Shintar's Galactic Season 6 Diary, Week 6

Week 6's objectives excited me for two reasons: It was the first week without a flashpoint objective, and it was the first week with not just one, but two PvP objectives. I don't like that it took six weeks to get any overlap between PvP Season 5 and GS6, and looking at the PvP track made me realise that after my initial excitement about the new PvP season, with plans to do at least the basic reward track on multiple servers, too much time had passed already for me to still complete the PvP track on Star Forge and Shae Vizla without buyouts, due to how focused I'd been on Galactic Seasons instead.

Anyway, in detail, the weekly objectives were:

• Earn 200k Conquest points: As usual.
  
• Visit another player's Rishi stronghold: Easy enough to do.
  
• Craft war supplies and two invasion forces: Once again something I was likely going to do on Darth Malgus but nowhere else, due to the lack of skilled crafters in my stable of alts.
  
• Dig up 3 treasures at a seeker droid dig site: Probably something I was going to do at least on some servers.
  
• Complete 15 missions as a trooper or agent: I was definitely going to aim for this one everywhere, as I usually do with the origin story objectives.
  
• Kill four named champion mobs on Corellia (2 Republic, 2 Imperial): Once again, not my favourite but one I was likely going to do at least on some servers to get the numbers.
  
• Kill both Taris world bosses: Easy and fast to do, I was counting on getting this one done on most servers again.
  
• Play 5-10 arenas (wins count double): I was definitely going to do that one on Darth Malgus, and maybe on other servers depending on whether I could get pops in the sub-80 brackets.
  
• Heroic space missions: I've never been good at space missions, to the point that I haven't even completed all the normal ones, so this was a definite no.
  
• Play 4-8 warzone matches (wins count double): I was probably going to aim to do that one on all servers, even if it's a bit time-consuming, but I do love warzones.
  
• Do dailies on Ruhnuk or Kessan's Landing: I figured I might do that one on Darth Malgus with Mr Commando, but nowhere else as I don't have that much story progression on any of the other servers.
  

Day 1 - Tuesday

I had another surprise working from home day after it turned out that the previous night's heavy winds had caused damage on my usual train line and I couldn't get into London. I was also feeling a bit tired and unwell though, so instead of using the time saved not commuting for gaming, I ended up napping instead.

In the evening I did ops with my guild, and then expanded my Copero stronghold to hit the daily seasons objective (I'd been saving up the unlocks for this kind of thing instead of using them the moment I got them).

I then logged over to Leviathan, where I had weird server lag problems when trying to transition between areas. It didn't just seem to be me either, as I played a warzone match and everyone else seemed to have issues leaving at the end as well, though it did eventually resolve itself. I then killed the Taris world bosses on both factions, which was nice and easy as lots of people were doing it and it basically took no time at all to find an impromptu group. I did the same circuit (one warzone plus both world bosses) on Tulak Hord, Star Forge and Satele Shan.

On Shae Vizla, I had no luck with warzone pops or world boss groups at this time of night, so I just parked two characters at their locations, visited a Rishi stronghold and did a couple of missions on my trooper.

Day 2 - Wednesday

In the morning I logged into Shae Vizla since I figured that was a better time for group content with the Aussies. I got both world boss kills done, and since level 80 warzones were popping instantly for me, I also played enough matches to complete the weekly. 

After the reset at lunch time, I returned to Shae Vizla to do some questing on my trooper, followed by a Black Talon run with my agent on Leviathan, which counted as 7/15 missions completed.

Later I was supposed to help out with an ops run on Star Forge, but it kinda ended up being cancelled, so the four of us that actually showed up ran a couple of master mode flashpoints instead (in the one week where this wasn't a seasons objective - typical! Still, it counted as ten missions done as a trooper.)

In the evening I first logged into Tulak Hord, where I did a warzone and a couple of missions on my trooper over there. I then spent some time PvPing on Darth Malgus, and finally I did exactly one warzone again on Satele Shan; plus I paid a visit to a Rishi stronghold.

Day 3 - Thursday

I was back in the office so didn't get any play time until relatively late in the evening.

On Leviathan, I visited a Rishi stronghold, did some warzones and killed the Imperial named champions on Corellia. Logging over to Tulak Hord, a single warzone there was enough to get my daily Conquest done, so I left it at that.

I then did some more PvP on Darth Malgus (both warzones and arenas), followed by a few warzones on Star Forge. While in the queue there, I also went around and killed the Republic champion mobs on Corellia. I started doing a couple of missions on my agent on Satele Shan, but it was late and I was tired, so I decided to leave any additional action for the next morning.

Day 4 - Friday

In the morning I logged back into Satele Shan and did an Esseles run on my little trooper there. Because of the Galactic Rampage Conquest objective, this completed her personal Conquest immediately, while also giving me several missions worth of credit towards questing as a trooper or agent. I then logged onto Shae Vizla and continued my trooper's class storyline on Belsavis for a bit.

In the evening I did more PvP on Darth Malgus, which resulted in me completing the arena weekly before it was time for ops. After that I logged into Leviathan where I played exactly one more warzone for the weekly mission (it was a Vandin Huttball in which I rocked by the way). Then I did the same thing on Tulak Hord, except that the match I played there was a Voidstar where we got properly spanked but still won on objectives.

On Star Forge I queued for a few midbie arenas (since this was the only other server where I could get them to pop without too much of a wait), followed by a couple of level 80 warzones on Satele Shan. Finally I did some PvP on Shae Vizla as well, even though I didn't need any more games for seasons there, but the guild I'm in was organising some level 80 warzones and I wanted to take part, so I completed another warzone weekly mission while killing some champion mobs and digging up treasure between matches.

Day 5 - Saturday

I didn't play until after reset, and then I started by going to Leviathan, where I dug up some treasures on my knight and did a few missions on my agent. Later on Tulak Hord, I visited a Rishi stronghold, and since that was my fourth weekly objective, I was immediately close to being done with the daily, so I just hopped over to Corellia and killed the named champs there to get myself over the finish line.

On Satele Shan I did some more missions on my agent, before logging into Shae Vizla to kill the champion mobs on Republic side. I was surprised by how tough this was on my level 74 Sage (my highest level Republic character on the server). I basically spent five minutes kiting Lord Rashal around a nearby pillar, whittling down his health one DoT at a time, until finally someone else showed up and helped to kill him. This was relevant in so far as I'd kind of forgotten at the start of the week that the reason I never did this objective on all servers before was that I never had a high-enough level Imperial character to kill stuff on Corellia. Now my Imps on Leviathan and Satele Shan were in their low forties, which is high enough to go to Corellia, but still low when it comes to killing level 48 champions. I'd been optimistic about my chances since I previously had pretty good experiences while doing the equivalent objective under-levelled on Taris, but my level 74's struggles made me seriously doubt myself.

I wanted to put the matter to the test right away, so I returned to Leviathan and took my level 42 bounty hunter to the first Republic champion on Corellia. Killing any mobs that dismounted me during the trip was definitely a lot slower than usual, but perfectly doable. I was happy when I got to the droid's spawn spot and saw someone else already waiting there. Unfortunately it turned out that person was also in their low forties and clearly waiting for help! Fortunately an 80 came by and took charge, so we were able to leech off their success easily. Unfortunately the trip to the next champion took a while since I didn't have any of the quick travel points unlocked yet, so I arrived just in time to see the 80 port away from the second champion's corpse. Fortunately another 80 was right there when he respawned.

I then re-did the same tour on Tulak Hord, where I'd forgotten that I actually got my Sorc up to 51 already. She killed the droid by herself with no problems whatsoever and would have done the same with Jimmy Weasle if someone else hadn't shown up to contribute some damage near the end. Are the Imperial champions just that much harder than the Republic ones? Let me know your experiences in the comments!

Emboldened by my success, I was going to try my luck soloing the champs on my level 42 Sniper on Satele Shan, but it just so happened that there were always other players present to support her anyway.

In the evening it was time for social ops with my guild on Darth Malgus, and doing Scum and Villainy on 16-man counted as completing four missions as a trooper. I finished the evening by completing the arena weekly in the midbie bracket on Star Forge.

