Day 3: Companions & Pets #IntPiPoMo

I'm taking part in IntPiPoMo, and this is the third of ten screenshot posts I'm making this month, each one themed around a certain topic. Today's topic is... companions and pets!

This first shot is of me doing the hidden achievement to get the nerf calf pets... I recall that I didn't do this when it first came out and the spawns were quite contested but rather much later when I could go through the whole process in relative in peace and quiet. I also seem to remember that at the time I thought about writing a blog post about the whole experience, but as these things go, I got distracted writing about other things and then forgot about it. All that remains is a brief reference to it in this post.

When I came across this screenshot from the Jedi knight class story, I went: Oh yeah, remember when Doc also had character traits like being a kind guy who took his oath seriously and was happy to take care of wounded Imperials? Somehow all anyone ever thinks about when he's brought up is his boundless horniness...

I really liked the way Bioware handled companion returns on Ossus and beyond. Here my Marauder is shown getting rid of dark side Jaesa, a moment I rather enjoyed.

The reunion with Khem Val was pretty cool too. Though I had to quickly abort the mission on my first Sith inquisitor to reach Ossus, as she had sided with Zash and thus the Khem return showing was a bug... I did later go through without encountering Khem once it was fixed, and my boosted Assassin was the one who got to see the return dialogue instead, as siding with Khem is assumed to be the default choice for boosted characters.

While it was a bit disappointing that we didn't get to see Holiday again when Tharan returned, I did find the idea that he got... this guy as his new assistant quite amusing. Plus if he really does love Holiday, it does make sense that he'd get someone else to run his more basic errands after a while.

I really appreciated that Bioware added these little pieces of dialogue on Odessen that troopers get with Elara and agents with Vector respectively, just because someone thought it would be nice/make sense to have them.

IntPiPoMo count: 23

Limitless

I'm making good progress on my pre-expansion goals: My pacifist character hit level 75 a couple of weeks ago, and on Halloween night, a full month ahead of my original schedule, my main hit Renown rank 999 and earned the Limitless achievement. It was pretty well timed as well, as it happened in the middle of a Dread Guards 16-man master mode kill (you get Renown each time one of the bosses dies), which made it extra memorable.

Also, I'm very glad now that I made it a personal goal for myself to get this done before the expansion, as another one of last week's bombshell announcements included the bit of news that Renown will be completely removed in Legacy of the Sith. Several of my guildies have been scrambling to also quickly get the achievement now before it goes away forever, but depending on their current progress there might not be enough time left to grind out the remaining ranks on a sane schedule. I think most people expected that Renown ranks would be reset with the expansion, but not a complete removal of the system.

I can't claim to be hugely upset by this move - Galactic Command as the sole source of endgame gear was a nightmare, but once Bioware rebalanced it to be more supplementary than anything else, getting reward boxes for a sort of infinite levelling was kind of nice. When GC turned into Renown with Onslaught, it was nerfed so heavily though that the reward crates became only another piece of junk to deconstruct every so often; I don't recall getting a single interesting thing from them all expansion. If anything, I'll miss the concept of endless levelling more than anything else. I first saw and learned to appreciate it in Neverwinter, but they eventually got rid of it too...

Other systems on the chopping block are social points in their current form and the dark vs. light system as introduced in Knights of the Eternal Throne (not to be confused with the original character alignment system).

There's still going to be a social system of sorts, but instead it's going to count how many runs you've done in the group finder, similar to World of Warcraft, which is... meh. I always liked the idea of social points being awarded for more than just taking part in group conversations (and you did use to also get them for things like handing in quests as a group), but tying the system to the group finder leaves a bit of a sour taste in my mouth, as it just limits it in a different way. Now you'll be able to level up doing quests with a friend without being considered social, and I'm not sure that's an improvement!

I don't mind the group finder and I understand Bioware wanting to incentivise it, but from what I remember in WoW, the people who were flaunting their group finder achievements were usually the most impatient and obnoxious players of all to get in a pug because they were only after the achievement and nothing else. Let's hope that SWTOR's community is different enough to withstand that kind of pressure.

Finally, the galaxy-wide dark vs. light system... I guess it had a good run. I did kind of like the way I could use the state of the galaxy as the tie-breaker for which alt to play when I was unsure, and I had my fun hunting down all the dark vs. light world bosses with my guild last year, but I never liked the forced personal toggle and how it made it impossible to have a neutral/grey character anymore unless you constantly flip-flopped between both sides. Still, it doesn't sit quite right with me to see something like that just get removed with no replacement. The forum post said they're planning to reintroduce the world bosses at some point, but who knows when that will be...

I do feel Bioware has been holding out on us a bit, waiting until so shortly before the expansion launch to tell us all this stuff. I mean, I guess it's still better than not finding out until it actually goes live, but still. I wouldn't go so far as to call something like the removal of Renown "bad news", but it's not really good news either, and at least to me it just feels like an unnecessary dampener on everyone's expansion hype.

Day 2: Class Stories #IntPiPoMo

I'm taking part in IntPiPoMo, and this is the second of ten screenshot posts I'm making this month, each one themed around a certain topic. Today's topic is... class stories!

The last time I made a post on this theme three years ago I noted that I have a very haphazard way of playing through the original stories nowadays. Many still consider them SWTOR's most compelling content ten years later, and while I don't exactly disagree, I'm clearly not as compelled to stick with them as most! Where others might start a new character and play through their story from beginning to end, I regularly hop between different characters while only progressing them by one or two missions at a time, meaning that without my spreadsheet I'd be hopelessly lost when it comes to remembering where each of my alts sits in terms of story.

