My Total Galactic War Routine

Last week was Total Galactic War again - my first after successfully conquering the galaxy with my guild last June. I was kind of wondering at the time what that would mean for my interest in future Conquest events, and last week I got my answer: I wasn't any less engaged and it was still as much fun; I was just a little less tense now that the stakes were no longer as high for me personally. We re-conquered Ruhnuk and it took some effort, which made it more enjoyable, but it wasn't as manic and crazy as the last few TGWs have been.

It also occurred to me that maybe the time has finally come to share some more of my accumulated knowledge about Conquest. It may sound a bit paranoid, but I've actually held back a bit on that subject in the past because I didn't want to accidentally help any of our opponents in case they came across this blog. At this point I'm not really that worried about that anymore though, plus as a guildie pointed out, any guild coming across this place in search of more information about how to take on Twin Suns at Conquest should mainly come away with the conclusion that we are all maniacs and they are better off not messing with us.

As a start, I thought I'd share my Conquest routine for Total Galactic War, which always has me generating between five and fifteen million Conquest points across my legacy, depending on how much time I have and just how much effort I'm willing to put in for that particular week.

To begin with, I tend to mentally think of the objectives I decide to tackle as split into roughly three "tiers". Tier one includes the ones with the best payout for the time invested, and the ones I try to do every day, even if I don't have a lot of time after a long day of work. Tier two is how I generate additional points if I have extra time, and tier three is what I do when it's the weekend, we desperately need more points and I'm trying to find just a few more activities to squeeze points out of. 

All number values cited in this post are rounded up or down using a full stronghold bonus as the baseline. Yours might be smaller if you don't have that maxed out, or bigger if your guild also has a Conquest guild perk slotted. The point here isn't to provide exact number values to do maths with, but just to give a general idea of how rewarding an activity is - it obviously makes a difference whether something awards 5k, 30k or 100k Conquest points.

Tier 1:

- My first priority of the day is to do the Galactic Starfighter weekly objective, "Starfighter: Achiever". It requires you to play only two to four matches (depending on whether you win or lose) and grants over 100k points. Make sure to fly all four different types of ships whenever you get the chance and over the course of the week you'll also earn an additional 120k or so for completing the "Starfighter: Bomber/Gunship/Scout/Striker Pilot (Eternal)" objectives (after flying each type in six matches). The only downside to this objective is that GSF queues don't pop at all times of the day even on busy servers, so you've got to make sure to get this done during prime time. Also, you can only repeat it up to three times on the same character. If you want to get credit for more than three days you need to use alts.

- My next priority is to do the weekly warzone objective, "Warzones: Achiever". If you win every single match it will be done after only four games. Now this one carries more risk than the GSF weekly, as the worst case - if you were to lose every single match - would require you to play twelve of them, but realistically you'll get something closer to a 50/50 win rate while queueing solo, which would then complete the quest for you after six matches. You'll also earn additional points from "Warzones: Medalist", "Warzones: Victorious" (which comes in three tiers) and "Activity Finder: Socialite" (which also comes in two tiers). If you win a lot, there's also the infinitely repeatable "Warzones: Infinite Domination" which grants an additional 80k for every tenth win. Like with GSF, you'll need alts after three completions.

- While sitting in queues for the above activities, I do the Iokath weekly. Many people seem to hate Iokath, but it really doesn't take that long once you know what you're doing and awards an insane 50k points for "Iokath: Patrol" plus some extra from "Iokath: Mission Complete" and "Iokath: Defeat Enemies". Last I checked, this can be done twice per week per character, so again, alts are needed to get the most out of it.

- Alternatively, you can also do heroics. I prefer to use a stealther to do a really quick one on each planet, since you get bonus points for one planetary heroic per day, but you can also go for one that requires more mob killing and try to knock out the "Defeat Enemies" objective for that planet at the same time. 

- Alongside all of this, I also do various easy clicky objectives if I have the resources for them, such as "Advancement: Reputation", "Companion: Influencer", "Crafting Invasion Force", "Crafting: Dark Project", "Crafting: Inventor", "Crew Skills: Missions" etc. None of them give huge numbers anymore, but they can add up to an easy 50k or so points that you just earn almost passively/in the background. If you haven't fully expanded all available strongholds yet, opening a new room also earns 30k per day.

Tier 2:

- If I have time to get into tier two territory, the first thing I like to do is to play a low-level alt (below level 70). You gain about 4k points each time you level up, plus 30k every fifth level once per day, plus 25k for completing ten quests of any type once per day. If you do your personal story, that also gives 6k for each quest completed.

