Finding My Season 3 Groove

During Galactic Season 1 I kept a diary of all the objectives I completed, because the way the system worked encouraged you to play in slightly wacky ways and it was fun to document that - e.g. me trying to squeeze in two rounds of dailies before having to go to an emergency dental appointment. I was grateful that Season 2 eased up on that, but it also made the whole thing somewhat less fun to write about because a lot of objectives more or less completed themselves, in the sense that they simply got done as a side effect of normal play.

Since everything was so easy to complete, I took up the additional challenge of completing Season 2 on the game's other four servers as well, and that was actually quite engaging and interesting. Since Season 3 only made some very minor and (to me) inconsequential changes to how things work, my plan was to go for completion on all five servers right away this time.

In many ways I figured that this would actually be easier now that I have established legacies on all servers, but as it turns out, going all in from the beginning does actually feel like a bit much. Originally my plan was to just focus on Darth Malgus to begin with and only earn points from logging in and completing the daily objective on the other servers, but then I was like "well, this weekly isn't that hard, I'm sure I can do at least that one on multiple servers" and then things kind of spiralled from there.

I thought things would be better during week two, since it was also Total Galactic War and I wanted to focus on helping my guild win a planet through Conquest, but our competition turned out to be a lot less competitive than I expected, meaning I soon felt that I could ease up on the point grinding and do other things anyway, such as completing the CZ-198 weekly ten times (twice per server) - madness!

So while it's only the end of week two, I'm already sitting on seasons level 23 on Darth Malgus and 16 on all the other servers. I'd really like to pace myself better because part of the appeal of doing the season on multiple servers is that it'll give me something to do for longer, without being done quite so quickly, but obviously that doesn't work very well if I push my legacies on the other servers too hard from the beginning.

The "problem" is that the weekly objectives often encourage doing things in planned-out chunks, so you do just a little bit and then log off to do something else... and if you're like me you might go: hey, why not do the same little bit on another server, and on it goes until I've suddenly done the same daily zone ten times.

Trying to find the right balance in that regard is going to be... interesting.

Also, I know you can't complete more than seven weekly objectives, but I liked how close I got to getting all ten done near-simultaneously last week.

Andor Is Amazing

I'm perhaps not the most discerning Star Wars fan, which is why I don't really get it whenever people get super upset about not liking some new piece of content. I'm generally happy if I derive some sort of enjoyment from it, even if it's not perfect, and I'm okay with not everything being good or appealing to me personally. I thought the sequel trilogy was ultimately disappointing, but I've been enjoying most of the stuff Disney's been producing for TV. I thought Andor was going to be just another one of those shows - not groundbreaking, but enjoyable enough.

And the first few episodes did start out that way for me - entertaining enough, with some interesting parts, and others that were a bit more meh (in my opinion anyway). However, something happened around episode four or five: things started to ramp up, tension started to build, characters got more interesting. Episode six had me glued to my screen. I had to watch episode seven a second time to make sure I hadn't missed anything important (and I had, so it was good that I did that). I started seeking out articles and conversations about it because just watching the show wasn't good enough anymore. Andor reminded me what it's like to not just enjoy something, but to truly be a fan.

Poster taken from the show's IMDB page.

Why is that? Well, I do think it can be said that it's objectively very well produced. The acting is good, the writing is sharp and clever, there are some great visuals and it's supported by a strong soundtrack. It presents a number of interesting characters with a lot of nuance to their actions, and it does a lot of world building - not in the sense of inventing new locations, though that's something that does happen as well, but in the sense that it really explores what it means to live under the Empire as a regular person, to work for it or rebel against it.

I get that if for you, Star Wars is all about the lightsabers and spectacle, this may not be your cup of tea, but for me as someone who's always been very interested in the wider setting, it's fantastic. I liked this about Solo as well.

Unlike Solo however, Andor leans heavily into a more serious interpretation of the setting, to the point that I feel it genuinely manages to shift genre. The core Star Wars films could be classified as family-friendly action adventures - sure, there are some serious themes and bad things happen, but we're not meant to think too deeply about e.g. what it means for a whole planet to get blown up and a whole civilisation to be eradicated. That's not a flaw; that's just a convention of the genre.

