Cost of guild flagships too high

[Layno_Maul]

Hello everybody. I want to discuss how much the guild flagships cost.

I mean,if it's 50 MILLION credits that should include ALL the rooms.

And think of the smaller guilds-they probably won't have 50mil.

I've seen people on the fleet having to ask for "donations" to help build a flagship.

It's a very good idea, especially the planet conquest part of it.

BUT, it is way too $$$COSTLY!$$$

 

So please bioware, could you even CONSIDER lowering the cost of flagships OR keeping it that price but being able to unlock all the expansions if you pay 50mil.

 

Thank you for reading

[LyraineAlei]

I love how you used the search function to find threads about this and bumped the most recent one instead of making a new one. Love it.

[Essence_of_Light]

Déjà vu

[MSchuyler]

Look, OP, haven't we covered this ground sufficiently well in the last couple dozen threads about it? The fact is that guilds, by and large, have not found it a problem and quite a few bought a guild ship on the very first day. That should tell you how "over priced" they are.

[PLynkes]

My guild is tiny. Usually less than ten people online at any one time, unless it is a raid night. Often less than five. We managed to have flagships for both factions the same day they came out.

 

They aren't hard to get. The price isn't too high.

Edited September 12, 2014 by PLynkes

[DarthTHC]

Just imagine what he'll say when he finally gets a ship and discovers that it's way harder to expand it, and not because credits, than it is to get it.

[jedip_enguin]

I must have stepped through some kind of temporal portal which has sent me back to just before 2.9...

[arunav]

My guild is tiny. Usually less than ten people online at any one time, unless it is a raid night. Often less than five. We managed to have flagships for both factions the same day they came out.

 

They aren't hard to get. The price isn't too high.

 

I think unlocking rooms/areas on them is. The price on this may come down in the future at some point.

[branmakmuffin]

I love how you used the search function to find threads about this and bumped the most recent one instead of making a new one. Love it.

There's no winning on that. "You started a new thread? What?" "You necroed an old thread? What?"

 

On topic for the OP: too expensive? Don't buy it.

[Kratess]

The price of guild flagships is too damn high.

But yeah.....you dont NEED a flagship or a stronghold. I grabbed my free one when the patch dropped and spent 20 mins there. Stop in there to drop stuff in my legacy hold or use a GTN to ditch my cra......stuff for sale. But thats about it...I dont spend any time there.

Edited September 12, 2014 by Kratess

[DOHboy]

There's no winning on that. "You started a new thread? What?" "You necroed an old thread? What?"

 

On topic for the OP: too expensive? Don't buy it.

 

sure there is, just need to find the balance between age of the thread, validity of the topic and current issue.

 

soemthing like this, do a search find the thread(s) that has 50 pages of responses read every page and response. At which point determine if your comment is valid/worth the necro, if so feel free to update the original thread(s). If not leave it dead.

 

If you have new information or a new way of looking at the topic or a different perspective than what was originally discussed or perhaps the original thread was hijacked to the point of being off topic THEN it is ok to open a new one.

 

However, most points (like this one) are not necro worthy (what MORE can be said) and also do not add any new perspective or insight or different view point on a current topic...which leads us to this.

[TUXs]

The price is too high and Bioware is being foolish about it.

 

Guildships/Conquest, is the best thing to hit this game since launch imo. Locking it behind any type of credit barrier is absolutely wrong...they should be giving these ships away as a way to encourage more play time. Players who weren't even playing have come back to experience it. Players who were Preferred have subbed to participate in it. Bioware should be handing these out like mother ******* candy to their customers!

 

Imagine returning to try this out, but your guild doesn't have the $ or the care to grind it out...you think that player who returned is going to stick around after seeing absolutely NOTHING of Conquests? Housing sucks...Conquest is a home run though.

 

Bioware should hand out a ship for free to all returning players...not doing so is only hurting their bottom line and impacting their customer retention.

[Reno_Tarshil]

Not too high, we just got ours. You can do it.

[Khevar]

Guildships/Conquest, is the best thing to hit this game since launch imo. Locking it behind any type of credit barrier is absolutely wrong...they should be giving these ships away as a way to encourage more play time.

Perhaps.

 

But I believe (just my opinion, of course), that a guild that cannot raise the funds will also not be competitive in Conquests. The credit barrier does potentially encourage a guild to come together to afford the flagship, and it would follow that they'd do better in the content they'd just unlocked.

