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.

A Good Time to Come Back to SWTOR

A couple of months ago I got a very surprising DM, from a player who had been in Twin Suns Squadron with me throughout 2012 and 2013. He'd decided to finally get back into the game and wanted to re-join the guild as well. I've got to admit that he and I hadn't been super close back then, so after more than a decade I barely remembered more than that he was English and had always seemed kinda nice, but that was still more than enough reason to welcome him back with open arms.

Our guild has pretty low churn, so it's not unusual for someone to take a prolonged break - sometimes several years long, even - and then come back and be happy to find that they are still in the guild and able to immediately pick things back up where they left off. But someone coming back after thirteen years was definitely a longer absence than anyone had ever returned from, so his level 55 trooper did need a re-invite, which I was happy to provide.

Since then, he's been online most days and is often hanging out in the social channels. I was honestly pretty delighted to see him go through all the expansions he'd missed in real time, based on which achievements were popping up in guild chat each evening. Ooh, he just finished Shadow of Revan! Ooh, he's doing chapters now! Etc.

I'm pretty sure he's fully caught up by now, but the achievements have kept on coming. The other night I congratulated him on unlocking Bessi, and he replied with something along the lines of "I just keep finding new things to do; it's great!"

While someone coming back after this long may be an unusual situation, I've also noticed an uptick in more "regular" returners, people who've just been away for months or a couple of years at most. Steamcharts also recently registered the highest player count for SWTOR since around 2023.

It just feels like a good time for that kind of thing. Knowing that there'll be a new expansion at the end of the year has people excited. If you got bored of waiting for story updates at some point during Legacy of the Sith and checked out, that storyline is now wrapped up and you can come back and play through everything you haven't seen yet in one go.

Additionally, we're also at the end of Galactic Season 10 now, with Season 11 probably starting in August, and both of these have been bringing back companions from previous seasons, giving people another chance to pick them up now if they missed them before. With only a few weeks to go it's too late to organically complete the Season 10 track in its entirety, but the companions are right at the start of the track so it's not too late to play a bit to just unlock those.

As a reminder, these are the followers you can still unlock from now until July 27th:

• Altuur Zok Adon, the companion from the very first Galactic Season that ran from April to September 2021,
• PH4-LNX, who was originally available to earn between October 2022 and March 2023.

Season 11 will then give you a chance to grab these two companions if you missed them before:

• Fen Zeil, who was previously earnable between February and July 2022.
• Amity, who was the main reward from Galactic Season 4 between March and August 2023.

 So if you haven't played in a while and happen to read this... I'm just saying!

New Player Meets Old Player Meets Endgame

I have absolutely no clue about the actual numbers, but my general impression has long been that for an MMO that's approaching its 15th birthday this year, SWTOR still does pretty well as far as attracting new players goes. Despite what some may say, Star Wars is still quite an active franchise, so new people have a reason to find and try out a free Star Wars game all the time.

Getting those new players into endgame is trickier, because the general public has been dismissive of SWTOR's raiding pretty much from launch, and over time the devs have also supported this kind of content less and less. It's not like World of Warcraft, which has a reputation for being a game that's very much worth playing purely for its endgame (even if it has other problems as far as new players are concerned). I'm not sure anyone has started playing SWTOR in the last decade with endgame being a primary driver of their interest. (If you have, or know someone else who has, shout out in the comments!)

As a result, I'm always delighted when a new player ends up joining our guild and it turns out they are interested in operations. That makes them such a precious find, I just want to accommodate them and make them happy, but at the same time without overwhelming them. It doesn't always work.

At some point last year, a new player joined our guild whom I shall call Bob. Bob turned out to be the son-in-law of an older member of the guild who'd also just returned after a bit of a hiatus. Yes, we're training the next generation of MMO players here! Bob originally started levelling with his significant other, but she lost interest after a while, something that easily could have spelled death for Bob's engagement as well. However, he really seemed to enjoy attending our social nights, whether his girlfriend and father-in-law were there or not, and quickly became a valued member.

As far as I could tell at least, Bob wasn't terribly bothered about his performance, and I loved that for him. (Disclaimer: He did later do a few runs with one of our progression teams and I don't know if the subject came up in that context, but that would be outside my purview.) He upgraded his gear over time, sure, but despite being surrounded by a lot of people who care about min-maxing their stats and rotations, it didn't seem to rub off on him. I always hear people complain about how every MMORPG is solved these days and how new players supposedly get crap all the time for not following the meta, so it was nice to see someone being this carefree still.

The one thing I did push him on a bit was levelling an Imperial character, if for no other reason than that we sometimes like to do activities on our Imp side alt guild, and without a max-level character, there were some of them he couldn't join for. At first I simply tried to minimise our activity on Imp side during social nights, but after a while I felt a bit bad that we apparently all couldn't go there just because of him, so I kept egging him on to finally get those last few levels on his Imperial Scoundrel.

The day he finally dinged 80 on his second character felt glorious - and as one of that week's seasons objectives was to do a flashpoint, we made him jump right into that (I don't remember whether the objective specifically required a master mode flashpoint or whether we just decided to do one of the featured flashpoints on master mode). Sure, his dps wasn't great and he was undergeared, but we should be alright to carry him through most master modes, right? We ended up in Battle of Ilum of all places, which is one of the oldest and easiest master modes nowadays.

About halfway through the flashpoint, I noticed that he was seemingly just spamming Lacerating Blast (the Scoundrel's AoE with no cooldown) on every pull. "If you want to do more dps, you'll have to do use some of your other abilities occasionally," I teased, to which he responded "I know, but this one's just so fun". Can't really argue with that, can you?

And everything seemed fine. Perhaps we weren't proceeding as fast as we could, but we weren't having any problems either - until we wiped on the last boss due to nobody interrupting his Force explosion.

Now, I can't blame that one on Bob, because there were after all three other people in the group who could've done it. My excuse was that I was healing and more focused on the group's health bars than on enemy cast bars. The tank was one of our progression raiders on a Juggernaut/Guardian alt with not so great gear - I don't remember all the details, just that he'd been unable to procure a better weapon in the moment and had been joking about how he was using some random green lightsaber ever since. The second dps was another long-time guildie on a Sniper alt. She used to raid with us as a healer a long time ago but (like me) had never been much of a dpser.

