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 Czech's 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. 

Dread Master Shintar

I have a somewhat strange relationship with operations in SWTOR at this point. I think most raiders would posit that for them, raiding is about some sort of progression: seeing the content, beating the challenge, getting the gear... and once you've hit your goal, you move on.

SWTOR doesn't really support that kind of attitude towards raiding anymore, or at least not if you're a long-term player. If you're coming to the game completely fresh, there's plenty to do and many encounters to work your way through, thanks to scaling keeping all the old content relevant, but new operations come out way too infrequently to keep existing players busy for very long.

I sometimes find myself wondering why I'm still so focused on that part of the game after more than a decade to be honest. I've seen all there is to see, many times, and while my skill at the game has improved over the years from sheer repetition, if I haven't been able to beat a higher-difficulty encounter that's been in the game for over a decade at this point, I'm not holding my breath that it's still going to happen.

I guess it's just a habit, a way of hanging out a few times a week, and the fact that Mr Commando and I do it together has led to a sort of feedback loop where we keep each other going even if one person's interest flags at some point.

That said, there's been turnover in the people we raid with over the years, and every now and then we'll get some fresh faces who haven't yet seen it all and who'll be excited to tackle this or that operation for the first time, and I'll be like "sure", because what else am I going to suggest?

In line with that we cleared Dread Palace master mode again a couple of months ago, and it actually went so quickly and smoothly (considering that some people had never done it before), that I found myself daring to hope for some personal progression for the first time in a while, because I'd never gotten the achievement for the timed run, which requires you to clear the instance within an hour.

Everyone was game for working on it, so we kept going back every week, just to get better at the fights and progress that little bit more quickly, with fewer wipes along the way. Progression was far from smooth, as some nights would see us one-shot the first four bosses in a timely manner just to keep failing on the final Council fight, while on others, we would mess up repeatedly at the very beginning and then never even finish the instance.

However, improvement did happen, and this Wednesday we finally got there. We were actually off to a very bad start at first and wiped twice on the very first encounter. We'd learned early on that whenever this happened, it was possible and indeed recommended to just reset the entire instance and try again from the beginning, but it still didn't seem to bode well for the rest of the evening. However, it turned out that the third try was the charm, and we then proceeded to one-shot every boss after that, including the Dread Council themselves.

Embarrassingly for me, I died a few seconds before the end because I got into healer tunnel-vision mode, focusing so hard on keeping someone else alive that I missed my own health getting dangerously low - oops. Fortunately we'd basically won at this point so it wasn't a big deal; it just made my "victory" screenshot look a bit awkward.

A guildie also recorded the whole run and uploaded it to YouTube if you're curious, though he failed to record his own voice so some bits of conversation may sound like non-sequiturs without the inclusion of his comments.

Anyway, it was just nice to have one of those little success stories to share, as they've become more and more rare for me at this point.

Social for Seasons

Galactic Seasons are clearly designed to appeal to all kinds of players, from soloer to raider. The mix of weekly objectives isn't always perfectly balanced, but over time things should even out enough so that everyone can complete at least the main season track by only taking part in activities they enjoy. So even if you don't like doing group content for example, and there's a week where most weekly objectives require a group, you should be fine skipping that one while still being able to achieve your goals.

Personally, I'm kind of the opposite of that hypothetical example as I rather like the group objectives. We have a thing called "social night" in my guild, and during seasons we always knock out whatever items require a group on that evening.

Usually there's one or two of these per week, but last week was unusual in that no fewer than five of the eleven available objectives required a large group, plus there were a few more for which having a small group was at least beneficial. My guild group knocked out all five of the large group objectives in short order (pulling in some pugs for Nightmare Pilgrim, but that barely took five minutes) and a few of us also ran the uprising of the week afterwards. I'd initially felt a bit awkward making almost no progress towards any of my seasons objectives for most of the week, just to go and reach 7 out of 7 completed within a single evening on Saturday.

Several guildies also expressed delight at having been able to max out their progression for the week within only a couple of hours. The group objectives are really great that way, in that they require a bit of extra effort to get the group put together, but if you can be efficient about that part, actually completing the tasks themselves is super quick.