Accordingly, when I gathered screenshots for this post, I ended up with an eclectic mix of images from different classes at very random points in their personal narrative.

This may well be the earliest moment I screenshotted in any class story ever, as this happens when your bounty hunter is like... level two? Historically I don't tend to take a lot of pictures on the starter planets except maybe on Tython due to how pretty it is.

This is Zilek, my Jedi Shadow on the Satele Shan server, solving his primary task on Taris the violent way. He's actually an absolutely ancient character - I think I first created him around the time free-to-play came out, but I don't actually tend to spend much time on servers other than Darth Malgus. One thing that makes him interesting though is that he's the only male character in my giant stable of alts - for some reason I've always struggled to bond with characters of the opposite sex in MMOs. I still dream of actually making some progress with him one day though.

Here we have another one of my consulars, my dps Sage, meeting with a child of the Emperor called Stark, like the ill-fated family from Game of Thrones. I always kind of liked this guy in the sense that despite of his very brief appearance, the voice actor manages to imbue him with a lot of character and he comes across as quite a tortured soul.

And one more shot of yet another consular, this one my DvL Shadow. It's a bit hard to make out in this static image, but the giant statue on the right was being smashed dramatically at the moment I took this. I've always liked these rare, more wide-angled scenes from the early game, considering that a lot of the earliest cut scenes were just basic shot/reverse shots.

Another nice wide-angled shot, this time from the Sith inquisitor's class story, when Darth Andru's Force ghost tries to kill you on Dromund Kaas, just before old Lord Kallig steps in to intervene. Who says Sith can't make great parents? Having a ghostly ancestor come in to save your hide on more than one occasion is definitely a perk.

Another shot of another inquisitor of mine, this time taking part in the iconic activity of shooting lightning! On second thought, I'm not 100% sure this was actually from a class story mission and not just a planetary quest, but there are enough similar moments of this type either way.

What else is iconic for Force users? Flinging/smashing things with the Force! Modelled here by my DvL Juggernaut.

And finally, here's the same character striking another one of my favourite iconic poses, lightsaber raised with determined expression on her face.

IntPiPoMo count: 15

LotS (of) Gear

It seems that Bioware decided to open the floodgates in regards to information about what else is coming with 7.0, which makes me glad that I'm not a news site and therefore not compelled to repost everything they say asap, but there's been a lot of food for thought and I'd definitely like to talk about at least some of it.

Today I'd like to discuss the news post called "Itemization in 7.0", which basically revealed that set bonuses being replaced by legendary items is only the beginning... and um, wow. My overall impression of that blog is best summed up as this new system being a sidegrade from Onslaught's, getting rid of some issues while introducing others, and I'm not sure whether I'll like it.

As I said in my review of Onslaught, I honestly thought the gearing this expansion has generally been great. I won't deny that it's had some issues, but at least to me, they were so minor that they barely affected my enjoyment, if at all. I guess I can't blame Bioware for aiming to address them anyway and trying for perfection, but I do worry a little that they'll just end up causing other issues that'll ultimately bother me more. I guess we'll see.

Less randomness, less gear needed

The way things worked in Onslaught, there was a lot of randomness (and bad drop rates for certain sets and Tacticals was definitely one of the criticisms I had), but this was somewhat compensated for by the game absolutely showering you with loot at every opportunity, so odds were good that you were going to get at least something interesting reasonably often. In terms of sheer quantity of drops, this system was very over the top, and having to pause after every other flashpoint or ops boss to deconstruct all the random gear filling up your inventory wasn't great, but I didn't consider it a massive bother either.

In the linked blog post, Bioware basically states that players hate RNG so they want to do away with most of it. In LotS, every time you complete (a weekly mission for) a certain type of content, you'll either get a piece of gear that's guaranteed to be useful to you, or some sort of currency to improve it. Very utilitarian and deterministic.

Some people will love that I'm sure. However, I've always liked a bit of RNG to be honest, that feeling of being surprised by what drops. To me, it's only bad if there's an expectation that you'll get a certain item within a decent amount of time but bad drop rates keep holding you back, or if it takes a lot of effort to even spin the metaphorical wheel and the results tend to feel unrewarding for the effort required. Overly deterministic loot systems can feel somewhat work-like in comparison, which I'm not a huge fan of, but I guess we'll see how this one ends up feeling.

Not all things are equal anymore

The second big ticket item in the news post is the announcement that they want to bring back tying item level rewards to specific pieces of content (read: you can only get the best gear by doing the hardest raids). More than anything, this is just one of those cans of worms I'm kind of tired of dealing with because I honestly don't care either way at this point in my life.

I do think it's fine to incentivise certain bits of content with more powerful rewards, especially if this content depends on a minimum number of participants to function or has high skill requirements. I'm perfectly fine with not having the best gear in the game myself, as long as what I've got serves me for doing the content I want to do. In a casual theme park game like SWTOR it really doesn't matter and I think people who get up into a huff because someone gets to do their dailies with a few more item levels than they have are drama queens.

But at the same time, I also don't care if it's not that way. Onslaught's gearing system made SWTOR the most egalitarian it has ever been, as everyone could work their way up to item level 306 by doing any activity they wanted. I continued to do operations anyway because I enjoy them, and it didn't hurt me that someone else could grind their way to the same gear by doing things that would be boring to me. Live and let live, I say.

So I don't really mind either way, though I do sort of wonder what prompted this change on Bioware's end. Not enough people doing the latest operation this expansion, I guess? I will say that Nature of Progress was terribly incentivised initially, but that didn't have anything to do with item levels, but rather with the fact that it initially dropped less loot than the old operations while also having worse drop rates for its coveted special gear sets somehow, even though the new ops was "supposed" to be the best way to farm them.

