Patch 7.8 Ramblings

Patch 7.8 with the long-awaited story update and more landed this week, and for the first time in a while I felt like there were so many things going on in SWTOR at once, I hardly knew where to start. And I loved it!

I finished my last Galactic Seasons achievement on Darth Malgus last week (which means I should probably write my usual season review soon) but on the other servers I still need a few more weeklies for the last meta achievement, and I didn't want to abandon them completely this week, even if there was new content to explore on my main.

Mostly I just ran the featured flashpoint on each server, which was Legacy of the Rakata this week. And oh my god, the skips! Fortunately there's not too much annoying jumping going on in this one, but I was continually surprised by the number of trash pulls for which I learned that you can literally walk right through them without aggroing anything as long as you walk down a certain narrow line between two specific mobs. I always wondered who was the first person to figure that out and how it spread.

Primarily I wanted to check out the new story of course, but on launch night I saw a few people talking about bugs so I decided to hold off at first, because with the level of anticipation I was feeling, I figured I really couldn't deal with the disappointment of then running into a blocker. Fortunately the aforementioned issues were fixed quickly, and as of the time I'm writing this, I've played through the Galactic Threads story once. I can tell you that my first impression was very positive, but before I write my full review I need to see it a few more times on different classes. It seems like the kind of story that's mostly the same for everyone, but at least one part of it is gonna be different for Imperials, and there were a few other small moments where I found myself thinking "I wonder if you get a different line here if you have a different origin story". I've got to know!

One thing that was very obvious was that this update was originally meant to be part of patch 7.6, which also brought us the XR-53 lair boss on Ilum and the first batch of dynamic encounters on Tatooine and Hoth. Because the story has us going to all these places and there would've been some very obvious synergy there, discovering dynamic encounters for the first time as you're also cruising around Tatooine for the story. As it was, I was like "nope, I don't want to help promote your band right now, I'm 100% on Tatooine encounter achievements, bye". Though I did pause to help out the Weary Travellers at the taxi spot, because I can never ignore those. And on Hoth I helped rehome an ice cat, because I can rarely resist that either. I could just tell that it probably would've been an even better experience if it had come out as originally planned.

One tiny thing I'll comment on in terms of the story - and I guess this could be considered a spoiler if you're a purist, but it's only a small thing that happens literally in the first five minutes - is that I took the opportunity to flirt with Rass Ordo, and for a moment it looked like it was gonna go somewhere, but then he wasn't in the mood. It just made me realise I'm so ready for my trooper to finally kiss someone. Since her creation almost fourteen years ago, she's taken some flirt options here and there, but has never taken it all the way! I sure hope Rass is around in the next update as well.

Next to the story, the other big addition that came with the patch was of course the new dynamic encounter zone on Dantooine. Again, I'll have to make a longer post about that later on, but first impressions are once again positive, even if I had some issues with bugs on day one.

On top of all that, it was the start of a new PvP season, so I once again jumped back into warzones and some lower-level arenas. Within the same evening, I had one Voidstar match that was absolutely beautiful, with amazing, objective-focused teamwork that I see so rarely in a pug, and an Ancient Hypergate where someone yelled insults and ALL CAPS at me after I failed to defend a pylon. I put them on ignore as I've had to do with others before them, but it still always gives me an unpleasant adrenaline rush in the moment to be attacked like that, and no matter how much I tell myself that I don't need to care about the opinions of some random internet stranger, it can be really hard not to dwell on it. Always reminds me of why so many people avoid PvP.

Finally, the devs once again made some minor changes to the user interface this patch. They keep doing that and I'm sure they have their reasons, but it's honestly always a bit jarring and strange from a player perspective. Did we really have to devote development time to making the quest tracker ALL CAPS for example? However, I will say that in this particular case, all was forgiven on my part the moment I noticed that they also added a scroll bar to the quest tracker at last, which is something that filled me with delight. I always hated how that feature always just kind of "gave up" after five missions or whatever the previous limit was and simply added "X additional missions tracked" at the bottom. It's not really helping me to say I'm tracking these missions if I can't actually see any details about them, is it? Well, with the addition of the scroll bar, I finally can. Thanks, Broadsword!

Tulak Hord Talk

After eight seasons and almost four years of playing on multiple servers, I'm pretty well settled in everywhere, with a growing roster of alts on each server and most of my characters in stable guilds. The one server where I was still feeling a bit "unsafe" though was Tulak Hord, mainly because I hadn't really found a guild that truly covered all my needs and made me feel like it was going to stick around.

You may recall from this post last year that after more than two years of staying in a two-person guild, my attempt to find something a bit more suitable for someone interested in playing alts and doing Conquest led me to a guild that turned out to run an old-fashioned guild website that nobody actually used. I was a bit put out by that but stuck around.

Over time, things got more quiet in said guild. I never actually got to know my guildies really, but I was under the impression that there had been a core group of people that did operations together, and it looked like that had eventually fallen apart. The guild wasn't strictly dead, but going by the numbers on the weekly Conquest board, it at one point looked like I was one of a maximum of five people that were still playing.

I had almost resigned myself to potentially inheriting the guild eventually once the last of the other players stopped logging in, but after several months of this state of relative inactivity, I noticed that things started picking up again, not because the gang was back together, but because the person that the GM title had defaulted to had seemingly decided to go on a recruiting spree. Which was fine by me, but I didn't give it too much thought either.

Tonight though, something funny happened. I was just doing a few more quests on an alt (on Tulak Hord, obviously) to finish off one last weekly seasons objective when someone said "hey Shin" in guild chat. I said hi back but didn't pay it any further mind as I hadn't really had a lot of interaction with anyone in the guild.

I continued to focus on my questing, until the same person said something along the lines of "I'll just go back to DM now" and I swear for a moment my brain was short circuiting. Why was someone speaking English in guild chat on Tulak Hord? And why were they telling me about going back to Darth Malgus? What server was I on again? What the heck was even going on?

I opened the guild panel and looked at the only other person online. Their legacy name didn't sound familiar, but the character name vaguely rang a bell. It sounded kind of like one of my guildies from Darth Malgus, the one who'd inspired me to try doing Galactic Seasons on multiple servers in the first place.

"Xen?!" I typed incredulously, and with my mind still spinning. How could he be here? Had I ever gotten him invited into this guild? No, even I couldn't be that forgetful, surely? What was happening?

He proceeded to tell me that he'd been invited the other day via a random recruitment message, after his last guild on Tulak Hord had kicked him for inactivity. I mean, what are the freaking odds? I just thought that was absolutely wild. Tulak Hord isn't the biggest server, but it's still got a good number of guilds, and the one we are now both in is relatively small, so that was some crazy serendipity alright. 

