Dozens of random NPC companions that I cannot interact with and are often in their undergarments have begun to appear at random in my Nar Shadda stronghold entrance. http://imgur.com/a/8vrpm1t

Nothing from Lord Patch on the first two bullets of this. Can this be updated?

Upon re-reading, I realized that you just lost yourself in your own example. Here, is where you started: and here is where you ended: So in part 1, you give two examples. 50 vs 200, a 4x difference and 250 vs 1000, also a 4x difference. Then in the second post you quoted the difference between your two examples, not the difference between the guilds in your second example and went on to claim that because you chose one example that was 5x higher than your first example, that meant that the difference was increasing in relative magnitude. So no, as before, the difference will be 4x for any arbitrary number of activities or point yield. I do apologize though, your problem seems to be 2nd grade reading comprehension, not second grade math.

A 20 player guild versus a 5 player guild is always going to be a 4x discrepancy, for literally any activity point values. Learn 2 Math.

It was not a mishandling. It was a deliberate price hike in the rewards for conquest in an effort to make players stay subbed longer without new content to entertain them. It was a blatant, shameless money grab. I unsubbed because of it. I am not resubbing until it is fixed.

There is an underlying pattern here that is present in many games, but especially MMO's as an essential conflict between players and developers, and that is the pace of reward. It is an indirect form of haggling over price. SWTOR charges a subscription for full access to the game, and offers cash shop items that accelerate the in game path to rewards. The most glaring conquest changes, though few people gave direct voice to them were the massive nerfs to the rate at which conquest points are earned. This is a price hike for the rewards. More time playing is more time subscribed, and a longer path to goals makes paid shortcuts more attractive. The price for conquest rewards was jacked up by the changes. The argument fundamentally going on now, is that players want the price returned to normal, or lower, than it was before, and Devs do not, they want the increased price to remain in place. Keith never once addressed the massively reduced yields from conquest and the absurd amount of time they expect players to play to get conquest rewards compared to what they were before. He did not touch that subject and he never will. He skillfully plucked the threads he could manipulate without changing the price hike, and made promises about those. He took the conversation away from the price hike and made it about side issues so he could avoid stating that he had no intention of really fixing the price hike. Then he made his counter-offer to the players, 15,000 personal target, reduced guild targets. This is the only meat of his post. A counter offer to their initial price hike. I hope everyone responds to it with the right answer. Not nearly good enough, get lost. They were successful in this endeavor in GC to by the way. They took the conversation away from "you've slowed down the rate we accrue gear end game gear for now reason" and put it on, "ok, we'll provide a deterministic safety engine to make sure that bad luck doesn't play too big a factor". They changed the message from being about them greedily wanting more money for less, and made it about side issues and GC never got fixed. I hope they lose the battle over the price of conquest rewards.

You could do this once for 7500 points if you had a full stronghold bonus and your guild was invading Ilum. If you have a full stronghold bonus now and you do this every day, you get 5775 points. Crafting an invasion force before was worth 5000 points max, vs 1825 points. Invasion force's component parts were also substantially less expensive. This one's maximum potential yield has increased even though its efficiency in terms of time and materials has been floored. If you were invading Ilum you could run any groupfinder flashpoint for 5000 points a pop, as many times as you want on as many toons as you want. Again, any GF flashpoint, 5000 points a pop. Group Finder Op pre-5.8, 5000 points a pop at max stronghold bonus (10,000 if invading hoth), infinitely repeatable. Warzone win 1250 (2500 with invasion), Warzone Participation 625 (1250 with invasion) This is actually new and decent and should be kept. You could do both heroics, every day, on every character, for 1250 points EACH, 3750 if invading Ilum. You could do this before for 2500 points, 7500 if Invading Ilum. Capping in the old system was much much less time consuming. It wasn't easier or harder because none of the activities have changes, it is now pointlessly more grind than it was before. There is no competitive reason for lowering these yields, because they are the same for everyone. there is no reason to lower them while keeping the target the same other than as a money grab. They want people to play longer for the same reward, so they subscribe longer, and their buy more cartel coins out of impatience.

