Living the Degen Conquest Life

It's patch day today and there are lots of interesting things going on, but I'll get to all of those in good time. First though, I wanted to talk about why I haven't posted in over a week, and the reason for that is that I was stuck in a Conquest-shaped rabbit hole because it was Total Galactic War.

I know this is where a lot of my regular readers probably click away, but I can't help myself: 99% of the time, SWTOR may be a character-driven multiplayer RPG (and I do love it for that), but that 1% of the time in which the game is a vehicle for fierce guild battles instead still fascinates me as well. Hardcore Conquest players are the type that even the most elitist raiders and PvPers see as a whole different level of degenerate, and two to three times a year, I'm part of the club.

This Total Galactic War started innocently enough. I did my usual thing of checking where the big guilds went first, and once all those planets had been ruled out, taking into consideration which destinations guildies were still interested in, the choice was clear: we were going to Oricon.

I didn't think it was going to be much of a challenge to win first place there as I didn't recognise any of the names on the leaderboard, though I'd later find out that the guild in the lead, called Ace of Saints (which is a pretty cool name, not gonna lie), was actually a well-known ops progression guild on Imperial side. 

For the first few days, enthusiasm for Conquest in my guild seemed to be at an all-time low, and often it felt like me and the one other major Conquest enthusiast were the only ones grinding out any points. As such, it wasn't entirely surprising that we failed to actually overtake this (to me) complete no-name guild even after several days, though I still found it frustrating, because even with just a few of us putting any effort in, we were at least keeping up with them pretty well, never falling more than a few million points behind.

I also developed a bit of a grudge against at least some of the Aces during that time, as I kept coming up against them in PvP and they were being annoying (something that can be seen as a compliment in that context, I guess?)

With two days left to go on the event, I finally made a passionate plea on Discord for someone else to generate some Conquest points, as it seemed to me like even a couple of people taking up the cause might be enough to close the gap and secure victory.

Somewhat to my own surprise, people heeded my call in respectable numbers and we quickly started to catch up, though we then got to see that Ace of Saints were serious about winning too, seemingly redoubling their efforts whenever we came close to overtaking them. At one point they suddenly surged ahead by something like four million points within thirty minutes, a number they couldn't possibly have generated by "natural" means with the number of people they had online at the time.

This did leave an impression on some of my guildies: "Look, we're not going to beat them! Look how many points they got in such a short time; we can't beat that!" Being a veteran of many Total Galactic Wars, I did my best to counter the psychological warfare of course: "That's what they want you to think! Look, they obviously popped some tokens to get that far ahead that quickly - we've got them scared! We absolutely can beat them, we just mustn't let their tactics intimidate us."

And once again, people actually listened, and if anything actually redoubled their efforts (because I think as far as competitive Conquest goes, a little bit of adversary actually helps stir their spirits and pride). I have to admit my heart melted a little when I saw a long-time guildie get the achievements for doing the Iokath dailies for the first time - all to earn us points!

We also picked up rampaging across the galaxy again, an activity that is nominally quite boring (you literally just run around as a big group and kill everything in your way) but which always tickles me a little just for how different it is from everything else in the game. As a guildie commented: "I wonder what a new player would think if they saw us racing past in this big group, scouring the landscape everywhere we go?" Personally I suspect that new player would wonder what the heck is going on, but they'd probably also think that whatever we're doing, it looked kind of cool.

As I've mentioned in previous stories like this, unless you've got a spy or something, you can never know with 100% certainty what's going on in your opponents' minds, but it did seem pretty clear that they were very much set on staying ahead of us at all times and at all costs, as any time we made some headway towards catching up, they'd get more people online to do group activities together or resort to popping personal conquest requisitions to give their score a boost.

So naturally, an idea started to form in our heads - after all, earlier this year there was this guild that was consistently trailing us all throughout TGW, just to then attempt to dislodge us from first place via usage of personal conquest requisitions minutes before the end of the event. What if we reversed the roles this time, happily continuing to farm points but without necessarily aiming to overtake our opposition? Our token stockpiles hadn't really recovered from the big click-fest back in April yet, so we still needed the gap to not be too big as we only had a limited supply to work with, but a gap of just a few million could definitely be overcome.

I really would have loved to be a fly on the wall in the Aces' Discord conversations over those last couple of days. Were they confident until the end, certain that they had it all figured out and would beat us eventually? Or were they fretting and unsettled by our unwillingness to just concede? One of them whispered one of my guildies on Tuesday morning to say that our efforts were pointless because they were going to win, which got a good chuckle out of those of us who were online at the time.

Now, when our planetary victory was last decided by frantic token-clicking back in April, I couldn't be online at the time so had to wait for others to report what had happened, but this time I was working from home on the day and boy, was it nerve-racking to be online as the Conquest timer counted down! I actually started to watch the way point gains worked really closely, noting that it took a minute from you earning any points for them to be added to the guild total, and on a separate timer, the guild totals on the scoreboard also update once a minute, so depending on your timing, it can take close to two minutes for points you've contributed to actually show up on the board.

I decided to pop my own twelve tokens with five minutes left on the clock, and then it was just frantic staring at the board as everybody's scores jumped once a minute, with no time left to react to any new developments. Suddenly, our score was at 79 million! Then theirs at 80 million! Then ours at 87 million! When the padlocks came down to indicate that the event had ended, we had once again won first place. (And I learned that despite Conquest nominally being locked, points still trickle in for another couple of minutes... I wonder what would happen if those last few points were to actually change the ranking of guilds...)

After spending all day grinding Conquest points for several days in a row (Mr Commando had expressed concern that I was behaving on a level of obsessiveness that was usually reserved for him), I almost wasn't sure what to do with myself for a few minutes after the event ended. More than anything though, I was extremely satisfied, as we'd once again been challenged to a fight and came out ahead.

 

I also can't help but wonder whether we simply had more tokens than the Aces when push came to shove at the end, or whether they could have beaten us if they'd only been more strategic about things and willing to let us get ahead for a few days instead of burning tokens worth millions of points early on to stay ahead of us at all times while also continuously spurring us on even more.

When I checked the galaxy-wide leaderboards to see how things had gone on other planets, it was striking that there hadn't been an actual battle over first place on any other planet - everywhere else the guild in first place had simply won without any real competition. There was one exception: Section X, where the Stale Cookie Warriors had only barely triumphed over the Republic branch of Yerba Mate (I only just looked up what that means... I always figured it was a phrase in a foreign language; I didn't realise it was a plant!) I wonder if they had a cool story to tell about their battle as well? Too bad we'll probably never know.

This is why I like to document our little stories, because while they may not be important in the grand scheme of things, they are the kind of emergent gameplay MMOs are famous for (and yes, it even exists in SWTOR for all its theme-parky nature) and tend to become the subject of tales told about the guild's history for years to come.