Liabilities of Taris

Last week I wrote a post about my experiences with the Hotblooded on Hoth seasons objective. There was actually another weekly objective that week that I wanted to talk about, namely the "Liabilities of Taris" one.

I'm generally fond of the "Liabilities" objectives that ask you to kill named champion mobs across the galaxy. I remember back when I was new to the game, I always got excited when I encountered a named champion mob out in the world. There were no achievements yet back then, but even so I was always intrigued. Was it going to have any special abilities? Would it drop anything unusual? Sadly, the answer was almost always no to both of these questions. And while I don't think that everything in the game world has to serve some deep purpose, I did kind of wonder sometimes just what the point of giving these unique mobs names was if that was all they had.

The devs did add achievements for some of them later, but still... you can only get those once, so it's been nice to have a reason to seek these named mobs out again every now and then. One champion I particularly enjoyed revisiting last week was Maltok, a named rakghoul on Imperial Taris that had been memorable to me for actually having a couple of unique abilities, such as repeatedly summoning swarms of small adds. I found him so challenging and interesting when I first encountered him back in 2014 that I recorded myself soloing him on my bounty hunter Powertech and uploaded the video to YouTube.

At least one of the multiple times I killed him last week was interesting in a similar way, namely when I fought him on my Vanguard bounty hunter on Leviathan. Imperial Taris is recommended for levels 32-36 but said character had only just hit 31 that week (and I didn't have an Imp any higher on that server). With how quickly you level nowadays, it had been ages since I found myself going up against any mobs actually higher level than me, so I wasn't even sure how viable that was nowadays. I tried my hand at a pack of level 33 flappers and they died easily enough, just a bit more slowly than usual. Nothing like Classic WoW where taking on an opponent several levels above you would result in an endless series of missed attacks.

I was still a bit nervous when I charged Maltok, as he was level 36 and nobody else was around at the time, but I did it! I blew all my cooldowns including multiple adrenals and my heroic moment, and after seven minutes or so he was down. I hadn't felt that excited to be soloing a champion in a while.

Coming up against one of the featured champions on my own turned out to be a rare occurrence however, as pretty much everywhere else they were being hunted to extinction. It wasn't unusual for me to arrive at a spawn location and find no mob, but three or four other players already waiting for it to respawn. These little parties could actually be quite amusing, as people would start emoting or cracking jokes about why the mob wasn't there after a while.

"He's scared because he can see us waiting!"
"Must have been patched out by accident."
"I think he overslept!"

It was just a silly little thing that reminded me that "down time" in an MMO doesn't always have to be a bad thing, even when some of the respawns took a bit too long for my liking.

Finally, it also highlighted to me that I'm glad that SWTOR Spy is still around (even though the site appears to not have been updated in almost a decade), simply because it's still the only fan site that has a full list of all the named champions with detailed directions. The site's age is really starting to show by now though, as the thumbnails display at about the size of a stamp on a modern monitor.

Addendum: While double-checking the above to make sure I wasn't missing anything, I realised that Illeva actually does also have a more "modern" guide to all these champions' locations, it's just that the pages are all named after their associated achievements, so they never come up as the top result when googling for a specific mob by name.

Enjoying the New Server Smell on Shae Vizla

There are about a dozen different MMO-related things I'd like to be doing right now, but I just had to make some time for checking out the launch of the new APAC server. I started by securing my name on a trooper, but then began levelling a Sith warrior instead, simply because one of the weekly seasons objectives was to complete fifteen missions as that origin story. I named her Apacella, which I thought was quite a clever pun for the occasion. In no rush to level up quickly but still keen to play, I made it to level 13 in my first play session.

I got myself invited to Kal's guild on Empire side but also kept general chat open - something I usually don't do - because I wanted to see what people were talking about on the server's first day. There was some silliness going on, but no real toxicity that I could see. Mostly people seemed to be talking about what a strange experience it was to start from scratch again and to have no legacy perks, whether this experience made them miss their legacies or filled them with nostalgia.

