Another Season of Feasting

The Feast of Prosperity has once again come and gone, and I just wanted to make a short post about how much I enjoyed it (again). I feel like the devs have really managed to hit the spot for me with these seasonal events as I pretty much love them all (except Nar Shadda Nightlife - but even that is "okay" nowadays in my opinion).

A couple of years ago I thought I'd be done with this event after getting all the achievements, but the many decorations have made it worth coming back every year to pick up a few more. The gameplay is fun, and that the event is also extremely good for Conquest points is just the cherry on top.

I simply never tire of the friendly world boss groups, and the game rarely feels more like an MMO and more alive than when you've got a full raid group thundering through the ruins of Coronet Zoo to absolutely steamroll everything in your way and collect exactly three Nexu tongues from mobs that fortunately seem to have way more tongues than you'd expect.

While waiting for those groups to fill, the food serving and cooking takes up just enough time to keep busy, ensuring that you never get bored. (I also like that all the ingredients we are sent to gather actually end up in the kitchen when we do the cooking, from ice crystals to scyk bellies.) It's all just very wholesome and well-balanced.

I'm already looking forward to next year.

 Though bringing this many pets along is probably not hygienic. Oh well.

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?

(This Year) I Love the Night Life

When Nar Shaddaa Nightlife was mentioned in May's dev stream, I was grousing that they didn't address the one thing I cared about in relation to that event - whether they were finally making the casino chips a legacy-wide currency. And to be honest... I still don't know why they weren't shouting this from the rooftops, but this past week, one day before the event began, they announced that the chips were becoming legacy-bound after all - halfway down the page in a pretty long article.

As it turns out, this change wasn't without hiccups: Immediately after launch, it turned out that acquisition of any new chips was apparently causing all your old chips to be deleted, which led to an emergency server shutdown and quick fix, but once that had been handled, I was excited to log in and cycle through all my characters to get a tally of how many chips I had. It took a while, mostly because once I got to logging through them all, I also felt the need to check their mail, claim the latest set of freebies they'd received etc. but in the end I was left with what I felt was a pretty decent amount.

Fortunately the days when too many free chips would just make me feel anxious are long gone (the max bet machines are a thing now after all), and I've been happy to just do a few spins per day for the Conquest points. I'm pleased that now that the chips are legacy-bound, this is much easier than it used to be, when I'd have to log back and forth between different characters all the time just to find who still had several different kinds of chips left.

There aren't any particular prizes I'm chasing this time around, but that doesn't mean I'm not happy to collect some new mounts and pets on different characters. 

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.

Lair Bosses Ranked!

I was wondering how to write about the new lair boss added with patch 7.6 without being too repetitive, seeing how I already put down some thoughts on the fight (at least about its difficulty tuning) after killing it on the PTS. I finally settled on this idea, to write about all the lair bosses currently in the game and rank them, seeing how there aren't that many of them and I haven't talked about the others all that much in the past either.

1. Xenoanalyst II

My favourite lair boss is still the very first one they ever added to the game: Xenoanalyst II from the Gree event. The concept of a fight that is openly just a test of your strength rather than hostility towards you has always tickled me (I liked that about Colicoid War Game too), and it always cracks me up how the boss is openly jubilant at the end after you beat him because you've done so well.

The mechanics require everyone to do their part on veteran mode but are fairly straightforward and easy to understand, while story mode is easy to pug with pretty much any group. The random chance to get Jawas during the species comparison is a fun little Easter egg, and reward-wise, it's always worth getting a bit more of the Gree-specific event currency. People like farming the boss for his rare mount drop as well.

The fact that he's only available for a few weeks each year also makes it impossible to ever overdose on the guy, so there's that.

2. Propagator Core XR-53

Yes, I honestly think that the new lair boss is the best boss we've had of this type that isn't tied to a Conquest event. Story mode is tuned in such a way that you can kill it with a pug without needing to give long explanations of anything, yet it also isn't impossible to die if you mess up enough. Veteran mode is a challenge, with several interesting mechanics that can be dealt with in more than one way and most of which have a decent margin for error, meaning that consistent mistakes do make things considerably harder, but there are very few things that will turn your attempt into an instant wipe. The dps check is tight for a standard ops group setup but not insurmountable, and you can also play with the group setup to squeeze more dps out of your raid.

Other things that make it good are the fact that it's very easily accessible, with the entrance being located right inside your faction's main base on Ilum. I don't think this is something that really matters a lot for ops in general, but when you're getting a group together to kill only one boss, you don't want to spend too much time faffing around just to get there.

In the same vein I like that there's a little bit of trash for flavour, but it's extremely quick to get past and doesn't really slow you down.

Finally, I know not everyone's excited about a new tier of augments, but I like that there's a reason to actually visit this boss in specific. Chasing better gear isn't as much of a motivation in SWTOR as it is in other MMOs, but I do think us raiders do appreciate a bit of a carrot to lure us in and make it worthwhile to do new content every now and then. I do suspect that whenever these augments become obsolete, the boss's appeal will also be somewhat diminished.

3. The Eyeless

The second lair boss that's tied to a recurring event is another one of my favourites. His mechanics are very simple on both story and hard mode, but he always feels like a fun romp. Someone always feels the need to comment on his perfectly sculpted butt cheeks, and on hard mode, at least one of the melee always dies to the very obvious and very easy to avoid AoE smash, but it won't cause you to wipe.

Like with Xeno, limited availability and drops that always retain their usefulness are other points in this guy's favour. The reason I rank him slightly below Propagator is that his mechanics are a bit basic.

4. Hive of the Mountain Queen

While we're now getting to the bottom half of the list, 4th place overall still isn't all bad, as it's effectively second place for bosses that aren't tied to Conquest events. Hive of the Mountain Queen's strongest point is that it's a very flavourful operation, with moody environments, interesting trash, and a fight that uses the theme of "insect queen using her minions to fight you" to great effect.

The reasons I rank it slightly lower is that I think the veteran mode is a bit overtuned, and while the trash is very interesting the first time you do it, it does feel like a tad much for frequent repeat visits. Also, the Queen basically offers no interesting loot (which was even a problem when the fight first came out!) - there's technically a rare companion from what I hear, but it's apparently so rare that few people have ever even seen it.

5. Toborro's Courtyard

I wasn't a fan of Toborro's Courtyard when it first came out, and I still struggle to find a lot of nice things to say about it today. I guess story mode is easy enough to pug, and veteran mode feels like it has an appropriate difficulty level as well. The mechanic of having to blow up barrels during the fight, as well as having to flit in and out of the boss's range (because he's completely static but does that laser beam of death every so often) are mildly interesting.

The problem is that you have to repeat the same couple of moves in the exact same way for far too long, which turns the hard mode version of the fight into a tedious exercise in struggling not to lose focus out of sheer boredom. There also isn't any interesting loot to be had, and the fact that prepping the barrels gets you stuck in combat, making it impossible to do a proper ready check before the pull, is a bit of a nuisance (even if "jump if you're ready" is always good for a bit of nostalgia).