Anyway, we laughed about the fact that this ability still did enough damage to kill us at this point in the game, dusted ourselves off and went again. We wiped a second time for the same reason, by which point I decided that healing or no, I needed to watch Darth Serevin's cast bar like a hawk.

On the next attempt, Force explosion finally got interrupted - and then we wiped due to the boss's enrage. Again, us old-timers were stunned. We didn't even know this guy still had an enrage!

Our tank started to feel embarrassed about his green lightsaber and went off to get a better one. It also wasn't until this point that it really sunk in for us just how low the gear rating of Bob's newest alt was. The max item level right now is 343 and I think he sat at around 200. We sent him to the fleet to buy a few higher-level greens from the vendor there, but he ran out of credits before he was able to upgrade his full set. Still, it didn't matter. Newly armoured and more determined than ever we went at it one more time and finally beat Darth Serevin on the fourth attempt.

This was a few months ago now, and I still haven't been able to get that run out of my head, because even though there was definitely a part of me that was kind of annoyed to be wiping in Battle of Ilum repeatedly, another part of me was honestly kind of amazed by the experience because I didn't think it was possible for a new player to still have this kind of organic learning experience in the game in 2026. Once upon a time, this is how we learned how to beat a boss fight ourselves of course, by trying and failing and then trying to improve on the next attempt. But these days, all the content is so much easier, it's almost impossible to fail, right? Never mind that everyone will know what to do.

Well, it turns out you can still fail even with three experienced players, if - despite knowing better - they are careless and silly enough. And for some reason that made me happy.

Gates Crashed

I bet you're expecting me to post about the patch! I will at some point of course, but not today. Today I want to talk about something else that happened this week.

Back in December I wrote about how I finally defeated my nemesis Dread Master Brontes (master mode) during my progression team's last operation of the year. I was sure that after three months of working on that kill, everyone would be dying to spend time anywhere other than Dread Fortress in the new year, but when I polled them over the holidays about what we should be doing next, the surprising result was that pretty much everyone wanted to go back to DF and beat up Brontes some more.

So we did that, and started earning Wings of the Architect for everyone. I'll forever feel slightly conflicted about that mount, because while it's a very cool and unique model, it doesn't fit my trooper main at all. It just used to be very prestigious to have for its rarity, though I guess it's less prestigious now, after my whole team acquired it.

As we got close to everyone having the mount and being able to kill Brontes more reliably (I hesitate to say that we had her "on farm", considering that we still wiped on her a lot as well), we started working on the achievement for the timed run. After shaking off some rust on the earlier bosses (we'd usually been able to use a lockout for our Brontes kill, so we'd skipped the first four bosses for several weeks) and after Mr Commando got very mad at our dps for being unable to remember their Draxus assignments, we got somewhat better at that too.

The timer for Dread Fortress isn't as tight as the one for Dread Palace, but things on Brontes can just go wrong so easily, and even if you have a clean run up to her room, you only have up to a maximum of three or so good attempts at her before the timer expires. Yesterday we'd had our best run at it up to then, with a pretty smooth clear of the first four bosses and enough time for those three full tries on Brontes herself - and they were all pretty decent as well, but alas, it just wasn't meant to be. One was a wipe at 0.8%. We even gave it a few more goes after the timer had expired, but that evening we just couldn't get her down.

When it came to the question of what we should do tonight, whether we should go back to trying to just kill Brontes or re-attempt the timed run on alts, I was initially in favour of the latter. But then I came home late from work, one of our dps players dropped out on short notice, and Mr Commando reminded me that his co-tank for the evening had actually never successfully killed Brontes with us. He soon had me convinced that it was probably better to go directly back to Brontes after all and just try to get a first kill with the less experienced co-tank.

However, the rest of our team had other ideas. They really wanted to try the full run again! So we gave in and started from scratch again. I felt pretty confident that we weren't going to be successful, so I wasn't too worried, but apparently that more relaxed approach was magic. We breezed through the first few bosses and then... killed Brontes on our very first attempt! With the co-tank who'd never killed her with us before! We just had such an insane amount of luck with the orbs, we could hardly believe it (though I also cursed a little for getting the title on my alt instead of my main).

After the extremely rocky experiences I had with raiding in early Legacy of the Sith, I didn't expect to finish the expansion on such a high. Now we just need to do it again so I can get the title on my main and so the members of our team who weren't there tonight can get the achievement too.

Total Galactic War: A Challenge over Taris

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.

Back in My Day: Conquest

"Back in My Day" is an (extremely) irregular series in which I muse about how certain aspects of SWTOR have changed over time. Today I'd like to talk about Conquest, a system that heavily influences the way I play the game. On any character I'll play in a given week, I try to accumulate at least 100k Conquest points to hit my personal target, and on the flip side, I often see hitting my personal target as a cue to switch to playing a different character. This wasn't always the case, however, and I think it's interesting to think about how this system has evolved over time.

The Early Days: A Different Time

Conquest was added to Star Wars: The Old Republic when it was less than three years old, with patch 2.9 in August 2014. It was part of the Galactic Strongholds update that introduced housing to the game, and to this day I wonder a bit just how these two systems ended up being bundled together, as their connection through the guild flagship - which is both a type of housing and required to take part in guild Conquests - is rather tenuous. I can only guess that the original plan for guild warfare was perhaps a bit more involved than what we ultimately ended up getting.

This original iteration of Conquest was quite different from what we have today, with the most important difference being that there were no guild targets, so the "guild component" of Conquest was entirely a matter of PvP. The guild in first place on the scoreboard would be the official conquerors of the planet, and the other nine on the board would get a consolation prize, but for everyone else there was nothing beyond their personal rewards.

Objectives and scoring were also somewhat different. As you can see in the above screenshot, everything about Conquest was contained in a single window. The personal target score varied from one event to the next from what I remember, with some weeks requiring as little as 20k points, while Total Galactic War required a whopping 50k.

