The Hunt for the Best View Returns... Again!

Last year, I mentioned that the "Best View in SWTOR" contest, first held in 2021 for the game's tenth anniversary, made an unexpected return. I was even more surprised when I saw the announcement yesterday that it was coming back for a third round this year. If the SWTOR team wants to make a habit out of this, they'll have to give us a lot of new planets this year or else start repeating some of them on the featured planet list next year.

Anyway, I immediately felt inspired and spent some time traipsing around the galaxy and taking screenshots - none of which I'm going to show here yet of course. Instead, I'll share my submissions from last year. Back in 2021, I only submitted shots for three out of ten possible planets, but last year I actually entered nine out of ten possible screenshots, with Odessen being the one planet I left out since I just couldn't find an angle I was happy with there. Anyway, these were my submissions - you can compare them to the actual winners here.

Coruscant will always have a special place in my heart, and the quintessential experience of the Republic home world is stepping out of the spaceport into that perpetual dusk while the music swells and sky cars roar past overhead. There was no question that this was going to be the focus of my screenshot, and it was for the winner as well, but they basically faced the other way. It's a worthy shot, but I'll admit I still prefer my own submission in this case.

The winning shot of Quesh shows grass, water, trees and part of a Hutt Palace, and it's interesting to me that I took some similarly-themed shots during my own exploration of Quesh, but ultimately I opted for submitting the refineries blowing smoke into the sky, since to me, the toxic air is what defines Quesh more than anything else.

I had a hunch that this one wasn't going to be winning shot material, since I noticed that while NPCs are technically allowed to be featured in your submission, no winner has ever included one in the foreground. However, to me it was perfect since swamp and rakghouls are what defines Taris above all else. The winning shot was of the wreck of the Endar Spire instead (I think?) which is of course a KOTOR reference but never meant much to me personally.

There's something to be said for the stark beauty of driven snow, but while taking shots of Hoth I struggled with how empty it always looked, which is why I opted to include these tauntauns in my submission. Same problem as with the rakghoul I guess... though I also notice now that perhaps I've been using the full width of the screen too much, seeing how the winning submissions get cropped down to 4:3 for the in-game decorations. Half of that tauntaun wouldn't even be in the shot then.

Alderaan is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful planets in the game, but I find that this beauty can be a bit challenging to capture accurately in screenshots, so I was quite pleased with myself for managing to take this wide shot of the Glarus Valley. The winning shot ended up being one of Castle Panteer however, which I guess was kind of the more obvious choice. I had taken pictures of it myself as well, but opted against submitting them.

Dromund Kaas is an interesting mix of rain-swept jungles contrasted against the stark, futuristic spires of Kaas City, and I simply decided to submit this rather old screenshot I took of the city since I really liked it. The winner shows both the jungle and parts of the city in the background, which I really can't fault.

With Manaan there was the question of whether to screenshot the new invasion zone or the serenity of the old entrance area. For me it was an obvious choice since I really don't like the visuals of the invasion zone all that much. This particular shot was actually taken inside the Depths of Manaan flashpoint. The contest winner was from the new area though.

Iokath was a challenging place to frame, since it's incredibly cluttered visually, in a way that I honestly find kind of ugly. I eventually found this view at the edge of the expanse, which looked much cleaner and more serene, with just the Eternal Fleet ships taking to the sky in the background. I will admit that this isn't very "typically" Iokath though. The winner managed to take a much better shot of just outside the Republic (?) base that manages to be visually busy but still look good.

Rishi was a tough one because I couldn't decide whether the Rishi Maze or Raider's Cove were more iconic for the planet. I eventually opted for the former, with a grophet in the foreground because I love grophets, OK? I was quite surprised that the chosen winner actually included neither.

Anyway, I'm off to take more pictures of this year's featured planets! If you want to take part, you can find all the details here, and you have until the 29th of September to make your submission(s).

PvP Season 3 & A Look at Some Battle Records

I completed the PvP Season 3 reward track last week, taking one more week than the absolute minimum required to complete the season, and I wanted to once again jot down some thoughts on it.

First off, I remember telling people at one point that I didn't really mind Galactic Seasons and PvP seasons overlapping all that much, since the Galactic Season sometimes has PvP-related objectives and there can be some synergies. This was the case last week as well, as there was a weekly objective to earn medals in PvP.

That said, I've kind of changed my mind about this, because I really liked the way PvP Season 3 largely fell in-between Galactic Season 4 and 5 this time. It was much easier to focus on earning my weekly PvP points with not much else going on. More of this kind of spacing things out, please.

