Drop In: Yavin 4

Now that I'm pretty much done with my seasons goals on the other servers, I'm not sure whether I'll continue the "drop in" series... but last week, I still visited Yavin 4 strongholds on three different servers, which is enough material for a post.

Like Alderaan, Yavin 4 is huge and personally I just bought it when it first came out without actually doing much with it. As a result, my first visit to a Yavin stronghold last week was primarily spent doing a lot of running/driving around to figure out where all the extensions even were. You won't believe how long it took me just to find my way out of the first building the first time...

The first Yavin 4 stronghold I visited was Leeha's Pursuit of Peace on Darth Malgus. I always thought of Yavin as a very "Sithy" planet, so I was intrigued by how someone might convert it to a more Jedi theme (which is what the name seemed to imply).

I didn't think the entrance area looked particularly peaceful. I see some massassi there, an underwalker, statues of Revan and Darth Marr, and I forget who the guy posing for the statue at the top was, but I know he's also a Sith.

However, the first indoor area seemed a bit more on brand, with potted plants, datacrons and various crystals - which can also be Sithy to some degree I guess, but they didn't give that vibe here. It felt kind of colourful and friendly, as far as that's possible in a dank ruin like this.

Exiting onto the bridge leading to the biggest chunk of the stronghold, I found myself confronted with this giant Jedi statue, more crystals and an avenue of trees, which also seemed appropriate enough. Apparently I forgot to take pictures of this same spot elsewhere, but I generally felt that this view you have immediately after exiting the first building was well suited to creating striking vistas.

In one of the side buildings I found what I can only call a "Rakata room", which I thought was an interesting idea. There are a lot of Rakata-themed decos but while they were an evil Empire, I never got the impression that their use of the Force fit as neatly into the light-dark dichotomy of the Jedi and Sith (the casters in the Legacy of the Rakata flashpoint all use Sage abilities for example).

Now this staging ground was amazingly well done in my opinion. I like the neat lining up of soldiers and vehicles, and while many of the named NPCs came up as holograms for me, you could still tell that there was thought put into their placement. I like how C2-N2 and T7 are right next to each other as if they're roleplaying as C-3PO and R2-D2 for example.

On Leviathan I went to "Tyriuna's Temple of Darkness" because I figured why not see how it looks when someone goes all in on the Sith theme this time? The first building certainly looked very different, with hanging vines, gloomy-looking statues and Imperial flags.

This deco caught my eye because it looked like an ancient graveyard and I had not seen that before:

The cave at the far end of the stronghold housed a Kell Dragon, which I guess is the appropriate environment for one of these beasts!

And once again, the bad guys kept prisoners. Poor Choza.

 

Finally, I visited Mercwiththemouth's Stronghold on Satele Shan, just because I thought the character name was funny. It was listed as being at 99% completion, so I immediately had an uneasy feeling when I zoned in and the entire entrance area was empty. Deco spam incoming?

 

 

 

I started to wonder what was going on when I found more and more empty rooms, yet at the same time everything was super laggy. Had the game bugged out on me in some way? How could I be lagging if all these rooms were indeed empty? I got my answer when I got to the top of the first building and found that the owner had spammed his stronghold with small animated turrets... all their movements were what was making the whole thing lag.

 

Ultimately I was still surprised by how much empty space I saw at 99% completion though. I wonder if some of it was Yavin 4 plants which I kind of overlooked as part of the scenery, because otherwise I don't know how else you could get to 99% completion with so much empty space, even if one did fill a bunch of rooms with lots of small decos.

Shintar's Galactic Seasons Diary, Week 9

Day 1

This was the closest I've actually come to missing a day, and to explain why, I need to share a bit of personal information. Basically what happened was that I came down with a horrendous toothache out of nowhere in the late afternoon, so that I spent all evening desperately trying to get some sort of emergency dental treatment, though I did not succeed at this. In the end I could only take a lot of painkillers and go to sleep, meaning that I was in no state to play at any point.

The next morning I felt a bit better and managed to get a dentist appointment, at which point I finally remembered to log into SWTOR to check on my Seasons objectives. My weeklies were GSF and flashpoints, but I re-rolled the latter and happily, it turned into warzones. My daily objectives were Oricon and Yavin dailies - both activities I didn't mind, and in fact Yavin had never come up for me as an objective before so I appreciated the novelty, but I was a bit disappointed by the complete lack of synergy. Looking at the time, I had about an hour left until I had to leave for the dentist, and I knew I wouldn't be back before the daily reset. Could I try to squeeze both sets of dailies in before then? Should I even try? Wasn't the very fact that I was having an urgent dental issue reminding me that there are more important things in life than video games? I decided to give it a go anyway just to see if I could... and I did manage to complete both sets of dailies just in the nick of time.

(Just in case you're wondering, the dentist identified the issue and I'm receiving medication now, plus further treatment has been arranged. I'm still in some pain but at least it's being worked on.)

Day 2

I logged on late in the evening to find that my daily objectives were to kill insectoids across the galaxy and 75 opponents across "Seat of the Empire" planets. I paused for a moment to think whether these could overlap somehow, but I don't think there are any kind of bugs on Oricon, Taris, Yavin or Dantooine, so I ended up re-rolling the insectoids once again and the associated daily turned into the warzone objective.

For the latter I played a late-night Huttball on my Sage, which was one of the rare matches that really frustrated me, not because it was a 1-5 loss but because it felt like it was due to a single player on the enemy team: This one Shadow scored most of their goals and repeatedly pushed or pulled our ball carrier into fire traps when we were close to scoring. (He finished the match with more than twice the objective score of the next person down the list.) I mean, on the one hand... respect! But on the other... damn it, a single guy shouldn't be able to run circles around an entire team like that.

For the mob killing I consulted my quest spreadsheet and decided to continue my DvL Commando's class story on Taris. Only when I logged in, I realised that the step in the story she was on was literally the last bit of talking on Taris before leaving the planet. I mean, I did do that while I was there, but it didn't help me with my mob kill counter. I moved on to my Scoundrel that I once created for lowbie PvP. To be honest, what she had left of her class story on Taris didn't require that much mob killing either, even more so with a stealther, but I just made sure to aggro and kill every single pack of rakghouls and scavengers I encountered on the way, so that completing my objective and finishing the planetary class story ended up aligning quite nicely.

Day 3

Like on day one, I ended up with two non-overlapping PvE objectives, Yavin dailies and heroics on Taris. For Yavin I ended up completing the weekly on my Marauder, who had done her first four quests there for Tuesday's daily objective (and I also found out - very much to my surprise - that based on the codex entries she received while doing them, I'd apparently never done the Yavin weekly on her before), and for the Taris heroics I returned to my DvL Shadow, whom I recalled having a pretty chill time stealthing through them last time. It worked out well.

