Conquerors of Corellia

Last week Total Galactic War came around again, and since it had been almost six months since the last one there was much excitement to be had. Not to mention that Bioware added two new planets to conquer in the form of Ossus and Ziost!

I happened to be home at the time of reset and the guild's Discord chat turned into a veritable war room as people discussed what would be the best course of action to take. With the 15% bonus towards the guild total that you now get for invading, there is once again pressure to get going as soon as possible, not to mention that there's also the psychological benefit of "staking your claim". At the same time we didn't want to accidentally go up against one of the big guilds by committing too early, however. While we may have become a bit blasé about all the small and medium planets we managed to conquer in the last six months, the large yield targets are still exciting because during a normal three/four planet week we don't stand a chance against the small handful of dedicated Conquest guilds that usually claim them. But with Total Galactic War there is a lot of spread and a chance for smaller guilds to punch above their weight, which we obviously wanted to make use of.

After some spying on Imperial side (since Balmorra and Taris are split by faction you can't see which guilds from the other side have committed to them) we settled on Corellia, which was our first choice in terms of how many people in the guild needed it for the achievement. We had a bit of a scare when we were soon joined by a relatively new guild called Exiles of Yavin which had been in the top ten for the large yield the previous week and a quick /who revealed that they had more than fifty people online... however from what we quickly gathered from their guild recruitment messages in general chat and their only slowly increasing score, they appear to be a social/casual guild who mostly just happen to score high due to their large number of active members. Let's just say that the Conquest-crazy Twins were more than a match for them and our lead over them was never really in question after the first night. I guess they had expected to go up against a guild of complete nobodies and didn't quite know what hit them.

While writing about the last Total Galactic War, I mentioned how the objectives got me to take part in activities that I don't usually bother with, such as the GSI dailies. The same thing happened this time, and I wasn't the only one either, which was really funny to me as guild chat suddenly had people who never do these quests talk shop as if we were all pros at doing them. In particular I remember a conversation that went something like this, about the Tatooine daily Looking for Droids:

A: Wow, they were in the very first sandcrawler I scanned!
B: Same thing happened to me!
C: Me too, how curious.
D: For me it was the very last one; I hate you all.
E: I just keep resetting the quest until I get them from the Anchorhead sandcrawler.
C: You can do that? Holy crap, I had no idea!

Made me laugh a lot.

A rich guildie also contributed some cash prizes for the biggest contributors this time around, and some people got really into it! It was quite fun to watch two players in particular race against each other - they were neck on neck until the last day. The winner had eventually earned an amazing 385k points for the guild. My own 195k spread across twelve characters were nothing in comparison!

Anyway, it was another very successful and fun event, and while the fact that it only occurs irregularly is part of the appeal, I do hope that we won't have to wait another six months for the next one.