I was somewhat ahead of the pack in that sense as I already got to wrestle with that particular sensation early last year, when I started from scratch on Tulak Hord and Leviathan. Still, at this point my legacies on those servers are at least moderately progressed too, so being back to square one on Shae Vizla was certainly a noticeable shift again. Killing that gold k'lor'slug in the blood pool at level nine was a proper life-or-death battle that I only won very barely - same with soloing the Korriban heroics later.

I also had to resist the urge to open my mail initially, since I did not have a stronghold yet that I could travel to and use to dump all my freebies in my legacy cargo hold. I figured that the ancient promotion that granted the Nar Shaddaa stronghold for free to everyone who was a subscriber at the launch of Galactic Strongholds (or something like that) doesn't apply on Shae Vizla, but I did see later on that it showed up as available for free on the stronghold directory; I just had to actually go there and activate it. Either way I opted to sort out my mail and bags once I got to the fleet.

I queued for my first PvP match at level ten, something I'd usually never do because of just how low-level and weak you are that early on... but I figured hey, the server is brand new and we're all low-level and weak, so why not. I certainly didn't feel like I was doing particularly worse than anyone else and it was good fun. I even did some arenas and the matches felt pretty balanced, with no twinks AoE-stunning everyone with grenades and nobody getting salty about losing.

Another thing that was really interesting to me was Conquest. Since there haven't been any fresh servers since launch, I hadn't considered how that system would function on a brand-new server. Since there are no established guilds yet, the Conquest leaderboard is currently completely empty as nobody has the funds to buy a guild ship yet - though even if they did, nobody's Conquest points contribute towards the guild score in their first week of joining, so it's literally impossible for any guild to score points this week. It'll be interesting to see who'll be the first ones to actually launch a guild ship invasion after the next reset.

For now I'm up to level 24, though I'm still not even done with Korriban as a lot of my XP came from doing random things like PvP or joining a world boss group. We killed the world bosses on Dromund Kaas and Balmorra for example and I levelled up twice from the insane XP payouts. The Balmorran world boss also nearly wiped us, because it turns out that a full raid group of piddly dpsers takes a lot of damage and we barely had enough healing going around. Truly, everything's an adventure again.

New APAC Region Server Launching TODAY!

We've known for a while that the SWTOR team had been toying with the idea of opening a new Asia Pacific server, ever since they tested the concept while getting ready for the move to Amazon Web Services earlier in the year. What I didn't expect was to wake up to a news post this morning announcing that the new APAC server - called Shae Vizla like its earlier test incarnation - was in fact going to launch today. When I came home from work in the evening, it was already open. Talk about keeping mum until the last second!

Technically it's "early access" for subscribers today, but tomorrow it will already be fully open to everyone. It's exciting times for our friends from down under who've had to suffer from bad ping ever since the last set of APAC servers were shut down back in 2013. I'm sure content creators Kal and XamXam (both Aussies) are over the moon.

But honestly, it's an exciting day for the whole community. The last time SWTOR added a new server was back in 2012 - since then it's been nothing but consolidations. So this is basically the first time the community as a whole has been able to experience something akin to a "fresh start" server (aside from the original launch), and I think many players will be treating it that way. Even if the ping for those of us not in the APAC region won't be great, if you're not aiming to play high-end content it shouldn't really be an issue, and there isn't really any reason not to join the fun of launch week at least. For Galactic Seasons altoholics like me it also means one more server to complete the seasonal track on, even if there's only a limited amount of time left in Season 5.

To have everyone start on (mostly) even footing, character transfers are disabled for now, though store boosts are still available. It'll be interesting to see what the GTN on Shae Vizla will be like to begin with, without anyone sitting on billions of credits hoarded over the course of the last decade. Later down the line, transfers are supposed to get enabled though, which makes sense as I'm sure many APAC players will be keen to move their existing legacies over.

Anyway, I don't have much more to say other than that this is surprising and great. There's a whole event schedule with people streaming, holding giveaways etc. which you can check out here. Let's all enjoy basking in those good vibes for the moment!

