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. 

Let's Talk About Czerka Combat Enhancers

During the last Galactic Season, we were introduced to the concept of experimental Czerka combat stims, which were supposed to bring a breath of fresh air to an old type of content that turned out to be the season's theme: uprisings. The reality of that didn't really match my expectations, and I discussed in this post how and why I thought that the effects of the stims were mostly boring and useless. I suggested that at least two of the three needed buffing, but nothing of that sort ever happened.

When new stim effects were announced for this season, I didn't get my hopes up too much but figured that they could hardly be worse than the ones from Season 8. Again I ended up slightly disappointed... this time not by the new effects themselves, but by the fact that all the old ones were still present as well, so every time you use a stim, you only have a two in five chance of actually seeing one of the new powers. I think it took me three or four weeks until I finally got sufficiently "lucky" with the random numbers. (Later I would always click the buff off if I didn't like it and reapply the stim until I got a result I liked, but early on I didn't have that many stims from drops yet and I didn't care enough to buy extras from the vendor.)

The two new effects are both decent actually: One gives you two floating probes over your shoulders that add dps by pew pew-ing everything you're in combat with, and the other one gives you a temporary action button that allows you to pick up a mob up to silver strength and throw it at another enemy. That can be kind of fun, especially when it leads to somewhat unexpected results (such as being able to pick up and throw a stationary turret), but it does kind of lose its lustre after a while - in my opinion at least - mainly because I think the cooldown is too long, and the fact that the throw causes everything in the vicinity to fly off in ten different directions is actually kind of inconvenient in AoE situations.

Anyway, talking about the different enhancer effects wasn't actually going to be the main point of this post. Instead, it's that this season has kind of made me wonder about the concept of these stims as a whole because I've noticed some friction for the first time that I never encountered last season. Back then, the main thing that stood out to me was that in any given uprising, I was often the only one to pop a stim, which gave me the impression that people didn't really know or care about the feature. If people were ever confused by some mobs growing big and red, or my character leaving pink puddles of poop on the floor, nobody ever said anything.

This season though, I've noticed an increase in friction around the stims. I still see few other people using them in pugs most of the time, but I actually had two runs of the featured veteran flashpoint of the week (both on the Leviathan server) where someone asked for the stim buffs to be removed. I didn't want to, and since I'm not fluent enough in French to have a discussion about it, I unfortunately turned into one of those pugs that just follow along silently and don't respond to anything, but it was still awkward.

On the other end of the spectrum, I've experienced (and heard of other people's unpleasant experiences with) people popping combat enhancers in master mode flashpoints. Now, best case that just turns the whole run into a big of a slog, but in some instances it can actually seriously kneecap you - for example on a boss fight where you're supposed to kill adds quickly, having those adds suddenly quadruple in health when they spawn in can pose a serious obstacle. The solution is obvious - get rid of the combat enhancer - but having to be the party pooper that asks someone else to please click off their stim buff isn't really any fun either.

What I'm getting from both of these scenarios is that the trade-off the stims ask of you (gain an extra ability in exchange for some mobs gaining more health and hitting harder) doesn't feel worth it a lot of the time. I'll be honest myself and admit that I'm 100% only doing it for the achievement that requires you to kill 250 enhanced mobs in flashpoints. This has turned out to be much easier to achieve than last season's equivalent for some reason - maybe because flashpoints are generally longer than uprisings?

On Darth Malgus, where I always do my weekly flashpoint with guildies and we all agreed to pop a stim at the start, we were all done with the achievement after only four or five weeks (though the fact that we're the kind of people who will do the bonus boss in every flashpoint certainly helped with that). On the other servers it's still a work in progress for me, but the reason I even considered this one achievable on all servers is the fact that even in a run where only one person is using an enhancer and we skip a lot of mobs, I'll still be able to make a decent chunk of progress on my tally.

However, once done I'm not really interested in continuing to use the enhancers after that, because I'm honestly inclined to agree that they just make everything take longer without a sufficiently fun pay-off and I don't want to get into arguments about it with the rest of my pug group. I don't know what kind of systems the devs are planning for the next Galactic Season, but I don't really feel like this whole Czerka stims thing has been a huge success, at least not the way it's currently implemented.

Still, I'd love to hear other opinions on this. What have your experiences been with the Czerka combat enhancers this season? Do you find them fun or tedious, and have you experienced any disagreement about this in your flashpoint pugs? Let me know in the comments. 

Galactic Season 8 in Review

We're once again at the point where the current Galactic Season has several weeks left in it, but more and more people are done (or close to being done) with it. Personally, I've hit level 100 on all servers, and on Darth Malgus I just need a few more weekly objectives to complete the last meta achievement. So what did I think of this season?

I was very negative about it when the details about it were first revealed, and was then disappointed a second time when even the few hopes I had for the uprising theme were quickly crushed. All that said, it ultimately turned out... alright, I guess.

I would still put it near the bottom of my ranking of all Galactic Seasons so far, for having a theme I didn't really care for, not having any rewards that particularly excited me (there was quite a lot of stuff that was "nice", but I've said before that I consider it a downside when there isn't a big central reward that also supports the theme), and for feeling more repetitive than any season before it (I still can't quite believe they made me kill all the DvL bosses again for a third achievement). 

At the same time though, things were not as bad as I had feared. Once they made the fixes to make doing your weekly uprising via the group finder more viable, the system worked well enough to funnel people into that to guarantee regular pops even on the smaller servers. (I could even get it done on Shae Vizla, where I hadn't done anything through the group finder in a long time.) With Trench Runner being the one notable exception, the tuning was such that even a group of low-level or generally underperforming characters could muddle through without too much effort.

I saw more than one comment, whether explicit or implied, that indicated that the person making it was actually doing uprisings for the first time, which is something that's always nice to see. And while my overall opinion of uprisings hasn't changed (still not a fan), I'll admit that I liked them more as levelling content than as max-level content, if that makes sense. The XP was pretty good every time I went in there on a levelling character, and somehow mowing down hordes of weak mobs feels more "on-brand" on a low-level character. It's what you do on the starter planets after all, when you're just learning how to play and might not necessarily have that many abilities yet. As endgame content I've always found that kind of gameplay a bit unsatisfying though.

