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.
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