Day 4

More Yavin dailies and insectoids across the galaxy. I re-rolled the latter and it turned into Ziost. I gritted my teeth a bit, as three out of four days up to that point being dailies was not exactly my favourite combo, but it was alright. I did half the Yavin weekly on my Sniper, fully expecting to have to do the other half later in the week, and a round of Ziost on my Operative healer - after all, it's not like there's anything that requires killing on there.

Day 5

Finally a GSF daily, which brought my weekly counter to one out of four, even if it was another somewhat depressing domination loss. (You know it's bad when you're fighting at satellite B, and when you get the message that the enemy has captured A and C, your team is only on a single point... then someone on the enemy team self-destructed and we went to two.)

The other objective was Taris heroics again... I decided to risk a re-roll to insectoids since I really needed more warzones for my weekly, but it landed on Oricon dailies again. Sigh, more dailies. I decided to start the Oricon storyline on my dps Juggernaut since I knew that the one-time story quests also counted as "dailies" for Conquest - but apparently Seasons are programmed differently, since I soon noticed that my objective tracker was not moving as I was progressing through the story. So I abandoned that angle and logged onto my dps Powertech to do the dailies the "normal" way instead.

Day 6

Since my daily objectives were to do more Yavin dailies (as expected... sigh) and to play a warzone, I started off by playing two rounds of GSF. No, really, that made sense! With my weekly still sitting at one out of four and the week being on its sixth day, the opportunities for synergetic dailies had mostly passed. I played both matches on my Powertech tank: The first one was a loss during which I still had a good time since I had the highest score on my team (not that this was any sign of me actually being good at GSF, mind you), and the second one was a solid win in domination mode for once.

For the dailies I first took to Vandin Huttball on my Sorc healer, and it was one of those frustrating matches that started out feeling relatively even but then quickly devolved into a 0-6 beatdown. Also, my mind boggled when I saw at the end of the match that I had the lowest objective score on my team despite of constantly chasing the ball and feeling very much alone in that. I guess you don't get points for healing nearby team mates and vainly trying to stop the enemy ball carrier without succeeding.

Completing the Yavin weekly on my Sniper ticked off the other daily objective. She too, got codex entries that indicated that she'd apparently never done it before.

Day 7

On the last day of the week, the game presented me with generic mob killing and Ziost dailies as my daily objectives. I was fine with the mob killing as I had an Oricon weekly to finish off anyway, but I eyed the Ziost dailies thoughtfully. Checking back with the official post about Season one, I figured I'd have a one in three chance of re-rolling to something more synergetic with what remained of my weeklies, and a one in six chance of making things worse by getting the insectoids - everything else would be a wash. Those odds seemed good to me, so I decided to risk it... and got the bloody insects of course, prompting Mr Commando to ask why I was swearing so loudly (something that's not usually my wont).

I decided to start off with finishing the weeklies. The GSF match I got into on my Assassin tank was an easy ride for once, as I spent most of the game squatting on the middle satellite (owned by us) while the rest of the team laid waste to the opposition for a quick and easy win. When I played my regular PvP match on my healing Sage a bit later, things looked a lot less promising as I loaded into an arena with horrible lag (I've been having recurring connection issues in the evening lately). I figured it was bound to be a loss but somehow the rest of the team carried us to victory regardless of me only getting a heal off every three seconds or so.

This just left the two rounds of daily slaughter. For the generic mob killing on a Seat of the Empire planet I finished off my Oricon weekly on my main (she'd still had the heroic mission left after doing the regular dailies on day one), and for the insectoids I decided to go slaughter Geonosians in Jundland on Tatooine on my DvL Shadow. While running around the area I noticed that I'd never done the local side mission to kill Geonosians (the one that used to be an [Area] mission), so I picked that up too while I was there.

Week 9 thoughts:

What a week, with personal emergencies, connection issues and other mishaps! I can't say that was as fun as it could have been. And yet I persisted, bringing my Seasons level up to 83 (or in other words, 660 out of 800 points earned). I'm in the final stretch now, with only one full week and a bit left to go to max out.

I'm definitely feeling somewhat ambivalent about the whole system at this point. I can't deny that it's worked to somewhat revitalise my interest in the game and made me play more - I'm a sucker for a good fill-the-bar routine. On the other hand though, it's also been somewhat exhausting and with both raiding and completing Seasons objectives, I feel like I haven't really had any time left to just log on and do something random for fun, if you get what I mean. So I'm very much looking forward to being able to say that I'm done with this Season thing, at least for a while.

We Succeeded at Killing a Boss

A little less than a month ago I wrote about my guild's attempts at killing a couple of unusual bosses. On the subject of the Ancient Threat world boss, I noted that while we had failed to kill it that night, we actually came pretty close by relying on a zerg tactic utilising guild ship summons, and that we were thinking about coming back and giving it another go on Imp side, whose nearest base is much closer to the boss's spawn point than it is for Republic players.

Well, last week we did just that and it worked! We did it with a group of 22 people and it took about ten minutes. It was still almost as much of a mess as last time, but at least we were somewhat more organised about the guild ship summons, which allowed us to achieve victory this time around. I uploaded a video of the fight too, where you can watch me do all kinds of stupid things such as hit heat venting cooldowns when I have no heat anyway (I'm used to the bar working the other way round on Republic side, okay?!) or just running around like a headless chicken while trying to get in range of the current tank without stepping into red circles. Maybe it'll help some other guild out there though!

We Failed to Kill Some Bosses

Last week was 16-man week in my guild again, and we decided to do something different this time by revisiting the Dreadful and Hateful entity (the latter of which I hadn't seen since that afternoon back in 2014), as well as a world boss on Yavin IV called the Ancient Threat, which I didn't really know anything about other than that it was kind of secret and existed.

It was... interesting.

The Dreadful Entity went down easily enough, probably in part due to the Veteran's Edge stacks you get on hardmode these days. The other two bosses... didn't.

With the Hateful Entity, there was some confusion at first about how to summon it as people kept saying that a certain pack of womp rats needed to be killed in a specific way. Mr Commando and I were raising our eyebrows at this as we remembered no such thing from back in 2014 - it sounded a lot like some sort of superstition to me and I said as much. In this case it turned out that I was wrong though, and you really do need to get all the womp rats equally low to get the "Hateful Presence" to spawn that in turn can be used to summon the Hateful Entity. I'm still baffled by how I have absolutely zero memory of doing anything like this back in 2014 and I even went on a bit of a googling spree afterwards to find out if Bioware maybe changed the mechanic at some point, but no: I found guides from before then that referenced the womp rat thing too. I can only guess that the allied guild that we ran with back in 2014 were already familiar with the whole concept and made sure to do it right without talking about it? I have no idea.