That said, I didn't expect to make much progress on the other servers during that week, as I don't have guild events to rely on for progression there, as they are either non-existent or take place at bad hours for me. However, I was really surprised that pretty much on every server, the moment I logged in, went to the fleet and took a look at general chat, someone was putting together a pug group for something, and I managed to join at least one such event on every server.

It wasn't always the same thing either. On Leviathan I got pulled into a DvL boss group for example, while I joined a Sparks of War group on Tulak Hord, and a Nightmare Pilgrim run on a different evening (which got me invited to a large German guild's TeamSpeak server).

It was all rather delightful. I know people often say that SWTOR's MMO parts were an afterthought and not well done, but my experience was always the opposite. When I first started playing back in 2011 I enjoyed the storylines for sure, but the reason I stuck around and didn't go back to WoW was the social aspect and that I was having such a blast raiding and doing group content in the open world. This week actually made me really nostalgic for that, and also made me wonder whether I don't spend too much time in my stronghold nowadays instead of on the fleet. I usually hide general chat because in the places where it's busy it tends to be filled with nonsense at best or utter toxicity at worst, but seeing all those random "looking for more" requests last week really took me back and I wanted to see more of that. 

This week has actually been similar, with another five objectives for large groups. I don't know yet how things will go for my guild on Darth Malgus tomorrow, but since I'm on holiday for a few days, I actually stayed up late on Wednesday and Thursday to join guild events on Shae Vizla and Star Forge, which might see me hitting 7/7 objectives on those servers this week, which hadn't really been my intent at all.

However, even without guild support the ease of objective completion has been amazing. The combination of Dark vs. Light world bosses and the regular world bosses on both Coruscant and Dromund Kaas both being objectives had people logging back and forth between both factions and looking for groups constantly. Leviathan may generally be a small and quiet server, but I've never seen it as packed on Coruscant as when I was killing the bosses there this week. On Star Forge I didn't even bother to look for a group, I just kind of hung around the boss spawns for a bit as a new group was coming by to kill them pretty much every five minutes or so anyway.

I don't think this is the first time I've gone on about how open world group content in this game makes me feel nostalgic, but it's simply true that nothing brings back memories of launch day crowds for me like these kinds of events do.

Darth Malgus Conquest News - Jan 28th 2025

Another Total Galactic War came to an end today and Twin Suns Squadron was able to continue its streak of successfully conquering a planet during this event by claiming first place on Onderon this time. After a heated battle against Ace of Saints in December, we got away with coasting this past week, as we achieved victory with a mere 33 million points, the second lowest score of all first place winners, only "outdone" by Looking for Drama claiming Makeb with a bit over 31 million points. (I took it relatively easy myself, only scoring 100-400k on all 22 of my currently guilded characters...)

The rest of the scoreboard revealed some interesting stories as well this time. Ace of Saints were not discouraged by how horribly things went wrong for them last time and successfully managed to claim victory on Section X by beating Remnants of the Eternal Empire. Both of the "Remnants" guilds, who are long-standing competitors in Total Galactic War, had a rather disappointing week as Remnants of the Eternal Alliance was also beaten by Czech Alliance on Tatooine.

The Czechs (with whom TSS had its own run-in last year) could also happily lay claim to Ruhnuk, which appeared to be quite hotly contested this week, with both Jade Empire and Some Like it Hoth seemingly also making a push for first place but ultimately not quite cutting it.

Another planet that was actually fought over this past week was Corellia, where Bogan ultimately triumphed over Eternal Hunger, though according to one member of the former, "nobody in Bogan cares" and they simply may have succeeded by sheer strength of numbers.

Over on Imperial Taris, Sith went up against Sith as Sith Ascendancy fought Sith Dominion for first place, with the former coming out ahead by less than three million points. Meanwhile on Imperial Balmorra, Primordial Flame came in first place with over 64 million points, their highest score on record yet.

The highest score of all guilds was, somewhat surprisingly, achieved by Looking For Group on CZ-198, where nobody was even competing with them and yet they nearly achieved 168 million points. Is this a sign that the "Looking For" conglomerate may be gearing up to take on Ashla and Beyond Madness during regular Conquest weeks as well? We'll see!

