Total Galactic War!

This past week Total Galactic War swept across the galaxy. In case you don't know what that means, it meant that instead of three to five planets being up for conquest, no less than twelve planets were up for grabs - fourteen actually, if you count Balmorra and Taris twice for having separate versions for Republic and Empire. This is important because during a normal week only thirty to fifty guilds can win anything by placing on the leaderboard. During Total Galactic War on the other hand, a whole 140 slots were available on the scoreboard, drastically increasing people's chances of winning at least a consolation prize.

Before the event went live I found myself wondering whether there were even that many guilds on the Red Eclipse yet who actually owned a guild ship. In the end the answer seemed to be no, or at least there were still ten empty slots left on the scoreboard when the event ended. It is however possible that some guilds simply chose poorly by invading a busy planet early on and then got pushed off the leaderboard there, even though they could have been in the top ten on another planet.

A couple of weeks before this event, one of my guildies had proposed the ambitious plan that we should try to go for gold during Total Galactic War. Since we already had an idea what sort of activities would reward points, he suggested that we start "saving up" things like completed operations quests to hand them in as soon as the event started. Even so it seemed overly ambitious to me at the time - after all we'd only even made it into the top ten twice before (once on Nar Shaddaa and once on Belsavis). Due to our guild name (Twin Suns Squadron) it was suggested that we should go for Tatooine.

When people started to come online Tuesday evening however, it was obvious that Tatooine was already highly contested. A contact in the guild that was in the lead at the time told us that they were determined to craft their way to victory, even if it meant clearing out their guild bank. We chose to look for easier prey and decided to invade Taris instead, which hadn't seen much activity yet at that point.

Shortly afterwards one of the server's top ten conquest guilds joined us there, and I wasn't the only one whose heart sank at the news. According to SWTOR Conquest they had previously scored three to eight million points a week, while our own all time high was barely above two million. Nonetheless we were determined to put up a fight.

Much to our delight, we not only managed to remain in first place, but we even succeeded at increasing our lead over the course of the week, finally ending with an impressive total and a new guild high score of 4,169,656 points. For a while we were even ahead of the top-scoring guild on Tatooine, which seemed highly ironic, though that guild did overtake us again in the end.

On the whole, I was kind of surprised that several of the mega-guilds seemed to have lower scores than during previous weeks. I can only guess that the high personal conquest target of 50k points put a lot of people off getting involved at all. Many are probably also busy levelling alts, what with the 12x XP bonus for people who pre-ordered the expansion.

For Twin Suns Squadron it was an exciting event in any case - I was thrilled enough when we managed to make it into the top ten before, but I didn't think that we'd be able to ever win a conquest event with a guild that only has about twenty active players logging on each week. Clearly all bets are off when Total Galactic War is at hand.