Hotblooded on Hoth

 ... is the name of a weekly seasons objective that asks you to kill the two world bosses on Hoth, Gargath and Snowblind. It's an easy 12-pointer if you're in a guild, plus killing these particular bosses also counts towards other goals you might potentially have, such as completing the weekly world boss quest, recruiting Qyzen Fess into your Alliance, or progress towards the Aratech Coral speeder, which (among other things) requires you to kill both of these bosses three times each.

If you're not in a guild, or just can't make your guild's usual time for these sorts of events, things are a bit trickier, though not as bad as they used to be. Thanks to shared tagging, it's viable to just kind of loiter in the area, and then simply join the fight once a proper group comes along, even if they're of the opposite faction.

Sometimes that works well, but other times it just takes forever for an actual group to show up. It seemed like a solid plan to me last week to just hang out next to each world boss with the game minimised, tabbing back in every so often to make sure I didn't get logged out for being AFK, but otherwise simply doing something else on the side while keeping an ear out for sounds of battle or other players approaching.

However, doing this on four servers, I spent literal hours just staring at Snowblind and Gargath's butts (even if it was intermittent), and it honestly got a bit demotivating after a while, especially since getting in on one kill was no guarantee that you'd get in on the same group killing the other world boss as well, in which case the camping process would have to start all over again.

I spent so much time stalking Gargath that I learned that he only moves if you get too close to him, specifically a distance of less than 67 meters. As soon as he's further away from players than that, he stops and just stands still. The more you know!

Another useful lesson I learned was that most pugs seem to be doing the bosses in reverse order compared to how I'm used to doing them. My usual M.O. when I'm leading a guild group is to simply go left to right from the Republic base, which means Gargath first and Snowblind second. However, every time I caught a group killing Gargath while lurking, I would rush to Snowblind's hunting grounds right afterwards (which are a looong trip from the nearest Republic base) just to find nothing but his corpse there.

Initially I thought that I was simply too slow getting there, but at one point a group at Snowblind threw me an invite, and they immediately told me that they were going to go do Gargath right after. That was on Leviathan, where I also learned that they apparently call Gargath "Titi" there - or at least the leader of that group did. Silly French people!

Anyway, once I changed my strategy to camping Snowblind first and then rushing to Gargath (who has a quick travel point much closer to his spawn) I started to have better luck with getting both kills in one go.

The other thing I found myself thinking about was that it's a bit of a shame to have cross-faction tagging but no ability to actually work together. Once I was waiting at Snowblind on a Commando healer, and a small group of Imps decided to pull the boss. I joined in to help out with dps, but of course my damage as a healer was nothing to write home about. I noticed that they had no healer though! However, me throwing down kolto bombs did nothing for them due to the faction barrier separating us. Eventually they wiped and I was in fact the last person standing, until the boss took me out too. As much as I think SWTOR's faction conflict is crucial to the narrative, in that moment it just seemed a bit dumb that my kolto wasn't working on them. (Though at least one of the Imps respecced to healer after that and they were able to successfully kill it on the next try.)

Surveyed!

I was pleasantly surprised the other day when I read that Broadsword has been sending out opinion surveys to players this week. I couldn't remember the last time I was asked to fill out one of these, but that's why I have a blog! This post from December 2016 mentions me completing a survey about Knights of the Eternal Throne. I'd completely forgotten about that... either way, it's been a while.

Presumably not every player is getting this survey (Jackie clarified on the forums that it's only available in English, so if you registered your game in French or German you might not get it for example), but it does look like it's going out to a pretty wide group as I've seen both guildies and people on social media talk about receiving it, plus they're staggering the email send over the course of the week (which is usually something you do when you're emailing a lot of people).

If you're unsure whether it's hiding somewhere in your inbox, look for an email from "The SWTOR team" with the subject line "You're invited to provide feedback on SWTOR". I received mine on Wednesday.

It consisted of a total of eighteen questions for me, though that number is clearly variable based on some of your answers, e.g. when I selected that I disagreed with a certain statement, a follow-up question suddenly popped up on the same page to ask me why.

I thought the first page was quite interesting as it basically asked about the new player experience: how much the first five hours of the game prepared you for what came later, and how hard you found different aspects of the game to get into. (I chose Galactic Starfighter as the most difficult to understand. Hell, I'm close to having played a thousand matches of that game mode and I still don't understand a good chunk of the kinds of things that happen to me in it.)

