Passage of Peace, Past

Galactic Season 4 is finally in my rear-view mirror at last. Despite my growing reservations about Galactic Seasons as a concept, I have ended up dutifully doing my part each time, although by now the process feels incredibly formulaic and in dire need of another rework.

The trouble is, it doesn't feel like there isn't a lot they can change to me. The objective system works well enough, and it's always nice when something that in recent years has been kind of neglected like a comparatively obscure world boss gets featured. Much like the introduction of level-scaling, I like how that particular aspect of the whole thing makes older content both relevant and actually involving. 

My appreciation for what SWTOR has done over the years has grown exponentially since getting involved in World of Warcraft. That game honestly feels horrifically dated compared to what SWTOR has going for it at times.

That said, I am definitely looking forward to seeing what Galactic Season 5 has up its sleeve to try and make things different. Honestly, the thing I would like to see be looked at or removed entirely, even if just for this upcoming season, is the seasonal reputation track.

A new reputation track is a pretty safe option to add as a new grind. It keeps people tied to specific content or areas for a while if they want shiny rewards from a reputation vendor, and with seasons it's just another thing to add to the checklists for specific weekly objectives and achievements. However, since the seasonal reputation is entirely tied to a currency you receive for completing seasonal objectives or killing foes, that can result in quite a big grind depending on what you do if you wish to stay afloat.

Sometimes, that's easy. If you're the sort of person who happily pugs flashpoints and story mode operations like no tomorrow, you'll likely end up swimming in the stuff. If you are a progression raider who spends half their week working up to a final boss and not necessarily killing it, and that's the only group content you do, that's an entire sector of content where you're effectively locked out of gaining currency for.

Not even the Jawa Intel feels like it helps a great deal while out killing foes on daily runs if that ends up being your main source of income outside of objectives. Sure, it does help, but the drop rate on the things is still really quite woeful. 

PvPers, meanwhile... okay, so it's been a while since I've done a PvP match and associated weekly, so maybe they've changed this, but I don't believe there's any way for them to earn currency just from doing PvP.

Oh, and even if you do get an absolute shedton, you're still limited to a 5,000-per-week reputation cap. Again, I get it, they have to stretch it out somehow as completing 100 weekly objectives for the achievement will take fifteen weeks minimum, so completing the reputation track six weeks before that isn't something I feel the developers are happy to let people do. Unfortunately, this does mean that if you start working on the reputation "too late", even by just a week, you're completely screwed and have no chance to complete the track in time to complete the relevant achievements.

The thing is, I can get why they've done it this way. It's clearly a hangover from the original design of 7.0's content: encourage players to do as much of everything as possible in order to maximise their gain of relevant stuff. However, there is a very fine line between people feeling "encouraged" and people feeling "forced", and in this regard I can definitely sympathise with PvPers in particular who care enough about seasons to complete everything, as their favourite activity may well yield nothing.

All of this is why I feel the seasonal reputation tracks require a rework. Just a slight one, it doesn't need to be massive, but I would like to see things change.

The most immediate thing I can think of would be to increase the source of currencies. Adding them to the PvP daily / weekly boxes if they aren't already there would allow those who only do PvP to maintain a steady income without needing to go elsewhere. Operations are trickier, in that while I would perhaps like to see them spread the currency tokens across bosses much like tech fragments are, that may lead to certain operations (looking at you, Scum & Villainy) being a better source if only by a couple, up to a few, tokens. 

At least all operations of a certain type and difficulty giving the same amount from the last boss is fair, even if it means those who just do progression raids without killing the final boss miss out on currency.

Secondly, I would like to see an option added for players starting later than others to "catch up" with the reputation if they would wish. I don't really know how feasible this option is, as there has been no indication that the developers can even allow the weekly cap to be adjusted on a personal basis. Added to which, there would also need to be a system in place to detect which players would be relevant for a catch-up mechanic.

If it is possible, I would like to see a multiplier-system be introduced. Let's say a player who is still at the lowest tier in week five is allowed access to a token which temporarily increases the weekly cap by a factor of 1.75, in other words up to 8,750, increasing to a factor of 2 in week 6, and so on. Any tokens that player activates during this time are also multiplied by that same factor. This would, in theory, allow them to use the same number of tokens to reach the original weekly cap as before, but still at potentially a fast enough rate to complete the track in time.

It might not even be possible to begin with, in which case pipe dream, but I'm just trying to think of ways that the developers can make this particular grind feel less annoying the later you come to it. I mean, sure, at the end of the day you're not going to get everyone through, but I do feel sorry for everyone who does come to it late, or believes they're fine until they get a rude awakening that oh no you're not, and by then there's nothing they can do.