Newcomers this week were Dynasty of Choas, whom I'd never noticed on the board before but who conquered Ilum with a strong showing of 80 million points without being driven by any direct competition. Out of Control, who first appeared on the scene in December, also managed to win a planet again, this time on Manaan (Invasion Zone).

Finally, in a somewhat random move, Beyond Sanity went to conquer Quesh - the exact same planet they conquered in the last Total Galactic War less than two months ago. They must really like those toxic fumes.

Meanwhile, abroad...

Congratulations to the Imperial branch of New Outriders (Intisar's guild) for conquering a planet for the first time in ten years and securing first place on Ossus over on Star Forge! Even though I was quite busy on Darth Malgus, I managed to squeeze in about 1.5 million points for them over the weekend so I could say I'd at least done my part. It's been great to see how excited everyone got over the whole thing. You know you'll want to do that again some time, right? (wink wink)

Living the Degen Conquest Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

One Season Ends, Another Begins

I'm happy to say that I finished all my goals for Galactic Season 7 this past week. Everything just came together all at once: First I hit level 100 on Star Forge and Leviathan, then over the next couple of days on Tulak Hord, Satele Shan and Shae Vizla. Finally, on Saturday I ticked off the two meta achievements on Darth Malgus. I got the last few world boss kills I needed a few weeks ago, so it was just a matter of completing a few more seasons objectives and grinding out some more bounties.

I know I sometimes talk about how my ambitious goals for seasons can take on a somewhat chore-like quality, but damn, did it feel satisfying to be done with everything. I also love knowing that I can now expect to have a roughly three-month break from seasons - there will be a PvP season during that time, but that's not quite the same thing - and I look forward to checking out the new content coming with 7.6, progressing some characters' personal stories here and there, and just generally chilling and throwing snowballs during Life Day. As mentioned last year, during December more than during any other time of the year, I really appreciate this in-game holiday simply giving me a chance to relax, without putting any particular demands on my time.

As for GS7, I already gave my overall impressions of it last month. Setting stricter limits for myself on the other servers ultimately worked out well, as I definitely had fewer "trying to squeeze in just a couple more objectives before going to bed" moments of stress than on some previous occasions, and I still completed all my goals with plenty of time to spare. If anything, I should probably try easing up on my activity on the other servers even more next season, just to see how little time investment I can get away with (while still playing in a way I enjoy instead of simply maximising for seasons points per minute).

In general, nothing too exciting happened on the other servers this season; I would sum up my experiences playing on them over the last few months as follows:

While playing on Leviathan, I probably have the most strictly solo experience of any server, simply because my ability to communicate in French is so limited, but boy do I adore all my alts on that server for some reason. I've actually given my knight over there more different outfits to wear than most of my alts on Darth Malgus. I guess it's just been too long since I allowed myself to simply fall in love with another Twi'lek (I keep telling myself I need to try playing a greater variety of species)!

On Tulak Hord, I'm still in the guild with the dedicated website that nobody uses. I'm not sure how active the guild itself still is either, as I got guild mails from officers at various points that seemed to indicate that they hadn't been around as much. The planetary invasion still happened every week, and the guild Conquest bar did get filled up, but some weeks I was up there in the top five contributors just for making my 100k on my trooper.

On Satele Shan, I'm getting so close to finally finishing my Shadow Zilek's class story - it's so close I can taste it! I wrote about how he was my first ever male character in this post - it's hard to believe that I created him more than twelve years ago now and he still hasn't defeated the First Son. However, he's about halfway through Corellia now and I'm considering just pushing through even after being done with seasons, just to finally complete that particular milestone.

Star Forge and playing with New Outriders and occasionally helping out Swtorista's Team Disco has turned into a warm comfort blanket for me. I love my guild of twelve years on Darth Malgus, but being an officer is work sometimes, and many of my guildies are - how do I put this nicely - a bit cynical about the game at this point. So when I get to just hang out with friends on Star Forge, it's nice to not have to do any talking or organising for a change, to just tag along and do as I'm told, and simply giggle at people's jokes in a more light-hearted atmosphere.