Earning those points was also quite a bit harder due to the dearth of objectives (and completing objectives was the only way to earn points). There were only two types: one-time and endlessly repeatable. "Once per day per legacy" wasn't a thing yet, and the few objectives that existed were very limited in number. Crafting war supplies and running warzones were present pretty much in every event, but aside from that there tended to just be a few items like killing a specific world boss or running low-level heroics (which I thought was very pointless and boring, as this was before level-scaling, so you were literally going back to low-level planets just to farm grey mobs).

The one exception to this state of affairs, which weirdly made hitting your personal target even easier than it would ever be again later on, was crating war supplies, which as mentioned above was one of the endlessly repeatable objectives. So if your character was a crafter and you were interested and/or wealthy enough to accumulate all the right materials, you could basically send all your companions out to craft war supplies, log off for a few hours, and then come back to a completed conquest target.

The invasion bonus you got for invading a planet wasn't a flat percentage but rather a multiplier (usually 2x or 3x) tied to certain objectives. These varied per event and planet and were supposed to be loosely thematic I think, so if the event was "Clash in Hyperspace" there were bigger multipliers on GSF, or if the Nar Shaddaa world boss was a one-time weekly objective, you'd get a bigger multiplier if you'd invaded Nar Shaddaa than if you'd invaded another planet. These connections were fairly tenuous though, and most of them didn't make obvious sense to the same degree as the examples I just cited.

Other differences to today's system were that your stronghold bonus was based on how much furniture you had in your home, leading to people with no interest in decorating to stuff their houses with nothing but chairs or posters just to get the numbers up.

Also, each event only lasted six days, as the scores would lock in on Monday at reset time, followed by 24 hours of "downtime" until the next event.

The initial response to Conquests as far as I could tell was bemusement and slight confusion (my own first post about the subject was called "Conquests - what are they good for?") but the system got its hooks into people pretty quickly. I noted that "one of my guildies commented that he can't remember how he used to spend his time in the game before he started grinding conquest points" and for a while it was pretty exciting, but I think for most people a sort of disillusionment set in after a few months, as - crafting aside - Conquest did not mesh well with other in-game activities. The limited number of objectives meant that you had to play in a pretty repetitive way to earn points, and wanting to do other things like level an alt or play group content with guildies was not supported by the system. Obviously people still took part, but my general observation from the leaderboards at the time was that participation seemed to be decreasing, and my own interest kind of dropped off a cliff when the Shadow of Revan expansion came out (because there basically seemed to be a hundred other things to do than Conquest).

I then basically stopped paying much attention to Conquests for the next two years or so, except when my guild managed to secure a spot on the leaderboard a couple of times a year, but even about that I don't remember that much. The devs made the occasional tweak to the system, but it just wasn't that interesting to me anymore.

The Big Conquest Revamp of 2018

Everything changed in March 2018, when patch 5.8 brought with it a big revamp to the Conquest system that largely made it what it is today (one of the few great things to come out of Knights of the Eternal Throne). Changes included:

• Conquest being split into two windows in the UI, one for objectives and personal progress, and one for the guild invasion
• The introduction of planetary guild targets
• Lots of new objectives, including ones you could complete once per day per legacy
• Invasion bonuses for specific objectives were removed
• Stronghold bonus being based on the stronghold's expansion (how many rooms you'd opened up) instead of decoration percentage 
• Completing Conquest objectives also gave XP and credits
• The endlessly repeatable war supplies objective was no longer there all the time (and had also been nerfed I believe, though I don't recall the exact numbers)

This wasn't without hiccups - going back to what I wrote about it at the time, I'd forgotten that initially the devs had been so conservative with how many points were awarded for the new objectives that during the first couple of weeks of the new system, almost no guilds on the large and medium planets even managed to hit their targets, but this was quickly rectified in subsequent patches.

The following months actually turned into a bit of golden age for my guild in terms of Conquest, as we'd just absorbed members of another guild that were quite interested in Conquest, and our collaborative efforts to pursue the new objectives together were very successful - also largely due to the fact that it turned out that crafting had, in fact, not been nerfed nearly as much as everyone initially believed. Patch 5.10 in December 2018 also added guild perks and guild levelling, which was also based on Conquest point gains and added that extra cherry on top of our successes. 

This was not to last, however. While there hasn't been another change to Conquest as big as the revamp of 2018, some smaller changes that were made further down the line still ended up having a pretty big impact on the experience.

Conquest Points for Everything

Possibly the biggest of these came with patch 5.10.3a in June 2019. (It was actually meant to launch with 5.10.3 a week prior but had basically crashed the servers, so they needed to make some modifications before pushing it live again.) As of this patch, a "percentage of all experience earned [was] converted into Conquest Points". This included Galactic Command experience at the level cap, and kind of made Conquest objectives obsolete overnight, as you'd get more points than you would ever need just by doing dailies or killing random mobs. I was very dismayed by this, as actively being strategic about earning Conquest points no longer mattered - all you had to do was play any way you liked (as an individual) or make sure you were the biggest guild in town (as a guild).

Fortunately Bioware made further adjustments with the launch of Onslaught in October of the same year, not by nerfing anything but by massively increasing the points required to hit your personal target (from something like 15k to 50k) while also boosting the points earned from objectives, in order to put them back on the map as something that was worth pursuing.

Things swung slightly the other way again with patch 6.1.1 in April 2020 when the devs introduced the three different level brackets for Conquest objectives and added a ton of new objectives that were often ridiculously easy to complete. Again, I was personally kind of uncomfortable with this and ended up playing less since Conquest had been a big motivator for me and I could easily reach my personal target just by logging in and pressing a few buttons. My guild also went back to not being competitive outside of Total Galactic War since effortless point gains from just levelling and doing the story were too much to keep up with.

One degenerate practice that developed over the following year was that of "newbie farming" - creating a guild that invited low-level players to generate easy points, and then the GM would boot them again the moment they became inactive. Bioware eventually addressed this by making it so your personal points no longer counted towards the guild target during your first week, as well as changing it so that getting kicked would also remove that person's contribution from the guild total.