Finally, the location is also a bit annoying to get to. I like Makeb as a planet, but navigating all the different mesas is not easy, and getting to the courtyard requires riding through a pretty trash-filled area that is likely to force you to dismount and fight for a bit.

6. Colossal Monolith

I can imagine that some people might question my choice to put this fight at the very bottom of the list, making an argument that it should be above Golden Fury at the very least, if not higher up. I will give you that the Mololith has more interesting mechanics, but I still dislike him all the same. Both story and hard mode feel overtuned for what they're supposed to be (I've actually never killed this guy on 8-man VM to this day), and while you could argue that his mechanics may be interesting, several of them are what I refer to as "circles for circles' sake", meaning it makes no sense whatsoever in universe that you stop this guy from hurting you by having people jump into coloured floor tiles around his head on cue (I always disliked that about Underlurker as well). Like, what's even supposed to be happening there diagetically? Maybe I'm a sucker for caring about this stuff, but I actually find it more enjoyable when boss fight mechanics align with abilities that actually make sense in universe, and Golden Fury at least has that going for it.

Additionally, the Monolith is yet another boss that drops nothing of interest and is kind of a pain to get to. There's pretty much always someone who needs a summon because they haven't unlocked Ziost yet, and if you're unlucky, it will then turn out that someone else can't even accept the summon because they don't have their ship yet. Just being able to get to a boss that isn't even that much fun to fight shouldn't be this much of a hassle.

Have you had a chance to defeat the XR-Propagator Core on Ilum yet? If so, what did you think of the fight? And do you agree or disagree with my rankings?

One Season Ends, Another Begins

I'm happy to say that I finished all my goals for Galactic Season 7 this past week. Everything just came together all at once: First I hit level 100 on Star Forge and Leviathan, then over the next couple of days on Tulak Hord, Satele Shan and Shae Vizla. Finally, on Saturday I ticked off the two meta achievements on Darth Malgus. I got the last few world boss kills I needed a few weeks ago, so it was just a matter of completing a few more seasons objectives and grinding out some more bounties.

I know I sometimes talk about how my ambitious goals for seasons can take on a somewhat chore-like quality, but damn, did it feel satisfying to be done with everything. I also love knowing that I can now expect to have a roughly three-month break from seasons - there will be a PvP season during that time, but that's not quite the same thing - and I look forward to checking out the new content coming with 7.6, progressing some characters' personal stories here and there, and just generally chilling and throwing snowballs during Life Day. As mentioned last year, during December more than during any other time of the year, I really appreciate this in-game holiday simply giving me a chance to relax, without putting any particular demands on my time.

As for GS7, I already gave my overall impressions of it last month. Setting stricter limits for myself on the other servers ultimately worked out well, as I definitely had fewer "trying to squeeze in just a couple more objectives before going to bed" moments of stress than on some previous occasions, and I still completed all my goals with plenty of time to spare. If anything, I should probably try easing up on my activity on the other servers even more next season, just to see how little time investment I can get away with (while still playing in a way I enjoy instead of simply maximising for seasons points per minute).

In general, nothing too exciting happened on the other servers this season; I would sum up my experiences playing on them over the last few months as follows:

While playing on Leviathan, I probably have the most strictly solo experience of any server, simply because my ability to communicate in French is so limited, but boy do I adore all my alts on that server for some reason. I've actually given my knight over there more different outfits to wear than most of my alts on Darth Malgus. I guess it's just been too long since I allowed myself to simply fall in love with another Twi'lek (I keep telling myself I need to try playing a greater variety of species)!

On Tulak Hord, I'm still in the guild with the dedicated website that nobody uses. I'm not sure how active the guild itself still is either, as I got guild mails from officers at various points that seemed to indicate that they hadn't been around as much. The planetary invasion still happened every week, and the guild Conquest bar did get filled up, but some weeks I was up there in the top five contributors just for making my 100k on my trooper.

On Satele Shan, I'm getting so close to finally finishing my Shadow Zilek's class story - it's so close I can taste it! I wrote about how he was my first ever male character in this post - it's hard to believe that I created him more than twelve years ago now and he still hasn't defeated the First Son. However, he's about halfway through Corellia now and I'm considering just pushing through even after being done with seasons, just to finally complete that particular milestone.

Star Forge and playing with New Outriders and occasionally helping out Swtorista's Team Disco has turned into a warm comfort blanket for me. I love my guild of twelve years on Darth Malgus, but being an officer is work sometimes, and many of my guildies are - how do I put this nicely - a bit cynical about the game at this point. So when I get to just hang out with friends on Star Forge, it's nice to not have to do any talking or organising for a change, to just tag along and do as I'm told, and simply giggle at people's jokes in a more light-hearted atmosphere.

On Shae Vizla, I'm up to two class stories completed now (my consular got there the other week) and with me hitting legacy level 44 yesterday, I came to realise that despite the server's young age, this may well end up being the one on which I end up hitting legacy level 50 next, a feat I've otherwise only achieved on Darth Malgus and Star Forge so far. We'll see whether I get there during the next season.

Once More With Feasting

I've been having a blast with the Feast of Prosperity for the past few weeks. Looking back at my blog archives, I really enjoyed it when it was first introduced in 2020 (Has it really only been four years?!), had a good time again in 2021 (when I also used the event to get my pacifist character to the then-level cap of 75) and was pleased to finish off the last achievement associated with the Feast in 2022.

Last year I only gave it a brief mention in the context of getting my pacifist to 80 and how that hadn't actually been all that satisfying, and I think that if you'd asked me then how active I was going to be during the event in 2024, I wouldn't have given myself very high odds. After all, I'd achieved everything that there really was to achieve back in 2022, right?

However, then seasons greatly increased my interest in strongholds and the devs added a bunch of new rewards to the Feast vendor - many of which were decorations - so off I went. Housing enthusiasts have to be such great customers for Broadsword, not just because they buy deco packs from the Cartel Market, but also because decoration rewards are the motivation that keeps on giving. With things like pets, mounts or armour sets, it's mostly a one-and-done deal, but when it comes to things like chairs, potted plants and rugs, you can never have too many, right?

One item in particular that caught my eye was the Regal Wall Garden, which is a gorgeous small planter that fits onto a small wall hook. Perfect for those tricksy walls in the Copero stronghold, and it fits the aesthetic there quite well too! However, it's 1,125 tokens a pop, so I had a lot of work to do.

Actually, that's the wrong way to put it. I had fun doing the Feast dailies and weeklies, and being able to buy more and more decos after each round just made everything even better.

I did all the weeklies on three to four alts per week, and even dabbled in the event a bit on other servers. Even on the notoriously small Leviathan server I managed to get into a world boss group for Trapjaw - it wasn't big, but it was big enough to kill him. (My Operative was also only level 25 - I didn't even realise you could pick up the dailies at such a low level, and Trapjaw's AoE absolutely wrecked me... after dying once, I had to stay far away and just shoot at him ineffectively from max range.) It was a great way to earn Conquest points too, as well as to get credit for this week's "do x missions as a trooper or agent" seasons objective.