The changes the devs made to how you earn warzone medals were definitely noticeable and had a clear impact on how quickly I could complete medal-related objectives. I said last season that I wasn't going to go for the 2000 medals achievement again, since I was only about halfway there after completing the track and essentially would have had to double my efforts just for that achievement alone. So I didn't even look at it much this season, however when I checked after completing the reward track, I was actually about two thirds of the way there, which is a pretty dramatic improvement, and I don't think I suddenly got that much better at PvP.

AFKers are still annoying, but I saw fewer of them this season than last time. On a side note though, is it me or have GSF players become a lot more kick-happy recently? It's like they want to use their kick function as much as possible before the devs take that away too... I swear it feels like hardly a match goes by without me seeing someone get booted for inactivity.

The only really odd encounter I had in a warzone this season was in a Queshball where a gunslinger had somehow managed to entrench themselves on one of the lines above the playing area. They weren't unreachable and could technically still be attacked from range in certain locations, but obviously there was fighting happening in midfield as well and most dpsers seemed to want to focus on the closer threats even while the slinger kept raining death upon them from above. I was wondering whether that was some sort of exploit, but I never saw it happen again after that, so it might've just been the result of a knockback gone wrong or something like that.

One thing I wanted to do at the end of this season was take a look at my battle record. We used to have a very basic one in the past that recorded wins and MVPs earned, but I long suspected that it was a bit dodgy and eventually got my proof when I did a PvP weekly on a char whose stats were on zero to begin with, and afterwards the record showed fewer wins than I had literally just achieved.

When the devs got rid of ranked and added seasons, they also added a new battle record, so I wanted to look at what sorts of numbers I'd accumulated there over the last three seasons... especially since I often felt like I was losing all the time. (No kidding, the other week I lost twelve matches in a row. That hurt.*)

The stats revealed that things weren't actually as bad as I had thought, though I'm not sure whether these new battle records are entirely trustworthy either. For example I found that several of my characters had zeroes showing in most of their fields in a way that made no sense (e.g. 82 matches played but zero damage done or taken), and whatever "K/D" is supposed to be, it's clearly not the number of kills divided by the number of deaths as listed on the record (e.g. 209 kills divided by 46 deaths is most definitely not 0.819).

Still, assuming that there's at least merit to some of the numbers, they were interesting to see. I have a few characters on whom I do PvP more often than on others, but in general I try it at least a couple of times on every new alt. Of the fifteen battle records I checked for this, my worst win percentage was 33%, but that character had actually done only three warzones since the introduction of PvP seasons, so it doesn't really say anything. However, most were actually close-ish to the fifty percent mark, either a bit above or a bit below. Considering that I solo-queue 99% of the time, that seemed pretty alright.

The highest win percentage belonged to my level 77 Vengeance Juggernaut with 73%, but she's also played "only" 15 matches, so not a huge sample. The spec did seem pretty powerful and easy in warzones whenever I played her though, not to mention that she's in a pretty good place in the midbie bracket at the moment, near the very top and wearing the previous expansion's endgame gear. which undoubtedly helps a lot.

The honour of most matches played goes to my Nautolan Corruption Sorcerer, whom I created a few years ago for the sole purpose of PvPing. She hit the level cap this expansion and I've continued enjoying playing her there even at 80, meaning that she's up to over a hundred matches played at this point. Her 54% win rate is alright in my book.

Interestingly, my second most played PvP character is my Bodyguard Mercenary, my main's Imperial mirror, who's played 91 matches since the introduction of seasons, but somehow she's got the lowest win ratio of any of my characters aside from the aforementioned alt who only played three matches. Her win rate is only 43%, and her average damage taken is 38% higher than the Sorc's despite the heavy armour and in spite of also doing 36% more healing on average. So she does more healing but loses harder. Where's the justice in this world?

*There was a wholesome happy ending to that particular story though. Back on fleet I spawned in next to a guy who'd just been killing me in my previous match and they waved at me. I did a /cry since my dozen-long loss streak was getting me down and they expressed sympathy, followed by an offer to team up. Being on the same team after that, I noticed that person being nothing but constructive in chat as well. Then a couple of guildies wanted to join in too and my losing streak was balanced out by a win streak as we queued as a group of four for a few matches. More than anything I was kind of impressed by the rarity of meeting someone so friendly in PvP. I gave them my sincere thanks for cheering me up when we had to part ways again.

Patch 7.3.1 and Galactic Season 5 Are Here!