This is backwards. More non-repeatable activities, and a bigger falloff of point generating power there is after the one time and dailies are out fo the way, the harder it is for small guilds to compete. If you compare a guild with 5 players and a guild with 20 players, no matter what the activities are, the 5 player guild must get 4 times the conquest points from each of its players to beat the 20 player guild's score. If all objectives were repeatable and yielded 1000 points an hour, and the 20 player guild's players spent 15 hours and hit conquest on 1 toon, than each player in the 5 player guild would need to do 60 hours of conquest to catch them. If there are 12,000 points to be had at 1000 points an hour, then the repeatable activities after that are 500 points an hour, the large guild needs 18 hours per player to get rewards, the small guild needs 108 hours per player. The more limited the efficient point granting activities are in how often you can do them, the harder it becomes for any guild to make up a player deficit through hard work. Eventually you run out of hours to catch up. So the more restrictive, and lower the point values for activities are, and the faster you exhaust really efficient conquest sources, the more it punishes the lower population guilds. Edit: if all of the per legacy limits were removed, and one times were one time per character, alts would be a stream wherein you can overcome a manpower deficit by giving your guild access to more efficient point gains and so would potentially benefit small guilds more. I'm less concerned about competition though, and much more concerned with getting a realistic conquest week where a guild of 3-4 players can hit the small planet threshold without killing themselves.