I just found it striking how incredibly well the single-player and group content flow together during this event. I'd arrive on Nar Shaddaa and immediately try to get into a world boss group, but if I just missed the last one, the amount of time it took me to do the solo missions would be just about long enough for the next group to start forming, so it was always quick and easy to get everything ticked off for the day. The world bosses themselves are extremely casual-friendly and simple, and now with shared tagging you can get in on the action even if you're absolutely allergic to actually joining a group even for five minutes.

It's just been a joy all around, and all the (new) decos should provide motivation for me to keep taking part for years to come.

First Impressions of GS7

I haven't had as much of a chance to immediately dive into Galactic Season 7 as I maybe would've liked, but I did check in on all servers this week and at least made a start. I said I wasn't going to keep a detailed diary of my seasonal progress this time, but that doesn't mean that I have nothing at all to say about my experiences.

The first thing I noticed was that there doesn't seem to be a seasonal story this time. You still get a mission item at level one, but all that unlocks is a quick intro on Hutta where you briefly talk to someone from the Bounty Brokers Association about hunting down some Force-sensitive types - to provide an in-character explanation for killing the Dark vs. Light bosses I guess - and that's it.

I can't say I was particularly surprised or dismayed by that. While I loved GS5's story, last season was a bit of a damp squib in comparison, and I can only guess that the devs decided somewhere along the way that this "seasonal story" thing wasn't working out the way they'd hoped, so they just ditched it. And I'm fine with that. Yes, GS5 showed that there was potential to do more with the idea, but if it's not working, I'm happy for them to focus on other things, considering that seasons were never meant to be about story anyway. I just hope they put those cut scene and dialogue tree building resources to good use somewhere else.

In my last post I wondered which way GS7 was going to pivot after seemingly everybody hated last season's insane vendor trash grind. The answer to that is: they just got rid of the whole currency concept and the "big" seasonal achievement this time just requires you to do a lot of bounty contracts and kill a bunch of DvL bosses. That seems... reasonable to me. It's still going to take effort, but it's much more predictable and easier to space out based on your own preferences.

If you wanted to and have done a lot of bounty hunting in the past to generate unlocks, you could even complete the meta achievement in the first week! One of my guildies got all 40 of the required DvL boss kills within the space of a few days just by idling on Dromund Kaas and tapping the DvL boss for the week whenever a group came by. Shared tagging for the win! I do imagine this achievement is going to be a lot harder to get on the less popular servers though. (Not that I was planning to do that, but I mean for the people who have their mains there.)

With the currency (real or fake) gone and one of the easy weekly objectives having been focused on currency acquisition in the past, the devs decided to have two season-specific weeklies this time: one to kill two DvL bosses and one to do a bounty contract. I think that's nice as it adds more flavour to the season, and should satisfy both those looking for something easy to do solo every week (the bounty contract) and those who like the group objectives to have something to do with their guilds.

My experience with the DvL bosses themselves has been a bit of a... mixed bag. As mentioned before, I defeated them all back in the day, so I roughly knew what to expect, but I knew the devs were going to have to fix the awkward spawning/despawning mechanics and I figured maybe they were going to apply some nerfs in the process as well. The spawning issues have indeed been fixed, as just two bosses are up each week in a fixed spot, and they respawn after something like five minutes of being killed, so there's no fear of missing out if you're in the process of assembling a group and someone else gets there first.

However, in terms of difficulty, they don't feel nerfed at all. This first week, the two active spawn points were on Dromund Kaas and Tatooine - both low-level planets, which always used to make the fights easier - though even here you could already notice a marked difference between the damage output on DK vs. Tat. My guild group had no real problems of course, though even that wasn't without deaths, as it's easy to get caught out by a circle-drop-and-stun combo even as a seasoned raider.

On Star Forge I joined an Imperial pug group as healer, and it felt like insane level whack-a-mole trying to keep everybody alive, though we did successfully kill the boss on Dromund Kaas. I immediately moved on to Tatooine but some people said they wanted to kill the same boss again to progress towards the meta achievement. It then turned out that I must've either been the only healer or maybe just one of two, as it looked like the group wiped when they pulled the same boss again without me (I couldn't tell with 100% certainty, but everybody died and people in ops group chat sounded disappointed). I then summoned them to Tatooine, where we succeeded again, though with more deaths than last time.

On the other servers I was less successful. On Satele Shan I joined a pug but people kept dropping out as fast as new ones joined, and someone insisted that we shouldn't even try the boss until we had at least 16 players, so after about half an hour of that I dropped out too to go to bed. At other times, I just went to the jungle to see whether I was lucky enough to find someone else already fighting the boss, but was unlucky enough to not encounter any groups. I just got myself killed more than once when what looked like random levellers decided to try and solo the boss, and apparently the range at which you get pulled into combat is really big, meaning that if a single person decides to pull and you're an innocent bystander some yards away, you'll pretty much immediately find yourself dotted and stunned to death.

I suspect I could've gotten kills on more servers if I'd just had the time and dedication to simply loiter near a boss or on the fleet for longer, but I didn't want to do that this time. I'm trying to stick to my plan of aiming for fewer objectives per week on the secondary servers, and there were a lot of other objectives this first week that required a lot less time and effort. I still ended up achieving more than four weeklies on most servers, but it definitely felt much more relaxed to have a goal of four and then maybe go "oh, I can knock out one more out today" rather than trying to work towards six or seven from the start of the week and then feeling stressed out as the weekly reset draws close.

One thing I'd forgotten about and which I saw people complain about is that the dark and light tokens dropped by the bosses are per character, and that many of the rewards you can buy with them have alignment requirements. I'd honestly forgotten about all of that. I found that a lot of my characters still had loads of tokens from back in the day anyway, because there wasn't anything of interest to me left on the vendors. Plus the tokens were actually really easy to get back then, as you'd get one every time your character gained a Galactic Command (and later Renown) level while the side of the Force that matched your alignment was in the lead in the galaxy-wide Dark vs. Light war, which was easy enough to achieve. I agree that like the Nightlife chips, this is another currency that really should be legacy-wide, but considering what the devs said about the former, I wouldn't hold my breath for these tokens getting fixed before the end of the season either.

Nar Shaddaa Nightlife Again

Nar Shaddaa Nightlife has always been my least favourite of the seasonal in-game events, because I think playing the slots is honestly kind of boring, and it has always freaked me out a bit how nonchalantly people will brag about just how many millions of credits they've already wasted on the machines. I know it's only virtual money, but I've definitely seen it encourage some players' compulsions in a bad way (if you catch my drift).

That's not to say that it hasn't evolved to be somewhat more involved over time. Personally, I hit a bit of a low point with the event in 2020, when the game started heaping free chips on me faster than I could use them up, and it felt like I was being funnelled into hours of dull clicking just to claim some freebies. Fortunately that problem was eventually addressed in 2022, with the addition of the "max bet" machines and vendors that would allow you to convert a large number of chips into fewer special chips with better odds to get over the finish line more quickly.

