I typically log into and play a dozen toons per week, ten of whom are orgainized into an alt guild. Granted, half of those toons are only crafters, but I "play" them nonetheless. I can maybe realistically pull off a medium invasion during a crafting week, which this event most decidedly is not. I work full time, and I'm not going to turn the game into a second job for this incompetence. So this week, I will only play two of my 12 active toons. The first was an accident as I had crafting lined up before logging in today. The second is my guildmaster, who found no invasion targets to invade because 3 swoop planets do not align with large/medium/small invasion targets according to EAWare Math. The only reason I have to log into the game at all until next Tuesday is my typical Wednesday night swtor social hour with friends. Other than that, it's time to play the games I just picked up on the Steam Summer Sale--money that did not go into the Cartel Market, I should like to add. I'll maybe play the event the next time it comes up, if and only if Bioware makes swoop racing great for small guilds again.

A big giant negative that you omitted is the sheer tedium of inventory management once you do have your gear. Deconstructing 20+ items after *every* FP is a big chore, and if you dare to actually play the game instead, soon you will be interrupted by "inventory full!" after every boss, and then have to ask the group for bag clearance. Even though it's a universal problem so most people understand, it's still easy to feel shame for slowing the group down. Even toons that start with empty bags will encounter this before they finish the flashpoint weeklies. I know the legacy cargo bay got an expansion with 6.0, but tbh our main inventory bag should have been expanded to two or three tabs as well, just to handle the sheer amount of crap that the 6.0 gearing system throws at us. Coupled with a much larger deconstruction window, at least then we could have a hope of finishing our playing session before having to empty the bags. Better yet, an auto deconstruction filter option, with settings to deconstruct anything less than 306, deconstruct anything without gold amps, etc. would make the 6.0 gearing system 100000% better. I play 15 alts but only needed six gear sets, so I do appreciate the advantages of the new system, but once my toons are geared the sheer hassle of dealing with inventory overshadows anything else. I find myself almost exclusively pvping again simply because PVP drops less gear in more condensed form (crates that you don't have to open immediately). Hell, I know people who don't even bother opening the deconstruction window--they just throw gear on the ground, destroying it.

TBH, there's another reason why I KP farm in addition to what you have said: I don't need gear or tech fragments anymore, yet the game insists on cluttering my bags with random crap I can't use, have no need for, and have nothing to spend it on. So I have to stop every 30 minutes to an hour or so to decon crap to get more tech fragments that I can't use for anything relevant, which interrupts whatever I'm doing with whatever group I'm in. I already have gear on all the alts I'm going to use this xpac, I don't have anything worthwhile to spend the tech fragments on since I've decided I'm going to stop gearing alts because I've spent enough credits on Bioware's new credit sink system, and 11 alts is quite a reasonable stopping point that I arguably should have stopped earlier. KP farm doesn't fill my bags in 30-60 minutes with useless ***** that I don't need anymore, like almost all other group content in the game does. I WANT TO TURN IT OFF. Or at least a filter for auto-decon so I don't have to micromanage bag space several times in a single gaming session. Previous xpacs with maybe 1 personal loot and a couple things to roll on per boss were much, much easier to manage bags. Even a second bag tab (not legacy, on your character's person, you know where the loot spam actually goes), and an increase in the decon window capacity to 50-80 items, would help limit the tedium to once, maybe twice, per gaming session, instead of constant "Your inventory is full!" interruptions. Notice how KP farm wasn't a thing yet when 6.0 first dropped, because people needed to gear (admittedly they did it with HS farm but at least they were doing the entire FP), but now that they've had a chance to gear, they KP farm? Until Bioware adds features to MANAGE the crap their new gear system throws at us, there is KP farm, and if Bioware nerfs KP farm, I'm sure it won't be long before players find the next most efficient method of playing the game that balances earning conquest with ease of bag management.

Hear, hear. Even more infuriating: Sents can get this back via a utility, but Guardians can't. As if sents weren't already better than guardians in almost any respect anyway. And we still don't have access to the biochem schematic to craft the tactical that lets Enure reduce the cooldown of Focused Defense...one of the few good tacticals we (allegedly) have doesn't even exist yet. On Edit: If they *had* to do this to be able to fix the utility that reduces CD on leap when you are attacked, the least they could have done was attach the speed boost replacement bonus to something with a reasonable cooldown, like Blade Blitz.