Thirdly, there is also the option to have the objectives themselves drop reputation tokens rather than just currency. Make it so that the 8-pointers drop a large blue, and the 12-pointers drop a purple, and you're away. By all means, continue to have the currency as a backup option, as it would still be required to allow players to keep earning the reputation, but then maybe that itself needs a rework. Rework the jawa, make it so that he'll sell a reputation trophy of your choice from any inactive season to you for various jawa scraps, and you needn't continue adding seasonal currency after seasonal currency.

It would be nice to cut down on that. Remember when their goal was to reduce the number of currencies we had to minimise confusion? 7.0 says "hi!".

Fourthly, and easiest of all, make the dang things cheaper!

~

In all seriousness, I really wouldn't mind it if with GS5 we saw the removal of the reputation track, even if just for one season. I don't really know what its replacement could be in terms of achievements, although since each companion has a specific activity associated with them as a weekly objective, maybe they could make it so that you had to complete that activity a certain number of times during the season.

Or maybe just... don't add a new achievement for the sake of it if there is no reputation track to do. Just leave off with earning level 100, the 100 weeklies, and the umbrella achievement for both. 

If they do end up adding seasonal reputation tracks with each successive season and we don't end up with a break somewhere along the line, I really hope we get a change in the current status quo. It's been fine enough for the time being, but there have been some serious flaws exposed throughout the last three seasons that could really do with being addressed.

Trouble is, I don't really think there's a lot they're ultimately going to be able to do. I'd love to be surprised, though.

~~~

To bring this back on-topic for my finishing GS4, it was... alright. I still feel that Amity hasn't done quite enough to beat PH4-LNX as my favourite of the companion, despite my own disappointments about how Fay was handled, but he was decent enough. I do miss being able to dress up the seasonal companion like you could Altuur, but I get why they've shifted to full-body-and-outfit customisations, and at least with Amity they actually did a full unique costume rather than just the gloves as they did with Fen.

Well, I say "gloves", but really they were just his hands with a glove texture appended on. That's SWTOR's aliens like duros for you. 

I don't really know what, or who, I'd like to see next. Amity fulfilled my previously-expressed wishes for a faction-specific soldier and a Force-user in one go, but I'd still like to see something that feels like it's quite special at some point. Fen, Altuur, Fay, they're all in some regards representing the neutral underworld, when there is so much potential for more.

I'd still love to see us get someone whose role in the galaxy actively clashes with at least one of the factions, rather than someone who fits in no-matter-what. Give us a disgruntled Imperial soldier, a Sith, a Jedi, someone who doesn't necessarily plug-and-play. It could be really interesting to see how a character of a specific faction responds to their situation, whether it involves us helping them feel better about continuing their role now that warfare has broken out if you're of the same faction and loyalty as they are, or maybe even convince them that there is more to life than just being the same-old-same-old and to break away from their former ties if you're of the opposite faction or are a saboteur.

Heck, some of the best stuff in SWTOR comes when characters with specific dichotomies enter into dialogue with one another. Lana and Gnost-Dural's conversation prior to Objective Meridian still stands out in my mind as a really good interaction between two people of different origin and alignment, and even though the Alliance can be allied with either the Republic or the Empire as well as its own thing, it is still presented as maintaining some of its prior neutral elements.

But what is the point of that if the writers aren't actively trying to find opportunities to explore those elements? In general, it would be really interesting to get some feeling about how your personnel are feeling, like maybe some updated ambient conversations like the ones you hear as your alliance specialist influence grows, just so we know how our current personnel are feeling about potentially fighting their loved ones.

It's certainly still quite fertile ground. I hope to someday see it explored, and I feel a seasonal companion would be a decent way of going about things. We shall see what we shall see.

Galactic Season 4 - Further Thoughts

In my last post, I made it clear that I wasn’t factoring in my feelings of burnout in my assessment of the fourth Galactic Season. Instead, I was trying to look at it from as unbiased a perspective as possible, since it cannot be denied that burnout has a very noticeable impact on one’s willingness to engage with certain systems.

Having had a few days to think about things since that post, I wanted to jot down my unfiltered feelings on the season as things stand right now.

~~~

While I finished GS3 in early February, a full month before the actual season itself ended, GS4 has come far too soon for my liking. Even with a gap seven weeks between my finishing the previous season and this current one starting, the break was nowhere near long enough to be properly enjoyable. Granted, some part of that is because even when ‘done’ with seasons you’re still seeing its UI pop up all over the place, so you always get some sense that it’s very much active until the end.