Stabilisation in Legacy of the Sith

With Legacy of the Sith, the pendulum swung slightly back the other way one more time as the devs decided to rein Conquest rewards in again ever so slightly:

• Personal Conquest targets were doubled from 50k to 100k, because people were basically overshooting their targets constantly as it was.
• Credit rewards were removed from Conquest objectives as they were apparently a massive contributor to inflation.
• Conquest objectives and completing your personal Conquest also no longer awarded XP. In the previous iteration, it had been possible to get into a loop where you earned XP for completing Conquest objectives, then got more Conquest credit for levelling up, which resulted in yet more Conquest objective completion, and so on and so forth. (One of my own alts made it most of the way to the level cap just by standing in her Coruscant apartment that way.)
• With Season 2, Conquest also became an integral part of Galactic Seasons, with the daily objective requiring you to earn 25k points. (In Season 1, all seasonal objectives had simply required you to complete distinct activities, independent of Conquest.)

And that's more or less where we've been for the last four years. It's honestly been nice to have some stability in that area of the game, and while I still feel wistful for the times when Conquest objectives were more limited and required active pursuing, I can't deny that I've had a lot of fun competing in Total Galactic War for the past few years.

We'll see whether Broadsword will feel the need to tinker with the system again when 8.0 comes around, or even with Galactic Season 10, which is supposed to mix things up in some form as well. 

Out of Bounds, Into the Volcano

Last weekend was another one of those rare occasions when I got to join the New Outriders on Star Forge for some social fun. We killed world bosses, did some dynamic encounters together and generally had a good laugh. However, the most memorable part of the evening (for me at least) was the final activity of the day, which Intisar had advertised as "breaking reality".

To facilitate this, the attendees were whisked away to Ord Mantell, where we assembled at the southern end of Fort Garnik and were instructed to look west. "What do you see?" Int asked, and after various to-be-expected smartarse responses, we were told that the thing to look at was the mountain. We were going to climb the volcano.

Climbing walls you're not meant to climb, in order to discover terrain that players are not normally meant to see, is a time-honoured tradition in many MMOs, SWTOR included, and you can find plenty of YouTube videos out there of players breaking out of the map-imposed boundaries. I think developers are usually not very fond of this, as it can lead to all kinds of exploits, but on its most basic level, players being curious about what's beyond the visible horizon is understandable and not a bad thing.

I've never really been into that particular type of exploration as I'm no good at jumping and climbing walls, but the nice thing about undertaking something like that as a group is that people can help each other out with pulls and summons, so it didn't take us too long to get close to the visible top of the mountain.

We could tell that we were getting into an area we weren't really meant to be in when "reality broke" as Int had promised, which is to say our view of the terrain started to become glitchy, and depending on the direction in which you faced your camera, you either saw the mountain in its normal form, or an alternate reality where it was somewhat smaller, everything was orange, and player characters and mounts started to disappear. This was very disorienting and it became a lot harder to make progress, but someone managed to make it all the way to the lip of the volcano regardless and summoned the rest of us to their position.

Looking into the big... vent/caldera (?) the view was slightly strange, presenting a smooth, mirrored surface that looked almost like some sort of lake. After a bit of dancing and taking screenshots, we decided to finish the evening by hurling ourselves into the volcano.

Surprisingly, not everyone died immediately - instead, we actually found ourselves on some rocks above the separatist base built into the volcano, where troopers and smugglers deal with the final stages of their story missions on Ord Mantell. It was interesting to see that the base could actually be accessed that way, even if it clearly wasn't meant to be and wasn't visible from the top.

Another summon from someone who'd landed in a good spot gave everyone an additional screenshot opportunity with better views and allowed for another round of communal dancing. Then we hurled ourselves to our deaths for good and said our goodbyes.

It was a silly little adventure that didn't achieve anything in terms of in-game progression but provided a great sense of joy and wonder for me personally. I always admire the creative ideas that Intisar & Co. come up with for these social events.

A Nemesis Defeated

This wasn't the post I was planning on publishing today, but I'm just too giddy not to share it immediately.

Dread Master Brontes is the operations boss about whom I've probably written the most on this blog. Back in 2019 I detailed my history with her in this post, explaining how my group mates and I had been defeated by her nightmare mode incarnation over and over again.

A little over two years ago, I finally ended up beating her on 16-person master mode of all things, and noted at the time: "I just hope I don't need to wait another ten years to tick the box for the 8-man achievement."

Aaand... *insert drumroll here* tonight it finally happened!

Unfortunately there won't be a kill video this time, as my video recording software did not cooperate.

We generally seemed to be a bit cursed all evening. First Mr Commando randomly wrenched his back (he does have chronic back problems that rear their head every so often, but usually not randomly while he's just sitting at his desk), which required a time-out so he could stretch a bit and take some painkillers. Then the friendly guildie who'd offered to fill in for one of our regulars who was absent started having internet connection problems, which led to a couple of wipes and warranted various restarts on his end.

I was in this weird head space where I simultaneously really, really wanted the kill and felt that it was absolutely within our reach (I finally understood how every single part of the fight worked and had the impression that everyone else did too) and at the same time felt weirdly zen about not getting it, almost certain that we'd continue to fail somehow and finish another year without having bested this boss (after all, it had happened several times before, and all the random mishaps described above did not fill me with confidence).

However, in the end, we persisted and were victorious! I'm still a bit bummed that I didn't get a recording (there was some excited shouting for sure) but as I said to my guildies, I'd rather get the kill without recording it than have my recording work all evening and then have nothing to show for it but more wipes. I'm not sure yet what we'll attempt to tackle next, but I don't need to worry about making a decision on that yet anyway, as this was our last progression night of the year and we won't be back at it until January.

The Subscriber Login Event in the Rear View Mirror

Lots of exciting things are happening in my favourite MMOs, but sadly real life has been kicking my arse lately so I haven't had as much time to play games as I would've liked, never mind writing about them. Still, tomorrow SWTOR gets its first story update in one and a half years, so I thought I had to sit down and post at least briefly - not about what's to come, but about the subscriber login event that's also coming to an end tomorrow.

Back in September I was kind of "whatever" about it, looking at it from the perspective of someone who's never had a reason not to continue subscribing to SWTOR, but now that it's coming to an end I wanted to take a moment to say that I actually ended up quite liking it. It was nice to get something marginally more useful from the weekly login reward for several months.