Hi Eric, The spirit of what you have outlined in this thread is good. It is good to see there is a dialogue and the points being raised about this system are registering with you. It is also good to have more depth on the thought process you have used to arrive at the changes to date, that helps immensely in offering suggestions that keep with your goals, but address the problems the community has with the changes (and frankly, with the old conquest system too, a revamp should come out better than the original after all, else why do it). This is going to be a long post. Apologies for that in advance. Before I get in to the meat of my points, I'd like to first provide context for me as a player and participant in the conquest system, and review what you've told us here and provide my thoughts. I am a subscriber for the next 2 days. I've cancelled my recurring subscription after I did what I feel is a thorough evaluation of the 5.8 conquest changes and assessed their overall impact on what I was trying to do. I have 10 70s on Satele Shan, one of each of the 8 imperial classes a shadow, and a commando republic side, and a smattering of other sub-70 alts. I am the GM of a very small guild (from 3 to 6 active players at a time for the last year or so) made up of a close knit group of friends who met online but outside of SWTOR. We aren't a raiding guild, we all play quite casually, and the only reason we have stuck around as subscribers is the guild flagship. This has been a cool reward we've chased for a while now. We have placed on a top 10 leaderboard for conquest exactly once on a crafting week we prepared for over the course of a couple months, and got at the time 30 encryptions for our efforts across 6 legacies, so we leaned on alts heavily to do that. We've advanced our flagship construction through dark project crafting and buying surplus encryptions from the GTN. Right now we have 3 active legacies, which will become zero if the current system remains largely unmodified. We were obviously super excited for the announcement of the 5.8 conquest revamp and the changes to benefit small guilds and allow them to earn the guild rewards more readily. Those hopes have been dashed by the extreme nerfs to conquest point gains, totally misaligned guild targets, and harsh alt unfriendliness of this iteration of the conquest system. Going from the slimmest of outside shots to place on the leaderboard and earn the guild rewards to having no shot at all, and having our non-conquest paths to finish the flagship get harshly nerfed at the same time has totally sapped our motivation to play. These are good intentions and we're all happy to hear them, but you've missed the mark on delivering improved rewards because you've lengthened the track to get the rewards for everyone by a geometric factor. By my math, players are earning about eight and a half times fewer conquest points on average than they were before. Some examples: Starfighter Match - base conquest point yield went from 500 points to 130 points AND planetary invasion bonus was removed AND the objective requires a win instead of participation. Generously assuming a 50% match win rate it takes fifteen times longer to earn conquest points by playing starfighter than it did before. It takes 47 wins to complete conquest on starfighter alone now with the max stronghold bonus (previously the max stronghold bonus and planetary invasion bonus together made it take 8 starfighter matches). 47 wins could easily take over 100 matches with even decent luck, I'm not sure it is even possible to compete in 100 starfighter matches in a week. Warzone Win - base conquest point yield went from 500 points to 330 points AND planetary invasion bonus was removed AND the objective went from fully repeatable to once per day PER LEGACY. It takes players three times longer to earn conquest points by winning war zones than it did before, they no longer earn them by participating, and you can earn a maximum of less than 6000 points for the week for your entire legacy doing this activity, which previously, could account for your entire conquest on any number of characters. Previously it took as few as 6 warzone wins to hit the personal target for the week. Now the cap for warzone is 30% of a single character's conquest target. Crafting War Supplies - requirements increased from 1 war supply to 10, materials cost increased 2.5 times. Even assuming rank 50 companions doing the crafting this is twenty times more expensive to do for the same yield. Crafting was good, it was not 20 times too good. (more on crafting later) So lets start with making conquests less homogenous and encouraging players to branch out into new activities. It is never a good idea to promote a path or course of action by removing the alternatives. It is easy to accomplish this by having all your baseline conquest activities (heroics, uprisings, flashpoints, warzones, GF ops, GSF, etc) as repeatable objectives and then add daily or one time objectives with large yields to the activities that you want to promote with that conquest. Lets say you wanted relics of the gree to promote GSF and Uprisings. A daily uprising, and GSF match win objectives that trigger in addition to the repeatable ones that give you a pile of bonus conquest, some CXP, and Credits. This promotes without removing the paths for those who are really averse to the particular content you are promoting. Nobody loses in this system, while many communities lose when objectives are taken away for certain weeks. Have a baseline, make the stuff you are promoting more attractive, you remove the homogeneity, you don’t piss people off by taking out their preferred content every other week. Crafting - I only want to make two points here. First, you didn’t reduce the overall amount crafting can contribute to conquest, you increased it, and then you made it vastly more expensive and more tedious. You nerfed war supplies by 20-25 times depending on how high companion influence is. Crafting war supplies, was at max, 5000 points a conquest, so ¼ of 1 character’s conquest. I have no context for what you’ve done to crafting weeks, if they exist anymore, or what their changes are. Second, your changes to war supplies and dark projects outside of conquest have far reaching detrimental implications. Everything that costs invasion forces or dark projects went up in cost significantly. Dark projects are a critical means for guilds who could not compete in