While I do not participate in anything like progression raiding or PvP – truthfully, I entirely avoided making any progress whatsoever on the first PvP season! – which helps eat into the time I have available in a given week, engaging with seasons for 14-and-a-half weeks still takes the wind out of my sails for a bit. Some cooldown time is incredibly important following that time, and whether the downtime was seven weeks or three weeks, the downtime between GS3 and GS4 has just been far too short.

Indeed, largely courtesy of GS3, I was leaning towards taking another extended break from the game. I have quite happily settled into a regime of not playing too much, following on from the numerous posts I made on that subject last year, which I am very happy with, but even with that focusing on just doing a collection of bits and bobs for a good three months is quite some task.

Alas, courtesy of the seasons’ current fondness of introducing some measures of FOMO with its exclusive “do everything!” achievement rewards, taking any form of break is a risky endeavour. Sure, at this point it’s probably fine, it’s still early days after all, but since this season seems to last a good week or two less than prior seasons (most are 150+ - this one started with 139 days to go!), one cannot really enjoy a ‘true’ break for very long.

And, sure, nobody “forces” any of us to complete everything, it’s all optional. It’s still a far more pleasing result doing everything prior to a season’s end than missing out on, say, a reputation faction which is incredibly painful to grind for when relying on mob drops alone. As I’ve got at before, woe betide anyone who comes to any of these seasons “too late” to actually make meaningful progress on a reputation track before the season ends.

Plus, until we know for sure whether or not BioWare actually intend to re-run any seasons, even if just as an add-on of sorts to a future season, we have absolutely no idea whether or not everything that gets missed out on will become available again in future.

So, yes, all this is optional… but it’s a right bloody nuisance if it’s not able to be completed for whatever reason.

I guess that ultimately, my concern is just what all of this seasonal nonsense means for my love of this game. I get that grinding is part of an MMO, of course it is, but there’s a massive difference between running the same daily zone or flashpoint for the hundredth time because it’s a personal favourite and having to run them because it’s one of the things to be ticked off on certain weeks.

Honestly, that was one of the things I really disliked about the early 7.0 days with flashpoints and weekly zone missions all being restricted to a select few. Fortunately, those have been undone – even if the result is admittedly more painful for Galactic Seasons when queuing randomly for flashpoints. Sure, the others were still accessible somehow, but the game was still telling us “no, no – you don’t do what’s fun for you, you do only what we’ve selected for you!”.

I still eagerly await the day when operation missions return to the way they used to be. I get that they’re the way they are now because of how important they were for gearing and BW didn’t want everyone to do the last boss of EV every single week for a crate, so I’m not envisaging a return to the old system while the current gearing systems exist. It would just be nice to have all weeklies accessible again regardless of week.

At the same time, I do acknowledge that certain world bosses being part of the seasonal rota means that they actually get some love, whereas previously they had been completely and utterly ignored outside of the occasional guild event and the Feast of Prosperity.

As you can probably tell, I’m conflicted. On the one hand, I really like seasons for reintroducing some stuff to the playerbase, but on the other I really don’t like having several options for what I would choose to do for fun basically ruled out as meaningful activities other than potentially for getting kills with the season companion whenever that objective pops up or for grinding any required Conquest points.

Plus, sometimes you just want to have a quiet week for whatever reason, and having little choice but to fit in with a crowd doing the same activities as you can be very much counter to that mindset.