It was particularly nice for my alts on the other servers, where I spent all my currency on buying Rakata gear for my level 80s, and if I had tokens left over at the end of that I spent those on some extra OP-1s for further gear upgrades. Do I need this gear for anything? Of course not, but it's still a nice thing to have.

On my main on Darth Malgus, I ended up buying the two ship droid customisations and after that, all the different pets. I think at the end I had purchased every single one of them except for one. Did I think they were all amazing? Not really, but on Darth Malgus I have more gear and currencies than I know what to do with at this point, I already had all the emotes that were on offer, and I'm not huge on regeneration toys, so the pets were the next best thing. Especially since they were all originally from the Cartel Market, so now they're in my collections for future unlocking if I should fancy it.

Can I just say that it's kind of funny in hindsight that a single pet from the vendor cost as much as three Rakata gear pieces? Interesting value assignment there...

If you were a subscriber, what did you end up doing with your tokens?

Some of my guildies - who are usually not necessarily representative of the wider player base - were almost aggressively uninterested; it was actually kind of funny. Like, you're already subscribed and the devs are giving you free stuff, don't you want it?

The funniest to me was one particular guildie who's been a subscriber since launch and seems to have remained subscribed out of inertia more than anything, as he doesn't even really seem to play anymore - he just logs on once every two months or so to join us for a social night or something and then disappears again. He also hated the gearing system that was introduced with Legacy of the Sith and was always moaning about the fact that the the gear he got from being carried through an operation wasn't the best yet but required further upgrading.

So naturally, when this event came around, we were all like "oh man, this is going to be great for Nev; finally he can get the 340 Rakata gear he always wanted for simply logging in" - and then he didn't log in until literally the penultimate week of the event. We told him that he still had time to get three pieces if he just logged in four times during the last week, but he didn't do that either. Too busy, he told us afterwards, before stating wistfully that he wished he could just buy gear with Cartel Coins. (I know, I know. But hey, pay to win wouldn't be a thing in any game if there weren't people who liked it.) 

Tulak Hord Talk

After eight seasons and almost four years of playing on multiple servers, I'm pretty well settled in everywhere, with a growing roster of alts on each server and most of my characters in stable guilds. The one server where I was still feeling a bit "unsafe" though was Tulak Hord, mainly because I hadn't really found a guild that truly covered all my needs and made me feel like it was going to stick around.

You may recall from this post last year that after more than two years of staying in a two-person guild, my attempt to find something a bit more suitable for someone interested in playing alts and doing Conquest led me to a guild that turned out to run an old-fashioned guild website that nobody actually used. I was a bit put out by that but stuck around.

Over time, things got more quiet in said guild. I never actually got to know my guildies really, but I was under the impression that there had been a core group of people that did operations together, and it looked like that had eventually fallen apart. The guild wasn't strictly dead, but going by the numbers on the weekly Conquest board, it at one point looked like I was one of a maximum of five people that were still playing.

I had almost resigned myself to potentially inheriting the guild eventually once the last of the other players stopped logging in, but after several months of this state of relative inactivity, I noticed that things started picking up again, not because the gang was back together, but because the person that the GM title had defaulted to had seemingly decided to go on a recruiting spree. Which was fine by me, but I didn't give it too much thought either.

Tonight though, something funny happened. I was just doing a few more quests on an alt (on Tulak Hord, obviously) to finish off one last weekly seasons objective when someone said "hey Shin" in guild chat. I said hi back but didn't pay it any further mind as I hadn't really had a lot of interaction with anyone in the guild.

I continued to focus on my questing, until the same person said something along the lines of "I'll just go back to DM now" and I swear for a moment my brain was short circuiting. Why was someone speaking English in guild chat on Tulak Hord? And why were they telling me about going back to Darth Malgus? What server was I on again? What the heck was even going on?

I opened the guild panel and looked at the only other person online. Their legacy name didn't sound familiar, but the character name vaguely rang a bell. It sounded kind of like one of my guildies from Darth Malgus, the one who'd inspired me to try doing Galactic Seasons on multiple servers in the first place.

"Xen?!" I typed incredulously, and with my mind still spinning. How could he be here? Had I ever gotten him invited into this guild? No, even I couldn't be that forgetful, surely? What was happening?

He proceeded to tell me that he'd been invited the other day via a random recruitment message, after his last guild on Tulak Hord had kicked him for inactivity. I mean, what are the freaking odds? I just thought that was absolutely wild. Tulak Hord isn't the biggest server, but it's still got a good number of guilds, and the one we are now both in is relatively small, so that was some crazy serendipity alright. 

On an unrelated note, another thing that bothered me about playing on Tulak Hord until recently was that this guild didn't have an Imperial counterpart, so my Imperial alts were still homeless and lost in space. I'd done a bit of research about where I could take them but hadn't come up with anything enticing enough for me to make the effort of actively applying.

Well, the other night I was just about to log off on my Sith inquisitor when someone offered me a random invite to their guild. I checked that the guild name wasn't anything offensive or utterly ridiculous and accepted. So now I'm a pirate on Imp side, and my characters have the guild rank "fish food". We'll see where that goes! 

Another One for the Books: Scum Speed Run

Back in June I wrote about successfully completing the Dread Palace timed run achievement with my guildies. Our next destination after that ended up being Scum and Villainy, which also has a timed run achievement... but I initially hardly dared to hope that we might be capable of accomplishing that, mostly because of the last boss. I still remembered from when we worked on the Styrak fight during Onslaught, how we literally spent months wiping on him, and how even the final kill - satisfying as it was - took us over 20 minutes, something I found difficult to mentally reconcile with the idea of a speed run.

However, things went better than I'd expected as we started working our way through the ops without the timer. I didn't actually keep track, but I think I would've been able to count the number of attempts it took us to kill Styrak on my fingers if I'd wanted to. Clearly what had held us back those years ago had truly just been the bad group composition above all else, and going in with the knowledge that we needed certain combat styles and preparing accordingly turned that into a complete non-issue.