Day 6 - Sunday

In the morning I logged into Shae Vizla and did a few missions on my trooper there, since I hadn't quite hit the Conquest target before getting distracted by the whole thing with the Corellia champions the previous day. This also took me to 7/7 weeklies completed.

In the evening I did a round of Kessan's Landing dailies with Mr Commando, which got me to 7/7 on Darth Malgus as well. On Leviathan, I did some questing on my bounty hunter for the daily - I still needed a few more missions on my agent as well but wanted to work towards my bounty hunter's personal Conquest target first. This was followed by a round of freeing Sobrik on Tulak Hord to get credit towards 15 missions completed as a trooper.

On Star Forge, I continued my trooper's class story on Corellia until I hit 15 missions completed there too, and swung by the remaining two champions as well since I was already in the neighbourhood, taking me to 6/7. Similarly, I did two warzones on my consular on Satele Shan and killed the champions during the wait time between matches, which took me to 5/7 weekly objectives completed.

Day 7 - Monday

In the morning I wanted to quickly catch up on what I had been a bit too tired to finish the previous evening. I did some quests on Shae Vizla for the daily and visited a Rishi stronghold on Star Forge. On Satele Shan I wanted to "quickly" dig up three treasures on Hoth but had the worst luck. The first dig site I visited was inactive, and the second had a guy already there who found the special treasure and depleted it just as I was honing in on my first target (and this was middle of the night for the west coast, FFS). I went to the last remaining site on Hoth in the Glacial Fissure and eventually got my objective done there, but for some reason every single treasure I found was inside a lava flow, which made it a pain to hone in on it without getting my poor guy set on fire. 

In the evening I logged into Leviathan to finish off my last few agent missions, though since I also had some juicy Conquest objectives close to completion, I also played other alts for a bit to easily reach their personal targets for extra rewards. On Tulak Hord I dug up some treasure (less painful in the Outlaw's Den this time) and then did some questing on my inquisitor for the daily Conquest.

On Satele Shan I completed my agent's class story on Tatooine to tick off my daily and last weekly objective, and on the other servers I only needed to do a bit more stuff on alts to finish off the daily objective there too.

Week 6 Thoughts

I had weirdly mixed feelings about this week. On the one hand I was happy to finally see a PvP objective pop back up as part of the regular season, but on the other hand they take ages to complete across all servers (and I was actually quite lucky with wins vs. losses). I think I completed a total of seven warzone weeklies and two arena weeklies this week, which is similar to the kind of craziness I would usually only engage in during a Total Galactic War.

In general there was little overlap between objectives, so getting to 7/7 felt quite time-consuming, no matter which route you decided to take - though again, this is in the context of doing it all on multiple servers. If I had only focused on a single one, it still would've been a breeze.

GS3 Review: The Leviathan

During Galatic Season 2, The Leviathan had been the server on which I was consistently the least progressed. Mostly this was due to a lack of PvP pops in the lowbie and midbie brackets, which often caused me to miss out on completing PvP-related season objectives. In Season 3, things turned around big time.

Queue times for midbie PvP were still not great, but they did feel a little better than they had been in Season 2, and I had some really fun matches. For a while I felt like I was on a proper winning streak, where I recognised the same names from one match to the next and they were always happy to have me on their team providing (what felt like) awesome heals. At max-level I could finally get into warzones reliably, and my good fortune continued. I gained five levels in the PvP season once that started, and at 65% my Sage knight has one of the better win rates for warzones among my characters. I think it helps that Leviathan is considerably smaller than the other servers, so the PvP community is also smaller and less sweaty overall, allowing even someone with moderate skill to shine sometimes.

Leviathan was also the first of the alternate servers where I unlocked seeker droids and macrobinoculars, and working on the GSI weekly there was what inspired me to write this post about "those damn eggs". I did eventually go on to unlock seeker droids and macrobinculars on all servers though, because some of the season objectives related to them were just too chill and easy to pass up.

In terms of character progress, my Sage knight went from being level 62 with her class story up to Nar Shaddaa at the end of Season 2 to hitting max-level and making it to Alderaan. She got up to an average item rating of 326, with 328 legendary implants. I also created a small bounty hunter whom I got to level 14, and together they raised my legacy level up to 19.

In general, I just really loved progressing my legacy on the Leviathan, though I couldn't tell you what made it stand out from the others. Maybe it's just that it's been a while since I levelled a Twi'lek on Darth Malgus. Seems I still have a soft spot for that species.

In terms of my French, I learned that the sides in Alderaan Civil War are called "neige" and "herbe", and when someone calls out "fufu" it means that they are worried about a nearby stealther (apparently derived from "furtive"). The more you know!

Buried in Time - Where Are Those Damn Eggs?

I've mentioned in the past that I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with the GSI dailies. In theory I like the concept of having more (mostly) non-combat missions, but with the way the GSI dailies work in practice, they are sadly often tedious to do. I still remember scouring three different instances of Alderaan for Big Red for example.

One mission I recalled being pretty pleasant though is Buried in Time on Tatooine. It requires you to dig up three "fossilised egg clusters" near some Krayt Dragon skeletons, and since the environment consists of sand dunes and there are almost no mobs around, it's easy enough to find them. Or at least it should be. I definitely remember it being that way for me in the past.

Having done the GSI weekly a couple of times for Galactic Seasons though, my experience was very different this time around, and I would easily spend half an hour or more driving in circles without finding more than a single egg cluster. I even took breaks and tried to switch instances, but to no avail.

I did some googling to find out whether this was a known issue that other people were having too, and while I could find some posts from players bemoaning that they were indeed having the same problem and wanted to blame it on some kind of bug or lack of respawns, there were always lots of replies along the lines of, "I don't know what you're talking about, it's as easy as ever for me!"

The best lead I found were multiple mentions about it potentially having something to do with graphics settings and view distance, and this seemed to align with some of my own experiences. For example there was one time I found an egg cluster next to a rock, thought "neat" and just went a few steps to the right to harvest an archaeology crystal... and when I turned around, the eggs were gone. I eventually got them to reappear by running back to the original spot and running around for a little bit. Another time I saw someone else doing the quest, and I could see that player successfully deploy their seeker droid and dig something up, but on my screen there was nothing there.

Eventually I managed to narrow it down to a problem with zoom, though it might also be tied to graphics settings. (I play with everything close to maxed out; I don't know if the problem also occurs on lower settings.) I play with the camera pretty far zoomed out nowadays, and as it turns out the fossilised egg clusters don't visually pop into existence until you're nearly on top of them when you play that way, which was what made them so impossibly hard to find.

When I finally did a test run with the camera closely zoomed in, I found four or five eggs within only a couple of minutes, and I noticed that if I stood still with an egg cluster in sight and then zoomed my camera out, it would disappear, and then come back once I zoomed back in. This creates a bit of a paradox as zooming further out usually allows you to see things further away from your character, but in this particular instance you'll see the eggs from further away when you're closely zoomed in. It's weird!

Anyway, as part of struggling with this whole process, I took some screenshots of known egg cluster spawn points to make it easier to find them again in the future, and I thought I might as well share them here. So if you're having the same problem as me, remember to zoom in closely and then just run around checking the spots below. (It's not a comprehensive list of all spawns, but it's a start.)

Near X -1141, Y -809, in the sand tracks leading away from the skull of the smaller Krayt Dragon skeleton.

At X -1155, Y -979 near the nose of the larger Krayt Dragon skull.

Around X -1162, Y -994, under the group of flappy birds near the larger Krayt Dragon skull.

Near X -1193, Y -756, next to the spine of the larger Krayt Dragon skeleton.

Around X - 211, Y -819, next to a large bone sticking out from the smaller Krayt Dragon skeleton.

At X -1223, Y -1016 where the larger skeleton's tail ends, close to the cave entrance with a class story phase.

Approximately X -1225, Y -861, a small distance away from the larger Krayt Dragon skeleton.

Around X -1226, Y -920, next to one of the bigger Krayt Dragon's ribs where there's also a Scyk spawn point.

At X -1286, Y -965 where the larger Krayt Dragon's tail loops down towards the cave entrance.

Around X -1340, Y -1104 above the cliff leading down to the bone pile below the cave.