I was therefore rather curious when developer Joe Stragmalia took to the forums a few weeks ago to announce further changes for this year. Players quickly latched on to what they perceived as nerfs and got grumpy, but to me, "reducing the amount of time it takes to play and win prizes with the slot machines" was only ever going to be a win. Remember, people, simply getting your chip back counts as a "win" but actually gains you nothing and just means that you wasted precious seconds of your life listening to a boop sound! Though on further consideration, didn't the max bet machines already address this problem to some degree?

I found that reading about the changes in bullet point form didn't really convey their impact very well, but after a bit of playing the slots myself it became clear very quickly that there's a new intended "strategy" to it all, which is to play the Kingpin machines until you get the (new?) Good Karma buff which lasts ten minutes, then play the Smuggler's Luck machines until you get the Feeling Lucky buff (lasts two minutes), and then go play the Emperor's Grace machine with both buffs - which will guarantee that you don't lose - and rake in prizes until the buffs either time out or you hit a jackpot, which also removes the buff. (This is somewhat contrary to what was said on the forums by the way, where the post claims that any win will remove the buffs, which is currently not the case.)

Now, I think this is an interesting concept, but the thing that bugs me about it is that it requires you to have sufficient numbers of all three chips to effectively follow the recommended strategy, and naturally, I found that a lot of my characters had huge numbers of just one or two of the chips but none of the third type. You can compensate to some degree by buying what you're missing from the vendors, but I for one don't actually want to spend money on these gambling adventures!

Joe kind of buried the lede in a follow-up post in my opinion, where he stated that they are looking into finally making the gambling chips legacy-wide as well but it's kind of complicated and definitely not happening this year. If they do manage to pull it off for next year, I'll happily come back with a vengeance and with piles of what's likely to be hundreds of chips of all three types, which just happen to be spread out across different characters in a very inconvenient way right now.

For the time being I'll just play a little, for a reason that hasn't received much attention on the forums... they actually added Conquest objectives for the event! Specifically a pretty meaty daily one to win five times (getting your chip back on Smuggler's Luck counts) and a big weekly one that requires you to play (not win) the Emperor's Grace machine twenty times. I've been trying to complete the former objective most days because it's such easy points, similar to increasing your influence level with a companion. The latter I've also done twice, though that one's a bit tougher to do because having twenty Emperor's Grace chips to hand does require some work or luck, and if you can't get the other buffs before playing them, you might end up just losing and feeling bad...

I'm actually less fussed about the prizes themselves though and will simply take whatever I can get. Remember the High Roller Shades which I so coveted and failed to get in 2021, and finally got just before the event was about to end in 2022? This year I got two more of them during the first week of the event... naturally. The new helmet doesn't excite me quite as much - I'd probably try to use it in an outfit if I did win it, but I won't cry about it if I don't.

The Abundance Festival in Review

I wrote about the Festival of Spring Abundance at the start of the month when it first came out, but now that it's about to wrap up I wanted to write another post about it to reflect on how it's gone.

For me personally at least, this new event has been a massive success. I took part in some of the activities pretty much every day, completed the little event storyline on nine different characters, and ground out enough currency to buy most of the rewards I really wanted on Darth Malgus, which included the Nightshift Tech armour set for one of my agents as well as at least one of each decoration. I can definitely see myself coming back for more of the potted plants though, as they tend to be one of my favourite types of stronghold decoration. The only slight regret I share with Intisar is that the armour set is character- instead of legacy-bound.

I also got all the achievements except the one that is still bugged (so nobody could get it) and the one for the rare fish that is completely RNG-dependent. All in all, I enjoyed this event enough that I can see it competing with Life Day for the position of being my favourite seasonal event in SWTOR - except they're both such chill events, they'd probably be happy to just share first place.

The daily missions were easily my favourite part, because they were both fast and easy while still awarding a lot of Conquest points. Okay, so the dancing one was pretty much a matter of getting paid for taking an AFK break... but I'm not someone who minds a freebie every now and then.

The pie baking and eating was probably the most fascinating to me, though I was a little disappointed that there wasn't as much complexity to it as I originally assumed. When I first learned that there were achievements for eating a perfect and a bad pie for example, my mind instantly went spinning with all kinds of theories about how to make my pie qualify as perfect ("bad" seemed obvious since you can select the wrong ingredients while putting your pastry together), but I then found out that your skill in preparing the pie actually has zero impact on its perceived quality when someone else eats it by clicking on it on the table; it just seems to be completely random.

What still remained fascinating to me though was that people seemed to bring real life food preferences into the baking process. What I mean is that most days, when it came to choosing which pie to bake, I took a look at the tables to see which of the four types had the least representation or was maybe even missing entirely, so I could fill the gap for anyone else who was still on the weekly pie-eating mission. And the vast majority of the time, it was either the Deepwater Dac Pie (tentacles, gross!) or the Pitted Ka-Olive Pie, but mostly the former. Bestine Threeberry Pie and Sweet Spore Tarts were almost always represented, I can only guess because they looked and sounded like something one might actually want to eat in real life. I just thought that was kind of amusing.

The weeklies were a bit of a mixed bag for me. The creature rescue was extremely adorable the first time I did it, but once I realised that it was the exact same set of creatures every week, it became my least favourite just because it required so much running around. I'm pretty sure the sheer amount of planetary travel involved also cancelled out most of the reward money.

The cultivation daily was similarly time-consuming, and once again I was slightly disappointed to see us planting the exact same crops every week, especially considering that the prerequisite seed procurement mission sent us to a different planet each week. You'd think they'd actually make us pick up different seeds while doing that. I did enjoy making Mr Commando do the mission with me though to get the achievements tied to completing it as a group.

The egg hunt I generally enjoyed, though the experience could vary a lot depending on which server I was on as well as the time of day (I did some of the event stuff on Star Forge and Shae Vizla as well). Yavin IV was very easy for example, since the area is large and offers good visibility, with the roaming Massassi not really posing much of an obstacle. In general, the eggs were not as hard to spot as the livestream in which the event was first announced had led me to expect, but the fact that players were competing for spawns could be a real pain in the neck. The Rishii Village location was the worst in my opinion since it was both small and featured a lot of verticality, which made it hard to do a good "circuit" of the area and competition could be extremely fierce. While trying to poke my nose into every nook and cranny, I also managed to get stuck between buildings more than once, to the point where using /stuck actually killed me instead of moving me. Death by egg hunt, what a way to go.

The one-time story quest was much shorter than I expected. I thought that it was going to be a mirror to the Feast of Prosperity, giving us a new story step for every week of the event, for a total of four missions, but in reality it turned out to only have two parts, both of which were quite short. I can't say I really minded though, as this meant that it actually felt very doable as something to complete on alts. For comparison, I haven't actually done the Feast of Prosperity storyline on many characters due to its length. My only gripe with the Abundance storyline was that even though the cut scenes were KOTOR style and all the talking was alien gibberish (so there was no voice acting cost tied to giving additional choices), there was no dialogue option to account for your character not actually knowing Juna Helos from the Copero stronghold story. It felt kind of wrong that all my alts were just supposed to know her automatically.

