At (Token) War with the Czech Empire

After I recently bemoaned the lack of a Total Galactic War between seasons, the devs decided to give us one last week, right in the middle of both Galactic Season 6 and PvP Season 5. Too many things to do at once, argh!

Twin Suns Squadron, my guild on Darth Malgus, isn't big enough to win first place on the Conquest board in regular weeks, but during Total Galactic War we usually give it a shot since there are so many planets on offer and the big guilds get all spread out. This can basically go one of three ways for us:

1. We invade a planet and then a bigger guild lands on top of us. We try to push for a bit but are quickly outclassed, causing us to give up. This rarely happens anymore nowadays, since I've learned to keep a close eye on which guilds are too big for us to beat, and I'll insist on holding off from picking a target until they've chosen a planet to invade, so that we know where not to go.
2. We invade a planet, push hard for a couple of days, but it turns out that none of the other guilds on there can even remotely compete with us, so we slack off for the rest of the week and enjoy a free win.
3. We invade a planet and find ourselves toe to toe with a guild that is big enough to challenge us, but not so big as to automatically leave us in the dust. A fierce battle ensues that lasts all week.

The third one is the most fun outcome in my opinion, at least for an event that comes around only once every six months or so. (I fully admit it's not something I'd want to stress about all the time!) And it's what we got last week as well.

We had set our eyes on Manaan (Invasion Zone) since that's a planet we'd never conquered before, and the biggest guild on the board at the time was "Remnants of the Eternal Empire", a guild that we knew to be reasonably large but that we thought was probably possible for us to beat. However, we had barely chosen to commit to the planet when a third contender appeared: Czech Empire.

Now, Czech Alliance is an absolutely ancient guild that has been around forever and for which I actually have a slightly soft spot. Many years ago we had a Twi'lek smuggler called Zayac in our guild with whom I enjoyed PvPing. He was Czech and eventually decided to leave us to join his countrymen, with no hard feelings on either side. He probably stopped playing long ago, but on some level I still thought of him whenever I saw the guild name. I also had them marked down as one of the guilds we wanted to avoid, however I hadn't had any real awareness of their Imperial alt guild as a name to watch out for.

Guilds that are active on both factions are an interesting beast in the sense that no matter how much they want to be supportive of both sides, there'll usually be one that's more popular than the other, and not all members will have an equal number of characters in both, so even if the guild is really strong on one faction, it might not be able to bring quite the same power to bear on the other, as resources can only be shifted around up to a certain degree. With that in mind, while I would have felt somewhat discouraged if we'd been up against Czech Alliance, I felt that we could probably beat their Imperial counterpart if we put our minds to it, so we got to grinding.

Somehow I've ended up in the role of the officer most involved with Conquest, and it's a weird position for me to be in, as it's still strange to me that everyone else pretty much defers to my judgement on this matter. I enjoy rallying the troops to the cause and seeing everyone get busy to contribute to our guild score, but there's also a certain responsibility that comes with this, in that I feel I really need to give it my all too, or else how could I ask others to do the same?

We were off to a good start and managed to pull ahead of Czech Empire quickly, though beyond a certain point we seemed to be unable to shake them. No matter how hard we tried, we just couldn't maintain a lead larger than ten million points - if we did manage to surge ahead at any point, they'd soon catch us up again within a few hours. It was mildly infuriating, but also helped to keep us going.

We really squeezed the Conquest objectives for the week for everything there was to be had. Star Fortresses were amazing for points a few years ago until the devs nerfed them. Now they're not as good anymore but still well worth your time if you can go in with a full group and do three heroic ones for the weekly mission. We did runs where we just powered through and killed everything in our way, and we did full stealth runs where we managed to skip quite a lot of the trash. There was also a weird in-between mode where one or two stealthers would go ahead and then allow non-stealth group members to skip part of it, though I wasn't entirely convinced by the efficiency of that unless the non-stealthers used the time outside to actually score Conquest points from another source in the meantime, which not everyone did.

I've never been a huge fan of uprisings, but they are incentivised quite heavily with Conquest points during Total Galactic War, and eventually I decided to take the bait. A guildie showed us that it was possible to do Landing Party in particular in something like six to seven minutes since you can skip a lot of trash in it, and it was honestly quite amazing. I'm not usually a fan of trash skipping, and we were musing on whether this needed to be nerfed in some way to be more on par with the other uprisings, but we did a lot of runs of it all the same.

At one point we even resorted to "rampaging" a.k.a. running around different planets as a full ops group, killing random mobs for the "[planet]: defeat enemies" objectives. This is something we hadn't done in many years, but one evening when I was "spying" on the enemy by checking on them via /who, I noted that all of them were in Black Hole together and I questioned whether they were doing dailies in groups. Another guildie who has alts in other guilds opined that they were probably rampaging, since "that's what all the big guilds do for Conquest". So we decided to imitate them... to admittedly mixed results, because it turns out a bunch of independently-minded, scatterbrained and questionably "helpful" individuals are not great at running in tight circles to kill mobs as a group (people were constantly running off in different directions to go "look what's over there" or to "pull more"). There are probably ways to handle this more efficiently, but I'm not sure we got much wiser in that regard. Still, it did the job of earning us some points.

