This has been the case since they introduced the cxp crates. Previously one of my playstyles was to do tons of pvp in low and mid so that I could get most of the pvp gear immeadiately when hitting max level. (And yes low and mid pvp was a lot of fun, more so than max level often). Also it was a great place to learn pvp as things are just going much slower than at 70 pvp. I remember my first matches at max level pvp a few years ago... I barely knew the maps and everything went so... fast. Doing low and midbies helped prepare a lot for that, without it I would have been completely lost Right now there is nothing to be gotten from low / mid pvp however. The best to do is just to level up asap and pvp is not the optimal route for that. Add in the much easier levelling in general, the tokens aso and it is clear that low - mid levels is in the current design just something you make as short as possible so you can get into the cxp grind. I used to enjoy levelling up alts, that is no longer the case but I also don't see it coming back. Face it, it is an old game and anything bioware has done in the last few years is all geared towards the max level. There is not much new stuff but what there is is only for max level. (a reskinned pvp map excepted I guess, I don't consider the new fp's as even if you can run them at lower level they make no sense at all when doing so. This is not the case so much with the older fp's... even if they were meant to be played only after you got to some part of the story, I think they stand on their own much better) I have no idea whether this game still attracts new players regularly. They seem to be pretty rare tbh. Much rarer than a few years ago for sure. It is a petty as I still think the game has a lot to offer for new players. The class stories are mostly excellent. The group content is also pretty good if you haven't done it to death already. But my feeling is that the game is now mostly thriving on a shrinking base of players who have been there for years. They may still create a new alt once in a while but if so, unless you want to experience a class story again since it's been a few years... you just want to get the alt to 70 asap... As bioware seems to be catering to this type of player as well it seems fair to assume that the influx of new players is unfortunately quite low, which also has a big effect on low and mid pvp.

I still kinda like master FP's. Still have some achievements to collect there, there are a few which you don't have in vet so they are - even though years old - refreshing in a way and on average you get much better teams. Eg lost island or kaon or still pretty fun imo. The new fp's are pretty poor compared to the older ones. If you get umbara or copero more often than not at least 1 team member immeadiately abandons (on vet it is even worse) due to the bad reward vs time spent, problem on master is that if it is not a dps that abandons you can wait for a very long time for a replacement so in most cases it is an abort. But you are absolutely right on fi the decoration drops. They could also add fi some of the new mats to the weekly. At least on master. For me there are the achievements on master, the occasional fun of getting an old favorite and other than that I run them just for some cxp(*) and conquest, (well for conuest at least that is why I used to run them, we will see on tuesday whether that still holds true/holds true again...). Well sortof - lately I am just shipping the cxp packs around over mail waiting to see what char might become feasible / not feasible anymore after 5.9. if I am still around by then...

I am in a conquest oriented guild and we just (barely) managed to get the yield needed for invading a large planet. The last few hundredthousand points needed came from running killing illum republic base over and over again on alts. This is not repeatable as an experience as the boredom and mindnumbingness of it all is not something I ever want to do again. I do hope that besides adding in the FP's and PVP again for conquest also the points for the activities get a decent look at so they are in line with how it was pre 5.8. I.e. where you could easily cap a multitude of characters from just doing some pvp, fp's, gsf, ops, crafting, heroics as a last resort aso. It should be telling that previously you had 30 guilds getting the reward. I think there are less now. Looking at DM I see only 2 guilds qualifying for the large planet, 2 or 3 for the medium. Possibly there are many qualifying for the small planet, but you would and should expect that the large majority if not all of the top 10 on large and medium planets should also make the cap. Now take away the 10K bug and the numbers would look much worse than they even do right now. I do sincerely hope that FP's and PVP will not be added in with the insanely small reward you get for GSF, but with values very comparable to pre 5.8

