I am pleased to announce the return of our all star x16 nightmare raid team the Nightmare Crusaders. This is a group of excellent raiders from across the guild with Tizia, the Master of Nightmares as their squad leader.

What is an "all star" team?
It's a term used in sports as a shortened way of saying "the team is all star players". The Crusaders will be tackling the most difficult content in the game so the team will be a mix of highly skilled people from our x8 raid teams along with a few lone wolves. Think of it as a group of people that want to do something special on a day they are not raiding with their main teams.

When?
They will raid each Saturday afternoon at 13:00 GMT/UTC. This was intentionally chosen to avoid conflicting with our x8 teams schedules and general events.

Trials will begin on Saturday December 22nd with the first official raid planned for Saturday January 5th.

Requirements

• Ability to multi-class/multi-role (i.e swap roles/classes if we are short on specific roles/classes)
• At least basic nightmare experience
• Prompt and ready for raids
• Reliable about attendance or giving plenty of notice of planned absences
• Able to get on Starparse and Teamspeak
• Preferably able to use discord for communication outside of the raid

How to apply
Please send a mail to Tizia on the site or in-game letting him know about your class, experience, the primary role you are applying for, your secondary role if you have one and anything else you would like to add about yourself.

I'm great, why am I not on the team?
There are limited spots. Tizia is aiming to have 20 people as permanent members of the team. Our past experience with fixed x16 teams is that with so many people it can be an issue to ensure that all 16 can be there each time. By having 20 people it means there should be enough people most weeks.

But I'm waaaaaay better than some of the Crusaders, why am I not on the team?
Tizia is aiming for a chilled group who can focus on objectives while handling their areas of expertise, not a group of prima donnas who think they are better than everybody else.

Will they be using Nightmare Crystals?
Nah, we don't consider it progress if crystals are used.

With patch 5.10 we get some nice in-game guild perks we will be able to use to benefit players in our guild. If you open the guild panel you can see the Perks tab. The way it works is that I can slot different perks into the slots around the ship. These provide either passive or active abilities to each of your characters. You can see the details for the ones currently in use by clicking them in the slot. You can also get a preview of ones we will be able to use in the future by clicking them in the right hand column. There are some really good ones but they require a higher guild XP level for us to access.

How do we get Guild XP?
Guild XP is directly tied to conquest and rewards 2 Guild XP for every 1 Conquest point earned with a cap of 8m GXP (4m CQ points) each week. There are tons of activities that earn points in conquest so you automatically earn points just by playing the game as you normally would 🏆

What do we do with Reinforcement Components?
If you meet your CQ weekly score you now get a new reward called a Reinforcement Component. These are bound to the character. When you have 10 of them on a single character then you can click them to create a Reinforcement Module. You can then donate these to the guild bank officers vault. The modules are used to purchase some of the higher level perks.

How will the perks be used?
The purchased perks only last for a limited amount of time before they expire, usually in the 14-28 day range. If we want to change a perk then we don't have to wait for the perk to expire as they can be manually deleted to open the slot for another perk. Each slot has its own unique set of perks so we can't double up on them.

The plan is that we'll focus on perks to help as wide a range of the guild as possible. That means having some perks which will apply to everybody and some which will be cycled to help specific groups at different times. For instance, I can work out a schedule with the progress raid leaders were we have a week of raid focused guild perk buffs. In a similar sense if we move ahead with the PvP training sessions (more info soon!) then we can also have weeks with more PvP perks (there's a sweet Valor boost).

Guild perk set bonus
Each perk belongs to a different category. If all the perks we have activated at one time belong to the same category then we also get an extra set bonus. Each category has its own bonus. You can see the set bonuses in the bottom left of the Perks panel. On general weeks we will probably not have the set bonus active since we'll have perks from several categories but on weeks were we focus on raiding/PvP then we will factor in the bonus when choosing the perks.

Raider upgrade time
I've retired the Ghost Battalion rank and given each raid team their own custom rank. I wrote more about that here (Raid leaders please read). I think it looks really good and helps our dedicated raiders stand out 😎

Progress team rewards 💰
I'm going to be rewarding each raid team for their progress. I've currently pegged 135 million credits per team and the rewards apply retroactively to their current progress so I'll be sending your squad leaders a big chunk of credits very soon. The squad leaders will handle distributing credits to their team members. That is also how it will work with future reward payments. This way in raids that span days/weeks you get rewarded as you progress through it instead of getting one big reward after the final boss. Any new x8 teams we form in the future will also be eligible for the rewards.