Here are some of my favourite items from the patch notes:

Update on Kai Zykken and the Spoils of War set bonus armors -  Kai Zykken will be removed and Set Bonus Armors will be available from a new vendor in the same location on the Fleet.

It's been a while since I last wrote about gambling away my Tech Fragments with Kai Zykken, but we've hit a point in the expansion where I once again have a lot of them to spare, to the point that I started visiting Kai again, even if the set bonuses are useless at level 80 and I was doing it purely for the achievements. There was supposed to be some sort of bad luck protection but it never really seemed to work for me - so it felt kind of vindicating to actually see a dev comment on the forums that it "[wasn't] working as intended".

I've been very pleased to just see the whole system get replaced by a vendor who'll simply sell you the sets directly, which should make filling out those last few achievements a lot easier. I also had a chuckle at the fact that the vendor is a droid called "S3T-BNS" (because he sells set bonus gear, get it?) and has dialogue about how Kai is under investigation for misleading his customers... which is basically a fun in-game jab at all the trash he used to sell us.

Decorations will now drop when killing enemies in the Interpreter’s Retreat area.

Nice to hear that they fixed that now, even if it's too late for many of my alts, who have been done with the area for a while.

"Pickled Space Worm" can be used as a crafting ingredient again. The Cantina Hoth vendor now sells a craftable version of this item. Players who acquired the item recently will need to repurchase the item from the vendor. 

At first I was like "what the hell is this even talking about", but then I looked it up and I had totally forgotten that this was an ingredient for Ice Scrabbler Jerky... dang, I had no idea that item was actually rare for a while due to this bug.

The debris piles for the mission "It's Really Piling Up" now respawn as expected.

Fun fact: I did this mission about a dozen times without actually knowing what I was doing because the things that looked like debris to me apparently weren't it... so I just ran around the area spamming the button until it completed.

Fixed an issue where weapon part VFX could be seen floating in areas.

Wonder if that will put an end to the "you seem to have forgotten your cannon" jokes that have been a thing for a long time...

The maximum number of Dark/Light alignment points is now 10,000 (down from 100,000).

Actually it's 11,000 right now for some reason! But still, good that they reduced this... the higher numbers made sense back in KotET when doing anything gave you a constant trickle of light or dark side points, but now that we're back to only gaining 50 points a pop from conversation choices here and there, requiring 100,000 of either type to fill out the bar was ridiculous.

Quick Travel costs will now scale with the player’s level.

I wasn't fussed by the introduction of quick travel costs, but this is a good change to make things easier for new players in particular.

When listing an item on the GTN, the default listing value will be based on recently completed transactions, if available.

I've seen this in action and it's actually quite funny... like when you see a weapon listed for 400,000 credits and then the GTN suggests you list it for 30k. The real value revealed!

Fixed various 7.3 Old Wounds Cinematic bugs including the NPCs clipping during the conversation with Oggurobb.

Oh, you mean like this? (May have to embiggen to see it properly.)

This happened during my first Imperial playthrough and it was admittedly quite distracting... though also hilarious.

All shrubs in the Athiss Flashpoint have been fixed.

I have no idea what this was about but I'm now extremely intrigued by what was wrong with those shrubs.

The queue icon now only glows when the group is queued for Warzone and PvP Arena matches.

I'm glad to see this one fixed as it was quite odd to see it glowing randomly when you weren't queued for anything (and vice versa, seeing it say you weren't in the queue for anything when you actually were).

Thrill of the Hunt / Forced March has been renamed to Mobile Protection / Frontline Medic.

I thought there weren't any class changes for Commando healers this patch as this innocuous "renaming" sounded purely cosmetic, but no, it turns out we've been nerfed because we can now no longer cast Full Auto on the run. I already noticed this being very annoying. 😞

“Inspired by” tabs have been created for the Cartel Market to help players easily find special items.

So this is fine, but personally I really just wish they added class filters to the armour sets, so you could e.g. see all bounty hunter style armours at a glance instead of having to click through dozens of pages of everything jumbled together.

Priority Transport: Personal Starship can no longer be used in Warzones or Arenas.

I hadn't heard of this bug before reading these, but man, I do love the mental image of someone just noping out of an arena for example by simply quick travelling to their ship.

Fixed issue where Galaxy Map would blink for new players before they had a ship.

Yes, finally! This bug had been there for years and also happened on new alts of existing players. As someone who must click on all the shiny things, I always found this one super annoying.

Fixed an issue where some areas would not allow Quick Travel or Stronghold Travel.