conquest previously to expand their flagship, and that path became much longer as collateral damage to the conquest crafting nerfs. If you want to nerf crafting for conquest, nerf it for conquest, not in general. It doesn’t need nerfs in general. Also, I don’t know why you think crafting was a big part of relics of the gree or really any conquest other than the repeatable crafting weeks. I guess it is in the paradigm that each legacy only hits conquest on one character, but as you've seen from the alt outcry, that is simply not the case. As I’ve stated in other threads, the changes to yield targets this week will result in far fewer guilds getting encryption rewards than the leaderboards would have before the changes. The reason for this is that your targets are out of sync with the changes you’ve made to the objectives. Earning conquest points is 8-10 times harder now than it was before 5.8, your targets don’t currently reflect that, and under the old conquest objectives, might have been reasonable. Your small planet objective is particularly egregious, because it is the ground on which guilds too small to compete before are supposed to be able to compete now. Those guilds don’t have the amount of players you think they do. Your game isn’t that popular, sorry. And flashpoints? And GF Ops? And Heroics? And weekly quests in GSF/Warzones/Flashpoints? You removed a hell of a lot more paths to conquest than just Warzone/Starfighter participation, and you nerfed several more into oblivion by making them daily, deleting their planetary bonuses and flat out nerfing their point yield. Do you plan to fix any of that? Do you math? Let me do some simple math for you: 200/15 = 13.3 THERE ARE NOT 13 ACTIVE CONQUEST PARTICIPANTS IN MOST SMALL GUILDS. Repeat after me: SMALL. GUILDS. DON’T. HAVE. THIRTEEN. PLAYERS. More math 15/20 = 0.75. 2 * 500 * 3 * 2.5 * 7 = 52500 1 * 330 * 2.5 * 7 = 5775 5775/52500 = 0.11 You’re planning to reduce the target value by 25%. Heroic Missions on Ilum (a planet with only 2 heroics) were nerfed as a conquest objective by 89% if you only consider one character. Every alt you add increases the size of the nerf by 100% because you can only earn the reward once per legacy. Heroics were in my analysis one of the most lightly nerfed objectives. Others, like starfighter and crafting were nerfed by a factor of 15 or 20. Lowering the conquest target by 25% is ridiculously inadequate compensation for the level of grind that was introduced to conquest this patch. Do you plan to fix the negative economic impact your conquest changes have had to flagship construction through crafting, decorations, or anything else that cost invasion forces or dark projects? Let me tell you what is going to happen. Smart small guilds like mine (3-5 active players) who don't decide to unsub over the changes (unlike my guild) are going to stop doing conquest entirely. What they are going to do is farm raw materials for the massively more expensive crafting objectives, or arbitrage the process by buying materials and selling the assembly components at a markup, and then sell them on the GTN to players in the mega-guilds fighting it out for top of the leaderboards. When those guilds who have finished their flagships collect their encryptions and have totally finished flagships they will sell those encryptions on the GTN to finance their next conquest, and we will buy them back from them with the money they paid us for the mats. So instead of participating in conquest, because you made it so ****** for small guilds that rely on small numbers of players with alts, we'll simply become feeders for the big fish and buyers for their unwanted rewards to finish our flagships. So this is not a grip at the changes, because this was a terrible wart of the old system as well, so let me just ask that you answer a few theoretical design questions: Does it make sense for objectives that track absolutely everything about them by character, to be limited per legacy? Is there a reason it should be harder to complete a legacy objective on the second or third character than on the first? Does this restriction improve the gameplay or prevent abusive gameplay in any way? Thanks for taking the time to respond to the feedback. I hope changes can be made quickly to bring the conquest system up to its potential. To summarize my feelings on this plan in a quick point form: Point Targets for small guilds are still too high even after the proposed change. They need to be within reach of actual small guilds. 13 active conquest participating players is not a small guild. Everything that was repeatable and became daily needs to go back to repeatable Use daily objectives like bonus missions, something you get in addition to the baseline reward. Rotate these to promote the content week over week and break up the monotony without forcing players to abandon the content they enjoy when it is not the week that content is being promoted. Something needs to account for the points lost from planetary invasion bonuses. Everything tied to legacy needs to be tied to character instead. This was a wart of the old system as well, but hitting the target on the second character should not be any more tedious than doing it on the first. It already has sufficient tedium from being the second time in a week you are doing it. Something needs to be done to blunt the impact of the crafting nerfs for non-conquest purposes, such as decorations, or crafting for encryptions directly. Very bad things are going to happen to the economy, participation in conquest, and participation in activities in general. Your production game is not a testing ground. You have a public test server, you do communications with the public. Look for feedback before you make changes live. Tell us in detail what you are going to do. At least some of this feedback could have been solicited if you'd stated before 5.8's launch that you intended to dramatically reduce the amount of conquest points rewarded for most activities, and make completing personal objectives on more than one character an unrealistic goal. You have no doubt lost many subscribers over this who would have stayed if your course corrections had been done before the revamp went live. Saying you intended this to be the first in an iterative process doesn't excuse the fact that you released it without any details or feedback from your players about it. That is a shameful lack of preparation and lack of professionalism.