Different gearing paths

A catchphrase that Bioware has been using to describe their design philosophy for several years now is to "play your own way", yet somehow this can apparently be used to justify totally opposing design decisions, which I find fascinating. In Onslaught the "play your own way" concept was supposed to be supported by the fact that you could get your gear drops - with the exception of a select few sets - from any source. The implementation was just a bit wonky because in practice rewards from PvP were absolutely anaemic while flashpoints were the way to go, but I guess I was willing to forgive that because I really like running flashpoints with my friends anyway.

In LotS on the other hand, playing your own way will apparently mean largely separate gearing paths for every activity, though the details of just how separate they are going to be are still a bit fuzzy to me. The basic idea is that veteran flashpoints will drop different items from master mode flashpoints, which will drop different items from PvP and so on, with each one having its own upgrade currency as well, though my understanding is that their stats should be comparable except for the different item level caps for some activities as per the previous point.

At the same time they're apparently not totally separate, as the example they cite is that you'll be able to upgrade flashpoint gear with "flashpoint upgrade currency, daily/heroic currency, conquest currency" - but not PvP currency? Which does bring me to my main gripe with this announcement, which is that as someone who likes to regularly take part in different types of content, it sounds confusing as hell and as if gathering pieces of gear from different sources might end up being a proper nightmare. Maybe they just didn't explain it very well and it won't be as bad as it sounds, but I really don't miss having umpteen different vendors to trade in different tiers of stuff like we had at the end of Knights of the Eternal Throne.

Some simplifications 

While the above sounds like potentially unnecessary complication to me, there are some things they are planning to simplify. Amplifiers will be gone, and nobody will miss them except for the handful of crafters who actually bothered to optimise them for a special crew skill crit set, and these players do have my sympathy.

Augments are still somewhat in the air and it sounds like Bioware don't plan to add a new tier of them, but the old ones will keep being useful.

Most importantly though, the default way of gearing at level 80 will simply be unmoddable items, with purchasable modifications becoming something that still becomes accessible at max level if you do want to change things around for some reason. As someone who's never enjoyed the number-crunching associated with min-maxing, I'm happy with this, especially as it sounds like this should e.g. result in damage dealers being automatically accuracy capped with a few pieces of "default" gear without having to maths out the perfect way to mix and match their mods. Leaving in the option to do this if you're hardcore while making things more straightforward for the more casually inclined strikes me as a good compromise.

All in all, it sounds like a lot of change to address what were mostly non-issues to me anyway, so I can't say I'm hugely excited about anything I've read here. I'm not massively worried either... just a little disappointed that they feel the need to mess with gearing this much when Onslaught already had it mostly right in my opinion.

Day 1: Bugs #IntPiPoMo

I'm taking part in IntPiPoMo, and this is the first of ten screenshot posts I'm making this month, each one themed around a certain topic. Today's topic is... bugs!

One thing I noticed while compiling these was that the vast majority of them fell into one of two categories: issues with terrain or character display oddities. I don't know if it's a sign of a mature MMO that its bugs tend to be less random or whether it's just that those two types of bugs are most likely to be visually striking enough for me to bother screenshotting them.

From the first category, we have the classic "stuck in falling pose". This one was kind of impressive to me because there wasn't even any obviously problematic terrain around, my character's foot just touched a nearby holo sign or something?

Fortunately SWTOR's /stuck command is good at helping you extract yourself from most situations of this kind, though it does have a cooldown and I've definitely been in positions where it took me several minutes to escape my predicament. I suppose this is the kind of thing no MMO can ever be 100% foolproof against, but it does seem to me that I get stuck in SWTOR's terrain a lot more often than in other games.

Here a guildie appeared to have sunk into the floor visually, though I don't remember whether he was actually stuck too or our game clients were just confused about his position.

Something that has only happened to me very rarely but always amused me to no end is falling through the terrain. Here a leap by my Guardian during a Novare Coast match had somehow resulted in her crashing straight through the ground and disappearing into the aether... hang on, I even have an animated gif of this one somewhere for the full effect:

The final item from the terrain category is visually broken ground:

Here we found a very noticeable gap in the floor of the Huntmaster's room in Nature of Progress. I only saw it on that one day though, I submitted a bug report form for it and the next time I checked it was already gone again.

For the character display oddities category, we have this shot of us fighting the last boss in the Divided We Fall uprising. The issue may not be immediately obvious, but if you look at the enemy targeting window, you can see that Commander Kallin was the invisible man and had no face! And it wasn't just in that window either, we did look at him up close over the course of the fight and he was invisible "in person" too, so to speak.

This one on the other hand may have been an issue with just the targeting window, but I still thought it was funny. Was this Sage too short to reach all the way up to the camera? I'm not sure where exactly this was, but I'm thinking it was probably the Boarding Party flashpoint.

Finally, one bug that was slightly unusual but for which I like the story associated with it: Basically, at the end of the Kaon Under Siege flashpoint you need to have a group conversation with an NPC called Melarra, and as per the way group conversations work, everyone needs to stand within a green circle around the NPC. The problem was that people didn't always see Melarra in the same place - she was supposed to be on a raised platform as visible in the screenshot, but for some players she would appear on ground level, making it impossible to initiate the conversation properly. It wasn't a huge deal as there was a simple workaround that worked almost all the time, which was to have the player who saw her in the wrong place leave the instance and come back in, but considering that you spawn back in quite far away from the conversation location, it always wasted a lot of time.