Near X -1346, Y -820, some distance away from the larger Krayt Dragon skeleton and near where another Scyk spawns.

At X -1357, Y -977 next to a large rock.

Day 4: Missions & Conversations #IntPiPoMo

I'm taking part in IntPiPoMo, and this is the fourth of ten screenshot posts I'm making this month, each one themed around a certain topic. Today's topic is... missions and conversations, which means everything surrounding story content and the sorts of cut scenes we get to experience while playing through it.

I think I've said it before, but the Makeb storyline is one of those pieces of content that I've come to appreciate more and more over time. When it came out it seemed like a downgrade from the unique class stories, but from where we are now I see it as a good example of a planetary story that is unique for both factions, with both halves coming together to form something greater.

One thing I like about the Imperial storyline in particular is that the Imps are effectively doing good for selfish reasons, like in this scene where they end up rescuing some civilian scientists from evil mercenaries... because they need them for their own ends of course.

Another thing I've mentioned before is that thanks to the quick travel between planets I don't see the "planetary ship approach" cut scenes very often anymore, so when I do come across a shot like this one of the Jedi knight ship landing on Voss it honestly takes my breath away.

Beautiful scenery and framing are another thing I loved about the Ossus storyline, such as this series of shots of Darth Malgus and the player character coming out of the Jedi library.

Speaking of framing, I like this shot of my group coming up to Lord Tagriss to claim the last Dread Seed. I've done this infamous group quest more than a dozen times, but I hadn't really taken in the sights of the corrupted Jedi temple properly until this time.

Another thing I enjoy taking screenshots of: good action scenes! Above we first have a Sith warrior facing off against Nomen Karr during their chapter one finale, and below we have Senator Nebet fighting Beast Lord Akoru on Onderon.

Of Akoru I also have this fun shot of my bounty hunter whispering to him... I think it's to blackmail him? But the gestures and expressions make it look more like she's making a pass at him or something, hehe.

IntPiPoMo count: 30

Daily Tour: Oricon

I spent an unusually large amount of time doing dailies this past week. I've said before that I'm not really a "daily person" - I tend to binge on them a bit when they're new to max out any associated reputations, but after that I pretty much stop doing them unless an alt is making it to the area for the first time or it's worth doing them for Conquest. This past week was an occasion of the latter.

It got me thinking about what I do like about dailies whenever I do them, and it's a mix of trying to come up with an efficient route and then enjoying the familiar routine of following it. Since dailies are usually a solo endeavour, we all tend to come up with our own routes and don't necessarily exchange information about them... but it's something I find quite interesting, so I thought it would be fun to share some of my own daily routes.

I'd like to start with Oricon, and I made a little graphic to visualise what I'm talking about:

Roughly speaking, my route through Oricon could be described as a clockwise swirl that starts in the base (the image illustrates a Republic character's journey, but an Imperial's wouldn't be very different; it would just start further south) and ends in the central tower.

I think the somewhat circular motion is pretty natural, but while drawing this up I did find myself wondering why I'm going clockwise instead of counter-clockwise. I think the reason for that is that the initial storyline makes you run through all the missions that become dailies later in a specific order, and it sends you north before it sends you south, so I guess I just incorporated that initial direction into my routine without thinking about it. Or maybe it's because I'm Republic and the northern quest is closer than the southern one.

Anyway, starting in the Republic camp I begin with freeing the soliders from the crashed escape pods immediately outside the base, though I sometimes make a little detour right away as there are some strong mobs guarding a chest just to the left of the base exit sometimes (not shown on the graphic). Chests may never contain anything valuable nowadays, but I still like opening them.

Then I turn north and start hunting for the mobs dropping the quest items that allow you to enter the northern phase. If I'm on a character that has their seeker droid unlocked, I might meander a bit to also do the bonus mission to dig up roots.

After the phased bit, I turn south-east towards the heroic area, crossing over a giant root thing... I always dread that part because there's a mob standing on it that will yank you if you try to just ride past and dismounts me pretty much every time. I'm always relieved when someone else has just been through before me and killed it.

The heroic area is always the most time-consuming part since it's actually somewhat challenging still (just today I managed to get myself killed in there by accidentally aggroing a large group and a champion mob together, oops) - I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with that. I find it best to start at the north-western entrance since the bonus mission that becomes accessible if you have macrobinoculars also starts there.

If I'm not going to do the bonus I'll just try to climb shuttles and kill champions without aggroing too many other mobs before legging it back out, but if I also want to do the bonus I have to make my way south to get in range of the two southernmost things I need to scan and then double back up to complete the mission at the same terminal where it started. I vaguely recall someone mentioning to me once that there's supposed to be a spot where you can scan all four things at once but at this point I'm wondering whether I didn't just imagine that... as it is, the doubling back is quite annoying since everything takes a while to kill, but stuff's usually already respawned by the time I make my way back.

Then I ride south between the tower and the heroic area, destroy the terraforming devices and do the phased bit in the southernmost end of the zone. Afterwards it's back up towards the tower, which I always enter via the southern ramp. This is interesting in so far as I didn't find out until a couple of years ago that the mob that can drop the "bat hat" spawns at the start of the northern ramp because I simply never go there. Was quite a surprise when I found out!

Then I do the tower before quick travelling back to base. Here it's important to remember to exit the phase before using quick travel, because the mission has a step that says "exit the chamber" or something like that, and quick travelling straight out doesn't count. On at least one occasion I returned to base from inside the chamber, just to realise that my mission was stuck on asking me to exit the phase, so then I had to fight my way all the way back up the tower and inside the room just so that I could leave it "properly"... /facepalm

Anyway, I'd be curious to hear how this resonates with some of my readers. Does this route look similar to your own or do you prefer completing your dailies in a different order?

Shintar's Galactic Seasons Diary, Week 8

Day 1:

Got GSF and flashpoints as my weeklies and re-rolled flashpoints into ops. My dailies were generic killing in Hutt Space, and killing 75 insectoids on Voss. I re-rolled the latter, naturally, but it just transformed into insectoids on Ossus instead. I mean: yes, that's better, but still not great. At least the two dailies went well together. I went to Ossus on my Guardian and picked up five daily missions in bug-infested areas, did those, and then ran around killing some extra Geonosians since the quests only got the counter to about halfway. Both objectives completed at the same time.

Day 2:

I did a bit of a double take when I saw that my dailies were generic mob killing in Hutt Space and to do three GSI dailies on Makeb. Looking back at my Seasons diary, I've only had the latter objective once before, back in week three, which was also focused on Hutt Space. I don't know why they don't have these as options during other weeks; after all, GSI dailies exist on a number of planets. Or maybe the objectives also exist and I've just not seen them outside this one week? I assume they only have a chance to show up if your first daily login is on a character that actually has a seeker droid and macrobinculars, hmm...

Anyway, I quite appreciated this change of pace and took my Vanguard tank to Makeb to do some GSI dailies there, expecting the associated mob killing to come naturally. I tried to pick the "opposing set" to the missions I took last time to keep things varied. It was a chill enough time, though I have to say the macrobinocular quests pretty much always work out to be the better deal. The seeker droid ones always sound really appealing on paper, technically requiring zero combat and all, but then the things to dig up are so hard to find that you have to do three rounds of the map and things end up taking forever anyway.

Day 3:

Insectoids on Ossus and Voss for both my dailies, are you freaking kidding me? Naturally I re-rolled the Voss one and got GSF instead. In the match I played, a guildie of mine on the enemy team killed me over and over and we lost. I feel like I'm just losing these all the time, but I don't know if that's just in my head. I'll have to do a tally at the end of the Season to figure out the actual numbers.

For Ossus I did another round of five dailies on my Guardian. Since I knew from day one that I'd have to kill extras, I tried to do so, but probably because it was earlier in the evening it was actually quite busy, I struggled to find any mobs at all in places. So I then did another round of five dailies on my Sage, and both together did get me my mob tally quite comfortably.

Day 4:

Generic mob killing and Voss insectoids again. I re-rolled the latter and it turned into Ossus insectoids instead, so it was off to Ossus for another combo deal of doing five dailies each on two characters. For the second round I chose an Imp this time. It's a good thing I love Ossus as much as I do or I probably would've got a bit annoyed by all this repetition.