A guildie who's a much better player than me encouraged me: "You've done the DP timed run, and that's much harder! This should be very doable." And indeed, where in Dread Palace you only have one hour to beat five encounters, in Scum you have two hours to defeat seven of them. Everyone agreed that it was both a realistic and a worthy goal to pursue.

Nonetheless, progression still wasn't all as smooth as that. Most fights in Scum master mode are much easier than in Dread Palace, and I'd say at least four of the fights became more or less guaranteed one-shots pretty quickly. Thrasher, the third boss, could sometimes be a random road block if something was even slightly off with the group, as there's a lot of damage thrown at random targets, requiring strong burst healing, people to use their cooldowns correctly, and dps to be very responsive to the add spawns.

The worst fight by far though were the Cartel Warlords, primarily because Sunder, the boss that needs kiting, has been suffering from terrible desync for years, meaning that he'd often appear on the other side of the room from where he actually was, which is not a good thing when you have to stay away from him or else risk being one-shot. It could be very hit and miss whether our tank could kite him long enough without anything going horribly wrong. And that's without even mentioning that it can be very easy to already wipe in the first phase, when the pressure on the healers is the highest and there are once again a lot of randomly targeted damage abilities going around that could cause someone to fall over if they just so happened to be hit by a lot of things in a row.

Styrak himself turned out to be a comparatively mild obstacle, with the biggest problem being just how long the fight still was. With better dps we could now take him down in less than twenty minutes, but that's still pretty long for a boss fight, and a single wipe at a late stage of the encounter could be massively costly in terms of time.

Once again progression was very much not linear, with us getting hard stuck on Thrasher one week, then breezing through all bosses until Styrak the next, just to keep wiping to silly mistakes; followed by us getting stuck on Cartel Warlords again on the next run.

That said, this Wednesday the stars finally aligned: we one-shot Thrasher, and got Cartel Warlords down on the third attempt. It was a pretty epic victory too, with only one person still alive to deliver the final killing blow to the last warlord. And Styrak was once again super-smooth, with us finishing the speed run achievement with plenty of time left on the clock.

Even better: the next evening we did it again, for the one member of the team who still needed the achievement and hadn't been there the previous night. This time we one-shot both Thrasher and Cartel Warlords and only had a silly wipe in Oasis City that was completely my fault. However, we did lose some time to real life interruptions, and then wiped on Styrak four times. Fortunately, fifth time was the charm and we got him down mere minutes before the timer was about to run out.

I'm happy that I got the achievement (as well as the character title on both my main and main healing alt) but above all, I just feel extremely proud of how well the team got together to make this happen. I hardly want to think about how long this streak of good luck can possibly last because good times like these never last forever.

Fun fact: Even though this operation is over ten years old at this point, I was surprised to find that there are still certain mechanics for which it's hard to find hard data about how they work. The specific example that made us scratch our heads was the knockback add on Styrak. There seemed to be agreement that the healers needed to stand out and it would jump to them, but even though we made sure to do that, it would still leap into the melee group sometimes. Someone suggested having a third person stand out, a ranged dps - still no difference. The best we could work out eventually was that a Watchman Sentinel's group healing could cause the add to mistake them for a healer and leap to them, because the moment our own Sentinel changed to a different spec for this fight, the random leaps into melee stopped happening.

Fun with the New Outriders

I've mentioned previously that aside from being an officer in Twin Suns Squadron, the guild on Darth Malgus that I've been a part of for over a decade at this point, I also joined some guilds on the other servers on a more casual basis. The standout among these is probably New Outriders, a multi-gaming guild/community that has its SWTOR branch on Star Forge and in which Intisar is an officer.

I don't get to actually interact with the people there that often because of time zones, but when I do it's always cordial, and on the rare occasion when they have an event in the afternoon in their time zone, meaning that I can join in as well, I'm always excited.

Yesterday was one such occasion, and it started off in a way that was very flattering to me, as Intisar instructed me to come online a bit early, declaring that a few people would help me get the last three DvL boss kills I was still missing on Star Forge. So we did that, and it wasn't actually too painful, even on Hoth! The GS8 achievement for the boss kills by itself doesn't actually give anything worthwhile, but it turns out the original achievement to kill all the bosses from back in Knights of the Eternal Throne is also still active, so that triggered as well and I got lots of banner decos for it, which was nice.

This was also a good example of one of the things I do love about joining events on Star Forge - there I'm just another member and can rely on other people to carry me a bit. I don't mind being an officer in Twin Suns Squadron, but it is also work sometimes, and only the day before I'd been making lists and parking summon alts all over the place to help my guildies there tick off their last few achievements, so it was a nice change of pace to have someone do the same for me, you know?

Anyway, once the event got started properly, a lot more people came online, including a couple of the officers from the wider community that clearly hadn't played SWTOR in a while. I got quite wide-eyed inspecting them, with one of their characters being level 55 and the other one 75. It was like looking at a time capsule! I think I must have gasped lines like "OMG, he's got an Oriconian ear piece" out loud at my screen at one point.

The event itself was a very casual-friendly affair open to all levels that involved travelling across various planets, killing world bosses, collecting datacrons and just generally having a bit of fun. I was pretty impressed by how even though there was never a dull moment, I couldn't quite tell how much of it had been planned and how much was spontaneous. The characters that had been parked next to difficult-to-reach datacrons had obviously been prepared with intent, but other times we'd arrive on the scene of a dynamic encounter and Intisar would just go "oh, this one is fun" and we'd all do it together and I figure that can't possibly have been planned that way? I don't know.

The most whimsical detour was when we got to Tython and Intisar beckoned everyone to join him at the planet's 0,0 coordinate to marvel at the strange floating orb of light there. It's funny how something that's clearly just a random bug has developed into a kind of mysterious attraction and people like to make up their own lore about how the Uxibeast next to the flame must be Force-sensitive or something.

Since there were no level requirements for the event, I took part using my little Sage alt who had only just earned her own ship (that part was required to be able to accept summons) and she gained no fewer than five levels from gallivanting around the galaxy and trying to take part in killing world bosses. Plus she got a lot of random creature codexes from when people around her decided to kill all the wildlife in the vicinity.