Anyway, we eventually managed to summon the Entity, but killing it was unfortunately another matter. I don't think we even got it to 80 percent on our best attempt. Some of that failure was undoubtedly down to bad play on our part (especially early on we lost quite a few people to death mark dispel failures), but the damage also seemed quite insane. For example a Gunslinger reported being hit by two unavoidable abilities in quick succession that hit for more than his entire health bar even when at full health. How do you deal with that in a downscaled operation with fixed health values?

A quick search yielded only a single kill video uploaded since 6.0, but I guess that proves that it's technically possible. Unfortunately it's a bit hard to tell what's going on in it, but it looks like they brought a lot of Powertechs in order to have the Sonic Rebounder buff on the group 24/7, which would then presumably prevent the sort of deadly two-shot combos that kept befalling some of our raid members.

Speaking of it being hard to tell what's going on, I remember being told back in the day to make sure to turn all my graphics settings to low for this fight as it would otherwise be too hard to see what's happening... this is probably still true, but I decided to leave mine on high anyway this time as a sort of experiment. My PC could actually deal with it fine, but the sheer amount of lightning and particle effects did indeed make it hard to tell what was happening a lot of the time. Still, I have no regrets - at least I got some cool screenshots out of the whole ordeal whenever I died and hid my UI to watch from floor level as the rest of the group slowly followed my example.

Another thing that was funny and which I definitely don't remember happening back in 2014 was that after wiping, people wouldn't necessarily respawn at the start but instead appeared in a random location inside the operation. I ended up on the other side of Thrasher's gate a couple of times, and in the middle of trash pulls the rest of the time. The latter made for a sort of cruel but hilarious Russian roulette as the whole ops group would revive but certain people (often including me) would immediately die again as they were teleported alone into the middle of various trash packs and mugged to death. Hey, if you're gonna die anyway, you might as well do it in an entertaining way!

We didn't have much luck with the Ancient Threat world boss either, though at least it was an interesting experience to get all the buffs required to summon it, as this requires you to find a number of small "secret" clickies dotted around Yavin IV that also grant several achievements.

The boss itself is the same "glowing ball" model as the two Entity bosses and has similarly simplistic mechanics, though the mask from Dreadtooth isn't required anymore. A lot of guides we found said that this fight was quite easy, but this didn't really match our experience. For example the red circles that were supposed to come down only every 15 seconds or so according to some sources were dropping almost non-stop, forcing the whole raid to run around like headless chickens. More importantly though, the ongoing AoE damage that was supposed to be insignificant and easy to heal through actually ticked for about seven percent of everyone's health every two seconds and felt pretty impossible to heal through with a normal role setup of "only" about a quarter of the group being healers.

For this one we couldn't find a kill video from this year at all, just one that was uploaded this year but clearly recorded before Onslaught, so it may well be that the scaling went a bit awry for this boss. We heard from some acquaintances that they have successfully killed it since 6.0, but apparently only by going in with a group of five (two of which were healers) and drawing out the fight to nearly an hour.

Interestingly we did get quite close to killing it once, by going complete zerg and spamming guild flagship summons every time someone died, revived and ran back. The only problem was that as Republic, the run back without a summon is really long (way too long for a significant number of people to survive). At some point, one of the summons got borked up and red circles were dropped right under the summoning spot so that people got put in combat or died instantly the moment they accepted the transport, and then we couldn't get another person into a position to summon in time, leading us to wipe at around ten percent. As guild ship summons have a long cooldown, it wasn't really feasible to keep trying that method for several attempts in a row, unfortunately.

We are however of half a mind to try this same zerg method again some other time, but this time on Imperial alts, who respawn much closer to the Ancients Threat's "home", meaning that people should be able to keep running back to some degree even without a summon. If we do get it down that way it wouldn't exactly be something to be proud of, but hey... sometimes you just gotta do what works.

Back In My Day: Dailies

"Back In My Day" is an irregular series in which I take one aspect of Star Wars: The Old Republic and look at how it has evolved over time. This particular installment was inspired by me doing a lot of questing on Ilum recently, which got me thinking about how many of the quests there used to be daily repeatable but aren't anymore.

Launch - The Dailies That Weren't Really

At launch, it was very obvious that SWTOR hadn't originally been conceived as a game with daily quests as an endgame activity in mind - until someone at the Bioware offices had a sudden panic attack three weeks before launch or something, and in order to shoehorn the daily concept into the game somehow, they took two quest chains that had been designed to be done at or near the level cap, the Ilum storyline and the Belsavis bonus series, and turned all the missions that weren't part of the main quest chain into daily repeatables that handed out endgame rewards. (I remember some of them gave out purple item modifications, but I seem to remember that this wasn't the case for all of them.)

This went about as well as you would expect. In a post from February 2012 describing my first impressions of the Belsavis dailies, I hilariously noted that I didn't even know where to go and where to start, as there was no "daily hub" or anything, and the daily missions were utterly indistinguishable from regular one-time quests.

Story-wise, a lot of them made no sense either. Now, daily tasks in an MMO require a certain suspension of disbelief most of the time, but there are still ways to make them more credible vs. blatantly hitting the player over the head with how little sense it makes to repeat certain things. My favourite example of this was always the Republic quest on Ilum that had a little astromech droid desperately seeking help and supplies for his owner, a recently crashed fighter pilot... who apparently crashed every day? We used to joke that the guy was really just a hermit who happened to live in a ship wreck and we were basically his daily supply run.

Mechanically, things were pretty bad as well. People were complaining about others not space-barring through the daily quest givers' dialogue quickly enough long before anyone got tired of the cut scenes in flashpoints, but at the same time they didn't just want to have the mission shared with them because they did want to go through the cut scene to farm social points and/or companion affection.

The area also didn't really seem to be designed to have a large number of people questing in it at the same time. Most infamously I remember the quest on Republic side to kill Rattataki leaders, of which you needed three for the quest, and there were only about five in the area, with half of them habitually bugged out and unkillable. Sometimes I'd just sit down and wait for the same guy to respawn three times.

Now, all of this may sound horrible, but it wasn't really that bad. It wasn't well designed for its purpose, but at least for me it also managed to stay below the threshold of actually becoming tedious and annoying. The fact that the Belsavis bonus series included no less than three heroics encouraged people to group up for the whole chain of dailies, and the end result felt kind of awkward but also fun. The payout was also high enough that you never really felt like you actually had to do the whole thing on a daily basis to stay afloat.

