If it seemed like I fell off the face of the earth about a week ago and you were maybe wondering why I wasn't posting about recent events about which I should surely have something to say, such as last week's dev livestream or the new WoW expansion, it's because it was Total Galactic War in SWTOR again, and it ended up being another very intense one. I don't mean for these things to swallow up my entire free time, but sometimes it just happens!
As the last TGW had occurred only about a month ago, I wasn't exactly itching for a particularly tough or involved competition, but unfortunately it doesn't matter how much care I take in selecting an invasion target and avoiding the mega guilds, it seems to be becoming a trend that some relatively unknown guild likes to muscle in on our territory, and it's always one that is both very determined to win while also not really knowing what they signed themselves up for. (Twin Suns Squadron has won every single planet it invaded during Total Galactic War since at least 2022. We're not easy prey for newcomers.)
I had chosen for us to invade Taris since a couple of our members still needed the achievement for that one, and it's often one of the easier options as it's split by faction, meaning we'd only have to go up against other Republic guilds, with any Imperial competitors completely out of the picture. On top of that, the guild that was in the lead when we invaded didn't have a very high score, nor did they look particularly threatening.
Trouble on the horizon (or scoreboard)
However, we'd barely claimed our spot when another contender appeared, a guild called "Sequels are trash". Now, I'm not going to lie: that guild name immediately made me want to beat them more than our average opponents. While I'm no fan of the sequel trilogy myself, I'm very wary of people who make disliking a certain piece of media their primary flag to fly online. (That said, it was amusing to me how whenever I wanted to check what they were up to during the event, I had to type "/who trash" and their guild name gave me an excuse to refer to them as "Trashies" when discussing the competition with my guildies.)
Initially, I thought that beating them should be easy enough. They were not a known entity in the Conquest scene, and the only achievement they had to their name was conquering Balmorra in the previous TGW, but with a relatively low score and against no real competition. So my guildies and I didn't really fret too much about it for the first couple of days. We made a point of taking part in some dedicated activities to earn Conquest points like we always do, but without too much pressure.
When my ops team didn't have a good group for master mode Dread Fortress on Wednesday for example, we decided to do MM Explosive Conflict instead "for the Conquest points". While we did complete it, we made quite a mess of it and it took us all evening to clear, which meant that it didn't really make for a very effective method of Conquest point acquisition. However, we weren't really worried yet at this point, as our competition didn't seem super organised yet either, even if they were initially ahead of us in terms of points. Like us, they visibly had some people working on Conquest but no large-scale efforts were in progress whenever we checked.
However, as we ramped up our efforts in order to catch up to and overtake them, so did they in order to stay in first place, seemingly always just a little bit ahead of us, no matter how hard we tried. When we did more uprisings for points, they also started doing more uprisings, and they always had just a few more people online - not so many that they were unbeatable, but just enough to always stay that little bit ahead.
By Saturday morning I decided to post a call to action on Discord, asking more guildies to take part in our Conquest shenanigans, as clearly more numbers were needed. That same evening, we decided to go rampaging across the galaxy as a group to mass-generate points. (I explained this concept before.) We thought that this was going to be a sure-fire way to overtake the Trashies, but lo and behold, two hours after we started, they suddenly had twenty people online rampaging across the galaxy too. We couldn't help but wonder what was going on in that guild, for them to be able to spontaneously get so many people online to grind points late on a Saturday evening (since the rampage clearly seemed to be a response to our own). Did none of them have anything else going on in their lives? Either way we had at least briefly overtaken them by this point, though somehow they always seemed to be able to pull another million out of thin air at the end of the day.
A strange proposition
Things took a strange turn on Sunday evening. We had just set out to start rampaging again when a member of the guild brought to our attention that someone from the Trashies with whom he had sometimes interacted in PvP and pugs had messaged him about Total Galactic War. Specifically, the person had asked whether we were saving our Personal Conquest Requisitions for the end, as he had heard from someone else that we had "cheated" our way to victory that way in the past. (I bet that was someone from Ace of Saints!) Specifically, he stated that if we were planning to do that again, they might as well give up now and not waste their time.