Another nice quality-of-life change as this bug was really quite annoying, blocking you from quick travelling in seemingly really random places, and the only way to "fix" it was basically to run a little in any direction and keep trying until it would let you. I mostly noticed it in Seeker Droid areas.

As for the new season, I don't have much to say about it yet. I had enough of a break since last season that I was happy to check back on my alts on the other servers and get back into the grind. Obviously there's no new companion this time to instantly judge... I wonder how popular that decision will ultimately turn out to be. I'll admit I kind of had to chuckle when Mr Commando, who's taken a bit of a shine to seasons but doesn't pay much attention to news about it, asked me "how to get the new person" and I had to be the one to tell him that there isn't a "new person" this time.

I did like the first of the new missions though (it was very silly), and I also like that there is now a hand-in box on the fleet for the reputation items that all your characters can access regardless of their storyline progress. I was not a fan of how how in Seasons 3 & 4, if you wanted to get reputation tokens on alts (for example for the "gain reputation" Conquest objective), you had to claim the companion on that alt first because you had to hand in to them personally on your ship.

Strange Conquest Drama

Last week was Total Galactic War in SWTOR - I've often talked about this Conquest event in the past and expressed my love for it. Most weeks, Conquest may be dominated by the same few guilds entirely dedicated to it, but a couple of times a year at least, small to medium-sized guilds get to have a shot at conquering a planet as well and I like that.

I think the SWTOR team is also well aware of the extra engagement this event generates, as they've taken to strategically launching it at times when there's a bit of a lull in content - without it, this past week likely would have been pretty quiet in game, with PvP season 3 slowly winding down and Galactic Season 5 not starting until tomorrow.

Things in my guild started off in the usual way: planning which planet to invade, scoping out the competition, rallying our members to the cause and so on and so forth. Picking a planet was actually surprisingly easy for once, as all the guilds we wanted to avoid committed relatively early, which made our options quite clear. We opted to invade Ruhnuk, as we had never conquered it before and none of the guilds already on the scoreboard were ones we knew to be competitive. The guild in the lead before we invaded was an Imperial one called "The Tribe", named after the guys from The Mandalorian. We overtook them within a few hours and then worked on maintaining and expanding our lead.

Now, two days later I was doing some PvP on a low-level character when I received a whisper from someone called "Cassian Andor" (with some special characters), who wanted to speak to the GM or an officer. I immediately had a bit of an uneasy feeling as the guy had drawn attention to himself in an earlier warzone by berating people in chat, which at the time made me think that he was unfairly defiling the good name of the character he'd decided to roleplay as.

Anyway, I engaged with him anyway, just to see what it was about, and it turned out that he was a Republic alt of someone from The Tribe and boy, was he mad. With ALL CAPS and insults flying left and right, he told me that supposedly ALL the guild masters on the server had decided who was going to conquer which planet this week and Ruhnuk was supposed to be theirs. Ignoring the insults, I initially decided to treat the whole thing as some kind of misunderstanding and calmly told him that we simply hadn't been involved in anything like that.

He briefly pivoted towards a weird RP angle - that it should have been common sense that Ruhnuk was owed to a Mandalorian guild, and that Twin Suns Squadron had no special connection to that planet, but ultimately it seemed to come down to him simply not believing me when I said that we weren't involved in whatever scheme he had been a part of. According to him, there had been an agreement and we had violated it!

He proceeded to make some vague threats about how we had "created enemies" in his 500-member guild now and that they were going to "infiltrate (y)our guild" and mess with us going forward. I was in a Voidstar match while all of this was scrolling across my chat window, and when it became clear that the conversation was going nowhere except more CAPS and insults, I eventually blocked the guy.

Now, in hindsight this just seems weird/funny, but I'm honestly pretty thin-skinned and at the time I actually felt somewhat shaken by having this rando come up to me and repeatedly call me and Mr Commando names over some made-up offence. So I shared screenshots of the conversation with the other officers and also warned the rest of the guild to be on the lookout in case this guy or other members of The Tribe decided to come harass them instead.

The other officers' minds were equally boggled by both the vitriol and the sheer ridiculousness of the attack, and the members who chimed in on the conversation - bless their hearts - only felt spurred on to work harder on actually securing the win. However, a couple of them pointed out that they were indeed aware of the existence of a Discord where some guild leaders were making agreements about which planets to invade during Conquest.

To be honest, that didn't really surprise me and I don't have an issue with it either - it's all part of playing the game. However, I do take issue with those people then deciding that their secret backroom deals are now the law and going around harassing people whose actions don't fit into their plans - plans which aren't even known to them! Is this going to be the next big thing on Darth Malgus? People pretending to be the Conquest mafia?

