Leaving an MMO Behind: Putting Personal Issues with Galactic Seasons into context with leaving 'The Elder Scrolls Online'

A few weeks ago, I made the point that I still wasn't entirely happy with SWTOR in terms of its continuing to find ways to introduce grinds, and that I was worried about how that would impact my love for it. I know for a fact that I am a long way away from saying "no, I'm done" with the game, but it is still really interesting to put my issues into context with another MMO I've been playing.

For the past five-and-a-bit years, I have been involved with The Elder Scrolls Online. It's been a fun experience, and the game is hands-down one of the most gorgeous games I have ever played. Yet it's also proving to be more and more difficult to really say I "enjoy" it.

I've always found its combat clunky, which is a fairly damning thing to say about any game, but I keep on being drawn back to it by its aesthetics and just how 'alive' the in-game world feels. However, the past couple of years within ESO have highlighted to me that, while I am okay with some changes that will happen, I'm only okay with them up to a certain point. Case in point, abilities.

Abilities in ESO tend to adhere to one of two resources; stamina and magicka. It used to be that an ability that cost magicka would deal more damage and / or healing based on not only your maximum magicka but your spell damage as well, and vice versa for stamina abilities with stamina and weapon damage. All abilities require XP to be pumped into them, and can be 'morphed' into one of two different forms at a certain point.

At which point, more XP is required until the new version of that ability reaches its maximum level.

A little over a year ago, ESO introduced hybridisation. This made it so that your abilities' damage or healing scaled from your highest resources and damage values, not just the one which adhered to their cost. Suddenly, any character could use any ability and weapon type effectively, and the meta shifted to a very restrictive set of recommended builds.

So, if your magicka-based ability was now dealing less damage than its stamina cousin, you would have reason to completely respec and thus need to grind out more XP to level your new ability. Multiply that by as many abilities as were affected by this, including entire skill trees like weapons you may not have had reason to use before!

I'm really glad that I never really got into raiding properly in ESO. I remember trying it last year, and I really disliked how the options I 'had' to spec my character with clashed with how I had characterised her, and that goes a long way in terms of turning me off from this sort of thing. That's also not mentioning the impact different set bonuses have on things, and the efforts and grinds required to acquire those...

Ultimately, these changes have really tarnished my former love of the game. Sure, you can still play your way, but if you want to actively get involved with raiding or endgame dungeons, that environment is now much less forgiving for non-hybrid builds, and you'll always get the sense that you could be doing this little bit more to help your group clear this difficult fight if you'd spec a certain way. While that feeling may have been prevalent before, it certainly feels much more invasive from a casual perspective than it did, and is one reason why I've long abandoned any interest in doing group content.

Due to its comparative simplicity, it doesn't take nearly as much time to readjust to changes in SWTOR. At least in this game, an ability doesn't need to have its own XP pumped into it to raise its damage or healing, thus necessitating extra work if that ability suddenly becomes 'obsolete' for whatever reason. That's not to say that it doesn't take time to readjust; it just isn't nearly as much.

It also helps my case that I genuinely do feel a love for the combat and general gameplay of SWTOR. You know what you're getting with your class in this game, and while there is some variance within a given spec, you're not going to lose any sense of combat style identity. The general gameplay is just much more my thing, and something I don't think I'll ever really lose appreciation of.