We were on voice chat when we were told about this and weren't quite sure what to make of it - it sounded almost too good to be true! Sure, we'd enjoyed the competition well enough until then, but we hadn't really intended for it to be quite so tough this time around, so being handed a win a few days in advance certainly seemed appealing, though there were also concerns that it might be some kind of trick or trap.
Either way, we advised our guildie that it was okay to answer honestly and confirm that yes, this was usually our MO during Total Galactic War. He also hinted that we'd made up pretty big discrepancies via the use of PQRs in the past, without giving away any exact numbers or what we had in store this time. For a brief while we were very cheerful at the idea that we'd practically won already.
However, not long afterwards, the Trashies once again formed up to start rampaging again too. I'm still not sure what happened there exactly, considering the guy seemed so close to understanding the situation - whether his offer to surrender had never been genuine and he'd simply been fishing for information, whether there was some kind of miscommunication or what - either way they were once again back to fighting harder than ever. We initially just shrugged it off as an oddity and continued our grinding for points as before.
Another twist and - a spy?
However, things took an even stranger turn less than twenty-four hours later, as the guy from the Trashies whispered our guildie again, this time to tell him that someone from his guild had transferred in Personal Conquest Requisitions worth thirty million points from other servers, and while he didn't exactly approve of winning that way, he could hardly stop him now, could he?
This 180 degree turn from seemingly being ready to give up to "no, you should probably give up" was very surprising, and to be honest, not very believable from our point of view. Only the day before, he'd been very incredulous at just how many points worth of tokens my guild had saved up in previous Total Galactic Wars, questioning whether that was even possible without exploiting, just to suddenly find a guildie of his own who'd had millions worth of tokens in his back pocket all along?
We had first-hand experience with what it meant to use thirty million points worth of PQRs in a single event, and while it's very much possible, it takes a lot of time and considerable effort to accumulate that many of them. In our case, it had been years in the making, after we'd missed out on our chance to conquer Belsavis again and again, and had reached a point where we were basically willing to do whatever it took to win it. The idea that someone in a guild that hadn't really been interested in Conquest before would just suddenly be able to conjure up 200+ PQRs on a whim seemed highly unlikely.
We'd barely had time to discuss this when another twist occurred - another guildie who isn't actually very involved in guild business and doesn't care about Conquest (but had taken note of all the chatter about it this week) piped up to say that he was on a lot of different Discord servers, including the one for Sequels are trash, and that someone there had just posted a screenshot of a character with a whole cargo bay full of Personal Conquest Requisitions, which he then went on to share with us.
One reason this was startling was that someone had been joking off-handedly about how we might have a "spy" in the guild, and now it turned out that we kind of did. Since the guildie in question doesn't care about Conquest either way, I doubt he was intentionally leaking secrets to the Trashies, but he might well have thrown some off-hand comments about our strategy their way, just like he'd now shared their screenshot with us.
The other surprise was that the screenshot seemed to provide proof that the mysterious Trashy with his thirty million points worth of tokens appeared to be real - though doubt remained of course, because no character or guild name were visible in the screenshot, so it really could have been anyone, or it could have been photo-shopped, or... well, you get the idea.
I'm not gonna lie: in the moment, seeing all of that was a bit disheartening. I was willing to believe that we were unlucky enough for the story to be true, and thirty million points is a lot to overcome. I was pretty sure that we didn't have that many PQRs lying around at that moment ourselves. Did that mean we had already lost?
No, giving up over mere words was not the Twin Suns way. I quickly pulled myself together and told the other officers that while I'd acknowledged the risk of losing, we weren't just going to hand victory to the Trashies without them still having to work for it. I did a tally of our biggest token holders and decided that all was not lost yet, though there was a potential chance that things could still go very wrong for us.
The final countdown
On Monday things seemed to be fairly quiet in Sequels are trash, which certainly aligned with the idea that they were confident in their victory now that this one guy had an additional thirty million points in his back pocket. I'd shared my plans with my guildies on voice chat, and they agreed that we weren't just going to lie down and give up, though we considered not bothering with a rampage that evening to give ourselves a bit of a break.