Well, my guildies once set themselves the target to figure out just what was causing this bug and were soon able to reproduce it reliably: Melarra starts running up to her spot once you reach a certain checkpoint yourself, and if anyone was still on the ground floor at that time, that's when Melarra would spawn on the ground floor for that person too. Basically, it was a lesson in not running ahead and leaving people behind! This bug was fixed in patch 6.3.

IntPiPoMo count: 7

Coming Up: Lots of Pictures! #IntPiPoMo

November is National Novel Writing Month, and a few years ago someone came up with the idea of International Picture Posting Month to go along with it, as a picture is worth a thousand words, right? I've taken part in this cute little initiative several times in the past; it was just on break last year.

Chestnut of Gamer Girl Confessions has more information about the event here, including a link to a sign-up form where you can officially join in to have your efforts recognised.

Since I'm not someone who always includes a lot of pictures in her posts organically, I'll also revive the tradition from past years to go through my themed 10 days of SWTOR screenshots over the course of the month, in which I'll post a selection of screenshots centred around a certain topic every few days and tell whatever little stories go along with them.

My self-imposed rule for selecting the screenshots has always been that anything's eligible that I've taken since the last time I did the challenge (minus any images that I already included in other posts, as per IntPiPoMo rules), which means that I can go as far back as November 2018 for my screenies this time! We'll see what I'll dig up...

Big 7.0 News!

Sorry, we still don't have a release date for Legacy of the Sith. Considering that Onslaught's launch date was announced about seven weeks in advance, and if we assume that Bioware is aiming for a similar schedule this time around, they're rapidly running out of time. If we don't have a date by the end of next week, I expect we'll eventually be hit with an announcement that they have to delay until January because things just aren't quite ready yet.

However! We did get a big info dump yesterday, detailing more major changes coming with the expansion that had previously not even been hinted at, so I thought those were very much worth talking about.

Goodbye to Set Bonuses, Say Hello to Legendaries

First off, we had a big news post detailing how they'll be phasing out set bonuses in favour of simply putting similar effects on single pieces of gear for either the ear or the implant slot, which will be called legendary items and you'll be able to equip two at a time.

This was quite a big surprise to me personally because Bioware generally seemed happy with the way gearing in Onslaught has panned out and hadn't said anything about wanting to make any major changes to this, so this announcement comes on fairly short notice. Aside from the surprise, I can't say that this evokes any particularly strong feelings in me though. As mentioned in my Onslaught in Review post, one downside of the current system has been that it felt a bit clogged up with too many useless sets, but I don't really know if this change is going to address that (there could still be plenty of useless legendaries).

Needing fewer pieces to swap between different bonuses will be nice for min-maxers who like to adjust their gear for different situations while also wanting to have every piece augmented, but I'm not really one of those so that won't impact me personally. I do wonder whether the removal of the whole set concept won't make these new legendaries too similar to Tacticals... as the only difference between them will effectively be that legendary ear pieces and implants can also be augmented and still have regular stats on them as well.

Oh yeah, since legendaries are effectively regular gear pieces with an item level, you'll also be able to upgrade them if you get a good one at a low level. No details have been provided about how that's supposed to work though.

Then there was also a big forum post announcing not one but five other major changes. Click the link if you want all the details as I'll just be summarising and adding my thoughts on each item.

Daily and Weekly Mission Resets

According to this, Bioware will change the way dailies and weeklies work, so that progress won't be saved anymore past reset time and old dailies/weeklies will be removed from your log. My first thought on reading this was that this must surely be meant to combat the kind of Conquest prep my guild has been doing for Total Galactic War by e.g. getting the PvP weekly to 9/10 the previous week and then finishing it quickly on the next day, but on second thought that's such an incredibly niche thing to do that doesn't really harm anyone, and while this change would put a stop to it, I don't think that's the primary intention.

Thinking about it some more though, I still couldn't help but see anything but negative effects to this proposed change. On Iokath I like to pick up several sets of rotating dailies over the course of several days so that I can then knock out all the quests in a single area in one go - with this change this would no longer be possible. Also, Conquest prep aside, things like the PvP weekly can require quite a bit of time to complete with its ten win requirement, so in this brave new world of constant resets you'd have to be very focused in your play to ever complete it before it gets reset, which would go very much against SWTOR's casual and alt-friendly nature.

The reasoning given for this change is that they want to rotate weekly content for bonus rewards, so I guess that some weeks the PvP weekly would be different from the "normal" version? I have to admit I don't fully understand what they're planning to do here, so I'll have to reserve final judgement until we know more, but as laid out it doesn't really sound appealing to be honest, with the downsides of these forced resets far outweighing any potential benefits I can imagine.

Economy Adjustments

Credit inflation has been a hot topic recently, so I'm not surprised to see Bioware address this. I am somewhat surprised that Conquest credit rewards are their first target for a nerf, but then they are the only ones with hard data on just which activities inject the most credits into the economy so I'll take their word for it.

I'm less clear on why they want to remove certain rare material rewards from Conquest, as that will drive up their prices even more and not have any effect on the influx of credits? Unless Bioware felt that these particular items are actually worth too little at the moment, but if that was their thinking they didn't make it very clear.

Shared Tagging for Mobs

This is something that many more modern MMOs have, so I'm sure many will rejoice and go "finally", but from me this one gets nothing more than a shrug to be honest. I've spent enough time in MMOs with and without shared mob tagging to have seen its benefits in areas where mob spawns are contested or fights are very tough, but from my experience it also has downsides that don't make it objectively superior. People sometimes say that it makes the community better when other players are not viewed as competition, and it may well reduce incidents of someone yelling at another person for "stealing" their mob, but at the same time it reduces incentives to group up with and talk to other players, and at least in my book, basically being able to ignore the people around you because their actions don't affect you in any way isn't actually "friendlier".