On Shae Vizla, I'm up to two class stories completed now (my consular got there the other week) and with me hitting legacy level 44 yesterday, I came to realise that despite the server's young age, this may well end up being the one on which I end up hitting legacy level 50 next, a feat I've otherwise only achieved on Darth Malgus and Star Forge so far. We'll see whether I get there during the next season.

Mid-Season Doldrums

It feels a bit funny to talk about mid-season when Galactic Season 7 has only been live for one and a half months and we know that it's supposed to last another four and a half months. However, I am level 69 out of 100 on Darth Malgus, so even with the bonus achievements in mind, it does feel like I'm reasonably close to the halfway point, which feels like a good time to talk about how things have been going so far.

In a nutshell, while I thought that everything about GS7 sounded solid on paper, I haven't been enjoying myself as much as I would've hoped. But let's start with the good and then go down from there.

What's going well

I do love that the weekly objective for the DvL bosses means that there's one guaranteed large group objective every week, because this helps to fill my guild's social nights. You could argue that it's not ideal if people only show up to tick their weekly boxes and don't want to hang around to actually be social afterwards, but from my perspective as a guild officer, I'd rather have people who are perhaps not that into the game right now show up at least briefly once a week to say hi than not show up at all. It's good for guild cohesion, basically.

What's going so-so

My plans to impose stricter limits on my investment in seasons on other servers have worked out well so far in the sense that I've been able to stick to them without suddenly having the urge to binge. However, it also hasn't increased the fun as much as I had hoped. When you're only aiming for four easy weekly objectives each week, this basically means that I do a bounty contract on every server (because that's the easiest/fastest one by far), get 200k Conquest points somehow, and the rest is usually some kind of combination of mission-related objectives. However, depending on the nature of said objectives it can still be oddly time-consuming and a bit samey to be doing them on all servers.

I'm still aiming to do the 25k Conquest points per day for the daily objective on each server at the moment as well, but I'm starting to wonder whether I shouldn't be cutting down on that too. With the final removal of any kind of seasons-related currency there just doesn't seem as much of a point to it (when previously the extra currency you'd get from the daily objectives certainly added up) as the one hundred levels themselves can be achieved extremely easily without that. It's still worth logging in at least four times a week for the free season points from the login rewards, but beyond that, I think I need to reconsider this one as well.

What's not going so well

When I gave the notion of Bounty Contract Week being live all season a thumbs-up, this came with the assumption that everything related to that event would be available too, including Conquest objectives. The latter has not been the case however, and I can only guess that these are still strictly tied to the Death Mark Conquest event, which has not come around so far this season and I'm not sure it will (since Bounty Contract Week is usually its main draw). As someone who's quite motivated by Conquest, this has been disappointing to me.

More importantly however, I'm just not that into seasons at the moment. I'm kind of reminded of how I had to cut back on my investment in seasons a bit during GS4 (after burning myself out a little during GS3) and there might be a bit of that at work again this time, but it's also the first time that I find myself really straining against the way seasons try to keep you engaged at all times.

What I mean by that is that things like login rewards and daily objectives are not a big deal while you're having fun anyway - they just provide a bit of extra reward and direction. However, when your interests shift and you kind of want to do other things for a while, these same incentives can start to feel like a bit of a ball and chain, as they demand more attention than you perhaps really want to give the game at that particular moment. Worst case, by the time the chain finally snaps, you'll actively resent the way it held you back until then and you'll actually feel negatively about going back to the game. I vaguely recall having feelings like that in regards to ESO's extremely valuable login rewards and all the various incentives that Neverwinter used to give me to keep me logging in multiple times a day. I actually talked about this a bit when login rewards were first introduced to SWTOR back in 2020.

Now, those login rewards were actually pretty mild, ultimately, but seasons are definitely doing that thing where they really push you to keep coming back and playing in order not to miss out on the rewards. They've become such an integral part of the game that it's wild to think that they were only added three and a half years ago.