On an unrelated note, another thing that bothered me about playing on Tulak Hord until recently was that this guild didn't have an Imperial counterpart, so my Imperial alts were still homeless and lost in space. I'd done a bit of research about where I could take them but hadn't come up with anything enticing enough for me to make the effort of actively applying.

Well, the other night I was just about to log off on my Sith inquisitor when someone offered me a random invite to their guild. I checked that the guild name wasn't anything offensive or utterly ridiculous and accepted. So now I'm a pirate on Imp side, and my characters have the guild rank "fish food". We'll see where that goes! 

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?

A Farewell to the OotiniCast

According to the OotiniCast website, they posted their first episode on November 19, 2011, almost thirteen and a half years ago. I myself didn't find out about them until about two years later, with the first mention of them on the blog dating back to February 2014 and a post called "Some Podcast Recommendations". It's funny to me that even back then, more than eleven years ago, I described OotiniCast as "one of those SWTOR podcasts that have seemingly been around forever".

However, even "seemingly forever" eventually comes to an end, and I was slightly dismayed when I found out on Bluesky last week that they were going to record their very last episode this past Tuesday. I very rarely caught them live, as time zones meant that their recording time usually started around midnight in the UK, but as we're currently in the strange twilight zone of the US having changed to daylight savings while Europe hasn't done so yet, this particular show started an hour earlier for me than usual and I was able to stay up to tune in. It was a good and wholesome time, even if cried right along with Chill at the end when he wrapped things up, explained what was going to happen next and thanked everyone for their contributions over the years.

I'm not going to pretend that I was OotiniCast's number one loyal fan who listened to every single episode, because I didn't. I think I used to listen to them more frequently in the early days compared to later on, but even so my engagement was always a bit on and off from what I remember. It's not that the show wasn't interesting enough, but it never tried to promote itself as hard as other fan sites. They talked about the news, but they weren't your number one news source about SWTOR, and while their tip of the week could be insightful and useful, they weren't exactly aiming to teach you how to play the game either (a bit like me on the blog really). I reckon this was both a blessing and a curse.

I think it was clearly a blessing in so far as I don't think the show would've been able to keep going for as long as it did if it had tried to be something other than a couple of friends chatting about the game and inviting the community to join in. I watched so many other podcasts come and go over the years, and they often managed to entice me with catchy episode titles or in-depth discussions about specific topics - but two dozen episodes later they'd run out of interesting subjects to talk about at length, quickly followed by them burning out and/or losing interest.

I do however think that the more meandering nature of the podcast was a bit of a curse in the sense that it made it a lot harder to promote it in a way that grabbed people's attention. In the early days, they would at least have detailed show notes on the site that would give you a glimpse of what to expect from each episode, but at some point that was replaced by a simple copy and paste with just a bit of information about the show in general, including a link to their guild website which had stopped working years ago. I imagine that with every new episode announcement simply being summed up as some variation of "here's a new episode in which we talk about stuff", it became a lot harder to draw in new listeners.

That said, I feel like OotiniCast's influence on the community over the years should not be understated. I think due to its sheer longevity, pretty much anyone looking up anything about SWTOR online would stumble across it eventually. While most episodes were just the hosts chatting, over the years they also included interviews with devs, voice actors and other content creators, and I think you'll struggle to find people who've been involved in SWTOR fan spaces who haven't been touched by and/or involved with the OotiniCast at some point. (Checking my email, I found that I myself sent them some suggestions for questions for an interview with Charles Boyd back in 2020.)

I remember crying over nine years ago when Chill shared the story of his wife's death (which was absolutely heartbreaking), but there were also many more happy moments. OotiniCast was where I first heard about the notion of levelling from one to cap purely via GSF for example (yes, there was a time when you could queue for GSF at level one).

In recent years, Chill would always tell stories about wacky projects he'd start, such as farming Coruscant heroics on every single alt for Alliance crates, levelling without a companion, or levelling his newest alt named and dressed up based on another IP and the strange shenanigans they would get up to. In the last episode he talked about how he'd created a trooper called Zapp Brannigan (based on the character from Futurama), how he made him make all the worst choices, and how he was going to turn Yuun into his version of Kif. I always thought that was funny and fascinating, because it's not how I'd play myself but sounds really fun in its own way.

Chill didn't go into much detail about why they decided to end the show beyond mentioning changes in his real life and that he just didn't want to keep going with it. Considering that he was there from the beginning (unlike his co-hosts, who seemed to change every few years), I think he definitely earned the right to just go "I think I've done this for long enough; I want to do something else now." I appreciate that he did draw a clear line to end the show instead of letting it simply fade into oblivion, with updates just stopping with no further notice.

That said, I've got to admit I've been kind of surprised by how hard the news hit me, considering that I wasn't someone who listened to every single episode. I think it's because OotiniCast is the one SWTOR fan site I could think of that was actually older than mine and was still receiving regular updates. I feel kind of like when you've been employed somewhere for a while and find out that the last guy who's been there longer than you is leaving. Suddenly you're the most senior person in the room, and there's no longer anyone left who can reminisce with you about "the good old days". I mean, does anyone reading this in 2025 even remember Darth Hater, TORWars or TOROCast? I kind of feel like I'll be entering my "old lady yelling at clouds" era soon.

All that said, I salute Chill and the rest of the hosts for their dedication over the years (putting out more than 500 episodes of a single podcast over so many years is amazing) and I hope they can continue enjoying the game even without podcasting about it. Your contributions will be missed.

Around the SWTOR-sphere: February 2025

I'm a little late posting this due to real life reasons, but I certainly wasn't lacking in interesting material to share in February!

• First we have "I Soloed SWTOR's TOUGHEST Raid Bosses!" by Snoopster, which was posted on the 31st of January and therefore just missed getting into the January round-up, but which I loved so much that I just had to feature it here instead. For those who're not familiar with his work, Snoopster used to be known as SWTOR Snoopy and is an old-school content creator who's seemingly less concerned with maximising his view count and more with having fun, with many of his videos being goofy and silly. He just seemed to kind of lose interest in SWTOR at some point, so it was an unexpected (but welcome) surprise to suddenly see him coming out of the woodwork with a two-hour magnum opus unlike anything he'd done before. I know the length may be intimidating to some, but it's filled with his usual fast-paced editing throughout and at least to me, there wasn't a boring moment. As a bonus (for me) I unexpectedly got to see one of my guildies included, as Aregelle (who's featured in the section about Bonethrasher) is in my guild and ops team.
• It being a new year, it's time for a new round of "Is SWTOR worth playing this year" videos! Unfortunately the first one I saw in January was an utter disappointment (which is why it didn't get featured). I'd seen the creator's 2024 version and it looked like they hadn't even logged in during the past year. I (politely) queried this in the comment section, just for my comment to quietly disappear into the aether, which told me all I needed to know, really. "Is Star Wars the Old Republic Worth Playing in 2025?" by Emperor Bebop on the other hand was more to my liking, as even if it doesn't get everything 100% correct (I did leave a comment on the video about the point about inflation being outdated for example), he does show some knowledge about the game (including endgame, which is somewhat unusual for this type of video) and is pretty funny. The self-awareness at the start of the video sure made me chuckle.
  