1.2 - Into the Black Hole

Patch 1.2 introduced the game's first "proper" daily area, the Black Hole on Corellia. It was a bit of a pain to get to as you had to go through no less than three loading screens to travel there, but it was much more streamlined for its purpose. There was an introductory quest with dialogue on the fleet, but then the actual dailies could just be picked up from a terminal all at once and were neatly clustered around the area.

Bioware decided to keep encouraging people to group up by also adding a heroic mission, as well as a weekly meta quest that required you to complete each mission, including the heroic, exactly once. I noted at the time that the concept of the weekly was very much in line with SWTOR's very casual-friendly approach, in that the best rewards only required you to visit the area once a week. It was also very much worth doing as the weekly also offered a new type of currency called Black Hole commendations, which could be used to buy new and more powerful gear from vendors on the fleet.

1.5 - Experiments in Section X

Section X iterated on the Black Hole and mostly tried to improve it. 1.5 was also the patch that included the free-to-play conversion though, which led to the weird experiment of making the new zone into paid content that you could unlock by subscribing or via a special access pass (which was eventually dropped).

I can't even remember what sort of rewards the missions gave at launch, but they were most assuredly overshadowed by the introduction of the reputation system, which also made Section X the first daily area with a reputation attached and gave players an incentive to increase their standing with the faction just to get access to things like cosmetic armour shells and pets.

The area was also spiced up by featuring the start to the quest chain to acquire HK-51 and having the world boss Dreadtooth path around the area. People with an interest in world PvP were delighted to actually run into the other faction on occasion now - one thing that had been a bit odd about the Black Hole was that even though technically Republic and Imperial players were playing on the same map, their quests were on entirely separate halves of it and they never even crossed paths. In Section X the two factions still had their own separate missions, like in the Black Hole, but they took place in roughly the same area, and the heroic mission for the weekly was even located in the same instance.

The heroic mission in Section X was the one somewhat controversial thing about the area, as it required exactly four people for successful completion - you couldn't substitute someone with a companion as there were several sections where people needed to click on things in sync to bypass some force fields. This was a bit of a nuisance, and was later on removed without much fanfare, though the quest's [Heroic 4] tag wasn't changed. Personally I only found out that I was suddenly able to solo it pretty much by accident.

1.7 - The Gree Revive Ilum

Patch 1.7 introduced the Gree event, the first world event that was designed from the ground up to be repeated, and which re-purposed the previously abandoned Western Ice Shelf on Ilum where the big open world PvP debacle from launch had taken place. While it also featured one instanced and two open world bosses, the main focus was once again on daily missions with which you could earn reputation to unlock some nice goodies from the local vendors.

The biggest controversy here was Bioware's attempt to use dailies more openly to encourage people to engage in world PvP within a small separate area down south, which would not allow you to be in a group larger than four, dismissed companions, and flagged you(r group) for free-for-all PvP. Personally I thought this was quite fun and novel, but some people got very hung up on the mere existence of two daily quests that required you to flag for PvP, despite of their rewards being minimal compared to the regular dailies.

2.0 - Makeb and Galactic Solutions Industries

2.0 was not a very successful addition to the game in terms of daily quest endgame. There were daily quests to do on Makeb, but they were part of the super awkward Makeb Staged Weekly and required you to limit yourself to one mission at a time, which had you travelling all over the damn place and wade through dozens of mobs just to achieve a single objective. Myself and most people I knew did it once or twice and then decided to go back to the old daily zones because they were much more fun.

Rise of the Hutt Cartel also introduced Galactic Solutions Industries as a faction, which asked us to make use of our new Seeker Droids and Macrobinoculars which we had acquired through one of 2.0's side mission arcs. Like the Makeb dailies these were very spread out, across different planets even, though at least the fact that many of them were on lower level planets allowed you to travel largely unimpeded, and quite a few of them didn't even require any combat at all. Unsurprisingly, these weren't a huge hit with people either, though there does seem to be a niche audience for them that appreciates the slower and more relaxed gameplay that they offer.

2.3 - CZ-198 & Bounty Contract Week

CZ-198 was the first daily hub to be introduced post 2.0 and went back to the classic model of having a small area shared between the two factions in which you could just "do the rounds" for some credits, and it quickly became popular because it was very quick and easy to do and therefore a very efficient way to make some money. It was also the first permanent daily area that didn't really differentiate much between the factions, as they both got the same quests. (I'm not counting that Republic players collect kolto and destroy toxin while the Empire does the opposite. It's still "click on these containers five times".)

What was really odd about CZ-198's weekly mission though was that it required you to run both of the local flashpoints in addition to doing all the dailies... which was a bit awkward to be honest. It's probably the reason I got the achievements for running these on story mode twenty-five times more quickly than for any other flashpoints, and I remember trying to always have the CZ weekly in my log before running a random just in case one of the Czerka flashpoints would pop up. This odd system was eventually patched out in 3.2, when the requirement to run the two flashpoints was replaced with a single heroic mission to kill a big droid.

2.3 was also the patch that introduced the second recurring world event, Bounty Contract Week. This followed more in the steps of the Makeb Staged Weekly, by making you choose a single daily quest that you then saw through to form a kind of storyline. It was a little weird, but still made a lot more sense than the stuff on Makeb.

2.4 - Oricon

Oricon always felt to me like it was made by the same team that created CZ-198, only with small improvements: again we were in a small area shared by both factions, both doing the same quests. Even though the change to the CZ weekly to not require flashpoint running anymore didn't come until much later, it seemed like Bioware already felt a bit awkward about that particular design decision, so the Oricon weekly featured a daily in a heroic area instead. It was brutal and I loved it - to this day it remains at least moderately challenging despite of how much heroics have been toned down in general.

What was different was that there were bonus missions for those who had unlocked their Seeker Droids and Macrobinoculars - CZ-198 had only featured a one-time quest for a pet, but the bonuses on Oricon were attached to dailies and therefore repeatable.

More importantly though, there was a much bigger attempt to tie the whole area into a story. On CZ-198, there was an introductory quest that asked you to run the flashpoints, and the flashpoints were part of the weekly, but the dailies were just kind of... there. Oricon took a different approach, by unlocking the daily quests one at a time and tying them into a quest chain narrative that you had to complete once before the missions unlocked as daily repeatable from the nearest terminal. (As an aside, the story was also refreshingly different for the two factions despite of running along the same general lines.) The story quest then cumulated in you being sent to do the two Dread operations, something that generated some resentment among solo players, but that's really another story as it had no impact on your ability to do the dailies.