- Next it's doing three uprisings for "Uprisings: Veteran Weekly", which is worth over 100k points by itself. You should also get credit for "Uprisings: Tour of Duty" along the way, though that one's buggy and not all uprisings count for some reason. If you do Landing Party, you'll also get credit for the one-time "Chapters: Defeat Skytroopers" for about 20k plus the less profitable daily repeatable version of the same objective. In terms of raw points earned per time investment, this is really a tier one, but to do it efficiently you kind of need to create a pre-made group that knows what it's doing, which takes extra effort. Personally I also find uprisings a bit tedious, so I don't actually want to do this one every single day.

- I have a similar attitude to the arena weekly for "Arenas: Achiever". Everything I've said about the warzone weekly actually applies to this one as well, I'm just personally not as fond of arenas. You objectively also need to do more arenas to complete the quest, even if you win all the time, and pops tend to be less frequent than for warzones, meaning it takes longer. Still, if you enjoy warzones and arenas equally, you can almost double your daily points by doing both of these. I limit myself to doing this one maybe twice over the course of the week.

- Another thing you can do while waiting in queues - if they take long and you've already done Iokath and a heroic on every planet - is work on dynamic encounters (outside the starter planets, since those don't count) for about 4k points per encounter and an extra 80k+ for completing fifteen (up to once per day). This isn't huge but can add up, especially if you choose encounters that don't take too long. You'll also get points for killing mobs for "Defeat Enemies" on that planet, so it might be worth moving around the galaxy a bit. The only risk to doing these while queued is that you might get a pop before you're able to complete the event you're currently working on.

- Finally, there are daily areas other than Iokath that award points for completing their weekly mission (usually once per day): In descending points order: Makeb ~50k, Ossus ~30k, Kessan's Landing, Manaan, Ruhnuk, Yavin 4 ~25k each, Rishi, Onderon, Oricon, Section X ~20k each, Black Hole, CZ-198, Ziost ~10k each. I'd actively avoid Makeb since its missions are way too spread out and take forever to complete, and I very much recommend Ossus as something that gives a lot of points for how quick and easy it is to complete, but beyond that, your mileage may vary. Personally I can't do too many of these without starting to feel burnt out.

Tier 3:

- Star Fortresses were my bread and butter during Total Galactic War at one point, when they awarded about 100k per completion, but the devs realised that this was perhaps too good and nerfed them heavily. Nonetheless, the weekly mission still gives over 60k points, plus 10k+ per heroic or 5k for a normal run. There are also additional objectives for completing specific Star Fortresses. It's not the best way to earn points, but if you've exhausted most of your other avenues or are just looking for a change of pace, there are some valid points to be gained here. Though they do require your character to be past KotFE chapter nine to start doing them. While they are technically soloable, this is another piece of content that greatly benefits from bringing a competent friend along.

- Finally, there's what we tend to call "Rampaging" after the "Galactic Rampage" objective, though that one is no longer part of Total Galactic War and limited to other Conquest events. Its goal is to simply kill mobs of any type. While that particular objective is no longer relevant during TGW, there are still all the other "Kill enemies" objectives on most planets, which net about ~15k points per planet for killing 75 mobs. Now, I mentioned above that these can feel like a nice bonus to get while you're already doing dailies, dynamic encounters or heroics, but just running around killing mobs is pretty dull. Still, if you're out of other things to do, it's an option. It's also worth noting that as an organised guild activity, this can be extremely efficient, because having a whole ops group scouring the landscape makes 75 mob kills go past in a breeze. Still, this post is primarily about what choices to make as an individual player, and from that perspective simply killing mobs is a lot less exciting and profitable. 

Patch 7.8 Ramblings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

7.7 Dev Stream: More Alien Colours Are Nice, but Still No Story

Yesterday it was time for another dev stream, this time focused on the upcoming patch 7.7. There was some competition for my attention as the new pope had gone live mere moments earlier, but I loaded up Twitch on my laptop and dived right in.

There was a new Twitch drop to be earned (a purple-framed Dromund Kaas poster), for watching one hour of live SWTOR content, but apparently Twitch measures time a bit differently from the rest of the world as it took almost the full one and a half hours of the stream for it to show as earned. Yes, the stream lasted one and a half hours! I wish I could say this was a sign of it being chock-full of exciting updates, but to be honest I get the feeling that they've just got better at fluffing up what they have to make it look bigger. For example there was a whole section about fixing a bug with the sprinter guild perk, which... don't get me wrong, fixing bugs is a good thing, no arguments there! But is a single bug fix of that nature really important enough to warrant a segment with the game producer on your livestream to get players hyped up? Personally I don't think so.

