objective every day and it's on for another month.

Peaceful Progress on Nar Shaddaa

Once again it's been a while since I last wrote about my pacifist Jedi Pacis. I made a new tag called "pacifist levelling" now to make it easier to find the previous posts in the series. Anyway, last time she had done everything she could on Taris and it was time to continue to Nar Shaddaa.

Taris had been quite satisfying in terms of how many of its quests were doable without fighting anything, though there was some disappointment near the end when I had to acknowledge that none of the heroics were feasible to do in such a manner. Nar Shaddaa was kind of the opposite in that I initially found it somewhat annoying but then discovered some real gems towards the end.

I wasn't actually off to a bad start with one of my favourite side quests to cleanse the spice trade. Handily, someone else had just been through the area and killed all the actual spice traders, meaning that I didn't even have to hide from anyone while clicking the shinies for quest completion.

Another exploration mission I found and that worked for me involved blowing up some swoop bikes. This one was a bit trickier as I was on my own and the Nikto gang members did not take kindly to my meddling, meaning I had to use Force Cloak after each attack (on the bikes, not the bikers) and then wait for it to come off cooldown before I could go again.

After that I hit a bit of a lull as I couldn't actually remember the details of a lot of the quests I started, meaning that I repeatedly went through the trouble of sitting through the mission dialogue just to realise too late that they had objectives that clashed with my pacifist creed, meaning that I just had to abandon them again. I also used the dialogue option to decline quests a lot (where it was available). This was actually interesting because it's not an option I ever used very much (nor did anyone, I suspect, which is why Bioware didn't bother with including it anymore after launch). While it was interesting, I can't really recommend it either... rejecting just always made my character sound like either a coward or a jerk, and the quest givers were either annoyed or depressingly resigned to their impending doom.

One mission that I had been looking forward to, the one to find the wayward droid, was not available, presumably due to being tied to progressing one of the main story quests somehow. I did find two more though: first the one where a worker asks you to find a missing Jedi padawan who had told her that she was Force sensitive before disappearing. I thought I remembered that one requiring the killing of some Nikto, but apparently that was only a bonus as simply finding the dead Jedi's body completed the mission just fine.

The other one was the one where a mercenary / escaped prisoner asks you to destroy some Imperial torture devices... again, I suspected that there would be some killing required in this one as well, but this turned out to not be the case. The only annoying thing was once again a lot of waiting for Force Cloak to come off cooldown, as pretty much every objective was next to some angry mobs that I had to immediately escape from after destroying it.

Anyway, the most interesting thing about this quest was actually the introductory cut scene, which has the NPC pointing a blaster at you and as a Jedi you counter by drawing your lightsaber... except that Pacis doesn't wield a weapon! I was rather stunned that the cut scene equipped her with one anyway. (The colour crystal in the non-existent saber was bright white by the way.)

Not sure where that came from.

The area in the vicinity of that quest was actually quite frustrating as there were a lot of probe droids with stealth detection abilities about, often putting me into combat unexpectedly or even foiling my attempts to vanish sometimes, and with no safe places to escape to I even died a couple of times. It did force me to pay more attention though and to actually watch out for the stealth scan casts.

On the plus side, it was in this area that I discovered another heroic that I could complete as a pacifist: Shadow Extraction, which requires you to break someone out of prison. This one was also absolutely crammed with stealth-scanning droids, which was quite a pain and required some trial and error, but eventually I figured out how to sneak past some of them safely, and where I couldn't do so I learned to quickly run past out of stealth and then Cloak once I was safely out of range of their detection range.

I did think it was funny that a prison break-out of all things didn't include a single objective about taking down guards or anything... I basically just hacked sliced into their computer and then opened the guy's cell. How he actually made it out without any of the guards stopping him remains a mystery...

Sorry, Phalanx, you're on your own from here.

Anyway, the real jackpot was that I then found a second heroic that I could stealth: Breaking Down Shadow Town. Again, just lots of clicking on different terminals and such required but no actual fighting, so I just had to spend a lot of time waiting for Force Cloak to come back off cooldown every time I was spotted (which in many instances seemed pretty unavoidable).