2.5.2a - Return of the Rakghouls

(Fun fact, I couldn't actually find any patch notes about this... I only know that the event came with this patch thanks to my blog posts about it.) The third big repeatable world event, the Rakghoul Resurgence that would come to rotate between three different planets, took a fairly conservative approach and basically mirrored the basic setup of the Gree event, with a small enclosed daily area, an instanced operations boss and a couple of open world bosses. They just dropped the PvP area and replaced it with another heroic area instead.

What was somewhat revolutionary at the time was that the event was trying to be level-agnostic - the mobs in the tunnels were mostly very low level and would only spawn reinforcements of your character's level once you got aggro, allowing players of (nearly) all levels to join in the fun. The operations boss The Eyeless was also the first boss that featured PvE bolster, boosting lowbies to a high enough level that enabled them to participate. It's kind of ironic that this whole event appears to have been overlooked when they introduced the galaxy-wide level sync in 4.0, which now makes it feel kind of outdated and causes lowbies to get left out of parts of it due to some of the system's limitations.

3.0 - Soloing on Rishi & Yavin IV

Shadow of Revan's two new planets were a funny bunch in terms of dailies. Rishi featured several missions that were daily repeatable, and some of them even had achievements attached to repeating them often enough, but they were scattered all across the area and had no coherent theme or reward structure to them.

Yavin IV was the "real" new daily area of the expansion but required you to complete the storyline first. There was the whole thing with giving you the choice of either doing dailies or doing the Temple of Sacrifice operation to complete the storyline, which was honestly just kind of awkward. The dailies themselves, once unlocked, were decent enough fun and proved very popular. I ranted at the time though that I thought they were actually kind of over-incentivised, with the hugely powerful companion gear that was rewarded by the weekly making you feel like you kind of had to do them to kit out your companions (this was back when their gear affected their power level). What's also noteworthy is that while there was a weekly quest to kill the walker world boss on Yavin, this was completely separate from the regular weekly mission for the daily quests, which could be done solo in its entirety and was therefore the first of its kind to not feature any kind of grouping component.

3.2 - Pointlessness on Ziost

After the fun of Yavin, the dailies on Ziost felt like a bit of a step back. Requiring the completion of both the basic Shadow of Revan story as well as of the Rise of the Emperor patch, they presented the as of then largest number of hurdles to overcome in order to gain access to a new daily area. It wasn't exactly a prohibitive amount of effort or anything, but compared to the ease with which any alt could jump into any of the pre-3.0 daily areas it felt like a lot.

Mechanically it was interesting in that all the dailies were non-combat missions, enforced by the circumstances of the story... but the big problem was that there was basically zero incentive to come back. Where Yavin felt like it was almost showering you with too many rewards, Ziost had nothing, neither a reputation to work on nor anything interesting to buy with the currency the quests rewarded. I expect the value of all rewards to deprecate over time, but I distinctly remember Ziost being the one planet where I did one round of the missions on the day of release, looked at the local vendor, and realised that he didn't have anything of interest to offer even on day one, which was kind of disappointing. My impression is that I wasn't alone in this and that Ziost has remained comparatively unpopular with the masses for this reason... though again, some players did appreciate the novelty of the combat-less mission design.

4.0 - Goodbye To All The Quests I've Loved Before

Knights of the Fallen Empire brought with it a new focus on solo story, and new dailies were not really a part of Bioware's plan because they were considered too MMO-like I guess. Since the devs were busy retuning a lot of content anyway though, they decided to make most of the old heroics soloable while also attaching Alliance endgame rewards to them, which basically means that they morphed from being open-world group content for levelling players into just another set of endlessly repeatable dailies. I hated that, but based on the responses I got to the linked post a lot of people felt the opposite way.

As part of this great, galaxy-wide tidy-up, the former dailies on Belsavis and Ilum were also turned back into the regular quest chains they had clearly been meant to be from the beginning, so you did them once and that was it. I didn't even notice this for a long time, but as with all things, there were people who were unhappy about the change because they had actually still been doing those old dailies, mostly as a way to farm companion affection.

5.2 - Icky Iokath

Nearly two years after Ziost, Bioware brought us our first new daily area in ages in the form of Iokath. While everyone was quite excited about getting a new planet to explore, what we eventually got felt a lot less iterative than the previous daily areas, and more like they struggled to remember how to design this kind of content after a long time away from it. It felt as if they picked a bunch of features from the old areas, mixed in a couple of new ideas, and simply hoped that the end result would be fun. Unfortunately the different parts didn't gel too well and in the end it was more of a slightly awkward mishmash.

There is an initial storyline like on Oricon, and a couple of the quests you complete in it do return as dailies, but most of the repeatable missions are actually quite different. The quests are more or less the same for both factions and take place in a shared area, though it's larger than most daily areas. Travelling around the zone is also very convoluted, making questing on Iokath very time-consuming.

One of the new features was the concept of different daily missions rotating on the terminal from one day to the next, and the player being expected to do more than one day of them to complete the associated weekly quest. There were also several vehicle quests, which were very badly tuned in terms of cost vs. reward at launch, and while Bioware fixed this later, the bad first impression tarnished many players' impression of the planet forever. The vehicles were also meant to encourage PvP, but the combination of the initial high cost to buy them as well as the awkward geography not really encouraging people to meet up made that fall flat on its face as well.

Nearly three years after the last bunch of daily quests that also featured group content, Bioware also decided to include a single world boss on Iokath, the Colossal, and to make a daily quest for him... but since it wasn't required for the weekly and wasn't even marked as a group quest, most people picked it up once, went "mm, nope" once they saw what they were up against (or maybe did it once just for the achievement) and that was that. It's not like the boss drops anything either.

Looking Back And Looking Forward

Looking back at this history of SWTOR's daily quests / areas, I see several different developments over time. Aside from launch and it's "improvised" dailies, the Black Hole's precedent of the terminal with both dailies and a weekly quest was something that quickly became the norm and that has persisted to this day, but other aspects of the system have been more fluid.

First off, there was a lot of experimentation with story. The first daily areas just offered a voiced introduction and then tried to engage you by giving you different things to do on each faction. On Makeb and with Bounty Contract Week they seemed to try to create a sort of daily repeatable miniature story, with very mixed results. The Oricon approach of weaving the dailies into a one-time story was the most attractive way of going about things in my eyes. More recently they have gated largely separate dailies behind doing a longer, one-time story quest, which I haven't been quite as fond of.

