GS11 Start & Total Galactic War

Galactic Season 11 started last week, and for the first time since Galactic Season 2, I'm only aiming to complete it on one server. (While I did end up completing the GS2 track on all servers back in 2022, I didn't really get started on that until a bit later into the season; originally I was just aiming to complete it on Darth Malgus.)

It's honestly been a big relief. No longer am I thinking about how to slot seasonal progress of some sort into every single day of the week. I basically check at the start of the week whether there are any easy weekly objectives that I want to knock out right away, on Saturday I do the large group objectives with my guild, and then I just mop up any leftovers after that. In-between, I don't have to think about seasons at all! Amazing!

I haven't abandoned the other servers entirely, though. As a subscriber, you get a guaranteed level each week for simply logging in on four different days, which is easy enough to do, and I should be able to hit the first milestone that grants free Cartel Coins on all servers just by doing that. I do still love me some free CC.

Aside from that, I'm also still allowing myself to play alts on the other servers as and when I feel like it, which can result in some more progress on the seasons track as a mere side effect. In the first week for example, I attended a social event on Star Forge that earned me a good amount of Conquest points, and I ended up completing the weekly objective to earn 200k points on that server.

It'll be interesting to me to see how that continues as the season goes on, and if I maybe end up hitting any other milestones incidentally - I'll just have to remind myself not to get carried away. This (second) week for example, there was an objective to do quests as a warrior or knight, and again I thought that's something I might feel like doing on multiple servers just for the fun of it, but since I also had other things going on, it did end up feeling like it took up a bit more time than originally planned in the end.

One of said "other things" that were going on this past week was Total Galactic War. For once it wasn't an all-consuming experience for me and my guild, as nobody challenged Twin Suns Squadron for dominion of Nar Shaddaa this time around. The event doesn't end until Tuesday, so I don't want to jinx it, but we're more than 40 million points ahead of the guild in second place and they've shown no sign of wanting to be competitive, so it feels like we're pretty safe this time around. As much as I've enjoyed some of the crazy competitions of the past couple of years, sometimes a straightforward and easy win is nice too.

It's been an interesting experience to have a TGW in the second week of a new season. In recent years, Broadsword has mostly slotted that particular event somewhere in the gap between seasons, which to me made sense as a way to keep people busy and boost engagement with the game during what's otherwise a bit of downtime for many.

You'd think that the start of a season would be interesting enough on its own merits, making it a bit of a "waste" to have this special event on top of it, but I do wonder whether there's a method to the madness. I've definitely noticed in my own guild that there's always a bit of an activity slump between seasons now, and things don't immediately pick back up again the moment the next season starts either - there tends to be a two to three week delay until people have properly "woken back up" again.

This meant that this time, TGW fell into a period where people were already turning their attention back to the game naturally, and it made everyone's reactions to the event so different, it was quite surprising to me. With Total Galactic War, too, there are patterns I've observed over the years, namely that my guildies tend to start off slow and then ramp up their efforts over the weekend. This time though, everyone was crazy excited about the event from day one, with me logging in on Tuesday to find more than twenty people online and grinding points already. I was able to choose an invasion target pretty easily and quickly for a change, and by Wednesday morning we were sitting on about ten million points, more than twice our usual day one performance. I do think this also helped with dissuading other guilds from challenging us this time around.

So maybe the devs were going for a more synergistic approach this time - giving people more than one reason to get back into the game after taking a bit of a break. Or maybe they were hoping to boost PvP participation while the actual PvP season winds down. Or maybe nobody gave a lot of thought to the Conquest calendar and TGW just ended up in a different place than usual by coincidence. It's been interesting to observe the differences either way.