Galactic Season 9 in Review

It's finally done! I completed all Galactic Season 9 meta achievements on all servers. I didn't have to wait with writing this until that was done, but I kind of wanted to, just in case anything that happened towards the end was going to change my mind in some ways - it didn't.

Galactic Season 9 was easily one of my favourite seasons so far. While most of the rewards were solid and the armour sets pretty versatile, my enjoyment was mostly down to the theme. I love flashpoints! I ran the featured flashpoint of the week up to six times per week, sometimes multiple times per night, and it never got boring because no two runs were the same.

I saw people that were in a hurry, and I saw others that were proceeding at a more slow and careful pace. I had groups that tried to skip as much trash as possible and others that killed absolutely everything in their way. Most importantly though, it was almost always good fun. There were a couple of badly behaved exceptions early in the season, but the vast majority of runs were pleasantly uneventful or filled with some amusing shenanigans. It was pretty reaffirming really, both in the way it reminded me of just how much I really enjoy flashpoints and have been missing having a good reason to run them more regularly, and how the majority of the SWTOR community is pleasantly chill and considerate of others in group content.

If I had to cite any negatives, I'd say the fact that the weekly objective was limited to veteran mode only meant that few guildies could be motivated into running flashpoints during our weekly guild event, as vet mode is so easy and quick, I can understand why many didn't see it as worth the extra effort of waiting for a dedicated time and place. I did appreciate though that there was at least an optional master mode objective during quite a few weeks, which I always did when it was available.

The special queue for the veteran mode of the week was a bit of a double-edged sword. Some nights I really would've preferred to just walk in with two guildies and a companion for example, but undermanning like that or even just going in manually with a full group to see the cut scenes was simply not an option. On the plus side though, the simplicity of this system meant that it saw plenty of use, as it was very straightforward with not much room for confusion.

As far as other objectives go, I was glad to see that the addition of all the new dynamic encounters in summer led to much more varied objectives from one week to the next, and we weren't constantly hopping back and forth between Hoth and Tatooine like in GS8. That said, I still felt a bit burnt out on these and mostly skipped those two planets, focusing mostly on the objectives for the starter planets, capital worlds and Ilum instead.

In general I reached a state this season where I spent very little time doing things I wouldn't really have felt like doing otherwise. The flashpoints were always a joy to do, and then I'd just add two or three other weekly objectives from the list depending on what I liked most.

I don't expect to go this hard (going for all the achievements on all servers) next time around, but even so I feel like I'm pretty well set to continue completing the season on all servers without too much stress in the future - more so than before, in fact, as this season was a stark reminder of how comparatively little effort it takes to just max out the reward track. That said, we now know that Galactic Season 10 will "work a little differently than previous seasons" - I'm very curious to find out what that means.

GS9 Week 14: Flashpoints, Flashpoints, Flashpoints!

A little over a month ago I wrote about how much I've been enjoying the current Galactic Season, and how I'd been thinking about setting myself the stretch goal of completing the full meta achievement on all servers this time (instead of the basic 100 levels). I'm not here to tell you that I've achieved that, but at this point I can say that it's definitely happening. I've reached season level 100 and defeated my 250 enhanced enemies on all servers, with the only boxes left to tick being a couple more Flashpoint Frenzy objectives and about 20 more weekly objectives in total.

It's been really surprising to me how energised I've felt for this season. I always say that this whole "doing seasons on multiple servers" thing means walking a fine line between a fun challenge and burning myself out with too many digital chores, and usually I tend to start losing steam after around eight weeks. This time though, I've kept going all the way to level hundred, to the point that my secondary legacies were only slightly behind my main one, and even after that I've just kept going... and going... and going.

The weekly flashpoint objective has been a big part of that, and I've written about my fascination with seeing the flashpoint scene on different servers. This week was particularly amazing for that as there were a total of three weekly flashpoint objectives: Korriban Incursion and Assault on Tython were both featured veteran flashpoints for the week, and the objective to do any random master mode flashpoint was also up. I ended up doing all three of these on all servers (minus the master mode on Shae Vizla since I couldn't get that to pop), for a total of 17 flashpoint runs throughout the week, and it was thoroughly enjoyable for the most part. Sure, not every single run was amazing, but I'd say the majority were at least funny or interesting in some way.

Tython and Korriban were good flashpoints to do repeatedly because they are relatively short and have maps that are slightly more open than the average instance, meaning people can take different routes. There are a number of skips of varying difficulties, which I all saw done at some point, but I also saw every single one of those trash pulls taken down the old-fashioned way and more. Some groups pulled mob groups I didn't even know existed, even after all these years, such as when someone in Korriban Incursion accidentally hurled their sabers over a ridge and a bunch of angry tuk'atas descended upon us. I had no idea those were even there!

As far as skipping goes, on Tulak Hord, Assault on Tython popped up as my random master mode and the tank was very careful to skip as much trash as possible while we took out the artillery targeting arrays in the first part of the flashpoint, just to then randomly charge into several groups of enemies just before Major Travik while commenting that he wanted to do the bonus (which requires you to kill a certain minimum number of trash mobs). "Why did we just do all that sneaking then?!" I exclaimed, to which he replied that he wasn't sure either; it was just a habit. That cracked me up.

My favourite experience of the week - and perhaps of the season so far - was this week's master mode flashpoint on Satele Shan though. I'm still never quite sure on that server whether I'm better off queueing late in the evening or waiting until the weekend and trying early in the morning my time. This week I tried in the evening again, and even while queueing as both dps and tank the wait was long. I decided for once to spend my time doing something that was neither good for seasons nor Conquest and simply drove around Belsavis, doing the Macrobinocular mission step there, uncovering the map and picking up some datacrons. After what felt like nearly an hour's wait I was about to give up when I finally got a pop.

The group finder made me the tank in a master mode Cademimu run. When nobody gives me "bat out of hell" vibes I usually ask whether people want to do the bonus, and there was enough support to do it. The Cademimu bonus boss is called Garold the Dark One, which always makes me laugh because Garold sounds like a hybrid of Gary and Harold, neither of which are good Sith names. Anyway, we tried to fight him and promptly wiped. The healer immediately apologised, saying it was their first time and they had mistakenly rolled right into a red circle.

As I always love an opportunity to teach people when it arises naturally, I gave the tip that all ranged could just stand behind the railing by the elevator to avoid being pulled in by the boss, in order to stay safely outside of his AoE. On the next attempt we tried that, but someone fell down the lift shaft, two people died and we hit the enrage. I just thought it was entertaining and perfectly natural progression! On the third attempt we got him down and I think everyone was very pleased.

After dispatching General Ortol, one person in the group asked whether we were up for running another flashpoint for the weekly. I had only really queued for the seasons objective, didn't need the weekly mission and was tired... but that group had such great vibes, I did want to run with them again, so I did. The second flashpoint we got was Mando Raiders, and this time there were no wipes, just some minor shenanigans that got me musing about how nice it was to be the tank when you have a group that genuinely wants to be led and learn, and for whom you sometimes do have to work a bit to keep them safe if they accidentally butt-pull some extra turrets.

It was just a good vibes week all around, and I'm getting to the point where I think I can ease up on most of the other seasons objectives and just keep running the weekly flashpoints until (close to) the end of the season. 