There was also a gradual abandonment of group content. The early weeklies up to Oricon all had some sort of group component to them (even if CZ-198's flashpoint running requirement was eventually abandoned as a failed experiment), but with Shadow of Revan that all went out the window. The Colossal on Iokath felt like a hesitant breadcrumb thrown at players who liked to group up, but it wasn't handled very well in my opinion.

Finally, there is an interesting undercurrent of wanting to incentivise world PvP every now and then, most notably with the dedicated PvP area on Ilum but also with the Iokath vehicles, yet people never seem to have taken to it very well. From my experience the best thing to do still seems to be to simply force both factions into a small space and then let them sort themselves out. I've had some enjoyable world PvP both on Oricon and in the Rakghoul tunnels.

In a few days we'll all get to see the game's newest daily area on Ossus. I've mostly avoided spoilers about it, though I hear that there are supposed to be some new heroics, which is something that I at least would definitely appreciate. As far as story integration and world PvP goes, we'll just have to see!

Victory on Yavin and Crafting Craziness

It's barely been a month since I got excited about my guild conquering Alderaan during Total Galactic War, and I didn't expect us to go for first place somewhere else any time soon, but at the start of last week things took an unexpected turn. We were just about to go for our usual large yield target again, when someone pointed out that the medium yield planet for the week, Yavin IV, didn't seem heavily contested. There were only one or two other big guilds going for it, and they looked like we should be able to beat them.

And just like that, Twin Suns Squadron ended up conquering a planet for the first time outside of Total Galactic War.

Of course, we acquired a secret super weapon a few months ago. Does it count as giving away trade secrets if I talk about this? Ah hell, I don't care - if you're reading this and you're from a competing guild, I'm both flattered that you actually ended up here and salute you for your dedication to researching the competition.

Anyway, when we absorbed another guild a few months ago, one of the new members we gained was someone to whom I shall simply refer as X. X loves Conquest and he loves to craft, two things which made for a very potent combination in the past. Less so since the Conquest revamp, but it still seems sometimes that surely he must be spending more time just logging in and out of alts to claim crafting credit for repeatable Conquest objectives and to queue up new items than doing anything else.

With how hard Bioware nerfed crafting for Conquest points, his effectiveness was greatly diminished, but he still regularly hits his personal target on more than a dozen characters per week (which is why I have to laugh when I see people moaning on the forums about how the new system made it "impossible" to do Conquest on more than one character). However, this week he showed us what he could still do, and it made me wonder whether Bioware still hasn't nerfed crafting enough.

Obviously we were all doing our best to secure victory, but X achieved nearly 1.5 million conquest points on his own (yes, we counted), most of which were accumulated by crafting war supplies. Now, war supplies only gave 300 points a pop last week, even with a maxed out stronghold bonus, so he basically had to craft several thousand of them across his legacy. With how much more expensive Bioware made this process as well, my mind still boggles at the sheer amount of materials he must have poured into this project. And he did admit afterwards that this wasn't something he would be able to do every week, as he needs to rebuild his stockpile again after going nuts like that. But still...

I am extremely grateful for his hard work and in awe of his dedication, but at the same time it seems a little wrong that this is still possible. Our next biggest contributors that week, none of whom went crafting crazy, only achieved about a tenth of X's score across their legacies. I guess we'll get to enjoy this advantage while it lasts and see about conquering a few more planets while we're at it.

I Waited 3 1/2 Years For This

More than three years ago, I mentioned in a post that I had never killed the Revanite Walker world boss on Yavin 4. As I explained at the time, he just seemed to spend most of his time dead, as in: already killed at the hands of other people.

As the years went by, the Lance Squadron Commander slowly became less interesting for guilds to kill and could be encountered slightly more frequently... but at the same time there was also less interest in killing him from my guildies. And whenever we did have a large enough group of players online and I actually remembered to bring up the matter of killing this particular boss, someone else had once again beaten us to it.

Well, yesterday it finally happened. I was just finishing off tanking a partial guild run of EC story mode when another officer excitedly called out on TeamSpeak that he'd got a group for the walker together and the boss was actually up too! (The reason there was such large interest in killing him was that this actually awards conquest points this week.) I was so there!

Aaand then we killed him. After all this time it was actually kind of anticlimactic, especially with people repeatedly going on about how much tougher he used to be "back in the day". It's not like I'd know!

Still, it definitely felt good to finally be able to hand in a quest that had been sitting in my log for three and a half years. (It's actually a weekly repeatable too, hah!) Now I just need to repeat the kill nine more times for the final achievement... at my current rate I should have it by the end of 2050.

A Look At The Yavin Ruins

Last week's patch saw the (delayed) introduction of the new warzone Yavin Ruins. While I had initially been a bit disappointed when it turned out that the announcement of a new warzone actually meant "a new map for an existing type of warzone" instead of "a new game mode", remembering just how different Quesh Huttball turned out to be from regular Huttball still left me feeling excited.

Unfortunately it took a while until I actually got an in-depth look at the new map - even though Bioware stated in the patch notes that they had increased the new warzone's chance to pop, I saw little evidence of this on my first day of trying to play it. Two hours of chaining one warzone after another only took me to Yavin once, while Voidstar popped three times in a row. I'm guessing that they were trying to avoid a situation like during Odessen's release, where people were complaining about getting nothing else... but to me it seems that they turned the dial too far in the other direction this time.

Either way, eventually I did manage to get a closer look, and it's been... interesting. Yavin Ruins is not as different from Alderaan Civil War as Quesh Huttball is from regular Huttball, but there are still some noteworthy changes. It's also oddly... pretty. I never thought I'd say that about a warzone. So much beautiful foliage! I suppose it impedes visibility somewhat, but I consider that more of a feature than a problem anyway.

What has stayed the same is the basic layout of the battlefield: Three turrets lined up in a straight row from left to right, with the two on the sides being connected via an underground tunnel that goes under the central turret. Said central turret is once again encircled by two crescent-shaped walls.

Changes in the layout are comparatively subtle. For example you don't have to circle around the front or back to go from one of the sides to the middle, there is actually a little staircase leading straight up and across the wall on this map. The platforms in the middle don't have "railings" and offer slightly fewer opportunities to break line of sight. However, there is more space to fight around the side turrets, as they aren't directly up against a wall but instead against a slightly elevated platform which is nice for range and healers to stand on.

I  spotted two real mechanical differences: First, the turrets fire a bit faster, making the ships' health go down in increments of two instead of ten. This seems to make a psychological difference more than anything else - since a lot of people are bad at maths, the non-round numbers make it a bit harder to instantly spot the "point of no return" by which you are guaranteed to lose unless you manage to capture all the turrets, and which many therefore like to interpret as an excuse to give up.