  That said, if you're looking for something that's more factual and not aiming for five jokes a minute, Swtorista just released her own "Is SWTOR worth trying in 2025?" video a few days ago, which is still the gold standard for providing accurate and concise information for new players. Though I was a bit surprised that she apparently already forgot about the existence of the Shae Vizla server, as she talks about "all three English servers" at one point. Then again, she gave a warning that the population of Satele Shan isn't as high as it used to be, so maybe her not even mentioning Shae Vizla is meant to tell us something in its own way.
• Following the Bioware lay-offs in January (I shared some links on the subject last month), the Ask a Game Dev blog was asked "Why did SWTOR get shuffled to a different developer if it was apparently Bioware's most steady source of income for the better part of the last decade?" The answer isn't exactly going to shock and surprise anyone who's been following this blog and everything surrounding the move to Broadsword from the beginning, but it's nice to see someone else lay it out in even greater detail.
• Fellow SWTOR blogger Intisar continued his Pets of the Old Republic series (which I failed to give its proper due to when he first started it) with two new installments posted in February, about Dwedtoof and the Heartglow Mewvorr. I really like this series because I think there's generally not a lot of conversation about pets in SWTOR other than urgency to log in and grab them whenever they're being given away as subscriber rewards. Intisar's series goes into a lot of detail about the surrounding context for each creature, including lore from the wider Star Wars universe, and I always learn something new from each post.
• Speaking of learning new things, SWTOR content creator Illeva put out an updated companion customisation guide last month, which I took a look at because I was curious and wow, I didn't even know Treek and other Cartel Market companions had customisations! I used to not care about companion customisations that much because I generally quite like the default looks (plus some of them are quite iconic, let's be honest), but by the time you're levelling your tenth trooper it can be fun to make Aric look a bit different, you know?
• Getting in just under the wire, Chash Larol of the Old Republic Era blog posted about "The State of SWTOR's Economy Part 2" on the last day of the month, a subject that hasn't been getting enough exposure I think. What I mean is that people were crying endlessly when inflation was running rampant, yet ever since the devs actually fixed it, things have been conspicuously silent on the subject, so that I still see people talk about the economy being crazy (like in the video I linked above!) even when that hasn't been true in several years now. We need to be louder about the fact that this is no longer true. Many commodities and Cartel Market items on the GTN are probably the cheapest now that they've been in about eight years.

Got any SWTOR content of your own to recommend that was released in February? Feel free to leave a comment!

Around the SWTOR-sphere: January 2025

How are we already one month into 2025? Time gets weird as you get older. Anyway, here are some links to interesting, useful and/or fun SWTOR-related content that I came across over the past thirty days.

• Intisar decided to pass on making silly predictions this year (even though that has kind of become a tradition for him) and instead gave some more serious thought to what the new year might bring for SWTOR. I'm not going to say much more than that, just go and read for yourself!
• Roger from Contains Moderate Peril, whom I also gave a shout-out last month, continued documenting his journeys in SWTOR with Revisiting Star Wars: The Old Republic Part 4, in which he hits legendary status among other things. While he expressed some interest in endgame, I'm really curious whether there's going to be a part five or not, as I suspect that the transition into endgame is a point where many players fall off.
• Kal from Today in TOR decided to ring in the new year with a guide called "How to Make Credits in SWTOR 2025". I tend to find credit-making guides interesting in the sense that the very idea of playing the game specifically to make credits has always been quite foreign to me, as I find that just looting everything and playing in ways that I enjoy tends to provide for all my needs and then some, but I guess I also don't spend a lot of credits (besides the repair bills during operations) and there'll always be players looking for shortcuts to have more money available while playing less. I do like that Kal tried to label and sort everything very clearly, so everyone can find something whether they are subscribed or not, and whether they play with friends or by themselves. He's also intending to keep the guide updated on a regular basis (since a lot of it is based on selling items on the GTN, where prices might vary).
• Swtorista maintained her recent focus on fashion by fully mapping all the rewards you get for playing through the KotFE/KotET chapters, including the different weapons and outfits for every combat style. I was kind of in awe of that simply because chapters are among my least favourite content in the game and I can't imagine replaying them so many times just for a project, but she told me it made for good content to do on stream, where she can't necessarily focus much on the gameplay anyway while chatting with viewers. Anyway, some of those Outlander armours don't look half bad!
• My favourite post from the SWTOR subreddit this month was a short one called "Smuggler bad ending" by user Lomakys. It's not long so I don't want to spoil it, but in short they experienced something unexpected during the end of chapter one of their class story and the whole description of the event and their response to it made me smile.
• As I was putting this together, a comment I saw on reddit reminded me of a YouTuber I've been meaning to give a shout-out for a while: TakesCooosh. He's made some guides I think, but the primary content on his channel are videos of him doing group content in pugs, usually master mode flashpoints. You might have seen him in your recommendations before if you've ever come across a thumbnail with a short title and a cute pink cartoon twi'lek making a face. The thing is, I'm a little bit conflicted about him to be totally honest - he seems like a nice guy in all the vids I've seen and can be pretty funny, but his mannerisms are also very... "stereotypical streamer" with the YELLING and the EXAGGERATED REACTIONS to everything; it honestly makes me feel very, very old just to watch (and even hurts my ears sometimes). That said, I realise the latter is more of a me problem than anything else, so I still wanted to give that shout-out, because I do think he definitely deserves more viewers than he's got. Here's an example video from last month, hand-picked by me, called "WE GOT SOME NEW GAMERS", in which he tanks a Czerka Core Meltdown and things go kind of wrong, because we all know that's more interesting to watch than a super smooth run, right?
  
• Finally, in news not directly related to SWTOR (anymore), Bioware announced another round of massive lay-offs the other day. There's been a fair amount of talk about it online, but here's the IGN article for reference. While this is sad news for all the affected devs, it does kind of strike me as ironic that after literally over a decade of people predicting SWTOR's imminent doom, it currently looks likely to outlive the studio that originally created it. In 2023, most voices seemed to view the game's move to Broadsword as a bad sign for The Old Republic, but it really does look like it was bad news for Bioware more than anyone else. Ask a Game Developer has a bit of commentary on the lay-offs and also mentions that 2024 was Bioware's first year without SWTOR and that this likely hurt their financial situation significantly.