The next two pages focused on polling people about some general sentiments about the game, such as whether the graphics look modern, whether you like your companions, or whether you feel that your choices are meaningful, as well as asking about your favourite and least favourite story moments.

Then there was a question about whether you primarily play solo or with friends, and I desperately wanted a "both" option. As it was, I chose "with friends" since I guess that's the more unusual one... this only led to a single follow-up question about whether I considered my guild important to my gameplay experience, so I'm guessing the focus here was actually on the people choosing the solo option. Can anyone who completed the survey and went down that route confirm what sort of follow-up questions you got here? [EDIT: Pallais shared his survey with me and it appears that there were no special questions for solo players actually, just the guild one being limited to those of us who group a lot.]

Finally there was a section focused on monetisation that asked me to rate different subscriber benefits (not sure if this is different for people who aren't subscribed) as well as different types of Cartel Market purchases (e.g. hair styles, XP boosts, pets).

I was quite happy to complete this survey because I think it's in the interest of any good business to understand how customers interact with their product or service and while the devs obviously have some idea based on gameplay and transaction data, I'm almost willing to bet that there's going to be something in the results of this survey that's gonna make them go "huh, I never thought about that". (I say this as someone who finds customer surveys and focus groups extremely fascinating in her day job.)

I don't think any of our answers will trigger very specific changes - in fact, I thought it was funny that I first found out about this survey through someone posting about it on the PvP forum and asking others to please complain about premades in their survey responses... because my own version of the survey only included a single mention of PvP, and that was as one of the gameplay modes for which they asked whether it was initially hard to understand.

The way I see it, based on the questions I got to answer, they mainly seem to be looking for general guidance in three areas:

• How much to invest into improving the new player experience
• Which areas that are supposed to be core to the game do people find the least satisfying (e.g. if lots of people said they don't really care about their companions, that would be surprising and probably something they'd want to change)
• What else can they sell us that we'd actually like to buy

And I think those are some perfectly sensible questions.

My own answers to those three points were, in a nutshell:

I generally thought the game starts out teaching you the basics well, but there is a lot more to learn later. I rated GSF as the most confusing mode to get into, followed by space missions and strongholds. None of the "more standard MMO fare" like flashpoints or PvP ever gave me too much trouble from what I can remember.

I responded neutral to positively to pretty much all the things they asked about, except the question about whether SWTOR felt "modern", because I just don't feel like I can use that word to describe a tab-target MMO in the year 2023. That's not a complaint, mind you, just an observation of the zeitgeist. I also noted a couple of places where I personally feel the graphics could use a bit of sprucing up, even if the game is still gorgeous in many ways.

As for store items, I answered truthfully that I like anything that makes it more fun to create new alts, such as new species unlocks and hairstyles. Armours qualify sometimes, but weapons I care little about because they are too small to be well visible most of the time anyway, and I'm always mystified when people get excited about different lightsaber hilts. I did note that I also like pets but it's hard to get into them when they despawn after every loading screen (hint hint).

Feel free to share some of your own survey responses and observations in the comments!

Mysteries of Mek-Sha

I've been thinking about Mek-Sha recently. I had a good amount of fun at the Interpreter's Retreat, and people pointing out similarities to Mek-Sha made me want to reconsider my stance on that planet. I liked the story there back when it came out, but as I noted after three months of Onslaught, the repeatable content seemed half-baked and disappointing.

The other week Mek-Sha was one of the planets featured on the weekly seasons objective to do repeatable or side missions, and I thought I would use that as an opportunity to give it another look. I did so on my Shadow on Star Forge, and sadly I ended up being disappointed all over again, as most of the missions I completed didn't even count towards the objective. After I repeated one of the heroics for the third time without my mission counter advancing, I eventually gave up and finished the objective on another planet.