The biggest addition however is a new orange buff that can be picked up in the underground tunnel where you also find the two speed boosts (like on Alderaan). These give you a buff that lasts for a couple of minutes and cuts your turret capping time in half for the duration.

These are pretty fun to use right now because a lot of people haven't quite caught on to their existence yet and are startled when someone suddenly caps a turret in only four seconds, making them great to use in the middle of a large scale melee when people don't expect it. However, it's a bit hard to predict how much of a role they'll end up playing in the long run. The basic idea seems to be to make it easier to cap a turret without requiring either the complete annihilation of the enemy team or use of a stealth class. (The buff does not let you go into stealth, so no need to worry about it being abused by stealthers.) That seems like a noble goal at least and something that could make Yavin Ruins a bit more dynamic and fun to play than Civil War. I generally like these base-capping warzones, but the sheer difficulty of capturing an objective on Alderaan can sometimes be a bit off-putting, something the speed buff seems designed to counter.

Aside from that, I've been having fun watching people try to come to terms with communication in the new environment. I've previously expressed my amusement about the arbitrariness of "grass" and "snow" as directional markers in Alderaan Civil War, and of course Yavin provides a new challenge here because if you eschew cardinal directions, you have to decide on which landmarks to use as reference points instead and there is no agreement just yet on how to go about this.

Things seem to be trending towards calling the side with more undergrowth "jungle" (though this can lead to confused calls of "everything is a jungle here", the same objection I've always had to "snow" in Alderaan) and to naming the other, more open side after the ruins that are located there, which I've seen referred to as both "relics" and "statues" so far.

Finally it's worth mentioning that after Odessen, this is the second warzone that mixes players from both factions in its teams. While I'm against implementing this for all warzones (yes, I'm one of those suckers who cares about lore in PvP), it's nice to have another warzone where it can be justified and helps to give the losing side a break if one faction is constantly dominating (as you have a chance of ending up on the same team as the people who were beating you before).

My early conclusion is that it's a solid addition to the roster. I've always ranked Civil War pretty highly among my favourite warzones, though I like both Odessen and Novare Coast even better. Yavin Ruins therefore has a solid foundation to build on and so far it hasn't disappointed, even if it's not as different from Alderaan as Quesh Huttball is from regular Huttball. Have you given it a try yet?

Puzzling

Both of Bioware's most recent releases for SWTOR have contained puzzle elements. In chapter eleven, you had to find the right panels to shoot in order to progress past a forcefield, and this month's Alliance alert is pretty much one big puzzle to solve.

Both prompted similar reactions in me: First I was startled by the unexpected obstacle in my way, then delighted that it was something different from the norm. Then I got a bit annoyed when I couldn't figure out the solution quickly enough. I eventually made it past the forcefield myself, but for the companion mission I ended up looking up a hint online once I'd been stuck for a while.

This got me thinking about puzzles in SWTOR in general. I don't actually recall seeing a whole lot of them in the base game. The first one I remember encountering is during the interlude in the first chapter of the trooper story where you have to deactivate some laser beams in the right order to get to the middle of a room. A fair few datacrons have a puzzle aspect to them as well, but I didn't really bother with them on my first playthrough.

While levelling alts, I remember encountering the heroic mission Shadow Spawn on Dromund Kaas, which requires you to use the runes on a dark altar in the right order, and you figure out the correct order by following the lines of the Sith code. If you don't know them, they are engraved on the runes as well (and show up on their tooltip if you hover over them in your mission item inventory).

On Republic side, Traken-4's Legacy stands out, a former area quest on Balmorra, which requires you to solve a "lights out" puzzle on a three by three grid, which I don't know how to do to this day, but fortunately you can find automated solvers for that kind of thing online.

The operations were the biggest surprise in terms of puzzle aspects, because personally I'd never seen that kind of thing in large group content before. First there were the ancient pylons in Eternity Vault, which feature little combat but require you to figure out the fastest solution to a small puzzle before the fight. Then there was the Fabricator droid in Karagga's Palace, who required several members of your ops group to play Towers of Hanoi. In subsequent operations the "puzzle bosses" were toned down, but an aspect of problem-solving before the fight remained present for a while, from Colonel Vorgath's minefield in Explosive Conflict to Operator's colours in Terror from Beyond and Olok the Shadow's droids in Scum and Villainy. It's only with the Oricon operations that the notion of "puzzle bosses" seemingly came to an end.

In solo and small group content however, Bioware has continued to throw puzzles at us at irregular intervals. The Black Hole featured more than one daily that required a bit of puzzling. The whole Theoretika section of the HK-51 quest line stands out as a particularly memorable example of requiring brains over brawn. The Shroud quest line asked you to solve problems in ways other than fighting as well. Kuat Drive Yards has that ship-building scenario where you get a bonus for figuring out the little logic puzzle and choosing the right components. The Yavin quest line has the mission in the cave where you have to click on the right rune to activate the holocrons. On Ziost there is that short bit where you need to deactivate some panels to be able to run through a pool of water without being electrocuted. And now in KotFE we have the two examples mentioned above.

Do I like these puzzles? I think for the most part I do, but sometimes they've also caused me frustration. I generally like them in group content, because you can pool your resources and figure things out together. (Like when it comes to the aforementioned Traken-4 mission - the first time I ran into it, I was questing with a friend, and while I got annoyed with the puzzle, he enjoyed figuring it out and eventually got it done for both of us.) In ops, the puzzle bosses generally give one or two people the chance to shine with specialised knowledge without requiring everyone to be good at puzzles, though it can be very painful when you end up in a pug where nobody knows how to handle the puzzle aspect.

In what comes as a bit of a surprise to myself, I'm more likely to find puzzles annoying in solo content. It's probably because that's often the content that's focused on progressing the story, and it's annoying to hit a wall there just because you can't figure something out. Also, I'm generally more likely to get annoyed if several puzzles are strung together into one big puzzle, such as on the Theoretika or in the newest Alliance alert mission. I can generally appreciate a single puzzle inserted into a mission at random, though it can still sometimes feel a bit out of place simply because there aren't that many of them in game, so it's always a bit unexpected when instead of shooting things or talking to people, you suddenly find yourself hunting around the environment for the right thing to click or sifting through flavour text for hints. But if several of them show up in a row, it's even more likely that I won't be able to figure something out and will grow tired of the whole thing after a short while.

Do you like puzzles in your MMO experience?