Around the SWTOR-sphere: December 2024

It's the end of December, which means that I successfully made it through another year, and I was actually able to keep up with this series pretty well! Summer was a bit of a quiet season where I skipped a couple of months when I didn't really have much to share, but other than that I've managed to find some things to recommend pretty much every month.

• December seemed to be a month for more casual players to come back to SWTOR, whether it was because of the anniversary celebrations or because of the threat of the impending name purge for inactive characters. Roger from Contains Moderate Peril was inspired to return by the latter and wrote down some thoughts about his most recent experiences in "Revisiting Star Wars: The Old Republic Part 3". He also made a separate post about dynamic encounters. If the "part 3" in the title of the first post makes you wonder where parts one and two are, the answer is that those were made in 2022 and can be found here and here respectively.
• Another MMO blogger that gave the game another spin was Syp from Bio Break, who decided to make a new smuggler for what's probably the sixth time or so. I'm always kind of surprised he isn't more curious about all the class stories he's never seen before. Think I'm exaggerating his love for smugglers? Check out his blog's archive for the SWTOR tag.
• Speaking of personalities from the wider MMO space, if you haven't seen it yet, you'll definitely want to check out Josh Strife Hayes' magnum opus of a video called "The Ultimate MMO Tier List (Backed by SCIENCE) (sort of)". It's (obviously) not about SWTOR in specific, but SWTOR is included in the ranking. If you do want to know more about his thoughts about that game in specific, I did write about it when he gave it its own dedicated review back in 2022.
• Looking at SWTOR content creators in specific, Kal from Today in TOR posted a great dev interview with Ashley and Caitlin this month in which they talked about things like lore and their writing process, which was extremely insightful if you're interested in that kind of stuff at all. Full disclosure: part of why I was so pleased with this interview was that Kal collected questions from the public to submit for the interview, and literally half the questions they chose to answer were ones submitted by me. (Others may have proposed similar ones, I don't know, but the point stands that I apparently ask good questions.)
• Meanwhile Swtorista decided to go down the rabbit hole of Rare Blue and Purple World Drop Gear in SWTOR, which is such a convoluted and historically complicated system it makes my head spin, and I'm impressed that she was interested enough in the subject to actually do the research and put it all together. I know it's a meme that "fashion is the real endgame" but I'm not sure even World of Warcraft has as many content creators posting about how to collect outfits as SWTOR does.
• On the PvP front, Ivano 1337 caught my eye with his video "SWTOR 7.6 PVP TIER LIST | Best Classes for 8v8 Warzones". Now, tier lists can be entertaining content by themselves, but one thing I appreciate about Ivano's content (and I think I mentioned this before) is that as a more casual PvPer myself, I will often notice that something feels "off" somehow, but not being an expert in the field I can't quite put my finger on what exactly is wrong. In this specific case, I've been doing a lot of my PvP as Vigilance Guardian/Vengeance Juggernaut, which more recently just hasn't felt as good for some reason. Seeing Ivano put their current strengths and weaknesses into such clear terms while also ranking them as the weakest of the Guardian/Jug specs in the current environment was a real a-ha moment for me. Since then I've respecced to skank tank and while it hasn't suddenly improved my win rate (probably because I'm still figuring out what I'm doing) it's been really refreshing and a lot more fun. Not to say I necessarily encourage everyone to play whatever's the latest flavour of the month, but if you're struggling to make a particular spec work for you, understanding why that is and how you might have a better experience is really helpful I think.
• Finally, YouTuber /JawaFace got very excited about the introduction of the new companion mount with patch 7.6 - just for said excitement to turn into bitter disappointment when it turned out that his favourite Jawa Blizz doesn't fit into the sidecar for some reason. He expressed his feelings in a creative way with a short video simply called "Companion Mount", which gave me a good chuckle. Are you seeing this, devs?
  

Around the SWTOR-sphere: October & November 2024

October was a fairly quiet month in terms of how much interesting SWTOR content I saw, but things picked up considerably in November.

• Astute readers may recall that I've already been on Bluesky for over a year, but it was a fairly quiet place for most of that time. The last month or so saw a massive surge in activity however, and suddenly the previously almost non-existent SWTOR community on the site has been popping off like crazy, much to my personal delight. Far be it from me to tell you which social media sites to use or how (if any at all), however if you're a SWTOR player and interested in giving Bluesky a try, Swtorista put together a nice guide for how to get started and how to easily find other people interested in chatting about SWTOR on the site. The game itself has also had an official account over there for almost a year already.
• The OotiniCast, SWTOR's longest-running fan podcast, also had an exciting month as they got to release their 500th episode! They managed to make it a special one too by securing an interview with Keith Kanneg and Eric Musco. They chatted about a number of different topics but the things I personally noted down as interesting were that the upcoming Mac launcher actually came about due to them wanting to update the regular launcher, that porting the game to consoles would be a "monumental" effort, and that whatever the next venture is going to be, it probably won't be a companion. The latter was intriguing to me because I can't quite picture how a non-companion reward would even work with that system, but I guess we'll find out!
  
  The podcast's 501st episode was released immediately afterwards by the way, and had the hosts Chill and Kittykisses do their usual thing while also discussing the interview from the previous episode.
• The State of the Old Republic Podcast, which updates a bit irregularly, also released two episodes in October and November, with the first one mostly talking about the Feast of Prosperity and Galactic Season 7, and the second one talking about the 7.6 dev livestream.
• In more random SWTOR content, big YouTube channel Gamology released a video called David Hayter Reacts to Star Wars The Old Republic. (If you don't know, David Hayter provides the English voice for the male Jedi knight.) The title is a bit misleading because it's not really a reaction video in the classic sense, more of an interview during which he answers some questions about Star Wars in general and his work on SWTOR in specific. It contains some interesting tidbits though, even if the video editors seemingly got Kari Wahlgren (voice of the female Jedi knight) and Xanthe Elbrick (voice of the female Sith inqusitior) mixed up.
• Speaking of Xanthe, an anonymous commenter linked me to a GoFundMe in her name that's supposedly meant to help her recover from colon cancer?! I hadn't heard about that at all and hope she's doing well. I feel a bit weird linking to a health-related GoFundMe because I never know whether these are legit (though this would be a weirdly specific thing to make up and looks real enough to me) plus the general concept of people in the US basically having to beg for money online to not die from routine health problems always makes me freeze in existential dread, but in this instance at least it sounds like she's already on the road to recovery and this is more of friend trying to help her out a bit.
• As we're approaching the end of the year, reddit puts out its annual recaps, and I always tend to find the ones for the subreddits I frequent most regularly quite interesting. I was going to link it here but apparently you can only view recaps on their phone app? Boo. Anyway, I did save one post from the SWTOR subreddit that I personally found interesting recently (not from the recap). If you come here regularly, you already know that the ones that catch my eye usually aren't the most upvoted ones but ones with interesting comments, and so it is with this one as well: "Why is the Kotfe dlc so disliked?", which is a question that I often see newer players ask, and understandably so I think - if you come to the game now and it's just another storyline you play through, it can't possibly seem that bad. Anyway, what I found interesting is that there were a lot of different answers, and even quite a few I didn't personally agree with, even though I was incredibly relieved to leave the "Knights of" era behind myself. Which just goes to show that back then the devs really managed to conjure up a perfect storm of things that ticked off a surprising variety of players in different ways.