Day 5:

For the third day in a row, the game tried to send me to Voss to kill insectoids, and for the third day in a row I re-rolled it, this time into Ossus dailies. This was nice as I could just do the second half of the weekly on my Marauder without worrying about mob kills.

My other daily was Galactic Starfighter, which ended up being a domination match that was a decisive win for my team. Looking at the scoreboard at the end, it appeared to have been really unbalanced in our favour, with a lot of proper aces on my side.

Day 6:

This time my dailies were GSF and Ossus insectoids. The latter made me think hard since I didn't really want to go to Ossus for the fourth day in a row, but re-rolling could potentially result in Voss insectoids instead... in the end I decided to risk it and fortunately the die landed on "play a warzone" instead.

The GSF match was another disastrous loss during which I suffered my first death before my team had scored even a single point, but it was still decent fun. I played the regular PvP match on my Shadow in the levelling bracket and got into an Ancient Hypergates, which ended up being a very close loss. It was a good game though - we seemed to be hopelessly outmatched in the actual fights but me and another Shadow did the brunt of the point scoring for our team - sadly it just wasn't quite enough.

Day 7:

My last two dailies for the week were GSF and the killing of generic mobs in Hutt Space, both of which I was fine with. The GSF match also completed the associated weekly - just in time. It was another match where I got shot down by a guildie and we lost horribly. More annoyingly though, I had really bad lag again. There was one point where I hit the speed boost on my way to a satellite, then let go because I wanted to stop, but the ship just kept going on and on and on, shooting right past the satellite and into space because I couldn't make it stop. I just about managed to turn around but got killed right afterwards anyway (unsurprisingly).

This was also the day when I got my second weekly done, by running Scum and Villainy story mode with my guild. I don't think I've ever left both weekly objectives until so late in the week. Finally I completed the mob killing daily by doing a couple of quests on Quesh on my evil Juggernaut.

Week 8 thoughts:

I don't think I've explicitly said it before, but I don't actually care that much about any of the rewards from Seasons, I just enjoy filling the bars. I won't say no to another free companion, but truth be told I have more than enough of them already. Likewise, all the old rewards now available on the vendor are irrelevant to me since I was already playing when they were given out the first time. About the most interesting thing I thought were the two new fleet apartments - while I have more empty strongholds than decorated ones, they at least have some novelty value.

I realised this week that I had earned my eighth token, meaning that I had enough to buy one of the two strongholds. (The way it's designed you can only buy one per Season.) I meant to buy the Republic one but was tired when I talked to the vendor and so ended up buying the Imperial one by accident instead. D'oh! Oh well, I guess I was planning to eventually get them both anyway. Now it's just the Republic one that will have to wait until the next Season.

Shintar's Galactic Seasons Diary, Week 3

So, hey! I guess me keeping a diary of my Seasons progress is a thing now.

Day 1:

New week, new bugs. When I logged in to check my new objectives, I found that I only had one weekly instead of the intended two. I could only add my voice to the forum thread talking about this bug and move on for the time being. The one weekly I had was flashpoints again. While I wasn't sure whether that one had been fixed, I wanted to wait a little with re-rolling to see if any more information was going to surface about the bug with the missing weekly first (in case it reappeared and I found myself wanting to re-roll that one).

My dailies were Hutt space enemies... and insectoids on Voss. I couldn't even think of any insects on Voss off the top of my head! Shaclaws count I guess, but still... I re-rolled it and got... three GSI missions on Makeb? Unexpected, but at least something different. I did them on the Scoundrel with whom I also did the GSI round on Alderaan in week one and made a point of not trying to be too sneaky so that I would naturally kill a decent amount of mobs on the way. This worked out well enough and I completed both daily objectives at almost the same time.

Day 2:

I checked the forum thread about the missing weekly and it was up to four pages of people saying that they had the same problem. There was some theorising going on about what might be happening, but nothing conclusive and no dev response yet.

My dailies were to defeat 75 enemies on any Hutt space planet and do two heroics on Makeb (I think - title and description disagreed on whether it had to be Makeb or could be another Hutt space planet). I figured I might as well go for it. I decided to go on my Vanguard tank, picking two Makeb heroics from the fleet terminal more or less at random. I know I've done them all before at some point, but it's been so long I honestly couldn't remember anything about them at all.

Then a funny thing happened when I charged into the first pull at the first heroic: I... died? And with hitting some cooldowns even! Another Vanguard was there too and threw me a group invite just before I died, which I accepted. Then he attempted what remained of the pull, and died as well. We both revived, and dusted ourselves off with slight embarrassment before proceeding to do the rest of the heroic together, which was of course much easier. The friendly fellow agreed to team up for another one as well, and he accepted me sharing my second choice of heroic (we did try the other way round but it said I wasn't eligible for the one he had picked).

I honestly can't remember the last time I grouped up with someone for a heroic other than to avoid fighting over limited spawns and it genuinely felt beneficial as well. Anyway, that little adventure took care of both of my daily objectives in short order.

Day 3:

I was pleasantly surprised to find that the devs had actually rolled out a hotfix for the missing weekly issue, and on login I now had a second weekly to do warzones. At this point I decided to risk re-rolling the flashpoints, as I was signed up for a Scum run with guildies the next day and it would have been nice to also get the operations weekly completion from that, but I got GSF instead, which I was also fine with.

It also aligned with one of my dailies being GSF, which ended up being a domination match during which I managed to blow myself up not just once, but twice, and yet still came out as the second highest ranked on my team. Unsurprisingly, with that being the average skill level of my team, we were three-capped and it was over quickly.

My other daily was more Makeb heroics, and that still felt novel enough to me that I didn't re-roll it. This time I took another one of my Scoundrels and picked two different heroics, hoping to save some time by stealthing since I didn't need the kills... probably needless to say that this once again didn't work out. I'd forgotten how involved some of those heorics were: fight three turrets that become immune to damage on a rotation - almost like a boss fight - pick up some explosives, free prisoners, plant explosive charges at four different points on an AA turret, start doing the same on another turret before a scripted interruption brings in an elite droid... and that was all in the same heroic! At least I didn't die this time.

Day 4:

My dailies were GSF again and more Makeb heroics. I decided that I didn't want to go to Makeb for a third day in a row (though according to my guildies the heroics on another planet should have worked as well, despite of the objective name only stating Makeb) and risked a re-roll while crossing my fingers in hopes of not getting shaclaws. I got the one to do a PvP match and all was golden.

My GSF match was another one of those in which everyone was so terrible that we ran out of time before achieving a sufficient number of kills, which I actually tend to find kind of fun, but sadly my team was still on the losing side. In contrast to that, my Sage's PvP match took her to the Huttball pit on Vandin once again, where she personally scored two of her team's goals (we won 5-0) and generally achieved some beautiful synergies with a few of her team members.

Day 5:

GSF and Makeb/Hutt space heroics again! I re-rolled the latter again and got the generic "kill mobs on these planets" objective instead.

For GSF I took a different character out for a spin since my Assassin tank was long done with her Conquest. My Powertech tank had never done a GSF match at all and did very badly, but as it happened that particular domination match ended up being a win anyway.

For the mob kills I did a couple of random quests on Quesh and Makeb on my DvL Assassin and my Juggernaut tank.

Day 6:

Got GSF as my daily yet again and the one to do a warzone. Honestly, that's pretty much the perfect combo for me, but if I was someone who hated GSF, I could see it being frustrating to get it as a daily objective four days in a row.

For GSF, I got into a death match where my team completely obliterated the opposition (no thanks to me), which also completed my GSF weekly objective to play four matches. My warzone ended up being another Vandin Huttball which was a pretty well-balanced game that we won 3-2 (and the enemy was close-ish to potentially scoring again so it really could have gone either way). Sadly I noticed in this Vandin that while Bioware did indeed address certain lag issues, de-sync still isn't a thing of the past, as I still witnessed people catching the ball while being nowhere near it on my screen and similar shenanigans.

Day 7:

On the last day of the SWTOR week, my daily objectives were GSF and Hutt space heroics yet again. I decided that I was okay with the heroics today and would just try a different planet than Makeb, but I didn't really want to do any more GSF after completing my weekly. I re-rolled it in hopes of getting a warzone maybe... and was promptly punished for this foolish gamble by being given the "kill 75 insectoids on Voss" objective, with no escape this time. D'oh!