The other thing I did like about this season was how the devs incorporated the dynamic encounters on Hoth and Tatooine into the weekly seasons objectives. I think they're a fun new kind of gameplay and I appreciated their addition to this. Especially on the other servers, where I hadn't had any reason to do dynamic encounters before, so I enjoyed gathering a bunch of achievements all over again.

There are a few things I hope they tweak in coming seasons though: First off, there were two variants of each dynamic encounter objective as far as I could tell, one that required you to do 15 for the weekly, and one that required 25. I thought the first was reasonable, while the second was too much. I still did both types this time around because I also had the draw of wanting to work on the achievements to keep me motivated, but when that's no longer applicable I don't think I would bother with doing 25 again; it's just too time-consuming.

The second "issue" I had was that just having encounters on Hoth and Tatooine made things a bit repetitive. One of my favourite weekly seasons objectives up until now has been the one to do "repeatable or exploration missions" on a number of planets, and I think the dynamic encounter objectives largely replaced those this season. (I did a count, and in the same number of weeks, Season 7 had 17 objectives of this type, while Season 8 had only 7.) This makes sense in so far as they fill a similar niche and the DEs were the new hotness, but it also meant that what previously made this objective so much fun to do - that it was so varied in its locations and could be done in a number of different ways - was kind of lost as we were just stuck on either Tatooine or Hoth week after week.

We'll see how they'll handle this in future seasons, but I think my personal preference would be if they simply merged the two types of objectives together, into something like "Complete Dynamic Encounters, Repeatable, Exploration, or Bonus Missions while defeating enemies on Coruscant or Dromund Kaas", therefore restoring the "rotating between different planets" aspect while also including dynamic encounters in the mix.

Still, I've got to admit I'm going to try and temper my expectations for whenever they announce Galactic Season 9, because I'm definitely a bit bored of the repetition and lack of even small bits of newness at this point. And by god, if they ask us to kill all the DvL bosses a fourth time... I actually don't know how to finish this sentence, but I still hope they come up with something different for us to do next time.

Pugging Trench Runner

I've previously talked about how the current Galactic Season's focus on uprisings was off to a rough start, though things improved once Broadsword applied some difficulty nerfs and replaced veteran mode in the group finder with story mode.

Since then, I've pugged the uprising of the week on at least some servers pretty much every week with no issues. Until last week that is, when it was Trench Runner time. It had been a little while since I'd last run that particular uprising before that week, but from what I'd heard from people who'd given it a go more recently, it was both very good for progressing the seasonal meta achievement to kill empowered mobs and one of the more challenging uprisings.

I got to experience that for myself when I got into a run on my level 63 Sniper on Satele Shan. Everyone else in the group was also still levelling, with the highest level being a level 79 Juggernaut. The other two members of the group were another Juggernaut in their 40s and a low-level... something, I forget what their combat style even was, but they were only level 18 and by their own admission fresh off of Hutta and new to uprisings as a whole.

Things did not start off too well as we suffered several deaths right at the start, and the low-level quickly became very apologetic, clearly assuming that it was their fault somehow. I assured them that it was alright and that this was simply one of the tougher uprisings.

However, things continued to be messy. I kind of expected one of the Juggernauts to pull by virtue of being melee, but everyone kept standing around awkwardly, waiting for someone else to pull. Eventually I got impatient and did so myself, just to die on every pull where I did so. At one point I realised that I was high enough level now to spec into the Sniper's OP self-heal in cover and did that in hopes of increasing my survivability, but it still wasn't quite enough. I tried kiting, but if I wasn't shooting things, they just weren't dying.

It just felt like nobody but me was really doing much damage to anything at all (not least because whenever I pulled, I'd keep aggro on absolutely everything until I died). I even fired up Starparse to understand what was going on and it showed people doing about 3k dps each, which seemed crazy with everyone being scaled up to 80. I figured that simply couldn't be correct and had to be distorted by the long periods in combat when you were just waiting for things to spawn. (After the run, I had a closer look at the log and at least one of the Juggernauts was spending most of their time just hitting their basic attack.)

Regardless, we slowly bumbled onwards despite the dying and sometimes full wiping, until we got to the third bunker, where we just ran into a hard wall, always wiping within a minute at best. "Alright, tactics time," I said and started to explain how the turret worked and how we needed it to kill most of the adds at the top. I explained how we needed to kill at least some of the adds on the ground as well and couldn't just nuke the boss because we were taking too much damage. And to their credit, people tried! But we just couldn't do it.

I think on our best attempt, the low-level handled the turret while we killed the first few rounds of unavoidable adds, but things were dying so slowly and we were taking so much damage in the process that we used up both kolto buffs in the vicinity and they took ages to respawn. At some point the lowbie would get kicked out of the turret controls and I would take over, but while I was shooting the walkers and droids at the top, the rest of the group in the trench would wipe quickly, at best having gotten the boss to about fifty percent health.

I don't recall how many times we tried this, but eventually I just didn't know what else to suggest. The lowbie was a bit helpless by nature and neither of the Juggernauts seemed to be using any survival cooldowns from what I could see, but trying to teach people how exactly to use their class toolkit seemed to go a bit beyond what's appropriate in a piece of group content that's meant to take about ten to fifteen minutes.

Eventually I just thanked everyone for trying and left (after sending the lowbie one more reassuring whisper that it wasn't their fault and that the combination of people not using their abilities and being put into one of the tougher uprisings was just unfortunate.) A few minutes later I re-queued and got another pop quite quickly - this time with a group of three eighties with whom we blitzed through the whole thing without any real issues. However, I still felt bad about the group I had abandoned, especially for that lowbie who'd tried an uprising for the first time ever and had been keen to follow instructions but we just couldn't make it happen. I can only hope they weren't completely discouraged by the experience, and that the devs maybe revisit this uprising in particular in terms of tuning before the season is over.