The "We're Wanted Men" heroic isn't even marked as one (which is why I guess it didn't count for the seasons objective) - though it did advance my "do heroics on Mek-Sha" achievement. It's also a bit "plain" compared to its predecessor "Turf War", as it just has you fight off waves and waves of mobs. I hadn't fully processed this previously, but they completely replaced the Turf War heroic with this "new" one back in 2020. Xam Xam still has the guide for the old version up, and I remember it being quite tough and having a sort of puzzle aspect to it. You'd get one of four different opponents that had a unique buff, and you'd have to interact with the environment to counter it (so for example you'd splash the guy with the "drunken rage" buff with a glass of water). I mean, there was a reason Mr Commando and I stopped bothering with it after a few tries, but that had more to do with bugged credit than the mission itself.

The two regular heroics are also quite a bit longer than most regular heroics, requiring you to move between phases in different areas, which makes them feel like a lot of effort for little reward.

Finally, I was reminded of how Mek-Sha has all these hidden achievements, but I couldn't be bothered to look them up online. I think the Interpreter's Retreat was much better at luring you in and getting you interested in what else there was to discover. Achievements that stay hidden until you complete them are not very intriguing, because unless you look up a guide in advance, you won't even know that you're already working towards something. I much prefer the approach of letting you discover the achievement as soon as you do something that progresses it.

I'm glad that the devs seem to have learned from those issues, considering how much better the Interpreter's Retreat worked, but part of me still kind of wishes that they'd go back and clean up Mek-Sha a bit too. Make sure heroics are labelled and counted as such, make sure exploration missions are labelled and counted as such, and allow hidden achievements to be found once you do something that triggers them, so you know you're actually making progress and have an incentive to keep going. Just one of those little things.

Looking Back at SWTOR's Patch History

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

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

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

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

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

Timeline of main story updates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Timeline of small group content releases

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

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

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

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

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

Timeline of large group content releases

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

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

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

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

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

Timeline of major PvP additions

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

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

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

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

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

Timeline of post-release open world planets/zones added

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

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

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

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

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

Features and events added to SWTOR over time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thoughts on Dxun Master Mode and NiMs in General

Nature of Progress (or Dxun for short) was released with the Onslaught expansion in 2019 and received a master mode with patch 6.1.2 in June 2020. I really liked this operation when it came out, barring some minor criticisms such as story mode still being a bit overtuned at launch in my opinion. Veteran mode was also good fun, even if a lot of community guide-writing had died out during the "Knights of" years and we essentially had to go in blind at first. I just found the last boss to be a bit of a drag.

When master mode came out however, my attitude was mostly one of "no, thank you", as I figured it was going to be way too hard for me and my team to make much progress. (Worth noting that some people in my guild felt differently, did go in and did manage to kill a few bosses.)

Recently the subject of visiting the place came up again though, and it seemed like maybe the time was right for it now, considering that patch 7.1 applied heavy nerfs to all difficulties of Dxun last year.

I'm happy to say that I've seen some success! On 8-man my team managed to kill the first boss so far, and during our most recent 16-man week we made it up to the Mutant Trandoshans on master mode.

And honestly, it's been pretty fun so far! I may be biased because a lot of the challenge of these fights lies in the tanking, meaning that I haven't been too stressed as a healer so far (for a change), but I've generally been pretty impressed by the inventiveness of some of the new mechanics introduced for the higher difficulty.

Stare at Red long enough between wipes and she'll start to look cute...

What kind of came as a shock to me though was how little documentation there is of Dxun master mode. When we first decided to go there, I thought I'd start by googling a guide to the first boss to get a basic breakdown of the mechanical differences and was shocked to find that there were no results on any of the well-known fan sites. Literally the only thing I could find was this reddit post linking to a YouTube playlist of the author killing all the bosses on master mode with her team and providing a bit of narration about what was happening. I left a grateful comment on her video about Red, while also expressing astonishment that a three-year-old YouTube video appears to literally be the only guide to this content on the entire internet.

I then found myself wondering whether there were any guides for Gods from the Machine master mode, which is even older, having been added to the game in patch 5.10 in November 2018 almost five years ago now, and which - with current tuning - is considered to be the hardest operation in the entire game. And what do you know, there are no written guides for this one either. Just like with Dxun I found exactly one reddit post with a narrated YouTube playlist of the kills and that's it.