The end-result is... I've felt like I've been done with ESO for quite a few months. I still do log in nowadays, just for doing the daily for the new card game, but I really don't see myself continuing to have it installed for much longer. It's a shame to walk away from it, but... I don't see there being any real point to keeping playing. It's been a fun ride, but it's time to go.

~~~

I don't know what sort of changes would have to happen in SWTOR for that same feeling to really apply in the same way as it has in ESO. I may dislike seasonal systems and the intensive work that is all but required if wanting to complete everything, but it's not like that is how the game itself is. You can pace yourself with everything else, and I believe the ability to do so more with seasons would solve a fair amount of my ill-feelings. As things are right now, I don't feel comfortable even taking a week off from engaging in seasons until I've done all I can.

Of course, in SWTOR, things do tend to come and go, so it's entirely possible that this time next year I will have zero misgivings about things. ESO tends to be much more static in terms of how things 'are' with its systems, so it's more difficult to see something changing drastically for the better if they're not in a fantastic state. 

That's not to say that things don't improve, but the differences are nowhere near as drastic as they tend to be in SWTOR.

While I feel my time with ESO is coming to a close at last, its decline has really made me realise that the issues I have with SWTOR are, on the whole, minor. Sure, they feel big to me, but putting galactic seasons into context... it's just a side thing. It's frustrating how much "fear of missing out" applies for the extras like reputation and the other meta achievements, and it also doesn't help that GS4 has come so soon after GS3 which no doubt is inflating the issues.

However, it's not like GS4 is the game. It's just something else to do, with just some very frustrating elements. Hopefully, they get toned down eventually, but for now... I just have to grin and bear it. 

Queue Wars Celebration: Redux!

Star Wars Celebration returned to the UK last week for the third time, last being here in 2016 (and before that, 2007). I attended the 2016 convention, and came away with a not-too-positive impression.

This was due to numerous factors, all of which were due to bizarre flaws in the management of the thing.

Firstly, if you wanted to attend a panel and weren't guaranteed a spot unless you had a VIP pass (if that's even how that worked back then), you had to queue up each morning for wristbands. Trouble is, because people literally brought sleeping bags with them to queue overnight, those wristbands were snapped up very quickly. The only thing I was able to attend by way of panels in 2016 was the cosplay competition, as all the "big" things had of course gone already.

Secondly, when it came to photo opportunities, they only had one photo booth and its queue was in between the autograph sections and the special celebration store. This meant one of two things. Firstly, if a celebrity was delayed for whatever reason, even if just getting through "just a few more!", that slowed everything else down. Secondly, the poor staff had to cope with tonnes of ambient noise, and they had no technology like megaphones or "you are x minutes away" boards to help.

Ironically, the celebration store queue did have those boards. Priorities?

Thirdly, and let's be honest here, there really wasn't a lot going on for Star Wars at the time. Yes, The Force Awakens had been released a few months prior, Rogue One was due to come out later that year, and Rebels series 3 was also on the cards. That was pretty much it.

Compare that to 2023. We've had four further films throughout those years, Mandalorian's in full swing, Clone Wars and Rebels have both ended officially, Andor's first series aired to an incredible response with its second series much looked-forward-to, Ahsoka has her own series upcoming, Bad Batch is doing very well, we've had Hayden and Ewan back as Anakin and Obi-Wan in Obi-Wan Kenobi, and that's not even mentioning the numerous other projects coming in 2024 and beyond!

Point is, as far as exciting new or recent stuff is confirmed, 2023 had a lot more going for it than 2016 in terms of activity potentials.

Indeed, back in 2016 I actually ended up calling the whole thing quits after the second day despite being eligible to attend through all three. Granted, I had some extra incentive as I had an invitation to attend a friend's birthday meal, but even without that I think I still would have said enough was enough. With limited opportunities to even glimpse a 'big' panel wristband unless it was already attached to someone's wrist, there just was not enough there to justify staying.

Roll on 2023. What's different, and what's stayed the same?

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.

Musings on Personal Goals

It has been some time since I last provided a general update about my feelings regarding SWTOR. As the number of posts since December will doubtless indicate, I am feeling significantly better about things than I was for most of last year, and I am also happy to say that I have settled into a decent balance between time spent in-game and outside of it.

I have had two main goals on my mind throughout the past couple of months:

Firstly, Luck of the Draw. When Galactic Season 3 was on the horizon, I was initially deeply sceptical about my chances of completing the season in-full, that is to say all 100 levels plus all meta achievements. Still, I reasoned that it was at least worth giving it a go and see how I felt about it, since as I have expressed before it is rather easy to start these things "too late" and subsequently miss out on all rewards, etc.

Despite my initial reservations I am happy to say that I ultimately stuck with it, although I am still thinking that the current setup requires a bit of a shake-up going forward. I suspect that the novelty of farming reputation tracks for 12 - 14 weeks every time a season crops up will have worn off in quite a big way if they repeat it ad nauseam.

Still, it is done, and now we wait to see what sort of things GS4 entails. 

Secondly, character-gearing. When 7.2 launched, I unlocked the ability to buy 332 mods using gear from a couple of Columi and Thyrsian crates I'd saved up prior to the patch, and subsequently went on to upgrade all my characters' earpieces, legendaries, and relics up to 332 as well. I told myself, and voiced this plan to others, that I wouldn't get the 336 gear; no longer being involved in progression ops, I don't really need gear of higher rating than 326, although higher gear is still almost always useful.

However, a few weeks later it settled in that the longer I put off upgrading gear to its highest potential outside of R-4, the more painful it would be to upgrade it beyond 332 when the time came. It was already going to cost me 360 OP-1 catalysts per character to upgrade earpieces and relics to 336 from 332, and if we eventually get the option to upgrade Rakata to 340 that's a further 120 catalysts per gear piece on top of that.