However, not much later the Trashies suddenly surged in activity again and were back to rampaging themselves - which was odd and seemed to contradict the idea that they were sure of their impending victory. We decided to follow their lead at least for a couple of hours so as not to fall too far behind, and for once, we actually had more people online than they did. We were slowly but surely catching up again - until, like clockwork, they always seemed to gain another 200k points from somewhere. This made it very obvious that for all the questioning of how legit it was to be using Personal Conquest Requisitions at the end, they clearly had no qualms about popping them like candy to stay in first place at all times - something that people had already suspected, but which to me hadn't been fully proven until that night.
There was one funny moment when both guilds ended up running into each other in the heroic area on Oricon, and things were extremely manic for a minute or two as people were surging all over the place and both friendly and hostile emotes were flying left and right. Personally I just kept yelling "follow the star" as I was worried about some of my more easily confused guildies running after the other ops group by accident.
We finished the night being somewhat behind yet again, but only by a few million. Just as I was about to log off, I saw someone from Sequels are trash walk up to me on the fleet and recognised the same guy that had been talking to our guildie. He soon whispered me too, to ask about our token stockpile once again, and happily chattered away about how it had been a fun competition but surely there was no point in either of us wasting our resources on a big token battle tomorrow. I gave a few polite but non-committal replies and then logged off. For someone who seemingly wanted us to just fold, he still seemed quite uncertain of his own guild's position.
The next morning a small number of us ground out a few more points the normal way and then gathered round just before Conquest's end. The worst case scenario I could think of was that the enemy's big PQR holder just decided to pop them all to ensure the Trashies' victory, but on the plus side, since 200+ tokens which are subject to the global cooldown actually take more than ten minutes to click, we'd be able to see it coming.
What I considered the more likely scenario, since they did have a "natural" lead of several million points and based on the previous night's whispers showing a reluctance to go all out and "waste" resources, was that they'd be at the ready to use some Personal Conquest Requisitions if we showed any sign of fighting but would probably prefer not to use too many, if any at all. This seemed confirmed when they used a few tokens to increase their lead back up to about five million and then stopped.
Meanwhile I'd instructed the guildies online with me to "play dead" and wait. Based on some of our previous token clicking wars, I had a pretty good idea of how long personal point gains took to be added first to the guild total and then to the global scoreboard, so I waited until the Conquest timer had nearly run out and then told everyone to go (as well as clicking my own Personal Conquest Requisitions). About a minute later, our guild score jumped, and with less than a minute to go on Total Galactic War, our new, massively increased total appeared on the board and we leap-frogged the Trashies' score by about ten million points. Seconds later, Twin Suns Squadron had officially conquered Taris, without our opponents having had any real chance to react. We did not get any more messages about what a great competition it had been after that.
Ultimate thoughts
And thus another epic tale of Conquest victory was added to the annals of the Twin Suns. It definitely was a bit of a weird one though and provided some interesting food for thought. I find it interesting for example that everyone is fine with Personal Conquest Requisitions being used at the start or over the course of the event, but if you save them for the end, some people consider it "cheating".
All the conversations with what I can only assume was an officer or even the GM of Sequels are trash definitely added a strange new dimension to things as well. It made me realise that I definitely prefer to not get interpersonally involved with our opponents in Conquest. "Psychological warfare" via the scoreboard is one thing (such as by pushing your score up strategically to demotivate your opponent), but trying to talk them into or out of things one to one is a bit too awkward for my personal taste. I just want to compete based on the rules of the game, and maybe do the virtual equivalent of a polite handshake at the end to pay respect to a good competition.
With all the messages we got... I still don't quite know what to make of them even now. Was it all part of a grand game of deception/trying to get us to give up? The kindest interpretation I can think of is that the guy kind of thought of a stash of Conquest Requisitions as something like a pile of nukes - better used for deterrence than actually deployed - and that it genuinely pained him to think of seeing it all get burned up. But this is just a game; nobody gets hurt in Total Galactic War and the resources are there to be used.
I do think it was ultimately ironic that the Trashies had more information about us than most of our recent opponents, that we explicitly told them what our strategy was going to be - and yet they still fought until the very end just to lose to us doing exactly what we said we were going to do. If you read this, man, I hope your guildies didn't end up being too cranky, and I do still agree that it was a fun contest.
