Game Update 7.3.1 coming soon!

[TrixxieTriss]

2 hours ago, Jdast said:

You wrote in this thread that in the U.S. summer officially ends on the 12th of September. You transposed the 1 and the 2. The official end of summer in the U.S. is the 21st of September.

My bad. I was trying to remember (without rereading) what you wrote & I was sure you & some others said the 12th September. Honest mistake when it’s the same numbers & our season in the southern hemisphere changes the end of August. 

Edited August 22, 2023 by TrixxieTriss

[Spikanor]

1 hour ago, Sarova said:

I know, but for some of us that storyline is ancient history.  It would be nice to see them in something new.

all is it ancient history he is still playing a part in a story line.

and for the something new part i think you need to ask your self first if there is good new story line comming in the first place.

[Blakinik]

I dislike the changes on the surface.  Maybe I will like it when implemented.

My problem is the more you do this the less "play my way".  At least we have come to the conclusion "play my way" was never there.  But let's go into the reasons I dislike these changes:

• Rail ship is fine.  Heroic Rail ship sucks unless you are nerfing the difficulty curve.
• Companion Kills - well I guess DPS and Tank will get their time to shine I suppose.  So would this count in a team or do I need to have my personal companion in Tank / DPS mode to get credit?
• I dislike the Flashpoint changes.  Let me pick my flashpoints unless I get story mode choices.
• Don't care about Operations.  Like doesn't impact me because I gave up on Operations nearly a decade ago (basically Oricon was the last Ops I actively tried to do).
• Can we add more crafting objectives?  Crafting needs more love.

Think that is it for now.

Blakinik

[DIVAvonFarstar]

8 hours ago, TrixxieTriss said:

My bad. I was trying to remember (without rereading) what you wrote & I was sure you & some others said the 12th September. Honest mistake when it’s the same numbers & our season in the southern hemisphere changes the end of August. 

The two calendars (meteorological and astronomical) exist in both the northern and southern hemispheres.
--> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Season
The preference for which of the two is colloquially referred to obviously varies from country to country.

[TrixxieTriss]

30 minutes ago, DIVAvonFarstar said:

The two calendars (meteorological and astronomical) exist in both the northern and southern hemispheres.
--> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Season
The preference for which of the two is colloquially referred to obviously varies from country to country.

We only follow the meteorological calendar in Australia & NZ 

[TziganeNZ]

1 hour ago, TrixxieTriss said:

We only follow the meteorological calendar in Australia & NZ 

Yup - 1 September is 1st day of spring for me and Trix.

Can't wait - it's been a ghastly winter!

[DIVAvonFarstar]

September 1st for me in Europe is the day I would personally use for the beginning of autumn since summer is over. But if I look at the printed calendar hanging on the wall the beginning of autumn this year is entered on September 23, 2023, official calendars are based on astrology.

[KyraMalakai]

Well, I never had heard about the meteorological calendar (always learning something new around here).

In my country, also in europe, we only use the astronomical calendar, as far as I know, probably they only use it for the weather.

[OlBuzzard]

Growing up .. (and still in college) ...  to ME .. when school stared summer was over and DONE!  (back to the grind)

😉

There's a message in there somewhere!

[OlBuzzard]

1 hour ago, DIVAvonFarstar said:

September 1st for me in Europe is the day I would personally use for the beginning of autumn since summer is over. But if I look at the printed calendar hanging on the wall the beginning of autumn this year is entered on September 23, 2023, official calendars are based on astrology.

All jokes aside ...  yeah .. September 23 is pretty solid!

[TrixxieTriss]

With NZ & Australia being colonised by Brits, wonder if the UK is the same as us?

[Gamer_Auto]

On 8/11/2023 at 4:01 PM, JackieKo said:

But wait, there's more! Here's an overview of what will be coming in Game Update 7.3.1 and the general timing of when it will go live. Please give the article a full read through. We will have more details to share next week and we will be adding to this specific thread. So for now, I will be locking this space to keep dev posts in one spot and front and center. Once we publish additional details, the thread will be unlocked. 

In the meantime, enjoy this cute photo of 3V-1L.  

Hm, yes, very cute droid pic.

On 8/17/2023 at 10:50 AM, EricMusco said:

As you may have seen in our "Game Update 7.3.1 is Coming Soon" Article, there are a few changes coming to Galactic Seasons starting this next season. With GS5, we are going to try something a little different, there will not be a seasonal Companion. We are doing this for a variety of reasons that we hope will improve the Galactic Season experience (along with creating some separate opportunities as well, more on that later).