Flashpointing on Different Servers

One of the major reasons I've really been enjoying the current Galactic Season is that it's gotten me back into pugging. I've enjoyed doing group content in SWTOR with strangers for as long as I can remember, but over the last few years I've kind of fallen out of the habit on my home server Darth Malgus. I think it's mainly because I spend so much time on organising and running things with my guild that my "weekly group content quota" feels more than filled by the time that's all done.

On the other servers though, it's a different story. While most of my characters are guilded at this point, due to time zones I rarely find myself with an opportunity to join my guildies there for group content, so most of the time I'm at the mercy of random strangers who happen to be online at the same time as me. And it's been surprisingly fun!

What's been really interesting about the whole experience though is that doing at least one flashpoint per week on every server, one can really feel the different vibes. I briefly toyed with the idea of taking detailed notes and trying to come up with some sort of objective ranking but quickly discarded that notion, both because it would've been a lot of work but also because things like whether you had a nice group or why you may have liked one pug more than another are really hard to objectively quantify. I decided it was fine to limit myself to subjective observations and let people make their own judgements about that.

To begin with, I'll say that the differences between the servers are actually not dramatic in my opinion. It's not like you'll always have good runs on one server and bad ones on another. So far this season, every single flashpoint I got into was completed successfully, with the exception of a master mode Ruins of Nul where we called it quits on Regnant. However, that particular boss is very tough, we'd given it several decent tries, and it just didn't look like we were getting even close to succeeding. Everyone was very polite about collectively admitting defeat at that point.

I also haven't seen a single hostile vote-kick initiated anywhere, which was interesting to me compared to World of Warcraft, where people will boot you for the most frivolous of reasons. In my SWTOR flashpoints this season, I once initiated a kick for someone who'd been disconnected for a while when we couldn't proceed any further at a checkpoint that required everyone in the group to be present and click, and in another run an individual who'd been kind of toxic themselves actively begged to be kicked to get away from the rest of the group. But that was entirely it.

That's not to say that all players in my flashpoints have been perfect angels, but if there's conflict, people would seemingly rather have a verbal fight about it than simply try to give their opponent the boot, which I find interesting. I could imagine that some might prefer being quietly removed over being insulted in what's supposed to be just a game, but personally I kind of appreciate that this shows that even when things get heated, SWTOR players have an unspoken attitude of "we're in this together, so let's all just get to the end, OK?" where they don't want to deprive someone else of their flashpoint credit even if they find the other person annoying.

Generally, most of my runs have been what I'd call pleasant and quiet: not much conversation and we just get on with things without too much friction. Usually at least one person will aim for every possible shortcut there is, but at the same time nobody bats an eyelid if someone fails to be sneaky and pulls an extra group - you just help to clean up and get on with it.

So that's what's been the same on all servers. Now let's talk about those subtle differences I mentioned:

I feel like on Leviathan and Tulak Hord, you can really tell that these are smaller communities as everything's just a little bit more friendly and relaxed. People are a bit more chatty than average, with everyone always saying hi and bye at the start and end of a run and actually pausing to discuss tactics if there are any questions or hiccups. I wouldn't say these chats are necessarily "nicer" than on other servers (the chattiness can also include rudeness or complaints) but there is a clear acknowledgement of the other players being there and attempts at communication.

You'll run into people with a range of skills, from the one who's never done the instance before to the experienced raider, with most probably sitting somewhere in-between. These servers are small but still healthy communities, where you'll learn to recognise the names of some of the bigger guilds after a while.

This is somewhat of a contrast to Star Forge, whose mega server status has only been increasing over the past couple of years, as people from smaller servers with an interest in high-end or queued content are increasingly transferring off the smaller servers in order to have a larger pool of players to work with and shorter queues. As a result of that, I feel like Star Forge is the server where you have the highest chance of having one or more super efficiency-obsessed players in your group who set a stiff pace because they're already planning their next activity afterwards and don't want to spend a second more inside this flashpoint than they have to. If there's some new degenerate trash skip, you'll probably learn it here. (Me in D7: What's this guy doing, running right through so many groups at once? Wait what, if we just stand here and wait, everything evades? WTF.)

I think this creates an interesting conundrum because in general we'd like to guide new players towards a server that's busy and where queues are popping, but I can't help but get the impression that at least as far as flashpoints are concerned, almost any other server is probably a more welcoming environment for someone's first run, as people are going at least marginally more slowly, so that chances of the newbie just being left behind and panicking over where everyone went are at least somewhat reduced.

To clarify though, I'm not claiming that Star Forge players are unfriendly or anything. I haven't seen that particular situation arise myself, but I imagine most would probably be perfectly fine with slowing down a bit if someone said that they're new and need a bit of help. It's just that the default assumption in group content seems to be that if you're on Star Forge, you're here because you're a veteran player who wants to maximise your efficiency in terms of play time, more so than anywhere else at least.

This is particularly striking when compared to Satele Shan, the other and now smaller US server. Am I saying that everything there is super slow? Not at all, SS players can also be in a hurry, but what has stood out to me there is how much personality players display in my runs there. Both my best and worst runs of the season (so far) have been on Satele Shan.

The worst was a run where one guy was always rushing ahead and ignoring that the rest of the group was still fighting things, while another player who was queued as tank was pulling things willy-nilly without actually tanking them. These two people could hardly have been more at odds with each other, they fought about it, and me and the remaining dps were awkwardly caught in the middle.

The good runs on the other hand were ones where people were chatting happily, asking to do the bonus boss and just generally goofing off in a way that's just such a contrast to the more business-like, in-and-out approach that I usually encounter on Star Forge (and many other servers). It's like everyone who wants a fast and easy ride has transferred off and what's left of the population has a much higher density of absolute maniacs (both good and bad).

Finally, we have Shae Vizla, the Oceanic server where queued content mostly died about three months after its release. The current and previous Galactic Season have been good at creating groups for the featured content at least, but I've got to admit the experience always feels a bit sad to me, because my impression is that you basically get only two kinds of people in these runs: complete newbies who decided to queue up for something for the first time, and seasoned veterans who are only here for Galactic Seasons (and are usually in one of three guilds). 

I'm being a bit hyperbolic of course, but it does feel markedly different from the vibes on Leviathan and Tulak Hord, where you still have this healthy mix of different player types. On Shae Vizla, the newbies presumably don't talk because they're unsure of what's going on, and the veterans don't talk because they're like Star Forge rushers on crack - gotta quickly finish this flashpoint here so I can do it five more times on the other servers!

I'm curious whether others who've done group content on more than one server have had similar experiences or see the situation completely differently. Even if you play on only one server, do you think my characterisation of the flashpoint-playing population matches up with your own experiences there?

Let's Talk About Czerka Combat Enhancers

During the last Galactic Season, we were introduced to the concept of experimental Czerka combat stims, which were supposed to bring a breath of fresh air to an old type of content that turned out to be the season's theme: uprisings. The reality of that didn't really match my expectations, and I discussed in this post how and why I thought that the effects of the stims were mostly boring and useless. I suggested that at least two of the three needed buffing, but nothing of that sort ever happened.

When new stim effects were announced for this season, I didn't get my hopes up too much but figured that they could hardly be worse than the ones from Season 8. Again I ended up slightly disappointed... this time not by the new effects themselves, but by the fact that all the old ones were still present as well, so every time you use a stim, you only have a two in five chance of actually seeing one of the new powers. I think it took me three or four weeks until I finally got sufficiently "lucky" with the random numbers. (Later I would always click the buff off if I didn't like it and reapply the stim until I got a result I liked, but early on I didn't have that many stims from drops yet and I didn't care enough to buy extras from the vendor.)