So far that is what it seems like indeed. The changes Eric mentioned will somewhat improve the situation but the absolute silence on a serious upwards revision of the points per objective, reinstatement of weeklies counting for conquest, getting rid of the new legacy bound restrictions aso means that after the 'fix' next week and potentially long after 5.9 it will still be much harder than before to reach personal conquest goals. There are numerous posts that spell out the mathematical differences, which remain extreme even after the downwards revision of the 15k target pre and post 5.8 and hard as it is to believe that noone at Bioware did some mathematical comparison between how easy it was to get the conquest score in the old vs the new system before they released it is insane to believe that they have not read the posts made by the community proving this and so are aware of it now. So the silence on it means that it is probably intended. Edit: also - it can not be much effort to raise the points per objective. I assume it is a very simple table whose values need to be updated. I.e. like a 5 minutes job.

Couldn't help but rereading the original announcement and after a few sentences you get this "Conquest point values for all objectives have been rebalanced across the board." Apparently rebalancing is the same as "adjusted downwards in degrees varying between a factor of five and infinity" in bio-speak. I suppose technically it is a form of rebalancing so in a court it may hold up but as players who are paying to have fun it is not exactly what most players expected with this I guess..

Well yes it was predictable. Also take into account that a huge part of these numbers are coming from the 10k bug and the other conclusion to easily draw is that even the lowered planet targets (next week?) will mean that less guilds than ever will receive the conquest rewards at all. Which just shows how badly they missed the mark on giving more guilds the opportunity for the rewards.

Eric, While your post dealt with some of the pain points nothing was said about: - conquest points for weeklies - raising the conquest points received for a lot of activities. - getting rid of legacy restrictions on conquest activities There are several posts regarding these topics and some communication would be appreciated. In short: - is it a goal to make achieving the personal conquest target much harder to achieve on a single char? Yes/no Lowering the target to 15k is only a small reduction and still leaves a much bigger effort than there used to be if not also the points for the activities go drastically up. - Is it a goal to make it much harder than it used to be to complete conquest on alts? Yes/no The things you listed as actions that will be taken still leave the idea that overall the goal is that conquest will be much harder to do than it used to be even without taking crafting into account. It is unclear whether this is a goal of the update or not.

To all the people suggesting linking the size of a guild to which tier planet you can go for. One consequence of this for sure would be that guilds will start being extremely selective in their membership. Ie you don't contribute enough conquest points -kicked. You are inactive for a short time - kicked I do not believe the general atmosphere in a guild or the game in general would improve because of this. It risks turning guilds into extremely competitive environments themselves and just reinforce one of the main issues with this update, ie turning conquest from a fun side effect of normal play into a chore.

I play a lot of PvP and it is extremely rare to see this. Except for solo ranked where about every second match there seemed to be a thrower. Not sure whether those are pve'ers, trolls or double agents of the other team though

Excellent post. Besides the quantified reduction in efficiency I only want to add that the new system if you want to participate also forces a complete change in gameplay at least for me and I suspect for many others. I.e. For me and I suspect for a large number of players the majority (let's say 80% plus) of my conquest points came from there. This was my normal gameplay and I accumulated enough conquest points along the way to make the personal target with sometimes an occasional bit of crafting or specific uprising added in. Now in order to still get the conquest goals I would have to completely revise my gameplay in something which I can only describe as a mindnumbing grind. Critical Missions for a target planet (Ilum/Iokath) Ie. repeat an already played to death Heroic or specific FP over and over again. Critical Missions for an Event (Gree) I have maxed out reputation for all events years ago. The bosses I still like to do as they have a good time vs reward factor but all the other event specific missions offer nothing to me anymore. Group Finder: Uprisings This is actually a good addition. Never understood why you got a reward for the FP's and not for uprisings. Crafting: Aid the War Effort Has been discussed to death already. Yeah repeat crafting could have used an adjustment (fi a hard cap on the number of conquest points you could get from them) but the new crafting format is just a horrible money and timesink with next to no reward. Starfighter: Mission Objectives Never played starfighter so no opinion on that one. Adding an objective in itself is always good though.