So my current goal is to get all characters up to 336 rating, although of course for the time being the highest legendaries can get to is 334. I only have one more character-pairing to go, that being my hunter-smuggler duo, and I'm hoping that I can get at least one of their three required pieces as loot from a veteran mode op. Every piece is, after all, 120 catalysts saved, but if needed I will of course splash out if I get back up to 360 catalysts before that point.

Alongside this, I've also been getting each character their own separate set of tacticals. Each character already had their own main and off-hand weapons, so I've further reduced the number of items they need to send across to their partnered-character by at least one, but I imagine this is where things will stop. It's far too costly to source legendaries for all characters, at least while I still need them for upgrading the few 332 legendaries I have left, and crafting augments is too much of a palaver at the moment to get full secondary armour sets for them.

Still, only a few more pieces to get then I'm done with this goal as well. After that, who knows? Maybe I will decide to start splashing out on alternate legendaries. 

I'm not too sure that's a serious concept, though.

Perpendiculars of Grey

The Gree event is probably my favourite of the original SWTOR events that are still in circulation today. I don't really feel that the BBA week suits anyone other than my hunter - hopefully for obvious reasons - and I've never really gotten over my distaste for rakghouls as a concept.

I do still kinda regret missing out on the first rakghoul event, though, but since exams took priority ultimately it was a necessary loss.

The Gree event, meanwhile, is just... serene. You aren't dealing with horrific creatures or scumbags across the galaxy, but instead just seeing a bizarre research project in progress. Even the instanced boss, Xenoanalyst II, is hands-down the most pleasant raid boss in the entire game - it acts more like a laboratory professor dealing with its latest batch of test subjects and wanting to see how they react to certain stimuli than it does a 'traditional' boss, even celebrating its defeat as it still meant it gets decent research.

However, while it has been out for almost ten years now there have been a couple of things I haven't been all that invested in. Firstly, the PvP aspect. Sure, the original purpose for Ilum was this big open-world PvP planet and this is BW's attempt to pay homage to that, but I've never really been one to seek or incite fights. 

Secondly, the additional world bosses, Gravak'k and Surgok'k. Sure, I'd killed them a handful of times on Harbinger, but the times when organised groups for the two bosses coincided with my being available were very far and few between, even within my own guilds. The ability to transfer to The Red Eclipse at least meant that I was in guilds that were active and more likely to kill these bosses, but again it just seemed very rare when something actually could and would happen. 

Still, I managed to acquire ten kills of Gravak'k and nine for Surgok'k. It would have been ten for both, were it not for my abstaining in protest at my guild's actions on one such evening in 5.0. We'd killed Gravak'k and headed over to Surgok'k's cave to find an Imperial team gathering to kill it. Our tank for the evening charged in, followed by the rest of our group, effectively stealing the boss from under them. I stayed back by the entrance of the tunnel, still mounted, doing nothing but watching the Imps run past me. 

I'm sorry, but I tend to take a very negative view on actions like that.

The end-result of not focusing a lot on these aspects of the event is that I still lacked the Gray Perpendicular and Blue / Red Octagon legacy titles by the start of 2023 while many of my peers had had them for years. 

Well, finally, I have acquired Gray Perpendicular at last.

It was a bit of a weird thirty minutes, to be honest. On the Tuesday (24th), someone put in Imperial Ilum chat that they were seeking group members for a Xeno kill, and I promptly signed up. They pulled together a group of 13  including themselves in the end, and then it became very clear that the group leader unfortunately didn't quite understand what they were trying to do.

Unable to get any more than 13, they announced boldly ten minutes after the group had started that the plan was to do 16-man veteran mode for a chance at the Red Sphere. Now, veteran mode Xeno has historically been one of the hardest bosses to pug due to its DPS checks, and 7.0 ramped it up a fair notch even with higher gear now being accessible. A group of 13 stood no chance, especially as the group only had one healer and one tank.

A good number of people traipsed into the instance, assuming it to be set for 16VM, when it wasn't. They were asked to leave when a couple of the others tried and failed to enter, but the group leader still didn't set the phase even when asked. However, the ops leader never set the phase properly at all. Best guess is that they'd never learnt how to, which is fair enough I think. SWTOR doesn't actively teach you how to do such things outside of the read-only tutorials which most seem to just gloss over or forget about, so if you've never had to actively do it and only see others do it, I can understand not knowing what to do about it.

To top it all off, whether it was because the group was proving more trouble than it was worth or they just fancied doing the daily while it was there, they kept the group waiting and went off to the the Gray Secant daily. This understandably ticked off a good number of people, with at least one threatening to quit. They passed leadership over to the solitary healer (who, incidentally, didn't realise they were the only healer), and left.

So after about twenty minutes' general confusion, we remaining 12 headed into Xeno SM at last. It went well enough, although a couple of people needed to be taught about the consoles while the fight was active, and afterwards someone asked if we could go and do the other bosses. Fortunately, nobody left so we had enough to make it a feasible venture, although we acquired a thirteenth member anyway.

Gravak'k was messy, but we got it down without wiping. We did lose most of the group, though. Surgok'k was straightforward, with no deaths whatsoever, and finally... it was done. Gray Perpendicular unlocked. I'm not intending to actually use the legacy title but it's still nice to just own it, y'know. I wouldn't have made a post about it except for just the rather unusual circumstances behind my tenth Surgok'k kill. 

I do hope that ops leader managed to get into a Xeno VM group after all that without much hassle.

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!