My fascination with Andor led to me rewatching Rogue One the other day as well, and while that tried to be grittier in many ways, it still feels like a traditional Star Wars film in most other aspects... which actually makes all the tragic deaths feel a bit weird, because all the heroes dying doesn't quite fit the genre, yet at the same time the film also doesn't go far enough to really pause and think about what it all means.

Andor on the other hand is a full-blown... drama, spy thriller? I find it hard to categorise actually, but it's definitely not just an action adventure. In fact, one of the criticisms I've seen levelled at it is that there hasn't been enough action, that it's "too slow" because we spend so much time just watching characters talk with seemingly nothing happening except character development, but I can't say that I've ever felt that way, even during the first few episodes that didn't really excite me that much.

Usually I'd wait to write this kind of post until a show or at least the season is over, but in this case my excitement has got the better of me and I couldn't really contain it any longer. At the time of me writing this there are four episodes left in the season, and for all I know the writers could still mess up horribly and ruin everything, but at the moment that doesn't seem likely to me. I'm pleased to hear that a second season is already in the works.

Assuming that the show can stick the landing, I hope that this will inspire Disney to allow more Star Wars films or TV series like this to be made. And by "like this" I don't mean that they all have to be dark and super serious. Rather, I see Andor as confirmation that the Star Wars setting is rich enough to produce all kinds of excellent stories, and that they should dare to venture outside of the traditional boundaries of action adventures about Jedi more often. That could mean other more adult shows, but I'd be just as happy to see a good comedy set in the Star Wars universe for example, or even a romance (we've actually seen the latter done quite successfully in written form already, in Lost Stars). It doesn't all have to be aimed at my own personal tastes; I just love seeing this vast universe being given some room to truly breathe.

Meeting "Fay"

So the launch of Galactic Season 3 ended up being delayed by a couple of days due to Bioware discovering an issue during patch deployment (what else is new) but on Thursday we finally got to dig into it.

I have to admit that my first impression involved a slight feeling of disappointment when I looked at the weekly season objectives and saw a lot of the exact same ones that had been used in Season 2: Capitals of Dichotomy, complete the Revan flashpoints... there's nothing wrong with these as objectives, but while I wanted them to keep the structure of Season 2 for Season 3, I'd been hoping for a bit more variety in the content of the objectives.

However, soon I was off to pick up my new companion, and here I was quite positively surprised. Again, I wasn't immediately keen on a Scorpio-lookalike (the initial announcement about the season being "Galactic Gaming"-themed made me think we might get a Huttball player or something as a companion... wrong type of gaming it turns out) - but her intro really won me over.

I thought PH4-LNX has a much more interesting backstory than the previous companions, what with being a former Gemini droid, being captured by Czerka and being indentured to a Hutt! The little introductory storyline where you hop from planet to planet has her allude to even more tales of crazy adventure, such as when she tells you that she once killed a Hutt on Tatooine and became an Alderaanian Duchess.

One weekly objective that is new to Season 3 also involves travelling around the galaxy with "Fay" in tow to catch cheaters in casinos and cantinas and it's... weeeird. On the one hand I kind of like how it encourages you to visit different planets to find an uncontested spot to watch over, but on the other hand the scarcity of the designated gambler NPCs makes the whole thing a bit dystopian.

What I mean is that you end up with these scenes of half a dozen people staring at a character playing at a slot machine and just waiting to pounce on them to get them arrested for wrongdoing. Every gambler cheats at some point or another as well, and there are no false positives or anything where it turns out that their "acting suspiciously" was actually something innocent. I don't know, maybe I'm overthinking this...

The only real hiccup I've run into with the intro mission on Republic side (I don't know if the same issue exists on Imp side) is when it tells you to slice a terminal on Coruscant, pointing you to the Senate Tower cantina, and when you get there you see a gambler playing at a machine, surrounded by half a dozen people staring at him, so your natural inclination is probably to be confused in some way... is that the "terminal" I need to slice? Everyone seems to be looking at it, but I can't click it; does that mean it's bugged? I had to look it up when I got to that step myself and have since seen other people be equally confused by it. Bioware seems to be aware of this though and is looking into how they can reduce the confusion.