The thing that we of course all wanted to know above all else was whether there was any update on the story content and sadly, the answer was not really. Basically, they've built 7.7, but the voice actors' strike is still going on, so we're still not getting anything. The only thing I noted down here was that they showed the little trailer from Star Wars Celebration again (the one that included [Spoiler?]) and the accompanying slide said it featured "a mysterious figure that has been pulling the strings behind the scenes", which does seem to confirm that this person's role is going to be more than a throwaway cameo.

Anyway, having the second major patch in a row release without story content will be a bummer, but I guess I can't really complain as we know the voice actors' strike is still a thing. I'd just gotten my hopes up a little as a "datamining-adjacent" friend had told me that something had happened and somehow the 7.6 story looked ready for release now. (You know who you are; consider yourself given the side eye!) But that's not the devs' fault, and just goes to illustrate once again why you shouldn't put too much stock in things that are datamined.

Anyway, they still managed to fill a one and a half hour stream, and it wasn't all bug fixes, so there obviously were some other things announced.

Among a number of UI updates to the mission log and map, the one that stood out the most was the addition of the so-called "eras window", a new tab on your mission log. All this does is basically show you the storyline split into "eras" (which mostly align with expansions, but not 100%), to show you where you are and what's coming up. This seems like it could be a major boon to returning players who don't remember where they left off in terms of story. It was also noted that it doesn't "currently" include notes on any decisions you've made, though I guess this is something they could expand on in the future. Either way, it's a good feature but won't do much for me as a "power user". I wrote about how I had to create a spreadsheet to keep track of all my alts' progress almost seven years ago, which is much more detailed and most importantly, let's me see where each character is at without having to log into them in game to check. I still rely on that to this day, but for less hardcore Swtorites this new window will be useful.

In terms of group content, we got the official announcement for master mode XR-53, which is cool for the relevant target audience but I suspect it will be too hard for me and my guildies so I can't muster too much enthusiasm for it right now. I was also a bit disappointed by the clarification that the new augment schematics it will drop will be brand-new gold augments that will outclass the purple ones that people spent the last few months researching and crafting. We don't even know whether you'll be able to reverse-engineer the gold ones by deconstructing the purple ones (it was asked in chat multiple times but not answered). So eh. As a side note to this, they said that PvP weeklies will start rewarding small amounts of corrupted bioprocessors, the (until now) unique crafting material dropped by XR-53, which is nice I guess, though for me personally the bottleneck has actually turned out to be other mats.

Speaking of PvP, PvP Season 8 will launch with 7.7 and in order to align it more with how Galactic Seasons work, it will now also include an option to just buy out levels with Cartel coins. I've got to admit there was a small part of me that bristled at this because isn't PvP about skill? You shouldn't be able to buy that, right? But then, these new PvP seasons have always been just about participation with no particular requirement to succeed, so I guess it's not that big a deal.

They talked about Nar Shaddaa Nightlife returning in July, which just felt weird to think about this early in May, but I guess summer isn't that far away. The main thing that irked me here was that there was no comment about making the various slot machine chips a legacy-wide currency. They talked about this last year and said it was complex and would take time - but then they managed to change the DvL tokens from character- to legacy-bound within a couple of weeks, so I was really hoping we'd be able to start this year's Nightlife with something similar. But nope, nothing. I guess I can still hope that it will be addressed later, but for now I'm just disappointed that the main thing I was curious about in regards to this event was not mentioned at all.

The biggest and most universally accessible bit of gameplay to be added with the patch will be new dynamic encounters on seven planets, which will include all the starter planets, the two faction capitals and Ilum. The starter planets won't have that many encounters due to how small they are, but still. I thought going for these early planets next was an interesting choice when I first heard chatter about it during the previous PTS. I thought Tatooine and Hoth made great sense as first locations for this new feature, and in my mind the best place to use it going forward were going to be other large planets with a lot of empty space, such as Quesh, Belsavis or Voss. Cramming them into the tiny starter planets is kind of the opposite of that, but I can understand the devs wanting to introduce the feature to new players early on in order to get people interested and familiar from the get-go. I'm still a little concerned that it might end up being a bit of a pain to have god knows how many players compete for the same six k'lor'slugs on Korriban (which would not improve the new player experience I reckon), but we'll see how it goes. In general I've really enjoyed dynamic encounters and am looking forward to getting more of them.