The two new effects are both decent actually: One gives you two floating probes over your shoulders that add dps by pew pew-ing everything you're in combat with, and the other one gives you a temporary action button that allows you to pick up a mob up to silver strength and throw it at another enemy. That can be kind of fun, especially when it leads to somewhat unexpected results (such as being able to pick up and throw a stationary turret), but it does kind of lose its lustre after a while - in my opinion at least - mainly because I think the cooldown is too long, and the fact that the throw causes everything in the vicinity to fly off in ten different directions is actually kind of inconvenient in AoE situations.

Anyway, talking about the different enhancer effects wasn't actually going to be the main point of this post. Instead, it's that this season has kind of made me wonder about the concept of these stims as a whole because I've noticed some friction for the first time that I never encountered last season. Back then, the main thing that stood out to me was that in any given uprising, I was often the only one to pop a stim, which gave me the impression that people didn't really know or care about the feature. If people were ever confused by some mobs growing big and red, or my character leaving pink puddles of poop on the floor, nobody ever said anything.

This season though, I've noticed an increase in friction around the stims. I still see few other people using them in pugs most of the time, but I actually had two runs of the featured veteran flashpoint of the week (both on the Leviathan server) where someone asked for the stim buffs to be removed. I didn't want to, and since I'm not fluent enough in French to have a discussion about it, I unfortunately turned into one of those pugs that just follow along silently and don't respond to anything, but it was still awkward.

On the other end of the spectrum, I've experienced (and heard of other people's unpleasant experiences with) people popping combat enhancers in master mode flashpoints. Now, best case that just turns the whole run into a big of a slog, but in some instances it can actually seriously kneecap you - for example on a boss fight where you're supposed to kill adds quickly, having those adds suddenly quadruple in health when they spawn in can pose a serious obstacle. The solution is obvious - get rid of the combat enhancer - but having to be the party pooper that asks someone else to please click off their stim buff isn't really any fun either.

What I'm getting from both of these scenarios is that the trade-off the stims ask of you (gain an extra ability in exchange for some mobs gaining more health and hitting harder) doesn't feel worth it a lot of the time. I'll be honest myself and admit that I'm 100% only doing it for the achievement that requires you to kill 250 enhanced mobs in flashpoints. This has turned out to be much easier to achieve than last season's equivalent for some reason - maybe because flashpoints are generally longer than uprisings?

On Darth Malgus, where I always do my weekly flashpoint with guildies and we all agreed to pop a stim at the start, we were all done with the achievement after only four or five weeks (though the fact that we're the kind of people who will do the bonus boss in every flashpoint certainly helped with that). On the other servers it's still a work in progress for me, but the reason I even considered this one achievable on all servers is the fact that even in a run where only one person is using an enhancer and we skip a lot of mobs, I'll still be able to make a decent chunk of progress on my tally.

However, once done I'm not really interested in continuing to use the enhancers after that, because I'm honestly inclined to agree that they just make everything take longer without a sufficiently fun pay-off and I don't want to get into arguments about it with the rest of my pug group. I don't know what kind of systems the devs are planning for the next Galactic Season, but I don't really feel like this whole Czerka stims thing has been a huge success, at least not the way it's currently implemented.

Still, I'd love to hear other opinions on this. What have your experiences been with the Czerka combat enhancers this season? Do you find them fun or tedious, and have you experienced any disagreement about this in your flashpoint pugs? Let me know in the comments. 

GS9, Week 4 Thoughts

This week was probably the least fun week of Galactic Season 9 for me so far, though I can't tell for sure whether the objectives were just less fun by themselves or whether my "new season enthusiasm" was slowly starting to wear off. That isn't to say that it was a bad week, just one that felt like it required more effort.

The dynamic encounter planet of the week was Dromund Kaas, which was weirdly enough quite a mixed bag. First off, it required 25 instead of 15 encounter completions again, which I found off-putting, though that didn't prevent me from doing the objective anyway, at least not this early in the season.

More strikingly though, Dromund Kaas was a weird inverse of Ilum last week - as mentioned then, I think the dynamic encounters on the latter are usually somewhat less fun due to the high mob density, so having more people around who were constantly clearing things out actually made everything more pleasant. Dromund Kaas on the other hand has a lot of encounters that are usually quite fun in my opinion... but they just don't scale with large crowds at all. Watching a dozen people all try to be the first to click that one terminal in "Rogue Droid Uprising" would have been funny if it hadn't also been very frustrating. The cherry on top was that this particular encounter has an achievement for clicking the terminal really quickly after getting to that stage of progression - not this week, bucko!

The veteran flashpoint of the week was the first part of the Jedi Prisoner storyline on each faction, which meant running either Taral V or Boarding Party and was another objective I wasn't too thrilled about. The Jedi Prisoner is an interesting storyline, but all the flashpoints involved in it are definitely in the bottom half of my list if I had to rank all flashpoints from best to worst. Gameplay-wise, they're all kind of long and boring, and while there are a lot of mobs that can be skipped, that just makes the whole experience feel a bit unsatisfying in a different way (to me anyway). Also, what's the point of doing Boarding Party if you don't get to confront Captain Yelto at the end?!

Unsurprisingly, my favourite run of this objective was the one I did with Mr Commando, who - despite not having run any flashpoints in what felt like forever - still remembered his exact pulling routine to unlock the Taral V bonus boss in what he felt was the most efficient way possible, which I thought was quite beautiful to behold. As it happened, we also had to pug one dps in that run, and I was a bit worried that we might get someone who'd be annoyed at us not skipping everything to finish the run as quickly as possible. However, we got lucky and got a level 15 who actually seemed quite delighted by the experience, gained six levels throughout the flashpoint and asked us at the end whether we wanted to do another one, which I thought was cute.

Running a master mode flashpoint was also an objective once again, and I was happy to do so on five servers (Shae Vizla is only being left out because I can't get the queue to pop there, even while queueing as tank or healer). My random pops this week were Blood Hunt, Cademimu, Mandalorian Raiders and Assault on Tython times two, which took me up to four runs of the latter this season already.

I'm curious whether that was just pure RNG or whether this is a side effect of the new exclusion rules. I have this theory that people primarily choose to exclude flashpoints from their random queue for three reasons:

1. They're perceived as too hard (e.g. Ruins of Nul, Shrine of Silence).
2. They're perceived as too long (e.g. The Esseles, Directive 7).
3. They're perceived as easy and overfarmed to an annoying degree (e.g. Hammer Station, Athiss).

If all four people that are up next in the queue have excluded five flashpoints for different reasons, that narrows the selection down by quite a lot - and I reckon Assault on Tython may simply be one of those that slips through the net either way, as it's neither faceroll easy nor particularly hard, and not terribly long either (especially if you skip some of the early trash). Has anyone else been seeing more of this one than usual? My hypothesis will need further testing for sure.

As for the other flashpoints, Blood Hunt was largely unremarkable, and Cademimu was the one I did with Mr Commando, which once again meant doing the bonus and just dragging a pug along whether they liked it or not, though they didn't complain about it. It was funny though when the guildie who was our fourth accidentally took the elevator downstairs in the middle of the bonus boss fight. 