I went to do a warzone on my lowbie Merc anyway, since I needed one more for my second weekly objective. I got into Vandin again (have I been doing anything else recently?), though this one was a 0-6 loss. I was tempted to blame it on the level disparity again (my team had no level 70+s, while the opposition had several) but if I'm honest it was probably just bad tactics. They had a stealther waiting on our line that nobody seemed to bother to dislodge for ages - I eventually went back myself and knocked them down twice but they kept coming back. Oh well.

As for my daily objectives, I remembered there being one or more Imperial heroics on Voss that had some shaclaws in it, though I wasn't sure which ones they were. I went on my Juggernaut tank and picked up both Ancient Guardians and Rock Eaters, since they sounded like likely contenders. Ancient Guardians turned out to be the right one, as it did have ten shaclaws in it, though it contained even more droids. Rock Eaters was also the heroic I'd expected it to be, but I'd misremembered the big mob at the end - it was a vorantikus, not a shaclaw.

I then swapped to my DvL Assassin to do Ancient Guardians a second time. I killed both groups of shaclaws in it and paused. My insectoid counter was on 20/75. It was really late in the evening and while I was sure there were plenty of shaclaws out in the open world somewhere, I didn't know for the life of me where exactly, and I knew that driving around blindly to find some would take me forever.

I remembered how commenter Pallais had mentioned the idea of resetting a heroic over and over (probably this one) in response to my last Seasons diary. It was only ten mobs... but they were all non-elites, right by the entrance, and as a stealther I could skip the pull consisting of strong and elite droids located between the two groups as well. So I exited, reset the phase (just the phase, not the heroic), went back in and killed the shaclaws again. Then I repeated this process five more times.

Once my insectoid killing objective was completed, I continued to actually complete the heroic, which took care of the second objective. (Fortunately the game had no qualms about giving me credit for doing the same heroic twice on two different characters.) All in all, this was actually reasonably quick, but I have to confess I felt slightly dirty. Talk about degenerate gameplay.

Week 3 impressions:

The bugginess hit a new high (or low?) for me with the missing weekly, though I appreciate that this particular issue was addressed quickly. Still, the amount of small bugs continues to be headache-inducing, as it feels like you should be visiting the forums every day just to check which objectives are reported as buggy before actually attempting to do anything.

In terms of RNG, I felt pretty lucky this week as about half of my objectives were things I liked doing anyway. I do kind of appreciate how the system encourages you to take part in different activities though, including things you may not have done in a while (or ever, in the case of some more casual players I guess). I'd seriously forgotten so much about those Makeb heroics...

I saw someone on the forums say that Seasons is basically what Conquest used to be (the personal part of it at least), back when it had more limited objectives and the weekly themes were more distinctive. This feels very true to me.

The Shroud Bugged Out

You may have surmised from the fact that I was talking about doing the Dread Seed quest chain in my last post that I was also going to do the heroic missions that cap off that very same chain and the one for Macrobinoculars this weekend. I'm very fond of both of these missions because I'll forever remember the first time I did them both being hilariously chaotic.

You would also think that after successfully completing them half a dozen times I'd be able to knock them out pretty quickly at this point, but this is a notion of which I was quickly disabused this Sunday.

And to think that we started out so well! When we met up in front of the Shroud's lair, I was immediately pleased to note that all of us were actually on the correct step of the quest. Most of the previous times that I've done this mission it usually turned out that someone still needed to do the part that I like to call the "taxi chase", and then it always took some time to get them caught up with the rest of us. Our team on the other hand - consisting of me and my guildies Mostyn, Ken and Uni - looked like it should be able to make short work of the whole thing.

Unfortunately it soon became apparent that I was the person in the group who had the most experience with the mission, which was less good. As it turns out it's very easy to follow the instructions of other people telling you to click the button in front of you, but being able to do so doesn't necessarily mean that you now automatically know what everyone else in the group is supposed to be doing.

Already in the second room we briefly got stuck as everyone else went into the little side alcoves and started clicking the buttons there, while I ran up and down the corridor yelling about how I knew that there was something for me to click here but I didn't know where it was. Fortunately another guildie who happened to overhear us on Teamspeak was able to point me in the right direction (the ceiling). "It's like the blind leading the blind," Mr Commando observed wistfully from the other side of the table.

Then things got buggy though. We got to the part with the droid in the security station, where mines keep going off around him, you kill the turrets surrounding the station, he summons some droids, and after you kill those, he surrenders. The problem was that we killed the turrets and then nothing happened; the mines just kept beeping away and the next phase refused to start.

This is actually something that had also happened to me the previous time I did this quest, though back then we'd been able to reset it by simply walking away from the area, and when the sequence restarted it completed properly the second time around. That didn't work this time though. We ran all the way outside the phase and back in, even tried wiping the group by suiciding on the laser grid, but nothing seemed to work.

Eventually we exited again and reset the phase, which did not reset the first two puzzles but respawned most of the mobs, so we had to kill those all over again. Fortunately the security sequence also started up properly this time (we noticed that messages about escalating defenses popped up in the middle of the screen now, which hadn't happened before).

Though then we got stuck again because when the droids finally spawned, one of them managed to somehow run inside the controller's defensive shield, where he was untouchable and kept us stuck in combat. Fortunately this time we were able to reset the thing by simple getting some distance. When we tried again we made sure to instantly stun and nuke any droids coming out of the station right next to the shield.

Then it came to the puzzle part, one I thought I remembered reasonably well. One person mans the security station (this is usually my job), one has to go into the room with all the poison gas, one to the droid assembly line, and the last to the elevator. How and why any of these things go together and interact in a logical way I don't know; I just know that they do.

We started off with me at the security station, Mostyn by the poison room, Uni at the droid assembler and Ken at the elevator, but Uni kept complaining that he couldn't get in. "When I click this thing, doesn't the door go up?", I asked. "Yes, it does, but there's another one right behind it. It's like it goes up and stays closed at the same time." While this sounded quite inane, I was quickly reminded of a visual glitch that I sometimes see in cut scenes involving doors. The problem was that for Uni it was more than visual: the "second" door remained solid and wouldn't let him pass. Mostyn walked over and was able to walk right "through" it in front of Uni's eyes.

So we decided to have Mostyn and Uni swap places. However, Uni's game would have none of that either: While he didn't see any doors at the poison room, he was still prevented from entering by an invisible force field.

We tried swapping him with Ken, but now Ken was having problems with the poison room. He could get inside; but he couldn't click the console! "I can see where I'm meant to click, but it's just not letting me interact with it!"

As a last ditch effort, we were going to try having Ken back at the elevator, me at the poison room and Uni at the security station, but of course he couldn't click on that either.

Everyone agreed at this point that it would be best for both Ken and Uni to leave the instance and restart their game, since whatever was wrong seemed to affect them in specific and not the instance as a whole. "Are we going to be featured in a blog post now?" Uni asked on the way out. Well, you've got your answer!

After they'd both relogged and rejoined the group, it at first turned out that they had loaded back into the wrong instance, so they had to leave the phase again to switch instances outside. But once we were finally all together again, everyone was able to get through doors and click on things, and we literally unlocked the next step on the first attempt. If only it could have been that easy right away!

Fortunately nothing that came after caused us any more serious issues, Mostyn just fell to his death once and in the last fight people were running in circles like headless chickens for a while, but that didn't prevent us from getting it down.

Ken went to bed after that but the three of us who remained also needed the Dread Seed heroic so we did that too, and fortunately it went down without a hitch, except that I swear those power cells get deadlier every time I do the part where you have to power up the turrets. I know they are supposed to explode if you get hit while carrying one, but I've also been one-shot seemingly just from stepping on a floor cable while carrying a cell (are neither the cables nor my shoes insulated?!) and this time I managed to fall over dead literally the moment I clicked on one to pick it up.

Another bug I had previously encountered but which fortunately didn't happen again this time was one of the doors not opening for a group member (who was fortunately only helping out at the time and didn't need to be there for the final kill anyway, and unlike the Shroud heroic, fighting Lord Tagriss doesn't actually require a full group of four players).