The reason I'm really straining against this at the moment is that I'm having a lot of fun with the latest WoW expansion right now. And to be clear, by itself, that's not a dig against SWTOR in any way. While I've been continuously subscribed to the game since 2011, I've always played other games on the side and I've always gone through periods of being more and less invested in it. When WoW Classic came out back in 2019 for example, I was all over that and not very interested in SWTOR at all for several months, especially as the latter was also suffering from a period of pre-expansion doldrums at the time. The point is: that was okay. The game didn't have any FOMO mechanics back then that made me feel like I'd be punished for not logging in and not playing for a few days.

Nowadays however, things are different. I may feel like spending more time in WoW, but SWTOR "demands" that I log in daily to earn my Conquest points and do my seasons objectives every week or else I miss out. And yes, I know it's not that strict and it's not as if you can't take a break and still earn all the rewards. And I don't actually have to do anything. However, the point is that the game is a lot more demanding of your time than it used to be and I'm just finding myself nostalgic for the old days when that wasn't the case. Seasons are just the most obvious reminder of that.

Being in Guilds on Other Servers

When I first started playing on other servers for Galactic Seasons, it was purely a solo project. However, as my characters there started to make progress through their class stories and I became more attached to them, I also developed an increasing urge to be part of a guild with them, to be social with other people, and to have some sense of belonging while playing on those other servers too.

Season 6 has been the first season for which I was guilded on at least my main character on every single server, and it's been... an interesting experience. I've certainly developed more sympathy for people who struggle to find a good guild. For me, it's always kind of happened automatically, because when I'm really into an MMO I play a lot, and when you play a lot you run into familiar faces after a while, and when you spend a lot of time around the same people, you learn who you like and who you don't like being around kind of automatically. However, when you're playing more casually, like I am on these secondary servers, it can be much harder to get a good picture of which guilds offer the kind of experience you're looking for. Fortunately I seem to be at least mostly there after this season.

On Shae Vizla, I am of course still a member of Heroes of the Republic/Empire, which I joined at the server's launch. It has a bunch of nice people in it, and when the server launched, it was the biggest guild in town for a while, which allowed me to get the Galaxy Conqueror achievement without even trying, which certainly felt kind of ironic when that's one I'm still missing on Darth Malgus after more than a decade. One day you'll be mine, Belsavis! Ahem.

Anyway, things have kind of calmed down a lot since then, but I don't mind - it means I have to be less concerned about logging into all my alts to keep them active and avoid removal from the guild.

On Star Forge, I joined Intisar's little guild at the end of GS4. I had a pretty good time with them in GS5 (which was part of what inspired me to seek out guilds on more servers, because even with only casual involvement on my part it just made the whole experience much nicer). During Season 6 I didn't have as many chances to play with them (their events usually start at 1 a.m. my time and that's just not doable for me most of the time), however I still felt included and welcome on the Discord. I also got to join for some action with "Team Disco" on Swtorista's streams a few more times, since she streams at what's mid-morning in her time zone, which translates into mid-afternoon for me, which in turn means that I can actually stop by sometimes and backfill if I'm working from home and my workload allows it.

On Satele Shan, I joined Ootini Knights/Rage at the start of this season, and felt warmly welcomed there too, though I was a bit surprised by how quiet it was on their Discord. I didn't really expect to run into people a lot in-game due to my time zone issues, but I didn't see much activity on the Discord either, such as organised events or anything at all. I just figured a guild connected to a long-running podcast would have a bit more going on. As it is, it feels more like a place where a lot of people park their alts while primarily playing somewhere else... which is exactly what I'm doing myself, mind you, so no shade from me!

Loyal readers may remember that on Tulak Hord, I helped someone form a guild the first time I reached the fleet, and then just kind of stayed in that guild even as it went nowhere. Ultimately it just had me and one other guy left in it, but I didn't mind. During GS5 I even made it a bit of a personal goal for myself to use the guild ship that the other guy had purchased to invade small yield planets and then achieve the guild target by myself. I initially thought that I would just do the same again in GS6, but the nerfing of the reputation objective, as well as my inability to get alts into the guild due to the other guy never being around, made it hard to be efficient and I got a little frustrated after a while. In the end I left a friendly farewell in the guild message of the day and decided to try and find myself a new home where I could reap some guild Conquest rewards without having to do all the work by myself.