Hi Eric, The spirit of what you have outlined in this thread is good. It is good to see there is a dialogue and the points being raised about this system are registering with you. It is also good to have more depth on the thought process you have used to arrive at the changes to date, that helps immensely in offering suggestions that keep with your goals, but address the problems the community has with the changes (and frankly, with the old conquest system too, a revamp should come out better than the original after all, else why do it). This is going to be a long post. Apologies for that in advance. Before I get in to the meat of my points, I'd like to first review what you've told us here and provide my thoughts. These are good intentions and we're all happy to hear them, but you've missed the mark on delivering improved rewards because you've lengthened the track to get the rewards for everyone by a geometric factor. By my math, players are earning about eight and a half times fewer conquest points on average than they were before. Some examples: Starfighter Match - base conquest point yield went from 500 points to 130 points AND planetary invasion bonus was removed AND the objective requires a win instead of participation. Generously assuming a 50% match win rate it takes fifteen times longer to earn conquest points by playing starfighter than it did before. Warzone Win - base conquest point yield went from 500 points to 330 points AND planetary invasion bonus was removed AND the objective went from fully repeatable to once per day PER LEGACY. It takes players three times longer to earn conquest points by winning war zones than it did before, they no longer earn them by participating, and you can earn a maximum of less than 6000 points for the week for your entire legacy doing this activity, which previously, could account for your entire conquest on any number of characters. Crafting War Supplies - requirements increased from 1 war supply to 10, materials cost increased 2.5 times. Even assuming rank 50 companions doing the crafting this is twenty times more expensive to do for the same yield. Crafting was good, it was not 20 times too good. (more on crafting later) So lets start with making conquests less homogenous and encouraging players to branch out into new activities. It is never a good idea to promote a path or course of action by removing the alternatives. It is easy to accomplish this by having all your baseline conquest activities (heroics, uprisings, flashpoints, warzones, GF ops, GSF, etc) as repeatable objectives and then add daily or one time objectives with large yields to the activities that you want to promote with that conquest. Lets say you wanted relics of the gree to promote GSF and Uprisings. A daily uprising, and GSF match win objectives that trigger in addition to the repeatable ones that give you a pile of bonus conquest, some CXP, and Credits. This promotes without removing the paths for those who are really averse to the particular content you are promoting. Nobody loses in this system, while many communities lose when objectives are taken away for certain weeks. Have a baseline, make the stuff you are promoting more attractive, you remove the homogeneity, you don’t piss people off by taking out their preferred content every other week. Crafting - I only want to make three points here. First, you didn’t reduce the overall amount crafting can contribute to conquest, you increased it, and then you made it vastly more expensive and more tedious. You nerfed war supplies by 20-25 times depending on how high companion influence is. Crafting war supplies, was at max, 5000 points a conquest, so ¼ of 1 character’s conquest. I have no context for what you’ve done to crafting weeks, if they exist anymore, or what their changes are. Second, you’re changes to war supplies and dark projects outside of conquest have far reaching detrimental implications. Everything that costs invasion forces or dark projects went up in cost significantly. Dark projects are a critical means for guilds who could not compete in conquest previously to expand their flagship, and that path became much longer as collateral damage to the conquest crafting nerfs. If you want to nerf crafting for conquest, nerf it for conquest, not in general. It doesn’t need nerfs in general. Also, I don’t know why you think crafting was a big part of relics of the gree. As I’ve stated in other threads, the changes to yield targets this week will result in far fewer guilds getting encryption rewards than the leaderboards would have before the changes. The reason for this is that your targets are out of sync with the changes you’ve made to the objectives. Earning conquest points is 8-10 times harder now than it was before 5.8, your targets don’t current reflect that, and under the old conquest objectives, might have been reasonable. Your small planet objective is particularly egregious, because it is the ground on which guilds too small to compete before are supposed to be able to compete now. Those guilds don’t have the amount of players you think they do. Your game isn’t that popular, sorry. And flashpoints? And GF Ops? And Heroics? And weekly quests in GSF/Warzones/Flashpoints? You removed a hell of a lot more paths to conquest than just Warzone/Starfighter participation, and you nerfed several more into oblivion by making them daily, deleting their planetary bonuses and flat out nerfing their point yield. Do you plan to fix any of that? Do you math? Let me do some simple math for you: 200/15 = 13.3 THERE ARE NOT 13 ACTIVE CONQUEST PARTICIPANTS IN MOST SMALL GUILDS. Repeat after me: SMALL. GUILDS. DON’T. HAVE. THIRTEEN. PLAYERS. More math 15/20 = 0.75. 2 * 500 * 3 * 2.5 * 7 = 52500 1 * 330 * 2.5 * 7 = 5775 5775/52500 = 0.11 You’re planning to reduce the target value by 25%. Heroic Missions on Ilum (a planet with only 2 heroics) were nerfed as a conquest objective by 89% if you only consider one character. Every alt you add increases the size of the nerf by 100% because you can only earn the reward once per legacy. Heroics were in my analysis one of the most lightly nerfed objectives. Others, like starfighter and crafting were nerfed by a factor of 15 or 20. Lowering the conquest target by 25% ridiculously inadequate compensation for the level of grind that was introduced to conquest this patch. Do you plan to fix the negative economic impact your conquest changes have had to flagship construction through crafting, decorations, or anything else that cost invasion forces or dark projects? So this is not a grip at the changes, because this was a terrible wart of the old system as well, so let me just ask that you answer a few theoretical design questions: Does it make sense for objectives that track absolutely everything about them by character, to be limited per legacy? Is there a reason it should be harder to complete a legacy objective on the second or third character than on the first? Does this restriction improve the gameplay or prevent abusive gameplay in any way? Thanks for taking the time to respond to the feedback. I hope changes can be made quickly to bring the conquest system up to its potential.