Still, all of these were ultimately very minor complaints, and overall I've had a grand old time. I already look forward to revisiting this event next year to earn some more plant decos and work on those last two remaining achievements.

Spring Abundance

This week's patch 7.5 brought with it three major new features, all of which I'll write about at some point. However, the one of which it was the easiest to get a general impression was undoubtedly the new seasonal spring event, called Spring Abundance Festival.

Unfortunately it's been a bit hard to locate during its first week, as the mission terminal they put on the fleet is in the exact same spot as the Gree event terminal, which was also active this past week, causing the two quest starters to overlap almost completely. With a bit of careful hovering you could find the right spot to start the introductory mission though.

From the looks of it, there's going to be a story mission that unlocks a new step each week like there is during the Feast of Prosperity, and completion of the first part is also required to unlock the various repeatable event missions. It's a bit longer than most event-type intros, but still not too bad to do on alts. One thing I noticed though was that other players were constantly photo-bombing my KOTOR-style cut scene; I wonder if the devs forgot to tick some box to hide other players from these?

Based on the general theme of the event, I expected a degree of similarity to the Feast of Prosperity, and I think it's fair to say that there is, though I'd argue that Spring Abundance manages to be even more chill. After all, the Feast still has you going out hunting world bosses and there's a bit of pressure to serve those meals in time. At Spring Abundance, aside from having to kill about a dozen mobs for the introductory mission, there are no such pressures. Just chill, 100% of the time, catching fish, baking pies and dancing at the May holo pole.

I've seen some people snark about the very idea of having these activities in SWTOR, but to be honest I don't get why. I thought it was a bit odd that we were sweeping floors for the Gormak as part of the main storyline, but as a side activity like this? Why the hell not? Nobody can be hero of the galaxy 24/7, and who says even a Sith can't enjoy a bit of gardening in their downtime?

The daily activities are cute, fast and fun, and everything gives Conquest points too, which is a nice bonus. One thing that's interesting to me is that the mission structure is a bit different from the usual in that there isn't a weekly that requires you to do x number of dailies, but instead there are several weeklies that are tasks of their own that can only be done once a week, plus the dailies which you can just repeat every day for fun (and profit).

Particularly clever to me is the way they used this for the pie baking and eating, as there is a daily to bake pie, but the mission to sample different pies only requires you to do so once a week, so even if it was quiet and not all pies were available to eat when you first showed up, you can try again the next day. Right now the event is pretty much the opposite of quiet though, mind you - people seem to happily and enthusiastically be taking part at all times of day from what I've seen. There are some pretty nice rewards to be earned as well (though I haven't decided yet what I'll go for myself), so this event just strikes me as a winner all around.

7.5 Dev Stream Highlights

Yesterday it was time for another SWTOR dev stream, hurrah! As usual, this is not the place to find all the details about everything that was said, but rather a summary of what I thought were the most important points, with my own opinions sprinkled on top. If you're looking for something more comprehensive and less editorial, let me point you towards one of the sites below instead:

• Swtorista
• Today in TOR
• Vulkk

Now, on to my own thoughts...

7.5 Story "Desperate Defiance" on Hutta

We got a little more detail about the next story update coming with 7.5, without really getting into spoilers. As previously established, it will take place on Hutta where we'll be interacting with a number of new characters. My favourite of these was a Hutt called Yusinduu with a cool new look.

Again, without really going into spoilers, they said that Sa'har will follow up on what was said at the end of the 7.4 story, and apparently how we respond to her will have an impact on her development going forward - curious to see what that means.

My only slight disappointment was hearing that the new area on Hutta won't contain a new daily area or anything. It's not so much that I'm particularly dying to have a daily area in every patch, but it kind of sounds like there's literally nothing there other than whatever you do for the main storyline, which sounds kind of wasteful to me if true. We'll see I guess.

Graphical Updates for Hutta

They'll use the addition of the new area on Hutta as an opportunity to also give the planet as a whole a graphical update, which sounded good to me. I mentioned it in the past when they made similar changes on a smaller scale on Tython and Korriban.

The only thing that threw me for a bit of a loop was how utterly different the skybox looked in the footage with the updated graphics. Hutta's sky is currently dominated by yellow clouds that cause the whole planet to be basked in a yellow-ish hue, while the updated version seems to feature a uniform grey cloud cover that looked like it strongly changes the vibe. I don't know how I feel about that yet. If you like the yellow, go and take some screenshots while it lasts I guess!

Below you can see before and after shots of the sky over Jiguuna that I took in the live game and on the PTS. I'll admit the change didn't feel as drastic in game as it looks in the screenshots and the new version is definitely much crisper and more detailed.

I'm curious whether this update will also affect the Karagga's Palace operation, since it is also set on Hutta so might be sharing some assets (but I can't be bothered to check that out on the PTS).

Dantooine Spring Event 

We currently have Nar Shaddaa Night Life in summer (which will start on the 9th of July this year by the way), the Feast of Prosperity in autumn and Life Day in winter, so there was a gap in the calendar that the SWTOR team wanted to fill with this new event. It's going to be full of chill activities like growing crops, dancing around the Star Wars equivalent of a May pole, hunting for eggs (random Easter vibes?), looking after animals, baking and eating pies, and finally... fishing. Yes, after more than twelve years, SWTOR finally gets its own version of fishing!

I don't know, I can't claim to think that this was something that was desperately needed, but I've enjoyed it in other MMOs that have it as an activity, even when it worked in very different ways. The appropriately Star Wars twist on it is that you basically make a little probe droid do the work for you, the notion of which amuses me greatly.

Yes, I actually logged into the PTS to check this out.

I think this sounds like a lot of wholesome fun and I look forward to experiencing it in full once the event goes live.

Our Own Little Basilisk Companion

Another thing that will happen in 7.5 is that Lane Vizla finally manages to fix that little basilisk from Ruhnuk and it will become our companion - a proper one that fights and everything, not just a non-combat pet. It'll be called B3-S1 or "Bessie" for short. However, there'll be a twist, as we'll have to train the little bugger to truly make it ours, which will involve something called "ventures" and will require you to take Bessie out to do dailies over the course of a longer period of time. I have to admit my initial reaction to this were somewhat mixed feelings.

On the one hand: new companion that we actually have to work for and build a relationship with! Yes! I'm 100% on board with that concept, and we haven't really seen anything like this since the release of HK-51.

However, from the way it was described, I'm not sure why we need a new "feature" with a new UI just for this instead of it simply being a quest chain or tied to an achievement, because it doesn't sound that dramatically different from anything already in the game. In fact, it sounds a lot like yet another way of making us go back to old daily areas, which makes me somewhat less happy. Also, I'm waiting for clarification on whether there's going to be an option to just unlock Bessie for your alts via the legacy system after you've jumped through all the required hoops the first time.