Galactic Season 3 Starts Tomorrow

On Friday we got (rather short!) notice that patch 7.1.1 will go live tomorrow, with one of the biggest patch features being the release of Galactic Season 3. After how decidedly meh I felt when Season 1 was originally announced, the concept of seasons has quickly grown on me (especially with all the positive changes that were made from Season 1 to Season 2) and I'm actually looking forward to Season 3.

That said, I'm a bit surprised by how little we've heard about the upcoming season this time around. Before the first one, we got a decent (if not fully finalised) overview of what it was going to entail about a month in advance, and Galactic Season 1 hadn't even ended yet when Bioware took to the forums to explain how they were going to make massive changes for Season 2. With Season 3, we haven't really heard anything beyond a vague mention that it will be "Galactic Gaming themed". (Note: While I was writing this, the patch notes went up and clarified that the official title of the season is "Luck of the Draw" and that the new companion will be "PH4-LNX, the new Croupier Droid".) I'm hoping that means they were happy with how positively Season 2 was received and aren't making any major changes to how it worked, but truth be told, we don't really know.

Assuming that Season 3 will follow the same general pattern as Season 2, I'd like to complete it on all five servers again, while jumping into that project from the beginning this time. If I start casually accumulating points just by logging in and doing the odd objective here and there from week one, I should hopefully be able to achieve full completion everywhere without having to resort to credit buyouts.

Looks like the next few months are going to be quite busy for me in terms of gaming... are you looking forward to the start of the new season? Or are you more interested in other aspects of the patch, such as the return of the Feast of Prosperity or tweaks to class balance?

Imperial Saboteur, Part 3

It's been a few months since I wrote about my decision to make my Chiss Sniper an Imperial saboteur and how that changed the story from Jedi Under Siege onwards. Part one, which covered the story content up to Onderon, could largely be summed up as "these saboteur options are pretty neat and interesting", while part two was still fun but veered a bit into the ridiculous with how obvious my character's sabotage was at times.

Last week I finally got the character caught up with the latest content - at the time of writing this, that's the "Digging Deeper" story update, though I can already tell you that I won't have anything to say about that one as I didn't encounter any saboteur-specific options in it; it seemed to be exactly the same as for all my loyalist characters. As far as everything else goes however, there'll be post-Onslaught spoilers in this post; you've been warned.

I previously covered up to the end of the main Onslaught story, so I had to pick things up with The Task at Hand and the introduction of Darth Rivix. Your sabotage is shown to have had consequences here as unlike the briefing for loyalists, the one saboteurs get from Rivix describes the Empire as being in deep trouble after the loss of the Meridian complex.

There's also a little section where Rivix asks your opinion on something that's specific to your origin story, which I don't actually remember catching on to before... for agents he notes that Darth Xarion appears to have planted some spies among the Hand's prospective staff and as a saboteur you can get him in trouble with the Emperor or Empress for that, though I didn't choose this option. I was also a bit confused why Rivix called me "Keeper" as I don't remember my agent attaining that rank (not that this is something that's specific to saboteurs).

Echoes of Oblivion and Spirit of Vengeance unsurprisingly had no saboteur options, seeing how they're not about the Republic/Empire conflict. In the "intermission" after that I didn't really note any saboteur options either, other than being able to dismiss going after Zenith as not worth your time, which I liked.

Secrets of the Enclave felt like the saboteur option was given some more thought again here. Krovos justifies her delayed arrival with Imperial forces facing "heavy resistance", which is not the case for loyalists. Before you set out, you also have the option to contact Jonas Balkar to give him a heads-up about where you're going.

With that in mind, I kind of enjoyed the bit where you land on Dantooine and are shocked that the Republic is already there. I mean, I know that's how the story goes regardless and that it has nothing to do with being a saboteur, but considering I'd literally tipped them off personally, it just made so much more sense, you know? Just like the complete abandonment of Malgus at the end of Objective Meridian makes more sense when you have reason to dislike him for being suspicious of you.

When you rescue the medical droid inside the caves, you've got the option to instruct her to also transmit her data to Jonas/Odessen, which I thought was a bit blatantly suspicious with Krovos and Rivix just around the corner, but whatever it takes I guess...