With Trouble in Deed I'm now up to three repeatable heroics that I can do without fighting anyone, which I think is pretty rad, though I think I'll have less incentive to repeat the two on Nar Shaddaa simply because they required a lot more effort / were a lot more time-consuming compared to the quick in-and-out job you can do on Coruscant.

With all the new Conquest objectives for doing quests (plus nonsense like taking a taxi and gaining a level), this was also the first time that Pacis was able to complete her personal Conquest. She's really moving up in the world! I've also already started on Tatooine, so hopefully the next part in this series won't take another four months to get published, but at this point I'm not making any promises.

SWTOR's Top Five Worst Planets to Navigate

Thanks to commenter sootnsweep for giving me the idea for this post. I don't think they actually meant to encourage me to make this particular post, but creativity works in weird ways. Thanks for the inspiration anyway.

#5 - Zakuul

Some of you might be raising your eyebrows at this one, thinking something along the lines: "Zakuul barely even qualifies as a planet, how confusing can it be?" Not that confusing, which is why it's only in fifth place, but considering how few open areas it consists of, it's still quite impressive how awkward Bioware managed to make those to navigate.

Look at this screenshot of the landing zone. Do you know where any of those arrows lead to? I've taken the wrong elevator while attempting to get to the last area I was still missing to uncover the full map on more than one occasion. There's also this area near the tram station where I swear I've gone up and down the stairs repeatedly just to watch the quest indicator change its mind about whether I should be going up or down. And despite of having done "To Find A Findsman" on multiple characters by now, there's still always that one part where I initially go the wrong way because the seemingly obvious route ends in a dead end and you actually have to go round the long way.

#4 - Iokath

I bet some of you were waiting for this one. It seems everyone loves to bash Iokath! And I agree that it's pretty underwhelming as a daily area and awkward to navigate.

Still, I couldn't justify placing it any higher on this list because as I expected when it came out, the confusion about where to go for your quests diminishes greatly once you've done the dailies a couple of times, and what with the various teleporters it doesn't take you too long to get to any of the parts of the map that you need to visit to complete your daily round. There's just this one area in the south-east part of the map where you have to follow a pretty annoyingly serpentine path to get to an objective, but at least the related mission is easy to avoid.

#3 - Balmorra

Good old Balmorra. I'm sure everyone will immediately know what I'm referring to with this one. Most of the map isn't too bad, but this planet's problem are the lifts, which are mostly located in and around the Gorinth Canyon. Their problem is that a) they are located in annoying places that never allow you to just go straight from one objective to the next, and b) for some reason some of them aren't in the same places on Imperial and Republic side, so if you switch between factions a lot this can be extra confusing.

The Republic also has this one quest hub for the bonus series in the lower part of the canyon called Moraine Outpost which for some reason still doesn't have a quick travel point to this day, so the fastest way to get there is to QT somewhere else and then take a speeder. Why, Bioware?

Also, there are a bunch of broken bridges that tease you with the idea that you could be getting over there much faster if only the bridge wasn't missing a big chunk in the middle. I guess this teaches us that war is bad because broken infrastructure sucks.

#2 - Corellia

Corellia has two simple but persistent problems. The first and minor one is that all its areas look and feel extremely same-y. Except for the park, which I know has the zoo and Lucky in the middle, I couldn't tell you what's where. I still get confused about where to go every time we want to kill the Commander in the Imperial base or whenever I try to find one of the datacrons again. I know how they all work, but just finding the right general area they are in is more of a challenge to me these days than anything else and I usually quickly resign myself to consulting a guide rather than running in circles.

This is because of the second and larger problem, which is that Corellia's roads seem to have been designed with the intent to make the journey between any given points A and B as long as possible. It's pretty much a straight-up labyrinth. The worst thing is that the map can be very deceptive too, showing a path where actually the road leads to the dead end of a building wall or some collapsed bit of masonry prevents you from going any further.