Got any good SWTOR-related content of your own to share? Feel free to leave a link in the comments and tell us what you liked about it!

Character Modernisation Panic on the PTS

I mentioned in my post about the 7.6 livestream that the devs revealed that they're also working on updating NPCs and player characters with new textures, shaders and more. They emphasised that they were aware of how important it was that your character still felt like your character afterwards, and the examples they showed in their previews looked very good.

I didn't expect them to also push this update onto the PTS immediately afterwards, but they did... and I found out about it because there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth about it. Well, actually, the first time I heard about it was when Intisar showed me a before and after screenshot of his main and commented that his Jedi suddenly looked old enough to be her own mother, which just made me laugh. However, as I heard more reports and saw a couple of honestly kind of appalling-looking screenshots, I got curious - something was clearly wrong here.

So I updated the PTS myself to have a look and... honestly, at first I didn't get what the fuss was about, as both my Republic and Imperial main (who are a body type four cyborg/human respectively) pretty much looked fine to me. But then I loaded up some alts and yeah, I could see that things looked rough. Doing my own before and after shots for my Chiss agent and Mirialan smuggler, they both appeared to have aged about twenty years each.

I figured that obviously couldn't be right, considering that it went completely against what had been said and shown on the livestream, so I was still more amused than worried. I posted some feedback on the PTS forums, but in what I thought was a kind of playful tone - you might want to review some settings on these, guys! I also took further heart from seeing posts like this one from someone who has some knowledge about 3D models and textures and showed that a lot of the issues people were seeing could indeed feasibly just be caused by one slider basically being set to the wrong number.

However, the SWTOR community loves a good freak-out and I still saw many posts that weren't just pointing out that something was wrong, but whose authors were seriously upset, threatening to unsubscribe forever over this, and so on and so forth. As someone who's 41 in real life, I was honestly a bit offended by some of the comments that claimed that the changes made their characters look 70 years old. Have you ever seen a 70-year-old in real life, kiddo?! I'll admit that some of the memes people came up with were amusing, but all in all I found the whole thing a bit tiring, considering that it seemed so obvious to me that it was simply a bug on the PTS, which exists specifically so people can find bugs before go-live.

Fortunately the latest PTS update has improved things and the worst of the panic seems to have subsided... though I'm still seeing some criticisms in the new PTS feedback thread, the most poignant of which to me was the one pointing out that the new faces look a lot worse on low graphics settings than the old faces, which I agree is definitely something that should be looked into.

I also had a kind of strange experience when checking out the new update myself, as I basically logged into the PTS, clicked through my characters on the character selection screen one by one and thought "yep, these all look great". However, after I took a few more screenshots for comparison purposes, I lined them up next to the "buggy" faces and they... actually didn't look all that different? As in, there are still some pretty noticeable differences compared to the old faces, and I can still see more wrinkles than I'd necessarily like to on my idealised video game heroines, but at the same time - it didn't bother me at all while in game, only when staring intensely at the close-up shots, which is not something I would usually do while playing.

Bugged PTS vs. updated PTS

Live vs. updated PTS

Bugged PTS vs. updated PTS

Live vs. updated PTS

My conclusion for now is that I'll be fine and will be happy with my characters getting updated, but I also feel like I have no clue how the majority of players will react to these changes. As mentioned, there are still plenty of complaints being raised in the feedback thread, some of which I can kind of see, but others just make me feel like Pam from The Office, going "They're the same picture" (meaning I honestly don't see what all the fuss is about).

And maybe that makes you think that my eyesight is lacking and obviously everyone will still hate this update, to which I'd respond: Will they though? Because I've also spoken to people who saw that very first, bugged update and genuinely thought it was fine too, going "sure, my character looks a bit older than before, but so what". My hunch is that most players will probably be fine, because even if you do notice differences between old and new that you don't like in the direct comparison shots, I reckon most players don't actually spend that much time staring intently at their character's nostrils in everyday play if you get what I mean. I don't think the differences will be as noticeable when you're actually playing the game normally and not glaring at your character like they're about to have their police mugshot taken.

All in all, I guess this goes to prove once again that player character updates in MMOs are a tricky thing. I remember when I briefly resubbed to World of Warcraft in late 2013 after having been away from the game for more than a year, the low-resolution old character models that I'd always liked before suddenly appalled me, as I'd gotten too used to SWTOR's much better-looking avatars. When WoW then updated its models in 2014, I logged in once just to check out my characters' new looks, and while I thought Blizzard did a decent job with the upgrades overall, I also noted at the time that many characters looked older and angrier than before, and ten years later I'm still not over what they did to female tauren. So this kind of thing is always a bit of a gamble, but remembering my own reaction to WoW's old character models in 2013, it's probably also a necessary one if the game is supposed to continue attracting new players.

If you have any doubts about this update yourself, I can only recommend downloading the PTS, copying over some of your characters, and giving feedback in the relevant forum thread. If you've already seen your characters' updated looks, how do you feel about them?

Around the SWTOR-sphere: September 2024

This post is a few days late because I briefly forgot that September only has thirty days and then figured since we were already in October anyway, there was no rush anymore to get it out as soon as possible. I once again didn't have any interesting links to share in August (in fact, when I opened my draft at the end of the month it was literally empty), but in September my link-collecting endeavours were more fruitful again.