Still, though. I used to think that the toughest thing about these quests was finding a group for them, but now I'm not so sure anymore. I mean, we had a whale of a time because we are friends who trust each other and are able to see the funny side of most mishaps, but can you imagine trying to communicate Schrödinger's door to a pug group? They'd just think that you've gone mad! Hopefully the Bioware devs will find the time to fix some of those bugs before they ruin too many groups' experiences, even if this isn't one of the most popular quests in the game.

Voss Seeker Droid Bug

Consider this one of my rare PSA posts, which usually come about after I stumble across a question or problem that's very peculiar, and then on trying to google the answer/solution, I realise that nobody seems to have posted one so far. Hey, might as well perform a small public service and do it myself, right?

This time the issue is the Seeker Droid/Dread Seed quest line which sends you all over the galaxy to dig up Dread Seeds, as there are a couple of areas where the Seeker Droid mechanic is a bit buggy. One of them is Balmorra from what I remember, but it's relatively easy to work around that one because the area is very open, so you just run around a bit and eventually you'll get it to work.

Voss on the other hand is a tricky one, because the dig site for the mission is underneath Voss-Ka and can only be accessed via a tunnel and by going down a narrow little path. What happens is that you do that, get the "Your Seeker Droid detects something in the area" message, take two more steps, and immediately get its "Your Seeker Droid no longer detects anything" counter, which causes the icon/item to get greyed out again. If you then continue into the area marked on the map, you can run around as much as you want, the icon won't light up again and you can't dig. Frustrating!

Fortunately there's a simple workaround, which I'm not sure everyone's aware of, so I made a little video about it last night while doing the quest on my Scoundrel:



Basically it seems to be less about absolute positioning and more about making sure you don't "trip" over the line that triggers the "Your Seeker Droid no longer detects anything" message. So the thing to do is to walk down the path very slowly and stop instantly the moment your Seeker Droid lights up as available. Then, instead of continuing down the little winding path, turn towards the cliff and edge your way down into the area that way. If you run into the "Your Seeker Droid no longer detects anything" message at any point, go back up and start again. You should quickly be able to find an invisible "path" though that allows you to enter the area without your droid becoming disabled, and then you can run all over the place and dig to your heart's content. Hope this helps someone!

Seek And You Shall... Be Surprised?

Bhagpuss' adventures in SWTOR continue to surprise and amuse me. I mean, here are the developers trying really hard to funnel new players into just doing the storyline, by highlighting the main quest chains in bright purple and hiding all side missions by default, and what does Bhagpuss do? Barely halfway through his class story on his first character, he starts doing macrobinocular and seeker droid missions.

I tried to alleviate his confusion about them a little bit with a helpful comment, but after posting it I did find myself pausing for a bit. Was I sure that my assessment of seeker droid areas only rewarding "junk" was still accurate? Just how long had it been since I last visited one anyway?

As I was driving around Hoth in search of information about nerfs (don't ask), I drove past one of those areas that caused my seeker droid to light up because it had detected something interesting. I decided to detour towards it and do a little digging to refresh my memory.

I did not find any of the "junk" I was expecting, such as low-level mods and green implants. I guess someone at Bioware did bother to go through the loot tables to remove those at some point. The first thing I found was a seeker droid related consumable that, according to its tooltip, "reduces the deployment time for your Seeker Droid by 100% for 1 hour". Wow, so it's instant then? Actually... as it turns out, it "only" makes your Seeker Droid go about twice as fast (whoever wrote that tooltip apparently doesn't understand how percentages work), but it was still a neat little thing that I previously hadn't even known existed.

Other things I proceeded to dig up were various speeder parts (they are a type of loot I vaguely remembered though I hadn't thought about them in ages, and I always thought they were much rarer), more of the speed boost consumables, some blue "secure crates" containing grade seven crafting materials (this was about the closest to what I'd consider junk, because while not totally useless, rank seven materials are of little value six years past their prime), GSI reputation tokens (no good for me anymore since I'm maxed out, but useful loot in principle), as well as one piece each of the cosmetic Dread Seed and Star Forager gear sets (that's the one valuable I actually remembered existing but had never seen myself before).

It was kind of mesmerising and before I knew it, I'd spent a full hour digging, at which point I asked myself: Just how long was this going to continue? As far as I remembered, dig sites were supposed to deplete after a while, but maybe that had been changed too? I looked it up and the exact way it's supposed to work is that the dig site stays up until someone finds the "special treasure". Since I was the only person working on it, I figured that this might be the reason for it taking so long and decided to keep going.

As it turns out, the system does still work this way, and I did eventually find the special treasure. Unfortunately that was indeed junk - a piece of purple level 55 gear, which is pretty much totally worthless now. Special treasure my arse.

While this was an anticlimactic conclusion to my little treasure hunting adventure, I was still positively surprised by how much better the loot had been than I expected. For example I got so many of the speeder parts that I was able to go and buy one of the speeders in the GSI offices on Nar Shaddaa straight away. It's nothing special in terms of looks, but it was still a nice little reward that I hadn't expected to get when I started digging.

I'd almost consider going back to dig for more, but let's be honest: While the treasure was marginally better than I had expected, I still spent one and a half hours just walking in circles in a small area of Hoth and shaking my fist at the seeming inaccuracy of the directions I was given at times. (My tip: Always use one of the consumables that are supposed to improve accuracy. The process is maddening enough either way, but at least this alleviates the pain a little.) There's a reason players haven't been clamouring en masse for Bioware to add more content for this system.

Back in October they actually said during a dev livestream that they were going to bring back macrobinoculars and seeker droids on Ossus, with the latter system also slated to receive some improvements. Based on the complete lack of coverage of the subject once 5.10 actually released, I'm guessing that this feature didn't make the final cut though... oh well. Nobody seems to be missing it either.

Pre-Expansion Energy

Everybody knows that the time just after the release of a new expansion is one of the most exciting periods in an MMO's life cycle, but it's only during the last year or so that I've come to appreciate just how important the time just before the release of a new expansion is as well. I observed it from the outside with WoW's Battle for Azeroth, and now with Onslaught's announcement I see it in SWTOR.

Just knowing that new content is coming is enough to get a good percentage of lapsed players back into the game, even if its release is still some time away. I was utterly amazed the other day when my friends list suddenly lit up with the names of not just one, but two members of my old launch guild (which dissolved less than a year into the game).

For me personally the expansion announcement has done wonders for my motivation as well. It's not that I didn't have fun playing before, but I was just kind of cruising along lately by alternating between doing dailies and PvP. I guess none of what you could call my long-term character goals have been feeling very urgent after two and a half years without an expansion. It's all still going to be there tomorrow, right?

However... with an expansion coming up, you never know! I mean, realistically I don't expect it to change many of the things that I'm working on right now, but strictly speaking you never know - so better get on with it. There is a bit of a sense of urgency now (as far as you can apply that word five months in advance) and it's been helping me to get off my butt and get some things done.

There hasn't been much rhyme or reason to my goals just yet - my enthusiasm is more based on a general feeling of being re-energised than any sort of real plan. So I've done things like getting two more characters their Aratech Ice speeders (the one you get for completing all of the original set of master mode flashpoints), finishing off the Seeker Droid and Macrobinocular missions on one character, and finally starting them on a bunch of others.

Cue my guildie: "I think the last time I did this quest was in 2015..."

It also helps that after Ossus I'm really excited about the current story direction for the first time in years. While KotFE and KotET had their strengths, ultimately I did not enjoy being the Outlander and leader of the Alliance, and I think that put a bit of a damper on all my alt playing. Beyond the sense of boring repetition that you get while replaying the chapters, taking any alt into the 4.0 content and beyond felt a bit like a dead end to me, not somewhere I actively wanted to go.

Since Ossus, I'm actually excited by the thought of taking more alts through the new story for the first time. KotFE and KotET are still going to be a bit of a "hump" to get over in terms of story (since I don't want to just skip them and be saddled with default choices), but I can actually see the light at the end of the tunnel now, which is a great feeling.