Hard Mode

• Ravagers - 12 million
• Sparky - 2m
• Quartermaster Bulo - 2m
• Torque - 2m
• Master & Blaster - 4m
• Coratanni - 2m
• Temple of Sacrifice - 12 million
• Malaphar the Savage - 2m
• Sword Squadron Unit - 2m
• The Underlurker - 2m
• Revanite Commanders - 2m
• Revan - 4m
• Gods from the Machine - 14 million
• Tyth - 2m
• Aivela and Esne - 2m
• Nahut - 2m
• Scyva - 4m
• Izax - 4m

Nightmare Mode

• Explosive Conflict - 12 million
• Zorn and Toth - 2m
• Firebrand and Stormcaller - 4m
• Colonel Vorgath - 2m
• Warlord Kephess - 4m
• Terror From Beyond - 16 million
• The Writhing Horror - 2m
• The Dread Guards - 4m
• Operator IX - 4m
• Kephess the Undying - 2m
• The Terror from Beyond - 4m
• Scum and Villainy - 18 million
• Dash'roode - 2m
• Titan 6 - 2m
• Thrasher - 2m
• Operations Chief - 2m
• Olok the Shadow - 2m
• Cartel Warlords - 4m
• Dread Master Styrak - 4m
• Dread Fortress - 16 million
• Nefra - 2m
• Gate Commander Draxus - 4m
• Grob'thok - 2m
• Corruptor Zero - 4m
• Dread Master Brontes - 4m
• Dread Palace - 14 million
• Dread Master Bestia - 2m
• Dread Master Tyrans - 4m
• Dread Master Calphayus - 2m
• Dread Master Raptus - 2m
• Dread Council - 4m
• Gods from the Machine - 21 million
• Tyth - 3m
• Aivela and Esne - 3m
• Nahut - 5m
• Scyva - 5m
• Izax - 5m

Our special October conquest competition to celebrate our 200th first place victory was a great success which helped lots of guild members get rich from the 700 million credits in prizes that were awarded throughout the month. It was great to see you all enjoying yourselves by playing together to achieve a common goal. Well done to everybody that took part and an extra big grats to our Minister of War Iroland who accomplished the staggering task of winning first place each week! 🏆

Now the competition is complete we have started invading with Beta guild again. For those that don't know, we have two Imperial guilds and one Rep. All are part of the same entity and our events are run with all of them. The only difference between our Imperial guilds is their conquest goals:

Imperial: Stroke my Wookie (Alpha)
Alpha focuses on taking 1st place each week using our conquest rotation which means it attacks all the small, medium and large yield planets in date order with the target each week being the one that we last conquered furthest in the past. This is the place to be if you want the conquest titles and achievements.

Imperial: Stroke my Wookíe (Beta)
Beta guild's goal is simply to place in the top 10 of the Large Yield target each week to help guild members get the large augment component crafting boxes. The aim is to help our guild members get rich with hardly any effort, not to take first place.

Republic: Stroke my Wookiee
Our Republic infiltration guild is where we keep our Rep characters. Even though this is our smallest guild it still attacks the Small Yield target as it's super easy to get encryptions. It's also very handy for when we run our cross faction server events.

New Raid Lockout Rewards
We've come up with another easy way for you to make credits whilst helping the guild. Basically, get us the lockouts we need for the Tuesday & Thursday conquest events and you get 2 million credits each time we use your lockouts! So if we have 3 groups that need lockouts at both CQ nights and there are 6 raids as objectives then there is over 70 million credits up for grabs. Check out the thread I made which has the details.

To celebrate we will be awarding 140 million credits in Conquest prizes for each week of October:

• 1st: 25 Million Credits & "Minister Of War" legendary rank
• 2nd: 20 Million Credits
• 3rd: 15 Million Credits
• 4th: 15 Million Credits
• 5th: 10 Million Credits
• 6th: 8 Million Credits
• 7th: 5 Million Credits
• 8th: 5 Million Credits
• 9th: 5 Million Credits
• 10th: 5 Million Credits
• 11th-20th: 2 Million Credits Each
• Alpha Highest Single Character Score: 5 Million Credits
• Rep Highest Single Character Score: 2 Million Credits (We haven't forgotten our Rep guild!)
• That's 700 million credits in total for the 5 weeks of October 😱

Alpha FTW!
Our Alpha guild conquest schedule indicates that we will be invading the Large Yield target for each of the 5 weeks in October so to help ensure our victory we will be combining Alpha and Beta for the duration of the month. We ask all our Beta guild members to transfer the characters they actively play to Alpha guild on Tuesday after the 19:00 BST CQ reset. That way you get all your Beta guild prizes for this week and you get to be in Alpha from the start of the week when our celebration contest goes live. Myself and a few officers will be online at that time specifically to help with the transfers. We will not be invading with Beta for October so if you want the big rewards then Alpha is the place to be 👍

I am pleased to announce our new Commander rank which re-balances the previous officer roles. We continue to have Grand Moffs but the rank is now more exclusive as it will only be granted to officers that regularly help with the wider guild admin tasks. The remaining officers and Black Knights have been combined to form the Commanders. This is a full officer rank which has most of the abilities of the Grand Moffs and many more than the old Black Knights.