This was just one of those situations where I'm never quite sure what the right solution should be. Does story mode content really need to be tuned down to the point where it can be completed with a group of people just hitting their basic attack? Part of me wants to yell no and argue that it's okay to push people a little bit to learn how to play the game. But then, how are people supposed to learn how to play while being put into group content with strangers where there's an expectation that it's supposed to be super accessible and that you can be in and out in ten minutes?

(As a side note, the swarms of mobs gave crazy XP. Just from that one aborted run followed by the full run that I completed shortly afterwards, my Sniper gained three levels. So there's that, I guess.)

A Rocky Start

I've made it clear that I wasn't enthused by the announcement that the current Galactic Season's theme would be uprisings, but I was willing to give it a shot to see how things would play out. Specifically, there were three items that stood out to me as promising during the announcement dev stream:

1. The talk about the Czerka combat enhancers and the fun effects they'd have on your enemies reminded me of WoW's Mists of Pandaria Remix event from last year, which did something similar in an effort to make old content interesting to replay in a new way, with special gems empowering your gear in that content only. I played a lot of that and it was quite fun whenever I'd fire off a simple attack just to trigger a hail of meteors around everything in the vicinity for example. Now, things got a bit crazy in Remix due to the fact that the gems also levelled up, with people being able to one-shot raid bosses solo in the end, and I didn't expect (or even want) SWTOR to do anything close to that, but I figured there'd be some flashy effects and we'd get to feel a bit OP in uprisings compared to how our characters usually behave.

2. There was mention of uprisings being something that you could do solo, which implied to me that either as a side-effect of the above making us OP or through re-tuning, uprisings might become easy enough for the average player to solo, at the very least on story difficulty. This struck me as a solid idea to expand their appeal, especially considering that the three existing difficulties weren't really differentiated by much other than mobs having more health and doing more damage.

3. With the minimum level to queue for them dramatically decreased, I imagined levellers that had only just arrived on the fleet queueing up for uprisings instead of veteran mode flashpoints, and "levelling through uprisings" potentially becoming a new way to spice things up for long-time players who are levelling their umpteenth alt.

Unfortunately, none of the above actually matched the reality of what we got.

First off, there are only three different buffs you can get from the Czerka boosts, and they are mostly underwhelming. The one I've got most frequently so far is the one that supposedly makes every fifth enemy explode, but in reality only counts personal killing blows, so if you're in a group and/or (god forbid) not in a dps spec, you can forget about this doing anything at all. When I got this buff as a healer, I saw it go off maybe twice during a run. Utterly useless.

The one that makes you leak puddles of "radiation" is a bit better, though I wish they'd given it a different animation than the pink agony circles from the DvL bosses, because my brain does not like that the exact same visual effect is something to avoid on penalty of death early in the evening and then something to actively stand in two hours later. Still, it's decent in boss fights when you can place it directly under the boss's feet, though it's pretty useless on trash, especially if you're ranged, as you generally won't be pooping out circles anywhere near to where the actual mobs are.

The one that summons little droids seems to be the only one that manages to be both useful and fun, and naturally I've never gotten that one myself yet in more than half a dozen runs. As a result, most of the time the buffs feel like they make zero difference to your runs and you only apply them since they are required for one of the meta achievements for the season (something I wasn't aware of until I actually saw it in game).

The devs also did not retune uprisings to make them soloable in a way that is comparable to solo mode flashpoints. I know that someone, somewhere is gonna go "well, I solo them all the time" and you know what, good for you. But they are only soloable in the same way that other pieces of group content are technically soloable if you min-max your character's output and are willing to bash your head against the wall repeatedly until things go just right. I was expecting something that would be accessible to the average player and would be quick to do, in order to make the uprising of the week an attractive seasons objective to complete. This has not been the case.

Well, at least it should be easy to run them in group finder if they are kind of like veteran flashpoints now, role neutral and accessible from a low level? Also wrong! I was surprised to find that at the start of the season, story mode uprisings weren't in the group finder at all, only veteran mode. As all my own uprising runs have always been with guildies, I have no idea when this happened, but I'm pretty sure you used to be able to queue for story mode as well.

Anyway, having veteran mode accessible from level ten but still having it require a trinity group and be somewhat challenging was just a disaster. People were reporting everywhere that queues took ages to pop, even on the biggest server, and that the groups that did form seemed to struggle more often than not. I ran the first uprising of the week, Done and Dusted, on veteran mode with a group of guildies and was surprised by how hard everything hit. We were all max-level in top-end gear and still suffered some deaths, so I can only imagine the kind of shit-show a pug consisting of low levels would have been.

Oh, and the whole "levelling through uprisings" idea was also dead in the water since the devs changed it so only the featured uprising of the week is available in group finder. I mean, you could still technically just spam that one over and over again, but why would you want to? I can understand why they did that, but it was still another small disappointment.

Basically, my first impression was that the much-hyped buffs were boring and useless, and the devs were funnelling people into a mode that took ages to pop just to provide a terrible experience, something that players were understandably balking at. I was just baffled by how undercooked this all seemed. I can imagine people making arguments in defence of some of the decisions they made, but only having veteran mode in the group finder and funnelling low-levels into something with a similar difficulty to a master mode flashpoints was just such an obviously bad idea, I couldn't believe they went live with that.

Now, in my earliest draft of this post I was going to make a list of bullet points for what Broadsword could do to still salvage this whole thing, but fortunately they did actually take some actions already. Most importantly they took vet mode out of the group finder and put story mode back in, as well as further tuning down the difficulty of both modes.

Veteran Firefrost with my guildies this week already felt a lot easier to me, and I successfully pugged story mode on all the other servers. I even got a quick pop on Shae Vizla! A lot of people were clearly new to the content as well, as I saw visible confusion about where to go and what to do more than once, and in one run, two of my group mates immediately jumped to their death upon spawning in, not realising they had to wait for an elevator.