I don't usually like to quote myself but I think I summed it up quite well in this post in which I was talking about levelling my Sniper: "[...] the maps are confusing and you constantly end up being lured into dead ends. There was one point where it took me something like fifteen minutes to find the right way to access one of my quest objectives... and I've been playing this game for nearly five years. FFS, Corellia."

#1 - Nar Shaddaa

I was somewhat torn whether Corellia or Nar Shaddaa should get first place, but I decided to give the award to Nar Shadaa for one simple reason: the Industrial Sector. I'll concede that most of Nar Shaddaa isn't too bad to find your way around, unless you're on a mission that tells you to go from one sector to the next and for some reason the quest indicator keeps telling you to go to the promenade first every time instead of simply pointing at your final destination. The smugglers' moon also suffers from a similar degree of "samey-ness" as Corellia, which always causes me to struggle to remember the datacron locations.

However, the Industrial Sector is the big one simply because it's three-dimensional, which is to say that there isn't a single overview map but that there are various ramps and lifts you have to take in order to navigate between different floors and which will spit you out in surprising locations.

If you know off the top of your head where each of these buttons takes you, I'll call you a liar. In fact, while trying to take this screenshot I initially quick travelled to the wrong place because of course I did, because who can remember what's where down there? And that's with me having gotten a lot better at navigating the area ever since the world boss that's located in a remote corner of the area became a Conquest objective, encouraging frequent visits.

Still, at the end of the day I think I can actually view it as a good thing that this list was relatively easy to come up with. While thinking about it I concluded that most of SWTOR's planets are actually fairly easy to get around on, which made the few exceptions to the rule easy to single out.

Pugging with Shintar: July Update

I know it's August now but this is mostly about videos recorded in July. I thought I would give another update on how my Pugging with Shintar series is progressing for those who aren't subscribed to my YouTube channel (and at this rate, I really need to give these posts their own tag).

Episode 7: Defying the Randomiser - After getting Hammer Station for the third time in six episodes, I decided that while repetition had been fine while I was simply writing about adventures like these, in the video format redoing the same flashpoint over and over again was simply boring and rubbish. As a result, I cut down the run to a few key scenes in the video and then queued again with every flashpoint I'd already done unselected from the group finder list. This time I got Athiss, which was at least something new.

Episode 8: Sneaking Through Red Reaper - I decided to start doing the intros on Nar Shaddaa while the Nightlife Event is running and after a commenter reminded me that I could use the heroic quick travel to get there even without a ship. Forcing the group finder to always give me something new from now on, I ended up in Red Reaper, a place known for its nightmarish trash pulls at the start. Of course since I knew and talked about those, I ended up with a rock-solid group that had no trouble with anything whatsoever and managed to skip even more pulls than usual. In Red Reaper I've never minded because there is no bonus anyway.

Episode 9: Cheerful Musings in Korriban Incursion - After the previous episode I realised that out of sheer habit, I had been uploading these in a lower resolution than I actually use to record, so this episode brought an improvement in video quality as I finally made some adjustments. Korriban Incursion made me particularly talkative because there are so many connections to the Sith starter quests - though I wasn't beyond making mistakes when trying to recall them from memory. I oddly enjoy correcting myself via text overlays while editing the footage later.

Episode 10: An Unlucky Gunslinger in KDY - Finally I got the story quest for Kuat Drive Yards out of my log, after having had it there since level 15 or so. A gunslinger asked early on whether he could do the "rescue ten prisoners" achievement if we got the prison cell scenario, and everyone enthusiastically agreed... but this is a pug, you can already guess how it went.

Episode 11: Sentinel Silliness in Battle of Rishi - I was late with recording this episode due to real life distractions and recorded it on a weekday after work, feeling like I was going to fall asleep at any moment. Oddly enough, this made me even chattier than usual, and I ended up in a group with three sentinels, which I considered very humorous. Also, I enjoyed ranting about Battle of Rishi's wasted potential like I already did in a blog post once here.

Episode 12: Businesslike in Czerka Corporate Labs - After a slightly chaotic start, this flashpoint became quickly dominated by a scantily-clad Commando who was eager to push forward no matter what, clearly thinking that she didn't need the rest of the group. I couldn't fault her ability, but I also couldn't help highlighting it as another type of behaviour that I'm personally not super fond of in my pug groups.

