[Conquest Feedback and Upcoming Changes]

Crafting Changes Too Harsh

Crafting in Conquests was just too good prior to 5.8. There is a feeling though that we cut a bit too deep on its overall impact to Conquests. The War Supply schematics were combined which made them harder to craft, and their point contribution went down, even with the added functionality of being able to consume them.

Plan: We are going to give it some time and monitor the impact of these changes, and then we will make any needed adjustments in 5.9 or beyond.

 

You could've simply reduced the amount of conquest points from crafting. But no, you instead choose to make the change without saying anything first - so as to avoid the uproar this would cause - and now you come and say that you're gonna "monitor the impact of these changes"?

Please, we all know you're not gonna do anything to get it back the way it was.

Sorry, but this is not good enough. And a lie by omission is still a lie. You knew full well you were gonna screw us over with this changes, but you simply choose to avoid a headache of pages and pages of people raging about it by not saying anything.

And all the grand declarations you've made about how you were gonna be transparent with all the upcoming changes were, once again, completely false.

[Conquest Changes Coming in 5.8]

There are some good things in these changes you're making, but there are also not so many good things. Let's go over them in order, shall we?

Hey folks,

• Completing objectives will now award credits, experience points, and Command Experience in addition to their Conquest points.

Considering that most of the objectives, (Heroics and Dailies, PVP, GSF, OPS, FPs and Uprisings), already do this, I don't think this was a priority, but still a nice thing to do.

 

• Conquest point values for all objectives have been rebalanced across the board.

This can be really good or monumentally bad. What does "rebalanced" actually mean for you, guys? And can you give us some example?

 

• In addition to one-time and repeatable, there are now also daily objectives. Some current objectives will change type with 5.8.

I'm on the fence about this. Could be good, giving more options to people that don't PVP or craft, or bad if it these objectives plays a major part in how many points you will gain by completing them. As for the type changes, again, can you give us some example?

 

• The Invasion bonus for Conquest objectives has been removed.

Why? I don't think the bonus posed any kind of problem, except maybe when it came to calculating how many points you'd actually get from each objective. But even that was easily fixed, since the formula was known.

 

• The Stronghold bonus still applies but has been changed. Each owned Stronghold counts for a 25% bonus, up to a max of 150%. Sorry to all you “Stronghold full of chairs” owners out there.

I could, maybe, get behind this if what you actually mean is that each stronghold still needs to be completely unlocked, even if it remains empty, to actually count for the bonus. If, as many of us thinks, it means that you just need to buy the stronghold to have the bonus without needing to fully unlock it, then this is a big no. And your little comment at the end of it doesn't help one bit.

If all people needs to do, now, to get the full bonus is just to buy the stronghold then it's a big "**** you" to each and everyone of us that put time and effort into farming the credits needed to buy and unlock everythin.

It doesn't matter if people have stuffed them full of chairs - because stronghold counts for nothing in this game, there's not even any sort of leaderboard for it and with the merges Prestige points means even less than before - because people still worked their *** off to get it done, so they should have the right to choose to fill them full of junk if that's what they want to do. Also, even if you will still need to fully unlock 6 SHs, you can bet that the majority of players will leave them empty, except maybe for the basic utilities like bank(s), gtn, modification station and mailbox.

 

• Weekly Conquests are no longer on a set schedule and will be randomly selected each week. The exception to this rule is that Conquests that coincide with recurring events will still be on a set schedule (such as the Gree event).

Again, why? We finally got you to give us a schedule that was, more or less, regularly updated and now you go and change it? What purpose does adding another RNG thing to game serves, exactly?

It's just going to mess up all the guilds that actually prepare in advance an work on a full set of guild events based on each conquest week. Not to mention those hunting down a specific planet (or planets) to complet the Galaxy Conqueror achievement; this will not make them happy. At all.

Also, since pretty much nothing except the Xenoanalyst and the Eyeless counts as conquest objectives, why are you still keeping the conquests tied to the recurring events? It doesn't make much sense at all.

 

On the Guild Conquest front, we have gone even further on changes. We have untied the Guild rewards from the Conquest leaderboards, with the exception of the Guild in first place as they will still receive the Conqueror title and planetary bonuses. A big change is that now every planet falls into one of three designated Invasion Targets. These targets differ by the minimum Conquest Points thresholds that we call “Planetary Yields.” These thresholds determine the minimum points a Guild has to earn to receive those Conquests rewards. The higher the yield the harder it is for the Guild to receive the reward, but also means a better reward.