One interesting thing they announced closer to the end was "combat updates", which is to say they are going to make some changes to combat styles, such as which discipline is selected for new players by default and what order you get some abilities in. The example they gave was that Guardians/Juggernauts don't really have any AoE other than Force Sweep/Smash for a long time, so they want to pull Cyclone/Sweeping Slash forward and grant it automatically at level 7 instead of making it a level 27 optional choice like it is right now. This sounds like a good idea in principle, though I could have thought of better examples to choose. From what I recall there are currently some utilities that actually give you buffs to certain abilities several levels before you actually get that ability, which is just weird, and I'm hoping that this kind of thing will also be included in this overhaul. (I quickly logged in to find an example and e.g. Deception Shadows have a talent option at level 27 to add functionality to Force Cloak when they don't actually get Force Cloak until level 31.)

I do wonder a little though, as another example they gave about something they want to change was to make the default spec for Shadows Serenity (the dot spec) instead of Deception (the direct damage one). I just wrote down "why?" in my notes here as the latter is much easier to play, so why change to the more difficult one as default? So I have some reservations as well, not fully understanding what they are going for here.

The big surprise at the end of the stream (including one here seems to be a pattern they are settling into) was that they'll be adding lots more skin colours for aliens in the patch, and I do mean lots. Like, Nautolans will go from having 10 colours to 95 different shades. Now, only some of those will be completely new colours, like the (inexplicably, to me) popular purple Twi'leks, but just getting a lot more different shades of say, green, will be cool too. I think this was the most exciting announcement of the stream for many players, and I liked it too. It's just no replacement for actual story content, you know? I continue to wait.

Meanwhile, further info about the patch and stream, should you want it:

• VOD on Twitch
• VOD on YouTube
• Article on the official website
  
• Swtorista summary
• Today in TOR summary
• Vulkk summary

Best Ding in a While

I overestimated my guildies' interest in generating Conquest points on Imp side this week... which meant that I buckled down over the weekend and put in extra effort myself to make sure that we'd still hit our large yield target. As part of this I dusted off my old DvL Merc, who'd been sitting at level 79 for ages, and did some PvP on her, even though I finished the PvP season a few weeks ago.

PvPing at level 79 can feel a bit like cheating, considering how much more powerful you are compared to most other characters in the bracket, but since you can't halt your XP gains, it's a fleeting pleasure that I'm simply happy to enjoy while it lasts. Even without any augments and with gear that had never been the best even back when 75 was the level cap, my Merc was rocking the damage charts hard, and the matchmaking algorithm blessed me with a winning streak to boot. There was one match where I was startled to find upon consulting the scoreboard at the end that we'd apparently been a man down the entire time but had still come away victorious somehow.

With only a tiny sliver of my XP bar left to go, I knew that my next match was going to be my last one in the midbie bracket, and since my warzone weekly mission was on 9 out of 12, I really wanted one more win in order to complete it before levelling up. I still would've been able to finish the quest at level 80, but then I would've had to sort myself out with level 80 gear before queueing again, which would've meant extra effort.

I got into a Voidstar that started with both teams severely under strength and my team on attack during the first round. I wouldn't swear by it, but it certainly felt like we were a man down again at least to begin with, which made it difficult to make any headway for a long time. However, we did eventually manage to breach the first door and cross the bridge, with the round ending at the second door - a situation that isn't really a clear indication of an impending win or loss, as matches that end there can very much still go either way.

As we started the defence round, it quickly became apparent that the rest of my team (which had filled out by then) seemed decent enough at watching the doors, however there was zero communication going on. I just kept running back and forth between both sides as I noticed our opponents changing their angle of attack repeatedly.

At one point I ended up fighting on the left side with only one other person against about four enemies. The other guy died and I soon followed, realising too late that nobody else had moved over and I had been the last person standing. I typed "left" into the chat but it was too late. Waiting inside the respawn area, I saw one person still try to reinforce from the right but they didn't make it over in time to prevent the enemy team from planting the bomb.

I got out of the respawn just as the door was blown off and hurled myself right back into the fray in an attempt to stall the enemy forces. They enjoyed taking me down but sadly I barely slowed them and soon found myself in the respawn again, this time on the other side of the bridge. However, this turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as the rest of my team did not do a great job at halting the enemy advance at this point, and one of the bridges was activated mere seconds later.

I typed "bridge open" into the chat in an attempt to get those who were still brawling wherever to pay attention to the objectives, and then ran forward to shoot the first enemy that came into my range, to make sure that I was in combat and couldn't be CCed by one of the enemy's stealthers.