After the mission I got a mail from Jonas which initially confused me and I was actually going to ask my readers whether they could tell me what the encoded message in it was, but as I was looking at the screenshot again while editing this post, I suddenly noticed it myself: "Got message from droid. Good. Talk soon."

Again, the "intermission" style updates leading up to Legacy of the Sith didn't contain anything relevant to saboteurs other than that there was obviously no Zenith follow-up.

Now, Manaan was a weird one. I immediately noted that it was lacking the sorts of small touches I'd really enjoyed during Onslaught, where you let a Republic fighter escape after doing some damage if you're a saboteur instead of destroying them completely as a loyalist. On Manaan, our saboteur is shown to have no such reservations and seems perfectly happy to blow up the Republic pilots that are chasing Major Anri at the start. Also, I felt kind of bad about the bonus missions to kill what felt like a million Republic forces... couldn't they have thought of something more appropriate for saboteurs? Maybe to complete the mission while only killing less than a certain number of Republic NPCs...

I don't think it had anything to do with my saboteur status, but at one point while Anri was telling me who Darth Norok was, she also commented that "Darth Shaar's retired to some frilly palace on Dromund Kaas" and I was like, "What?". I actually had to pause and go back through the text in the conversation window to make sure I'd heard that right, because I didn't remember encountering that comment before.

Anyway, as far as Manaan goes, I'd actually exposed myself to some spoilers about the saboteur path by accident so I knew that something was going to happen at the end with Colonel Korrd, but I wasn't really sure how it was going to play out. I chose to cover for him in front of Darth Krovos, and then went with the saboteur-specific option to say something about how you protected him because you still have a use for him and you'd like him to report for debrief with your people on Odessen.

I honestly found that kind of confusing, because while Korrd is fed up with a certain kind of Sith, he still seems deeply loyal to the Empire, so I'm not sure what the angle is supposed to be here. The spoiler I'd read seemed to interpret it as him being recruited into the Alliance, but that doesn't really make sense to me. My best guess is that the implication is that you'll mine him for Imperial secrets since he owes you and has no reason to distrust you, but if so, that's not made very clear.

The conversation at the end where you have the option to flirt with Anri and where she tells you how amazing you are reminded me of my comment in an earlier post about how nonsensical her admiration feels when you've been playing a saboteur who's messed up one mission after another.

At the end I got a call from Jonas about the Republic weapons platform being destroyed, and there was no option to say that you feel bad about it. You can say something about how you've gained new intel through Colonel Korrd (somehow...) and how you secured some kolto for the Republic, but I mean... they were already doing well on that front before you came in to help the Empire beat them. It just didn't feel like a very satisfying exchange and like I didn't really help the Republic, considering how many of their people I mowed down.

Ruins of Nul didn't have any saboteur-specific options again, except that during the intro conversation, after Rivix asks you to come to Elom, you can say to Lana: "Let Malgus tear the Empire down. What do we care?"

All in all, the saboteur role still provides some interesting variations on content but I've got to admit that the post-Onslaught stuff has generally felt more muddled and less impactful to me. I know the story is progressing very slowly, but at some point you've got to wonder where we're going with this whole saboteur thing and how much longer it makes sense to maintain it. More than three years ago I wrote a post called "Will we ever get to change sides?" and my answer to that question back then was that it seemed very unlikely.

However, I've got to admit that since Bioware has gone through all the hassle of decoupling origin story from combat style since then, it seems... less far-fetched now that they could do the same thing for faction one day, though this would actually increase the amount of work required from the voice actors, as they'd now have to account for every base class being able to play through Republic or Imperial story. Whichever way they go, my main hope is that they didn't just add this whole saboteur thing with no real plan for where it should go in the long run.

Enjoying the View

A year ago, in the run-up to the game's ten-year anniversary and the Legacy of the Sith expansion, Bioware held the "Best View in SWTOR" contest. It wasn't anything fancy, just a basic screenshot contest inviting players to capture nice views of their virtual environment, but I liked the idea. After all, I like taking screenshots!