You evidently didn't think this through. This new system - seriously guys, what the hell is with you and RNG/tiers systems?! - won't change anything. Big guild will still win and small guild will be left with scraps. Exchanging the leaderboard for thresholds not only doesn't help smaller guild chances of winning a planet or getting the rewards, but they also add another layer of difficulty. Right now, all you need to do get at least the reward is to get into the top ten; with this change you will also need to meet a certain number of points, which will increase the difficulty, especially if a guild wants to try and go for a bigger planets. In short, you're making things worse than what they currently are.

 

We made this change to encourage more leaderboard competition among similarly sized Guilds, smaller Guilds going after smaller Yields, etc. Note that this is not a restriction, just a recommendation. If a larger Guild wants to go for lesser rewards in a smaller yield, they can, and the same is true of a smaller Guild trying to go for the highest yield.

You're basically creating a bigger problem, here. Yeah, maybe in the beginning some of the smaller guild will try and go for the medium/biggest planets, but that will stop pretty fast, because they will have even less of a chance of actually getting anything out of it.

All the while, bigger guilds will monopolize the small and medium yield because yeah, maybe the reward will also be smaller, but the time and effort required to actually get something for their "work" will also be less, leaving more time for other things.

 

All in all, a few good things. Many potentially really bad things.

At some point, you will have to realize that you can't disregard the majority of your playerbase just to appease a few. Especially not if you want to keep the game afloat.

[Conquest Changes Coming in 5.8]

Six empty Strongholds does mean 150% bonus, yes.

 

-eric

 

Do you just need to own the stronghold to get the bonus or do you still need to unlock it all? Because if that's not necessary and you guys are going to award the full bonus to people that have just bought the strongholds and didn't actually unlock them, then you're giving a really big finger to those of us that spent millions of credits to buy and unlock everything.

[Please Increase/Remove Guild Member Cap With Merges]

In most, I would go as far to say all, cases this is true, despite ignorant people claiming it's not the case. It's of course nothing that can be avoided by anyone so trying to claim otherwise is dumb^10, because really large guilds, and nobody needs a guild with let's say more than100, max 200 accounts, are by their nature unsocial to a large degree - you could compare it to people living in a skyscraper or megacity where almost nobody knows anyone else who's living there as well. Saying it's not true is absolutely stupid and ignorant, but people claiming otherwise want mega guidls for the very reasons you listed here, so they need to grasp for "arguments" lol.

 

When you resort to insulting people you don't even know, mate, the only thing you accomplish is to make clear to all who reads your posts that you have no arguments whatsoever and that it's you who's grasping to find one.

While conquests are useful to a guild's social life, because they bring people together to try and achieve a common goal, they are not essential.

There are many in the game that don't care about conquest, but they do care about their guildmates.

I've been following this thread since the beginning and I've never seen Ula say something about wanting to get more people to win conquests more easily, because that's not his point, at all.

The point is that a GM should not be forced to purge his guild every 15 days - at most! - of the less used alts just to be able to free space for other players that would like to join the guild.

 

And all the arguments I've seen about how removing the cap would be unfair towards smaller guilds makes no sense: if a guild can't get more than a 100 members - with any number of alts involved - then it's pretty clear that they're not taking full advantage of the current cap, so why should it pose a problem if the cap gets removed?

Competing in a conquest - because apparantely this is all you and many others in this thread cares about, as if the game revolves only around that - against a 1000 members guild or a 10.000 members guild is not gonna change anything at all if they can't even get to half the cap *now*.

[Please Increase/Remove Guild Member Cap With Merges]

Double signed.

 

Just remove the cap altogether. As Ula said, there's no point in it and I won't make a change for smaller guilds, because if they're not hitting even half of the current cap, they're sure as hell are not gonna get more players just because there's no more cap.

[Game Update 5.4a]

next batch of codes will most likley be put up when most of us in the EU go to bed...why not just credit everyone with something via the mail ? even if people who didn't login receive the item they will think it as a nice thought .?

or as someone posted here make the codes have unlimited uses but only allowed once per account.

 

Agreed.

[Can't get Stronghold till next Tuesdays reset]

They put caps and such on these things because people will grind the crap out of something and then the next day complain there's nothing new. It's not Bioware's fault people don't want to stretch it out a bit and enjoy the game for what it is.