Edited September 12, 2014 by Khevar

[TUXs]

Perhaps.

 

But I believe (just my opinion, of course), that a guild that cannot raise the funds will also not be competitive in Conquests. The credit barrier does potentially encourage a guild to come together to afford the flagship, and it would follow that they'd do better in the content they'd just unlocked.

The problem is, that credit barrier doesn't only impact the people playing, it impacts returning players who want to see what it's all about. If their guild doesn't have one, they'll simply return to whatever they were doing in another game.

 

Bioware NEEDS to make this obvious and open to everyone, new or old, rich or poor, vet or n00b.

 

I also disagree about not being competitive. 2-3 players can make the difference between top 10 or below.

[AlienEyeTX]

Housing sucks...Conquest is a home run though.

 

Conquest seems to be working well. I don't really know for sure, because my guild doesn't have a freaking ship yet.

 

Housing, though, is terribly nice, I think. It's given me a reason to craft again and even has me visiting old planets, kind of like conquest must be doing, and that's a good thing!

[DarthTHC]

The price is too high and Bioware is being foolish about it.

 

Guildships/Conquest, is the best thing to hit this game since launch imo. Locking it behind any type of credit barrier is absolutely wrong...they should be giving these ships away as a way to encourage more play time. Players who weren't even playing have come back to experience it. Players who were Preferred have subbed to participate in it. Bioware should be handing these out like mother ******* candy to their customers!

 

Imagine returning to try this out, but your guild doesn't have the $ or the care to grind it out...you think that player who returned is going to stick around after seeing absolutely NOTHING of Conquests? Housing sucks...Conquest is a home run though.

 

Bioware should hand out a ship for free to all returning players...not doing so is only hurting their bottom line and impacting their customer retention.

 

Figure out what it takes to expand your guild ship once you get it. 50 million credits to obtain it and whatever the credit cost for each expansion is are nothing compared to the rest of it.

 

This content is not for the faint of heart. It's not for the participation trophy generation. It's not for casuals who define "casual" as "I don't even play, bro."

 

It is designed to enable groups of organized achievers to compete against each other.

[Max_Killjoy]

The guild flagship is definitely content with a high threshold for access. It's not for small guilds or laid-back players.

 

It might appease a lot of players to see the personal starships opened up for some customizing and easier hosting of guests, so that there's a personal equivalent to guild flagships, in the same way that personal strongholds relate to guild HQs.

[Max_Killjoy]

The price is too high and Bioware is being foolish about it.

 

Guildships/Conquest, is the best thing to hit this game since launch imo. Locking it behind any type of credit barrier is absolutely wrong...they should be giving these ships away as a way to encourage more play time. Players who weren't even playing have come back to experience it. Players who were Preferred have subbed to participate in it. Bioware should be handing these out like mother ******* candy to their customers!

 

Imagine returning to try this out, but your guild doesn't have the $ or the care to grind it out...you think that player who returned is going to stick around after seeing absolutely NOTHING of Conquests? Housing sucks...Conquest is a home run though.

 

Bioware should hand out a ship for free to all returning players...not doing so is only hurting their bottom line and impacting their customer retention.

 

Huh... really, I have almost no interest in Conquest.

[DawnAskham]

Figure out what it takes to expand your guild ship once you get it. 50 million credits to obtain it and whatever the credit cost for each expansion is are nothing compared to the rest of it.

 

This content is not for the faint of heart. It's not for the participation trophy generation. It's not for casuals who define "casual" as "I don't even play, bro."

 

It is designed to enable groups of organized achievers to compete against each other.

 

Try again.

 

Conquest was developed as a way to encourage and engage players in running old / existing content which already exists in the game and which does not require Bioware to expend budgets creating new content.

 

It is a recycling program, pure and simple.

 

As such, I think TUXs is on to something when he says that returning or on the fence players who feel cut out from conquest may very well leave SWTOR, and that is bad for all of us as fewer players most likely means less investments by EA / Bioware for new content in the future.

 

Does that mean everyone should get a flagship for free?

 

Probably not.

 

But I feel there should be more alternatives for smaller guilds to feel engaged with conquest without having to expend 50 million on a ship or feeling like they have no way to compete.

 

Alternatives could include letting guilds 'attack' a planet to gain bonuses and buffs without a flagship, making smaller ships available for reduced costs, having a winning category for highest average points gained per member, or even just tiered 'leagues' pitting similar sized guilds against each other.

