82.4% Towards Fleet Admiral - Maybe I DO Like GSF?

One of the things I've been doing to gain my two to three Renown levels a day while working on my goal to reach Renown rank 999 before Legacy of the Sith comes out, has been playing Galactic Starfighter. I quite enjoyed binging on it during Total Galactic War, and I kept thinking that it was kind of odd how I kept doing random matches on all kinds of alts with minimal ship upgrades unlocked while my main had maxed them all out ages ago and yet I pretty much never did anything with that.

(After making an attempt to make more use of them I will say though, despite of what's considered common wisdom on that subject, I found that the ship upgrades don't make that much of a difference. There's something to be said for having all your preferred ships and components unlocked, but despite of many upgrades nominally increasing your survivability and damage output by quite a chunk, I can't say that I really feel more powerful in my fully upgraded ships than in ones that aren't. It's still possible to just get blapped out of the sky sometimes before I've even had time to realise what's happening, and that process remains as opaque to me as ever.)

On a whim, I decided to have a look at the GSF statistics in my achievement panel and I was... actually kind of surprised! I always say how I'm not a huge fan of GSF and that I don't feel that I'm very good at it, but some of those achievements felt like they were trying to make a liar out of me. I knew that I'd unlocked all the crew members and mastered all the ships at some point (except one on Imperial side, hmm... need to go look for that and finish it), but I was surprised to see that according to the Matches Played category of the GSF achievements, I'm also on 824 out of 1000 matches played for the legacy title of "Fleet Admiral" (which is what inspired the title of this post).

I mean, 824 matches played seems like a pretty big number for something that only makes up a tiny portion of the game and that I've always professed to not like all that much. At the date of me drafting this post, 2,875 days have passed since Galactic Starfighter went into early access, so that averages out to a match every three to four days (even if in reality I've gone months without playing and then just binged on it during certain periods).

Even more astounding, I've apparently won 422 out of those 824 matches, which is 51.3%! I was certain that I must have lost more matches than I've won. (On a side note though, with a win-loss ratio this close to 50%, maybe Bioware's match-making isn't quite as dire as it feels sometimes...)

Similarly amazing, I've got 95% completion on the "Battle" category, which includes such random feats of strength as finishing a match with a 6:1 kill-death ratio - something I apparently achieved once in Feburary 2014 - who knew? The only one I'm missing for completion is the one to destroy 12 enemy turrets in a single match, which... yeah, I don't think that would ever happen organically, but I could actually see myself achieving it if I specifically went for it over the actual domination objectives one day.

You don't get to give out MVPs in GSF the way you do in ground PvP, but apparently the game awards some automatically in the background based on certain contributions, and while I haven't completed any of the categories in this section, I'm still kind of impressed that I managed to get the MVP for most damage dealt during the match 75 times so far, even if it was over the course of eight years...

I'm also on 84% completion for the medals category, which led to me googling what they all mean because sadly the achievement panel itself doesn't explain what causes you to e.g get an "Annihilator" medal. Apparently I've completed all the achievements in 13 of the 18 sub-categories, with the only incomplete ones being Demolisher (destroy 8 turrets, surprised I've organically done that twice apparently), Mechanic (repair 2k total damage, 66 out of 100!), Ravage (get 8 kills, 77/100), Savior (repair 4k total damage, 11/100) and Siege (destroy 4 turrets, 14/100).

Seeing all these statistics progress slowly but surely, I could even see myself getting close to reaching 100% completion of GSF achievements one day! Though I don't think I'll ever actually reach 100%, because there's a line in the objectives category that requires you to gather five power-ups during 100 death match games and I've not done that a single time. I'd actually have to do some research on how to even do that and then put some work into it while potentially playing rather sub-optimally in all those matches, and that's definitely more than I can be bothered with.

But still, overall... I'm kind of surprised by the picture these numbers paint. Maybe I enjoy GSF more than I give it credit for while also being at least a little bit better at it than I thought.