That said, the weirdest/most amusing run was probably the Mandalorian Raiders I did on Satele Shan. I noted last week that I'm not a fan of dps running ahead and pulling when I'm the tank, right? Well, in this one there was a Guardian dps who took off like a bat out of hell the moment we zoned in and then kept pulling non-stop. I considered saying something like "you know this is master mode, right" but decided that this would've been too passive-aggressive - but also, I was honestly kind of confused more than anything because of how he kept getting away with it, in the sense that none of the trash seemed to hurt him too badly even when he got all the aggro. I was even starting to wonder whether I'd accidentally queued for veteran mode by mistake.

It wasn't until we killed Braxx the Bloodhound with the healer dead and everyone else on about ten percent health that the Guardian paused and said something along the lines of "I only just realised this is master mode since there were no kolto stations". So that was kind of humorous. He did stop pulling after that, we had a few more mishaps anyway, but ultimately it was all good.

GS9 Flashpointing, Week 3

I wasn't planning to keep a diary of my weekly activities this season - and I guess I'm still not really keeping one, at least not one that involves the level of detail with which I kept Galactic Season diaries in Season 1 and Season 6 - but I do find the weekly flashpoint objectives interesting enough that I keep wanting to take some notes on them.

In general, the third week of Galactic Season 9 was another really pleasant one with multiple easy objectives, to the point that I ended up going 7 out of 7 on all servers. You know it's an easy one when you set yourself a goal to reach a certain objective by the end of the week and end up ticking off several others by accident before you even get there! That's the kind of week it was.

The dynamic encounter planet of the week was Ilum. It's the planet I've ranked as the least fun in terms of dynamic encounters so far, but the reason I did so was that I think many encounters have a high mob density that tends to get in the way of whatever the actual objective is. In a week like this one, where there were plenty of people on Ilum every day, this wasn't nearly as bad as mobs were constantly getting cleared out left and right. Turns out even the rather tedious Fall of Fort Tonvarr can be fun with a sufficiently large crowd of people around.

The featured veteran mode flashpoint of the week was Mandalorian Raiders, which is another relatively easy one. I wonder if all the featured flashpoints will be softballs or whether the devs will make us "graduate" to some of the trickier ones as the season progresses.

Anyway, nothing too noteworthy happened in any of my runs of this particular flashpoint this week, except that in one run where we had particularly high dps (it was a group with multiple level 80s if I recall correctly) the last boss was burned down so quickly that he completely forgot to do any mechanics, just stood there and didn't move until he died. The only downside of this was that this also seemed to bug out his on-screen position, as none of us were able to loot him, always getting the "you can't reach that" error message.

I still remember when at least parts of this flashpoint could be quite deadly, such as if you pushed the last boss himself too quickly and got too many turret adds, but in the one group where this happened it was no problem to survive the turret fire anyway.

Also, the dog trash used to hit so hard, I remember on master mode we'd have to rotate stuns to make sure the tank would survive. I will say though that in runs with lower-level characters, I did notice that ahead of some pulls with multiple dogs, people often suddenly step on the brakes, clearly waiting for someone else to go first and get pounced on (I tended to volunteer).

The more exciting thing were once again the master mode flashpoints though, even if I got a pretty tame selection this week.

On Leviathan I got Hammer Station at last! I'm happy that it took until week three for it to show up in my randoms. Also, we actually killed all the trash to the first boss properly instead of trying to run like headless chickens, which is something I appreciated.

On Tulak Hord I got into a Maelstrom Prison and nearly died on the first pull when I got all the healer aggro just as a guildie was asking me something, but other than that it was smooth. And yes, a guildie was actually online in the largely inactive guild I joined! They asked me to invite an alt of theirs into the guild, so I had them invite two of mine in return after the flashpoint, so I can at last reap a few more Conquest rewards on this server. (Now, if only I knew what to do with my Imps...)

On Star Forge, I did several flashpoints on Swtorista's stream, and we got Nathema Conspiracy and Legacy of the Rakata. In the former, we actually did no skips, and we all agreed that the last boss used to be way harder somehow. In the latter, we wiped once on the bonus boss, oops! But it was all good fun.

On Satele Shan, I once again used my magic tank powers to get an instant pop for a pug. The power is addictive! This time I got into Red Reaper, a flashpoint I hadn't done in ages. A dps Powertech was constantly running ahead, which annoyed me a bit because if you're on a class that can tank and you want to always be the first to charge in, just queue as tank, damn it! These sorts of damage dealers are my least favourite to tank for. Though this one did stop just short of actually trying to pull for me. Fortunately I did still end up remembering all the pulls and skips so I managed to keep up reasonably well. I was really just having tank ego problems here: I got an instant pop and had a smooth run where nobody died, but one of the dps was playing in a manner that was slightly annoying to me, woe is me.

On Darth Malgus, we managed to field two groups for master mode flashpoints after our social ops run on Saturday, which was something I was very happy to see as I've always felt that flashpoints are a great social activity. My group got the Esseles, which I didn't have any particularly strong feelings about at this point, but Mr Commando groaned as it was the third time he'd had to run the Esseles in three weeks. I will note that I think for master modes the cut scene skip is fine by the way, because these were always meant to be a gear grind above anything else.

I'm curious to see what exciting places the group finder will take me next week!

A Good Start to the Season

You may find it hard to believe after my outrage at how gutted the Esseles and the Black Talon feel without cut scenes, but I've actually had a pretty good start to Galactic Season 9 in spite of that. Patch day was a bit rough, with my game crashing to desktop something like seven times, but once I learned that this was caused by hovering over one specific UI element, I was once again too amazed by just how weird MMO bugs can be sometimes to really be mad about that. (Plus, once I knew what was causing it, it was easy to avoid. They then patched the issue a couple days later.)

The flashpoint theme has actually felt surprisingly invigorating. I've long said that I'm a big fan of flashpoints, but I'm not immune to incentives, and the fact that there's literally been nothing to earn for me in flashpoints for a couple of years now has admittedly discouraged me from running them. I would rarely go for the seasons objectives that required you to run two specific flashpoints because they were just too time-consuming and felt inefficient. The dedicated weekly objective for this season only requiring a single quick veteran mode run makes a world of a difference, and I was genuinely surprised that I actually had fun blitzing through Athiss six times this past week.

My favourite run was the one with my husband on our home server, where he actually bothered to go into one of the side alcoves to use his scavenging to repair the broken combat droid there, something I hadn't done in so long that I'd genuinely forgotten that it was even a thing. One of the guildies in our group then kept casting a heal over time on it to keep it alive, to the point that the temporary pet was actually still alive when we got to the last boss. This is where we learned that the living fire debuff can go on non-player characters! The poor droid didn't manage to survive that one, but it was good for a laugh. 

The other weekly objectives for the first two weeks were pretty good too, with some nice softballs that didn't take too much time to complete on multiple servers while also earning me new achievements.

My personal biggest delight last week though was that there was also an objective to run any random master mode flashpoint, which I did on five out of six servers. (Sadly I couldn't get the queue to pop on Shae Vizla even while queueing as a tank.)

Even better, not a single one of them was Hammer Station, even though I had queued for the full selection. I had the expectation that most people would use the new feature that allows you to exclude a few flashpoints without losing your random bonus to primarily veto long or difficult ones, but maybe there are more fellow Spammer Station haters out there than expected who are actually excluding that one instead.

