Declare Weekly Conquest Winning Side Based on GSF Results

[Linuxizer]

Here is a pretty simple concept to add some incentive, and a sense of accomplishment, to playing GSF. I like having a weekly Conquest, but not as a contest between guilds. So let's additionally declare a Republic or Empire victory for every week's Conquest Event, based on GSF results.

 

No change is needed in GSF itself (but fix the unequip bug already!!!). This is mostly just adding a database--not to say that it's simple to implement. The server will need to record the results from every GSF match and from every player who leaves a match early. Wargames will really be just for fun and will not count. At the start of every Conquest (Tuesday 02:00), Republic and Empire each sends a fleet of 10,000 Starfighters to the Conquest region. The region is divided into 100 sectors. All sectors are neutral at first. Each Domination win turns one neutral sector to Republic or Empire. Each Starfighter shot down is subtracted from the fleet. The first side that takes 50 sectors, or that eliminates the whole enemy fleet, achieves a major victory. If there is no major victory by the end of the Conquest (Monday 02:00), the side that is ahead achieves a minor victory.

 

There will be some nice maps/charts and stats screens, automatically updated after every GSF battle, to show Conquest progress. Upon victory, there will be an announcement on the Fleet, rewards will be e-mailed out, followed by appropriate audio/visuals on the Fleet until the next Conquest. Post-victory GSF matches are just for fun.

 

In a way, GSF will become the main event in SWTOR as the only part that makes visible progress in the war, and all other contents like Class Stories and Flashpoints will be the historical footnotes At the same time, GSF players who do not care about Conquest can simply ignore all this and just fly as usual.

 

The reward is a bit tricky. More participation and better performance should be worth something, but not to the point of pushing noob-bashing to the next level. Victory should be worth something, but not so much that a player will throw a match, and anyway intentionally bad performances have to be punished. An algorithm to distinguish a malicious player from a genuine rookie player will be difficult. If this is not manageable, the reward could be left out, and just having the weekly statistics is still cool.

[Maulkat]

Nice idea, but I don't think there are 10000 fliers out there. Also many people fly on different servers, so how would that work? Also if I die right away, does that mean I'm out of the contest?

[Linuxizer]

Nice idea, but I don't think there are 10000 fliers out there. Also many people fly on different servers, so how would that work? Also if I die right away, does that mean I'm out of the contest?

 

If you die, you respawn--same as today. I prefer to think there is an automatic ejection seat/capsule with a small hyperdrive, so only the ship dies and the pilot never dies...

 

The total is for the whole server for that week. You can fly as many--or as few--matches as you like. Everybody is contributing at least a little bit each match to the overall war.

 

There is a winner on each server each week. There is no change to GSF itself or to Conquest itself. I'm only adding some stuff, kind of like a Battle Record per server per week.

[ALaggyGrunt]

Why not combine the metrics if there's no clear victory?

 

100 starfighters = one sector = 100 points, most points wins.

 

There's noob-bashing anyway. If there is something worth winning, even a little bit, there's a good chance it will get messy.

Edited September 18, 2015 by ALaggyGrunt

[Monumenta]

Isn't the point of conquest to combine all play styles into one over arching metric?

[Linuxizer]

Why not combine the metrics if there's no clear victory?

 

100 starfighters = one sector = 100 points, most points wins.

 

Yes, I thought I had forgotten something

 

Isn't the point of conquest to combine all play styles into one over arching metric?

 

The current format of Conquest never says "Star Wars" or "GSF" to me. The leaderboard has nothing to do with whether Republic or Empire is winning. It gives little incentive to play GSF, and even less to play it well. Winning a tough GSF battle has no noticeable effect on the leaderboard, when your companions are constantly churning out trinkets like a sweatshop. And if you are not in a humongous guild, your efforts are worthless.

 

But I don't need to break it. I only add something to it. What better war metric than GSF results? The Roman Empire built roads. The British Empire had ships. American airpower blah blah blah... You can't win a Star War without fighting in space.

[ALaggyGrunt]

They're getting rid of the massively antisocial one-guy-with-30-alts crafting machine for most of the conquest objectives. Everything else will be relevant most weeks.

[Muljo_Stpho]

They're getting rid of the massively antisocial one-guy-with-30-alts crafting machine for most of the conquest objectives. Everything else will be relevant most weeks.

 

Basically that, although that description is very weakly worded for what they said that they were doing.

 

They're effectively removing conquest crafting completely. Instead of having that one repeatable 500 point objective that people can prepare massive stockpiles for so that they can keep all of their characters' companions busy crafting as close to 24/7 as possible to help generate millions upon millions upon millions of points for their guild... That objective will be changed into that horrible "once per legacy" BS that plagues too many conquest objectives already, and it will be worth 2k points. It will mean that we will only be able to earn points for 1-2 items per legacy per week (it's only 2 items if you craft a regular war supply to trigger the general war supply objective before crafting an invasion force to trigger the invasion force objective, since an invasion force alone triggers both objectives).

 

So one single character will be able to get a total of 4k points (before bonuses) and then it's up to any of the non-crafting objectives to earn their remaining 16k points (targets are being lowered to 20k on everything except the 25k crafting weeks and the 50k all-planets week) on that specific character or to earn any points at all on any other characters.