65 on the Ebon Hawk

I'm proud to say that I hit level 65 on a server other than The Red Eclipse for the first time! I mentioned before that the DvL event reinvigorated my interest in levelling alts, causing me to pick up a couple that had been lingering without progress for a while. One of these was my Commando on the Ebon Hawk, on whom I'd decided to go through all the side quests on Republic side again. With how much levelling has been sped up and thanks to level sync (not to mention the current double XP event), I hit 65 shortly after finishing Alderaan and completing chapter one of my class story, after going back to Nar Shaddaa for that planet's bonus series (which for some reason doesn't unlock until level 60 since 4.0).

I guess I'll keeping questing anyway just to see more of those side missions again and to find out just how well or badly I'll fare along the way. While the restrictions that a single character is faced with are annoying sometimes, it's also been kind of fun to not have a legacy and a guild to fall back on for a change and to actually have to start over from scratch with things like datacrons and achievements. I haven't had a reason to ride the Jawa balloon since 4.0!

I also had a good laugh levelling in the PvP instance of each planet from Nar Shaddaa onwards. As mentioned before, they were pretty dead... but once when I arrived at House Organa on Alderaan, I ran straight into an Imp killing all the guards there (presumably for a conquest objective). I was so surprised that I ran straight into his line of fire and died - but it was way too funny for me to be annoyed!

It's just a bit ironic that all this happened on the Ebon Hawk of all places, since the whole reason I rerolled there, to play PvP/GSF with Traitine, has since become moot as he transferred his main over to TRE. According to Madmar's Twitter list, Swtorista and Zerne live on Ebon Hawk I guess? Feel free to give me a shout in the comments if that server is your home too, maybe we'll see each other some time. (Though admittedly it's not very likely, as I would be playing at awkward times for the US, not to mention that I still "live" on TRE.)

Nar Shaddaa and PvP Instances

This past weekend I decided to take my Ebon Hawk Commando through all of Nar Shaddaa (except for the bonus series, which for some reason is still restricted to level sixty and up). It was a stark reminder of why I wasn't too impressed by that planet even back in the day, and it's not just due to the corridor-like environments. Honestly, its storylines simply also aren't all that engaging. Talking solely about Republic side here, there was maybe one side quest I liked, and even the main story arc was a bit meh. I suppose the Jedi war hero gone bad was at least somewhat memorable, as were the Empire's plans to commit Evocii genocide, though the whole scenario isn't as meaningful if you haven't already played through Hutta on an Imperial character and know who the Evocii are. (Also, I burst into giggles when my character randomly called them "ee-VO-chee" once... gotta love those random voice acting inconsistencies that are still hidden in various corners of the game and break your immersion like whoa.)

I suppose the problem is that Nar Shaddaa just comes across as a crappy place to be. Most quests in the game are about dealing with unpleasant situations, but at least you generally get the impression that the planet you're on is still a place worth saving or at least worth being on. Whatever good sides Hutt Vegas is supposed to have, we don't really get to see them, and I just found myself wondering over and over again why all these people even bother to stay if crime lords, drug cartels and prisons are all there is.

While doing Blood Money, I ran into another player and the usual annoyance of there not being enough mobs for this quest for more than one person/group at a time. Then it occurred to me: I could use the new PvP instance system introduced in 4.3! Switching was as easy as transferring between any two instances and immediately I had the whole area to myself. If I'd had any fears of being forced to engage in actual PvP, these quickly turned out to be unfounded because a) the Nikto Sector is a Republic-only area so the PvP instance there is pretty redundant anyway and b) the population counter in the top left corner never went above four and I don't think things were much busier on Imp side. So, if you're one of those people who loves to shout that the game is dead, switching to the PvP instance on an RP server is the perfect new way to "prove" it!