I mean, I've long known that Conquest can be rife with drama and people doing some pretty deranged things, but I guess the worst of it has always passed me by because my guild is not a dedicated Conquest guild - we just push Conquest a couple of times a year when the opportunity arises. I've been taking part in Conquest since it was introduced nine years ago and had some pretty intense competitions with other guilds over the years, but they always stuck to fighting us by playing the game and trying to beat us fair and square. I'd just never encountered anything like this before.

It's certainly ironic that a guild seemingly based on roleplaying as Mandalorians of all people got mad about actually being challenged to a fight because they simply wanted to have the win handed to them. Mind you, I'm not blaming the guild as a whole - who knows how many of them even know what their GM gets up to. (To be clear, the guy I talked to didn't explicitly identify himself as the GM, but based on his passion and his legacy name being "Tribe" it seems like a reasonable guess.) I guess it's just another strange tale of Conquest to add to my records...

Take That, Brontes!

Dread Master Brontes and I have a long history. I'm not going to talk too much about that right now, because I already wrote a whole post about it back in 2019 and for the most part, what I said back then still applies - if you want to know the details, just go back and read it. The tl;dr version for our purposes today is that in the almost ten years since the release of Dread Fortress, I've never been able to kill the last boss in it on nightmare/master mode, despite spending a fair amount of time trying.

Not much changed since 2019... though I think we never even attempted the fight during the Onslaught patch cycle, as word on the street was that the boss's tuning was so out of whack that she was basically the hardest boss in the game at that point. Legacy of the Sith's operations tuning has had plenty of issues of its own, but Brontes' difficulty sounded like it had been dialled back down to more "normal" levels again, so we've been visiting her occasionally.

Specifically, my guild does 16-man progression one week a month, and last week we actually managed to clear Dread Fortress for the first time! One of Brontes' remaining orbs exploded just after she died and took out the remainders of our raid group, so you could technically call it a draw, but it still counted. Here's the kill video, consisting of footage from both myself and another officer who was playing a dps Vanguard:

It certainly felt like quite a milestone to finally get her down after all this time, though at the same time it feels a bit weird to think that the 8-man kill still eludes me. 16-man might be ever so slightly easier in terms of gameplay, especially as a healer, but then getting a 16-man progression group together in this game is much harder than finding an 8-man team, so it's kind of a wash in terms of overall effort I suppose.

At least the additional time spent on progressing the fight has taught me that it wasn't my healing that was at fault in the past, as I now understand a lot better what happens in the last phase (in the 2019 post I admitted that I found it hard to tell what was going wrong in our attempts). Basically it's almost always the tanks' fault - no shade intended, as they do have the hardest job in that part of the fight if not in the whole fight in general. It's just that everyone else is so busy with their own priorities towards the end, there isn't much time to keep an eye on everything the tanks are doing. And then one mess-up pretty much just results in the whole group getting obliterated without anyone being able to tell in the moment what exactly just happened.

I just hope I don't need to wait another ten years to tick the box for the 8-man achievement.

What Is Conquest and Why Should I Care about It?

I'm mostly writing this post as a reference point for my guild, but I hope that it might be useful to others as well.

What is Conquest?

Conquest is a rotating weekly event that offers a selection of useful and valuable rewards. In terms of how it works, you can think of it like temporary achievements - complete certain tasks during that week and earn points. The types of activities that award Conquest points are generally very simple and varied, from gaining a level to completing a heroic mission, plus you also receive a small trickle of Conquest points from simply killing mobs or completing any quests at all.

Conquest matters on three different levels:

Personal / Solo

If your character is level ten or above, earning 100k Conquest points in any given week (starting on Tuesday with the weekly reset) will give you a reward. Even if you've never cared about Conquest, even if you didn't know what Conquest even was, you've likely taken part in it by just playing. Earning 100k points on a single character is not hard at all if you play at least a few hours during the week, and the reward would have simply popped up as another mission completion for you. You may have clicked it away without thinking much more than "huh, free stuff".

Guild (non-competitive)

A guild's Conquest score is based on the individual Conquest scores of all of its members combined. At the start of each week, leadership gets to choose a guild target from one of three options (small, medium or large). If the guild reaches this point target within the week, everyone who contributed (by reaching their own personal Conquest target) gets an additional reward after the next reset. Rewards are better based on the chosen size of your target.