When it comes to open world mobs and bosses with rare drops, it could also increase hostility as basically someone could run in and e.g. hit Dreadtooth twice while an ops group is fighting him and then get his rare loot assigned to them by RNG. If you can't "secure" the loot by tagging, certain players may feel that they instead need to discourage competition for loot with abusive behaviour, though I admit that would likely be an edge case. My point is that in my opinion it just trades one potential source of occasional bad experiences for a different kind.

Combat Change - Vanish

So this one is interesting - vanishing into stealth will no longer cause you to exit combat in flashpoints and operations; it will just drop aggro, with the stated intent of doing away with the stealth res meta. For those not too up-to-date on these things (I wouldn't blame you), the way it works currently is that every advanced class that is capable of healing is able to revive in combat, but the ability to do so has a four to five minute cooldown for the individual, and also puts a five-minute debuff on the whole ops group so that combat res can't be used again during that time, even by another player.

This always seemed pretty reasonable to me, but balance was thrown out of whack by the fact that characters with stealth could vanish during the fight, exit combat, and then use their normal, out-of-combat revive which was unaffected by the debuff - as a Scoundrel/Operative you could do this multiple times in a row! While this has technically been possible forever, I think in the early years it was relatively rare as it takes some skill to not get put back into combat by bad timing, so it took some time for the meta to truly permeate the community I guess.

Nowadays it's pretty common in higher-level content though and puts a very high value on having multiple stealthers in your group. My own ops team doesn't have someone who can stealth out to revive in our normal setup, and I found it very noticeable that when I went to help out my other guild's progression team on some nights (who run with more stealthers) that they relied quite heavily on those extra revives sometimes and that this allowed them to recover from many a mishap that would have forced a wipe for my own team.

So this change is meant to get rid of this whole meta... but to make up for it, Bioware will remove the debuff that limits combat revives and instead just restrict the ability to healing specs. I've seen some negative reactions to this, primarily from people who liked to prove their skill with well-timed stealth reses or dpsers who feel they are losing some utility with the removal of combat revives for non-healers, but for the average ops group this is simply a big buff as you'll have way more combat revives available, and without having to stack stealth classes.

Dps-specced resers losing their in-combat revive is a bit of a downer for those classes, and it does mean that it will always fall on the healers to do the resing going forward (which does have its own risks - I've seen many a wipe triggered by a healer deciding to stop healing in order to do a combat res at a bad time), but overall I'd expect the benefits to outweigh the drawbacks on this one.

The one question mark that remains is what other bits of "stealth cheese" will be affected by this change, as the post does call out the fact that vanishing in general often makes it possible "to circumvent intended game mechanics" - a good example of this would be the first boss in TFB, where having a Shadow tank vanish out during the tank swap currently causes no small adds to spawn, which means you don't have to deal with that mechanic at all and your dps gets a lot of extra uptime on the boss. It's not entirely clear just how many of these sorts of situations will be affected by this change though.

Weapons in Outfit Designer

This mostly made me smile due to a couple of comments I got in the past that claimed that Bioware couldn't do this and that combat styles were in fact supposed to be a "replacement" for this feature, which I never thought made any sense. Seeing it announced as another addition coming with 7.0 felt somewhat vindicating in that regard, though I'm kind of surprised they didn't make a bigger deal out of it.

For me personally this won't actually do anything as I never understood why people wanted this so much (if every Jedi in my flashpoint and ops groups used the exact same lightsaber I would never notice), but I know it's something that a lot of people have been requesting for quite a while, so it's a good thing that it's being added.

What are your thoughts on these changes? Most of the early reactions I've seen so far have been somewhat mixed, with people loving one thing but then hating another. I'm honestly kind of neutral about most of them at this point, with the vanish nerf striking me as the most positive change and the plans to reset repeatable missions sounding the most unappealing - with the caveat that I feel there are aspects to the latter that I don't think we fully understand yet.

10 Years of SWTOR, Split into Periods

SWTOR's tenth birthday is still more than a month away, but I've decided to get in on the reminiscing a bit early. It's crazy to think that I've been subscribed to this game continually since launch - at this point I've played SWTOR for longer than even my early love World of Warcraft. During this time, I've been witness to a lot of ups and downs... and I think it's interesting how - at least from my point of view - the game's history can be broken up into a number of very distinctive and different periods, usually lasting around two years on average.

The Short-Lived Subscription MMO - December 2011 to November 2012

SWTOR launched in late 2011, towards the end of what I'll just call "the WoW Killer Years", a period during which a lot of different publishers tried to get into the MMO business after World of Warcraft's runaway success, hoping to outdo Blizzard and earn even more subscription money than they did - just to fail pretty spectacularly (at least in terms of achieving that goal). SWTOR looked like it probably had the best chances of them all, having a massive budget behind it (some estimated that at release, it was the most expensive video game ever made up to that point) and being based on one of the world's biggest IPs.

It launched to resounding critical success and an initial subscriber pool of nearly two million, causing Bioware to open lots of new servers during the early weeks just to accommodate everyone. As late as three months later, the game was still celebrated as a success and even dubbed "the fastest growing MMO of all time". But as the like-dislike ratio on that video shows, clouds were already starting to appear on the horizon as subs were stagnating and people were expressing discontent with the game.