It was just very wholesome and I'm always kind of impressed by the joyful energy everyone in the guild still displays while playing the game, even when they're off to kill the Coruscant world boss for what must be the 100th time. It probably helps that they have a seemingly endless supply of in-jokes that sometimes make my head spin, including every boss and their abilities having special made-up names. (I've got to admit, FR3-D0M being introduced as "the Hamburglar who does cheese and tomatoes" broke me a little.)

Either way, it's refreshing to me because even though I obviously love my guild on Darth Malgus, I think it's fair to say that we have... a considerable number of members who are a bit jaded about the game at this point and are much harder to excite. It may not be possible to go back to being a wide-eyed noob, but I for one am still capable of having a lot of fun with even the more basic aspects of the game and it's nice to hang out with others who feel the same sometimes.

Conquest Events That Are Good for Small Guilds

This post has been sitting in my drafts as a personal reference for me for a while, and I figured it was about time that I actually finish and publish it so that other people can benefit from this information too.

If you're the guild master or an officer in a smaller guild, you're probably familiar with the dilemma of which invasion target to choose for Conquest each week. On the one hand you want to go as large as your guild can manage, to maximise everyone's rewards, but on the other hand you want to make sure that you don't bite off more than you can chew, causing your guild to struggle or even fail to reach its cumulative target.

Also, raise your hand if you've ever been in a situation like the following: You go for small yield and then someone decides to randomly be super active that week, causing you to way overshoot the required score. So the following week you go for medium yield, thinking that there's clearly more activity going on than you expected, and suddenly it's totally dead again, so you find yourself personally grinding out the missing points on Sunday or Monday just to hit target. It's annoying!

Now, I can't tell you what your guildies are going to do from one week to the next either, but one thing I've learned over time is that there are some Conquest events that are much better at generating points than others, which is something to keep in mind.

Death Mark

First we have the event that is tied to Bounty Contract Week and therefore comes around as frequently as once a month. You'll definitely want to bookmark this one as it contains the following two objectives:

• Galactic Rampage 
• Missions: Supreme Taskmaster

The former requires you to kill 200 mobs anywhere in the galaxy (and yes, flashpoints and operations count) and gives a little less than 100k points if you have the full Conquest bonus from strongholds. After completion, it also turns into a daily repeatable that's good for another chunk of points every day.

Missions: Supreme Taskmaster requires you to complete 35 missions of any type, awards over 200k points on first completion and then also turns into an only slightly less rewarding repeatable version.

The key thing here is that there are very few activities in SWTOR that don't require you to kill mobs or complete missions, so if your guildies are active at all during the week, they'll be generating Conquest points whether they are actively trying to or not. As a result of this, I've found that during Death Mark weeks, it's generally safe to put your guild's Conquest target one size up compared to what it'd usually be, meaning that if you usually go for small yield, it should be safe to go for medium, and if you usually go medium, you can probably go large.

Revenge of the Revanites

This Conquest is event is much rarer but features the same rampage and taskmaster objectives as Death Mark, so the same rules apply.

Swoop Gang Mayhem

This event is not as "powerful" in terms of points but includes the following noteworthy objectives:

• Missions: Heroic Pinnacle
• Activity Finder: Pinnacle

These give a large chunk of points for completing ten heroics or ten group activities (flashpoints/operations/uprisings/PvP matches) respectively, and they also turn into slightly less rewarding repeatable versions on completion.

Now, I'm not a huge fan of heroics, but many people do like doing them, and if they do they'll be adding a lot more points than usual to your guild's tally.

Similarly, not everyone is into group content, but again, if you have guildies that take part in any type of it repeatedly over the course of the week, they'll be adding more points than they'd usually earn from the same activity.

So this is another candidate for potentially going for a bigger yield than usual, though somewhat dependent on your guildies' preferences. 

The Balance of Power

Like Revenge of the Revanites, this is a rarer event since it's not tied to any world events, but it features the same two objectives as Swoop Gang Mayhem above and may be worth your consideration before choosing your guild's invasion target for the week.

Conquest of Pa...rison Planet

Last week it was once again time for Total Galactic War. I'm not going to rehash once again what that is or why it's important to me - if you need a refresher, I recommend reading one or both of these posts:

• April 2024: At (Token) War with the Czech Empire
• December 2024: Living the Degen Conquest Life

The two Conquest events recounted in the above posts taught my guild two important lessons: The first one was that Personal Conquest Requisitions have been a game-changer for small to medium guilds that are willing to plan for the long term, and the second one was that there were even more ways to game that system than simply saving them up over time. I didn't mention it in those posts at the time, but one guildie who ended up popping a particularly large number of tokens to help us achieve victory admitted that she had used a character transfer to shuttle in extra Requisitions from another server, where she'd been collecting them from her login rewards on the side.

Now, for additional context, my guild successfully conquered every single available planet at some point over the last decade - with one notable exception: Belsavis. For some reason that one always seemed to be taken by a top five guild that we couldn't possibly beat, even during Total Galactic War. I'm not sure why that is, but I can only guess that Belsavis might not come up as often in the rotation as other planets. A planet like Tatooine for example is tied to the Death Mark Conquest event, which in turn is tied to Bounty Contract Week and comes around once a month. Belsavis on the other hand is only available during Emergency Operations and The Dread War (outside of Total Galactic War), two events that don't seem to get slotted into the rotation very often.

Combining what we learned about Personal Conquest Requisitions and our growing frustration with being unable to lay claim to the one planet people still needed for the Galaxy Conqueror achievement, the biggest Conquest fan in the guild eventually proposed the following: that one of these weeks, we should just pool all our resources from all the servers (he and I both do Galactic Seasons on all servers) and simply go for Belsavis anyway.

I did some maths around this suggestion initially, and while I kind of liked the boldness of it, it still seemed a little too crazy. We had a lot of Requisitions saved up, but not that many.

Anyway, last week's Total Galactic War arrived and the matter was brought up again. Looking at the scoreboard, all the biggest guilds had committed early for a change, and the guild in the lead on Belsavis was none other than our frenemies the Czech Empire. They were not a top five guild, and we'd beaten them before... but it had also been the fight of a lifetime, and they were the reason we were so acutely aware of the power of Personal Conquest Requisitions in the first place, so there was no chance that we'd be able to surprise them.

