Here's what I posted about in March: Back in My Day: Datacrons - Musings on how datacrons and our relationship with them have and haven't changed over time Jumping into PvP Season 5 - I enthusiastically throw myself at a new season after more than a month's break and talk about what a different experience it can be on different servers What Have We Lost? - I take stock of what has changed since the move from Bioware to Broadsword Patch 7.4.1 Is Here! - Comments on my favourite patch notes Galactic Season 6 & Reputation - I talk a bit about the changes to reputation that came with GS6 and that the devs forgot to announce Persistent Pet Pals At Last! - I celebrate a decade-old bug finally getting fixed Shintar's Galactic Season 6 Diary, Week 1 - Insight into what it can be like to aim for 7/7 weekly objectives completed on all servers Drop In: Mek-Sha - I visit some strongholds for seasons and comment on them Date Night With Theron and Arcann - My thoughts on the two date nights I was able to access so far Shintar's Galactic Season 6 Diary, Week 2 - Another week of seasons objectives across all servers Around the SWTOR-sphere: March 2024 - Once again I share some links of interesting SWTOR content I encountered throughout the month

On the subject of Shae Vizla PvP, it seems that at the moment it's basically hard to impossible to get a pop randomly. But things can be organised! The guild I'm in (Heroes of the Republic/Empire) put out a call for lowbie PvP (level 10-41) on Sunday 10:30am Sydney time, and we were able to do both arenas and warzones for about three hours. The plan is to try for the same thing again next week. Obviously not ideal, but I thought I'd throw it out there for anyone interested.

New month, new monthly summary! These are the posts I made in February: Bring Back Kuat Drive Yards! - In which I realise that I really miss KDY and campaign for it to return to the group finder Kessan's Landing - Thoughts on the new map/daily zone that came with 7.4 Bad Romance - About the strange experience of replaying the Quinn romance after a decade 7.4.1 Dev Stream Highlights & Thoughts - What it says in the title! A new stronghold and date nights, oh my! Three Months of APAC Life & Waiting for Transfers - About the situation on the Shae Vizla server three months after its launch Republic Saboteur, Part 3 - Impressions of playing through the latter half of Onslaught and Legacy of the Sith as a Republic saboteur Around the SWTOR-sphere: February 2024 - I once again share some SWTOR content from other creators that I considered interesting throughout the month

Still a problem in February 2024. Also, we found that the proposed "fix" of hitting both at the same time didn't work, so we just gave up on the boss. We would get the indicator that both generators had been critically damaged, but the OPT remained shielded and we couldn't progress to the next phase. This was in 16-person veteran mode.

I've been pretty busy on the blog in January, updating some widgets and evergreen pages for the first time in ages - didn't realise my characters page hadn't been updated in almost seven years for example, oops. There was also the usual number of regular posts though: Is SWTOR Unusually Bottom-Heavy? - I muse on whether the low-level game is more popular/important in SWTOR than in other MMOs Struggling with Credits on Shae Vizla - Life at endgame is expensive nowadays, and you notice it more on a fresh server than on any of the old ones Thoughts on the New Galactic Trade Network - Some pros and cons of the new interface Guild Level 600 - My guild hit max level without me even realising... I feel a little melancholy Meeting the Curator - Thoughts on the Lane Vizla story continuation that came with 7.4 The End of Galactic Season 5 & The Future of Shae Vizla - My thoughts after finishing the GS5 reward track on the new APAC server PvP Season 4, Arenas & PvP on Shae Vizla - My experiences in my busiest PvP season yet Seeing How the Other Side Lives - Three things I didn't realise people liked/cared about until I became part of more casual guilds on other servers Around the SWTOR-sphere: January 2024 - A round-up of some SWTOR content by other creators that I found and enjoyed throughout the month

Just spent two hours in the level 80 warzone queue, 8-10pm Sydney time - not one pop. 🥲 I knew things would go quieter after the end of seasons, but dang.

I think one major reason they launched the server when they did is Galactic Seasons, as the launch date was chosen in such a way that it was still possible (but only just) to complete the GS5 track without using any buyouts. You can disagree with that choice, but I'm sure it encouraged a lot of dedicated players (APAC or no) to give the server a go to try to reach that goal and earn some free CC along the way. I always think I'm a rare weirdo for doing seasons on multiple servers, but on SV, Republic/Imperial Court is currently the third(?) biggest guild and they advertise as exactly that being their focus. I do worry a bit about what will happen in terms of server activity after the season concludes this week.