I frantically shot two attackers going for the right door, but then saw a stealther appear at the left door as well, so I quickly whirled around and interrupted them too. I knew I wouldn't be able to hold both sides by myself for long, but by god I was going to try (while hoping that nobody had a stun or root up because that definitely would have screwed me over in that moment).

After what can't have been more than thirty seconds but what felt like an eternity of me having to cover both doors by myself, a friendly arrived and started defending the left door, freeing me up to fully focus on the right one. Eventually the rest of the team trickled in as well and we established a more solid defence.

Finally, it was over, my quest ticked over and I dinged 80. The final scoreboard showed me as having the most kills and damage taken out of everyone (the enemy clearly hated me), most damage and healing on my team (apparently we had a proper healer at one point who had left), and third highest objective points to boot.

It's rare that I get to rock the numbers like that in a warzone (I'm not usually focused on them and happy to spend a match just standing guard for example), nor do I generally feel like I did the bulk of the work, but in this one I feel confident in saying that I carried a heavy load for my team, especially with that solo defence of the two doors across the bridge. Too bad there are no more MVP votes to earn, so I'll never know whether any of my team mates appreciated it... but it sure was a great and memorable way to hit max level.

Another PvP Season Under My Belt

PvP Season Seven has a few weeks left to run, but I completed my last achievement last week, so things are going to be kind of quiet for me in game for the next few weeks. At least we can expect to get some information about the next patch in the livestream next week.

The pacing change that came with the additional levels introduced last season still felt odd, as I once again finished all the bonus achievements before actually completing the seasonal reward track. If anything, it was even more pronounced this season, as I didn't make an effort to make the maximum progress of one thousand points a week this time around, which meant that I needed an extra week to complete the track. The track being the last thing to get finished remains slightly strange to me.

My most stand-out experiences this season were all in arenas, interestingly enough. The best match I had was without a doubt when the plasmatech Vanguard that I'm levelling dinged upwards into the midbie bracket. I actually don't like doing PvP at the lower end of a bracket, because you usually feel very obviously underpowered compared to the characters at the upper end, and sometimes people even get shirty about having low-level team mates. As it was though, I still had a PvP weekly I wanted to complete, and in this arena, fortunately nobody complained. And we ended up having an insanely good match, which we won 2-1, with me actually doing crazy amounts of damage with my DoTs despite my low level. The last round also came down to a 1v1 between me and an enemy, which I won. That felt pretty great.

My worst arena experience of the season were several days when the midbie queue was made unbearable by a premade, which was kind of ironic as people complained about premades a lot in past seasons and many seemed to think that discontinuing 8-person queues for warzones would solve that problem. Yet I rarely had problems with premades in previous seasons, while they were a really noticeable nuisance this time around.

Even so, I'd still argue that the real problem isn't the existence of premades in itself - I see nothing wrong with friends or guildies wanting to queue together. The problem is population (yes, I'm beating that drum again). When you only have about ten people or so queueing for midbie arenas on a given evening, and four of them are in a group together, it's obvious that everyone else is doomed to have a bad time. I very rarely quit matches, but when I got put up against the same premade for the third time in a row, I apologised to the one person on my team who had already loaded in, explained that I was getting tired of getting stomped by these guys over and over and left, followed by me logging off and doing something else for an hour or two. When I logged back in I thought I'd give queueing another try - and was immediately put up against the same premade yet again. It was absolutely infuriating.

The generally most interesting arena experience I had, with a mix of good and bad, was when I was doing a midbie arena on my Juggernaut, and the second person to load in on my team immediately said something like "oops, I meant to queue for warzones". Sensing that he was about to quit, I quickly teased "you've got to stay for this match though", which at least worked to engage the guy in conversation. He groused that he wasn't that good etc. and I simply said I'd still rather have him here than go up against the three people on the enemy team by myself, which oddly seemed to convince him.

I can't actually remember whether we ended up with properly balanced teams in the end, but I do recall that there were only three people on our team and that both I and my reluctant arena buddy actually put up a pretty good fight. The third person however was a Scoundrel that did nothing but use their basic attack and throw grenades every now and then. Didn't even use stealth from what I remember. There was one particularly odd moment when I and the warzone guy had both died, and the only two players remaining were our Scoundrel and a Powertech on the enemy team. And the Scoundrel just stood there, plinking away at the PT with their basic attack so uselessly, that the Powertech actually stopped fighting for a bit and just watched in confusion. Was that Scoundrel really not even going to try anything else? Eventually the PT got bored though and killed them (easily, of course).