PvP Season 6

This was a bit of a weird one. First off, they announced that they'll be changing the launch timing of PvP seasons and have them more regularly start alongside the big patches. I'm in favour of that in so far as it should avoid some of the weird overlap issues that have been occurring with Galactic Seasons sometimes, assuming that those will continue to go live on the x.1 patches between the major ones.

However, then the devs also said that they wanted to make PvP seasons longer to give people more time to complete them, which sounded fine enough to me, but then they also want to add extra levels and make each level require more points... someone on the forums immediately did the maths and it sounds like you will still need to play pretty much just as many matches each week as before, only for more weeks, which doesn't really sound like an improvement.

Also, they talked about adding warzone medpacks and adrenals as rewards for the extra levels, which made every PvPer go "what?" - you already get more of these through normal gameplay than you could possibly use (because of their internal cooldown, you literally earn them faster than you can click them), and every character that does PvP already has hundreds if not thousands of these. That just seemed... odd. I hope they'll review that particular plan based on people's feedback.

What Now?

There isn't an official launch date for 7.5 yet, but we're probably looking at a late May/early June release.

The Public Test Server is up and you can check out the graphics updates, the spring event and some of the "venture" stuff there if you like (no story content though).

The reward code they gave out during the stream this time was "MalgusWhen", which grants a Darth Malgus in-game poster decoration - if you don't already have it, because unfortunately this one's a repeat of a reward they handed out previously. If, like me, you already had it, you can still enter the code and it will say that you successfully claimed it, but you'll get nothing. It's valid until May 16th.

Speaking of things that are valid until May 16th - in order to celebrate Star Wars Day, there's also some other goodies available. Logging in between now and then will grant you another floating cube droid non-combat pet, there's double XP going on, a Cartel Market sale, and a 50% off Collections sale. Enjoy!

Enjoying Life Day

Today I'd like to wish all my readers a merry Christmas and happy holiday season - especially if it's perhaps not the happiest time for you personally, for example because your life doesn't conform to the traditional requirements of what a happy Christmas tableau should look like, such as if you have to work over the holidays or don't have a good relationship with your relatives.

I've been thinking about that recently, and for me at least, Christmas is probably the holiday that has "degraded" the most since I was a little kid. I'm honestly a bit envious of adults who still get genuinely excited about it. When I was a child, I couldn't wait to open the next door of my advent calendar every day in December, and Christmas Eve always felt pretty magical when we were finally allowed into the bedroom to see all the presents lined up. However, as an adult it just feels like I care less and less every year. Mr Commando and I mostly agreed to not bother with buying presents for each other as it just stresses us out, and on past occasions when I bought myself an advent calendar "for fun" I usually forgot to open the door most days since I'm just too busy with other things. It's a bit sad, honestly.

With that said, I've been surprised by just how much I've been enjoying Life Day in SWTOR. There isn't that much to it, but in a way that's what I love about it (and I have talked positively about that in the past). While real life is filled with all these expectations about cards, presents and family visits, Life Day is just wonderfully chill.

There's nothing quite like hanging out in front of the Senate Tower or on the Nar Shaddaa Promenade and pelting things with snowballs. If you feel like getting more involved, you can run around and try to tag all the different gift droid spawns, or look for a flash mob assembling around an overheated one, but if you're feeling lazy, just staying in the same area and throwing snowballs at random NPCs and passers-by works as well. It's a great way to pass the time while waiting in queues, especially if you don't expect the wait time to be too long and/or you don't feel like going out and doing something more involved in the meantime (such as dailies for example).

If only the real-life holiday could be equally as relaxing to me... anyway, my point is that I appreciate that it's there. I'll definitely try to make the most of it while it lasts.

Looking Back at SWTOR's Patch History

Every time the SWTOR devs announce a new content release, part of the community inevitably complains that it's too little and not enough to be worth p(l)aying for. Now, I don't want to spend too much time on that argument because it's the same thing every time, and how much is "enough" is ultimately always going to be subjective. People are entitled to have their own opinions about that.

However, I do find the question of just how fast or slow SWTOR's content release cycle is interesting because while it's obviously true that we get less content nowadays than in say, 2012, when the game was new and still trying to be the latest WoW killer with a giant dev team to support it, when you compare things to say... 2017, I'm already not so sure. Lately I would even say that things have felt... pretty good?

I suspect that I may be biased due to my real life circumstances changing over time. Back in 2012 I was only working part-time two days a week, and then I was unemployed for several months, so I had a lot of time to play. Nowadays, with a full-time job keeping me busy to some degree (even if it's a pretty cushy one), I suppose it takes less for an MMO to give me the feeling that I'm getting good value for my money.

But still... I wanted to know whether there was anything we could look at with any degree of objectivity. The game has faithfully been documenting both its major and minor patches since launch, so I thought it would be interesting to go through them and note down the release dates for certain "big ticket items" such as story updates and operations, to get an idea of how much love that specific part of the game has been getting over time. I'm only comparing SWTOR against itself here, as I think comparisons with other MMOs are always going to be too flawed in terms of accounting for things like different business models, production values, size etc.

Let's start with looking at what's inarguably The Old Republic's main draw: its well-presented personal story:

Timeline of main story updates

• April 2013 (2.0): Rise of the Hutt Cartel
• April 2014 (2.7): Assault on Tython, Korriban Incursion
• August 2014 (2.9): Depths of Manaan
• September 2014 (2.10): Legacy of the Rakata
• December 2014 (3.0): Shadow of Revan
• April 2015 (3.2): Rise of the Emperor
• October 2015 (4.0): Knights of the Fallen Empire chapters 1-9
• February 2016 (4.1): KotFE chapter 10 
• March 2016 (4.2): KotFE chapter 11
• April 2016 (4.3): KotFE chapter 12
• May 2016 (4.4): KotFE chapter 13
• June 2016 (4.5): KotFE chapter 14
• June 2016 (4.6): KotFE chapter 15
• August 2016 (4.7): KotFE chapter 16
• November 2016 (5.0): Knights of the Eternal Throne
• April 2017 (5.2): War for Iokath
• August 2017 (5.4): Crisis on Umbara
• November 2017 (5.6): A Traitor Among the Chiss
• May 2018 (5.9): The Nathema Conspiracy
• December 2018 (5.10): Jedi Under Siege
• October 2019 (6.0): Onslaught
• February 2020 (6.1): Task at Hand/Signal from Noise
  
• December 2020 (6.2): Echoes of Oblivion, Spirit of Vengeance
• April 2021 (6.3): Secrets of the Enclave
• February 2022 (7.0): Legacy of the Sith
• August 2022 (7.1): Digging Deeper
• December 2022 (7.2): Showdown on Ruhnuk
• June 2023 (7.3): Old Wounds

The first thing that stands out to me here is that even though the game launched in December 2011, we didn't actually get a continuation of our character's personal story until almost one and a half years later. This was interesting to me because I remember those first couple of years as a cornucopia of new content every other month - and it was, but in the other categories (which we'll get to later). On the story front, there was silence - presumably because they were initially planning to continue the class stories but had to pivot when it became apparent that this kind of development was not sustainable with the existing subscriber base.