I rarely participate in last boss lockouts but you have a few very valid points there.

I agree with most of what you say except this lumping together of mercs and snipers in terms of defenses. Merc defenses are still extremely good, but snipers are pretty run of the mill since the nerf to shield imo. I see no reason at all to do any further nerf to sniper defenses or they will go back to what they were for a very long time, ie ready to be globalled at a moments notice.

The official reasoning behind changing conquest that was communicated to us can be summarized as follows: a. Give smaller guilds a chance to reap the rewards by: - not restricting the top 10 rewards to the top 10 anymore Partial success? However the cap on even the small planets is so high that combined with the much decreased ease of scoring conquest points (see below) I think that a guild that manages the cap now had very high likelyhood of scoring in the top 10 anyways imo. So I guess it is a failure after all. - encouraging the bigger guilds to go for the big planets through better rewards Logically speaking since you already had a. (top 10 rewards) this means giving a guild that is not in the top 3-4 on a server a chance to actually win a planet or that is how I interpreted it. Complete failure. The difference in rewards between the various tier planets is insignificant. As I predicted you see the big guilds just dividing the first place on each tier again with no opportunity for any other guild. The title / achievement for whoever did not have it already (and the ego boost) heavily outweighs the puny extra reward for ending let's say second or third on a big planet. b. Improving the interface Complete failure in my opinion. It is absolutely not intuitive which objectives are repeatable, repeatable daily, repeatably by legacy and so on. I suppose the little icons are meant to give an indication here but since there was not even an explanation in the patch notes and not even now it is still a mystery what is supposed to be repeatable daily on alts, by legacy aso. Some of the confusion may also come from bugs (ie some people seem to get rewards on alts for the same objective, while others don't) still no communication at all from the team on what is a bug, what is working as intended and what the **** icons mean - if they mean anything. This particular one can be salvaged though by at the least giving a clear explanation of the various objectives and their repeatability and fixing the assumed bugs with it. Then I guess you also took the opportunity to do some 'rebalancing' of conquest points and objectives. This is the part where things actually went completely wrong. No more conquest points for daily FP's, no more conquest points for completing weeklies, minimal and heavily restricted points for pvp aso. I don't think anyone was asking for this. I never saw anyone complaining about it yet all of these activities were nerfed into oblivion from a conquest point of view. Why? It helps no-one. For small guilds it makes conquest much harder to complete, for players with a specific preference for a particular aspect fo the game (eg pvp'ers) they are now locked out of conquest completely, even for players like me who participated in a variety of aspects (mostly pvp, master FP's, the occasional op and limited crafting) there is no place in conquest anymore. If I want to do conquest from now on I will be forced to do the things in your very limited list of objectives and most of these things I have no interest in at all as I have done them numerous amounts of times already and there is nothing in them for me except a measly amount of conquest points. Then the crafting changes: I have been stockpiling crafting components. It gave me something to do while waiting for a master FP or pvp match to pop. The reason I was doing so is so that if there is a planet with a crafting objective that I don't have the achievement for I could try to help my guild win it for once. (I am in a big guild but you could call it the smallest of the big guilds on my server, so for the rare planets we stand no chance of winning it wo this sort of stockpiling) In one unancounced swoop you have completely devalued all the effort I spent in that and looking at the abyssymal return you now get from crafting I have no interest in continueing this stockpiling. The effort is just not nearly worth the potential reward. Similar with the dark projects btw. I should have and would have crafted them all if I had known about this nerf to their crafting. Then the complete alt unfriendlyness of it all. The once per legacy objectives are horrible, but of the remaining ones there is no variety at all. Think for yourself a second. Running a random FP on various alts or participating in a few PVP matches with various alts was for me a good and fun way to get them to their personal conquest goals. Repeating ad nauseum a single FP or Heroic is not. The weekly rewards I also used a lot to help in my conquest achievements on alts. I.e. once the personal conquest goal is achieved on an alt, you leave for instance the FP or PVP weeklies at a high level of completion but not complete, which helps a lot in getting the next weeks personal conquest goal relatively easy on an alt. All destroyed now. Once again it seems that no consideration at all was given to the large number of players with alts. I would have assumed that after the CXP debacle this should have been a natural consideration, ie how do we make conquest alt friendly. How all of the changes come across though - and I assume they are not meant like that is that the overall goal was to make casual but conquest minded behaviour impossible. If you want to do conquest you shall confirm exactly to the very limited set of goals that are available to it. Furthermore if you have a job and life and would like to achieve that goal on multiple alts we suggest you quit your job and rest of your life.. I am certain that was not the intent, but the way it was implemented it sure feels that way.