Guild (competitive)

Guild targets are associated with planets, and each planet has a leaderboard showing the highest scores of all the guilds that have invaded that planet/chosen that target during the event. The guild at the top of the planetary leaderboard by the end of the week earns a rare achievement and legacy title. This is why guilds may care about scoring extra points beyond their non-competitive target.

Why is my guild asking me to work on Conquest?

In most situations, a guild's officers will choose a guild target that's appropriate for their guild's "natural" level of activity, to ensure that everyone gets their guild reward at the end of the week with no additional effort required. However, there are situations in which leadership might ask members to put in extra effort when it comes to generating Conquest points:

1. You've joined a dedicated Conquest guild. There are usually no more than three or four of these per server, and they are focused on staying on top of the leaderboard each week. They may ask you to score as many points as possible each week to achieve that goal. These guilds will have relatively strict activity requirements and may quickly remove members that become inactive and are no longer contributing.

2. Your guild is trying to move up. As an example, your guild may have been hitting the medium target for a while, but it's been growing/getting more active, and leadership thinks that large yield and its improved rewards are within your reach (but not yet guaranteed). Officers might then choose to go for the large target the next week and ask people to play a bit more than before to push the guild over the threshold.

3. It's Total Galactic War! Most Conquest events only feature three to five planets, meaning that the same few dedicated Conquest guilds will end up on top of the leaderboard over and over. However, there is a rare Conquest event called Total Galactic War, during which every planet in the galaxy can be invaded, meaning there are a lot of opportunities to win first place somewhere. Medium-sized guilds may rally their members around this event and call for a big Conquest push to make use of the rare opportunity to win first place without being dedicated to Conquest all year round.

OK, so... what do I do?

Your guild has asked you to help with Conquest and you want to, but... what do you do? The simple answer is to just play and be active. Almost everything you can do in game generates some Conquest points. As a rule of thumb, organised small group content and PvP will generate points more quickly than just playing solo, but there are plenty of opportunities to score a lot of points as a solo player as well, such as increasing your reputation with a faction or increasing a companion's influence level once per day.

If you do want to learn more about the nitty-gritty of how Conquest works, what activities there are to do and what rewards you can earn, I recommend checking out these guides by Swtorista and Vulkk.

Saving TOR Fashion

Fan sites are a big part of an MMO's life blood. Even as someone who likes to go in "blind" most of the time when it comes to exploring new content, sooner or later there'll be a point where I get stuck or confused, and being able to look up a guide - or even just finding out that other people have been having the same problem - can become an important part of continuing to enjoy the game.

With that said, I was not best pleased to find out about a week ago that TOR Fashion was going to shut down. TOR Fashion and its sister site TOR Decorating have been on my blog's side bar for a very long time now. Back in 2014, which must have been around the time they started giving people the ability to submit custom outfits, I uploaded one of my own. Other than that, I don't recall using the site much since I'm not hugely into fashion or decorating (I know...) but I'm sure it came up in quite a few of my Google searches over the years.

Fortunately, I then found out that Swtorista was going to preserve most of the content from both sites, hurrah! I gave the virtual equivalent of a thumbs-up and didn't give it any more thought beyond that. I was therefore very surprised when I received an email from Swtorista a few days later in which she asked me whether I was interested in helping out with a small task related to the project. While she was busy figuring out how to export all the data and incorporate it into her site, she'd come across a few pages that defied automatic processing due to weird layouts, and she was wondering whether I'd be up for helping to manually move those into her Wordpress account.

To be honest, I'm not sure why she picked me - maybe because I'm clearly somewhat familiar with blogging software, even if this site runs on Blogger? Maybe because this blog is evidence that I love documenting and preserving things? No matter, I was honoured to be asked for help, and after some careful inquiries about how much work would be involved (I do have other things to do as well, after all), I agreed to take care of transferring twenty odd pages.

Of course, it wasn't until after I'd started that I realised that some of those pages consisted of a multitude of tabs, and included a total of over a thousand images.

Still, you might think: How hard can it be to copy and paste some text and click "save as" on a bunch of images? Well, you'd be surprised! For example, it turned out that not all of the images were saved in the same file format, and Wordpress wouldn't let me upload one of those formats, so I had to then go back and find all the odd ones out and manually convert each one to something that would be accepted. It's not difficult, but it can be pretty time-consuming, and before you know it you've wasted an afternoon and are wondering where the time went.

I have to admit there were moments when I thought to myself, what am I doing here? How many people really care about what outfit Mako wears when you first get her as a companion? But then I thought, well, someone cared enough to make a page about it and upload 300+ images of companions in their starter gear, and I respect that.