I quickly had a look at possible alternative invasion targets (that we had conquered in the past but that newer members would've liked us to conquer again) but nothing stood out as an easy or obvious option, so after a bit of deliberation I decided to commit us to Belsavis. We agreed that we'd hold off on using any tokens for now and that we'd play it by ear, deciding our next steps later in the week depending on how it went.

Interestingly, it went quite differently than a year ago. Back then, we'd overtaken the Czechs quickly, and they'd been quite happy to trail us for the rest of the week with a steady ten million point gap between us. This time, they'd clearly made a push on launch day to get a solid lead from the beginning, and they did not want us to catch them. We were about three million behind by the end of the first day and I figured that this was a difference we should be able to make up quickly enough, but somehow we couldn't quite get there. In fact, by Thursday morning the Czechs had grown their lead to seven million, and by evening we were sixteen million points behind them.

There was a time when being that far behind would've been reason enough for us to fold, but I knew that the game wasn't quite over yet this time, as the other Conquest guy and I - if we went ahead with the server transfers - would have over 50 million points in tokens at our disposal. We did discuss amongst ourselves that if they kept gaining points at the same rate we'd likely have to give up, but for the time being, we kept going.

Even though I knew that we had a plan, it was honestly a bit demotivating to keep grinding away when we were so far behind. I heard more than one defeatist comment from guildies but still did my best to counter the psychological warfare. I basically told everyone that we'd let them know once the battle was lost, but as of now it wasn't over yet and they just had to trust me and keep going. (People knew about the saved up Conquest Requisitions, but I didn't tell anyone outside the leadership circle about the exact numbers since we're not very strict about removing people from our Discord for inactivity, and I was paranoid about information getting leaked to the competition somehow.)

And it seemed to work! While people weren't necessarily in the best of spirits, they kept at it. At its worst, the Czechs' lead grew to around 18 million points, but they only maintained that for a brief while and most of the time the gap between us seemed to hover between ten and sixteen million.

Then the weekend came and with it a sudden and unexpected burst of energy. (I think I'm actually starting to notice a trend here, that my guild is better at Conquest in the second half of the week than in the first half.)

An officer that had been on hiatus for months popped his head in the door, asked how Total Galactic War was going and quickly ground out a half-million points in one evening. Another guild member who hasn't really been playing SWTOR in a while piped up to say that he had the week off and fancied randomly lending us a hand with grinding points. The funniest moment to me personally was when another guy who hadn't logged in in months showed up on Monday evening and we had a conversation that went something like this (paraphrased):

• Me: Look at you, logging in for the first time since the last Total Galactic War! [I could tell because on log-in he triggered the "Conqueror of Oricon" achievement.]
• Him: Hah, you got me there. Would you like me to pop some tokens?
• Me: How do you even have any? You haven't been online and you said you popped them all last time.
• Him: Oops, I guess I lied.

All of Sunday afternoon and evening the guild was absolutely buzzing with activity and achievements were popping left and right as people went out of their comfort zone and tried content they hadn't done before in order to earn Conquest points. Guild PvP was more active than it had been in months and there was plenty of banter. Point gains aside, it was a joy to see.

We could see that the Czechs were active in the evening and trying to bolster their score with some planetary rampaging, but we actually had a similar number of people online and were absolutely on fire. By the end of the evening, the gap between us was down to less than ten million.

I expected Monday to be more quiet, so I was both pleasantly surprised and had a good laugh when I decided to do a quick check-in on Monday morning and saw seven people online in guild. Clearly our members were less constrained by work than I'd expected.

We continued Sunday's trend at a slightly slower pace and the gap between us and first place continued to shrink all day. By the time the last person went to bed we were only about a million points behind.

Tuesday I was working from home and I had put a bit of time aside around the end of Conquest to pop my Personal Conquest Requisitions as needed. I had transferred four characters to Darth Malgus the day before (my first character transfers ever) and now held 182 tokens in my inventory and cargo hold. Several other people were online and trying to earn some last-minute points while buzzing with excitement. We were pretty much neck on neck with the Czechs, but still always about a million behind.

With eight minutes to go on the timer, I decided to start clicking my Requisitions. I'd told myself that I wasn't even going to look at the score, but was just going to keep popping the tokens. We didn't really care about overshooting and wasting points, as for us, this was the fight to end all fights. We wanted Belsavis and winning it was all that mattered.

While I wasn't looking at the board, other guildies were, and I was cracking up as several complained about their scoreboard going blank at some point. I'd like to think that we were pumping so many points into the system that we temporarily overloaded it. Anyway, it turned out that apparently the Czechs did not have a counter to a big final push this time, so I saw guildies cry out "twelve million ahead", "twenty million", "thirty million", "they are not doing anything" and: "Are you still clicking, guys?" 

I eventually stopped with about twenty tokens left in my inventory, though my fellow Conquest buddy used up every last one of his. It had been overkill indeed, as the final scoreboard showed us more than fifty million points ahead of the competition. But it was definitely worth it, as Twin Suns Squadron owned Belsavis at last, earning several of us the "Galaxy Conqueror" legacy title. I think I mentioned before that this isn't actually something that's hard to get if you simply join a large guild that wins a lot without even trying - it's how I got the title on the Shae Vizla server myself. But to have earned it in a smaller guild with hard work and communal effort, over the course of over a decade, that felt pretty good.

We wondered a bit why the Czechs folded as soon as we started our final offensive, and we can only guess that since the "surprise attack coming from behind" didn't work for them last time, they frontloaded more of their efforts (including token pops) this time in order to stay in first place from the beginning (and hopefully demotivate us). They probably didn't know that this exact strategy had failed Ace of Saints against us back in December as well, but that's how it goes.

I almost want to say that I feel like I can retire from Conquest, now that I've finally achieved it all, but I honestly enjoy it too much to just give up on it I think. However, any future planetary conquests for newer members admittedly won't quite carry the same weight or garner the same amount of excitement as this one did.