It just blows my mind that in all that time nobody bothered to create a proper guide for these. As mentioned earlier, there was definitely a period of time during the "Knights of" expansions when operations were considered officially abandoned and this was reflected in fewer active players dedicating themselves to that content. While progressing Gods and Dxun veteran mode, my guild had to rely a lot on word of mouth from more experienced players because there just weren't any publicly available guides when they first came out. But things got better again! I may not have been too pleased with R-4 Anomaly personally, but multiple sites had guides for both difficulties up within weeks, so the current lack of interest just seems to be limited to master modes.

I suppose you could argue that a difficulty mode designed for only a small number of players will always have fewer people talking about it, which is of course true, but I honestly thought there was still more interest in it than this. Especially as there was a bit of a storm in a teacup a few months ago when it was confirmed that a master mode for R-4 was no longer on the dev team's road map. From how much wailing and gnashing of teeth I saw on that subject I thought that clearly there was still a community that cared a lot about this content, even if there weren't that many of them. However, the lack of positive or explanatory content about NiMs released in the last five years seems to serve as evidence to the contrary, which honestly strikes me as a bit of a shame.

Peace Out, Again

My pacifist character Pacis hit the level cap taking part in the Feast of Prosperity. Again!

I last wrote about her back in April, when the introduction of Amity inspired me to pick her up again as she could finally go on adventures with a (supposedly) fellow pacifist friend for the first time. I was really hoping that this would rejuvenate my interest in the character and the project, but it didn't really work out.

Having the two of them hang out on Dantooine and doing the peace time dailies did initially give me a bunch of new things to think about. For example I was baffled when I found Pacis drawing a lightsaber one day, considering that unequipping her weapon was one of the first things she ever did. 

Eventually I realised that the following had happened: I had completed a Conquest on her, which rewarded me with a gear create. I haven't found crates from solo activities to be very reliable when it comes to detecting which piece of your gear needs an upgrade the most, but it clearly noticed that I was missing a weapon and therefore rewarded me one. And of course another change that came with 7.0 meant that if one of your gear slots if empty and you receive an appropriate piece of gear for it, it now gets auto-equipped, so I hadn't even noticed that saber sneaking in there. What can I say, this game really wants you to be ready to inflict violence!

The other thing that happened was that while gathering on Dantooine, a slicing node gave me my first rare crew skill mission. Considering how long Pacis had been doing this without ever getting one before, I kind of wonder whether there's something preventing you from getting these if you don't actually have a companion that could run missions... or maybe it was just bad luck.

Either way, she had Amity now, so I was of course happy to send him out. As I awaited his return, a vision of a whole new future for Pacis briefly unfolded in front of me. Crew skills as a pacifist activity! I'd actually have to read the mission text again to make sure it was compatible with her ideas though. And she could drop one or more of her gathering skills to start crafting instead! A true pacifist's career!

However, I don't think I even contemplated this for five minutes before the idea lost its lustre. Crafting is a peaceful activity, sure... but Pacis wouldn't be the one actually doing it, and it would be no different from any of my other characters sending their companions out to do stuff for them; she would just be worse at it than those with larger, more developed companion stables. Plus the materials would come out of my legacy-wide material stash, fuelled by all my regular characters who'd done who knows what to acquire them. It just didn't seem very... satisfying.

So that idea went nowhere and I just continued running the Dantooine peace time missions for a little while - until I got a bit annoyed with Conquest. As I already alluded to in my last pacifism post, Conquest as a pacifist post-7.0 is annoyingly hard. Doing one round of dailies on Dantooine, she now just gets "Dantooine: Mission Complete", "Missions: Bonus Missions" (for petting the Kath Hounds), the one for getting a crew skill skill-up and the one to harvest ten gathering nodes. That's not a lot, and meant that I had to be diligent in doing those tasks every single day of the week or she wouldn't be able to hit her personal Conquest target.

