Most of you know that I have been championing having the guild cap increased above 1000 since before the merges in December. Despite over 250 posts the devs have chosen to ignore our pleas for help. The guild cleaning is down to 10 days of inactivity which is sadly a necessity to allow you, your friends, your alts and new friends we haven't met yet to join us. Think of it this way; the cap is 1000 and we have over 500 active accounts so technically that means most people could have just 1 alt in guild.

It is impractical to continue daily guild cleaning and due to the producer's deafening silence I have been forced to put the backup plan into action so effective immediately we are activating all three of our guilds:

Imperial: Stroke my Wookie (Alpha)
Our primary guild is super popular which has led to it becoming full to the limit so we're hoping some of you will volunteer to move characters over to our second Imp guild. SMW Alpha will continue to aim for 1st place on each of the planets based on our Normal Rotation so this is the place to be if you want the conquest achievements and titles.

Imperial: Stroke my Wookíe (Beta)
We have reactivated our original guild that was merged over from ToFN so we now have two Imperial SMW guilds. If you want all your characters under one roof then the Beta guild is the place for you. This is not a dead alt guild but a second active Imperial home. Conquest wise, this one will target Large Yield planets with the aim to cross the yield line but not to take 1st place. This is where you can get your new augment materials and encryptions.

Republic: Stroke my Wookiee
Our Republic guild is a great place to meet up with wookies on the other side. It is the quietest of our guilds as we don't run a lot of events over there but that may change soon 😉 When it comes to conquest, SMW Rep will invade Medium Yield planets. The aim is just to cross the 550k yield line but not to take 1st place.

If you are not interested in conquest then it doesn't really matter which guild you join as our events and competitions are shared across them all 😀

Please Help!
We are one of the most popular SWTOR guilds in the world and we fill over 30 spots every day. I want everybody to be able to have all their characters in one guild. I beg you. Please help. I am not asking a lot of you, just post #uniteourcharacters in this thread anytime you see it slip off the first page:

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=935231

Do not give up. Help me to help you by showing Musco, Keith and Charles that this affects all of us.


How To Join?
Myself and Cara will be available tonight (Tuesday May 8th) after 20:30 BST to handle the first wave of invites. Cara and Silver will be around on Wednesday afternoon to handle more. I will ask the other officers to help with this as well.

What About Communications?
We are sticking with Teamspeak for our voice comms and Discord for cross guild/faction text chat:

SMW Discord: https://discord.gg/MNh6W8S

There are 6 channels:

• welcome - Read only welcome message
• new-arrivals - The server will auto-announce here when new members join the server
• guild-invites - Used for when you want to have a character invited to one of our guilds
• group-finder - Cross guild and cross faction LFG channel
• ghost-battalion - Channel for Ghost Battalion to LFG, ask question and swap tips
• general-chat - This one's a trial. If you know you can't say it in guild chat then don't say it here!

One concern that several officers brought up was what a pain it would be to moderate so I've been pretty strict on the permissions system. Additionally, if you try to use any of the channels beyond their specified purpose then you will get a warning. If you do it again then you get banned from the Discord server. For more substantial discussions you should continue to use the website forums.

Once you've joined the server please right click your user and choose "Change Nickname". Set it to match your in-game name/member note so we know who you are. Don't worry, this only changes your name on our server.

Why Not Use Discord For Voice Comms?
500-800 guild members listed in the Discord user list will be ultra shit plus moderating or even just reading more varied chat channels will by massively time consuming. It does work well for smaller groups but not for a guild of our size.

Why Not Three 1st Places?
Two reasons, one is that it will take a lot of effort from myself, the officers and you. Nobody wants that kind of pressure. The bigger reason is that we don't want to piss off everybody else on the server, Bioware already did a great job of that with their new improved "3 planet" conquest 😁

Isn't This A Lot Of Effort?
Yes. 3 guilds means myself and the officers have to do three times the work which sucks. If we can persuade the producers to increase the cap to 10k+ then we'll merge our two Imp guilds back together. I look forward to that day.

What About The Weekly Conquest Prizes?
I will continue to do conquest scoring but now it will be across all three guilds. For the last few years I have totaled up everybody's scores based on the legacy and member notes. Now I will do the same for all three guilds but we we will continue to have a single score board which means you could appear in there more than once. Here's an example to make things clearer:

1. Player A - SMW Alpha - 150,123
2. Player B - SMW Beta - 140, 000
3. Player C - SMW Rep - 130, 444
4. Player A - SMW Beta - 120,120 (Same player as 1st place but different guild)

It's being handled this way to save time on my part. Having three guilds already means all my work is tripled and having to double check every legacy/member note across all three guilds for CQ scoring purposes will be too much for me to handle on a weekly basis. The Bright side is, you can win more than once 😀

What About The Guild Lottery?
The only competition that is guild specific is our bi-weekly lottery which will only be run in our Alpha guild. It takes a lot of time to count all the tickets in just one guild bank and it's much better to have a single large prize pot instead of 3 smaller ones.

Increased Member Cap vs Account Number Cap
The current 1000 limit is on characters. Several people have suggested a better solution over increasing the cap is for the devs to change it to be 1000 accounts with unlimited alts. I love that solution however the reason I am pushing for a member cap increase is because it should be easier for the devs to change a number then it is to change the entire cap system. They already increased the cap from 500 a few years ago so they already have the knowledge of how to do this.