Not only for that but also because this no reward for losing will a. Only encourage leaving a war zone as soon as the odds of winning seems low b. Immediately leaving it if you are backfill in a losing match. (Which will happen even more now since a. Is encouraged)

Yes this should just be completely rolled back. There are many issues with it but it can be summed up as. If you want to do conquest you have very little choice in what activities to do. Conquest on multiple alts became a nightmare, crafting became waaaay to expensive and group content for conquest is dead. It was not thought through at all, does not help anyone (though the stated goal was to make conquest more attractive) and then the crafting nerd and subsequent devaluation of stockpiles of materials a very nasty hidden ****. Best is just to apologize to the community and do a complete rollback imo.

It makes sense, THe problem you have, like many is that you do not understand the root cause of inflation. Inflation is usually described as 'prices going up', but that is incorrect. The prices going up is a consequence of inflation of the money supply, just like in the real world. Central banks keep on printing money -> prices go up. The first part is inflation, the second is the consequence of it. Now in this case the GTN Tax Rate sucks money out of the system in a black hole. That money is gone and does not get back into the game economy. So it does lower the money supply which will reduce the overall increase in prices. Whether you are actually going to see prices go down is another matter as I think the rate at which money gets created in this game is still going to be higher than the rate at which it gets sucked out (*). But you may see a lowering in the rate at which prices go up. (* it is hard to imagine otherwise, while technically feasible most people would find it very annoying to see their bank accounts go down, even if the purchasing value is higher. This is mostly mental conditioning in the fiat currency world we live in and not rational, but I guess the devs are not going to risk the massive outcry it would cause. )

As in an earlier post. I don't like the lockout runs much and hardly participate in them, but people who believe that all of a sudden the guilds who will win conquest will drastically change if they changed this are very mistaken imo. The conquest oriented guilds will still win as they will still focus on it, the lockput run players will just move to do to whatever is the new best thing, and on DM the difference in score between the top 3-4 guilds and the rest is usually so big that the rest will still be without hope unless.. they also start focussing on conquest which they currently are not doing. We will know tomorrow but from what I saw in the screenshot of the stream I don't expect much difference in conquest at all in the sense that the winner of a planet will still be the same as it is now. Unless the rewards for a large planet are hugely better than for a small planet the first place will still be sortof reserved on each planet, as typically the large guilds also don't compete much with one another, there is sort of a pecking order I guess. The top guild picks a planet, number 2 guild waits untill they can see what planet nr1 guild took and takes a different planet, nr3 guild then does the same... Only on rare occasions the top guilds will compete with one another for first place. The only way to change this would be to make the difference in rewards between ending say number two or three on the large planet and number 1 on a small or medium planet huuuge, otherwise I think not much will change at least not in the odds of any but the existing big/conquest guilds ever having a shot at winning a planet.