As a general rule over many years of playing SWTOR, I'd say that "prime time" for getting activity pops is roughly 7pm-10pm server time, with a bit of a "halo" of still decent activity 1-2 hours before and after. Sometimes there are also minor activity spikes in the morning and around lunch time/early afternoon. As a European playing on Shae Vizla, I figured I should be able to have decent luck finding some groups in the morning (9am UK is 8pm in Sydney) and maybe in the late evening (11pm UK is 10am in Sydney). And I did have a great time initially, however activity has been declining noticeably recently. To some degree that was to be expected as the novelty wore off, people split off into different level brackets etc. but I also keep wondering whether my expectations of when the server should be the most active are off? As there's clearly also a significant percentage of non-APAC players and I don't know how that influences things, so I'm wondering what other people's experiences are with getting pops. For myself, it's been like this recently: Ops/MM FPs: haven't tried Vet FPs: always pop very fast, almost instantly GSF: pops reasonably quickly when there's a GSF-related seasons objective, otherwise never Level 80 PvP: can be a bit slow, but usually pops eventually and fills up too. Midbie PvP: has noticeably gotten harder to get pops for and will often result in half-empty matches. Been struggling to get my weeklies done this week. Lowbie PvP: after hours of queueing, I only got a single 3v3 arena this week so far (after previously completing both warzone and arena weeklies in this bracket) What are your experiences? Any suggestions for times of day when I might have better luck with some of these?

I'm actually not sure if this is a bug, but it seems... odd at the very least? On the step to collect the crystals, my husband and I could only find two places to collect them, just south of the central mission marker (which I think is also the location highlighted with a screenshot in Illeva's guide). We rode around the Eastern Ice Shelf far and wide and saw a lot more glowing areas, but not a single one of the others was clickable or had a red arrow. The mission is completable by just waiting for those same two deposits to respawn, but from the looks of all the glow around, I'm thinking there should be a lot more clickable nodes?

Happy New Year! December was another busy month on the blog; here's what you might have missed: GS5 Review: Satele Shan - What I got up to on that server during Galactic Season 5 7.4 First Impressions - New gear, shiny dyes and bugs, oh my! Chains in the Dark Story Review - My in-depth review of the 7.4 story update (with spoilers) A Great Dev Interview - Basically a plug for an interview done by the New Overlords podcast, with some choice dev quotes highlighted The Shae Vizla APAC Server Is a Month Old Today - Impressions of how things are going SWTOR Turns Twelve Today - I look back at a pretty momentous year and how I felt about it Twelve Years of SWTOR Blogging - My annual review of what I talked about on the blog Enjoying Life Day - How MMO holidays can sometimes deliver when real life doesn't Galactic Season 5 in Review - What I thought of this season as a whole Will We Return to Hutta in 7.5? - I look at what looks like a deliberate hint at what's to come on the new loading screen

You wouldn't have seen the anonymous comment option before, because as I mentioned above, I enabled commenting without logging in after seeing what people were saying about having difficulties posting here... bummed to hear people are still getting errors even when trying to use that 😭 but that may just be a general issue with Blogger then. Quite annoying though. Anyway, thanks for the nice words and I do hope you enjoy SV whenever you do check it out. 😉 Though I totally get wanting to stick with your guild on SS.

Gah, I need to be better at remembering to post here at the start of the month! I know we're well into December now, but here's Novembers summary for now: Looking Back at SWTOR's Patch History - A massive post in which I look at SWTOR's content cadence over the years in terms of releasing story updates, group content, new planets and more Mysteries of Mek-Sha - A bit of a short rant about the incongruence of everything on that planet Surveyed! - I write about the survey that Broadsword sent out in November, what sorts of questions it asked and my personal answers to them Hotblooded on Hoth - About the experience of trying to get kill credit for world bosses while on your own New APAC Region Server Launching TODAY! - Let's just say, I was very surprised to see the Shae Vizla server launch as it did! Enjoying the New Server Smell on Shae Vizla - My experiences playing on the new server immediately after launch Liabilities of Taris - How hunting named mobs for seasons can turn into an unexpected bit of fun GS5 Review: Star Forge - TL;DR: I joined a guild and it made everything better A Week of APAC Adventure - More observations about life on a completely fresh server GS5 Review: The Leviathan - I made some new alts and struggled with bonus series bugs GS5 Review: Tulak Hord - I experimented with doing guild conquest by myself in a mini-guild I enabled non-logged-in commenting again for now after the previous exchange by the way... we'll see whether it causes any issues with spam etc.

Still seems to be a thing in 2023!

Giving this a bump because that scene was so strange; it must be a bug. I thought it was very weird that the player character

I was wondering whether it was just me when my fleet was super laggy and everything kept stuttering. Despite the crappy performance, I was able to stay logged in and play for about two hours with no problems; then I thought I'd try to see whether a restart would help. I started the new story and got up to "A Helping Hand", waiting to click on a crate next to two or three other people when suddenly everything started to freeze again. When I finally managed to click, everything came to a halt and by the time it unfroze my companion had killed the spawning mobs by himself. 😅 I had enough time to complain about my issues in guild chat, then the game crashed entirely. However, since then I've been playing just fine for several hours with no further performance issues. It's quite odd.