• Earlier in the month I promoted my appearance on Ivano 1337's PvP podcast, and on the day of recording he told me that he was actually already about to talk to his next guest that same evening. That episode released a few days later and had him talking to - what shall we call him... controversial personality Snave. I have no love for Snave myself - I played Republic on The Red Eclipse before streaming became super popular, and being stomped by Snave's Imperial premades and then being publicly ridiculed for losing on his stream was generally enough to make me stop queueing for the evening. And that's without even going into any of the other reasons most major content creators won't go near him... but I will say that his chat with Ivano was interesting. They also recorded themselves playing a couple of warzones at the end. Funny thing is that for all the reasons to dislike Snave, I actually agree with him about objectives in warzones.
• In the blogosphere, commenter Yeebo (who also has his own blog) finally got around to publishing the two posts about SWTOR he'd been telling me about for a while. The first one is about the "Knights of" era and the months that followed immediately after, and how that content put him off the game for a while. The second one is about how he came back to SWTOR at the start of this year and was pleasantly surprised by the new content he found, and how he thinks the game is actually in a much better place now. Happy ending! (For the time being.)
• The second variety blogger I saw writing about SWTOR last month was Bhagpuss, in a post titled "Back to the future", which was at least partially inspired by reading Yeebo's posts mentioned above. However, he was a lot less enthused and immediately lost interest again as far as I can tell, as there was no follow-up. Still, I appreciated his perspective. I thought it was interesting how disconnected he felt from his characters upon returning for example, when usually people cite feeling more connected to their characters as one of SWTOR's strengths.
• Finally, the SWTOR subreddit actually yielded a couple of posts last month that I found particularly amusing/interesting. On the amusing front, we had this post by someone whose Alderaanian trees were going bonkers - I've got to admit I quite liked the idea of in-game wind moving the leaves (even if it probably shouldn't look quite like that).
• On the "just interesting" front, we had this post by a now deleted user who talked about how transferring from Satele Shan to Star Forge was a complete game changer for them. The topic of server populations has been on my mind a lot after my experiences with doing seasons on all the servers and seeing how dramatically different things can be from one server to the next. You don't have to agree with everything the poster says, but I thought there were some interesting conversations sparked in the comments.

Around the SWTOR-sphere: June & July 2024

Did you miss this column back in June? I didn't forget about it, but when I opened my draft at the end of the month I found that it only had two links in it, which didn't really seem like enough material to make a post out of, so I decided to combine my recommendations for June and July. That's not to say that people weren't doing enough interesting SWTOR-related things in those two months; as usual I'm just compiling things that I personally came across. I was also quite busy simply playing and writing myself, with less time spent on looking at other people's stuff.

The overarching theme for this installment of "Around the SWTOR-sphere" is going to be patch 7.5 and the content it brought us, which included the Spring Abundance Festival, Bessi the Basilisk droid, the Deseperate Defiance story update and graphical updates to Hutta.

• On the subject of the new story update, before I even wrote my own review of it, Chash Larol from The Old Republic Era wrote theirs, so go and read!
  
  While I was poking around on YouTube for more story reviews, I came across the channel CK Outpost and their video "SWTOR Chains in the Dark Review - What I liked. What I didn't" (that was the name of patch 7.4 if you don't remember). They were quite critical of some things, but I was super stoked to find someone providing in-depth reviews of story content based on multiple playthroughs, something I don't see very often, so I instantly subscribed. Naturally I was also excited when they shared their thoughts about 7.5 this month, in a video simply called "SWTOR Update 7.5 Desperate Defiance Story Review". Unfortunately - unlike me - they liked the latest patch's story even less than 7.4 and sounded quite disenchanted with the game in general to be honest, which is sad to see. Still, I wanted to give the channel a shout-out anyway since I thought their criticisms were well-articulated and they also have a bunch of other, older videos on their channel that people might enjoy, such as various SWTOR-related "top 5" lists and such.
• On the subject of Spring Abundance, I have to give a shoutout to Siow on Vulkk.com, who posted about Baking a Bestine Threeberry Pie with Recipe. Now, I'll have to confess up front that I didn't actually read the whole thing since it's extremely long and I'm not actually that into baking. However, I just think it's really neat that someone went ahead and attempted to recreate one of the new in-game pies in real life. World of Warcraft went so far as to release an official cookbook with recipes to recreate all kinds of in-game dishes, so there is precedent for this kind of thing! We're not quite ready for that in SWTOR I think, but it's a start.
  
  Another Spring Abundance-inspired piece of content I wanted to highlight was this little machinima made by /Jawaface about his character's adventures during the festival on Dantooine. He's only a very small YouTuber, but I've known him for a little while and he's always super friendly and fun to interact with. I also really admire his passion for video editing and creating SWTOR machinima... my only "problem" being that almost all his videos are about jawas and/or his OC Kara, who's supposed to be half-human, half-Jawa I believe? And I'm just... not that interested in Jawas, sorry! Still, I've been wanting to give his channel a shout-out for a while, and this seemed like a good opportunity.
• On the subject of the graphical changes to Hutta, my opinion when checking them out on the PTS was that they would take some getting used to but I also thought that they looked better in game than on screenshots. That said, I shared the sentiment of the post called "Same spot on Hutta one server maintenance apart... I'm kind of shocked" on the SWTOR subreddit, which showed that a lot of environmental assets in the distance had gone missing with the revamp, making the horizon look very bleak. Fortunately this appeared to be accidental however, as it was later followed up by: "They put the low-res distant mountain PNGs back on Hutta. This vista looks absolutely GORGEOUS once again!". Phew!
• I haven't come across any non-guide or news content about Bessi the Basilisk droid yet, but I do have one more "SWTOR in 2024" review this month, this time by MMOByte and called "Star Wars The Old Republic in 2024... is Absolutely NOT What You Expect". What surprised me about this one is that they didn't even actually play the game - they have done so in the past and figured that going through the same motions yet again would just be a waste of time - but instead just looked at the activity on SWTOR's various social channels to see how much posting was going on there. I just thought that was... an interesting approach to say the least, and I guess once again highlights the importance of those channels, not just to keep current players up to date, but also because of what kind of image of the game it projects to people who aren't (currently) playing but might be considering it.

Brief PSA: Shintar No Longer on Twitter

Almost twelve years ago, I made a post on here to announce that I had made a Twitter account. It only seems fair to also make a note today that I no longer have a Twitter account. Or rather, it technically still exists, but I've been locked out of it.

Twitter had been pestering me for a while now to add my date of birth to my account. I'm usually not the kind of privacy nut to refuse giving any personal data to anyone, but Twitter under the leadership of Elon Musk? No, thanks. Plus I'd been using the site just fine for over a decade without giving them that, so I didn't see the need. I figured they just wanted it to have an excuse to shove porn down by throat, since that seems to be their latest thing.

At one point they decided to set me a deadline. If I wasn't going to add my birth date by July 8th, I was going to lose access to my account! That day came and went and nothing happened. Figures that it was just a bluff. But then yesterday...

So I guess that's it. I mean, the site had got a lot worse since Elon took over and I've been wanting to move away from it anyway, but I've got to admit I didn't expect it to quit on me first. And despite myself, I'm a little annoyed and upset.

I won't miss Twitter as a whole... the random browsing experience got so much worse once they made the change the verification, as the top replies to any post would just be blue checks saying horrible and/or stupid things. But for some reason most of the SWTOR community (including the official account!) seem to pretty much live on Twitter, and I feel that I'm going to miss out on a lot of things now.