Had a level 70 operative in a MM FP today, who had no idea what he was doing at all. Now the tank was good, the healer lowlevel but at least trying and me as the other dps so we still get to the last boss without too much issues, (It was cademimmu). Had to try that boss four times but managed in the end. Still the 'funniest' for me was at try 3 where we had the boss down to 20% when the healer dies. I ask him in chat to offheal us, which would have been enough to make it to the end. He does not respond and doesn't offheal so wipe number 3. I ask him why he can't just spring some kolto probes on us.. Answer: I am new to this class and have not set up any heal abilities. To which I respond then why are you queing for mm fp's... a basic knowledge of your own class is about the absolute minimum you should have when doing mm fp's. Now he calls me a moron and tells me he does it for fun... Well, I don't have many people on ignore but he made the list today,..

wonderfull observation ...LOL

I am a member of one of the guilds that runs a lot of lockouts, Personally I participate in them only occasionally, ie if they absolutely need an extra dps or something or to push me over the personal conquest goal on an alt. My focus lateley had been mostly on achievements in master fp's and trying to get better at ranked pvp:) Now that said I do agree with you. I don't think it is 'fun' to run a lockout (hence why I don't do it often) and I am pretty sure that most of the players doing them don't think of them as fun either. More as a means to an end (ie finish high in conquest, which in itself is mostly an ego or achievement / grabbing titles thing). What I typically think I see is a few players with many alts pushing them through the lockouts for conquest. I assume it is similar with the other big guilds. I.e. you have a core of maybe only 5 or so real life people with many alts that fill the absolutely needed spots (tank, dwt, heal usually..) and then the rest of the guild players fill it up with what is needed. So my points First off my observation is that also the 'big guilds' are really not that big. Their foundation exist on a very small (as said only a few) core people who are really passionate about conquest and have many alts. Take these people away and conquest scores would drop dramatically. (Ie someone has to get the lockout, someone has to play heal & tank more often than they probably like). If you had a 10 man real life group of people with a lot of dedication and alts you would beat the 'big guilds' easily in my opinion. You would be the new big guild and rule conquest imo. (as is the current big guild group of core dedicated people is below 10 in rl imo) Then secondly yes I agree that the lockout running should not be the 'cheesy' way to run conquest, As said I don't think even the people running them enjoy it much. It is a means to an end nothing else. These same people would probably still win conquest events however you change the formula but my guess is that they as well would be happier doing this with things they really enjoy in the game than running a lockout for the xxxx'th time.

I think all types of players are a bit starved for content and all will feel the same. I don't think there is any player group (raiders, pvp, pve, story...) that will feel they are being listened to sufficiently. I play a bit of everything and the one big disadvantage of story vs other changes is that the stories have very little replay value. The first time I played kotet I loved it. But it very very quickly became a bore. If I play it now it is very rarely and tbh only to get some achievements on the more difficult modes or do something while I am waiting for a queue for master fp or pvp to pop. The story itself even in solo I tend to spacebar through now.... What I mean is that a. I don't think any group of players is happy or feels they are listened to as much as they would like and b. one big draw of FP's/ops and certainly PVP over 'single player story' is that the repeatability is much much better. PVP you can do endlessly and no matches are ever the same / predictable. FP's and Ops become predictable after a while but your team mates are not so at least that can remain a surprise / challenge. Single player content however is utterly predictable and it's repeatability is extremely low. Ie given the resources this game has, you get a lot more 'playing time' out of pvp/multiplayer additions than single player story, What is only known to Bioware however is how the playerbase is distributed. Maybe there really is an enormous amount of paying subs who are there only for single player / story. I have no idea tbh. But my guess is that the metrics showed that KOTET and KOTFE which were purely single player story were not cost effective. Then again there is a large amount of quite cheap single player things that could have been added to these expansions and would have greatly increased their lifespan, On Iokath they made dailies and yes I grinded them. But why no dailies on Zakuul fi. Why was not more done with odessen? I imagine it would be relatively cheap to make it into a stronghold (which many people would love and would motivate them to grind all the companions that then show up in your stronghold) Ie low effort compared to the amount of playing (grinding ) time people would get out of it. And you have to be honest: In the time story players got kotet and kotfe, pvp'ers got a reskinned warzone and which was actually probably a much more meaningfull addition the mats in ranked. (Meaning I don't think the reskinned warzone increased the number of people playing pvp. The addition of the mats in ranked for sure increased the number of people playing ranked. Ie extremely low cost and an almost obsolete game mode suddenly came back to life.). Raiders got most of 1 operation in all that time... I.e. I perfectly understand and share a wish for more story, but from a realistic look at what may be the available budget and resources to Bioware I would wish they focus on things that add longevity to my playing experience and in that regard FP's, OPS or PVP add a lot more than single player content.

