Friendly Takeover

I've previously mentioned that my guild has an Imperial alt guild, but we've never advertised this much because it isn't really a full-fledged sister guild or anything like that. We're firmly rooted on Republic side for the most part, and the Imperial guild has only really served as alt storage for characters created on the opposite faction to see all the different class stories.

Initially, it was under the same leadership as our main guild too, which is to say it was led by our old guild leader and then Mr Commando once he took over. However, Mr Commando soon became absolutely terrible at remembering to log into his Imperial alts, so that after thirty days of inactivity on that faction the mantle of Imperial guild leadership would automatically get handed over to the next officer/player(?) to log in, which was usually me. I would then point this out to him, and he would log in just so that I could hand leadership back to him... and then immediately forget about the whole thing again, just for the whole process to see a rinse and repeat a month later.

After a few times of going through this whole shebang, I eventually reached a point where I decided that I was tired of it. If Mr Commando couldn't be bothered to lead the Imperial guild, I'd just do it myself! It's not as if it actually mattered who held the rank, considering that we weren't really doing anything with it. So the next time I inherited guild leadership, I tweaked some of the ranks, renaming the GM rank to "Empress" and giving Mr Commando a special rank that I initially called "Empress' Pet" or something like that, however as he wasn't very amused by the latter I quickly got rid of that again. In the end, there were some jokes about me trying to seize power/staging a hostile takeover, but as I said it didn't really make a difference to anything so we soon moved on.

An Empress arises.

When the Conquest changes about two years ago suddenly made it possible to get something out of Conquest without being competitive, I decided to trial going for a small yield target on Imp side. That went really well, and even better, it didn't remain a one-time thing. I got buy-in from a guildie that was always amassing a lot of points by crafting that he would help to "top off" our Imperial score towards the end of the week if needed, so going for the small yield every week actually became a regular thing. I don't think we hit it every time, but it did feel like it encouraged a bit more activity. If nothing else the steadily increasing Conquest score showed people that there was some activity on Imp side, even if the number of active characters was low and they were mostly being played asynchronously.

Another officer and I also started to organise small events on Imp side a bit more frequently, and I began investing into slowly but surely expanding our Imperial guild ship. As Conquest was made easier over time, we even found ourselves able to shoot for medium yield with increasing frequency. And with the most recent Conquest craziness, I decided that we might as well invade the large yield planet and we did indeed hit our new target after only four days. We also unlocked the last room on the Imperial guild ship that same week.

Chuffed with our performance and in a slightly jokey mood, I decided to set the guild message of the day to: "The Empress is pleased with your hard work on Conquest and smiles upon you benevolently." It barely took five minutes for someone to notice and pipe up about it on Discord... and then things escalated from there, as people apparently hadn't really noticed my chosen GM rank until then and started jokingly addressing me as Empress in guild chat (and sometimes even on voice).

It still makes me break into giggles every time, especially when it comes from particularly deadpan guildies whom I wouldn't usually expect to take part in such silliness. On a personal level it's also a happy reminder of how far the Imperial alt guild has come under my "leadership" though, and all joking aside, I am pretty pleased with that.