For starters, you can still expect a great character driven story within each season, it just won’t need to operate around the limitation of a single companion. That story will unlock based on your Galactic Season Progress.

We obviously have a lot of companions in SWTOR, a lot. So when we make the decision to give you another one we really want to be sure that it is meaningful and more fleshed out where possible and we think that Galactic Seasons may not be the place for that. But we’ll see, let us know what you think.

In that same vein though, we do have some ideas of places where we could achieve those goals with a companion, but more on that another day… *makes a quick comlink to Lane*

Over to Joe who is going to update you on how we are going to adjust the reward to track to account for the lack of a Companion.

-eric
 

Personally, I'm not too scuffed about not having another companion. We have far too many, and we can't even utilize more than one on the field and 6 performing crew skill tasks. I'm conastantly saying that we need to be able to use Rank 50 companions as substitutes for players when playing FP/OP/UP/InstBoss as a solo player, and there are ways to make sure that's fair and balanced (such as lock the companions to one combat stance, limit how many of a specific stance you can bring, and limit this feature to Story Mode).

On 8/17/2023 at 10:51 AM, JoeStramaglia said:

FIRST! 

Hello folks! But wait, there’s more!

1. We’re adding new rewards to take up the slots that would have been companion related
2. Season story will now be driven by Galactic Season Progress

We’ll continue to make changes here and evolve the format over time based on your feedback and data!

New Rewards:

Removing Companion from the season leaves a pretty large hole in the reward structure. To make up for this we’re adding some new reward types, giving more of the seasonal reputation items, and adding a new item from the Cartel Market (which will bind on legacy).

More explicitly, here is a list of new items that would have not been on the track prior to this change:

• More Seasonal Reputation items
• FIVE New Personnel Decorations based off of popular Armors
• A new unique consumable item that grants Jawa Intel to yourself as well as other players
• An exclusive new Pet
• A White and White Dye Module

We will continue to make adjustments here as we grow the seasonal reward structure based on your feedback and the data.

Season Story:

Although we won’t have a companion, there will still be character driven stories unique to each season. Progress in the story will be based off of special transmission items that are gained from the Seasonal Reward Track and mission completion. Players can progress on the track regardless of mission progress, you don't even need to do the missions if you don't want to. The unlocks work similar to the alert items we had with the companions except there are more of them, when you get to that unlock you get an item that can be consumed if you have completed the requisite missions before it.

The new season is a bit more lighthearted but also explores some intricacies in the dark side of the force. We hope you will enjoy it!

With all of that, I look forward to reading your feedback on all of these changes. There will be more coming in the future for Galactic Seasons 6 and onward!

May the Force Serve You
Joe
 

On Rewards:

• What does "more seasonal reputation items" even mean?
• Oh joy. More limited decorations that I have to be careful about when and how I use because decorations still have archaic and arbitrary quantity limitations.
• Oh joy, a consumable that I'm probably never gonna use.
• The pet sounds like fun, even though I rarely use them.
• Oh joy, another limited dye module that probably won't work on what I normally use, and can't get back if I wanna try it on something else.

On story: I just hope this is better than what we got previously.

• Altuur has no story for anyone who never played GS1 in full.
• Fen's story is only really good if you're playing as Empire and have the context of the previous Shadow Syndicate.
• Fey's story was the best of the bunch, but felt like it could have had more to do with her obvious connections to Scorpio and Iokath.
• Amity is Space Monk Tarzan with very little in the way of story and screams of laziness/inability to make something compelling with the concept.

On 8/17/2023 at 10:53 AM, BryantWood said:

FIRST! (dangit Joe!)

Hey Community!

I’m here to follow up on some additional changes you’ll see in Galactic Season 5!

Here’s your tl;dr for the min/maxers:

• New objectives for companions, space missions, and operations
• Changes to Flashpoint and Uprising objectives
• More objectives for Subscribers

New Objectives:
Looking at the content offerings of Galactic Seasons, we have added a few new objectives with the goals of creating more variety in play, and making objectives easier to understand.

• Objectives involving companions have been expanded to require companions in specific roles
  • Defeat enemies with a companion set to the DPS role
  • Defeat enemies with a companion set to the Heal role
  • Defeat enemies with a companion set to the Tank role
• Space Mission objectives have been split into regular and Heroic objectives
  • Complete Space Missions
  • Complete [HEROIC] Space Missions
• New objectives will be added for players doing Operations content
  • Complete specified Operations on Story difficulty
  • Complete specified Operations on Veteran or Master difficulty

Reworking Group Content Objectives:

With Season 5, we’ll be making changes to Flashpoint and Uprising objectives. Previously these objectives used a point system which allowed players to complete any Flashpoint and gain bonus completion for specific flashpoints. Throughout Galactic Seasons we’ve seen that this point system has a large potential to create bugs and makes it harder to understand how to progress the objective. We will be simplifying these objectives to remove the do any portion and the bonus boss portion.

