An Evening of Pugs

I log in on my main first, sending the minions out on some crew skill tasks, and pick up the freshly reset Galactic Starfighter weekly and daily. My first queue pop puts me into a deathmatch already in progress, and the enemy team is already 27 points ahead. Oy vey. I hop into my gunship and shoot what I can, but I only manage to earn two medals before it's all over.

My next match is almost the complete opposite. As the teams start to fill up for a game of domination, I can tell right away that we're probably going to win, and easily at that. There are no less than seven people on my team who have five ships in their line-up - and while a greater selection of ships doesn't exactly make you more powerful, it's generally a sign of a player who's really into GSF and knows how to play. The enemy team only has a couple of strong players like that, but several "two-shippers", who are often inexperienced free-to-players. Unsurprisingly, we end up holding all three satellites for most of the match; only at the very end do they manage to wrest one away from us by throwing their whole team at it and earn a couple of pity points that way.

With the daily done, I log onto my Sage for a bit of PvP, as I remembered that I got most of a random warzone weekly done on her last week but forgot to actually complete it. My first match is a same-faction Civil War, and our opponents are strangely... absent for most of it. Are they short a player or two? I never see more than three people attacking a node at once. They seem to have a couple of stealthers who keep trying to cap when they think that nobody's looking, but we interrupt them every time and as soon as that happens they run away and re-stealth. An easy win, but kind of boring due to our opponents' apparent disinterest in actually engaging in combat.

Next I get put into a Tatooine arena match. I'm healing three dps vs. a team of four dps. Should be doable if we can outlive them, but I'm a bit concerned by the fact that my team consists entirely of consulars. Light armour is not that great for surviving burst. At one point it's down to two of our dps vs. two of theirs, but both of my team mates die without killing a single enemy. The second round is much the same. I'm a bit frustrated because I feel like I should have been able to do more, but as I'm lying dead on the floor there isn't a single cooldown on my bars that I haven't used. I give my MVP vote to the Shadow on my team who did the most damage and try not to think too much about it.

I queue up for one more match to complete my daily and weekly and get into a Voidstar. Though not my favourite warzone, this game is fun. We start out defending and manage to hold them at the very first door for the entire duration of the round, even though it's not easy and we have to do a lot of running back and forth. On the attacking round, one of our stealthers manages to plant almost instantly, making for a nice, quick win.

Since I have a bit more time to kill, I check general chat on the fleet to see what operations pugs are running that evening. There are a couple, but nothing that I feel I need on any of my alts. ("Need" usually meaning that I have some sort of non-repeatable quest for it.) I log over to my Imperial agent to check what things are like on the other side tonight, and end up joining what's supposed to be a full run of Dread Fortress.

We're off to a bit of a strange start when Nefra turns away from the tanks the moment they pull her and runs over to one-shot me. Err, healing aggro from my heal over time? I laugh it off and everything after that goes very smoothly. Even at the end of the Corruptor Zero fight, everyone is still alive. Brontes should be no problem with a group like that, right? Wrong. As soon as the lightning fingers spawn, they wipe out half the group, including - much to my shame - me. I could've sworn there was nobody behind me, except of course there was that one guy, and of course he of all people had to spawn a finger. Bah! One healer quits without a word, but everyone else is good to go again. We should be fine with three healers, as long as we don't noob it up like that again. Yet again, the lightning fingers spawn and people die - slightly fewer this time, but one of them is the main tank, and since the off-tank doesn't have the presence of mind to pick up Brontes when she reappears, she blasts lightning all over the group and wipes us out anyway. Suddenly everyone "has to go", including the guy who initially put the group together, and within a minute it's all fallen apart.

I'm always disappointed when that happens, even more so as it means that I don't get to complete the story quest that was my main reason for joining the run. However, I did get the Dread Fortess weekly quest done and won three drops of varying usefulness, so I guess I can't complain.