I was surprised by how many of them didn't use any of the Czerka buffs either. Yes, they are mostly useless, but usage is required for one of the meta achievements. I wonder if maybe people haven't quite "got" how this is supposed to work yet and buff usage will go up as the season progresses or whether they just don't care at all.

With the group finder and difficulty fixes applied, I guess doing a quick story mode uprising once a week will be an acceptable effort for a weekly seasons objective for many, but I still think it's a far cry from the way all this was promoted on stream. In my opinion the devs would have to go ahead and significantly buff at least two of the three combat enhancers to actually make them worthwhile and fun, but I'm not sure they'll actually go that far. It just strikes me as a missed opportunity.

A Season of Uprisings... And?

Yesterday evening it was time for the SWTOR dev stream about 7.6.1, the patch that will bring with it the start of Galactic Season 8. I've been finding the lull in interesting activity recently noticeable, so I was hyped for some news - perhaps too much so, as I actually ended up feeling somewhat disappointed. I could tell that other people were also keen to hear about Galactic Season 8, as my post speculating about what its theme might be from back in December has been my most popular post for several weeks now.

The big reveal came and... *drumroll* it's uprisings. No massive surprise there, as this was one of the activities people had been throwing around as the season's potential focus during the speculation. I just didn't think it was going to be uprisings myself because I didn't think Broadsword would want to make a season entirely focused on a type of group content.

To be fair, they didn't explicitly say it, but it kind of sounded like at least some modes might become easily soloable during the season. To mix things up, we'll be given some special gadgets from Kai Zykken that will do things like call little droid swarms to come to our assistance or cause explosions. Uprisings will also no longer be limited to subscribers, and will become accessible from level ten.

I'm curious to see how they'll hold up as levelling content, and whether newer or more casual players will find them confusing. They don't have much in the way of a narrative, but they're technically set after Knights of the Eternal Throne's base story, with Lana and Theron sending you out to fight people on both Republic and Empire side that are conspiring against the Eternal Alliance, which doesn't really make any sense at level ten.

Some of the rewards that were showcased look quite good too - I really liked the Coruscant and Dromund Kaas themed decorations and can see myself finding a lot of good uses for those.

That said... I've got to admit I was the opposite of excited when all this was announced. In my review of GS7 back in December, I noted that it had been a rather "meh" experience for me, as I felt the season was kind of lacking in flavour and newness. Annnd, unfortunately GS8 looks like it's going to be more or less the same. From the sounds of it, there is once again not going to be a grand reward that everything's centred around, such as a companion, stronghold, or side story.

As for uprisings as an activity... let's just say that of all the things people speculated could be the theme of the season, I would have preferred almost anything else. I don't hate them, but they are very low down on the list of activities I'm happy to take part in, so having a whole season centred around them fills me more with dread than anticipation. I want to believe that the changes will make them more interesting! But I'm not sure the devs can pull it off.

When this was followed up by an announcement that they were going to add more achievements to the existing dynamic encounters on Hoth and Tatooine, as well as some new Bessi customisations to grind out exactly the same way as you ground out Bessi's unlocks, it just added to the feeling that all we have to look forward to is replaying more of the same content that we've just done. I think I wouldn't have minded these so much on any other day, but as a direct follow-up to the uprising season they felt deflating.

Then Eric got to the headline "Cartel Market Storefront Updates" and my ears perked up, because I think parts of the Cartel Market interface are pretty poor to use and I think that making a number of small key changes here could really improve the experience of using it. So Eric was like: "As an example you go: I wanna buy a blaster pistol. And so you go and look at weapons and there's just a lot of them." I was quietly nodding along. "And so one of the things we're looking at doing is... putting things across the market into retirement."

To which my mental reaction was something along the lines of: Jesus Christ, what?! That is not how that sentence was supposed to continue! The Cartel Market isn't overwhelming because there are too many items on it, it's because there are no freaking filters! If you want to buy a blaster pistol, there's no way for you to just see the blaster pistols, you have to wade through all these other weapon types that your character can't actually use just to find the odd pistol here or there; that's where the pain point is! You don't need a FOMO sale, you need bloody filters!

Ahem. This one may have kind of pushed my buttons because I work in e-commerce in real life and am part of the UI/UX team at my job. So I was suffering professional outrage at the fact that I can't remember the last time anything a dev said missed the mark for me by a mile like that. I guess consider this your public service announcement that there'll be a weapon sale for the next two weeks, and all those weapons that are on sale will then be removed from the Cartel Market afterwards. Then they'll do the same for another category and so on. This isn't an entirely new thing, as there are a lot of things that aren't available on the CM at any given moment. I just wish they hadn't led with making it sound like they were actually going to improve the user interface instead of making a FOMO push.

There were a couple of other (to me) minor things like that they are still working on improving the character texture updates, but I was kind of starting to tune out towards the end. So much so that I missed the casual mention of 7.7 bringing dynamic encounters to more planets and XR-53 getting a master mode. I would have missed that entirely if a guildie hadn't pointed it out to me afterwards! I think those things sound really cool actually, even if I'm personally unlikely to beat an XR-53 master mode. I just think the fight is well-tuned for story and veteran mode and has room for a master mode on top to challenge high-end players.

However, all that still feels kind of far away, and in the meantime I feel like I don't have a lot to look forward to, which is disappointing to me. And most importantly to me, there was no comment on the still missing story update that was originally meant to come with 7.6. Back in November I summarised what they said about this on the 7.6 dev stream as such: "[...] 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."

Back then, I wasn't sure how strong the suspicion about the voice actor's strike was, as people can be quite wrong sometimes when it comes to making guesses about what's going on inside a studio, but it seems to be quite cemented in at this point, as other games have released updates with bits that would usually be voiced missing, and I think I saw a comment from dataminers that the 7.6 story content looks largely complete in the game files except for the missing voice lines.

