What I learned from the Fourth Galactic Seasons

[Zarahemla]

After the third Galactic Seasons (Battle Pass) I was burnt out, and needed a break, from doing the battle pass.  The Fourth Galactic Seasons started so soon, that I wasn't able to catch up on story.  But I figured it would be interesting to do the Fourth Galactic Seasons to see if Bioware's efforts to get inflation under control would effect how many credits you earned from doing the battle pass.  So, one more time, into the breach. If you are interested in reading what I earned / learned from doing the First Galactic Seasons or the Second Galactic Seasons or the Third Galactic Seasons:  those are the links.

I learned that if you don't collect all the rewards, from the battle pass, you now get them mailed to you after the season ends.  This works for both PvP seasons and regular Galactic Seasons.

I learned that you earn less Galactic Seasons points for doing the objectives if you are Free-to-Play (F2P) than if you are a subscriber.  Objectives that would give subscriber 8 points would only give F2P 6 points, and objectives that would give 10 points to a subscriber would only give F2P 8 points.

The objective Reflections of the Cold Moon, where you meditate (pray) at a shrine and then get a debuff that is in-game time, not real life (RL) time was not fun.  If it had been RL time, you could get the debuff (had to do this four times to complete the objective) then log out, play an alt, then come back and pray again.  But because it was in-game time, it caused players to stand around the shrine, watching Netflix or doing some other activity while they waited for the debuff to fall off.  This is not fun.  At one point, there were eight people standing around the shrine, waiting for a debuff to fall off, while one person prayed.  I tried to make the waiting effective by talking to my fellow waiters, and see if there were any other battle pass objectives we could do together.  Across the four servers, only one person responded to me, and no additional objectives were done together.  Not sure which Bioware employee though standing around for a debuff to fall off would be good content, but they may want to reevaluate what fun in a video game is.
 

I learned that group members still don't get credit for doing the seeker droid objective together, that it is only the person who finds the object that gets credit.  Was really hoping this would have been fixed by now.

I also learned that it is possible to get the same thing in multiple packs, on the same server.  On one server, I got the Hunter's Planning table in all three gold packs.  Disappointing, as the hunter's planning table was only selling for around 1 million credits each.  This also seems to show that the gold decoration pack had a very small pool.

As before, I got many duplicate decorations across the servers which seems to mean the pool of rewards in galactic seasons packs are different than the normal packs, which again is dissapointing.  I also saw some duplicates from the last galactic season, so they are not changing up the pool between seasons.

Here is that list of how many times I got duplicate decorations, see if you recognize ones you also got (this is how many times I got the decoration, not how many copies I got in a single pull):  
x3 Topiary Tree (Hedge)
x2 Banner: House Rist
x2 Tuk'ata Research Table
x4 Emergency Celing Light (Red)
x2 Reliquary Vase
X2 Small Statue of Ancient Horror
x2 Small Holo Table
x2 Office Devider
x4 Arrangement: Cafe Table
x3 Computer Station (Emergency)
x2 Selkath Chair
x4 Engraved Reliquary
x5 Banner: House Thul
x4 Oriconian Standing Torch
x2 Gigantic Crystal (Cyan)
x2 Selkath Kolto Tank
x2 Rakata Security Monitor
x3 Republic Voss Embassy Sign
x2 Planter: Large Mushroom
x2 Networked Lamp (Orange)
x3 Segmented Lights (Purple)
x6 Hunter's Planning Table
x2 Voss-ka Street Lamp

I also saw that the achievement to get max reputation is still only for getting that reputation while the battle pass is going.  Was hoping this would change too.  Something I think Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR) does well is they don't have the fear of missing out (FOMO) as much.  If you were not playing at launch, and didn't buy the collector's edition, you can still buy an unlock to access the collector's edition vendor, although you will have to pay to do so.  If you were not playing during a specific time in the game's life, you can still get Z0-0M, although you may have to spend cartel coins to get her.  If you were not playing during a specific time in the game's life, you can still get Shea Vizla, although you might have to participate in a battle pass, to turn in your galactic seasons coins to get her.  I feel bad when there are achievements that are time locked, as some players will never get those, because they were taking a break, or hadn't even heard the game existed at that point in time.

I also learned that I have more galactic season tokens than I know what to do with, had some mailed to me, after the seasons ended, as I was already capped at 15.  I recommend that Bioware add a vendor for things that are no longer obtainable in the game, like the Colicoid manned blaster turret, so that players who might have missed out on those things, can buy them.  Also, if they have decorations for sale, players can more easily spend tokens knowing that it helps their prestige, so even players who have played non-stop from the beginning can still progress by spending their galactic season tokens.

Now that I have the title "Conqueror of the Galaxy," and I see that Bioware is not giving us a six months on, and six months off rotation to recuperate from the last battle pass, I don't think I will be doing the battle pass on every server anymore.  I am way behind on the storyline.  Also seeing that it takes around 24 hours to finish a battle pass on a server, and you only make $20 worth of cartel coins, I just don't see it being worth farming the battle pass on every server, if you only care about the cartel coins.

As far as the break down for the different servers, here it is:

The first server I finished the battle pass on, was my main server of Star Forge.  Because I played multiple characters on that server, to finish the battle pass, I wasn't able to time how long it took, or how many credits I earned.