Like that mount sale I posted about the other week? Was only announced on Twitter. Yesterday, a friend told me that the official account had announced a livestream for this Tuesday. If he hadn't told me, I wouldn't know because there certainly hasn't been any sign of that announcement on any of their other socials, including the official forums!

In the past it made sense to focus on announcing things on Twitter because unlike most social media sites it was open to be viewed by anyone, whether they had an account or not, but Elon Musk changed that! I wonder whether people even realise that all their "public" posts are no longer truly public. Like, if you go to the official SWTOR account's page without being logged into Twitter, the newest non-pinned post that you can see is from May 2022. Why do you think only Twitter users are worthy of knowing about what's happening with the game, huh? It's not even such a big platform anymore!

And of course many of my fellow content creators are the same. I wonder how long it'll take for anyone to even notice that I'm gone. Maybe in a month or so, someone will go "huh, I haven't seen Shintar post anything in a while; wonder whatever happened to her".

Anyway, that's that rant out of the way. I'll just have to live with less news about the game and community involvement going forward I guess.

Around the SWTOR-sphere: May 2024

Has it really already been another month? I've been so busy playing and writing, I feel I've hardly had time to look at other people's stuff for weeks. Fortunately May the 4th was Star Wars Day, so I managed to pick up at least a couple of interesting things around that date.

• The one I saw shared around the most but still wanted to post here as well was this Old Republic Lo-Fi tunes compilation by Morden Wex. Just a nice little twist on some well-known themes, plus the animation with Lana as the Lo-Fi girl seemed very appropriate. I actually found myself wondering where the concept of the Lo-Fi girl came from anyway, and it turns out Wikipedia has a whole bit about that. I thought that was fascinating!
• Sticking with the subject of music, via Bluesky I came across this 12-year old promotional video called Music of the Old Republic. As someone who wasn't really part of the game's pre-launch hype, I had never seen it and thought it was really interesting! Unfortunately it cuts off suddenly at the end, which made me try to find the full version - something at which I didn't succeed, but instead I found a slightly longer one called Composing the Music of Star Wars: The Old Republic, which appears to have been made using the same basic source material but featured different quotes. I had no idea they had five full-time composers on staff when this game was built! No wonder the soundtrack is so good... anyway, I know that this is old material, but I'd never seen it and thought it was really cool, so there.
• Staying on YouTube for a moment, commenter Thander replied to last month's round-up that there was another "Should you play SWTOR in 2024?" video that I should check out, this time by NoblePlays. And yeah, I enjoyed "Should You play SWTOR? (In 8 Minutes)". I like how these videos come out in very different ways depending on what kind of player makes them. Previous ones I featured were mostly created by new or very casual players and quite focused on just how the game works and what state it is in. Noble as a long-time vet focuses more on an audience that already knows what SWTOR is all about and talks about why he still enjoys it after all these years.
  
  I then saw that around the same time, he also released a video called "Should You PvP in SWTOR? A Realistic Explanation" which I also liked. If you've ever been in doubt about whether to try out PvP, please watch this! And I don't just say that because I'd like to see more people in the PvP queue (though I do.)
• In the written blogosphere, not a lot of things caught my eye this month. The only thing I noted down was Intisar posting his thoughts about various patch 7.4.1 features. I know that's a bit late now that we just got 7.5, but I still enjoyed reading his thoughts and opinions.

How's the Shae Vizla APAC Server after Six Months?

It's been a few months since I last wrote about the Shae Vizla server, but that doesn't mean that I stopped playing on it. The start of Galactic Season 6 did however result in a reduction of my play time. Before that, I was focused on my home on Darth Malgus, with playing on Shae Vizla as my only side gig, but the new season meant that I suddenly had to divide my "secondary" play time among five servers again.

As the server turned six months old a couple of days ago, I wanted to write about it again to talk a bit about how it's doing. Three months ago I acknowledged that it had become quite quiet, but was hopeful that the opening of server transfers would inject some life into it again.

Sadly, that didn't exactly happen the way I had hoped. I mean, the server transfers definitely had an effect, initially. A lot of the cheaper stuff on the GTN was snapped up and prices increased somewhat with the introduction of all those credits into the economy, though not as much as I would've expected. I even heard allegations that people were transferring characters over purely to "shop" before returning to their home servers, though I don't know if anyone actually did that.

Activity also increased for a bit initially, and at least level 80 PvP started popping again after having been pretty non-existent for several weeks. However, this doesn't appear to have lasted. I think guilds are still organising PvP events for their members in dedicated time slots, but just queueing at what should be APAC prime time hasn't gotten me much action in a while, even with my level 80.

However, in fairness, I haven't been around as much recently, so I reached out to some players whom I knew to be located in the APAC region and/or who I knew were much more active on Shae Vizla, to get their more informed input. Thanks to everyone who replied and was willing to chat with me! This group consisted of:

• Xam Xam - currently taking a break from SWTOR, but a well-known SWTOR content creator from Australia who was celebrating the opening of Shae Vizla when it launched
• Kal - another SWTOR content creator and owner of Today in TOR, Kal is also located in Australia and founded the guild Heroes of the Republic/Empire on Shae Vizla's launch day. (This is also the guild my own characters on SV are in.)
• J.R. - lives in Eastern Canada but has been one of the most active people in the Heroes guild, constantly organising and leading events like world boss hunts and activities for seasons objectives
• Paiche - lives in South America but is also very active on Shae Vizla. I mainly interacted with him in organised PvP events that were aiming to get queues popping

Without exception, everyone I spoke to did express a degree of disappointment or concern about the server's population levels. "I didn't expect the server to have this much of a falloff in terms of general population," was Kal's first comment. Xam Xam added: "Looking back, I regret that some players (including myself) and the developers placed greater emphasis on maintaining a fresh start experience or healthy server economy than on the player population."

People mostly seemed to agree that this was due to the way the server had been launched, including the way transfers were handled. J.R. said the following: "I feel there was little planning for the server and was an after-thought.  First, the short notice caught a lot of people off-guard. I believe if they announced the SV launch a few weeks in advance, then more buzz would be created and players that weren't already subscribed would subscribe to make sure they could grab their choice character names."

Paiche thought that it was specifically the intended target audience of APAC players that seemed to have been put off: "They came, saw how grindy it was gonna be with the economy and no transfers and went right back." J.R. also echoed this sentiment: "The initial transfer restriction was met with varied responses [...] but I feel the devs dragging their feet to make a decision on when and how to do transfers led to a drop-off on players who couldn't wait for transfers to unlock. During this time, casual players stopped playing or returned to their main servers. Launching a new server in the middle of GS and PvP Seasons also prevented players from establishing a foundation on the new server. While everyone rushed to create characters on the new server, most people returned to their main servers to finish their partially complete GS and PvP Seasons. I heard this from many APAC players - some of which haven't returned to SV." Paiche also commented on this, as he actually came back to the game specifically for the Shae Vizla launch: "It really was a fresh start [for me] because I didn't have anything to lose by starting from scratch - but other people were in the middle of GS5."