I already had a new guild in mind as well. I'd seen their recruitment message and liked it, their guild name sounded cute, and I'd actually run a master mode flashpoint with two of their members that had gone very well. It seemed like a good fit! So I got myself invited, looked for their Discord link... and found that they didn't have one. Instead they were old-school and used TeamSpeak for voice and listed a guild website in the guild description.

I was surprised, but didn't actually mind too much as my own guild on Darth Malgus also still uses TS for voice chat, and I was curious to see what a guild website would look like in the year 2024. I signed up and created a profile - but unfortunately the site turned out to be pretty empty. No event sign-ups or anything, and on the forums there was just an old message from someone complaining that they'd created events that nobody signed up for, and that they weren't going to bother anymore. Undeterred, I wrote a post to ask how one would go about finding out what's happening in this guild. More than a week later (!) I got a reply that said that people don't really look at the guild website, and to just be on TS in the evenings or speak up in guild chat. I've got to admit, that's a bit too old-school even for me, especially when I'm not planning to commit to playing a whole lot on this server. It was honestly kind of disappointing, because how am I supposed to make any kind of connection to people when I don't have opportunities to talk to them? I'm staying for now but we'll see where both I and the guild are at when the next season starts I guess.

Finally, on Leviathan I joined Republic/Imperial Court at the end of last season, the guild that I'd seen advertise on Shae Vizla as offering a home specifically for players doing Conquest and Galactic Seasons across all servers. That was a slightly odd experience in a different way. They do have a Discord, and when I joined it I found out that this whole "guild conglomerate" was owned by the same people who lead Wardens of the Old Republic on Darth Malgus, a guild that used to dominate the planetary leaderboards once upon a time but whose activity fell off at some point for reasons unknown to me. As it turns out, they're still alive and kicking on Darth Malgus, just on a slightly smaller scale, and active as "Courts" on the other servers.

I had hoped to maybe find some organised events for group seasons objectives on Leviathan on the Discord, but it turned out that while they do have guilds on all servers, the main focus in terms of activity is on Darth Malgus and Shae Vizla, with none of the others getting regular events, just impromptu pings when someone does something like put a world boss group together (which I usually don't see in time). I also muted the general chat on Discord at some point because it made me feel like I really didn't fit in there. Remember when I expressed confusion about people freaking out and rage-quitting on the second boss in False Emperor for example? Well, the same week I wrote that, one of the officers in Courts ranted about stupid pugs and how they (the officer, not the pugs) hate it when people use the turrets on that boss and how that always makes them quit the group. Awkwarrrd.

Anyway, I guess on Leviathan my options for socialisation were always going to be limited with me not really speaking French and only a small number of English-speaking players on the server. It does feel like everyone who's there for seasons is indeed in Courts, as the guilds on both factions always go for the large yield target from what I've seen and achieve it easily. There are clearly a lot of people logging in every week to get their Conquest and seasons objectives done, just not necessarily with any interest in socialising while doing so. I guess you can't win them all, but I appreciate that they freely invite anyone who wants to be there with no questions asked, and that the guild has made it possible for me to earn guild Conquest rewards on all my alts on the server. I just didn't think it was possible to be a member of such a big guild and still feel so lonely in the crowd.

I will say that this whole adventure has once again made me more appreciative of what an absolutely genius gameplay system Conquest is. I mostly write about it in the context of my guild getting into crazy competitions during Total Galactic War nowadays, but it's really rewarding from a casual point of view as well, making it very worthwhile to be a member of a guild even if you don't talk to anyone. And from a leadership perspective, Conquest points give a better indication of activity levels than mere logins. I guess most guilds don't regularly check on their members' contributions, but I know that I take note of who's usually getting their personal Conquest done and who isn't, and by doing my part in the guilds I'm in on those other servers, I can show at least a "sign of life" and make a small contribution even when I'm not able to be online at prime time to socialise.

At (Token) War with the Czech Empire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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