I continued my questing in the PvP instance afterwards but never ran into another soul. In some ways it was kind of neat to have all the named mobs, chests, and basically everything to myself and feel like a true hero of the Repulic. On the other hand it got kind of lonely after a while. And it got me thinking about this whole PvP instance system as a whole. I suppose it's no real surprise that it's not overly popular on an RP server, but how has it been working out in other places?

As I couldn't find much commentary on the subject while googling, I decided to ask reddit. Most of the responses seemed to indicate that those select few that choose to switch to the PvP instances tend to do so for the same reason I did: lack of competition, whether it comes to quest mobs, gathering nodes or commander kills. Going there is like an insider tip, but they are certainly not being used for their intended purpose. Someone also pointed out that the feature wasn't widely advertised when it launched and isn't particularly intuitive, so we might see more interest in PvP instances over time, once more people have realised that they exist and understand how they work.

I was particularly curious about what happened on the PvP servers though and was pleased when someone confirmed that on the former PvP servers, the players' default focus stayed PvP when the patch happened. One has to wonder about the future though. I rolled up an alt on Tomb of Freedon Nadd just for science, and even though it's not marked as such on the server selection screen anymore, I got a warning that TOFN was a PvP server, and was I sure I wanted to go there? Yet when my character loaded in, her focus was set to PvE by default. Is this just for the starter worlds and changes later? If not, one would think that PvP servers are doomed to die out eventually, what with the lack of an obvious designation and new players being defaulted to PvE focus as they join.

Have you changed your focus from PvE to PvP or vice versa yet? Do you even care?

Agent Shintar Continues

I haven't written about my little agent on the Progenitor in a few weeks because I've been distracted by other things, but I haven't forgotten about her. She's now level 28 and has so far completed her class story on Balmorra and Nar Shaddaa.

I still don't miss being rich and having a huge legacy. In fact, I got super excited when I dinged legacy level two today! The only thing I do miss sometimes is faster movement, specifically having rocket boots and my higher-level Scoundrel and Operative's ability to roll. That's just a small thing though.

I'm sadly terrible at taking the story in new and exciting directions; sometimes it feels like all my characters are doomed to have boring middle-of-the-road personalities. I remember reading somewhere that you could take your fellow agent on Balmorra out for a date if you flirted with him enough, but I didn't want to start with a flirt option the very first moment I met him... and then the opportunity never came up again. On Nar Shaddaa, I wanted to see what happens when you actually threaten the former executive in the casino with poison (I seduced him last time), but then I somehow managed to miss the chance to actually use the poison, and we had a really boring and civil conversation instead. The one thing I managed to do differently was that I let Watcher X get away! I wonder what sort of consequences that will have on certain developments in chapter two, where I distinctly remember exclaiming "But you're dead!" on my first agent...

The mission on Nar Shaddaa where you disguise yourself as a droid was ridiculously fun and I spent more time spamming emotes than actually doing the quest. I don't remember if the droid disguise was always capable of executing all the emotes or if I just never tried the first time around, but it sure is fun now.

I feel so pretty, Kaliyo! Don't you agree?

You don't? Well, you might regret saying that!

 I believe I can flyyy...

Or maybe I'll just do a handstand.

Interestingly, the epic story XP boost doesn't seem to actually result in me levelling much faster. It means that I do fewer quests, but I still end up doing other things that "waste time" (which is to say they grant limited or no XP) because I don't enjoy ignoring the world around me. So I drive around to uncover all parts of the map, pick up datacrons, gather materials and craft.

I did the introductory Soovada quest but didn't win anything with my five free chips. The casino seemed pretty abandoned. I'm guessing that the event isn't nearly as interesting to people this time around (to be honest, I didn't think it was all that last year either)... or maybe it's just another Progenitor thing.

I also did a henchman mission for Bounty Contract week. I found myself kind of intrigued by that event again... on the Red Eclipse, I got all the achievements for it during its first iteration (before Bioware imposed additional limits on how many quests you can do each week) and then I felt so burnt out that I basically never bothered with it again. Restarting with a blank slate, it feels like I could actually become interested in it again, dabbling in the content on a more casual basis.

I don't think I ever took a close look at the interrogation probe animations before... it's quite fun to watch them poke people.