 

The devs know no middle ground with these things. It can only be either completely broken in how well it pays out or completely broken in how poorly it pays out.

 

A better solution / a correct way to attempt to address the problem would have been the idea to introduce a mission terminal for crafting and fill it with dailies and weeklies saying to craft specific numbers of different things (quantities chosen to somewhat balance against the material and time costs involved, cheaper item = more needed, expensive item = fewer needed). And then they would just need to change the main crafting objective from repeatable 500 points "craft any war supply" to repeatable X points "complete any mission on the crafting mission terminal" (where X is chosen to balance against the number of missions available so that maximum possible weekly earnings for crafting cover a significant portion of the weekly target). With an idea like that, crafting would be a reliable backup plan to help any (crafting) character reach their personal target for the week with just a little effort in other areas, but a guild could never carry their entire conquest effort to victory on the weight of crafting alone.

 

Or maybe even do that and then have a very low value generic repeatable awarding points per item as well.

 

I think conquests need to do a lot more in the way of using mission terminals like this, actually. Like they could give GSF its own dedicated mission terminal (instead of being on the warzone terminal...) and in addition to the current 2-match daily and 7-match weekly they could add in a bunch of other dailies and weeklies with objectives like getting kills as each ship type, getting kills against each ship type, earning medals as each ship type, completing matches in each game mode, completing matches in each map, or whatever else. (Expand the warzone terminal with a similar variety of new dailies and weeklies too.)

 

Change the flashpoint objective that currently recognizes two specific weeklies so that it recognizes anything from the flashpoint mission terminal (like an operation objective already does for the operation mission terminal).

 

Add a terminal to every planet with missions for a bunch of on-planet activity and make sure that every conquest includes an objective for every planet giving repeatable credit for any mission on that planet's terminal.

 

Maybe even add an objective that acknowledges the missions for the solo on-rails missions on the class ships.

 

Then the major point earner for each type of gameplay would be the objective calling for completion of any mission from the terminal for that type of gameplay. (And maybe keep a generic repeatable of some sort on the side as well in as many cases as possible, but only for low value farming.)

 

I think an overhaul like that would give most players a fair chance to find something that they can do to at least reach the personal target, and then you maximize on that if you're doing it for a guild as well.

[ALaggyGrunt]

That post belongs here. Nice ideas about the crafting dailies, though I'd be very afraid of making it character-bound. Instead of just one-time and repeatable objectives, maybe make objectives which can be repeated 2-3-5 times.

 

The big thing about the on-rails being worth very much is people used to bot it. If space PvE is to be worth anything, it needs to come off the rails and have serious variability so just copying your keystrokes and mouse movements for a perfect run won't cut it.

Edited September 24, 2015 by ALaggyGrunt

[Muljo_Stpho]

Yeah, I've posted a lot of that in other conquest threads before (suggestion topics and the recent topic that blew up in general because of the announced conquest crafting nerf).

 

The conquest interface's current implementation of non-repeatable objectives is just pure crap and doesn't seem to suggest that the interface is capable of doing anything clever, so that's why I push so hard on the idea of basing objectives on missions (which a select few conquest objectives already do) instead of hard-coding the objectives into the interface so that the game can just enforce smart restrictions that way. If I'm wrong about that and they can in fact tweak the conquest interface to track objectives per character instead of legacy-wide and to allow a number of uses that isn't just infinity or one and to also allow such limits to be established as number per day or number per week as necessary, then cool. Do that. But whatever they do, this once per legacy BS needs to be completely eradicated.

 

About the on-rails missions, in the lead-up to the announcement of GSF when we knew for a fact that something was coming soon but we didn't know any details yet I had been imagining an overhaul for those missions that would have re-imagined all of the levels with some sort of network of criss-crossing alternative rails that we can switch between by following on-screen prompts. (I never expected anything free range, just a compromise of making the linearity of the format more flexible.) So you would see icons that represent possible decisions like which target to head towards next, which direction to approach the target from, whether to loop around for another attack run or head for cover or switch to another target, and whatever else. Veer towards an icon to switch onto that rail.

 

I don't know if that would really affect the botting issue that much if they were to actually use that idea... Unless they add in a random factor that changes up where waves of attack fighters will spawn from / where they will be heading so that such details may be something that you have to factor into your decision on the spot instead of just memorizing a favorite route. If they can add in something like that, at least, it might be fine. Otherwise, someone who wants to program a bot would just feed it the commands for whatever is determined to be the ideal route that always gets the jump on every wave of fighters that spawns in.

 

Regardless of holding onto some remote hope for a revamp like that though, I did say (edit: not in this thread apparently) that I couldn't imagine the solo space missions being worth many conquest points. It would be enough to be something extra that players with a PVE preference can consider doing but I wouldn't expect it to be worth enough to carry a character to their personal target. The points would also have an effective daily cap on them for each character. I imagined it specifically giving points for each "operation" mission (the space missions from the terminal which each call for completion of two of the specific flights that you can select from the galaxy map), not for the individual flights (which are technically repeatable since you can just select them from the map whenever you want).

Edited September 28, 2015 by Muljo_Stpho