Maybe you're wondering why it matters, but I really like Conquest as a pacing tool and like to hit my personal target on all characters I decide to play in a given week. Inevitably, a week came when I forgot to log in and do my Dantooine round one day, which caused me to barely miss my personal target for the week and made me quite annoyed. After that I kind of stopped playing her again, except for doing a bit of swooping at some point (I think?) - though I still haven't looked further into those one-time swoop story missions I meant to attempt two years ago.

Until the Feast of Prosperity came around again that is, and I decided to leave Dantooine to do charity for the Hutts again, which is such a nice and peaceful pastime, while also being great for both Conquest and XP, and resulted in Pacis eventually hitting level 80.

I'm a little disappointed that I didn't feel inspired to do more with her on the way to the new level cap, but I'm also reminded of this post I wrote back in 2021 about how my pacifism experiment had essentially become a solved problem. That's still the case, plus 7.0 also took some of Pacis' more fun tools away, such as the ability to CC multiple targets or to keep missions with quick travel items in her log to get around the galaxy at any time. So it's just generally not as fun as it used to be. Which is fine I guess, as this was only an experiment and I have allll my other characters to play with. But it's still a little bit of a shame as well.

A Livestream About 7.4 and Beyond

Yesterday was livestream day for SWTOR, a day that's quickly becoming a major event to look forward to for me, as we finally find out what's to come in the next big patch while getting to connect with the devs and deriving some entertainment from the process at the same time.

The stream lasted for more than an hour and yet time seemed to be flying by! A lot was said and done, and as usual you can watch a recording on Twitch or find a full written summary of absolutely everything that was revealed on the sites of the usual suspects:

• Swtorista
• Today in TOR
• Vulkk

I have no desire to go into that much detail myself, but will instead comment on the main things that excited me, of which there were still a lot! So let's get into it.

First off, it was interesting that they started the stream with Papa Keith saying hi and showing new studio pride by wearing a branded Broadsword jumper. (By contrast, I noticed that Musco was still wearing a SWTOR shirt with the Bioware logo on it; naughty!) What was really interesting about Keith's intro though was that he immediately started things off by telling us that beyond 7.4, they just reviewed their road map up to 7.6 with Broadsword, content that is meant to come out over the next year.

This was reassuring in the sense that it showed that there are no signs of things slowing down after the studio transition, and it was interesting to note that this planned patch cadence basically confirmed that there isn't another expansion coming soon. I personally didn't think there was, but I'd certainly seen some people speculate that the next patch after 7.4 would be 8.0, so I'm kind of glad to have that misconception dispelled. Obviously I'm not saying I never want another expansion again, but Legacy of the Sith definitely feels like it needs more time to cook at this point so I'm okay with adding more patches to its runtime.

The main announcement was the reveal about 7.4's story content, which will take us to... a new town on Ord Mantell? Can't say I expected us to return to another existing planet immediately after the return to Voss in 7.3, and Ord Mantell wasn't on my personal list favoured destinations, but I can't say I'm unhappy with it either. Actually, it's an interesting callback to the ten-year-anniversary news post from two years ago, when it was teased that as part of this expansion, we might "gain an opportunity to return to where your character’s journey first began so long ago…" My only disappointment was that when there was some talk about how it can be safe for Imperial characters to go to Ord Mantell, nobody thought to mention Lost Island. Come on!

I won't go into any detail about what they said about the story there to keep things as spoiler-free as possible, but unlike the Interpreter's Retreat, the new town Kessan's Landing is going to be a proper daily area and yes, we'll chase after Heta Kol and the Hidden Chain again. No, I don't know whether we'll actually achieve anything this time around. But! We'll interact with both new and returning characters, and I was particularly pleased to hear of the return of Sergeant Captain Blyes and Gizmel Gam. If those names don't mean anything to you, Sergeant Blyes is literally the first NPC troopers and smugglers talk to outside their class story phase, the guy who gives you your very first side mission to blow shit up in the village. And Gizmel Gam is the shady heroic quest giver who wants you to fetch his illegal drugs from Savrip Island (without telling you that it's illegal drugs). I love it when minor characters like that get to reprise their roles.