In the end I only submitted screenies for three of the ten eligible planets though (the ones used to illustrate this post) - I honestly don't remember why I didn't go for more. I only remember running around Zakuul for a while trying to take a shot that satisfied me but that I was ultimately not happy with any of the results.

I didn't win anything, but I can't really complain about that. In the news post that announced the winners, they stated that they received "thousands" of entries, and their chosen winners were all highly deserving. I still don't know where the winning Yavin IV screenshot was taken, but it looks amazing. (Feel free to enlighten me in the comments.)

Either way, I figured this contest was just a one-time thing for the anniversary, so I was very pleasantly surprised when the team announced a few days ago that we were all invited for another round this autumn, just with a different selection of planets.

I'd already liked the contest last year, but this time around it very much felt like the right thing at the right time for me. The other night I spent a whole evening just travelling to different planets and taking screenshots of the sights - it was quite refreshing to not think about gear or Conquest points for a change. As a result I've already submitted shots for nine out of the ten eligible planets this time around. I'm not sure I'll still come up with something for Odessen... in my opinion there just aren't a lot of good opportunities for nice views outside cut scenes there.

Again I'm not really expecting to win anything... but it just felt like a nice feel-good exercise, you know? I suspect that the devs and artists also enjoy looking at all the pretty screenshots and take satisfaction in knowing that players really look at their work and appreciate it. If you're feeling inspired yourself, you still have until the 12th of October to send in one or more submissions of your own.

R-4 Hoop Jumping

One of the things I've learned at my current place of work is that when resources to fix problems are very limited, small issues that can be worked around in some way can go unfixed for a very, very long time. After a while you pretty much consider the workaround the new "normal" way to do things without even thinking about it anymore, until you have to explain the workflow to a new starter one day, and suddenly realise that it's rather odd that whenever you want to perform a search in application A, you actually perform the search in application B and then copy and paste part of the URL string into application A, because the actual search function in application A itself has been broken for as long as you can remember and just causes the whole thing to crash. To use a totally made-up example.

What does this have to do with SWTOR? Well... I've been taking a break from progression ops in recent weeks. The frustration with the whole ops situation had just become too much for me to want to deal with. The rest of my team however, including Mr Commando, has largely soldiered on, and I haven't exactly been "away" either. I've still been chatting with my team, and once or twice I did attend an op to help out when they were a person short.

On Friday I was called upon once again and got to kill the second boss in R-4 veteran mode for the first time. I had a good time overall, but it really struck me how thoroughly broken the ops experience in R-4 is at the moment. That's to say in the sort of way I described at the start of this post, meaning that people have to apply half a dozen workarounds on a daily basis to be able to do anything at all.

First off there is the obstacle of the first boss being massively overtuned on veteran mode. Even people who've successfully killed it seem to agree, especially since the second and third boss are so much easier in comparison. This has led to the few who are actually capable of killing the first boss bartering their lockouts away to the slightly less capable, so that the latter can gear up from the second and third boss without ever having killed the first one.

My guild has also chosen to go this route, so even though none of our raiders have ever killed the first boss as far as I'm aware, some teams have been farming bosses two and three for a few weeks now. Someone just needs to have a connection to a team that can kill the first boss and then needs to organise a lockout handover before ops time every time.

Then follows the next complication: When you start the operation with the first boss dead, the second boss isn't accessible by normal means as a door that should be open bugs out and remains closed. However, someone figured out that there is a certain location on top of a crate where it's possible to have a duel, and someone with a knockback can then throw their opponent across a giant chasm if the person to be thrown also jumps into the air at just the right time. You want to choose a stealther for this manoeuvre, as once they've successfully landed on the other side, they can then stealth past the trash mobs there and unlock the train to the second boss. So this is another whole ritual that has to be performed at the start of every ops.

It's a good thing that you're able to duel inside of R-4, because generally this is disabled inside instances. It's unclear whether the fact that it's possible in R-4 is yet another bug that just happens to work in the players' favour for a change or something that Bioware intentionally enabled to make this and other workarounds possible, though I'd be very surprised if it was the latter.