Here’s an example of an objective from Season 4 and how that objective will appear in Season 5.
Season 4: Complete Flashpoints (1 point). Earn bonus progress for completing Depths of Manaan, Assault on Tython, Korriban Incursion, or Secrets of the Enclave (requires content) (4 points). Earn additional bonus progress for defeating their Bonus Bosses (3 points).
Season 5: Complete Flashpoints from the following list: Depths of Manaan, Assault on Tython, Korriban Incursion, or Secrets of the Enclave (requires content).

This same pattern of change will apply to Uprisings, requiring the player to complete specific Uprisings rather than any Uprising.

More Objectives for Subscribers:

We’ve heard your feedback on adding more group content to Galactic Seasons, and specifically more Operations content. To achieve this, we will be adding an additional subscriber or preferred only objective each week, increasing the number of objectives available to players from 10 to 11. Players will still only be able to complete 7 objectives per week but will have more options available. This new objective will create more opportunities for players to tackle Uprisings, Chapters, and Operations!

Those are your objective changes coming to Galactic Season 5. We’re excited for the new season to release and can’t wait for you all to experience it. As always keep the constructive feedback coming and we’ll continue to make Galactic Seasons the best SWTOR experience for everyone.

Bryant out! 
May the Force be With You
 

I have no complaints here, but I will say that I'd care about the space mission objectives more if space missions were relevant and if Heroic space missions weren't so horribly unbalanced.

On 8/17/2023 at 12:18 PM, JoeStramaglia said:

They will not be in collections, however if you've completed the mission on any character you will be able to re-acquire the mission items on other characters from the Galactic Seasons vendor Jaliet Nall.

CRINGE. EVERYTHING MUST BE UNLOCKABLE IN COLLECTIONS, ESPECIALLY IF YOU COULD POTENTIALLY PAY REAL MONEY FOR IT.
If you pay for these with GS Tokens: why should I pay my highly rare and highly limited GS Tokens on something that I can't even unlock in Collections?
If you pay for these with Credits: I fully expect to be paying in the millions for this, so I'm really hoping it's worth those millions of Credits.

[Dyhanna]

On 8/17/2023 at 1:43 PM, Saeten said:

This is great! But, many of us only need pieces to complete the sets we are striving for.  Please add pieces in addition to crates! Please please please!

Definitely want this. Have many "pieces" and would love to complete my sets. Would also like to acquire pieces from the KOTFE crate sets to complete those. And finally, legacy unlocks for the command crate sets once collected would also be nice.

[JadisUK]

On 8/23/2023 at 10:37 PM, TrixxieTriss said:

With NZ & Australia being colonised by Brits, wonder if the UK is the same as us?

Speaking as a UK poster, I don't think so as far as I'm aware.

[Sarova]

On 8/22/2023 at 10:23 PM, Spikanor said:

...i think you need to ask your self first if there is good new story line comming in the first place.

Been asking this since the end of KotET 😆

[Iceslasher]

I have lightside characters, rather all 60 + of my characters are, I tried to do darkside, and have never managed to do it, not sure why but it goes against the grain for me. The only way I was able to get the achievement of darkside was to lvl a warrior to darkside 5 was through diplomacy. Most of the story was just neutral. Got Jaessa Williams and deleted the character. So how will season 5 treat lightsiders. Does this mean we won't be able to do anything in this season ?? My characters have no commitment to the darkside other doing a darkside thing once or twice because the lightside option was kind of moronic. Like for my Bh or Chiss Agent a thing with no honour (BH) or else was just litterally dumb (agent). But all of them ended up light 5 in the end. So again how does that work??

[juliushorst]

Quote

3V-1L (Astromech)

It's not really saying much. Will he be on the ship serving as an astromech? Or a decoration, or a pet, or a companion?

Edited September 1, 2023 by juliushorst

[Nee-Elder]

2 hours ago, juliushorst said:

It's not really saying much. Will he be on the ship serving as an astromech? Or a decoration, or a pet, or a companion?

the info you seek exists already--> https://www.swtor.com/info/news/article/20230901-0

[VegaMist]

Scanned the notes and photos quickly - many things look cool. Nice, looking forward to it.