The primary difference between the ranks is that Grand Moffs help with the overall running of the guild whilst Commanders focus more on specific areas. All Commanders have the option of being promoted to Grand Moff but they have to show they want to be more involved. A simple example and one that I've heard complained about many times is how we may have over 10 Grand Moffs online but none will throw a ginvite out while we have several Black Knights who would be more than happy to help with that. Now all Grand Moffs and Commanders can handle invites as well as several other admin tasks.

This is a far reaching change that affects our guild in-game, on the website, in Teamspeak and in Discord. This refinement of our officer roles provides us with many advantages over the old system and helps ensure things run more smoothly for our guild as a whole.

Cara has been valiantly leading the ongoing war against the Battle Masters each Monday night for several months and feels now is the time for him to move onto an exciting new campaign. I'm using this as an opportunity to improve both our conquest and Battle Master systems with the first big change being that in Cara's stead I have formed a group of keen eyed fearsome killers to lead our hunts:


Improved Battle Master System & Rewards

• You can COD mail Encryptions of all types to me for 250,000 credits each (up from 150k)
• Encryptions drop for 12 random people in the group
• Frameworks go into the Officer's Vault in the guild bank
• We now have a large group of leaders in charge of our Battle Master hunts
• The event leaders will be working independently although there may be more than one at each hunt
• There will be no fixed time and day in our event calendar
• Different leaders will cover different times of day; morning, afternoon, evening and late evening
• The leaders will check the alts they placed at the Battle Master spawn points and if they find at least 3 alive then they will form a group via guild chat and the Discord LFG channel
• Once the group is formed they will summon you to location
• Some days there could be more than one hunt, some days there may be none. It all depends on the hunt leaders schedules and what they can find alive.

Increased Guild Weekly Conquest Score Prizes
We encourage people to get the highest conquest score each week by offering several rewards for those that earn above 100k with their legacy. The results are posted in our CQ image gallery each week as a combined list of winners from all three of our guilds so the same person could win more than once. These prizes have been significantly increased as a big thank you for the extra effort you are all putting in due to Bioware's "improved" conquest system.

• First Place
• • Wins the Legendary rank of "Minister of War"
  • Wins a chance cube
  • Wins 5 million credits for 1st place (up from 3m)
• Second Place
• • Wins 3 million credits for 2nd place (up from 1.5m)
• Third Place
• • Wins 2 million credits for 3rd place (up from 1m)
• General
• • 200k credits for each 100k points (up from 100k)
  • 300k credits for each 200k points (up from 200k)
  • Top single character point scorers in each of our 3 guilds wins 1 million credits (up from 1 person)

These changes take effect immediately and because I haven't sent out the prizes for last week's conquest yet then those will be the first of the increased rewards. Our new Battle Master system will go live within a few days of this post. Please do join in when you see the opportunity as it's fun to do things in groups, it helps the guild and it brings you one step closer to buying that shiny new item you've been watching on the GTN 🌟

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.

Our guild has always had a chaotic relationship with PvP. Over the years we've tried out several variations of structured PvP to help bring it inline with our PvE teams but it never works out. Part of that is down to the PvP playerbase changing so frequently but the biggest reason is down to a lack of PvP leadership. We've had a few leaders rise to the challenge only to fade back into the mists of time and that is where we find ourselves now.

The War Leaders
For this reason I have disbanded the League of Death and created the War Leader rank. There is no leader and no organised PvP nights. Instead this is a rank to recognise the best of our PvP players. Our War Leaders can group together safe in the knowledge that every one of them has incredible skill. The primary focus is 8 person unranked although several enjoy ranked.

Alpha Wing
Our best GSF pilots still have the Alpha Wing website title but in-game they will share the War Leader rank since Bioware thinks a guild of 1000 members should be limited to 10 ranks 😂 The Starfighter aces have an additional tag in their member note so you can tell them apart from our PvP killers.

How To Join
You must prove yourself in combat for the current members to the point that one of them will nominate you. You have to be one of those people that others on your team recognise in the pre-match team line-up and think it means easy victory or where your enemies see you and quit before the match even begins 😈

Don't worry if you're still a rookie, most War Leaders and Alphas are more than happy to help you improve if you are willing to follow their instructions 👍

You can see the current War Leader and Alpha Wing roster here on our PvP page.