It is a reasonable idea, but the numbers are still off. The leaderboard performance this week is going to be highly inflated thanks to the invasion force turn in objective and years of stockpiled invasion forces to float guilds through the first few conquests. Even with those inflated totals less than 30 guilds are on pace to meet the 460k objective by end of the week (remember that the presence of more efficient one time content and invasion inflation means about 70% of the points should be earned within the first 3 days). If your thresholds were adjusted to 160k for the reward and 500k for the titles, it would be more reasonable and in reach of actual small guilds.

3 days (43%) of the conquest week in the books so lets do a little math. I've taken a best guess at the amount of active time it requires a player to repeat each type of objective, and scored that against the point yield to come up with an expectation of conquest points per minute. Accounting for the bugged world bosses giving free points, the optimal points per minute when all activities are available is 422.6. With all of the one time content removed the points per minute is reduced to 60.6. At this point I make a couple assumptions in my model. The first is that approximately 1 day is spent on the low hanging fruit for conquest contributors before it is gone. So players operate at an efficiency of 422.6 points per minute for 1 day, and 60.6 points per minute for the remaining time, at the top end of the leaderboards any way where we can expect player routines to be optimized and adapted to completing conquest. We are for now going to ignore the effect of stockpiled invasion forces and Crafting: Aid The War Effort, because that is not going to be indicative of the system beyond the first few weeks while invasion forces are sunk into flailing against the nerfs and pretending everything is ok until they are gone. However, the existence of these means the totals we see on the leaderboards are highly inflated. Our model of 1 day at 422.6 and 6 days at 60.6 for the conquest week means that in all likelihood, close to 69% of the conquest points to be earned this week have already been realized. Using that number and checking the leaderboards that suggests the following: Only one guild is on pace to meet the large planet conquest goal. The current leader is setting a pace to hit about 2.8 million points. The second place guild is on pace to get 1.9 million conquest points. On the medium leaderboard, 6 guilds are on pace to meet the conquest goal. The top guild here is actually just on pace to meet the large planet goal. On the small leaderboard, 7 guilds are on pace to meet the conquest goal. The top 2 guilds on the small leaderboard are on pace to meet the medium leaderboard. So this week, we can expect about 14 guilds, instead of 30 to earn encryptions. I suspect the number to be higher than that, but not by much. Guilds that are close will dig into their invasion force stockpiles to push over the top at the end of the week, further depleting them. If large and medium targeted guilds down rank, you can add another 1 medium winner and 12 small winners would be possible. So if people target the right planets, you'll see close to the 30 winners that would have happened before, but just barely. 10th place on the large leaderboard is 46,000 points ahead of the pace required to meet the small planet goal, and the 10th place on the medium leaderboard is 508 points ahead of that pace, so it is unlikely there are a significant number of guilds below top 10 that would make the cut for small if they downranked. What this data reinforces is that the conquest point goals are poorly fit to the rate conquest points are earned, to the point where they are rewarding fewer guild rewards than just a top 10 for each planet. I'm pretty sure the design intent was to allow a larger pool of guilds to be competitive.

It is incumbent upon Bioware/EA to earn my subscription money with a quality gaming experience. The subscription fee is my side of the contract with them and my leverage to ensure they provide a quality gaming experience. I will be absolutely 100% clear with what I want to see from the game and what changes I deem to be unacceptable, and I will maintain or cancel my subscription accordingly. I am neither being hyperbolic, nor whiny, simply being clear about my wants and what I will do when they aren't met. For the last year or so my primary motivation for playing the game is to complete the unlocking and decorating of my guild's flagship. There are only a handful of active players left in the guild and we all have limited playtime so our ability to compete for conquest leaderboards was nil. We were extremely excited to hear about the 5.8 conquest changes, and the chance for us to be able to work hard at conquest and move the flagship unlocking forward at a much better pace as we would no longer have to worry about leaderboards and would have a static target to hit. Imagine our disappointment when we found that while the goal had been set statically, it was well outside of our current reach due to severe alt unfriendliness, and hugely reduced conquest point yield toward personal targets. In addition, in unannounced changes, our ability to progress the flagship through dark project crafting was all reduced significantly by the invasion force sinks and massively increased material costs for crafts. That is simply not acceptable to me. I had a goal I was prepared to work for and had been working towards continually for a long time yanked miles further down the line by ill considered changes. In essence, bioware told me and my guildies that our goal would cost us substantially more time and money, and so we collectively told Bioware that if that is the case, we're done with this game. If translucentwolf enjoys being milked for every dollar he has certainly found the right company to give his money to. I place more value on my time and money, and so I'm considerably less willing to tolerate a service provider who fails so monumentally to deliver on positive changes.

Do you place no value in the time and money you spend on this game? If they took the activities you wanted to do and the rewards you wanted to earn and randomly made them about a factor of 8 more tedious (I am very specifically not using the word harder here, nothing about conquest has become harder, it has just become needlessly more tedious for no stated reason) to obtain, you'd just be cool with it?

I will resub if... 1) Everything "per legacy" in conquest becomes per character 2) Warzone, Starfighter and Groupfinder Flashpoint conquest rewards are returned to at least their pre 5.8 state 3) Guild planetary targets are lowered by at least a factor of 2 4) Guild rewards for Medium and Large Planets are buffed to the point that mega-guilds actually chase them 5) All repeatable conquest rewards that were changed to daily are changed back, or degraded to repeatable at a lower conquest yield once the daily is met (presuming the repeatable yields are at least pre-5.8 levels and the daily yields are a factor of 2 higher) 6) Any conquest point yields that were nerfed are reverted to their pre-5.8 values (or buffed beyond that value for undervalued tasks, like virtual every solo PVE task) 7) Conquest point yields are adjusted to reflect the loss of planetary invasion bonuses

Under the old system, his day one activities would have earned him 66,250 points (3 completed characters and work on the 4th) and if his three guildies efforts were similar, his guild would be sitting around 265,000 points, which as of this reading would be 10th on the Ilum leaderboard. In the new system, his guild has ~90,000 points (of which 40,000 are likely the result of a bug), towards a minimum goal of 460,000 for the week. It doesn't take more evidence than that to understand that the conquest point yields were heavily nerfed and the system designed to be colossally more grindy.