While I have personally not used the refund timers (have too many alts needing set bonuses to need the said timers), I will be doing PSAs on fleet warning people of the change and urging them to spend their tech fragments now. I encourage others to do the same. On a side note, I'm very displeased about the nerfs to the Nimble Master set, especially since the utility to replace the double Force Charge is only going to Sentinels and not Guardians. I wasted 12k tech fragments for a set I could only use for a week, and the replacement set bonus is completely underwhelming. Saber Ward is on way too long of a cooldown to replace a mobility bonus that attached to a fifteen-second cooldown ability previously. Blade Blitz would have had a far more appropriate cooldown to attach the replacement mobility set bonus--Saber Ward is on such a long cooldown that Nimble Master set went from being great in PvP to completely useless in all scenarios.

You should PM this directly to both Eric and Keith; there's no way anyone at Bioware considered the law of unintended consequences

Over the couple months since 5.8, I've contributed quite a lot of constructive feedback (also here when someone tried to suggest a workaround for the originally-described problems I was experiencing with conquest revamp, and also here). But as I searched my old posts for conquest feedback, I noticed that over time my posts gradually became shorter, more curt, more blunt, as it became clearer and clearer that composing my feedback, and anthologizing the feedback that I had already given to make it more centralized and accessible to the devs, was a waste of time, that Keith would refuse to expedite changes that were already planned to try to save a game population that seemed to be in freefall. I'm clearly not the only one burnt out on providing feedback. Bioware's requesting of feedback that they had little to no intention of heeding proved quite pointless indeed. I went from regularly generating about 120-150k conquest points a week pre 5.8 to barely logging in once a week to do the PVP weekly on a single character now. Once a single toon is capped, there's not much point in going any further with the game. I'm quite burnt out on trying to find groups for PVE after my experiences with doing so between 5.8 and 5.9, amid the catastrophic population declines during that period. I'm well aware that by withdrawing from the game I'm contributing to the very population decline that I bemoan--but I have expended a more than reasonable degree of patience providing constructive feedback as to the urgency of fixing the problems that Bioware created with 5.8, only to watch that feedback nearly completely ignored. The devs do not have an unlimited supply of time to sit back and monitor metrics. I've already drifted off to EVE online, which surprise surprise, encourages alts.

I might do the PVP weekly on my main tomorrow...after that, let's just say that I reactivated an old EVE Online account and I might be goofing off with internet spaceships.

This. So much this. Now I pretty much log in Tuesdays to see what the objectives are and how repeatable they are...by Thursdays I'm not even bothering to play the game anymore because there's no point; Bioware suddenly hates alts and they're not going to change. I find myself watching youtube a lot more often instead of playing swtor.

Bug that benefits players by actually letting them alt for conquest? Oops, not intended, we need to fix that in a Thursday patch tomorrow... Bug that we've acknowledged is a bug but happens to align with our design goals of adding credit sinks? Well, fixing that bug might actually benefit a player somehow. We can't have that. *crickets*

The sad truth is that it won't be fixed because even though it is an acknowledged bug, the bug benefits Bioware's current design goals (i.e. improved credit sinks, they recently increased the GTN tax to try to add more), and there is no urgent reason to fix the bug. Unlike certain recent patches, it didn't break the game for large, vocal groups of players, so their response to this bug will be salutary (for them) neglect. They'll have long expected the economy to adapt to the increased mod removal cost by now. Because they're looking for credit sinks, this bug isn't really a bug, it's a feature! Not that I approve of this, of course--the above is sad but true.

No we don't. RNG is exciting when it's optional. Gambling is optional. Cartel packs are optional. Playing the DvL event was optional. Ben tried to make RNG mandatory for everything in the game at level cap. He tried to make RNG not optional. He tried to make RNG the only way to get level cap gear, period. Moreover, he didn't listen to the community screaming that RNG, with no workarounds for those with bad luck, would f over a significant part of the population. The community didn't tolerate RNG until it was once again made optional. Sure, you'll get the boxes no matter what, but unlike right at 5.0, you can also earn the gear directly now, without having to worry about RNG at all. And of course, the GC changes to make RNG optional instead of mandatory were slow walked to the point that they had to merge down to two NA servers. Where 5.0 hit gearing, 5.8 hit alts on a similar scale. It took far too long for Bioware to even admit there was a problem, they still seem ignorant about just how bad the problem is, and once again the studio has indicated it will slow walk fixes so that, by the time the conquest system encourages alts like it used to again, there is no one left playing the game.