Back In My Day: Dailies

"Back In My Day" is an irregular series in which I take one aspect of Star Wars: The Old Republic and look at how it has evolved over time. This particular installment was inspired by me doing a lot of questing on Ilum recently, which got me thinking about how many of the quests there used to be daily repeatable but aren't anymore.

Launch - The Dailies That Weren't Really

At launch, it was very obvious that SWTOR hadn't originally been conceived as a game with daily quests as an endgame activity in mind - until someone at the Bioware offices had a sudden panic attack three weeks before launch or something, and in order to shoehorn the daily concept into the game somehow, they took two quest chains that had been designed to be done at or near the level cap, the Ilum storyline and the Belsavis bonus series, and turned all the missions that weren't part of the main quest chain into daily repeatables that handed out endgame rewards. (I remember some of them gave out purple item modifications, but I seem to remember that this wasn't the case for all of them.)

This went about as well as you would expect. In a post from February 2012 describing my first impressions of the Belsavis dailies, I hilariously noted that I didn't even know where to go and where to start, as there was no "daily hub" or anything, and the daily missions were utterly indistinguishable from regular one-time quests.

Story-wise, a lot of them made no sense either. Now, daily tasks in an MMO require a certain suspension of disbelief most of the time, but there are still ways to make them more credible vs. blatantly hitting the player over the head with how little sense it makes to repeat certain things. My favourite example of this was always the Republic quest on Ilum that had a little astromech droid desperately seeking help and supplies for his owner, a recently crashed fighter pilot... who apparently crashed every day? We used to joke that the guy was really just a hermit who happened to live in a ship wreck and we were basically his daily supply run.

Mechanically, things were pretty bad as well. People were complaining about others not space-barring through the daily quest givers' dialogue quickly enough long before anyone got tired of the cut scenes in flashpoints, but at the same time they didn't just want to have the mission shared with them because they did want to go through the cut scene to farm social points and/or companion affection.

The area also didn't really seem to be designed to have a large number of people questing in it at the same time. Most infamously I remember the quest on Republic side to kill Rattataki leaders, of which you needed three for the quest, and there were only about five in the area, with half of them habitually bugged out and unkillable. Sometimes I'd just sit down and wait for the same guy to respawn three times.

Now, all of this may sound horrible, but it wasn't really that bad. It wasn't well designed for its purpose, but at least for me it also managed to stay below the threshold of actually becoming tedious and annoying. The fact that the Belsavis bonus series included no less than three heroics encouraged people to group up for the whole chain of dailies, and the end result felt kind of awkward but also fun. The payout was also high enough that you never really felt like you actually had to do the whole thing on a daily basis to stay afloat.

1.2 - Into the Black Hole

Patch 1.2 introduced the game's first "proper" daily area, the Black Hole on Corellia. It was a bit of a pain to get to as you had to go through no less than three loading screens to travel there, but it was much more streamlined for its purpose. There was an introductory quest with dialogue on the fleet, but then the actual dailies could just be picked up from a terminal all at once and were neatly clustered around the area.

Bioware decided to keep encouraging people to group up by also adding a heroic mission, as well as a weekly meta quest that required you to complete each mission, including the heroic, exactly once. I noted at the time that the concept of the weekly was very much in line with SWTOR's very casual-friendly approach, in that the best rewards only required you to visit the area once a week. It was also very much worth doing as the weekly also offered a new type of currency called Black Hole commendations, which could be used to buy new and more powerful gear from vendors on the fleet.

1.5 - Experiments in Section X

Section X iterated on the Black Hole and mostly tried to improve it. 1.5 was also the patch that included the free-to-play conversion though, which led to the weird experiment of making the new zone into paid content that you could unlock by subscribing or via a special access pass (which was eventually dropped).

I can't even remember what sort of rewards the missions gave at launch, but they were most assuredly overshadowed by the introduction of the reputation system, which also made Section X the first daily area with a reputation attached and gave players an incentive to increase their standing with the faction just to get access to things like cosmetic armour shells and pets.

The area was also spiced up by featuring the start to the quest chain to acquire HK-51 and having the world boss Dreadtooth path around the area. People with an interest in world PvP were delighted to actually run into the other faction on occasion now - one thing that had been a bit odd about the Black Hole was that even though technically Republic and Imperial players were playing on the same map, their quests were on entirely separate halves of it and they never even crossed paths. In Section X the two factions still had their own separate missions, like in the Black Hole, but they took place in roughly the same area, and the heroic mission for the weekly was even located in the same instance.

The heroic mission in Section X was the one somewhat controversial thing about the area, as it required exactly four people for successful completion - you couldn't substitute someone with a companion as there were several sections where people needed to click on things in sync to bypass some force fields. This was a bit of a nuisance, and was later on removed without much fanfare, though the quest's [Heroic 4] tag wasn't changed. Personally I only found out that I was suddenly able to solo it pretty much by accident.

1.7 - The Gree Revive Ilum

Patch 1.7 introduced the Gree event, the first world event that was designed from the ground up to be repeated, and which re-purposed the previously abandoned Western Ice Shelf on Ilum where the big open world PvP debacle from launch had taken place. While it also featured one instanced and two open world bosses, the main focus was once again on daily missions with which you could earn reputation to unlock some nice goodies from the local vendors.

The biggest controversy here was Bioware's attempt to use dailies more openly to encourage people to engage in world PvP within a small separate area down south, which would not allow you to be in a group larger than four, dismissed companions, and flagged you(r group) for free-for-all PvP. Personally I thought this was quite fun and novel, but some people got very hung up on the mere existence of two daily quests that required you to flag for PvP, despite of their rewards being minimal compared to the regular dailies.

2.0 - Makeb and Galactic Solutions Industries

2.0 was not a very successful addition to the game in terms of daily quest endgame. There were daily quests to do on Makeb, but they were part of the super awkward Makeb Staged Weekly and required you to limit yourself to one mission at a time, which had you travelling all over the damn place and wade through dozens of mobs just to achieve a single objective. Myself and most people I knew did it once or twice and then decided to go back to the old daily zones because they were much more fun.

Rise of the Hutt Cartel also introduced Galactic Solutions Industries as a faction, which asked us to make use of our new Seeker Droids and Macrobinoculars which we had acquired through one of 2.0's side mission arcs. Like the Makeb dailies these were very spread out, across different planets even, though at least the fact that many of them were on lower level planets allowed you to travel largely unimpeded, and quite a few of them didn't even require any combat at all. Unsurprisingly, these weren't a huge hit with people either, though there does seem to be a niche audience for them that appreciates the slower and more relaxed gameplay that they offer.

2.3 - CZ-198 & Bounty Contract Week

CZ-198 was the first daily hub to be introduced post 2.0 and went back to the classic model of having a small area shared between the two factions in which you could just "do the rounds" for some credits, and it quickly became popular because it was very quick and easy to do and therefore a very efficient way to make some money. It was also the first permanent daily area that didn't really differentiate much between the factions, as they both got the same quests. (I'm not counting that Republic players collect kolto and destroy toxin while the Empire does the opposite. It's still "click on these containers five times".)

What was really odd about CZ-198's weekly mission though was that it required you to run both of the local flashpoints in addition to doing all the dailies... which was a bit awkward to be honest. It's probably the reason I got the achievements for running these on story mode twenty-five times more quickly than for any other flashpoints, and I remember trying to always have the CZ weekly in my log before running a random just in case one of the Czerka flashpoints would pop up. This odd system was eventually patched out in 3.2, when the requirement to run the two flashpoints was replaced with a single heroic mission to kill a big droid.

2.3 was also the patch that introduced the second recurring world event, Bounty Contract Week. This followed more in the steps of the Makeb Staged Weekly, by making you choose a single daily quest that you then saw through to form a kind of storyline. It was a little weird, but still made a lot more sense than the stuff on Makeb.

2.4 - Oricon

Oricon always felt to me like it was made by the same team that created CZ-198, only with small improvements: again we were in a small area shared by both factions, both doing the same quests. Even though the change to the CZ weekly to not require flashpoint running anymore didn't come until much later, it seemed like Bioware already felt a bit awkward about that particular design decision, so the Oricon weekly featured a daily in a heroic area instead. It was brutal and I loved it - to this day it remains at least moderately challenging despite of how much heroics have been toned down in general.