This caused warzone guy to get mad and start insulting the Scoundrel, which in turn resulted in me trying to calm him down. He said things like "don't queue for PvP if you're not even going to try" and I tried to argue that the Scoundrel may well be a newer player and just not know how to play very well. Sure, they were above level fifty, but I'm pretty sure you can make it to that level by using nothing but two buttons nowadays if you want.

The whole thing just made me feel very conflicted because I've been converted to the benefits of accessibility and agree that the story doesn't need to be hard to be enjoyable, but at the same time putting obstacles in the player's way that force them to learn to press more than two buttons is one of the main ways in which you can teach someone to play better. I guess in an ideal world there'd be enough people queueing that two-button-pressers could go up against other two-button-pressers, but unfortunately that's not the world we live in and as it stands, encountering someone in PvP who is still on such a basic level of gameplay when they are more than halfway towards the level cap is definitely a shock to the system.

10 Types of Annoying PvP Match

PvP Season 7 is in full swing and I'm taking part in it as usual. I wouldn't do so if I didn't enjoy PvP, but even with the best will in the world, PvP can also be filled with frustrations sometimes. Inspired by some of those feelings, I bring you a list of ten different types of annoying PvP match that I regularly come across in my journeys.

Note that this is not a top ten list because the severity of annoyance with each of these types of match can vary a lot depending on the exact circumstances of the situation, and you can have both mild cases and ones that are really bloody annoying in each category.

The one that's doomed from the start due to numbers

By that I mean the number of people on each team, not dps numbers. This is more likely to happen in arenas than in warzones and mostly happens in lower level PvP, though it can technically happen in any mode depending on your luck. If the difference is only one person and the skill difference between the teams is big enough, you can still have an interesting match sometimes, but there's nothing quite like starting an arena with only one other person on your team vs. a full group of four, or the game pitting you against three enemies all by yourself. You just know it's not gonna happen no matter what. (Though the other day I was put into an arena by myself vs. three opponents and actually managed to kill one of them before they killed me - I considered that a win on a personal level.)

The one where desync keeps screwing you over

Mostly this happens in Huttball. I've written about desync in the past, and I remember they even took two of the Huttball maps out of the game for a while to "fix" them, though I don't think that ultimately went anywhere. It's not always equally bad, but there are definitely times when you desperately want to intercept the ball carrier but the game just can't decide what floor they are even on until after they've already scored.

The one where your whole team is just clueless

Everyone's got to start learning at some point, and I can't hold it against anyone if they don't know the rules and objectives of each warzone on day one. Nonetheless, being saddled with a whole team of players like that at once can be frustrating. The prime example I always think of for this was an Odessen Proving Grounds match that started with the southern and middle nodes active... and the moment the spawn point opened, everyone but me ran north, where there was... nothing. I just knew right then that I wasn't in for a good time. I mean, I couldn't even be mad, but it sure is deflating to be literally the only person in a team of eight going for the objective while the other seven bumble around in the middle of nowhere.

The one where you're just getting completely steamrolled

Whether it's because you're up against a premade or the matchmaker is just doing its usual thing of not giving a damn, it's not very fun to be in a match where you basically get murdered the moment you come out of the spawn point. If you're lucky, at least it'll be over quickly, but if you're unlucky, you might end up against a premade that intentionally tries to draw things out so they can farm more numbers before finishing you off.

The one where your team is trying but just not good enough

This is a very peculiar kind of annoyance because when both teams are trying but one is just a bit better, that should make for a good match, right? Even if you lose in the end, at least you had a chance? Well... I'd say that's true in principle, but there' a certain point where it can in fact make the match extra annoying, when you can tell that everyone is really trying but then you always get foiled at the last moment anyway, and still lose the Huttball match 0-6 or whatever. It's like you get your hopes up over and over again just to have them dashed repeatedly. This kind of match doesn't so much leave you mad at your team mates, but more like you're going insane from a terrible itch that you just can't scratch.

The one where people are going crazy with the insults

Honestly, I never quite got the idea of "smack talk" in PvP. I get that it's a thing that some people like, but I'm more in camp "good sportsmanship" where you try to not take it personally and treat everyone involved with respect, which is kind of the opposite really. Anyway, usually the sorts of comments I'm thinking of here wouldn't even remotely qualify for friendly banter anyway and just involve people outright yelling insults at each other. I'm not so thin-skinned that I consider a match immediately ruined if someone starts ranting, but depending on the intensity and how many people are doing it, it can definitely bring the vibe down. Though I've learned that /ignore really does help here.