PVP is one of the only sources of infinitely repeatable (albeit very low yield right now) conquest points right now. The first week of 5.8, this was not the case, there was no repeatable for doing warzones the first week. It was such a dumpster fire, and the outcry from PVPers (full disclosure: myself included) so great, that they deployed patch 5.8a the very next week to make PVP repeatable again--because they literally deployed 5.8 without realizing that doing so completely removed a section of the game from conquest. They still didn't do anything to address the yields being nerfed into the ground--we have to wait until 5.9 for that. But 5.8a begs the question: if they can deploy an emergency fix for one thing they broke, why could they not accelerate the planned 5.9 changes into a patch 5.8b that should have went out early to mid April? The published list of intended changes looks like updating a database of conquest point values, nothing more. They shouldn't have needed a month for that--especially after having gotten 5.8a out the door as quickly as they did. Just goes to show you, the studio had the ability to address player concerns and feedback about conquest in a timely manner. Even without giving into the demands for a rollback, they still could have timely addressed player concerns if doing so had any importance or urgency to them. However, with the VERY NARROW exception of 5.8a, they chose not to exercise this ability.

The real question is, will the devs make those adjustments quickly enough before the population declines below the minimum critical mass required to keep queues popping and sustain the game? While GC was eventually stitched together into something half-reasonable, the game sustained a grievous population decline while those adjustments only came as a trickle. There isn't enough population remaining post-GC for the game to absorb another blow over the course of several months on a similar scale. Population declines and increases in queue times have already become greatly noticeable--and that's as of the last time I logged into the game, a week and a half ago. I just can't find the motivation to log in and sit in a queue or wait for ops forming in fleet chat that hardly ever form anymore. The fact that Keith confirmed the studio plans on slow-walking these "adjustments" does not bode well for my motivation. Population will be nonexistent well before the conquest "adjustments" are complete.

Data can also be cherry picked, which I suspect Keith did here. Participation and guild rewards up? That makes sense if you are only looking for how many guilds make the guild conquest goal. Pre 5.8, it would've been how many guilds place on the board. Of course that one part of conquest is more flexible, it's the one thing that became less rigid instead of more rigid. That's probably the one metric that supports Keith's view. But he seems to be latching onto that single data point while ignoring: Active population DOWN Hours played DOWN Operations DOWN Queue times UP Number of characters making personal goal DOWN Number of characters *per legacy* making personal goal DOWN And it's possible to have a guild make the 200k goal and not get a single reward from it, if no one in the guild can break 15k because their personal conquest points are spread too thinly across their legacies. The legacy restrictions are VERY punishing for "oh I have to do this content on my healer to get it going, and start from 0...but my tank is at 12k and will now be locked out from these points and unable to meet goal now." And while this scenario was technically possible under the old conquest system too, it was far less likely because the old conquest system was far more flexible and it was generally much easier to get those last couple thousand points on a Sunday night than it is now. OK, tbf, Keith has acknowledged it's "alt-unfriendly," but I still believe he does not understand the urgency of actually addressing this. The studio is certainly doubling down on retaining legacy restrictions, instead choosing to add more one-off objectives in the hopes that the band aid is enough to successfully heal the gaping, sucking chest wound after all. And the worst is that the 5.9 changes to conquest could have easily been patched in by last Tuesday if only the studio found "alt unfriendliness" urgent enough to fix. But it's pretty clear that declining population doesn't concern them.