Either way, the random master mode flashpoints I got put into were Assault on Tython (twice), Battle of Rishi, Lost Island and Crisis on Umbara. The latter must have been nerfed a lot since I last did it, as my group completed it successfully without wiping despite feeling pretty mid in terms of skill. I know there's been some gear inflation since 7.0, but the first two bosses barely even seemed to do any damage, and we pulled the bonus boss by accident with a bunch of trash and still killed that successfully too. Not that I'm complaining!

Battle of Rishi had me busting out my Shadow's tank spec on Satele Shan, which I had actually set up some time ago but then never ended up using. I was very pleased with myself for how I guided the rest of the group through the run after someone expressed that it had been a while and they weren't sure they remembered what to do. Trying to model good tank behaviour!

Lost Island was the most memorable one though, as that was what I got on the Leviathan server while queueing on my Sage as a healer. It quickly became obvious that the tank and one of the damage dealers knew basically nothing about the flashpoint, while the other damage dealer gave the vibes of someone who had done it before and generally knew how to play but couldn't fully remember all the tactics properly. It was pretty funny to read the chat and try to make sense of it, as my knowledge of French is very limited. I think I could generally get the vibe/general topic, but not necessarily what exactly people were trying to say.

Unsurprisingly we wiped something like five times on the second boss as everyone but me kept getting knocked off the platform. I tried to use Google Translate to explain where people needed to stand, but either the translation made no sense or they intentionally decided to ignore me because I sounded too weird, as they didn't appear to listen to my advice. Fortunately they eventually seemingly managed to figure it out on their own and we were victorious. The remaining two bosses after that were comparatively easy, but I still felt like I was carrying pretty hard, healing people through some significant amounts of "standing in bad".

I felt properly giddy after we finished, both excited and relieved that we'd succeeded despite our difficulties, but also a bit amused by how ridiculous the whole experience had felt. The dps who'd given me vibes of having some idea of what to do whispered me afterwards to... I don't know, I'm guessing it was something like "we're queueing again" though it might have meant something completely different; I genuinely had no clue. I just logged off because I'd definitely had enough for that evening.

I'm hoping to see that objective pop up more often though.

Flashpoints: Why Are We Here?

I've been having fun with the new season so far and will probably talk about that at some point, but the removal of cut scenes and group conversations from the group finder continues to weigh heavily on my mind. While my initial reaction was skewing towards slightly negative, I was telling myself that this is probably one of those cases where I'm just a weird outlier for liking something (group conversations in pug flashpoints) that many people don't like, and that I'll see the benefits of this change soon enough. I still remember when the Czerka flashpoints first came out back in 2013, I was actually somewhat disappointed at first that they were so streamlined without any interactive cut scenes, but I got over that pretty quickly.

One of the seasons objectives this week was to run either the Black Talon or the Esseles on veteran mode via the group finder, and with me doing Galactic Seasons on all servers I had plenty of opportunity to see the new change in action. For the most part, the experience was... fine. I'm not going to pretend that I would have had so much more fun if I'd gotten the full cut scene experience six times instead of the new fade to black thing. Primarily, it was all just kind of weird, with a lot of running back and forth with no discernible purpose when you don't actually have the story cut scenes to tell you what is happening.

There was one run that really annoyed me though. I got into an Esseles on a level 80 healer, and the other three members of the group were a level 80 dps, a level 10 and a level 14. I don't know if the two lowbies were new players or just alts, but either way they were subject to certain limitations at their low level, such as slower speed and lacking strong AoE abilities or defensives. Yet the level 80 was constantly mounting up and driving ahead, aggroing absolutely everything to pull it into a corner at the end, while the rest of us slowly jogged after them on foot. (I would've been able to keep up more but I felt it was my duty to protect the lowbies, who would've died several times if I hadn't healed them.)

The 80 repeatedly told them off for fighting things and said they should just mount up as well. I got the impression that at least one of them got a bit flustered by that and tried to overcompensate by mounting up and rushing ahead even of the level 80 at one point, just to then be told off because not everyone had made it up the elevator yet when we were put into combat as a result of that (which was technically correct but also must've been confusing in terms of mixed messages).

I got really annoyed with that level 80's attitude but didn't say anything because frankly I was quite busy just keeping up with their constant running myself, as well as just keeping everyone else alive. I simply did what I could to support the lowbies, such as when one of them veered off towards the bonus boss while the 80 was just trying to go straight to the end. I just kept hoping that neither of the little guys were genuinely new players because if I had been a newbie in that situation, I would have been so put off from running flashpoints ever again.

Now, to be clear, all of this technically has nothing to do with the cut scene change, because people could act like that while the group conversations were still a thing. However, at least the cut scenes would put the brakes on things a little bit. They were a reminder that this flashpoint wasn't designed to be rushed like that. And I feel that the removal of the cut scenes does the opposite now, vindicating people like that level 80 in the sense that yes, the devs agree with you that flashpoints are something to get over and done with as quickly as possible. I feel like my opinion was validated by a thread on the SWTOR subreddit posted this week about how this kind of behaviour seemed to be worse than ever since the patch. In a comment thread there, someone who commented that "games are meant to be fun" also received the reply: "It's a season objective. Literally not meant to be fun. Just a way to progress."

I just kept thinking to myself: What are we doing here? Why are we optimising content for people who don't like it? And I realised that I'm worried about SWTOR flashpoints going down the way of World of Warcraft dungeons.

WoW was my first MMO as well as my introduction to doing group content with random players, and I loved it. The first time I did the Deadmines? Amazing. I got yelled at for ninja-looting a chest because I didn't know any better, but I apologised, learned from it and we moved on. For about three or four years, dungeons were easily one of my favourite things to do in the game. However, somewhere along the line, things changed. Blizzard wanted players to run dungeons in greater numbers and more often, so they became increasingly incentivised for endless replay, and people's attitudes changed accordingly.

I still play WoW almost twenty years later, but I rarely do dungeons in its modern incarnation now. Every now and then some reward will lure me into queueing up for a pug dungeon again, just for me to instantly be reminded of why I no longer find them fun. Everything is just an insane rush to the end to pick up the reward and it's a casual or new player's absolute nightmare.

When I started playing SWTOR, I instantly fell in love with the game's flashpoints too. The Esseles and Black Talon are absolutely amazing experiences that have no real equivalent in other games when you play through them in a group for the first time and as intended (which is to say, actually paying attention to the story and listening to the group conversations). They are also clearly not intended to be re-run on a daily basis. Sure, they can be fun to re-play every now and then, to see what different conversation choices do and so on, but it's clearly not something you're supposed to do all the time. The game won't stop you from running it multiple times a day if you want to, but I think it's fair to say that you were effectively "doing it wrong" in that case and couldn't really complain if it wasn't super fun. The idea with SWTOR flashpoints was that they were still meant to be a bit of an adventure every time you entered one, something you can only really consume in moderation.

With this change... I don't really know anymore. I can even defend the removal of cut scenes as a temporary measure for the Galactic Season, mostly because it benefits me personally, but people like me, who do Galactic Seasons on every server, can hardly make up a significant chunk of the player base. Clearly the intent is to get more players into flashpoints that haven't done them before, but I'm not sure this whole exercise is going to show them anything appealing enough to want to come back. Endless running along corridors with no rhyme or reason about what is going on? What's appealing about that?