What was different was that there were bonus missions for those who had unlocked their Seeker Droids and Macrobinoculars - CZ-198 had only featured a one-time quest for a pet, but the bonuses on Oricon were attached to dailies and therefore repeatable.

More importantly though, there was a much bigger attempt to tie the whole area into a story. On CZ-198, there was an introductory quest that asked you to run the flashpoints, and the flashpoints were part of the weekly, but the dailies were just kind of... there. Oricon took a different approach, by unlocking the daily quests one at a time and tying them into a quest chain narrative that you had to complete once before the missions unlocked as daily repeatable from the nearest terminal. (As an aside, the story was also refreshingly different for the two factions despite of running along the same general lines.) The story quest then cumulated in you being sent to do the two Dread operations, something that generated some resentment among solo players, but that's really another story as it had no impact on your ability to do the dailies.

2.5.2a - Return of the Rakghouls

(Fun fact, I couldn't actually find any patch notes about this... I only know that the event came with this patch thanks to my blog posts about it.) The third big repeatable world event, the Rakghoul Resurgence that would come to rotate between three different planets, took a fairly conservative approach and basically mirrored the basic setup of the Gree event, with a small enclosed daily area, an instanced operations boss and a couple of open world bosses. They just dropped the PvP area and replaced it with another heroic area instead.

What was somewhat revolutionary at the time was that the event was trying to be level-agnostic - the mobs in the tunnels were mostly very low level and would only spawn reinforcements of your character's level once you got aggro, allowing players of (nearly) all levels to join in the fun. The operations boss The Eyeless was also the first boss that featured PvE bolster, boosting lowbies to a high enough level that enabled them to participate. It's kind of ironic that this whole event appears to have been overlooked when they introduced the galaxy-wide level sync in 4.0, which now makes it feel kind of outdated and causes lowbies to get left out of parts of it due to some of the system's limitations.

3.0 - Soloing on Rishi & Yavin IV

Shadow of Revan's two new planets were a funny bunch in terms of dailies. Rishi featured several missions that were daily repeatable, and some of them even had achievements attached to repeating them often enough, but they were scattered all across the area and had no coherent theme or reward structure to them.

Yavin IV was the "real" new daily area of the expansion but required you to complete the storyline first. There was the whole thing with giving you the choice of either doing dailies or doing the Temple of Sacrifice operation to complete the storyline, which was honestly just kind of awkward. The dailies themselves, once unlocked, were decent enough fun and proved very popular. I ranted at the time though that I thought they were actually kind of over-incentivised, with the hugely powerful companion gear that was rewarded by the weekly making you feel like you kind of had to do them to kit out your companions (this was back when their gear affected their power level). What's also noteworthy is that while there was a weekly quest to kill the walker world boss on Yavin, this was completely separate from the regular weekly mission for the daily quests, which could be done solo in its entirety and was therefore the first of its kind to not feature any kind of grouping component.

3.2 - Pointlessness on Ziost

After the fun of Yavin, the dailies on Ziost felt like a bit of a step back. Requiring the completion of both the basic Shadow of Revan story as well as of the Rise of the Emperor patch, they presented the as of then largest number of hurdles to overcome in order to gain access to a new daily area. It wasn't exactly a prohibitive amount of effort or anything, but compared to the ease with which any alt could jump into any of the pre-3.0 daily areas it felt like a lot.

Mechanically it was interesting in that all the dailies were non-combat missions, enforced by the circumstances of the story... but the big problem was that there was basically zero incentive to come back. Where Yavin felt like it was almost showering you with too many rewards, Ziost had nothing, neither a reputation to work on nor anything interesting to buy with the currency the quests rewarded. I expect the value of all rewards to deprecate over time, but I distinctly remember Ziost being the one planet where I did one round of the missions on the day of release, looked at the local vendor, and realised that he didn't have anything of interest to offer even on day one, which was kind of disappointing. My impression is that I wasn't alone in this and that Ziost has remained comparatively unpopular with the masses for this reason... though again, some players did appreciate the novelty of the combat-less mission design.

4.0 - Goodbye To All The Quests I've Loved Before

Knights of the Fallen Empire brought with it a new focus on solo story, and new dailies were not really a part of Bioware's plan because they were considered too MMO-like I guess. Since the devs were busy retuning a lot of content anyway though, they decided to make most of the old heroics soloable while also attaching Alliance endgame rewards to them, which basically means that they morphed from being open-world group content for levelling players into just another set of endlessly repeatable dailies. I hated that, but based on the responses I got to the linked post a lot of people felt the opposite way.

As part of this great, galaxy-wide tidy-up, the former dailies on Belsavis and Ilum were also turned back into the regular quest chains they had clearly been meant to be from the beginning, so you did them once and that was it. I didn't even notice this for a long time, but as with all things, there were people who were unhappy about the change because they had actually still been doing those old dailies, mostly as a way to farm companion affection.

5.2 - Icky Iokath

Nearly two years after Ziost, Bioware brought us our first new daily area in ages in the form of Iokath. While everyone was quite excited about getting a new planet to explore, what we eventually got felt a lot less iterative than the previous daily areas, and more like they struggled to remember how to design this kind of content after a long time away from it. It felt as if they picked a bunch of features from the old areas, mixed in a couple of new ideas, and simply hoped that the end result would be fun. Unfortunately the different parts didn't gel too well and in the end it was more of a slightly awkward mishmash.

There is an initial storyline like on Oricon, and a couple of the quests you complete in it do return as dailies, but most of the repeatable missions are actually quite different. The quests are more or less the same for both factions and take place in a shared area, though it's larger than most daily areas. Travelling around the zone is also very convoluted, making questing on Iokath very time-consuming.

One of the new features was the concept of different daily missions rotating on the terminal from one day to the next, and the player being expected to do more than one day of them to complete the associated weekly quest. There were also several vehicle quests, which were very badly tuned in terms of cost vs. reward at launch, and while Bioware fixed this later, the bad first impression tarnished many players' impression of the planet forever. The vehicles were also meant to encourage PvP, but the combination of the initial high cost to buy them as well as the awkward geography not really encouraging people to meet up made that fall flat on its face as well.

Nearly three years after the last bunch of daily quests that also featured group content, Bioware also decided to include a single world boss on Iokath, the Colossal, and to make a daily quest for him... but since it wasn't required for the weekly and wasn't even marked as a group quest, most people picked it up once, went "mm, nope" once they saw what they were up against (or maybe did it once just for the achievement) and that was that. It's not like the boss drops anything either.

Looking Back And Looking Forward

Looking back at this history of SWTOR's daily quests / areas, I see several different developments over time. Aside from launch and it's "improvised" dailies, the Black Hole's precedent of the terminal with both dailies and a weekly quest was something that quickly became the norm and that has persisted to this day, but other aspects of the system have been more fluid.

First off, there was a lot of experimentation with story. The first daily areas just offered a voiced introduction and then tried to engage you by giving you different things to do on each faction. On Makeb and with Bounty Contract Week they seemed to try to create a sort of daily repeatable miniature story, with very mixed results. The Oricon approach of weaving the dailies into a one-time story was the most attractive way of going about things in my eyes. More recently they have gated largely separate dailies behind doing a longer, one-time story quest, which I haven't been quite as fond of.

There was also a gradual abandonment of group content. The early weeklies up to Oricon all had some sort of group component to them (even if CZ-198's flashpoint running requirement was eventually abandoned as a failed experiment), but with Shadow of Revan that all went out the window. The Colossal on Iokath felt like a hesitant breadcrumb thrown at players who liked to group up, but it wasn't handled very well in my opinion.

Finally, there is an interesting undercurrent of wanting to incentivise world PvP every now and then, most notably with the dedicated PvP area on Ilum but also with the Iokath vehicles, yet people never seem to have taken to it very well. From my experience the best thing to do still seems to be to simply force both factions into a small space and then let them sort themselves out. I've had some enjoyable world PvP both on Oricon and in the Rakghoul tunnels.

In a few days we'll all get to see the game's newest daily area on Ossus. I've mostly avoided spoilers about it, though I hear that there are supposed to be some new heroics, which is something that I at least would definitely appreciate. As far as story integration and world PvP goes, we'll just have to see!