I do vaguely seem to remember some people complaining about the lack of story continuation at the time, but it wasn't an issue for me personally as I enjoyed the other types of content they were adding as well, and more importantly, the eight unique class stories took me ages to get through anyway as someone who wasn't in a rush. I didn't complete the last of them (which was bounty hunter for me) until October 2013.

It's also funny to remember that when we did get new story in the form of the Forged Alliances arc, it wasn't actually apparent that this was the main storyline at first, as we didn't know at the time that it was a prelude to Shadow of Revan and not just another random side story taking place in flashpoints like Kaon Under Siege/Lost Island (this was before we had the purple markers to highlight main story missions).

Things continued to be somewhat slow until the release of Knights of the Fallen Empire in October 2015, which briefly ushered in a period of near-monthly story updates. I honestly find it pretty impressive to this day that they managed to pull that off, regardless of what you may have thought of the quality of those updates. Of course, this is was also the period when players complained about there being "nothing to do" more than I've seen at any other point in time - and not entirely without reason, as the hyper-focus on story definitely resulted in a dearth of content in other areas (again, more on this later).

All of this came to an end with the release of Knights of the Eternal Throne in November 2016. Interestingly, while I remember those months as a very dark time for the game, mainly due to Galactic Command, in terms of story updates the devs actually maintained a decent amount of momentum, releasing three updates in 2017. The main problem was that after a year of near-monthly chapters, this felt incredibly slow in comparison.

And then things slowed down even more, with only two updates in 2018 (even if Jedi Under Siege was pretty major) and then almost a whole year of wait until the release of Onslaught.

Then we had the pandemic, which we know interfered with their work and with recording voice lines for story updates, meaning we had to wait about another year until the devs were finally able to give us a big combo-patch in the form of 6.2's Echoes of Vengeance. Note that there were a few more, very short status update "chat missions" spread out over the Onslaught patch cycle which are considered part of the main storyline, but I couldn't even find those in the patch notes. I pretty much only know around what time they came out due to blog posts.

Then we had another year with only a single story update in April 2021, as Legacy of the Sith ended up being delayed. This was followed by three story updates in 2022, and we currently seem to be on track to finish 2023 with two story updates again.

So what does this show us, really? Honestly, the thing that surprised me the most here was just how slow things were from about 2018 to 2021. Yes, we can partially blame the pandemic for that I'm sure, but only partially. The thing is, I absolutely adored Jedi Under Siege and thought Onslaught was a great expansion as well, so I didn't even really notice how slow things were at the time...

The more recent pace of two to three main story updates a year actually seems pretty reasonable to me, assuming they also add other content during that time. Have they been doing that though? Let's have a look at how they've been doing with group content for example:

Timeline of small group content releases

• January 2012 (1.1): Kaon Under Siege
• April 2012 (1.2): Lost Island
• August 2013 (2.3): Czerka Corporate Labs, Czerka Core Meltdown
• February 2014 (2.6): Kuat Drive Yards
• April 2014 (2.7): Assault on Tython, Korriban Incursion
• August 2014 (2.9): Depths of Manaan
• September 2014 (2.10): Legacy of the Rakata
• December 2014 (3.0): Blood Hunt, Battle of Rishi
• October 2015 (4.0): Star Fortresses
• November 2016 (5.0): Crimson Fang, Done and Dusted, Firefrost, Fractured, Inferno
  
• January 2017 (5.1): Destroyer of Worlds, Divided We Fall, Landing Party, Trench Runner, Trial and Error
  
• August 2017 (5.4): Crisis on Umbara
• November 2017 (5.6): A Traitor Among the Chiss
• May 2018 (5.9): The Nathema Conspiracy
• October 2019 (6.0): Objective Meridian
• December 2020 (6.2): Spirit of Vengeance 
• April 2021 (6.3): Secrets of the Enclave
• February 2022 (7.0): Ruins of Nul
• June 2023 (7.3): Shrine of Silence

The thing that stood out to me here is that I can see now why the devs started to tie story updates to flashpoints: because it gave them an easy way to claim a two-for-one. Look, a new story update! Also, a new flashpoint!

With that said, I was kind of surprised that the periods where they added the most small group content at the most rapid pace were not when I would have expected them, with one high point being the run-up to and release of Shadow of Revan (since it crammed story updates into a total of six flashpoints) and the other one being (oddly to me), the launch of Knights of the Eternal Throne when they added all the uprisings. I guess the problem there was that these never really caught on as flashpoint replacements. As a commenter here once put it, they basically give you more boring trash and fewer interesting bosses.

Ever since then, we've had a pretty stable cadence of getting one new flashpoint a year. I wouldn't mind more, but at the same time I've got to admit with the way SWTOR keeps its old content relevant, I don't feel like we desperately need them to come out faster. If you queue for a random flashpoint right now, you've got a pretty big selection of valid destinations already.

What about large group content though? They do require you to subscribe for that one.

Timeline of large group content releases

• April 2012 (1.2): Explosive Conflict (4 bosses)
  
• September 2012 (1.4): Terror from Beyond (5 bosses)
  
• January 2013 (1.7): Xenoanalyst II (Gree event boss)
  
• April 2013 (2.0): Scum and Villainy (7 bosses), Toborro's Courtyard (single boss)
  
• October 2013 (2.4): Dread Fortress (5 bosses), Dread Palace (5 bosses)
  
• January 2014 (2.5.2? not actually listed): The Eyeless (Rakghoul Resurgence event boss)
  
• December 2014 (3.0): Ravagers (5 bosses), Temple of Sacrifice (5 bosses)
  
• April 2015 (3.2): Colossal Monolith (single boss)
  
• April 2017 (5.2): Tyth (Gods from the Machine first boss)
• July 2017 (5.3): Aivela and Esne (Gods from the Machine second boss)
• November 2017 (5.6): Nahut (Gods from the Machine third boss) 
• January 2018 (5.7): Scyva (Gods from the Machine penultimate boss)
  
• March 2018 (5.8): Izax (Gods from the Machine last boss)
• February 2019 (5.10.1): Geonosian Queen (single boss)
  
• October 2019 (6.0): Nature of Progress (6 bosses)
  
• August 2022 (7.1): R-4 Anomaly (4 bosses)
  

Here we can see where a lot of the dev's team resources went in those first few years when they weren't adding new story: making operations. Getting two to three new operations a year was certainly good times for a raider like me! Of course that all came to a halt when they decided to throw out all operations development in favour of monthly chapters. So far, these two content types seem most directly in opposition to each other when it comes to the tug-o-war for resources.

I'm glad that the devs decided to start working on them again, but this timeline shows that release of new ops bosses has been really slow. Back in 2016/2017, having to wait three years between Ravagers/Temple of Sacrifice and Gods from the Machine seemed like forever (I'm not counting the Colossal Monolith for now since it was just a single stand-alone boss), but nowadays, two to three years between operations releases seems to be the new normal.