The one where you're in a warzone with damage farmers

Look, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with just wanting to beat up the enemy, but there's arenas for that, right? Warzones have objectives for a reason, and it's very frustrating when the majority of your team is not on board with that. In fact, it's quite ironic how sometimes being in a warzone with a bunch of elite damage farmers is almost indistinguishable from being in one with a bunch of complete noobs. The only difference is that when you look at the scoreboard at the end, the veterans will have some big numbers and will presumably pat each other on the back about how well they did spamming AoE at the spawn for the entire duration of the match. However, you yourself will still end up just as frustrated being literally the only person going for the objective and ending up easily foiled by the enemy. The rare amusing exception to this is if both teams are damage farmers, and you can do objectives pretty much undisturbed while they all brawl in mid.

The one where you meet "that one guy"

Who's "that one guy", you might ask? The answer is: your nemesis, at least for the duration of the match. It doesn't matter what else is going on, you keep running into that one person and they piss you off every time! The prime example I always remember when thinking of this was a Huttball match where a Shadow was pretty much solo-running the ball for the enemy and would always have the perfect counter to every attempt of mine to stop him. It was so frustrating! More recently, I played a few matches on Star Forge where this one tank seemed to be absolutely intent on spending the entirety of each match crawling up my rear, no matter where on the map I went. I was healing, and to a certain degree getting focused as a healer is normal, but there were other healers on my team and yet that person was always on me. It's not even that I got killed all the time or anything, but it got very annoying rather quickly to be the target of seemingly every single stun and interrupt of that guy for the entire match.

The one where people give up and go AFK the moment the enemy gets ahead

I tend to think of AFKers in PvP as the bane of my existence, and a couple of seasons ago I ran into them quite frequently, but recently things have fortunately been better on that front and I haven't encountered that nearly as often. Interestingly, often when I hear people talk about AFKers, the blame gets (rightly or wrongly) put on people who actually don't like PvP and just queue up for certain rewards, hoping they'll get by just sitting in stealth for the entire match. I mention this because while I have no doubt that this does happen sometimes, my personal experience has been almost the opposite, that AFKers are often very much into PvP in general and may even be skilled players, but they just absolutely cannot deal with losing and will stop trying the moment their team falls behind, and then just stand in a corner while complaining about how much everyone but them sucks. In arenas this is often even worse, where you'll see certain people kill themselves with /stuck in the spawn at the start of the second round if their team lost the first round.

The one where you just need that one win or have been waiting forever

I think I've occasionally mentioned before how the way daily and weekly missions reset since 7.0 has made me feel more pressured for time when it comes to completing them, and that I actually often have more fun PvPing when I'm not trying to tick any boxes. As it is though, spending a lot of time in the queue and running out of time to, say, complete a daily, really ramps up the pressure for the match to be good when it finally pops, and there's nothing quite like the despair you feel when you've waited half an hour or longer to get into a game and then it just goes sideways immediately and you know it's going to be a waste of time.

7.6 Dev Stream Reactions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PvP Season Six Finished

The other day I finished my goals for PvP Season 6... including all the achievements. I was rather surprised to be hitting that point with almost two months left in the season.

When the devs originally announced their plans for Season 6, I wasn't too on board with some of the changes and noted that I was hoping they'd reconsider some of their plans based on people's feedback. Unfortunately that didn't happen, and I definitely grumbled when I claimed my adrenal and medpack "rewards", which didn't stack with the thousands I already have and vendored for a two-digit number of credits.

But the five levels added to the reward track had an... interesting effect. Usually the way my season progression would go was: finish the warzone weekly achievement first (since I really enjoy warzones and they are responsible for most of my progress in PvP), followed by finishing the main track a few weeks later. Then I'd need a couple more weeks to finish my arena weeklies (since I don't like them as much and pops in the lowbie and midbie brackets can be slow, I rarely complete more than one a week) and finally I'd hit the 2000 medals.

A screenshot from an arena I rather enjoyed. Four bounty hunters vs. the world! RIP, enemy team who got obliterated by three Powertechs with a pet healer both rounds.

This time around, the achievement for twelve weekly warzone missions was still the first thing I completed, but I also had quite a few levels of the reward track left to go so nothing else happened for a while... and then I completed the main track, the arena weekly achievement and the medal achievement all within hours of each other. I think the main track was actually the last thing I finished as well.

That was... odd. I honestly hadn't expected to finish everything seemingly at once and to then just be done, with so much time left in the season. On the one hand it was kind of nice, but on the other I'm not sure that's really the best way to balance these things either. I always figured that completing the reward track was meant to be the main goal, with the additional achievements being "stretch goals" that you can work towards if you're particularly hardcore. When it works that way, this also means that gameplay-wise, there's a kind of curve to your activity, where you first play a lot, working on everything at once, and then it gently slopes downwards as you complete things and have to invest less and less time to just finish off those last few remaining goals.