I'll go out on a limb here and say that there wasn't anything fundamentally wrong with it in terms of gameplay, even at launch... it's just that trying to out-WoW World of Warcraft isn't something that's worked for anyone, ever, and Bioware tried to do so with a budget and degree of ambition that might have been unrealistic even if they had gotten ten million subscribers. At the same time it wasn't actually different enough from other MMO launches of the era from a player's perspective: People who played it like they were used to playing WoW rushed to max level and then complained that there wasn't enough to do. Many who embraced the more narrative-driven nature of the game enjoyed the story, but felt that it was dragged down by all the "MMO stuff" such as needing to do content other than the main story to level up.

With how public Bioware and EA had been in their boasting about the game's success, the fall from grace was no less publicly visible: After initial brags about how they weren't worried about sub numbers at all because even in their projected "worst case scenario" the game was going to be totally fine with as little as 500k subs, it was very uncomfortable to watch the publicly reported subscription numbers approach that number at a pretty rapid pace. Soon, servers were merged and devs laid off.

It's interesting to note though, that if (like me) you really enjoyed what the game had on offer and didn't pay too much attention to the bad PR, it was actually a great time to be a player. Eight unique class stories provided months of story content to play through (assuming you didn't play 24/7 like some people), and new MMO content (such as flashpoints and operations) and quality of life features were being added pretty much every other month.

Still, thanks to the dropping sub numbers, SWTOR ended up announcing a conversion to free-to-play after only seven months of being a subscription MMO, which I think remains the fastest U-turn of its kind in the genre to this day. The actual implementation happened less than four months later.

Early Free to Play - November 2012 to October 2015

SWTOR wasn't the first MMO to switch from requiring a subscription to being free to play, but its predecessors like LOTRO and DDO had largely done this by granting free players only limited access to the game and chopping the remaining content up into bits that could then be sold as individual DLCs. SWTOR surprised everyone by taking a completely different approach and making all the then current content free... while also looking for every possible avenue to charge you money in other ways, from restricting certain quest rewards to subscribers to not letting you use emotes to selling random loot boxes in the newly minted cash shop.

This was greeted with understandable scepticism by genre veterans, and some of the more awkward monetisation attempts such as charging for extra action bars in the UI were (rightfully) mocked, even if they ultimately didn't leave much of a mark. The public consensus seemed to be that the rapid and somewhat clunky conversion to free-to-play was simply a sign that the game had failed and that was that. We do know now that behind the scenes, the business model change actually really turned the game's financial fortunes around though.

As a subscribing player meanwhile, you could continue to play happily as you had before, just with the addition of a cash shop with cosmetics. And again, the next three years actually weren't such a bad time if you enjoyed what was on offer. Despite the reduced scope and the admission that there wasn't going to be enough budget to add any more class-specific content, new releases kept coming out at a good pace. During those two and a half years we got two story expansions, housing, space PVP, seven new flashpoints and five more operations.

If dataminers are to be believed, this was at least in part made possible through the use of a lot of art assets that had originally been created in the game's early days to serve as backdrops for more class story and which could be repurposed for flashpoints or different storylines without too much effort. The only thing you could argue which was perhaps a bit lacking during this time was class-specific personalisation, as companions became irrelevant to the story and both the Makeb and Revan storylines were written to be one-size-fits-all, regardless of your originally chosen class.

Knights of the Drastically Different Direction - October 2015 to November 2016

In June 2015, Bioware surprised everyone by dropping a shiny new CGI trailer for the next expansion, called Knights of the Fallen Empire. With it came the announcement of a planned change in direction - instead of piling on more and more of all this MMO stuff, the game was going to focus more on being the always-online KOTOR that so many players apparently wanted it to be, with a more engaging and personalised main storyline and no immediate plans for more group content (though the existing content was going to be re-scaled to make it infinitely re-usable instead of something you eventually out-levelled).

Fans of group content were not well pleased by this - my previous guild leader quit the game as a result - but I think I was probably in the majority in hoping that this was still going to be a positive thing for the game overall. After all, a love for story was why we were playing this over something like WoW, right? And they could always add more group content later, right? (Insert "For the Better, Right?" meme here.)

Knights of the Fallen Empire (KotFE for short) released in October 2015 to what felt like universal critical acclaim. The new chapter format featured much more engaging cut scenes, and changes to companions meant that they were more involved in the story than they had ever been before. The renewed attention from the wider media seemed to bring in a whole new audience. It all looked quite promising... until you got to the end of the initial nine story chapters and were told to wait a couple of months for the release of the next one, with seemingly not much else in terms of goals to pursue. Anecdotally, the new story-only players went "okay, that was great, see you later" and then only came back for new releases or not at all, while the existing audience felt frustrated by a lack of new, social endgame.

Bioware actually did a pretty decent job with releasing one chapter per month over the next few months, even if they didn't manage to stick to their original schedule perfectly. The problem was that there wasn't much to engage players between chapters (which would only take an hour or two even if you were taking it slowly), and as the story progressed, the narrative direction was also viewed more and more critically by an increasing number of players, especially those who didn't main a Force-using class (yes, I'm biased here). Why was there so much focus on these new NPCs? Where were the Republic and the Empire, not to mention our old companions? Why were smugglers and bounty hunters alike shoehorned into a narrative full of Force mumbo-jumbo that made you out to be some sort of Chosen One?