[Uruare]

I think guild ships are excessively obnoxious to get and then unlock.

 

I get that it's 'supposed to be something guilds can work together towards over time', though credit/mat farming is all that really boils down to.

 

I'll forgive my absolute failure to find that exciting, or even motivating.

[AlienEyeTX]

I'll also state this about GSH and Flagships. My guild is "working toward" a flagship. I have donated to this cause and will do so again. However, for guilds that it takes a real effort to get there, bringing flagships with strongholds was just cruel. I've mad plenty of credits lately (thanks to conquest, ironically), but I'm spending most of my credits on my stronghold, rather than donating to the guild. Call it selfish or whatever, but the point is that smaller guilds now have another hurdle to getting their flagship.

[TUXs]

Figure out what it takes to expand your guild ship once you get it. 50 million credits to obtain it and whatever the credit cost for each expansion is are nothing compared to the rest of it.

 

This content is not for the faint of heart. It's not for the participation trophy generation. It's not for casuals who define "casual" as "I don't even play, bro."

 

It is designed to enable groups of organized achievers to compete against each other.

 

We've unlocked all of our decks, both hanger bays and we're working on more. I know full well what type of effort these require.

 

But you're 100% wrong on this not being for the feint of heart. It's BRILLIANT! It's designed to get players active, to give them weekly objectives, to give direction and rewards, to encourage playing, to enable low level characters to do things with high level characters. It is content built for EVERYONE, small guild or large, they can all compete. Last week we had ONE player who alone would have ranked in the top 10 on every planet. Don't pretend this is only for the mega guilds...it's not.

 

Bioware has completely failed to make it easy for players to experience what Conquests can bring to a guild. That failure is 100% tied to the buy-in cost, which is why I was so vehemently opposed to the cost before, and I still am now. Lowering the cost to close to nothing would be GOOD for this game. Gating this content, gating player excitement, gating group content, is an absolutely terrible design.

[Infernixx]

90% of the 2.9 patch content was designed around a two-fold goal. Get the players active doing older content and find a way to remove the excess from the system. Excess credits and excess materials. And, in my opinion, they succeeded wildly in both of these goals.

 

I look at my server's GTN and I see the end-results of it immediately. Things that 'had' gone for 15mil are down to 5-7mil, cosmetic and toy-related items are going for ridiculously low prices as people are emptying their cargo bays to try and make credits with which to buy SHs and decorations and Guild Ships.

 

The excess in materials is also all but gone now, turned into Prefab items and War Supply items.

 

Combine the sudden shift to a 'buyer's market' with the sudden evaporation of billions of credits in each server's economy, and each remaining credit gains that much more value. You have fewer credits, but they're worth more.

 

As to getting the players active again, what else can be said? It was a master stroke. People are running KP and EV and EC regularly, all the old 50 HMs as well and not for the crafting mats as I thought(right now, there's a glut of Dark Projects on the GTN), but for decorations.

 

Guild pride is a 'thing' now and it's created a huge shifting of player expectations. A lot of players aren't just content to stick around in a guild that's coasting along.

 

BW correctly perceived that huge amounts of players will compete with each other for no other reason than bragging rights and a title.

 

The best part of it all is that going forward with the next expansion and all the others to come, we'll have decorations and Guild Conquest and Strongholds. When the expansion hits, we'll have all new Conquest stuff to do on the new worlds, new worlds to Conquer, new decorations to gather, new Strongholds even. The game will be that much fuller with things to do beyond dailies and new Raids.

[DarthOvertone]

The price is too high and Bioware is being foolish about it.

 

Guildships/Conquest, is the best thing to hit this game since launch imo. Locking it behind any type of credit barrier is absolutely wrong...they should be giving these ships away as a way to encourage more play time.

 

Yep. Another great idea by BW, and yet another blown opportunity for success because of poor implementation. I play regularly on two servers. There are about 6-10 guilds on each server that actively participate and care about the Conquest content on a Weekly basis. The rest of the players and guilds don't give an F.

 

It's not like my guildies and I don't want to participate in Conquest, we actually do. However, the Guild ship price is just too high to bother. Ask me who any of the Planetary Commanders are and where you can find them. I have no clue, nor will I care until the content is made more accessible. 20-25 Million would have been doable. 50 Million is just stupid.