Hearing from the Devs

I often see SWTOR's devs and community team get accused of not communicating very much with the player base or not doing a very good job at it. I honestly can't tell how true that is because I find it hard enough to keep up with everything going on on the forums and on fan sites as it is - I never feel like nothing is happening in this community, and I'm more likely to miss out on important information than to sit there going: "You're not telling me enough!"

Also, and I know many people may find this weird, but I actually kind of like it when MMO devs keep certain things close to their chests and refuse to talk about them. For example, I love a good surprise. I really enjoyed the way Bioware tried to build up suspense via the Forged Alliances story arc when it was first released and I loved seeing people speculate about which villain might be behind it all. The big reveal in Legacy of Rakata felt very satisfying, even if it wasn't completely unexpected. But of course you can only achieve that by withholding information from the player base until they can see the content for themselves (and if the data miners respect that stance and don't go around spoiling things for everyone else). Those of us who've played since launch may also remember how completely out of the blue the first Rakghoul event came - and it was great! Compare this to Blizzard for example, who posted all the in-game cinematics for Warlords of Draenor on their front page, spoiling the entire storyline two months before the expansion even released. (That sure saved me some money.)

There is also the saying that it's better to stay silent and be considered a fool than to open your mouth and prove it without a doubt. How does this apply to MMO devs? When they introduce something that I consider awesome, I'd like to think that it was all planned that way and that the devs are really good at their job. I'd rather not hear that this feature was slapped together within a month and with no resources, and that my favourite part of it is actually an unintended bug. Conversely, if I don't like a change, I'd rather imagine that the devs only had the best of intentions and simply made a mistake. If they come out saying that they love the change and that they are sure players will consider it the most fun thing ever, that's probably going to contribute more to losing me as a player than the change itself. Basically, it's easier to enjoy a good meal if you don't spend too much time talking about how the sausage gets made.

That said, every now and then I can appreciate a good, non-spoilery look behind the scenes, especially if it doesn't include anything that I consider bad news. And there's been quite a few of those over the past week or so!

First off, Chuck and Brian from the Bad Feeling Podcast interviewed PvP developer Alex Modny and Eric Musco about upcoming PvP changes. Now, the Bad Feeling Podcast is always fun to listen to and you shouldn't miss an episode anyway, but this one is particularly informative as some pretty juicy bits of info were dropped. If you just want a summary of the important parts, Xam Xam has one here. Basically, it's a lot of good news for casual PvPers, with warzones becoming more rewarding in terms of XP and credit gains, PvP gear having its cost reduced by a huge amount, and warzone comms becoming easily transferrable between alts. There was some stuff about ranked too, but that doesn't really affect me. They were also discussing adjusting the way AoE works in warzones so it doesn't interrupt node caps anymore, which could be a pretty big game changer in a good or bad way, but we'll have to see.

On the same day this interview was released, Olib from SWTOR Network posted a (written) interview with Alex Tremblay, Bioware's Manager of Analytics. I think this interview hasn't got nearly enough publicty, even though it's really interesting and includes some well thought-out questions. There weren't any huge and shocking relevations, but for those of us who love hearing about statistics and such, there are still some interesting tidbits (such as which colour crystal is the most popular at the level cap right now).

Finally, on Wednesday Bioware held a developer stream to show off the upcoming new stronghold on Yavin 4 and the new Togruta species. You can watch most of it here. Personally I watched about five minutes of the recording and then stopped, because unlike an obviously large number of people, I actually find it pretty boring to watch others play a game that I'd rather play myself. Fortunately there are parts of the community that are willing to provide summaries for people like me, so you can find a breakdown of all the facts that were revealed on Dulfy as usual. If you want some more opinions on what the stream was like, Mae and Xam Xam are happy to provide.

I'm quite excited about the Togruta, even though I'm not a huge fan of the species - I just like having new character creation options to play around with, so I'll probably create a Togruta alt at some point just because I can.

As far the new stronghold goes, I have mixed feelings. From an emotional standpoint I'd have no issue with dumping my Nar Shaddaa stronghold for it as I never liked it very much anyway, however I've been using it to boost my conquest point gains (basically I filled it with random trophies, pets and speeders) and losing that would be a bit annoying. Not that my guild has been doing much with conquest lately.

Also, apparently they kept emphasising that we can look forward to an exciting announcement on the 15th of June. I'm fine with that as that's my birthday and I already happened to book the day off work anyway. This better be good!

What are your thoughts on the newest bits of information to come out of Bioware? And is it enough or are you one of those always craving more?

Day 8: Memorable Moments

This is the eighth post in my 10 Days of SWTOR Screenshots challenge. Click on any screenshot to see a larger version.

When I think about my most memorable moments in SWTOR, a lot of them are from my newbie days, which automatically disqualifies them from this series as I'm trying to use at least somewhat recent screenshots (no older than a year). Another large number involve operations boss kills... which are nice and all, but I didn't really want to fill this post with shots of achievement pop-ups, as I feel that those are kind of boring to look at. Therefore I made an effort to choose memorable moments for this post which didn't involve killing anything large but instead managed to be memorable in some other, smaller way.

First off, we do have something that involves achievements, though different ones: a screenshot of the scoreboard at the end of what was probably my best GSF match ever. Did I break any records with my number of kills and damage numbers? Hardly. But I'm not great at starfighting, and in this game the way I kept picking up buffs and blowing people out of the sky just felt magical. The fact that six or seven achievements popped up as soon as the match finished only worked to confirm my feeling that something amazing had just happened.

Up next, we have my Sage in the Senate Tower... I think I was in there to pick up the Dread Seed and Shroud quests at the time. On my way out I was suddenly enthralled by these two lowbies however, who seemed to be duelling for the sheer fun of swinging their lightsabers, without even looking like they were actually trying to kill each other (though if they were genuine newbies, it's also possible that they were still struggling to figure out how to play). Either way it was delightful to see them bounce around and visibly enjoy just being in this virtual world and doing silly things. It's something that us more jaded MMO veterans often miss I think.

Remember my story about "the other Shintar"?  No, I never did work up the courage to suggest that name change to him. But I finally met him in person in a warzone! It's a shame that I was on my Sage at the time or it would have been an epic Shíntar vs. Shintar showdown. Even so I immediately felt the urge to hit my print screen button and capture that epic encounter for posterity.

Finally, we have my pet tank and me on Yavin 4, gazing up at the Lance Squadron Commander. Why was this memorable? Because this was the first time that we saw this guy alive... and it didn't happen until about a month after Shadow of Revan's launch. For some reason he was always dead when I came by! I have yet to actually take him down, while I've seen at least one guildie get the achievement for killing this world boss ten times already. I'm sure one day I'll get around to downing him as well... but because it took so long, it will feel all the sweeter.