KotFE's last chapter released in August 2016, and already two months later the follow-up expansion Knights of the Eternal Throne was announced, again with a shiny CGI trailer. Taking in the feedback that KotFE had felt unnecessarily drawn out, they did away with the monthly updates and just condensed everything into nine more chapters that could be released all at once. There were also plans to bring at least a little bit of group content back in the form of uprisings, which were meant to be something along the lines of "flashpoints light". Oh, and they were going to introduce a whole new gearing system, which immediately set off alarm bells in every seasoned player's head because it was completely RNG-based, with no more item drops and just a sort of endless levelling where you'd get a lootbox with random contents every time you levelled up.

When the expansion launched only another month later, the story was once again mostly well received as a conclusion to previous events, but uprisings were no great success, and the new gearing system called Galactic Command was every bit as bad as people had feared, if not worse. Once again, I saw several veteran players throw in the towel during this period and to be honest it was the closest I've ever come to wanting to step away from the game myself, as the day-to-day gameplay was just that frustrating.

The In-Between Years - November 2016 to December 2018

In many ways, the game was not in the greatest of states after the release of Knights of the Eternal Throne. It's funny because to this day I can find comments from people who think that KotET was SWTOR at its greatest - but usually they are the type who played through the story once and then left, never interacting with the rest of the game or the community at large (which is a valid way to play, don't get me wrong, but it does make you somewhat less qualified to comment on the overall state of the game and its health).

The new gearing system was terrible and immediately required damage control that took time to implement. Many players who'd previously focused on group content had dropped out or let their subs lapse since Bioware had shown little interest in catering to their interests for almost two years. And even the story, for all the focus KotFE and KotET had put on it as a feature, felt rather derailed, as it had thrown much of the detailed world building of the base game out in favour of telling what turned out to be basically someone's tabletop campaign full of overpowered NPCs and ended with your character pretty much being the most powerful person in the known galaxy. Where do you even go from there?

I'd love to know what was going on behind the scenes during the "Knights of" years and immediately after. Maybe we can get a Jason Schreier-esque exposé on the subject one day. As a long-time player it felt as if someone who didn't really care that much about the game as it was had somehow managed to give a good sales pitch for injecting their personal pet project into SWTOR in a board room somewhere, and when that didn't pan out the way they planned, they jumped ship, leaving the rest of the team to pick up the pieces.

And that's what the next two years felt like, like the people in charge now slowly picking up the pieces and trying to recover what was left of this beautiful MMO. Galactic Command was eventually transformed into something that wasn't totally terrible. The story had to find a way to dial the player character's OP-ness back down a bit, something that never feels great even when it's necessary, and the focus was slowly shifted back to the older factions and existing companions. We even got our first new piece of proper group content in ages, in the form of an operation that was released one boss at a time over the course of nearly a year, plus a series of three flashpoints. Personally I did appreciate the general intentions behind this, it was just hard to be super enthusiastic about some of the results as the team initially seemed to struggle to find its feet again based on the awkwardness of some of the storytelling, plus releases just felt very slow after the rapid-fire way in which Bioware had added group content pre-KotFE and then story chapters during the "Knights Years".

A New Hope (The Expansions Strike Back?) - December 2018 to now

After more than two years of small, piecemeal content releases we were eventually told that we'd get a proper expansion again, though the name and details for it weren't announced until 2019. The reason I put the transition to this period in late 2018 is that this is when we got what you could call the "prelude" to the Onslaught expansion, in the form of the Jedi Under Siege update, which was a sudden return to form in the sense that it was much closer to the sorts of content updates we used to get before Knights of the Fallen Empire, with a whole new planet and separate, well-written storylines for Republic and Empire. This was continued in the Onslaught expansion that eventually released in October 2019, and now we're looking at a late 2021 release for the next expansion, Legacy of the Sith.

I'm sure some jaded old-timers will wonder why I've titled this section "A New Hope" when the content release cadence hasn't actually improved much since the post-KotET years. To that I'll say that first off, it has improved at least a little, even with the disruption by COVID, but secondly, the quality has been so much better and for me that counts for a lot.

Even more importantly though, unlike the early post-KotET content, it all feels very well thought-out and like it's part of a bigger plan, with the devs actually being in it for the long run. They're trying to add different types of content for all of the game's existing players again instead of hyper-focusing on one new idea that someone thinks will be a runaway success. The stories actually make sense and use the game's vast cast of characters to full effect. Old features are getting revised alongside new releases, not to give them some sort of drastic revamp but to keep the early game in shape and attractive to newer players as well. Basically, it feels like the game is finally being handled like an MMO should be handled, with realistic expectations, long-time planning and appreciation for its most loyal player base. And without wanting to jinx it, that absolutely does give me hope for the future and SWTOR's next ten years.

Maximum Pacifism Achieved!

At last, the time has come! Last night my pacifist Jedi Pacis hit level 75 after another round of Cantina Rush on Nar Shaddaa. The Feast of Prosperity turned out to be nothing short of a fountain of XP for her. Two daily quests each for cooking and serving food plus a weekly associated with both, plus the ingredient gathering that she could at least do when it involved picking fruit on Belsavis or gathering ice crystals on Hoth. Three weeklies completed then also granted the meta weekly, and all this with double XP - what more could you ask for?

The only slight disappointment was that she couldn't do any of the one-time story quests past the intro. The mission to Rishi doesn't require any combat and therefore would have been compatible with her ideals, but alas... Rishi doesn't have any heroics or other accessible quick travel options, so she can't actually go there.

Want to know what was the first thing I did upon hitting max-level? I went to the fleet, bought the "Go to Sleep, Go to Sleep!" Tactical and then returned to Tatooine to rescue Raith's loved ones. Yes, I never deleted that quest from my log and it had been staring at me from my mission tracker ever since. The funny thing was, after I used the double CC to peacefully remove the toy robots from the chest, I ran into another player on my way out who was just barrelling through and killing all the mobs anyway. If that had happened back during my first visit, I could have completed that quest over a year ago, but of course at the time nobody else just happened to come through at the right moment.