Someone pointed me at this video about the voice actors' strike, which I think explains the whole situation pretty well. To be clear, I'm 100% in support of the union and their demands here, and I'm not holding it against Broadsword either that they are unable to proceed in the meantime. However, considering that it's now been more than three months since the 7.6 dev stream and nine months since the last story update, I really just wanted them to say something, to acknowledge that this situation sucks, that they don't have an ETA yet but that they'll release all the built up story content at once as soon as the strike ends. Or something. 

And you know, I realise it's quite possible that they are simply not able to do that, as there may well be some kind of ruling from above to not talk about the strike to players/customers. But that doesn't make it any less frustrating to be presented with this front of "nothing's wrong" while there's a freaking elephant in the room. They also mentioned in this stream that there would be a new date night in 7.6.1, just to then say absolutely nothing else about it, seemingly acknowledging that while they've probably indeed built this content, we still won't actually be getting it with the patch due to missing voice work, despite their announcement.

I'm kind of reminded of when we didn't get a story update for over a year during 2020, but there were two important differences there: one was that the global pandemic was a very obvious obstacle to a lot of work in a sense that people could generally understand. While the SAG-AFTRA strike is obviously also a public thing, it's nowhere near on the same level, and without any public acknowledgement of what's going on, SWTOR players will just assume the worst as usual about how the game is now dying because it's no longer releasing story content or whatever.

The other difference is that SWTOR had just released the Onslaught expansion at the end of 2019, which was rich with new content and goals to chase, meaning the game was able to coast on that momentum for a bit. The current situation feels more like the opposite, in the sense that we went from getting a new planet in 7.2 at the end of 2022 to a smaller new daily zone in 7.4, to an even smaller new planetary area without anything to do in it in 7.5. The current storyline feels to many like it's overstayed its welcome a bit, and people are desperate for something fresh, so to me this feels like the worst possible time to suddenly have to stop releasing major updates.

I think I'm a pretty patient person and I always roll my eyes a little at the people who complain about two story updates with full voice acting, cinematics and story choices per year as if they were nothing, because I think the team is doing a great job putting out high-quality content with the resources they have. However, I hate feeling like I have nothing to really look forward to at the moment, as the new season doesn't particularly excite me and who knows when the voice actors strike will end. It's been going on for more than seven months! According to Wikipedia the longest SAG-AFTRA strike in history lasted close to a year, so I guess unless they are going for a new record we can hope for an agreement before July at least?

I don't know, man, that's just a long time to feel like I should be focusing on other games.

Speculating About Galactic Season 8

We got another Executive Producer Letter last week, and again it was mostly a summary of what happened in the game over the past few months, with only a couple of vague hints as to what's to come in the new year. Personally I didn't think too much about this at first, but then I saw several friends go absolutely wild with speculation about one particular line, which I thought was quite entertaining in itself, so I thought it would be fun to compile all the theories I've seen in a post as well as to add my own thoughts.

The line that got everybody talking was this one:

[Our next Galactic Season] will be a fun one as we throw you into some content you may not have played in a bit...  

The intriguing bit is of course the question of what's "content you may not have played in a bit". I think there are only two things we can exclude for certain here: content that is very popular (because people are presumably playing it all the time), and content that is no longer in the game (because then there would be no "may" about whether we haven't played it recently).

The main categories of content I could see Keith referring to here are as follows:

• Old side content that people maybe do for a bit when they first start playing, but then get what they wanted out of it or simply get bored: Bounty Contract Week, which formed the basis for GS7, would fall into that category for me.
• Content that just isn't very popular with the majority of the player base for some reason or another: A prime example of this one would be Galactic Starfighter, which does have a passionate community that loves it, but it's extremely small compared to the player base as a whole.
• Content that isn't very rewarding: These activities may be fun to do once or twice, but there's just very little incentive to repeat them. The main example I can think of here would be uprisings - while I've never been a huge fan of them myself, people sure did run them a lot back during Knights of the Eternal throne when they were a prime source of Command XP. Nowadays their rewards feel pretty laughable for the effort: I recently ran some during Total Galactic War for the Conquest points, but being awarded ten tech fragments at the end almost felt insulting.
• Content that may well be fun and appealing, but isn't very accessible for some reason or another. Here my prime example would be Kuat Drive Yards (a flashpoint people used to farm like crazy when it first came out) no longer being in the group finder since 7.0. 

I think the thing that jumps out as an immediate problem is that in each of these cases there's a reason the content isn't being done as much as it used to, and simply making it central to a new season wouldn't automatically solve whatever's keeping people from engaging with it right now.

For example I've seen it suggested that the next season could be centred on Relics of the Gree, the same way the current season had Bounty Contract Week active at all times. This wouldn't be the worst thing in the world as I've always enjoyed the Gree event, but unless the devs add at least some new rewards to the reputation vendor, I fear I'd quickly suffer from the same kind of "been there, done that a hundred times" boredom I experienced during GS7.

I also think that the devs wouldn't make a season purely focused on group content. As much as I enjoy playing with others myself, I think that having a whole season centred on one particular type of group content, be it uprisings or flashpoints, would not sit well with a lot of players considering how solo-focused the game has become. I also don't think that the season would be about anything that's particularly difficult, such as veteran or master mode chapters.

I think a Starfighter season could work, if only because they could simply call it space-themed and have GSF-related objectives for those who're brave enough to PvP and on-rails space mission objectives for those who'd rather stick to PvE and solo play, similarly to how GS7 had both the soloable bounty contract objectives and the world boss objectives for groups. My only concern here is that space combat in any variety doesn't seem to be that popular with the player base as a whole. Anyone remember when the devs were first hyping up the "Super Secret Space Project" that turned out to be GSF? I was never quite sure how they expected that to turn out...

Do you have any thoughts on what Keith's hint might have been about? I've really enjoyed seeing people's ideas (even if I've got to admit that the basic notion of another season focused on old - or worse, unpopular - content doesn't currently excite me). I'm curious to find out next year whether the speculation came anywhere close to reality or whether we've ended up barking up the wrong tree.