I’m just glad that GSF isn’t part of the PvP seasonal system, to be honest. I only tend to hop into it whenever I really feel like it, itself something of a rare occurrence, and I think I would stop doing GSF during those twelve weeks altogether if it was.

~~~

As I say, all this is just unfiltered. It’s a confused, jumbled mess, because honestly that just sums up my feelings of seasonal systems at the moment.

I am dubious of BW having much capability of drastically shaking up the core system again, much like how they did with GS2 after GS1 as, disillusionment and the like aside, I feel that the current system is pretty much as good as they can make it. The extra stuff like the reputation tracks etc., those definitely need some reworking now.

Sure, they can reduce the number of available weeklies, but that would only worsen the feelings of restrictiveness that occasionally arise. Sure, they can put more weighting behind the points offered by each weekly, thus being able to both reduce the number required each week and still keep ten open, but that would make it worse for the odd few weeks where there aren’t any “bad” objectives, and it wouldn’t be a good look only having 50% of the available objectives be completable.

So… apart from maybe spicing up some of the available objectives like having a 5 / 5 split between completing both warzones and arenas or introducing more generic objectives like “complete any flashpoints in activity finder”, I don’t really see there being much they can realistically do to shake things up going forward. The system works – it’s just easy to become disillusioned with something the more times one repeats it.

Fortunately, things aren’t as bad as the Knights of the Fallen Empire / Eternal Throne days yet. It would take something truly special to return to how tedious those expansions were in retrospect...

Still, I’m finding myself questioning more and more how much these rather intensive periods are impacting my love of SWTOR. I don’t see Galactic Seasons being a catalyst for quitting altogether anytime soon, but it certainly isn’t great that my first thought upon finishing a season is “great, I can take a much-needed break now…”.

Oh well.

Galactic Season 4 - Early Thoughts

Galactic Season 4: A Passage of Peace is upon us, less than a month after the previous season ended. We do at least now understand BioWare's intentions for any given season's release cadence - each aimed for an X.Y.1 patch - and it is just unfortunate that 7.2.1 has come so soon to GS3's end. During Total Galactic War just under a fortnight ago, it was very noticeable on Darth Malgus that numerous guilds were flagging, and it is quite possible that burnout from the end of both GS3 and PvP season 1 were responsible.

There may be other factors behind it, of course, but I am curious to know exactly what impact both seasons really had on the playerbase. While I myself finished GS3 back in early February, I was glad to have an excuse to stop doing stuff. Funny to think that one can just mindlessly do stuff for weeks or months without much question, but with Galactic Seasons 14 weeks can pass really slowly. I guess it's just the extra layers of having to do specific things rather than settling into a more unfocused regime?

Regardless, in my assessment of GS4 as it is at the moment, I shall be putting aside all thoughts of burnout and just trying to be as fair as possible in my assessment of things.

~~~

The Companion

Amity is our newest seasonal companion, and honestly I really don't know how to feel about him. I mean, sure, we finally get another human male Force-user companion to keep Arcann and, technically, Arn company, but the design choices made with him are... very weird. Okay, sure, cost-cutting measures mean that the chances of a fully-voice-acted companion happening anytime soon are slim, but I do find Amity speaking selonian to be... I dunno. It feels weird that he should be able to speak it exactly as they do (courtesy of reusing pre-recorded stuff), complete with accent and hissing sounds, but maybe it could work? 

The next thing is his look. Okay, so I wasn't anticipating a lilac or green-haired sorcerer from a bizarre other-worldly realm, but Amity's aesthetics are really quite weird nonetheless. Granted, they do come up with some reason in his story for him to be clad in full armour without the option to even hide his helmet, but I really do question why he decides to stick glaring lights on his robes in his later customisations. The extra spine, fine, I can get why that would perhaps be necessary given his history, but for someone who encourages meditating, the lights seem counter-productive if ever he decided to encourage meditating in a darkened room.

"Feel the darkness pressing in on you. Feel its calming aura..."

"Amity, I can see your robe's lights through my closed eyelids!"

"..."

Finally, on the list of things I'm not so sure about, his pacifist nature makes pretty much anything involving combat with him seem very bizarre (not as much as his "kill 2,500 enemies achievement", as a guildie of mine pointed out, which is the highest number required for such an achievement in the game!). He does at least say that he's willing to fight if he must and doesn't want to instigate fights, but it still feels quite wrong to have him out-and-about and happily killing things. At least he doesn't say "did I mention I'm a pacifist?" all the time.

On the flipside, I do very much like the concept of the Messengers of the Cold Moon, the faction that Amity essentially represents and who are responsible for sending him on his pilgrimage. A neutral organisation dedicated to helping the galaxy's "ordinary" Force-sensitives without forcing them to commit to the ways of the Jedi or Sith? That sounds very interesting, and honestly I wouldn't mind meeting more members of this organisation in the future. 

I also really like how, in ambient conversations aboard your ship, a Jedi or Sith character can have unique lines about how their views on the Jedi / Sith way of life contrast with Amity's own very strong views when he brings them up. Really nice touch, that, and it brings some additional value to having him across both factions.

So... yeah. Not really sure what to make of Amity quite yet. I suppose I'll just have to wait and see how my opinion on him evolves, but at the moment I would place him roughly between PH4-LNX and Fen in terms of my favourites of the four. Altuur's staying right at the bottom of the list.

~

The Rewards

Galactic Season 4 introduces the usual range of cosmetic items we've seen since season 2. 

The unique creature mounts, the Odux, are quite frankly hideous in my opinion. I really don't like their giant noses, and it is quite bizarre seeing the bantha animations without a lot of shaggy fur hiding its limbs when it walks. The new korreali are... okay. They're about as fine as I would expect a single-seat korrealis to be, and I probably would cite them as my favourites of the tech-based seasonal mounts we've seen thus far.