A story-related announcement that surprised me was the continuation of the Lane Vizla story from Ruhnuk. Now, again, trying to keep it as spoiler-free as possible... the way that story ends on Ruhnuk does sort of imply that there'll be a follow-up, but I honestly figured it would just be a mail or maybe a short conversation. But no, it looks like it's actually turning into a proper side storyline that has you seeking out new characters and places, and I'm here for it.

Next they announced a technical update that probably had me way more excited than it should have: "cinematic lighting". What does that mean? It means older in-game cut scenes will have better lighting, making better use of "natural" light sources and shadows instead of artificial spotlights. They showed a few clips from starter quests for different origins and I just kept thinking how gorgeous the new versions looked.

What can I say: this is a game with a heavy focus on watching your character look cool in cut scenes and it heavily encourages you to play alts. I'm not sure there's any other game where an announcement about improved lighting would make me feel like it's one more reason to make a new alt, but it really does in this instance.

Also, my favourite side story related to this was that when I checked the forums afterwards, I found this thread by someone going by the forum name Jazulfi, posted about a month ago and complaining about how bad the lighting in some of the old story cut scenes was. Needless to say, they were over the moon about this announcement. Just imagine being in that position, making an incredibly niche complaint about something and a few weeks later the devs announce that they are about to release a major technical upgrade addressing your specific issue. The timing just cracked me up. Good for you, Jazulfi!

Also interesting was the demo of the GTN update that had been teased before. At a glance I thought it looked kind of similar to the way things are set up in the modern World of Warcraft auction house - which is not a bad thing, as it's mostly quite convenient. Even better, the new GTN will have a "claim" button so you can grab your stuff directly from the GTN terminal instead of going to your mailbox, which I really appreciate because in WoW I always buy stuff from the auction house and then run off without remembering to actually take it out of my mailbox, so this is a very real problem for me. The only slight concern I have was that there was a brief mention of the deposit now being classified as a fee, which makes me worried that it might no longer be refunded if your item doesn't sell. That would be a shame as this particular bit of generosity of SWTOR's GTN was a really nice feature and meant that I was never shy about re-listing stuff as I didn't have to worry about actively losing money if nobody purchased right away. We'll see I guess. (Edit: This has now been confirmed in a forum post.)

In terms of gear, we were told that 7.4 will bring another gear rating increase. Implants and mods will become upgradeable to 340, and Rakata gear's max rating will increase to 344. There was also a cryptic mention of Rakata gear for everyone, not just ops players. The main takeaway I got from this is that after about a year of R-4 Anomaly on veteran mode being the only source of max-item-rating gear, they're basically dumping that entire idea and nobody will ever go there again. Can't say I'm sad, though the thought of updating gear across my entire stable of alts again is a little tedious, even if it won't be hard to do.

Now, the Cartel Market section of these streams never really interests me that much, but this time they had something that caught my attention... because it was SHINY! Basically, they're adding a new type of dye that doesn't just colour your gear but also gives it a shiny or matte effect, and the example they showed looked amazing.

To be fair, this is a brand-new gear set that has likely been optimised to work well with this new effect, and it might not look as great on older armours, but still... I could definitely see myself picking a couple of these up to see if I can give an old outfit a new shine. This gets a thumbs-up from me.

Finally, they finished the stream with an interesting twist on the Best View in SWTOR contest - they haven't chosen the winners yet, but Jackie wanted to share the five finalists for each planet... and I can see why, as they were all gorgeous. I kept an eye out for any of my own submissions, but while one of the Nar Shaddaa finalists looked kind of like one of mine, it had someone else's name on it so was presumably submitted earlier. However, apparently no fewer than three people I know found themselves featured among the finalists. Yay them! Either way, I loved seeing all those screenshots and they looked like worthy winners regardless of which ones actually end up being the final choices.

Oh, and if you read this before November 1st - they gave out a free deco code again, so you can redeem "LotsVizla" until then for another in-game poster of your (perhaps not) favourite Mandalorian(s).

Either way, the stream clearly did its job for me as it got me properly excited for 7.4. We don't have a release date yet, but based on how they've been handling these recently, it's probably going to be late November or early December.