Wait, I just spoke of "other workarounds" related to duelling, what else is there? Well, for a few months now there's been a bug whereby after a wipe and respawn, one or more members of the group will look dead to one or more other members of the raid, even though everyone is alive. This bug has been in the game since before 7.1, but at that point it didn't happen that frequently. Honestly, initially I thought it was just very funny - jokes were made about so-and-so being "undead" etc. - and if you're not a healer, it's not necessarily a deal-breaker that someone shows as dead in your ops frames when they're actually alive.

However, in R-4 this bug happens all the time, and it's quite annoying to deal with during progression, especially when it keeps affecting the healers (who obviously need to be able to see people's health bars accurately). Good thing there are more workarounds!

For one thing, it seems that it's possible to avoid the issue occurring if you're the last person to release and respawn. Now, obviously someone has to go first, but if the healers make sure to revive last, they'll generally be able to see everyone alive even if the bug affects other members of the ops group.

The other workaround involves duels once again - because if someone who can see the "undead" person's health normally duels them and hits them with a hard stun, they'll suddenly come back to life for everyone else in the group as well. I mean, I do enjoy being able to make sincere requests such as "someone kick Aregelle in the nuts please, he's dead to me again" but it's still a hassle.

If you make it to the third boss on veteran mode, apparently everyone has to Alt+F4 at the start and reload the game, or else they won't be able to see an important visual cue during the fight. When you exit the operation at the end, it's best to drop group before doing so, or else you'll have a high likelihood of getting stuck on an infinite loading screen. The list goes on and on...

It feels like every night in R-4 requires an obstacle course of following all the right steps to be able to raid at all, before you even get to having to learn the boss fights. I'm honestly kind of in awe of the people who have persevered in the face of all that just to get that purple 340 gear, but I've got to admit that with a bit of distance and perspective, it looks like a very weird experience.

Forum Nostalgia

A couple of days ago I was very surprised to find a post on the official forums announcing that the forums themselves were going to receive a makeover soon (and that's not "soon™" but "soon" as in next week). According to Eric Musco, the current forums are based on "a very old and very custom version of vBulletin [and] it was simply on its way to becoming unsupportable". That makes complete sense to me and I'm glad that they're continuing to modernise everything surrounding the game to be able to continue to support it for many years to come.

When Blizzard modernised the WoW forums a few years ago, they nuked all the old forum content, but Bioware has the lofty aspiration to import all the old posts into the new platform. We'll see how well that works out. I'll be very surprised if all the links to forum posts that I've included on this blog over the last decade actually continue to work - my more pessimistic/realistic expectation is that the move will generate a lot of link rot, but we'll see.

I've also been kind of surprised by how much of an emotional impact this announcement has had on me. I've never really been very active on the official forums as I don't tend to find the discourse there particularly inspiring, but I do tend to read them quite regularly... and I just have a soft spot for that sort of old-school, bulletin board format in general I guess, as similar forums were where I formed my very first connections online in my late teens around the turn of the century (gosh, it feels weird to say it like that). I even met my very first boyfriend on a forum about Transformers (the cartoon from the eighties, not the Michael Bay movies or the electrical components).

While the forum as a concept will remain, I expect the general feel of it to be quite different after the update. There's talk about the new software including "gamificiation" features, which I guess means stuff like upvotes, badges and what not. It just won't be quite the same. Then again, maybe that'll be a good thing and I'll actually feel inspired to post more often myself, who knows.

On a whim, I checked the stats on my current forum profile, and apparently I started 20 threads and made 124 posts in total over the years, which may not be a lot but is honestly more than I expected. Most of them revolved around bug reports or suggestions, which makes sense. While I do use the in-game /bug command sometimes, the official forums are still a primary destination for me when I encounter major bugs, because it does feel good to receive affirmation that a strange new issue is not just affecting me, plus the more attention you can draw to a bug the more likely the devs will make it a priority to fix it.

Occasionally I did post about other things too though, especially in the game's earlier years. For example I asked in March 2012: "How do Republic and Imperial side Quesh stories go together?" (I think the answer is: I still don't really know/they might just not go together.) And in April 2014 I felt the urge to poll people about their favourite and least favourite flashpoints for some reason. Nowadays I'd probably just do that kind of thing on Twitter.