On the stronghold pages I worked on, I learned a lot of new stuff about each stronghold actually. I technically own them all, but I don't really use any of them other than the Coruscant and Fleet apartments, so I never knew that the Alderaan stronghold has a "Killik Dispenser" in it for example. What the heck? The more you know...

In general, trawling through the old TOR Fashion site filled me with mad respect for the old owner. You could kind of tell that her enthusiasm diminished many years ago now, as some pages were extremely outdated, but in general there was so much stuff there and it was all managed in an incredibly manual way.

I learned that the site was originally founded by Dulfy (yes, that Dulfy) and then handed over to Exile, who continued to expand into something like a dozen different games (even if some of those expansions didn't last very long - both the sites and the games. Rest in peace, "Wildstar Fashion".) Exile did so much work behind the scenes; she just never reached quite the same level of notoriety as people like Dulfy or Swtorista (I guess it helps your brand if your name is literally your website's URL).

Anyway, I think it's nice that most of her work will now be preserved, and I appreciate that she actually went out there and offered people the opportunity to do so before shutting the site down. I remember way back in 2012, when Torhead was a thing, I went through a phase of compiling and uploading about five hundred screenshots of things like armour pieces and NPCs for them because I wanted to help make it more useful... and then a few years later it just went away.

Or take the aforementioned Dulfy! She lost interest in the game many years ago, but her site remained up and running, and even with no updates it continued to be a valuable resource for certain aspects of the game that hadn't really changed and simply hadn't been covered by anyone else. And then a few months ago, it just went offline! I've bookmarked an archived version of her "Dreadseed and Star Forager armor locations guide" because I'm not aware of any newer sites having content on the topic, and I'm not sure the old site is ever coming back. It just sucks! (EDIT: Swtorista pointed out to me that she does have an article on that subject too now!)

So I'm glad that all the stuff gathered on TOR Fashion is getting a new lease on life for now and that I've been able to contribute at least a small part to it. A site like that takes a huge amount of effort to build and maintain, and it would've been a shame to have it all just disappear.

A Long, Slow Goodbye to Twitter

I created my Twitter account almost eleven years ago. The site was still smaller back then, a kind of nerdy place for bloggers to hang out. It wasn't something I ever felt I needed in my life, but I was curious enough to check it out and see what the fuss was all about.

And I kept using it, even though I never loved it. In 2015 I wrote about what I saw as some of the pros and cons of Twitter. I will say that it grew on me over time though. As I became more active within the SWTOR community on Twitter, I had more positive interactions. Also, when I finally got a smartphone, I could verify that there was indeed more of an appeal to scrolling through Twitter on the train (for example) than to looking at it on my desktop PC.

And then all that Elon Musk drama happened last year. I kept hearing worse and worse things about him, but was still hopeful that even if he was a big jerk, that didn't necessarily mean that Twitter couldn't continue to do its thing (lots of tech billionaires are not among the nicest people, but that doesn't necessarily make their products unusable). Oh boy, did I have no idea.

Look, I'm not going to rehash all the nonsense he's inflicted on the site since then - there are hundreds of articles and videos out there laying it all out in detail. If you're a Twitter user and you feel that his buyout hasn't really impacted your experience, I'm not here to tell you that you should feel otherwise... but for many of us, the site has become increasingly less usable and just generally less enjoyable to hang out on.

I've seen a lot of people talk about leaving, just to then come back a week later because despite everything, they missed it too much, and I didn't want to be one of them. However, I also have very different motivations from many Twitter users. For me, Twitter was always meant to be an extension of the blog, and so my first reaction to Musk firing 80% of the site's staff was one of annoyance. At the time, I honestly wouldn't have been surprised if the site had just outright crashed within two weeks, and I was seething at the thought that I'd put ten years of myself into a website that might just disappear one day due to the whims of a random billionaire. I mean, we often joke about how Google might shut down Blogger any day now, but at least they are usually professional about these things, giving you notice and plenty of time to export your data.

So I came away from the whole Twitter debacle with two main resolutions: firstly, to slowly wean myself off using Twitter as much (though I was going to continue using it while there were still interesting things to read there), and secondly, to extract everything I had ever posted there, review it for things I wanted to keep and remember, and incorporate them into this blog.

Point one was relatively easy to action: I completely stopped using my secondary account, and cut down on posting on my main account, no longer offering up random thoughts or anything like that, but purely limiting myself to promoting the blog and posting the occasional reply to someone else. I also started to look for other places that would provide a similar sort of entertainment and/or could be used to promote my writings. (For example I've taken to making a post on the official SWTOR forums every month.)