Day 8: Memorable Moments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All In

Last week was Total Galactic War again, and I've written a fair number of posts in the past about my guild successfully conquering planets during that event. Last week was not one of those weeks though - we decided to go for a bigger challenge for once and ended up getting in over our heads, which eventually resulted in us falling behind and losing. C'est la vie.

It was still an incredible week for me personally though. Even though we eventually fell behind, we did manage to keep up with our main rival on Voss for at least a few days, and that despite of them having literally more than ten times as many players online most of the time. Being able to say that each one of my guildies is worth more than ten randoms (in terms of Conquest at least) felt pretty cool to be honest.

I also played a pretty crazy amount of hours, probably more than I did even while working on Galactic Seasons, and fully immersed myself in all kinds of activities that I hadn't done in ages: For example I did every single daily area and wallowed in the memories I associate with each. I even did uprisings with my guildies and am sad to say that I still don't find them very fun (the uprisings that is, not my guildies), but what was fun was seeing the ridiculous amount of achievements that popped up in guild chat that evening because we apparently had a considerable number of people who'd never done any uprisings before at all. (Oh, and it was fun to be the last person standing when it came to finishing off Crack-Shot Aggy in Done and Dusted because everyone else had died.)

I completed the GSF weekly on seven characters (one per day to align with the associated daily objective), playing probably close to fifty GSF matches if you assume a roughly equal win-loss ratio (though I didn't keep track). And I had fun with it! GSF occupies this weird place where I'm not hugely fond of it because I'm very bad at it and it's not really my kind of play style; but attach a significant enough reward to it and I'll be like: "All right, let's go!" Since there were special Conquest objectives for flying every kind of ship I even flew my scouts and strike fighters for a bit (despite of being terrible at them), and a few times I ran into people that were somehow even more terrible at GSF than me and managed to get a couple of kills that way.

I also completed the PvP weekly on seven characters, which required even more matches than GSF since it only counts wins nowadays. And again, it was actually great, because it had been ages since I'd done this much PvP over a relatively short period of time, and it was a great reminder of how queueing a lot means that you'll start to recognise certain names after a while. I could also feel my play improving massively on certain characters - for example I hadn't played either of my Scoundrel healers much recently, but with every match I got better at remembering to use my cooldowns and at predicting enemy movements. It was so much fun.

At the end of Total Galactic War we always do a tally and give away prizes based on people's contributions and I actually ended up in first place with over ten million points, which is something that never happened to me before (usually I'm maybe near the bottom of the top ten).

All this made me think a lot about how I've been playing the game for quite a few months now. I've long described myself as fairly monogamous in my gaming, unlike most bloggers I know, who tend to be variety gamers and like to dip into a lot of different games. I wasn't a complete purist anymore when I started playing SWTOR and also dabbled in other games from the beginning, but without much commitment. However, for a while now I've been splitting my time a lot more than I used to: never quite taking a break from Neverwinter, playing WoW with the husband, and Classic WoW with the guild I joined there. I never stopped thinking of SWTOR as my main game and home, but there were many weeks when it wasn't actually where I spent most of my gaming time.

I still think it's good to check out other games sometimes, even if like me you're mostly focused on one above all others, but I've been wondering whether I haven't been missing out on what I enjoy most by scattering my focus as much as I've done recently. Especially as there've been many times, not just in SWTOR but also while playing the other MMOs I mentioned, that I went: "Dang, this is fun... too bad I don't have enough time to really dig into this". No matter what I play, being stuck in this limbo where I'm always craving more but can't quite get it because of how much I'm divvying up my time is simply unsatisfying. I'm wondering whether it isn't time to go back to being full-on casual in those other games while being more focused on SWTOR and enjoying the perks that come with giving it my full attention.

More Patchy Goodness

Yesterday was patch day, which made me realise that it's been two and a half months since the last medium-sized patch. Dang.

One feature that wasn't in the patch notes but that launched at the same time was that they finally turned on the Steam achievements that they promised us on launch. I was quite amused by the deluge of pop-ups that appeared when I first logged in after the patch... and slightly disappointed that I had actually been granted every single achievement instantly. I mean... I knew that they were going to be granted retroactively, which is definitely how it should be, but I'd been kind of hopeful that there might be something to aspire to in there. Guess not. /dramatic sigh

Anyway, let's talk about the actual patch notes! As usual, I'm not going through literally every single one (you can find the full list on the official site), but just highlighting some that stood out to me.

Double XP Event - Starting September 15th and lasting until October 13th, there will be a month-long Double XP event! Enjoy a full month of Double XP, Valor, and Renown.

I've expressed my disdain for double XP often enough at this point, but double Valor and Renown are definitely useful. I'm still working on some of the Renown rank-related achievements.

Uprisings - Rewards have been improved and added to all Uprising bosses comparable to Flashpoint rewards.

Oh look, another attempt to get players to care about uprisings. I have to admit, I read this and thought: "Huh, maybe I should go have a look at that some time", just to immediately forget about it again five seconds later. Maybe one day...

Effects granted by “On Use” Relics abilities are now removed when the Relic is unequipped.

Now this one wouldn't actually have caught my eye on its own, except that players were immediately complaining on the forums that this also affects the relics you can buy to deal with the rakghoul plague, meaning that they don't work like a reusable stim anymore. (You used to be able to just equip them, vaccinate yourself, and then unequip them again.) I agree that this change is a nuisance, but at the same time I can't claim that it's a big deal. It's not like the sort of content for which you'd want to be vaccinated is so cutting edge that a small loss in power in one gear slot would really put you at a serious advantage. Though I guess I wouldn't mind Bioware actually making an MK-4 version of the relic with stats appropriate for level 75.

The following self-healing defensive cooldowns no longer generate threat: [a list follows]

This just made me raise an eye-brow... why shouldn't cooldowns that result in you healing yourself generate threat when all healing does? Wonder if there was some sort of heal-tanking cheese going on that this change was meant to address.

The Jedi Guardian’s Force Leap Cooldown reduction from the “Battlefield Command” utility is now working correctly.