Started reading more carefully, and came across this little gem:

"If a player has completed the mission on any character, they will be able to re-acquire the mission items on other characters from the Galactic Seasons vendor, Jaliet Nall."

Wait. What?

Scrolled down and saw:

"Dark Tidings" Unlock - 1 Galactic Seasons Token
"Small Victories" Unlock - 1 Galactic Seasons Token
"Chains or Freedom" Unlock - 1 Galactic Seasons Token

Are you seriously planning to CHARGE us Galactic Season Tokens to re-play missions on alts (I personally have 12, which I believe is on a low side of what most people have)? Aren't the point of completing missions normally is to GAIN stuff (currency, items, reputation, etc.) rather than waste it? And here we are supposed to PAY a rare currency for the privilege of re-playing missions? Whoever came up with this bright idea... what were you smoking? Perhaps, someone more sane should re-examine this in the short time left.

[dgnuff]

On 8/17/2023 at 1:42 PM, Macarrin said:

I'd love a maniacal ortolan with rockets and grenades. Call him "Short Fuse" or something 

Never mind that.  During the quest to get Blizz, you meet four of his companions.  I want R'bik D'nec.  What's better than a psychotic Jawa with a flamethrower?

[TrixxieTriss]

2 hours ago, VegaMist said:

Are you seriously planning to CHARGE us Galactic Season Tokens to re-play missions on alts (I personally have 12, which I believe is on a low side of what most people have)? Aren't the point of completing missions normally is to GAIN stuff (currency, items, reputation, etc.) rather than waste it? And here we are supposed to PAY a rare currency for the privilege of re-playing missions? Whoever came up with this bright idea... what were you smoking?

Agreed. This is outrageous. Especially for people who have multiple Alts in excess of 10+. I personally have over 60 Alts. Which means I’ll never be able to do the missions on most of them 🤦‍♀️ 

2 hours ago, VegaMist said:

"Dark Tidings" Unlock - 1 Galactic Seasons Token
"Small Victories" Unlock - 1 Galactic Seasons Token
"Chains or Freedom" Unlock - 1 Galactic Seasons Token

@JoeStramaglia @EricMusco @JackieKo You guys need to re-examine this idea as it’s poorly thought out. I was literally just talking to my wife about re-upping our subscriptions again for GS5 until I read this. Now I’m not so sure we should bother.

Maybe instead of Galactic Seasons Tokens, you make it credits 🤷🏻‍♀️. This would be a good credit sink don’t you think?

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on when you will make this change or at the least, outline why you think GST’s is the right solution if you want people to replay content & why you want them to be physically restricted from doing so. 

Edited September 2, 2023 by TrixxieTriss

[FrontLineFodder]

Is it time to add a new cycle to Jaleit Nall's items for sale ?

How about making Altuur Zok Adon available to buy with GS tokens for those players that missed it ?

pair it with some decorations like the heroic mission terminal or crew skills vendor

[Shayddow]

2 issues.

1. Having to buy unlock for Galactic Season tokens: I have 105 characters (spread around the 5 servers). No way will I be able to get this with tokens.

2. Heroic Space Missions. You have to have top notch gear to even attempt these. The tokens that you have to earn to get these are not easily acquirable. Seeing that you need three hundred fifty for each piece of gear. And not all missions, even the non-heroic ones are easy. The one with all the asteroids you have to dodge, I still manage to blow myself up 99% of the time - in 1 specific location.

[juliushorst]

1 hour ago, Shayddow said:

2. Heroic Space Missions. You have to have top notch gear to even attempt these. The tokens that you have to earn to get these are not easily acquirable. Seeing that you need three hundred fifty for each piece of gear. And not all missions, even the non-heroic ones are easy. The one with all the asteroids you have to dodge, I still manage to blow myself up 99% of the time - in 1 specific location.

The easiest way to obtain tokens is to play some GSF so if you can tolerate some PVP (there is much less toxic people among GSF players compared to general PVP population, if you're worried about insults and general mean behavior) do a few weeklies and you'll have your ship fully equipped.

With this said, we have 11 objectives to pick from. In weeks with veteran chapters, veteran operations and heroic space mission - for me there are only 10 objectives because there is no way I'm doing any of those.

My problems with this season:

1. No companion - I like companions (I also like armors and titles; don't care much for decorations and pets).

2. Having to buy quests for rare currency.

[MishaCantu]

As for paying tokens for replay on alts, it'd better be a darn compelling story for me to bother. I doubt it'll open up the reward track again, especially the 2K cartel coins for subscribers, so what's the point?

Now, if they offered replayable content with my original LI companion, I might consider, heck, I'd pay cartel coins for this.