for reference, I created a spreadsheet comparing the rewards of objectives for Relics of the Gree from that last pre 5.8 conquest round to the 5.8 version to get an idea for how much harder it is under the current point values to meet the personal goals/guild goals. Comparing the yields paints a pretty bleak picture. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bFobmGXBOJwvxG6d7b6sKAPm_DXsnIItSkJzu6TP4Lg/edit?usp=sharing Pre 5.8 there were 17 objectives to choose from that rewarded conquest points. Of those 5 were removed: Unranked Warzone Participation Warzone Weeklys Starfighter Weeklys Group Finder Flashpoints Galactic Flashpoints Weekly 5 New objectives types were added replacing those: Critical Missions for a target planet (Ilum/Iokath) Critical Missions for an Event (Gree) Group Finder: Uprisings Crafting: Aid the War Effort Starfighter: Mission Objectives 1 Objective Type kept the same maximum potential yield: Specific Operations - Any Difficulty (TFB and the Grey Secant). This objective is essentially unchanged from pre-5.8 4 Objective Types were "lightly nerfed". I use this term ironically. The efficiency (time/materials invested vs conquest point yield) of these objectives were reduced by a factor of 5 or less. Lets be clear, requiring 5 times more time and effort investment for the same yield is a MASSIVE UNSPEAKABLE NERF, but these have to be classified as the light nerfs due to the following category Specific Flashpoint Hardmodes - base yield reduced from 1000 to 750, up to 3x planetary invasion bonus removed. Efficiency reduced by a factor of 4 in optimum play. Specific World Bosses - base yield still 2000, up to 2x planetary invasion bonus removed. Efficiency reduced by a factor of 2 in optimum play. Warzone Win - base yield reduced from 500 to 330, up to 2x planetary invasion bonus removed, frequency changed from repeatable to daily. Efficiency reduced by a factor of 2.6 in optimum play, maximum yield for this activity reduced from unlimited to 5775 per legacy per conquest. Target Planet: Heroic Missions - base yield reduced from 500 to 330, up to 3x planetary invasion bonus removed, frequency changed from repeatable to daily. Efficiency Reduced by a factor of 4.54 in optimum play. Maximum yield for this activity reduced from 18750 per character per daily available for planet per conquest week to 5775 per legacy per conquest week. The remaining 7 objective types fall into the "Heavily Nerfed" category. The conquest efficiency of these objectives were reduced by an aggregate factor in excess of 5. That means your time and/or material investment to obtain the same results has quintupled or worse. Crafting War Supplies - base yield unchanged. Cost of materials increased by circa 2.5 times, crafts required per objective increased by a factor of 10. Efficiency reduced by a factor of 25. Crafting Invasion Force - base yield reduced from 2000 to 750, cost of materials increased by circa 2.5 times. Efficiency reduced by a factor of 6.66. Maximum yield for a conquest week actually went up from 5000 to 13125 points per legacy per week by moving to daily. Target Planet: Rampage - base yield changed from 1000 to 330, up to 3x planetary bonus removed. Efficiency reduced by a factor of 9.09 at optimal play. Maximum yield for a conquest week reduced from 7500 to 5775 per legacy per conquest week in spite of moving from one time to daily. Target Planet: Champions of the Opposing Faction - base yield changed from 1000 to 500, up to 3x planetary bonus removed. Efficiency Reduced by a factor of 6 at optimal play. Maximum yield per week increased from 7500 to 8750 by moving from one time to daily. Starfighter Match - base yield changed from 500 to 130, up to 2x planetary bonus removed. Requirement changed from participation to victory modeled as a 50% efficiency decrease on aggregate as each match should have a roughly equal number of winners and losers. Efficiency reduced by a factor of more than 15. Group Finder: Operations - base yield reduced from 2000 to 750, up to 2x planetary bonus removed, objective moved from repeatable to daily. Maximum yield reduced from unlimited to 13125 points per legacy per week. Taking the raw average of objective efficiency losses under the 5.8 system, completing the personal goal for the week takes 8.76 times more time and material investment than it did pre-5.8.

It is difficult to tell because of the bugs, but most if not all of the non-repeatable or daily repeatable goals are per legacy. So there are harsh harsh diminishing returns on the time it takes to reach a personal goal for every character after the first. This hurts a ton of guilds where a few dedicated players cap many toons each week. Got your War Zone win on your main today? You can't win more warzones on alts for points, because its 1 win per day for the legacy, not the character. With all of the goals being per character, it makes no sense to have anything be limited across the legacy.