The regular Galactic Season works like that too (or at least it did in the past, the silly fragments achievement in the last one kind of screwed things up). I'm not sure how much of a point there is to things like the medal achievement if you complete it automatically before even completing the track, just because that's how many matches you need to play to get to the end anyway.

That aside, I don't have much to add about the season that I didn't already express in this post from June.

Where Is the Group Content?

SWTOR has long had a reputation of being a "single-player MMO", and I've always hated that. One of the very first posts I ever wrote on this blog dealt with this topic in fact. Don't get me wrong, I have no issue whatsoever with anyone praising the personal storyline or preferring to play by themselves, but the thing that has always ground my gears is how this often dovetails into people being dismissive of the game's group content, calling it sub-par and not worth anyone's time.

Especially at lauch, that was just so not true. Coming fresh out of WoW's Cataclysm, where Blizzard had removed all group content from the levelling content in the open world, I loved that in SWTOR, heroics actively encouraged you to team up with others while levelling, plus you got bonus XP for questing in a group, instead of an XP penalty like in WoW. Social points also offered an incentive to do group content in PvE. While WoW players were moaning about being stuck with the Dragon Soul raid for nearly a year, SWTOR pumped out a new flashpoint or operation every other month. It was objectively a glorious game in terms of group content if you enjoyed that kind of thing.

Sadly, over time, SWTOR's dedication to encouraging grouping has been watered down quite a bit. Rise of the Hutt Cartel was the first and last story expansion that supported group conversations in new story content. Heroics were nerfed in difficulty and turned into just another kind of soloable daily quest in 4.0. Social points were removed with 7.0. Any plans to add new flashpoints or operations were discarded with 4.0, until they eventually made a come-back a few years later, but things have kind of petered out a bit again since then.

This has made me a bit sad, but not... devastatingly so, because while I enjoy group content, I obviously don't spend all my time in it either. I love getting new story updates! And I suspect that catering more to solo players is simply where the money is. At the very least, I'd assume that it's much more straightforward to measure the return on investment when you see a subscription up-tick after a new story update as opposed to a patch adding a new operation. I wouldn't expect many lapsed players to specifically come back for a new operation, and I'm guessing it's more of a retention mechanic for existing long-time players, giving them something to do with their friends once their interest in playing by themselves has been exhausted.

With all that said, I do think that spending some time on catering to players who like group content is still important, because they are the ones most likely to get others to try or stay in the game, to gush about it in public and promote it on social media. Off the top of my head, I can't think of a single well-known SWTOR content creator that doesn't participate in group content at least some of the time.

And recently, I've been hearing a lot of discontent - from different directions, so it's not just one person and their group of friends - around the fact that we haven't heard anything about upcoming group content in a while. Now, players always want more of the stuff they like, but the reason this really drew my attention is that I've heard these kinds of complaints before... and they usually did not bode well for the months ahead, as in the past these were the times when I had to watch people I cared about leave the game and never come back. I think at this point SWTOR players who are invested in group content have mostly come to accept that their preferred mode of play is not a high priority for the devs and that they can't expect updates tailored to their interests very often - but there's still an expectation of getting something at certain intervals, and there's definitely a point where they'll lose patience and unsub.

Looking at my timeline of major content additions from last year, the longest gaps between major group content releases over time have been as follows:

• Between operations: 2 years and 10 months, between the release of Dxun and R-4.
• Between flashpoints/small group content: 1 year and 5 months, between the release of Nathema Conspiracy and Objective Meridian
• Between major PvP updates: 4 years and 2 months, between the release of Vandin Huttball and the introduction of PvP seasons (yes, really)
  

I'm writing this at the end of June, shortly after we just got a major patch, so I wouldn't expect another one until October at the earliest, by which point it will have been:

• 2 years and 2 months since the last operation (R-4)
• 1 year and 4 months since the last flashpoint/small group content (Shrine of Silence)
• 1 year and 10 months since the last major PvP update (introduction of seasons)

In other words, it's not totally unprecedented to have to wait this long for new group content, but considering that it's been this long for every type of it, I'm not surprised to see people going stir-crazy all over the place.

I really hope that the devs will have something relevant to share whenever they announce the next major patch (I'm not counting the next Galactic Season, as I know that's its own thing), because few things are as much of a downer to me in this game as seeing players I like and whose company I enjoy slowly turn away from the game because the devs just don't care about giving them anything new to hold their interest.