A guildie of mine notoriously complained about how bugged this was. I experienced the bug with Force Leap showing as off cooldown when it actually wasn't a few times myself but didn't actually connect the dots tracing it back to this utility; I just thought my game or connection was being laggy.

The following archived Biochem schematics are no longer available to craft: [a list follows]

Aw, why you take things away, Bioware? And most of all, why now? There was a time when these were being used to win at Conquest in silly ways, but that's kind of been obsoleted by the more recent Conquest changes anyway. Once again, I can only wonder what that was about.

The Eternal Empire Walker in Chapter VIII of Knights of the Eternal Throne no longer interrupts the abilities of the player’s walker.

I experienced this bug the last time I played through that chapter of KotET myself and it was annoying AF. At the time I wasn't even sure what was happening; I just knew that it was nigh impossible to get any ability off on my walker at all (and then I died).

Players are no longer blocked in the “Macrobinoculars: Heroic 4: The Shroud Revealed“ Mission as droids are now spawning after the turrets have been defeated.

Another big "thank god"! This mission has been notoriously buggy for a long time, but at least there were workarounds in the form of resetting the phase and such. However, a few months ago or so they seemingly stopped working, and the last time I tried to complete this mission with a group of guildies we eventually had to give up after countless phase resets and what not because we just couldn't get those damn droids to spawn. I hope it really has been fixed (I shouldn't have to say that, but Bioware has a bit of a thing for saying they fixed bugs but then it doesn't actually turn out to be true). I should get a group of guildies together again soon to find out for sure.

The Emperor Slot Machine no longer removes a Kingpin’s Casino Chip when a Cartel Market Certificate is won.

This one just amused me because this is a patch note for an annual event that ended a couple of weeks ago. I guess it was already in the pipeline and they just decided to deploy it anyway in anticipation of next year? Still a bit weird.

Did anything catch your eye in the latest patch notes?

Flashpoints & Operations by Group Finder Level

This is that purely informational post I said I was going to make when I first found out about the unannounced adjustments to the group finder made in 6.0.

As far as I can tell the minimum levels set in 4.0 haven't been adjusted game-wide, so that you can still manually walk into any veteran flashpoint from level 15 upwards for example, however the group finder will only let you queue for content that it considers level-appropriate now. This mostly corresponds to the levels the content was originally designed for, with some minor tweaks made to the ranges for lower-level flashpoints.

Here is what you can access at each level:

10-14:
Republic only veteran flashpoint: The Esseles
Imperial only veteran flashpoint: The Black Talon

15+: 
Veteran flashpoints: Hammer Station, Kuat Drive Yards

17+: 
Veteran flashpoint: Athiss

21+: 
Veteran flashpoint: Mandalorian Raiders

25+: 
Veteran flashpoint: Cademimu

29+: 
Republic only veteran flashpoints: Taral V, Maelstrom Prison
Imperial only veteran flashpoints: Boarding Party, The Foundry

41+: 
Veteran flashpoint: The Red Reaper

45+: 
Veteran flashpoint: Directive 7

48+: 
Veteran flashpoint: Battle of Ilum

50+:
Veteran flashpoint: False Emperor

53+: 
Veteran flashpoints: Korriban Incursion, Assault on Tython, Depths of Manaan, Legacy of the Rakata, Battle of Rishi, Blood Hunt

55+: 
Veteran flashpoints: Czerka Corporate Labs, Czerka Core Meltdown

70+: 
Veteran flashpoints: Crisis on Umbara, A Traitor Among The Chiss, The Nathema Conspiracy, Objective Meridian
All master mode flashpoints
All story & veteran uprisings
All operations (most of them on a rotation*, Toborro's Courtyard & Hive of the Mountain Queen always available, Xenoanalyst II available during the Relics of the Gree event, The Eyeless available during the Rakghoul Resurgence events)

75:
Operation: Nature of Progress (on rotation*)

*The rotation of operations follows a fixed format, so that you can predict when a specific one will show up in the group finder next despite of only seeing the current and following day's in the game itself. The order is:

Eternity Vault
Dread Fortress
Nature of Progress
Colossal Monolith
The Ravagers
Karagga's Palace
Explosive Conflict
Gods from the Machine
Temple of Sacrifice
Terror from Beyond
Dread Palace
Scum and Villainy
(then back to EV etc.)

Looking Back on Three Years of KotET

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Insights From 2008

Considering for how many years I've been playing SWTOR now, it's still funny to me sometimes to think of how quickly and suddenly I got into it. A big part of why many people ended up being disappointed with the game at launch was apparently that there had been years of hype about how great it was going to be and that it didn't live up to, but for me, all of that went completely under my radar.

The very earliest mention of SWTOR that I can recall is Spinks making a post about it in November 2010, in which she mentioned that Bioware was holding a community poll about what to rename the Jedi Wizard class. The main reason that stuck with me was that I thought that Jedi Wizard sounded absolutely ridiculous and I couldn't fathom how anyone had ever thought that it was a good idea to give that name to anything (boy, am I glad that they went with consular in the end), but beyond that I didn't really take in that SWTOR was going to be a big, new MMO. That didn't happen until a few months before launch, and back then the impression I got was simply that it was going to be a game that combined Bioware storytelling with WoW-like MMO mechanics and an IP that I was very fond of - a combination that sounded great to me; and one of the reasons I'm still playing seven years later is probably that I got exactly what I thought I was going to get - and more.

So in a way, I'm really glad that I missed all the hype, but that doesn't mean that it's not interesting to my inner archivist to know what was said back then and what happened. Wilhelm from the Ancient Gaming Noob, who is always good for some nostalgia and general reminiscing, had a post up on Saturday about an old podcast episode dedicated solely to all the news surrounding the official announcement of SWTOR back in 2008, so of course I had to go and listen to that.

The most "so wrong now it's funny" thing in the show was probably Brent (the host)'s talk about how there was obviously no reason for Star Wars Galaxies to shut down just because of another Star Wars MMO entering the scene. Mind you, his logic was sound! They were/are two very different games. Too bad the higher-ups didn't see it the same way in the end.