We had a thread on Discord to keep everyone updated about the newest developments on the scoreboard, and early on Monday morning, another officer posted an update that claimed that Czech Empire had suddenly gained eight million points on us overnight. When the next update came hours later, the gap was back to ten million once again, and much confusion ensued about how they had managed to "lose" so many points (had they kicked someone who scored a lot of points?), until it was finally revealed that the first screenshot had simply been someone's idea of an April Fools' joke. Argh!

So that ten-million gap remained, no matter what we did. You'd think that having a ten million point lead should be plenty, but we knew better than that. Several years ago now, back when you could still score points with endless crafting, we were up against another guild whom we appeared to be beating until the very last day of Conquest, when they suddenly seemed to get an army of crafters online in the morning and managed to overtake us just before reset. Now, that particular crafting "hack" is no longer a concern, but instead we have the Personal Conquest Requisitions from the login rewards, and in a way those are even worse, because while you only have a finite number of them, they can be hoarded over months and years, just to add millions of points to your guild score within a matter of seconds.

I didn't want to be paranoid, but I had an odd feeling about the whole situation. I've mentioned in the past that there's a degree of "psychological warfare" to Conquest, and the way Czech Empire remained active at a steady level throughout the week was a bit unsettling, as it didn't match the profile of a guild making either a big push to take the lead or getting close to giving up. I mean, unless you have a spy literally within the guild itself, you can't know for sure what's going on on the inside, but sometimes... you can just tell, you know? I recently had someone claiming to be the GM of ChissMyHutt comment on one of my old posts in which I described my guild beating them in a tough battle, and their comment basically can be summed up as "lol, we weren't even trying at the time". And I mean... that was one and a half years ago now, so I don't know. But whenever we checked on Czech Empire via /who, they were very visibly busy working on activities with high Conquest point rewards, with no random levellers in sight, so there was no doubt about their intent - it was just odd that being ten million points behind pretty consistently apparently hadn't demotivated them at all. The last thing I posted on Discord on Monday night before going to bed was: "Here's hoping they don't have a token sneak attack up their sleeve in the morning or anything like that."

The Discord ping came at 5:41am the next morning: "ALERT" in all caps. They had indeed launched a surprise attack with Personal Conquest Commendations early in the morning, popping about 200 of them in quick succession and catapulting themselves from being ten million points behind to almost ten million points ahead. And that on what was the first day of being back to work after a long weekend for many of us! I had to get out of the house for a day in the office myself, so I just logged in quickly, cleared my cargo hold of my own Personal Conquest Requisitions and popped them all, before wishing the rest of the guild godspeed with the remaining few hours before reset, since I wouldn't be able to be there myself. Several other guildies did the same, which pushed us back into first place, but who could say whether there wasn't more to come?

I only know what happened afterwards from snippets posted on Discord that I was able to see from my phone. Basically both guilds scrambled to get some more points from playing and the occasional token, with Twin Suns Squadron in the lead, but we were on alert now for one last push immediately before the reset, and several people were at the ready with more Conquest Requisitions, waiting for Czech Empire to make their move.

About fifteen minutes before reset their score started to surge again, something to which Twins responded with more token clicking of their own, which led to both guilds leaping up another thirty million points each within that time frame alone, burning hundreds of commendations in one last, desperate bid for victory. However, my guildies maintained the upper hand, and we ultimately came out ahead... with so many points that we had the biggest score of all guilds during that Conquest event, even outdoing the big Conquest guilds (not that they had to try particularly hard, just getting their wins on other planets the "normal" way, but it was still funny to see).

I figure the Czechs must have been pretty annoyed/disappointed to have burned hundreds of their tokens just to come second place after all, but they can't really cry wolf as we simply beat them at their own game. In fact, I raise my glass to them for providing us with one of the most exciting Total Galactic War races in many years and wish them better luck next time (just not against us please, hah).

One thing that was interesting to me was that even though we were happy to have won, several guildies expressed a certain distaste with the way we had won after the fact. We had worked hard all week to raise our score to more than a hundred million, and then that crazy race to pop as many Conquest Requisitions as possible had nearly doubled our score in a matter of hours; it didn't seem right. There was some armchair game design discussion about how they could be "improved", such as by giving them a twelve hour cooldown to avoid this kind of last-minute craziness.

I honestly thought some of those ideas were pretty good and I wouldn't mind if such a change was implemented, but at the same time I kind of wonder whether it would really be worth the devs' time to fix this, as it was such an incredibly fringe situation. Yes, the battle of the last-minute token clicking was kind of wacky and not the best gameplay, but it also resulted in literal years of Conquest Requisitions being burned away within minutes, so it's not like this is something that anyone in either guild will be able to do again any time soon. 

It was quite an event either way, and I definitely enjoyed the sense of camaraderie throughout the week as everyone was working on gaining points and hanging out on voice chat during all hours of the day. I'm actually not huge on being social that way too much of the time, but on special occasions like these I do enjoy it, plus it served as a reminder of just how well we can all work together when we really put our minds to it.