I do believe that part of the confusion might originate from the fact that Eric's last posted update about further changes coming in 5.9 spawned another 600+ post feedback megathread. Many of us were wondering whether there is any point in continuing to provide feedback, in the hopes of expediting repairs to conquest to make our alts relevant again. Because of the large volume of feedback saying the planned 5.9 update would not be sufficient, some of us wondered if any of the feedback concerning 5.9 plans could still actually be considered/implemented in 5.9. For some of us, the population for group content feels like it is declining faster than the game can sustain at the current development schedule. After this experience trying to get the character I needed conquest on into GF ops, for example, I felt pretty dispirited. While there is some vague acknowledgment that the current implementation of conquest is alt-unfriendly, I still see nothing in the planned 5.9 changes that would address role flexibility so I could switch to the needed role to run ops without slitting myself in the throat as far as reaching my personal conquest goals is concerned. The only realistic solution I see in the near to medium term is to limit my play to my guardian (so I can tank or DPS if needed...though I hardly ever tank), or my scoundrel healers (so I can heal or DPS). Note that any character that cannot dual role (AND be viable in both roles) is severely limited for conquest purposes in the current system. Note that "be viable in both roles" excludes PT tanking, might soon exclude sin tanking (don't have a 70 sin anyway), sage DPS, and to a lesser extent, merc DPS. Granted, that's a class balance issue, but class balance is interacting with New Conquest here in what could best be described as a prescription drug interaction/conflict gone horribly wrong. I would be reduced to trying to limit my play to jack-of-all-trades characters to maximize my chance of getting into a dwindling supply of operations, because switching to another character for role reasons would perma-screw the character I had been trying to play under the more punishing legacy lockout system. As far as the "participation in conquest is up!" claim, there is precisely ONE measurement where I could see this happening: Guild conquest goals met, expressed as a percentage of total guilds because all the guilds go after the small yield, and we players can't see the tail end. But I expect that the metrics will soon be measuring a rapidly declining population, if they haven't already. As for myself, I haven't found the motivation to log into the game and play in about nine days. Other metrics to consider: -Total active population? -Total hours played? -Total hours spent playing group content, such as ops, FPs, pvp, things that are generally reliant upon healthy population? -Percentage of people completing their personal targets? -Of those that do reach personal targets, how many characters are they able to do it on? (I wouldn't be surprised if fewer encryptions are awarded, even if more guilds reach the 200k goal, simply because each individual guild member will probably be earning far fewer encryptions on far fewer toons than from before 5.8.) Above all, compare these metrics to before 5.8, and consider absolute numbers in addition to percentages, because percentages can be heavily skewed by a declining population. TL: DR: I sense some dev frustration in the dev post. Why won't the ungrateful plebes accept that changes are coming Soon?™ Players are frustrated too, at the lack of a sense of urgency on the part of the devs to fix what they broke (deploying Eric's list of 5.9 changes into a 5.8b patch the next maintenance after he posted them would have been reasonable), and a failure to be sensitive to rapidly declining populations. There might not be anyone left to play the game if conquest is fixed at the same speed that galactic command was addressed.

I just wanted to pick this one out because this is possible without hacking, at least in 8v8. Healer classes can use their in-combat revival ability in 8v8s. (Those abilities are disabled in arenas.) It's rare, because most people reflexively release to the spawn the instant they die, and the revival ability is a casted ability (that can be interrupted). So 99% of the time, if I tried to use my revive ability in a warzone, it would fail because the target released to spawn while I was still casting. But it is possible and I have done it on occasion. It's much easier for a group in voice chat as the healer is likely going to have to tell the target NOT to release, before the target reflexively hits the "release to medcenter" button. As a corollary, if the corpse of a dead player does NOT disappear in a warzone, it means the dead player has NOT released to medcenter, and the chance is pretty high that such player is expecting an in combat rez as described above.

Yep, people are already getting in their practice at expediting/sabotaging matches so they'll have their match rush strats prepared if lockouts (or similar penalties) are implemented.

I haven't even logged into the game in about a week because the content I enjoy running is dead, thanks to the above. And I've noticed that the white knighters still haven't come up with a rebuttal to this dumpster fire of a conquest experience. So far, they've just skipped over it. I wonder why.

GSF already has a problem with people suicide ramming random stuff to get the match to end quicker. I'm not sure how 5.8 affected that, if it became more common to grind matches faster, or if people just stopped bothering with GSF because 5.8 made hardly anything in the game worthwhile. But if there is a lockout imposed upon PVP, that GSF problem is gonna spread to ground PVP. The people who would now just leave are instead going to do things like stand on the goal line in huttball to give the other team leaps to end the match faster; if your team does get the ball, the sorc who would have bailed is just gonna pull YOUR TEAM'S BALLCARRIER INTO THE FIRE instead to force a turnover and make the match faster. On other maps, heaven forbid it's a same or mixed faction match, because the now-deserters are going to whisper intel to the other team to try to get your team three capped so the match ends faster. (And in this case, you might not know it's happening.) Because that's what the type of people who now just bail will do if they can't just bail anymore. If they can't leave, they'll just do everything they can to take the people who are actually trying with them, so they can get out faster and not have the lockout. I'd much rather just get backfill ASAP than get the people who just leave now actively trying to sabotage the match I'm in to make it end faster instead. And that WILL happen. And for the love of all that is good, let us choose whether we want 4v4 or 8v8, and let us disable backfilling into match sabotage in progress, if lockouts are implemented.