The essence of it is distilled here. The concepts discussed and executed and the direction is good, the numerical implementation of it is terrible.

My suggestions on how to quick and dirty fix 5.8 conquest: 1) Reduce guild targets - Small: 160,000 (8 player targets), Medium: 320,000 (16 player targets), Large: 480,000 (24 player targets), the current numbers here are totally out to lunch, sorry, needs a fix. If you want a multi-million planet, add a huge class of planet with unique rewards aimed at the large conquest guilds. 2) Increase Medium and Large Guild Target Rewards - make them exactly double/triple the small rewards excluding encryptions which can stay as is. 3) Undo the changes to the cost of war supplies, or reduce the attachment/component cost to 1 of each type rather than 4 so the cost is at least similar. 4) Re-introduce the exotic isotope stabilizer recipe for dark projects, or baring that, introduce a vendor that will give the player 10 assorted droid parts per exotic isotope stabilizer, and add refined isotope stabilizer to the jawa scrap peddlers at a cost of 5 assorted droid parts. 5) Make all one time and daily conquest objectives per character instead of per legacy 6) Add tooltips to the one time/daily/repeatable indicator so people know what it means 7) Increase the conquest point yield of all daily objectives by 50%, when the daily objective is complete, add a repeatable objective with the same goal, but no XP/CXP/Credits reward, and half the conquest reward, so that players can continue doing the activities they enjoy, just at reduced efficiency for conquest. 8) Make PVP and GSF related objectives based on participation rather than victory, or create repeatable objectives for participation so the victory objectives are a bonus rather than the only conquest reward. 9) Reinstate missing flashpoint, warzone, and GSF conquest objectives from the pre-5.8 iteration at reasonable conquest values and little to no CXP/Credit values if you're worried about those activities become too rewarding in terms of CXP (hint: they aren't too rewarding now, and increasing participation in these group activities is not a bad thing, we like queues that actually pop)

A pitty you didn't put those invasion forces on the GTN. Could have made a small fortune and ultimately come out with much more value than the conquest rewards.

My First Impressions: 1) Removal of play options is always the wrong choice. Removing the ability to craft dark projects with exotic isotope stabilizers, dramatically increasing the materials for crafting war supplies to unify them, dramatically reducing the conquest point yield of PVP and GSF, these were all poor choices. My hope for these changes were that solo PVE content would be able to produce a conquest yield similar to PVP and GSF under the old system, as I don't enjoy or partake in those activities and don't have the schedule to again do regular group activities. Not only did that not happen, PVP and GSF had their conquest paths dramatically reduced. All steps in the complete wrong direction. 2) Conquest targets are out to lunch. The yields have diminishing returns against the point targets as you go from small to medium to large which is going to make everyone push for the small yield planets. This reduces the chance of small guilds appearing on the leaderboards which was a stated goal of the revamp. Finally, even the small yield is way too high a target. Small guilds do not have 23 active players. Having the guild target for small guilds being 23x the personal target is therefor beyond stupid. 8x would have been ideal, 16x for the medium, and 24x for the large, with the rewards scaled to match (i.e. medium = 2x small, large = 3x small). A time limited return doesn't need to diminish when you can only obtain it once a week. Guilds would therefor be best served to target the highest planet they think they could obtain and leaderboards would be meaningful for guilds of all sizes as had been stated was the intention. 3) Diminishing returns across multiple characters within a legacy wasn't addressed, and was the easiest thing to address. There is no reason for the one time objectives to be per legacy and not per character, since the targets are per character and not per legacy. There is no reason to punish people who want to participate across multiple characters for their guild. They are already punished by the nature of zero sum with gearing and proficiency for mains vs alts and don't need to be double punished by having all the low hanging fruit removed by the first character they complete the conquest on. I haven't tested the per day rewards yet to see if they are per day per character or per day per legacy. If they are the latter I'm canceling my sub again (I remain subbed for the express purpose of completing the unlocking and decorating of my guild flagship, after a month of frustration with this task I prepared to unsub, and held off at the announcement of a conquest revamp favoring small guilds) The things that were done well: The interface is cleaner, having command and credit rewards as you hit conquest goals is superb, the stated goals of the revamp, to make conquest friendly towards small guilds, to make leaderboards meaningful to a wider audience, these were all great, and the conceptual ideas for them were spot on. The numbers however, have drowned all that success in a pile of steaming dog sh*t. In conclusion: Design - A+ Execution - F-