 

It's like me working in the bookstore, instead of walking in and browsing through the store to see where the book they want is, since they should have an idea of what the genre is, they stop right at information the second they walk inside, then ask us to look up like 10 books, grab them for them, and then they don't even buy them because we don't price match. I have no time for impatient and lazy people.

 

But back to swtor, it's ONE week. You guys won't drop dead.

 

What's there to stretch, though? The, very buggy, FP can be done in, what? 20 minutes in SM?

Although there are a good many people that likes to decorate their SH, at least the same amount - if not more - buys them and then dump inside all the decos needed to complete it so that they could maximize the bonus for conquest purposes.

I'm not saying that waiting a week is *all* that bad - I can be patient and hope that, in the mean time, they'll fix at least some of the bugs that have been reported so as to make the FP less of a pain to do, especially on VM and MM - but they're gone about this in a completely wrong way.

[Latency issues during specific times of day]

That is not a ping time it is a disconnected from server indicator

 

I know, and that's what baffles me. As I said, I've not used PingPlotter yet, but I've tried to keep an eye on the problem with tracert and pathping and by using window's performance monitor, which shows latency and packet loss.

Except from a very few times, neither of these shows anything out of the ordinary, in the sense that both packet loss and latency are within my normal parameters - keep in mind that I play by WiFi, (long story short, I'm phisically unable to connect via ethernet) - as if the problem isn't there when in reality the game is, for all intents and purposes, absolutely unplayable.

Tonight I'll see what PingPlotter says and I'm hoping to see something that can give me a inkling as to where the problem start.

 

Just a thing, though: using PingPlotter or tracert or pathping to the general East Coast/West Coast/European Server serves little to no purpose. You have to use it to the server you specifically log into.

For example, I'm currently playing Heroes of the Storm while waiting for a client's email - ah, the joy of working from home! - and the european IP for it should be 213.155.155.233.

If I was experiencing any problem, checking my connection to it would show next to nothing, because I'm currently connected to 185.60.112.105.

[Latency issues during specific times of day]

Not the OP here, but I'm gonna tell you anyway: I've checked out the thread you linked and I can say that, for me at least, it's not the same issue. I'm not experiencing a sudden loss in speed and stability all over, I'm getting spikes of up to 800k ms only in SWtOR and most of the times I don't even get disconnected from the game!

Yesterday, it kicked me out well over 600k ms, after the latency constantly rose with no sign of stopping.

The connection is otherwise absolutely fine: I can watch shows and movies in streaming, I can play any other game, I can even download files via p2p programs with my usual speed, (an average of 1.8mb/s, that while not much for some of you, for me it's absolutely normal).

I've got no complains about the services that Vodafone offers and up until the patch of Januray 17, I've never had any problem with SWtOR except the "normal" ones. I'm even paying for a 7mb DSL and my speed is usually arround 14.5/15, (my upload remain abysmal, but I'm used to it so it's not a big problem for me).

 

http://www.speedtest.net/result/6067598980.png

 

I've not tried PingPlotter yet, but I plan to use it tonight.

[Latency issues during specific times of day]

I recently started playing again and I've been enjoying a lot but there is one issues. I can play without any issues during the day but when the clock hits 7:30-7:40 pm ( Milan time ) the latency starts to spike and the game becomes unplayable, invisible walls, freezes, latency constantly rising etc. I assume the problem is caused by the traffic in the game or some sort of maintenance done by the provider. There are no issues on any other games and I have a 1000 mb/s internet. Help would be highly appreciated, thanks

 

I live near Milan - 35 km to the north, more or less - and I'm having the same problem, except the last two week-ends I had sever lag spikes around 5-5:30pm, too.

The game become absolutely unplayable and I've had yet to hear anything that can give me any certainty as to what exactly is going on. The connection works perfectly fine for the whole day and even when the lag is unbearable in SWtOR I can play any othe MMORPG or otherwise use the internet withouth any issue.

I've tried everything: upluggin my router for one minute and then plugging it back in, flushing my dns, using a proxy, a VPN, playing via tethering, playing with all graphic settings on low, reboothing my computer, closing everything but swtor.exe down, opening all the 11.001 ports that the game can use... Nothing works and I don't know what else to try to fix the problem.

It's obvious that there's a problem somewhere down the line, but where is it and who's resposible for fixing it?