I've also been doing some more PvP and have been trying to sell more furniture bought with warzone commendations for some extra cash. It's less appealing than it used to be though, since the new (crazy) warzone commendation cap of two hundred thousand makes it quite viable to just save up loads of comms while levelling and then spend them on a full max level set when you get there. We'll see. I'll probably take a break from PvP for a few levels once I hit thirty, because it's not nearly as fun to be at the bottom of the level bracket than it is to be at the top. Though I feel pretty damn powerful anyway. I mean, I just got my AoE heal two levels ago, the one that used to be the top level talent for healing Operatives. It's pretty bonkers.

Attack of the Clones

I'll say it right away: This post has nothing to do with Episode II. Sorry if you came here thinking that it would. The title was just too appropriate not to use.

A long time ago, I saw a video on YouTube that was bashing SWTOR pretty badly. I can't find it anymore, but it was very straightforward really. The video-maker was running around the Imperial agent/bounty hunter starter area on Hutta and accusing Bioware of being lazy and of having created a dead and uninteresting world. His evidence? The NPCs in front of Nem'ro's palace were all the same. Not literally all of them of course - but as he was walking around, he pointed the camera at various citizens that were strolling around the area, talking to vendors etc. and there were indeed a lot of clones among them. The guy sounded so bitter and hateful that I found it easy to ignore him and to dismiss his criticism. After all I had already been playing the game for a while by that point, and I'd never noticed anything like that. I figured that it was probably footage of placeholder NPCs from beta or something.

I kind of forgot about his whole argument until late last year, when my guild was getting really into conquests. Initially, one of our main sources of conquest points was grinding low-level heroics on multiple alts, which worked particularly well on Nar Shaddaa. As I was mindlessly killing the same mobs over and over again, multiple times a day and for several days in a row, I couldn't help but get a closer look at them. Since they were low level compared to my characters, they posed no threat and combat required no real attention. So instead I started to notice... similarities.

The thing is, to a certain degree I honestly expect lots of mobs to look similar. In SWTOR, we spend a lot of time fighting enemy soldiers of a certain faction or another, and it's no surprise that people in uniform or heavy armour all look kind of same-ish, especially when you're more focused on selecting the right abilities than on inspecting them up close.

But as I was grinding those heroics on Nar Shaddaa, I started to notice things that looked a bit odd to me. For example the [Heroic 4] Mandalorian Rage requires you to kill a lot of Mandalorians from Clan Sharratt. Especially when they have a helmet on, it goes without saying that a lot of them will look the same. But I noticed things like that all the mobs called "Clan Sharratt Vanguard" were female Zabraks with red skin. That's a rather striking look, and when there are two of them in each pull it looks rather odd.

A similar thing caught my attention in the [Heroic 4] Lab Animals, where you fight some bad guys called Xenobi. The Xenobi thugs were all body type one (or two, not sure now) with short hair so not particularly eye-catching, but the ones called rangers were all body type three and had that wacky haircut that Corso Riggs comes with by default. All of them. It was slightly disconcerting.

After that I started to notice the same pattern pretty much everywhere I cared to look: Bioware would make a bunch of different mobs with different names and mix them up in larger mob groups, but every mob with the same name would look exactly the same. I won't pretend that this bothers me very much, because most of the time when I'm in combat I'm busier with focusing on my survival than on inspecting the facial features of some random NPC, and I rarely go to low level areas to mow down mobs that can't really fight back (that heroic grinding for conquest purposes was definitely an exception). But every so often when Bioware gives one of these generic mobs a more striking look, with an unusual skin colour or a funky haircut, I notice it again.

I even went back to check on Hutta, and the YouTuber whose name I can't remember was actually right. That same NPC is still there, playing a whole plethora of roles in front of Nem'ro's palace.

I'm just wondering: Who else has noticed this? And if you have, does it bother you? I'm kind of thinking that in theory, I would like a world where no two NPCs look the same, but I'm not sure how much additional work that would create for the artists. I'm kind of doubtful it would be worth it, when even long-time players like myself can take almost three years to actually take a close enough look to notice.