I asked in general chat and it seems that if you completed all their previous missions (like I did), you currently can't talk to them again to pick up the new missions.

There seems to be a new bug with bonus series nowadays that can render them incompletable if you don't finish the entire chain in one day. The issue is not permanent, as you can try again after the weekly reset (and a manual reset might work as well - I haven't tried that as doing the whole chain from scratch again on the same day was too annoying for me), but it's still tedious so I thought I'd report it here. Places where I've encountered this personally: Nar Shaddaa: on the step to complete "Memory Flush" for Carina. Paused there because I figured I'd finish the chain on the next day. The next day, Carina didn't have a quest marker anymore and wouldn't talk to me if I tried to click on her anyway. I hadn't done her mission yet, but since I know that they're supposed to reset daily nowadays, I checked back the next day anyway - no change. I checked back every single day of the week and was never able to continue. Tatooine: same thing happened on the step to complete "Water Pirates" for Dester. Didn't finish the entire chain in one day, and when I came back the next day, Dester wouldn't talk to me. Eventually had to start the entire chain over from scratch. You can work around it by making sure to always do the whole chain in one day, but well... would be nice to not have to worry about that.

Just giving this a bump since this bug still seems to be around. Couldn't fix it without a complete restart either. I did use the search function for decos shortly before running into the issue, so I can only guess that it's related to that, maybe that the filter applied by the search becomes unremovable or something (pressing "clear" removed the text in the box but didn't change the search results).

That's weird though, because my pop for that match was near-instant and I was the 4th healer to be added. So not sure what the logic was there; I'd much rather have waited a little bit.

I don't remember when exactly it happened, but I seem to remember that at some point the devs implemented a limit on how many tanks and healers could be put into a match. I think for warzones it used to be 2-3? I noticed recently that I'm starting to see matches with more than that again and wanted to check whether this was removed intentionally? Like just now I had a Voidstar where we had four healers on our team. It was not very fun. 😅

That's interesting to know, thank you! As this is the first time I've heard of this... but then I guess a lot of the people who comment more regularly on my blog are already registered with Blogger as well so wouldn't have noticed. 🤔

Whoops, forgot to post my monthly update here last week! Here's what I wrote about in October: Thoughts on the Ahsoka TV show - I definitely liked parts of it, but it just didn't come together into a satisfying whole for me The Devs Speak - In which I profess to see hints of the devs being a bit happier/more relaxed in their interactions since moving to Broadsword Galactic Season 5 Story Review - GS5 is still going on, but the story can be completed once you hit season level 40, so I wanted to write down my thoughts on that Master Mode Flashpoint Tips: Infinite Army Prototype - Just a little guide as I noticed there seemed to be almost nothing out there about this boss A Livestream About 7.4 And Beyond - My thoughts on the 7.4 dev stream and which items I was most excited about Peace Out, Again - My pacifist character hit the level cap again - sadly, it wasn't that exciting the second time around Thoughts on Dxun Master Mode and NiMs in general - People clamour for more NiMs, so I was surprised to find that there's very little documentation of some of the existing MM ops even years after their release

Nice to see Joe reading along and responding to comments here. 👍 Meanwhile, some more observations from my own experience on the PTS: I was somewhat disappointed to see that for all the improvements, I still need to manually go to the buy tab to check an item's current price if my main goal is to sell it. If at all possible, it would be nice if the current listings would appear on the sell tab for price comparison purposes as soon as I put an item into the sell slot. Modern World of Warcraft's auction house works like that and it saves you from having to go back and forth between the two tabs all the time to price check. I agree with the previous comments that it's unintuitive that the price you enter on the sell tab is not what will be the actual sale price. It would be better if the default or at least an option was to set what you want the TOTAL price (including buyers' tax) to be. As it is, it's kind of hard to figure out what you need to enter to achieve a specific sale price. As a seller, I care more about setting a price that will be appealing to buyers than about specifying the EXACT amount of credits I'll receive after tax. Finally, this may just be a PTS thing and the UX not being finalised, but I hope there are some more sound effects planned. I was actually somewhat confused at first when I cancelled a listing and made a purchase because there was no sound feedback or flashing icons or anything else I could see to indicate that the command had actually gone through.

Finally had a chance to have a look at this on the PTS. I'll have more to say but the first thing I noticed is that the suggested pricing seems massively off right now? As an example, I wanted to sell 1138 warzone medpacs. The new GTN suggested I sell them at 159,320 credits PER UNIT. However, when I search for the same item on the "buy" tab, the current cheapest and median price shown is 5300 credits. That's a pretty wacky difference.

Not exactly something I've been waiting for for ages but... one of my guildies keeps teasing me with his Devious Creep, so now I feel I need one too. 😛