I also saw someone comment somewhere that Final Fantasy XIV used to have a similar problem with new players having a bad experience in the group finder due to issues with cut scene skipping, and Square Enix's solution to that was to make the cut scenes unskippable for everyone and increase the reward payout to make sure veterans were being suitably compensated for the fact that the run was taking longer to accommodate the newbies. Now, I don't play FFXIV myself, so I can't tell you how well that worked out for everyone, but I think it shows that "whelp, we've got to cater to the people who are in a hurry" is not an inevitability. SWTOR and FF have a lot in common in terms of their focus on story, so it's actually kind of odd to me now to see the SWTOR devs choose speed-running over story in this instance.

At this point, after thinking about it some more, I feel like instead of removing cut scenes all over the place they should've gone back and reconsidered what flashpoints are all about and why people are funnelled into them the way they are. Why do people ask to skip cut scenes? Because they're in a flashpoint they don't really want to be in. Why are they in this flashpoint? Because we give extra rewards for queueing for a random flashpoint. Why do we give rewards for that? So people who want to run specific flashpoints can get groups for them. But why would people run the Esseles in a group these days when there is a solo mode available anyway? Maybe the devs should've just taken it out of the group finder like they did Kuat and Colicoid War Games. Leaving it in but taking out everything that actually made it unique and insteresting just feels like extremely muddled game design to me. It just doesn't make sense in my head.

A Farewell to Pug Cut Scenes

I said in my post about the dev live stream last month that the most impactful announcement to me was that patch 7.1.1 was going to remove all cut scenes and group conversations from group finder flashpoints. While this was widely welcomed, I'm personally not convinced that it's the right decision for the devs to give in to the worst impulses of people who are always in a hurry, but we'll see how things play out. The patch went live this week, and either way it's done for now.

I just wanted to pay my own little tribute to all these cut scenes that I will no longer get to see, because I used to love taking screenshots of those group moments in pugs, so I dug through my screenshot folder archive and compiled some for this post. 

I was kind of surprised that the oldest screenshot of this kind I could find was the above scene from Battle of Ilum from 2016, but then I remembered that I was mostly unable to take screenshots during cut scenes for the game's first two years (not sure they ever fixed that bug) and yeah, I guess that checks out. You can tell that it's an older screenshot because everyone's outfits are relatively old school, with the Jedi in Thexan's robes being the most "modern" looking.

This shot on the other hand was from 2020, when I documented levelling a character purely through flashpoints for the second time and found that Battle of Ilum was a surprisingly common one to get randomly (if you excluded Hammer Station like I did). Gotta love the Twi'lek barely covering her privates on the ice planet. (No, I don't. I mostly dislike those kinds of outfits and in the cut scenes I found them quite immersion-breaking to be honest.)

The flashpoint I loved the most for group cut scenes was, ironically, one that only had a single one: Czerka Corporate Labs. However, it does have this brief moment at the end where your group enters the final boss room in this really cinematic looking way and I always loved capturing that one. I'm not kidding, I have so many shots of this scene. Here, have some more:

If you want to play a little game, you can try to pick out which character is mine in each shot! Or just generally let me know which character out of all the ones pictured you think looks the best. Or which group looks the most cohesive as a team. There are just so many things to ogle.

I almost forgot that Czerka Core Meltdown has a similar cut scene because it just doesn't work nearly as well. The above screenshot is cropped to focus more on the characters, because the camera is quite zoomed out if you look at the whole screen.

After Corporate Labs, I remember I kind of waited for Bioware to recreate that group cut scene magic in any of the flashpoints that followed but they never quite got there. The above shot from the end of Battle of Rishi is about as close as it got, and that, too required some cropping/zooming in.

A shot from Korriban Incursion. "Everyone with their weapons drawn" is another classic in terms of moments that looked great in screenshots.

Ah, Directive 7, one of the most interesting side stories from the base game that was never ever mentioned again anywhere. And another flashpoint with lots of little cut scenes (and even more trash mobs) that many hated for taking too long. But again, I quite enjoyed seeing my pug groups look cool and kick ass while facing off against Mentor.

Let's finish up with another screenshot from Battle of Ilum that stands for something else I'll miss: the dark side/light side choices. The image doesn't actually show the choice, but I saved it under the name "light side pug" - so the fact that I had ended up in a group of all light side characters on Imperial side stood out to me. I loved it when I found my people! And when someone disagreed about what the "right" choice was in a certain scenario, there was usually some friendly banter to be had. No more.

(Just as a disclaimer so nobody gets the wrong idea: I didn't "force" any of these pugs to wait for me while I was watching cut scenes. My attitude was always to skip if people wanted to skip, and watch if people wanted to watch, but you could easily get some great shots of certain moments even while space-barring through most of the conversation.)

Some Interesting News From SWTOR's 7.7.1 Dev Stream

I was somewhat disappointed by the last two dev streams, but the voice actors' strike ended a few weeks ago, so I was positive that we'd get some good news about the next story update this time, and I was also hopeful that whatever they were going to announce about Galactic Season 9 was going to be more appealing to me than Season 8's uprising focus had been. I did get both of those things, but as I always do, I have some nits to pick as well.

Story is coming... but later and perhaps less than we'd hoped

At least when talking with some of my friends, there had been a hope expressed that the next story patch would be one big "catch-up patch" giving us a bigger chunk of story than usual, kind of like how Echoes of Oblivion and Spirit of Vengeance (which were originally supposed to be separate pieces of content) were both released at the same time after delays caused by Covid.

This... is not going to be the case. 7.8, which will come out before Christmas, will have the "Galactic Threads" story that was originally meant to be included in patch 7.6 last Christmas, and then they'll speed up a little bit and add "Master's Engima", the story originally built for patch 7.7, with 7.8.1, which should then launch at some point early next year and would usually have included only the start of Galactic Season 10 and no story update.

While I'm glad to finally have something close to a date, having to wait another four months or so until the next story drop still hurts - by that point the game will have gone nearly 18 months without a story patch, which is unprecedented in this MMO's history.

The other thing that stuck out to me is that if we're getting the story that was meant to be in 7.6 in 7.8, what was meant to be in 7.8 before that? No story? Ultimately it feels like aside from the delays, we also lost one of the twice-a-year story installments due to the strike, which sucks.

Same thing with date nights by the way - they mentioned working on one back in the 7.6.1 stream, but now we won't even get one with 7.7.1, with the next expected release (Torian and Kira) coming with 7.8.1 next year. 

Galactic Season 9: Flashpoint Resurgence

As for GS9, its theme is flashpoints. Yippee! There will be Czerka buffs involved like there were for uprisings during GS8, which I don't really care about, but I'm good with running flashpoints with or without buffs. Unfortunately it sounded like the objectives will be veteran mode only, which is a bit disappointing to me personally and will not encourage my guildies to group up I reckon, but still, it's flashpoints.

The most interesting bit of the stream to me personally was the devs talking about how they were using the occasion of this seasonal focus on flashpoints to make some changes to the activity finder. A big quality of life improvement they will make is that you'll finally be able to queue as multiple roles again, change roles while queueing (so that you can e.g. do dailies in a dps spec while queueing for a flashpoint as healer) and it will take both of your combat styles into account, meaning you could queue as all three roles if you wanted and have the right combat styles for it. Now, to be clear, only the last bit of that is actually new - both the ability to queue for multiple roles and the ability to queue as a different role than you're currently playing were in the game before but got patched out at some point, I think because they were buggy or causing issues of some sort. Still, I'm very glad to see these features make a comeback at last.