The Aratech Advanced weapons are, so far, my favourites from across all four seasons, just beating out those from GS2. While I don't much like the colour of the special named ones, I am pleased to see them cutting back a bit on the laser-sights which have become awfully prominent, even if there are still  an awful lot of glowy lights. I'm not a fan of things like that, I must admit.

The armour sets both look pretty swish, although sadly their chestpieces don't look entirely versatile. I've done some playing around in the preview windows to see if I can find any better belts than the included ones, and very few options - if indeed any - seem to fit exactly the same way. That's an issue I've begun developing with some big-ticket cartel market items over the past couple of releases - the more specialist something is, the harder it is to use in a wider context. Don't get me wrong, I'm pleased that we are getting some more detailed stuff, but I also think there's a lot to be said for keeping to a generic structure as far as possible.

As themselves, these armour sets are probably my favourite from all four seasons. From a purely versatile perspective, I still feel that the GS3 armour sets win out. 

The final reward to touch on is the Mek-Sha stronghold. I... I can't really say I like it. I mean, sure, it's sold as a warehouse, and it is indeed a warehouse, but I also don't like how it doesn't have much that could resemble an office as pretty much all of it is open-plan. I was intrigued to see what it would be like, potentially as a place for my hunter to set up shop in terms of negotiating contracts (since otherwise she'd be inviting people into her Nar Shaddaa home... yeah, I don't think so!), but sadly it doesn't look like it's fit for even that purpose. 

Oh well.

~

Miscellaneous

Following the PvP seasons, which added the objectives panel to the seasonal panel itself, the Galactic Seasons objective panel has also been moved to the seasonal panel.

From a pure, unbiased, perspective this change does make a lot of sense. After all, it frees up the Conquest pane entirely now, and it keeps things entirely in one place irrespective of which season type is active. However, it's also currently quite annoying from a muscle-memory perspective, as I still flit to the Conquest pane to see what's what.

I'm sure I'll get used to it eventually!

Unlike the previous two seasons, I've noticed that the Notes of Reflection - the special currency required to gain reputation with the Messengers of the Cold Moon - do not have a weekly cap. I mean, I don't see a lot of people consistently getting to 200 / 200 being an issue, especially given how tight-fisted mobs are in handing them over in regular content. That said, I do think this is a decent move for those who are prolific in completing group content and are more likely to hit the weekly cap on a reasonably consistent basis. 

I'm not entirely sure what sort of meditations Amity puts us through whenever we visit any of the planets which have a shrine, but my goodness are our characters pathetic when it comes to meditating. Two minutes, oof, better have a ten-minute break before I continue! Arbitrary wait-timers are always going to be a thing in an MMO, I get it, but this does feel gratuitous to the extreme.

~~~

Conclusion

I mean... this is just another Galactic Season, at the end of the day. We've seen four of them now, the past two and this one all sharing the same structure and mostly-similar objectives, and it's just... here we go again. 

Sure, they have improved on the actual characters of the companions, and it is nice to not have the stories of PH4-LNX and Amity connected, either with each other or with Fen or Altuur, for some reason or other. Honestly, I really don't get the desire in general to connect as many things as possible into one big complicated or silly story. Standalone stuff works fine, it really does!

I'm very curious to see how GS5 differs. GS4 might have had some changes introduced based on the feedback (most likely the removal of the weekly cap is one such change), but it was also probably too far in development for it to have any real meaningful impact. Regardless, I think things have definitely improved in small places over the past couple of seasons, and I am interested to see how things develop from here on out.

An Overdue Perspective on... Galactic Seasons

The Galactic Seasons have been available for almost two years now, having started in April 2021 (how time flies!) and yet I haven't really commented on them except in passing.

This is because, until recently, I feel that I haven't been in the best position to comment on them, at least from a fair perspective. Season 1, The Stranger from Kubindi, was an interesting concept marred by horrific execution. Season 2, Shadows of the Underworld, shared top-billing with the sheer grind of early 7.0 and that really coloured my perspective of the whole thing. Season 3, Luck of the Draw, therefore, is the first season where I feel I can approach the system and offer a mostly-unbiased view of it all.

That said, I shall of course be touching on both prior seasons as part of my assessment of the system as a whole. After all, the system changed so much between the first two systems that it would be remiss not to comment on where it improved and where it might have become more tedious.

On with the show!

Thoughts on 6.3: The Dark Descent

The latest update to SWTOR, 6.3: The Dark Descent, saw us attempting to pick Darth Malgus’s trail back up after his disappearance in January of 2020 (has it really been that long? Gosh!) and discover what it is he has been up to. This update also saw the introduction of the newest game-system, Galactic Seasons, which is essentially an extension of the daily login rewards.

How do all these fit together? Let’s find out!