Entry 30: Operation Chinchilla

On Eclipse, faction bases were finally being planted… which also means that strike teams were being assembled to take them out. The bases themselves served a great many functions. The basic use case was to farm faction points. Another function was city protection. If you place enough bases in and around your city, gank squads would have a really hard time walking right into the middle of your city to look for trouble. <COL> eventually created “Operation Chinchilla,” which was a conglomerate of Rebel Bases, surrounded by strategically placed houses, leaving only one way in or out. If the Imperials wanted to take out the bases, they had to first get into the area itself, and then <COL> would trap them inside, easily be able to cut off their reinforcements, and slaughter them in between the NPC spawns and the PVPers who arrived to defend the bases.

As far as the screenshot above, it was my first base raid. It was an exciting time in SWG, as this aspect of the game had not been available yet. The bases themselves were only vulnerable at a certain time each day. It would sometimes take weeks to find out when a base was vulnerable, unless you could get someone on the other side of the war to leak the time. Some people would pay for a second account, just to have their toon join the opposite faction… and then go find out for themselves. Once you knew what time to hit a base, you’d have to then assemble a team consisting of the right professions for the task. Certain professions were able to access certain parts of the base self-destruction mechanism, so the right people had to be online, or you had to make new friends that could facilitate that part of the job.