The second server I finished the battle pass on was Darth Malgus.  It took 1 days, 2 hours, and 56 minutes of /played time to complete the Galactic Seasons Four.  I earned $651,509,054 credits from doing the battle pass on that server.  Because Bioware changed it, so now you have to pay a fee, when you give credits to another player, that guild stopped giving credits as a reward for earning conquest.  I had a gear score of 333 by the end of the battle pass.  A valor rank of 34, and an unknown amount of achievement points (as I had transferred a character to my main server and back again to get the achievement points on my main server, and my heroic moment abilities / datacron stats on this server).

The third server I finished the battle pass on was Tulak Hord.  It took me 1 day, 6 hours and 0 minutes of /played time to finish the battle pass on that server.  I earned $1,714,246,473 credits from doing the battle pass on Tulak Hord.  I had a gear score of 336 by the end.  A valor rank of 33, and 5,850 achievement points.  

The fourth server that I finished the battle pass on was Satele Shan.  It took 1 day, 4 hours, and 55 minutes of /played time to finish the battle pass on that server.  I earned $878,449,799 credits from doing the battle pass on Satele Shan.  I had a gear score of 335, valor rank 38, and an unknown amount of achievement points.

The fifth and final server that I finished the Fourth Galactic Seasons on, was The Leviathan server.  It took me 1 day, 5 hours, and 16 minutes of /played time to finish on that server.  I earned $1,853,511,676 credits from doing the battle pass.  I had a gear score of 334, and a valor rank of 26, with an unknown amount of achievement points earned.

You can see that the amount of credits earned, has drastically gone down, which seems to indicate that inflation is going down.  However, as i said before.  I do not plan to do the battle pass on every server unless Bioware (or Broadsword) decide to drastically increase the amount of cartel coins you earn from Galactic Seasons and reduce the amount of time it takes to complete the seasons.  IMO if the company in charge would value the player's time, the would give cartel coins in relation to at least working a minimum wage job.  Working over 24 hours for $20 of cartel coins, just isn't worth it to me.  In addition, no job offer from Bioware has been forthcoming from the result of my forum posts.  So I leave the stats torch for someone else to pick up and carry.  Good luck.

The order of servers that I finished the battle passes, reflects how active the server is, in terms of finding groups for the group-oriented objectives, like flashpoints and world bosses.  

[ThanderSnB]

Yeah, it does lead to burn out if you're doing all the servers. I've only done 2 servers at a time and it was tedious enough. I am interested in trying it on all 5 servers just once though, just a goal I think would be fun one time. I had a system the last season where I could get everything done on each server in a day, so if I was doing 5 servers, it would take 5 days to complete. Then I'd have 2 days to do other things in the game. I am interested what the rewards will be in Season 5. They could decide not to have any Cartel Coins. Then I won't have much reason to complete it outside my main servers, but maybe I will just one time for the fun of it.

[LD_Little_Dragon]

There's not enough variety in the rewards, the seasons tokens items haven't changed so those just keep piling up with nothing to spend them on, and those so-called 'cartel packs' keep dropping the same really limited items. 

Unless they change up the vendor items and rewards then I don't see any reason for me to keep doing seasons since I have more cartel coins then I'm likely to ever spend (so many expensive cartel items clip, or have horrible attachements, that I'll never buy them).

Seasons are great for newer players though.

[KianSri]

They really should expand the item pool for the cartel packs, I feel like I ended up with multiple repeats on just a handful of the same items (few of which I even wanted). Very disappointing.

[DeannaVoyager]

11 hours ago, Zarahemla said:

I also learned that I have more galactic season tokens than I know what to do with, had some mailed to me, after the seasons ended, as I was already capped at 15.  I recommend that Bioware add a vendor for things that are no longer obtainable in the game, like the Colicoid manned blaster turret, so that players who might have missed out on those things, can buy them.  Also, if they have decorations for sale, players can more easily spend tokens knowing that it helps their prestige, so even players who have played non-stop from the beginning can still progress by spending their galactic season tokens.

 

Not having anything to buy from the vendor is the biggest downside of doing the seasons IMO. They are labelled as reward, but it feels more like a punishment when you have to buy something you don't want just to get below the cap, to be able to accept another "reward". And it's not even just that there is nothing to buy anymore, the rotation on the vendor items is waste of my time. I might want to buy multiple copies of some decos, but if the vendor doesn't sell it when I go there, I'm not going back and I'm certainly not going to google when they are available and mark it on my calendar. It's a videogame. Just put all the items on the vendor at the same time.

 

Add items that are hard or impossible to get by playing the game. I would love to see Heavy Avalanche tank mount on the vendor, considering it used to drop a lot in the past until the drop rate was nerfed to close to zero. It has an achievement attached to it, and it's almost impossible to get it now.  Add Yavin storyline armor set on the vendor and make it a legacy bound set. Just to name a few. 

 

11 hours ago, Zarahemla said:

I also learned that it is possible to get the same thing in multiple packs, on the same server.  On one server, I got the Hunter's Planning table in all three gold packs.  Disappointing, as the hunter's planning table was only selling for around 1 million credits each.  This also seems to show that the gold decoration pack had a very small pool.

As before, I got many duplicate decorations across the servers which seems to mean the pool of rewards in galactic seasons packs are different than the normal packs, which again is dissapointing.  I also saw some duplicates from the last galactic season, so they are not changing up the pool between seasons.

 I found this very disappointing too. Most of the weapon and mount boxes included trash that no-one wants, they shouldn't be called rewards. Getting same decos over and over again is not that bad considering we can use multiple, but there are still limits on how many banners of some Alderaan group you can or want to use...

Change them back to cartel coins or add ALL CM items into the boxes.