They are also going to improve the loot you get in flashpoints while levelling, though it's not entirely clear what that will mean - I'm guessing more gear that is actually appropriate for your level and combat style, because getting drops that you can't even use or not use for another twenty levels was definitely a thing sometimes.

For the max levels, you'll no longer have to queue for all flashpoints to be eligible for additional daily/weekly rewards, but can exclude a few that you may want to avoid. You still won't be rewarded for just spamming Hammer Station and nothing else, but you can untick a couple you don't like, which I guess is nice. 

No more "spacebar plz"

The thing that kind of shocked me was that in connection to all these flashpoint changes, queued veteran and master mode flashpoints will no longer feature any cut scenes or group conversations; everything will just be auto-skipped and if there was some sort of decision to be made (such as whether to kill or spare the captain in the Black Talon) it will just do so automatically. If you want to see the conversations and cut scenes in the future, you'll need to do story mode (where available) or manually walk into the higher difficulty with some friends.

Now, I completely understand why they are doing this and I'm sure many people will consider this a major quality of life improvement. I made a whole compilation poking fun at people's urge to skip the cut scenes seven years ago. I've seen it all, from the guy who drops group the moment you zone into the Esseles or Black Talon, to endless arguments about who isn't hitting their space bar and why. It was a source of friction for sure.

AND YET. I myself have always loved the group conversations in flashpoints and was generally happy to watch cut scenes if other people wanted to do so too. I enjoy running flashpoints, but I never "spammed" them to the point where getting the Esseles again made me frustrated. (The only flashpoint that I've managed to get utterly sick of is Hammer Station, and that has nothing to do with cut scenes and everything to do with the community.)

I also felt that the group conversations often inspired fun little interactions, such as when a dark or light side choice got people chatting. My guildies have seen me express (not-entirely-serious) outrage at killing the engineers or leaving Asara behind in the Esseles more than a few times. And some of the cut scenes also just genuinely looked nice! I have a whole collection of screenshots of pugs in Czerka Corporate Labs, from that last cut scene that shows your group walking into the room looking heroic.

And all of that is just going to be... gone? Telling me that you can technically build a group manually and walk in to still see the cut scenes is a bit of a cold comfort because let's be real, how often do people do that? How often have you run Kuat Drive Yards since it was removed from the group finder? I just feel like this is going to be one of those things that will end up having negative ripple effects that people won't fully feel until later down the line. Or maybe I'm just a relic of ancient times for having actually enjoyed interacting with my pug mates in small ways, even if there was friction sometimes.

Be free, F2P-ers!

A big change for free-to-play players that's coming with the next patch is that the devs will be dropping a lot of the old restrictions on that type of account. You will now also get sprint at level 1, have all action bars unlocked, be able to hide your head slot  and equip random purples that you get while levelling. Honestly, with some of the things they mentioned I didn't even know there were restrictions for that: What, F2P players couldn't display legacy titles before? Or equip companion customisations? WTF?

Even as someone who's always been subscribed, I think this is great news. SWTOR has had a reputation for having extremely draconian F2P restrictions for a long time - I remember how the limited action bars were a source of ridicule across the entire MMO community when the game first went free-to-play. I think the devs did the right thing by being cautious when they first changed payment model back in the day (mostly because other MMOs that followed suit later and kept crowing about how much more generous their F2P model was in comparison, such as Rift and Wildstar, did ultimately not end up doing well).

However, all of that was over a decade ago, times have changed, and there's just no reason to be quite so brutal with all those restrictions on what's effectively the game's free trial mode. Annoying players with arbitrary feature locks before they've even left the starter planet was just never great, and I hope that these changes will give more people a chance to actually fall in love with what the game has to offer and then spend some money on it happily instead of feeling nagged from the get-go.

What about subscribers though?

So as not to leave subscribers feeling unappreciated, the game will run a new "subscriber login event" from September to December where you'll earn a special currency if you log in at least four times a week, which you can then use to buy some goodies. I kinda raised my eyebrow a bit at one of those goodies supposedly being "endgame gear" but we'll see. I really don't need more free stuff myself, but I can't blame them for trying to offer subscribers a bit more carrot while easing up on the F2P stick.

Say farewell to endless free CC

Speaking of carrots and sticks, regardless of your subscription status, you've long gained 100 free Cartel Coins per month if you've got a security key attached to your account. I often saw delighted comments from people who came back to the game after some time away to find that they'd accumulated thousands of free Cartel Coins while not playing. While that was nice, considering for how long the game has been running at this point, I can't blame the bean counters for concluding that someone coming back after years and immediately finding $40 worth of Cartel Coins in their account was maybe not so good for their bottom line. No, that free CC is not going to go away, but it will only be awarded going forward if your account was actually active in the last 30 days. 

Decos, Graphics, DirectX

Under "other topics about which I don't have that much to say", we have the Feast of Prosperity returning this autumn with some awesome new decos that I'll definitely want to grind for. (I actually broke my habit of ignoring Twitch chat to type "LOVE LAMP" when they showed the new ceiling lights.) 

The character customisation updates continue, with Rattataki getting updated textures next, and dark-side corruption getting a much-needed revamp so that it no longer turns every character into a pasty white dude regardless of their previous skin colour. (I might actually give showing it on my dark-siders a try once this goes live - I previously always disabled it precisely because it changed your skin colour so much and I didn't want to look like an albino axolotl.) Also, after they added all those skin colours for aliens in the last patch, they are expanding on this by adding more hair and montral colours with 7.7.1.

Finally, in technical news that I have to file under "I don't know enough about this to have an opinion but I guess it sounds good", they are making good progress on updating the game to DirectX 12 but there's still some work left to do. 

As usual, if you want ALL THE DEETS, including things I didn't mention here and images of various rewards, here are some other places you can look:

• VOD on YouTube (Twitch had some hiccups and split it into several parts) 
• Official recap article
• Swtorista
• Today in TOR 

Could Flashpoints Become Endgame Again?

I've been thinking a lot about flashpoints recently. Over the past year and a half, I've been dabbling in Mythic Plus dungeons in World of Warcraft with some friends, and while I have my issues with that system, it has served as a reminder of how much I still enjoy small group content with friends... and how little reason I've had to do any of that in SWTOR for a while now, even as I continue to run operations with my guild.

When 7.0 first came out, we ran master mode flashpoints as part of our gearing up process, trying to get items from every possible source available, but after that it soon became clear that of the three different PvE gearing paths available since Legacy of the Sith, flashpoints have come out as the most lacklustre. The Noble Decurion gear you get from solo activities is by far the easiest to grind out and upgrade, while the Rakata purples from operations offer the best overall itemisation, not to mention the highest possible item level, which makes them a worthwhile goal to pursue even if it takes some effort. Flashpoint gear occupies an uncomfortable position in the middle, meaning it's not the best, but also ridiculously pricey in terms of currency upgrade costs, meaning you're almost always better off choosing one of the other paths.

(I note that many guides recommend acquiring and upgrading a single Supreme Decurion item from flashpoints and dissembling it to unlock the mod vendor - but that's it, after that you're basically not supposed to set foot into a flashpoint ever again.)

