Strange Conquest Drama

Last week was Total Galactic War in SWTOR - I've often talked about this Conquest event in the past and expressed my love for it. Most weeks, Conquest may be dominated by the same few guilds entirely dedicated to it, but a couple of times a year at least, small to medium-sized guilds get to have a shot at conquering a planet as well and I like that.

I think the SWTOR team is also well aware of the extra engagement this event generates, as they've taken to strategically launching it at times when there's a bit of a lull in content - without it, this past week likely would have been pretty quiet in game, with PvP season 3 slowly winding down and Galactic Season 5 not starting until tomorrow.

Things in my guild started off in the usual way: planning which planet to invade, scoping out the competition, rallying our members to the cause and so on and so forth. Picking a planet was actually surprisingly easy for once, as all the guilds we wanted to avoid committed relatively early, which made our options quite clear. We opted to invade Ruhnuk, as we had never conquered it before and none of the guilds already on the scoreboard were ones we knew to be competitive. The guild in the lead before we invaded was an Imperial one called "The Tribe", named after the guys from The Mandalorian. We overtook them within a few hours and then worked on maintaining and expanding our lead.

Now, two days later I was doing some PvP on a low-level character when I received a whisper from someone called "Cassian Andor" (with some special characters), who wanted to speak to the GM or an officer. I immediately had a bit of an uneasy feeling as the guy had drawn attention to himself in an earlier warzone by berating people in chat, which at the time made me think that he was unfairly defiling the good name of the character he'd decided to roleplay as.

Anyway, I engaged with him anyway, just to see what it was about, and it turned out that he was a Republic alt of someone from The Tribe and boy, was he mad. With ALL CAPS and insults flying left and right, he told me that supposedly ALL the guild masters on the server had decided who was going to conquer which planet this week and Ruhnuk was supposed to be theirs. Ignoring the insults, I initially decided to treat the whole thing as some kind of misunderstanding and calmly told him that we simply hadn't been involved in anything like that.

He briefly pivoted towards a weird RP angle - that it should have been common sense that Ruhnuk was owed to a Mandalorian guild, and that Twin Suns Squadron had no special connection to that planet, but ultimately it seemed to come down to him simply not believing me when I said that we weren't involved in whatever scheme he had been a part of. According to him, there had been an agreement and we had violated it!

He proceeded to make some vague threats about how we had "created enemies" in his 500-member guild now and that they were going to "infiltrate (y)our guild" and mess with us going forward. I was in a Voidstar match while all of this was scrolling across my chat window, and when it became clear that the conversation was going nowhere except more CAPS and insults, I eventually blocked the guy.

Now, in hindsight this just seems weird/funny, but I'm honestly pretty thin-skinned and at the time I actually felt somewhat shaken by having this rando come up to me and repeatedly call me and Mr Commando names over some made-up offence. So I shared screenshots of the conversation with the other officers and also warned the rest of the guild to be on the lookout in case this guy or other members of The Tribe decided to come harass them instead.

The other officers' minds were equally boggled by both the vitriol and the sheer ridiculousness of the attack, and the members who chimed in on the conversation - bless their hearts - only felt spurred on to work harder on actually securing the win. However, a couple of them pointed out that they were indeed aware of the existence of a Discord where some guild leaders were making agreements about which planets to invade during Conquest.

To be honest, that didn't really surprise me and I don't have an issue with it either - it's all part of playing the game. However, I do take issue with those people then deciding that their secret backroom deals are now the law and going around harassing people whose actions don't fit into their plans - plans which aren't even known to them! Is this going to be the next big thing on Darth Malgus? People pretending to be the Conquest mafia?

I mean, I've long known that Conquest can be rife with drama and people doing some pretty deranged things, but I guess the worst of it has always passed me by because my guild is not a dedicated Conquest guild - we just push Conquest a couple of times a year when the opportunity arises. I've been taking part in Conquest since it was introduced nine years ago and had some pretty intense competitions with other guilds over the years, but they always stuck to fighting us by playing the game and trying to beat us fair and square. I'd just never encountered anything like this before.

It's certainly ironic that a guild seemingly based on roleplaying as Mandalorians of all people got mad about actually being challenged to a fight because they simply wanted to have the win handed to them. Mind you, I'm not blaming the guild as a whole - who knows how many of them even know what their GM gets up to. (To be clear, the guy I talked to didn't explicitly identify himself as the GM, but based on his passion and his legacy name being "Tribe" it seems like a reasonable guess.) I guess it's just another strange tale of Conquest to add to my records...