I think this is a fair enough point. At max level there is very little to do for F2P players. Probably bioware has metrics on it, but I would expect that the F2P players that were willing to sub did so by now. The weekly pass players probably left. Dunno whether you can get them back easily as it has been quite some time since they made the change. Probably wll need some marketing campaign as well. Though an e-mail to all old players could do a lot. All in see little cost in it for Bioware and for the subs it is also better.. the more pops the better. Overall since the server merges for me pops are fine at least in peak hours but even them there are some that can stand significant improvement, mostly ranked pvp and master FP's can be quite slow at times. Then again no idea whether many f2p's would do that content to start with..

I played very little in ranked before. Think last time before this season was 3 years ago or so. I never played it again untill now because of the incredibly toxic atmosphere in there at the time. From what I got from other people ranked was as good as dead before they added the mats as well. I.e. very few pops aso. So I did do ranked both team and solo a bit for the last two weeks, here are my observations. 1. extremely positive: the toxic atmosphere is gone! 2. extremely positive: pops are frequent! 3. the elo system has serious drawbacks. I made the 'mistake' of accepting random pugs a lot and as a result my rating is worse than it could be. I don't think of myself as a very good player but I do seem to be above average in the teams I end up in. It seems hard to improve my rating now as I do not have a network of decent players and more often than not I seem to end up in a team with at least 1 very bad player. (eg a merc who gets globalled!, a mara who does next to no damage...). Now for me giving ranked another try was not motivated by the mats - sure it is a nice bonus - but I already had all 236 augments and I am not trying to amass virtual credits either, The main reason was that with the much bigger population I thought the atmosphere would have improved and indeed it did (a lot). I do find it a fun change from the normal warzones and I think I improved a lot already in arena's and look forward to improving more. A better rating... well I guess there is next season So overall I do think that adding the mats was a great idea and I really hope that BW will do something to keep ranked appealing to a large group of people. What could be done however is increase the valor rating to participate, so the completely inexperienced have more practice in regs first. And then the matchmaking ofcourse which is another really big issue but from what I gather it is not on the prio list anyways for bioware.

Not true, add in that they give like a heal to full on almost all no matter whether they are stacked or not, ranged dps mostly doesn't even need to move to click them and the downtime if they are mistaken and the healer doesn't heal sufficiently and they die. The risk/reward is heavily in favor of using the stations with an unknown healer. Even with a good healer they can make sense. For frustrated healers I would really recommend giving the mm flashpoints a try... no stations there.

In an FP the group usually wants to get through as fast as possible - well in any content that is the case tbh. I play both healers and dps chars and in both cases I will make use of the heal stations when needed. As a healer I will often do it too, as I try to dps as much as possible, just to feel a bit less as a dead weight on the group. And yes as a healer with a competent group tacticatls are not much fun, you are mostly a very, very poor dps. On the bright side it does give you the opportunity to practice dps'ing with a healer but that is it. Now tacticals are not very challenging for any class if the group is at least somewhat skilled. (except for a few which are notably harder... the pair in and the extra boss in umbara, the one boss in depths of manaan and jos and valk come to mind). For the most part I would say that if you want to enjoy and feel needed as a healer run MM flashpoints or Operations / PVP. Bottom line: don't take it personally. Most of the content in these FP's is quite old and people have done them many, many times so they want to get through them for the cxp as fast as possible.