As for what's going to happen to Pacis now... I don't know, I'll probably let her participate in the Feast some more and then give her a bit of a break. Next time the swoop event comes around I might have a go at seeing how many of the one-time story quests for that I can do - I picked them up last time with the intent to just do them whenever, but then found out that the quest NPCs on other planets also disappear when the event isn't on, so you can't progress the off-Dantooine steps during that time either. When LotS raises the level cap to 80 I'll probably get her up there as well at some point, but certainly not as a priority over my regular characters.

I would say something about what a long, strange trip it's been, but it really hasn't been all that long. I created Pacis back in August 2019, over two years ago now, but the only reason it took this long to level her was that my interest in the project has been very on and off. Her actual /played time after hitting the cap was only two days and six hours, which isn't long at all, especially when you consider how much her pacifism hobbled her ability to level up normally.

Either way this has been a very interesting experiment. In a way I was both surprised by how much full pacifism limited me and by how much I was still able to do despite of all the additional limitations I put on myself. As an example of the former, I'm thinking of things like being unable to click certain quest items or use a lot of abilities without a weapon equipped (even when the ability didn't sound like something that should require a weapon), or how many side quests didn't even unlock without having made sufficient progress on the main storyline. And of course there was being unable to leave Tython via shuttle after having fully explored the map at level five.

I actually think that you wouldn't be able to replicate Pacis' exact levelling path today, since she only managed to "escape" the planet via the Pirate Incursion quick travel option to Dantooine, which was originally accessible from level one, however this has now been patched out to require level twenty (at least according to this event guide by Vulkk) and is therefore no longer an option.

On the other hand though, I was surprised by the sheer amount of quests that didn't strictly require any fighting or killing, despite of SWTOR's early levelling being very much designed in the classic "kill ten rats" tradition. As players we just tend to kill everything that's in the way because it's the "natural" and easy thing to do, and the game also pretty much assumes that you will do this - it never ceased to amuse me when some NPC dialogue referred to me supposedly beating people up when I had done no such thing.

Travel without a ship was also more feasible than I had expected. Generally speaking, the game really expects you to do your class mission up to the end of Coruscant at least and to definitely get your ship asap... without it, you can't freely fly from planet to planet, you can't accept guild ship summons, and you can't use the "exit to planet" option from a stronghold. But the quick travel items added for heroics in 4.0 and later even for some other missions make no such distinctions and were a surprising godsend in terms of getting around. I would have been quite content to level from 5 to 75 purely by running the two dailies on Dantooine (though that would have been quite boring) but being able to planet-hop via these quick travel items certainly made things a lot more interesting and varied.

EDIT: This was a big enough deal for me that I also made a post on the subreddit.

Feasting So Far

The first week of this year's Feast of Prosperity is behind us and it's been going well from my point of view. The funniest thing that happened to me so far occurred when I did the story quest on Rishi on my Sorc on the second day, and while the Selonian was talking to me about how I should please not kill this rare Orobird, another Sith sprinted right through my cut scene (a glitch that sometimes happens), immediately followed by sounds of lightning and bird screeches from off-screen. I actually laughed out loud at that.

Immediately afterwards another player ran up to me and asked me if I could help them kill a Tonitran. I said sure, but even as I did so I wondered why they needed help killing a single silver mob... it was only then that I noticed that the character was only level 36! I'm surprised you can even pick up the quest at such a low level, but I guess strictly speaking the Rishi step doesn't require you to kill anything...

I've been doing the dailies pretty consistently on at least one character per day. Initially I was quite motivated to earn the event currency to buy rewards too - something that's quite rare for me - because last year I realised fairly late that there were actually a lot of rewards that I liked, and that I hadn't earned enough tokens to afford them all. However, after a week I've managed to buy most of the things I wanted for my main and that I missed out on last year, so my enthusiasm to earn more tokens that I'm not sure how to spend anymore is admittedly waning a bit.

There are some achievements left to chase, and apparently achievement hunters were quite pleased that Bioware finally fixed the one hidden achievement that was impossible to complete last year, but what they haven't fixed is the hidden achievements revealing themselves on cue in the first place. Clicking on other people's progress has revealed to me that I've apparently also been working on them (unknowingly) but being unable to keep track of my own progress because it won't show in my achievement panel has been a bit of a downer.

It's a good thing I at least really love the world boss hunts, whether I still need them or not. There were some issues here too, with the Primal Destroyer not respawning properly if people tried to evade its adds instead of killing them, though I'll confess that I blame that one more on the players than on Bioware. Yes, it's a bug, but why even bother trying to evade a couple of mobs that only take seconds to kill... it astounded me that there were enough people doing that to bug out the boss in every single instance at one point. It's just so unnecessary. Like when people try to circumvent that one weak mob in Directive 7, someone gets stuck and then everyone has to wait around for them to un-stick themselves.

But I do love the feeling of the world boss hunts in general. Just pop down to Nar Shaddaa, pick up the daily mission, type "+wb" in chat and you're pretty much on your way. It's great to see ops groups filling up to their max capacity within minutes and see the traces of each group coming and going in the form of multiple dead copies of the same world boss lying next to each other. A lot of SWTOR's focus is on instanced and/or solo content and that's absolutely its strength, but I do love the hustle and bustle of these world boss groups reminding us that it's still an MMO for a reason.