Seasons used to offer an incentive to group up for flashpoints with guildies, as the way the old flashpoint objective worked meant that it was faster to run a master mode including the bonus boss with guildies than to do multiple, easier but more haphazard runs with pugs. However, since this was changed to require exactly two runs no matter what, it's not as attractive anymore to put the effort in to assemble a group of friends. Sure, I'll still run with guildies for fun sometimes, but the temptation to just "get it done" with a quick solo mode stealth run or pug when that is also an option at any time is definitely much stronger than it used to be.

It strikes me that there is really some missed potential there, considering the sheer number of flashpoints the game contains, most of which do have a master mode as well. There just isn't much incentive to run them beyond some achievements and rare decoration drops nowadays - and to be clear, I don't want to over-incentivise flashpoints either, so that people feel like they have to run them all the time, but I really think we could get a lot more mileage out of them than we currently do.

Whenever I do queue for a master mode flashpoint for example, I almost always get the same ones, because people want to just do the easiest ones for rewards and not have to deal with any of the harder or newer ones. Which I think is a crying shame!

I remember when Lost Island first came out, it was put into a second "tier" of flashpoints with a separate queue and rewards because it was considered to be so much harder than the others. That ultimately didn't go anywhere, I guess because having a tier with only a single flashpoint in it isn't particularly enticing. In this day and age however, when we have dozens of flashpoints available that are all scaled to the current level cap, many of which are of wildly varying difficulty, wouldn't this be a perfect time to revisit that idea? It doesn't make sense that the game treats master mode Hammer Station and master mode Ruins of Nul as if they were exactly the same.

Flashpoints I would personally put in tier two would be:

• Assault on Tython 
• Battle of Rishi
  
• Blood Hunt
• Crisis on Umbara
• Lost Island
• Nathema Conspiracy
• Objective Meridian
• Ruins of Nul
• Secrets of the Enclave
• Shrine of Silence
• Spirit of Vengeance
• Traitor Among The Chiss

That's 12 of the current 29 master mode flashpoints - maybe you could add or remove a couple. I'm not married to the idea of a specific list, and obviously any selection would still include some (comparatively) easier and some harder ones... but not "Hammer Station easy", you know.

And what would be the point of having a separate tier, you might ask? Well, it could give separate rewards, and again I look back at something that I liked about the early days of the game - that the last boss in a master mode flashpoint used to drop a Rakata piece. Why not do something like that again? You can't tell me that it takes less effort to complete any of these than to do a master mode Nefra.

Both of these suggestions wouldn't require the introduction of anything dramatically new, as they both refer back to systems that were in the game before, and gear rewards that are in the game right now, but I'm open to other ideas as well of course. I'd just like to see some incentives to make flashpoints more attractive again as something to run with both guildies and pugs, especially on master mode.

Achievements I Would Add to Old Content

I'm actually not the biggest fan of achievements and prefer it when MMOs don't have them, as the big UI pop-ups tend to take me out of the world too much, but seeing how they seem to be considered pretty much a standard feature of most games nowadays, I've learned to live with them. Sometimes they'll even motivate me to do something! I won't necessarily go out of my way to hunt for achievements, but if I'm already doing something, and there's an achievement to do just a little bit more for example, that can definitely work as an incentive.

For those who don't know, SWTOR originally launched without an achievement system, but added one with the Rise of the Hutt Cartel expansion in 2013, which included a lot of retrofitted achievements for older content. However, there were always some things that made me go "huh" - every time I found myself a bit surprised that there wasn't an achievement for a particular thing. Here's my top five list of achievements that I would still add to old content:

1. Being sneaky in the Black Hole

In first place, we have the mission that inspired this whole post: [Daily] Eyes and Ears on Republic side or [Daily] Hypermatter Directive on Imp side. These are mirrored dailies that require you to click on five spots in a warehouse while navigating a bunch of sensors that will spawn a guard droid each if you trip them. There's no particular punishment for this other than having to kill the droid so you don't have to do it perfectly, but I at least try to be perfectly sneaky every time, and on the rare occasion when I succeed, I always feel extremely proud. Alas, the game doesn't agree that this is a special feat and there's no achievement for it. If any daily mission ever deserved an achievement, I think it's this one.

2. Kill Esh-ka

One type of common achievement that was added with Rise of the Hutt Cartel was to kill a bunch of mobs on every planet, often sorted into different categories. On Voss for example, there's one to kill hostile droids, members of the opposite faction, and several different kinds of beasts. I didn't inspect all the newly added achievements in advance, so as I quested my way across the different planets for the first time after the expansion, it was always interesting to see what would pop up.

I have this distinct memory of doing this on Belsavis, and at one point wondering why nothing had popped up yet for the dozens of Esh-ka I'd killed. And then I checked and found that there wasn't even an achievement for these mobs... which make up what feels like half the enemies on the planet. I always thought that was a bit odd.

After thinking about it a bit more, I can only guess that the devs were worried that something like "kill 100 Esh-ka" might sound kind of... genocidal? Generally the kill achievements for humanoids ask you to take out a faction, not a species. But that strikes me as something that could be addressed with proper wording - "defeat 100 Esh-ka escapees" or something. I want my wading through tunnels and tunnels full of these to be acknowledged!

3. Harmonised flashpoint achievements

When a new flashpoint comes out nowadays, it generally has a pretty standard set of achievements: do it x times on story/veteran mode, do it x times on master mode, kill each boss at least once, and then maybe a couple of extra achievements for bonus bosses or special mechanics. This wasn't always the case though, and if you look back at the achievements archive, there are quite a few flashpoints that only have an achievement for running them once on story or vet mode, such as the Esseles, Black Talon, Athiss, Mandalorian Raiders and more. I think this is because at the time, they were low-level content that didn't scale, and it didn't really make sense to ask people to re-run a level 20 flashpoint twenty times after they'd out-levelled it (though there are always alts I guess...) Nowadays though, with everything being scaled, I don't see why these achievements shouldn't be the same across the board. Same with flashpoints that are lacking achievements for their bonus bosses, such as Assault on Tython and Korriban Incursion.

I know some old-timers would hate me for this - "I've already run the Esseles a hundred times and now you want me to run it another twenty times for a new achievement in 2024?!" Well... yeah. I'd still do it.

4. Planetary storylines

This one is fairly simple: I think it's a bit of a missed opportunity that there are achievements for completing all the class stories, but none for doing all the planetary storylines at least once. I'm not saying they're all narrative masterpieces, but I think they add a lot of context for each planet and achievements could make for a good incentive to encourage people to give them a try. I still occasionally see comments from players who try to do literally nothing but their class story and then wonder why they end up under-levelled at some point.

5. Exploration missions

I've always felt a bit sour about the fact that exploration missions get hidden by default nowadays, until I heard Swtorista say in a stream that they apparently confused people? I don't know, that was before we had the purple markers for main story missions... either way, I think at the very least they deserve an achievement of their own as well, to give people an incentive to check them out, similar to the planetary storylines. For these, I guess I wouldn't make a separate one for each planet, but simply something like "complete 50 exploration missions across the galaxy" (or however many there are - I wouldn't require you to do them all, but probably something like two thirds of them).

Have you ever come across something in game that made you go "huh, I'm surprised there isn't an achievement for that"? Feel free to share in the comments!