I already have some classes that can do this, and have recently made multiple copies of such classes, for the reasons you cite. However, doing so just swaps out one problem for another. Instead of being locked out of content because legacy conquest lockouts killed role flexibility for GF ops, I'm instead locked out of playing certain characters at all. While there's always a particular class that's at the bottom, limiting playtime to characters that can dual spec and be "flexible" eliminates half the characters I could otherwise play. (The only class I'd remotely entertain tanking on is my guardian, as I have some familiarity with tank spec from PVP, but I'm generally not experienced at PVE tanking in this game and that's one area where most groups are NOT willing to suffer inexperience). I do like the proposal of lumping all earned conquest points across the entire legacy into a single, legacy-wide pool, and giving out "personal" rewards in multiples of 15k, and guild rewards in whatever proportion of points earned in eligible guild/15k exists. That would eliminate the conquest "waste" that now results from alting to a character you hadn't intended to play to fill an unanticipated role to get group content going. The only reason why you might still want a 15k reward to "pop" on a specific character would then be for the individual CXP bonus for hitting goal--but it'd also be easier to come back to the intended toon later for the next 15k bonus. Much less un-fun micromanaging that way. If we're going to have to deal with legacy based lockouts, having a legacy based point pool to match is only fair.

Congratulations Eric! As for this: We'll give you 80 conquest points per post while Eric is gone. Personal goal is 15000:D

A not insubstantial part of the feedback was that the changes were so bad, that they killed population and activity so quickly, that slow-walking any changes would grievously harm the health of the game. Sure enough, after a couple of weeks, additional consequences of the Giant Conquest Dumpster Fire became clear. The closest the original rush of feedback came to that was "the queues are going to die," but there's a world of difference between the-sky-is-falling predictions and a description of that actually happening. The original rush of feedback didn't really anticipate "I am pigeonholed into running an op on a specific character only, yet my specific character can't run the op to get the conquest points because the only op in six hours on a weekend night needed a different role" very well at all. It would have been nice to have had that acknowledged. While Eric made a couple of posts in March, they indicated no grasp of the urgency of the situation, and their last known patching schedule indicates that Bioware doesn't really grasp the urgency of the situation at all. By 5.9, the damage to the game is long done.

Really the only thing that I pointed out that I could see this response as applicable is the fact that PVP doesn't respect ignore lists. That doesn't necessarily mean I expect PVP to be all care bear and friendly matches. In fact, I expressly recognized that there are valid reasons for PVP to not respect ignore lists. I generally ignore only gold spammers as I know how useless /ignore is for most of the content that I do. However, if /ignore worked for PVP, I'd really only ignore the following: 1) Known chronic AFKers 2) Match throwers 3) Win traders of which 2 and 3 are explicitly recognized as cheating by Bioware (even if enforcement is woefully insufficient). I presently don't ignore people who are abusive in ops chat for the exact reason Trixxie pointed out--I want to see their incoming calls. None of this should imply that I expect PVP to be care bear. And perhaps it is inappropriate to compare PVP LFG to PVE LFG, in the current meta. But Bioware is proposing to introduce a PVE LFG mechanic (lockouts) to PVP LFG. That proposal makes such comparisons more appropriate than they would be for the current build of the game.

While PVE has an option to disable backfill, PVP doesn't. While PVE has an option to filter what you're queueing for, PVP doesn't. While PVE respects ignore lists, PVP doesn't. (Yes I recognize people can abuse ignore by ignoring only bads, but it's also impossible to /ignore abusive trolls in PVP, and PVP is nowhere near moderated heavily enough to offset the ignore list being disabled.) Just a few reasons off the top of my head why PVP shouldn't be subjected to a lockout. When PVP has the same pre-pop options as PVE, maybe I'll reconsider my opposition, but the above are my minimum requirements therefor.