Anyway, I'm very curious about this update and am crossing my fingers that things go well next week. The concept of official forums may be somewhat old-school at this point, but the same could be said about my own attitudes towards that kind of thing and one could argue even the MMO genre itself. I'm glad the SWTOR team wants to continue to invest into keeping that line of communication to their player base open.

Combat Logging in SWTOR

Whether I like it or not, I've had a lot of reasons to look at dps numbers in SWTOR in the past few months: partially because I know I can't choose to hide my performance from others anymore, partially because certain operations have been so tough that looking at everyone's numbers and ways to improve has been very... relevant.

On a whim, I put "SWTOR combat logging" into Google today and was kind of shocked to see that most of the results were forum posts from 2012 full of now-dead links. So I thought to myself, why not use this as one of those opportunities to actually post something useful on here?

How to enable combat logging in SWTOR:

Go to your in-game preferences (bound to Ctrl+P by default) and select "combat logging" on the left. You'll see a checkbox called "Enable combat logging to file" on the right, which you'll want to tick. This will save all your combat data from each play session into a text file on your PC, which can then be found in your documents under Star Wars - The Old Republic > CombatLogs.

The game warns you that this is "a feature for advanced users that may require active disk management", which is their way of saying that if you play a lot, you'll want to make sure to clear out the combat log folder every so often or your hard drive might get clogged up with thousands of text files after a while. I hadn't cleared out my own since February and when I checked on it just now it was over 6 GB large, oops.

As for how to view the information recorded in these logs in a way that makes sense to a human, you currently have three main options that I'm aware of:

Ixale's StarParse

This is a separate program that you download onto your computer and run alongside SWTOR to watch your numbers (and now also those of your group mates) rise and fall in real time. Personally I find it somewhat clunky/limited for more detailed combat analysis (such as "just why exactly did we wipe there, I'm not sure what happened") but it's great for getting a quick overview of dps and healing numbers.

It also sports additional features such as timers and overlays. Timers can be a bit fiddly in my experience, but when they work they are the closest you can get to having something like a boss mod addon in SWTOR, as you can set them up to give you sound cues when certain abilities are triggered or to show countdowns to important boss moves.

Overlays can be set up to show you additional information on screen such as a boss's health percentage (without you having to keep the boss as your focus target) or to give a healer a better overview of their heals over time on different targets.

About the only thing it doesn't do is allow you to review your logs online and share them with others, but for that it has integration with...

Parsely.io

Not to be confused with the herb - I've mistyped this in my browser many times. Parsely is the longest-running site for people to upload their SWTOR combat logs and where you can compare your performance to that of other players, meaning it's full of interesting stats. With 7.0 and the changes to combat logging, it got a big revamp and now also allows you to do much more detailed analysis of your logs, making it possible to break them down in different ways and even allowing you to watch tactical replays of fights.

SWTOR Logs

SWTOR Logs is a relatively new kid on the block, but the site's creator isn't new as they also maintain well-known logging sites for other games, such as Warcraft Logs and FF Logs. I'd say that this has pros and cons: An example of a con is that SWTOR isn't their main priority, which is part of why it took several months for the site to be updated for 7.0. On the plus side though, if you're familiar with one of its sister sites, you'll find the UI very intuitive since it works in exactly the same way, and you'll likely appreciate the very powerful filtering tools that allow you to drill down to a very detailed level. I'm definitely biased here as I've been using Warcraft Logs for quite some time, and I've also spoken to the creator on Discord and found them to be very responsive to fixing bugs. You mileage may vary, but I can definitely recommend giving this one a try if you're interested in looking at logs at all.

Total Galactic Victory

I've mentioned in the past that Total Galactic War is my favourite Conquest event by far, as it really opens up the planetary scoreboard and gives guilds other than the usual top three a chance to conquer a planet.

In the past my guild has been pretty good at planning ahead for these, as we often used to hear through the grapevine when the next event was planned according to a datamined schedule, or there would be a situation like last Christmas, where Bioware made a point of telling us that they were giving us three Total Galactic Wars in short succession to give us something to do after they delayed the much-anticipated launch of Legacy of the Sith.