This was interesting to me because from my personal point of view, the launch had been extremely convenient, as I'd just finished up Galactic Season 5 on the other servers, and there was just enough time left to also complete it on Shae Vizla as well if you started at launch and then completed the maximum number of weeklies every week. However, I can see how players who are more casual about seasons may not have felt the same way. With that in mind, it might have been more beneficial to have the server launch at a time when there was no seasonal content going on. Also, while the way the server's opening dropped kind of as a surprise was pretty cool, a bit more notice may indeed have been beneficial to get the word out.

I also thought it was interesting that two of my interviewees chosen for their activity levels on the server were in fact not APAC players. Looking at the Heroes guild Discord, it does often seem to me like a lot of group content happens in what's the middle of the night for me, during US west coast prime time instead of APAC. While every server has visitors from other regions that play for Galactic Seasons or to join friends, it does feel at least to me that Shae Vizla has a particularly high population percentage-wise that wasn't the original target audience. J.R. seemed to get a similar impression, saying that he thought that "SV is unique in that outside APAC prime time the game gets a bump during NA prime time (when I play) as well" and that he considered it the server's biggest win that he'd made "new friends from not only Australia and New Zealand, but also Philippines, Indonesia, Brazil and throughout the United States and [was] learning about their cultures". Kal also commented that "it's really nice to see a lot of American and European English speakers coming to the server to hangout in the off-time on their own main servers".

I specifically asked Paiche about PvP, since that was how we'd first got talking and I figured he'd have a better picture of the situation than me. He bluntly stated that it's "worse than on other servers" though he did say it was still happening. Aside from the fact that it can be hard to get pops as has been my experience, he said that the problem is that the only people queueing are the remaining hardcore PvPers and even if they're not going in as premades, the fact that you only really run into these extremely skilled opponents whenever you do get a pop can be off-putting if you're not on the same level, as you'll basically just get stomped a lot. I haven't really seen this myself as much (whenever I do get a pop) but it does remind me of similar experiences I had in PvP shortly before server merges in past years, when the PvP population had kind of dropped down to the most dedicated.

Now, a lot of what I've described and quoted has been on the negative side. It's undeniable that Shae Vizla has become a small server, and many people will be put off by that. Personally I've always hated "dead server" narratives though, as both large and small servers have their pros and cons, it's just that due to the very nature of the fact that large server = many people and small server = fewer people, you'll see a lot more people extolling the virtues of large servers than you'll see proponents of small ones. (Ask me about my aggravations with mega-servers in WoW Classic some time...) Large servers are good for activity queue pops and getting pugs for group content, while small servers excel at providing a sense of community and a more relaxing and immersive experience for solo play (as you're not jostling elbows with ten other players doing the same thing every time a quest giver sends you out to solve their problems).

Paiche specifically asked me to quote him as saying that "Shae Vizla is the best server for solo players". In terms of community, J.R noted that "of all the servers I’ve been on, I’ve had great pug experiences and minimal toxicity on SV as compared to all the other servers. And this is the main reason I increased the time I spend on SV. I think joining a guild with similar objectives as you helps greatly." This was echoed by Kal by saying: "It is really nice to see the same names around every single guild you log into, it's like the entire server is one massive extended family or school to be honest, with all the different kinds of players like jocks and nerds in their different guilds". He also added that "with or without the server transfer limits, SV's GTN is probably the best in the game, there's no other server where playing 20 minutes of heroics casually each day lets you buy Gold or Platinum cartel market items".

About the "new server" experience in general, Xam Xam commented: "As much as I enjoyed the fresh start experience for a time, I don't think the APAC Region was the right place for it. [...] Regardless, I think this 'experiment' shows that there is an interest in a fresh start experience for SWTOR. Perhaps a fresh start server could be launched with a proper marketing campaign and much more notice in a more populated region someday." 

I have to admit I'm less sure about that one myself. I definitely loved the excitement of the experience myself, but based on how quick and steep the drop-off in engagement was, I'm not sure it would really be worth the effort to do more of this kind of thing. Based on my personal experience at least, even World of Warcraft - which is much bigger - has struggled with population management after its recent new event server launches.

Anyway, to get back to Shae Vizla, I think it's got some challenging months ahead to be honest. While I don't think the smaller population size is inherently a problem and does in fact offer some unique perks highlighted above, I personally feel like the server is currently struggling to really find its niche. To make a comparison to the Leviathan, which is generally known to be SWTOR's smallest server nowadays - I would never question it's viability because it has a very clear target audience: French speakers. So if, for example, you're a French person who also likes to do group content or PvP, you may feel the pull of a larger server like Darth Malgus where queue pops are more reliable... but people would be chattering at you in English there, in content where it's important to communicate and understand each other, which is a definite con if you're not comfortable with the language.

However, as far as Shae Vizla goes - the main advantage of having a dedicated server in the APAC region is finding people to play with in your time zone and the lower ping you get in activities like PvP or ops, where lag can really screw up your performance. Yet that's exactly the kind of content that's harder to get into on a small server, and from the sounds of it, many APAC players chose to remain elsewhere. So your choices become playing on one of the US servers, where your ping is bad... or playing on Shae Vizla, where your ping is great, but you might not actually find people to do the content with at all. I know which one I'd pick.

Players have somewhat limited power to improve the situation. They can form guilds and try to organise events, which can work well for a while, but it doesn't take much for any such group to fall below the critical mass needed to keep going. Paiche thought it would be good if Broadsword could encourage more players to move to Shae Vizla with some special sort of incentive: "Maybe 2xp again, double drops, cosmetics, decos, I don't know. Something that makes SV enticing to play in." On the forums I've also seen a group of players clamour for unrestricted transfers, and that all players located in the APAC region should simply get free transfers regardless of subscription status. I'm not sure how well any of that would work, but I kind of suspect that Broadsword considers their work on the server "done" for the moment and has moved on to focusing on other matters either way.

So my advice to you if you're in the APAC region and considering Shae Vizla as your destination would be:

• If you primarily play solo, go ahead and have fun.
• If you're happy to quest by yourself, but also want to do some group content, find a guild that caters to your needs and you'll also be fine.
• If your idea of a fun evening is to shoot the shit on the fleet and just queue for activities, hoping for quick pops, unfortunately Shae Vizla is not the right place for that right now and you're probably better off on one of the US servers.
  

Feel free to share your own thoughts about and experiences with the Shae Vizla server in the comments.