Point two meant requesting a copy of my stored data while that service was still functional, and starting work on sorting and categorising it. The latter is still ongoing, because it turns out that manually reviewing almost 5000 Tweets and pasting them into blog posts takes some time, and to be honest it's a bit boring - the kind of task for which I have to be in the right mindset. I am however close to being done, and what will happen then is that I will start making a series of posts on here called "Tales from Twitter" which will reproduce old Tweets of mine that I'd like to remember and preserve. I don't know how many parts this series will have yet, and since it's not time-sensitive, my plan is to intersperse it with "normal" posts. I don't know how interesting these will be to you as readers... I think some of them, like the random pug/PvP stories, are pretty amusing and timeless, but others might not be. Still, it's something I'd like to do for myself above all else, to have all this content in one place.

As for what will happen to Twitter... to be honest, at this point I think it will slowly fade away for me. As of now, there are still a few people there for whose content I check in every day, but the number of posts on my timeline is constantly decreasing as people leave and the weird crap that's been done to the algorithms makes it harder to find interesting new people to follow. I'm trying out Bluesky as a "Twitter replacement" (it's not the same but to me personally it does seem to be the competitor most likely to be able to serve a similar purpose right now) but regardless of how things go there, I feel like I'm going to make more conscious decisions going forward about where to post anything on the web.

My Very Own Malgus

I'm not a toy collector, but I do enjoy buying frivolous things sometimes. So when I found out that Hasbro was releasing a new Darth Malgus figure, I hesitated only briefly before taking the leap and pre-ordering.

I always felt like I missed out a bit by not getting the collector's edition of the game (which included a Malgus statue) back in the day - but when I decided to give The Old Republic a try back in 2011, I had no idea I would still be playing it twelve years later! Anyway, the point is that this seemed like a good opportunity to get my own Malgus after all.

He arrived in a nice cardboard box that made him look like a mummy when opened up. Honestly, I'm pretty impressed by the creativity employed in the plastic-free packaging that many companies have come up with for a variety of products recently, though it's my understanding that some collectors are not fond of not being able to see the figure inside the box through a plastic window anymore.

Anyway, once unwrapped, he's a pretty handsome, detailed and posable fellow.

I find myself once again reminded that I really wish SWTOR offered more merchandise. I believe the common argument for why there isn't is that it's too expensive due to the Star Wars license, to which my counter is always that I've seen crappy pens, bags of apples, and freaking toilet roll with the Star Wars logo on it, so surely it can't be all that prohibitive... however, I guess this kind of situation, where a company that's regularly producing Star Wars merchandise makes something that doesn't feature the game's logo, but does include a character or other content from the game in their regular line-up, is better than nothing. I'd love it if they made a Satele as well at some point. I'd get that one too and then the two of them could do battle.

SWTOR Moves to the Cloud & GS5 Changes Direction

After I recently posted about how with SWTOR, you rarely know what comes next beyond the very immediate future, we got some updates yesterday about what to expect in the next couple of weeks at least.

First off, the move to Amazon Web Services that's been in testing since earlier in the year is finally becoming reality! The latest news post on the subject explains once again why this should be considered a good thing for the game and informed us that the process will start in earnest this Tuesday. It looks like they'll be moving one server at the time, starting with the Leviathan - this makes sense to me as Leviathan is the smallest of the current five servers, so if anything goes wrong, the player base hopefully shouldn't be affected all at once. We'll see how soon after that they'll aim to move the rest - depends on how smoothly the first move goes I guess.

The other piece of news released on the same day was that patch 7.3.1, which will include the start of Galactic Season 5 as well as some more map UI updates, is meant to come "soon" - that is to say in "late August/early September".

One piece of feedback I've had over the course of the last couple of seasons was that while seasons as a concept were in a good place overall, I thought they could really do with a bit of innovation, such as more changing objectives and perhaps a reward that isn't another gibberish-speaking alien companion. I'm delighted to say that it appears that the SWTOR team has listened!

According to the blog post, we won't be receiving a new companion this time but will instead be "interact[ing] with several new characters [...] while making dialogue choices that affect gameplay" - whatever that means exactly. The story tied to this will replace the little personal stories that we've been getting with the seasonal companions since Season 2 and progression will be tied to overall season progression. There'll also be new objectives tied to companions, space missions and operations.

I have no idea what any of this will look like in practice but I'm happy to find out!