I've got to say, that's pretty rough. While the scalability keeps old operations relevant to some degree like it does flashpoints, having to wait so long for a new one is not great, especially since access to operations is nominally still one of the game's incentives to be a subscriber. Assuming the devs will continue along the same track, I wouldn't expect a new operation until end of 2024 or early 2025.

Finally, the other major group activity in the game is PvP:

Timeline of major PvP additions

• April 2012 (1.2): Novare Coast 
• June 2012 (1.3): Ranked warzones (8v8)
  
• December 2012 (1.6): Ancient Hypergates
• October 2013 (2.4): Arenas, ranked arenas (4v4) replace ranked warzones
• April 2014 (2.7): Quesh Huttball
• April 2016 (4.3): Odessen Proving Grounds
• December 2017 (5.6.1): Yavin Ruins
  
• October 2018 (5.9.3): Vandin Huttball
• December 2022 (7.2): Removal of ranked, first PvP season track

I was kind of surprised just how little I could note down here. The only things I could have feasibly added and that I left out as not important enough were a couple of new arena maps.

Now, PvP in an MMO is a fairly self-sustaining mode of play, meaning the main appeal lies in coming up against new people all the time, not necessarily in getting new maps. In addition, seasons of some kind (first for ranked warzones, then ranked arenas, now the new track model emulating Galactic Seasons) have been coming and going throughout the years, so I don't quite know how to rank this.

Still, I didn't realise it had been five years since Vandin Huttball was added to the game (the last time we got a new warzone map). I feel we're kind of overdue for another one of these now.

Instanced group activities aren't all there is to an MMO though. What sets it apart from many a lobby game is the open world, so I think the frequency of the addition of new planets/zones is another relevant statistic to look at. These also often include other kinds of non-story content such as dailies, datacrons, achievements etc.

Timeline of post-release open world planets/zones added

• April 2012 (1.2): Black Hole
• September 2012 (1.5): Section X 
• April 2013 (2.0): Makeb
• August 2013 (2.3): CZ-198
• October 2013 (2.4): Oricon
• August 2014 (2.9): Manaan (stronghold entry)
  
• December 2014 (3.0): Rishi, Yavin 4
• April 2015 (3.2): Ziost
• October 2015 (4.0): Zakuul
• June 2016 (4.5): Darvannis
• April 2017 (5.2): Iokath
• December 2018 (5.10): Ossus
• June 2019 (5.10.3): Dantooine
• October 2019 (6.0): Onderon, Mek-sha
• August 2022 (7.1): Manaan Invasion Zone
  
• December 2022 (7.2): Ruhnuk
• June 2023 (7.3): Interpreter's Retreat

This is another area where things seem to go pretty much in the opposite direction from story content, with lots of additions during the first three years and then nothing for two years around the "Knights of" expansions. I only added Zakuul and Darvannis as technicalities, as in practice they are pretty empty and hardly worth mentioning.

I also didn't realise that there was an almost three-year gap after the release of Onslaught where we got no new areas to play in at all. Again, I liked Onslaught so much that I didn't really notice. Unlike with the voice acting, I also can't quite see how the pandemic would have interfered with the creation of new maps... either way, kind of shocking now in hindsight.

On the plus side, this is an area where the team has clearly upped their game again since last year.

Finally, there is one more category that I'd like to look at, and that's one I'm going to call "features and events". This is going to cover items that don't fit into any of the previously mentioned categories but changed the game in what I consider a major way and permanently added one or more new activities for us to do.

Features and events added to SWTOR over time

• April 2012 (1.2): Legacy system, guild banks
• June 2012 (1.3): Group finder
• November 2012 (1.5): Free to play
• December 2012 (1.6): Heroic space combat
• January 2013 (1.7): Relics of the Gree, reputations
• April 2013 (2.0): Achievement system, macrobinoculars, seeker droids
• August 2013 (2.3): Bounty Contract Week
• December 2013 (2.5): Galactic Starfighter, Life Day
• January 2014 (2.5.2? not actually listed) - Rakghoul Resurgence
  
• June 2014 (2.8): Nar Shaddaa Nightlife
• August 2014 (2.9): Galactic Strongholds, Conquest
• April 2015 (3.2): Outfit designer
• July 2015 (3.3): Togruta playable species
• October 2015 (4.0): Level sync, Odessen Alliance
• April 2016 (4.3): PvE/PvP instances on the same server
• November 2016 (5.0): Dark vs. light system, Galactic Command, chapter difficulties
• December 2018 (5.10): Guild perks and levels
• June 2019 (5.10.3): Pirate Incursion
• October 2019 (6.0): Nautolan playable species, Galactic Command removed
  
• June 2020 (6.1.2): All Worlds Ultimate Swoop Rally 
• October 2020 (6.1.4): Feast of Prosperity
• April 2021 (6.3): Galactic Seasons
• February 2022 (7.0): Dark vs. light system removed, combat styles, loadouts

Now this is probably the fuzziest category, as the items on this list are of varying importance. I could see some people arguing that I shouldn't even have included the new species for example, since they are just a cosmetic update, while others might say that I should have included server merges since they dramatically changed the environment in which people got to play. I had to make some choices and this is what I decided to go with.

We can see that the devs have been quite busy in that area! It makes sense that this is something that has slowed down over time, because a lot of the early additions were honestly pretty "basic" features for a modern MMO, such as the group finder or achievement system. Likewise, there's only so many repeatable events you can cram into an annual calendar after a while. Not to mention that once you add all these things, you then need to continue to maintain them, or else you end up like World of Warcraft at its worst, proudly adding features in one expansion and then discarding them the next. Nobody really likes that.

Either way, I feel that in this area the devs continuing to add things at a slower pace is fine. Combat styles and loadouts were pretty major last year, and while I didn't have anything to add to the list for 2023 at this point, they did make a lot of under-the-hood changes to the game, such as the upgrade to 64-bit and the move to AWS, which are not exciting for players but were still important.

Anyway, after all this - what is my verdict for how good SWTOR is at adding different kinds of content right now?

• Story: Faster than at launch, slower than during KotFE/KotET, probably a good middle ground
• Small group content: slower than in the past, but still steady and good enough considering the evergreen nature of the content once it's added
• Large group content: very slow, hard to justify a sub if this is the only thing you care about
• PvP: not really been a focus since the first year, so not much change there, but probably overdue for a bit of love
• Planets/zones: Slower than at launch, but currently better than during KotFE/KotET and the more recent past
• Features/events: Slower than at launch but still steady and good enough considering how many systems there are to maintain already

And with that I've also found the answer to why, to me at least, the content output actually seems pretty decent right now: while everything is somewhat slower - which is to be expected to some degree after more than a decade and with a much smaller team - the only area that really feels like it's in a bad place is operations. And while I like operations and am in a guild that is quite focused on them, to me personally they're not the primary reason to play the game. As long as everything else keeps rolling along, I'm good.

Plus I've discovered while writing this that if you make some content that I really, really love (such as Jedi Under Siege and Onslaught) I'll be happy to spend time on that for longer than usual, to the point that I won't even necessarily notice any delays or content droughts. I didn't know that about myself. The more you know!