Highly Decorated

The other night, queueing for warzones on my Consular with a raging headache, I managed to end up in the Alderaan Civil War.  This one has usually been hit or miss for me when it comes to wins.

But this time, the team seemed to have the right idea.  We captured the middle and the left, then settled down to defend them.  I have usually been a defending type, so I stayed in the middle with a Jedi Shadow, and together we took down the silly single players who thought they could run up with impunity and get past the two of us.

The group in general responded well to calls for help from either node, and by the time the Empire had captured the left node, they were so far behind they could only win if they captured all three.

In a lull in the fighting at the middle node, I wondered with curiosity how many medals I had collected, as it seemed to be a lot.  I looked up and I saw this:

See that Rakata stim?  Gotta love it!

Not having any idea what that pink/red thing was next to the medal count (10, wow!), I moused over it and read the tooltip.

I was kind of surprised.  I don't think I'd ever reached the point where I had reached maximum medals for awards, so I had no idea this feature was in there.

Now I was really curious.  How could I get all these medals if I hadn't been doing anything outside my normal habits?

When we were finally victorious, I took a look.

Fully six of the ten medals were because I parked my Consular by a node and stayed around to defend it!

After a little poking around in the patch notes, I discovered I wasn't going crazy and I hadn't been completely clueless prior to 1.2.  Some of these medals are new to this patch, and the "Highly Decorated" designation as it stands now, which stops handing out rewards at 8 medals, is apparently raised from whatever number it was beforehand.  (Just tells you how few medals I habitually got.  If I had 5, I was doing really well.)

I guess this means it should be fairly simple for me to max out my effective medals on a regular basis now.  I can routinely get three non-defender-type medals, and with the new medals for attacker or defender, there is really no excuse.  Simply do something which will actually help the cause, and everything should work out.