Even more interesting to me personally were several quotes about SWTOR's game design.

The first one mentioned how all the quests in the game would have you doing truly heroic things and you would never just be accosted by a random NPC in a cantina or by the roadside to go and rescue their cat or something. This made me laugh because that's exactly what the side missions in the base game are like. In fact, there is even one on Republic Taris where two NPCs by the roadside literally ask you to free some felines.

At the same time, many people didn't find those quests very interesting, which is what I always figured was the main motivation for Bioware to make them optional and skippable with 4.0, as well as completely moving away from having any side quests whatsoever in new content from that point on (unless you count the Alliance alerts - but they follow quite a different format). Listening to the podcast though, this apparently wasn't just a reaction to player feedback but rather a throwback to older design goals they had.

With all that said, I've personally always liked the side quests, and I miss them. They add flavour to the world, and personally I don't see anything wrong with a Jedi taking a few moments out of their day to rescue someone's cat. The class story mission on Rishi even emphasises how important it is for a Jedi to not forget about the little things while also facing bigger threats.

The second design quote that caught my attention was about how they were planning to completely revolutionise MMO combat - hah! More specifically though, there was mention of how they didn't think that it feels good to have a bunch of people attack one giant boss, and that it should really be the other way round - for players to have an epic experience, they should always feel outnumbered and as if they are overcoming the odds. Now, obviously they went back on this as well, considering that the game launched with old-school style raids... but then I suddenly thought of the uprisings they added with KotET! I've wondered in the past what exactly the design intent was behind those, and wanting to create a feeling of being outnumbered makes perfect sense... on paper.

Of course, it turns out that most MMO players apparently prefer fighting a giant, epic boss to being outnumbered by mooks. As commenter Forztr put it in response to a recent post: uprisings feel as if Bioware took the basic dungeon design, removed the bosses that people actually get excited about and instead added more of the type of trash that players are always desperate to skip. In other words: in trying to finally deliver something they were apparently aiming for as early as 2008, Bioware created a type of content that most people consider inferior and less interesting than regular dungeons. The irony.

Finally, there was talk of them having plans to make it so that companions would evolve alongside your character and "become different people" so to speak, based on your decisions. This is something they obviously experimented with via the Sith warrior story and by having different versions of Jaesa, but I guess they decided that it was way too much hassle in the end. (Honestly, you can always tell that Sith warrior was the first story they worked on simply based on the amount of random crap it has going on that's not featured anywhere else.) One has to wonder if they had actually gone so far as to lay out plans for different versions of other companions. I guess we'll never know.

Anyway, that was a very interesting blast from the past, which - funnily enough - made me think that it's really a good thing that we didn't get everything they originally promised, because a lot of it probably isn't half as fun in practice as it sounded on paper. Were you following the game in those early stages?

Half-time

Today I uploaded Pugging with Shintar season 2 episode 10, which means that I'm halfway done with season two, hurrah! I've determined that I'll need/want it to run for exactly twenty episodes, since there are ten different operations for me to cover, and with my intended schedule alternating between operations and uprisings, that'll make for a total of twenty videos. With two uprisings per episode I will have completed all of them on story mode after the next episode, so for the remaining four installments meant to feature uprisings I'll switch to pugging randoms on veteran mode. Should be fun!

Unfortunately as a whole, this season hasn't been as much fun for me as the previous one. I've mentioned before that recording the operations pugs has felt more like "work" than anything I've done before, and as I've progressed I've noticed that it's my self-imposed rule of wanting to do them "in order" more than anything else that's causing me issues. I've always said that the best way to have fun pugging is to be flexible and jump into whatever content people are willing to run at any given time. Unfortunately I need specific operations for this series, and I need them at specific times too, since I only really have time to record an ops pug during weekends. It's getting a bit frustrating to be honest!

I've made a note for myself to not just fixate on the featured group finder operation in the future, but to also see what gives Conquest points in any given week, as those ops might be in higher demand as well. I'm hopeful that the next few will be easier to find groups for (as I said in the video, people aren't super fond of running that one operation that has more bosses than any of the others). Of course the biggest challenge will be Gods from the Machine, but at least I won't have to deal with that one until the very end.

What also hasn't helped is that my viewers seem less interested in this second season than they have been in the first. It might seem silly to worry about viewer numbers when I'm far from wanting to make a career out of making videos and am used to low view counts to begin with, but it's still noticeable and a bit disappointing to see less engagement on these newer episodes than there was on the older ones when they came out. I don't know if the episode length is off-putting, or maybe people just aren't as interested in the content? I'm guessing that season one was a bit more "relatable" in so far as most SWTOR players would have had an Esseles pug at some point (for example), so they have a frame of reference while watching someone else run it, but I'm guessing that not as many people have done operations or uprisings, and that might be why they aren't as interested. Anyway, I can only make guesses about that. If you're someone who's been following the series and has an opinion on this, feel free to share in the comments!

Anyway, these are the episodes I released since the last summary post (only four since the ops episodes in particular took some time to get right, as explained above):

S2E7: Tanking All The Adds in Uprisings - This one was a good demonstration of how the endless waves of adds that you get in many uprisings can get unpleasant for a healer (thus the title).

S2E8: Cheerful Wiping in Terror From Beyond - With TFB being my second favourite operation, I was really happy to pug this one, even if there was a slight hiccup in the middle. I also ended up in another guild's partial guild run again, this one led by an unexpectedly friendly and not at all evil Decepticon.

S2E9: Pleasant Uprising Surprises - This was probably the most fun uprising episode so far, with people interested in getting achievements in both of my runs. Even if I didn't need the achievements myself anymore and therefore gained nothing from them, it made for a nice break from the usual routine.

S2E10: Enjoying the Sights in Scum & Villainy - Scum was a bit annoying to find a group for, but I already talked about that in the main post above. The group itself was once again very pleasant.