This time around though, we were taken almost completely by surprise. It was literally only on the Sunday the week before that a guildie pointed out that he'd just noticed that the next week would be Total Galactic War (the Conquest tab always shows both the current and following week's events), and we all kind of went: "Wait, what?" However, most of us were also pleased as we had not had a Total Galactic War yet since Legacy of the Sith's launch, so it had been a while.

On Tuesday night, the deliberations about where to invade lasted less long than usual. In the past I had a whole list of guilds to avoid, but 7.0 had changed Conquest yet again and I honestly had no real clue how these changes had affected the overall competitive landscape. We just knew to avoid the current "big three" that were winning Conquest all the time when only three planets were up for grabs, but other than that, who knew?

Unfortunately the two large yield planets that we've still never won as a guild over the course of almost a decade were definitely out, so it was a matter of picking one of the other targets that members of the guild still needed for their personal achievements. After a bit of deliberation we settled on challenging a guild called ChissMyHutt for Iokath.

I remembered seeing their name in the top ten for large yield before, so I knew that they would require some effort to beat, but they seemed to be off to a very slow start, which made me hopeful that maybe they hadn't weathered the transition to 7.0 that well.

And indeed, for the first two days or so, things looked good. We quickly claimed first place and our lead slowly increased until we were about 3.5 million points ahead. I was already quietly patting myself on the back for my accurate assessment of their performance, while not stressing too much about my own contribution as we seemed to be winning with ease anyway.

But then, on the Thursday, they suddenly surged ahead, catching up with us within a matter of hours and soon acquiring a lead of almost six million points as well. I've said in the past that competitive Conquest involves a certain degree of psychological warfare, and seeing such a complete turnaround within less than 24 hours was certainly a blow. Had they just been toying with us? Did we even stand a chance if they could outclass us like that in such a short period of time?

However, with years of experience we were not that quick to give up and continued pushing, and in fact redoubled our efforts. I went into maximum grind mode to a degree that I hadn't done since September last year. Back then it was still possible to "prepare" partially completed weeklies and then finish them off quickly during the actual Conquest week, which is no longer possible now, but since the completion requirements for warzone and GSF weeklies were also lowered, I still managed to complete both of them every day, while rounding out my contribution with a bunch of daily zones and other activities.

Still, throughout the next couple of days it wasn't easy to stay motivated, as we consistently remained behind. However, the gap between our scores began to ebb and flow over the course of each night and day, and each time it shrunk we gained a little more ground.

There was also talk in guild about making strategic use of Conquest requisitions. These are an item that instantly completes a character's personal Conquest and were added when login rewards were first introduced as something that comes out of the final box of a specific calendar week. You can't really farm them as it's randomised which reward week will appear in your personal calendar, but if you log in consistently over long periods of time, you can save up a lot of them, and you can pop as many of them at once as you like. With 7.0 increasing personal Conquest targets from 50k to 100k, the tokens also doubled in power.

Since it had been so long since the last Total Galactic War, a lot of members had a lot of tokens saved up. I was one of the people who had popped all of theirs early in the contest, but others hadn't even touched their reserves, and a plan was hatched to "ambush" the opposition on Tuesday morning with a bunch of token pops. Considering that we had several million points worth of tokens saved up, we could potentially beat them even if we remained in second place until then, as long as we didn't allow the gap between us to grow any larger in the meantime.

However, as it turned out... we didn't even need that. After fighting us tooth and nail for several days, ChissMyHutt's activity just kind of seemed to fizzle out on Monday. I mean, Mondays are always a bit of a wild card as you never know how many members of a given guild will be prevented from playing due to work commitments, but the fight just seemed to have completely gone out of them all of a sudden, and we ended up closing the gap and overtaking them organically anyway. We still ended up popping a few tokens on Tuesday morning to be on the safe side (there had been a previous instance where we'd felt secure in victory just for the enemy guild to suddenly overtake us in a last-minute push), but our lead Conquest contributor made sure to save some for next time. I hope we won't have to wait another eight months for a similar opportunity.

All in all, I really enjoyed this round of Total Galactic War not just because we won, but also because it provided us with a good fight. You wouldn't necessarily know about all the stuff going on behind the scenes just from looking at the scoreboard, but those numbers can hide considerable tales of adventure.