New Conquest System: First Impressions

[txbrumley]

Hey folks,

Keep the feedback coming! Seeing your thoughts on the revamp is very helpful to the team. ... This will allow you to see our thoughts on Conquests and then to highlight the feedback you have stated that we are actively reviewing internally.

 

I'm generally pleased with the structure and intent of the conquest changes. The new UI is a big improvement. While I'm not a numbers guy and can't address specific point allocation issues, particularly for planetary targets, the multiple available targets is a good thing.

 

Things I like:

* The new UI.

* Removal of planetary multipliers to objectives.

* Stronghold bonus calculation change.

* The attempt to remove the ability to spam an objective (eg., lockouts) that make some guilds unbeatable.

 

Things I don't like:

* Win requirement for any points in PVP type activities.

* The negative impact on activity queues. Reports are that flashpoint participation is down, for example.

* I'm still wrestling with the crafting changes. I am one of the guys in a small guild that helps keep the guild on the board in crafting week, just about the only time we could reliably score encryptions. I don't know if we'll be able to do so under the new rules. My mats are situated to favor higher grade crafting since I can afford that while other players in my guild are more comfortable with getting lower grade mats and crafting to make personal target.

* The lack of any meaningful explanation or warning of the crafting changes.

* Some of the bugs are unforgivable. Resetting objectives across a character logout? Seriously?

 

Requests for change/improvement:

* Keep at the UI. Tooltips! Explanation of the icon meaning.

* In the UI, the track objective checkbox is positioned so that I expected it to be the completed flag. The "complete/incomplete" text doesn't pop out of the UI.

* Add filters and/or grouping of objectives into types. A tree view as with the companions and contacts UI would be very helpful.

* Restore daily flashpoint and weekly mission objectives in some form.

 

I know there's a lot of yelling going on out here that can make finding meaningful information difficult, but many of us want this to work well. I hope you can hear us over the wailing and gnashing of teeth. Thanks.

[Vuknasty]

Can someone from BioWare let us in on the super-secret meaning of the purple triangle in the Conquest Objectives list? Thus far it appears to mean "randomly gives Conquest points for completing activities".

 

As far as feedback: I canceled my subscription yesterday after spending 2 hours trying to figure out how the new UI and conquest point rewards actually function. Group activity is at a standstill and I feel punished for having alts that I enjoy playing.

 

The reason I had been enjoying this game is teaming up with my guildies to earn Conquest and generally have fun in a group environment. Now, everyone is talking but no one is doing.

[Morteistno]

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.

[PorsaLindahl]

Serious questions (I doubt it'll get answered, though):

 

You guys (everyone at BW that is involved with the game) are getting paid, right?

This game is your job, right?

If you destroy your job, what reason do the big bosses have to keep you guys around?

 

I know you all have heard the term "Sh*t rolls downhill."

 

Pissing off your customers is going to result in cancellations & less revenue for Big Daddy and Uncle Mickey.

 

Uncle Mickey's gonna get pissed and jump all over Big Daddy. Big Daddy then gets pissed off and starts kicking his idiotic employees to the curb because they don't know the first thing about customer retention.

 

Think on that.

[matthaxian]

I'm very disappointed in this update to say the least but I am going to do my best to be constructive.

I am someone who participates in conquest fairly casually.

I think the quality of life in general in the game has taken a step up since Keith took over, but this is a giant step backwards, and it touches every sub-system of playtype in the game.

 

It's not the reason I play but I usually find time to cap the 4 toons I keep in one of the large conquest guilds using ops lockouts and the occasional craft, heroic or wz..

Someone earlier in this thread was saying , "look at the big guilds making points, they found a way to make points, you can too". They couldnt be further from the truth. Half of those points game from the WB bug.

 

Today we are doing the same activities we did before, but there is a palpable fear in the air in guild and voice chat about how long that will last when people start getting frustrated about not even getting close to capping their toons, or being faced with the choice of dedicating all of their (in many cases quite limited) playtime to conquest just to cap a toon or 2.

 

My disappointment is more in the fear that these changes are going to destroy guilds and the opportunity to do the activities I enjoy. You just aren't nerfing conquest points, lockouts, pvp, gsf, and crafting, you are in danger of ruining a good deal of group activity that goes with it. It's kind of like you forgot why conquest was there in the first place, which is to pseudo-bribe people into trying out new things that they might not normally do.

 

Let me tell you what I hoped for when you announced the conquest update:

My hope was that you would change it so that, like CXP, you would reward ALL activities with conquest points and use time investment as a template for how many points to reward.

Whether I was pushing another toon through KOTET, farming some dailies or heroics, running the new flashpoint, ops, or pvp, I would be rewarded for my time accordingly.

This would make conquest a true measure of player activity within a guild.

This could easily have been done by adding a repeatable reward for completing a chapter, a repeatable reward for all 3 difficulties of FP (and hey why not all 3 difficulties of ops while yr at it), a repeatable reward for solo missions in the new group finder interface.

 

As a player with many alts I don't get the once per legacy objectives. I think they're silly..

I love that you added the Iokath weekly and Colossus droid, but its awful that you can only do it on ONE TOON.

I think you are drastically overcomplicating things.

Basic repeatable objectives like finishing an ops,fp,heroic, wz, gsf, etc, have always been the backbone of conquest..

 

My biggest objection is the huge nerf to last boss lockouts which was clearly intentional.

I was skeptical when I started running last boss lockouts.

But I have come to really enjoy them and they are my favorite way to earn conquest points.

And if you really want to incentivize running the whole ops, instead of nerfing, you should add a repeatable objective for killing any ops boss.

There are so many advantages to a last boss lockout: you as devs may be missing:

1. If you miss out on a run there is another starting in 10 minutes. This is not only great for busy people with kids and jobs, It keeps guilds together by keeping people from being left out and getting them on voice chat.

2. You get to play different alts and learn different roles in a low pressure environment.

3. You get to skip the "pugkiller" bosses that you may or may not be able to carry the weaker members of your guild through.

4. Contrary to popular belief, this is one of the best ways for small guilds to compete. A guild of just 8 dedicated people could put up a million points a night under the old system.

5. Ops allow the most people to participate, which is the whole point.

If you tied ops objectives to killing bosses instead of (or in addition to) completing groupfinder,

guilds would start running 16 man groups and even hardmodes to make points.

It's a bit frustrating to me that my CQ guild won't tackle VOTMG, but nerfing lockouts into oblivion isnt the way to fix it.

 

I like the change to guild rewards (meeting a set target instead of making top 10), it allows smaller guilds to work towards their flagship (or would if you hadnt so drastically nerfed points).

I think that your new UI would be much better if one time, daily, and repeatable objectives each had their own tab instead of being shoved together.

 

I sincerelely hope these changes were an honest mistake and not intended to hasten the winding down of the game.

Edited March 21, 2018 by matthaxian

[RudeDog]

Your intention is quite apparent.

 

Break it so bad no one wants to play it anymore.

 

If you had any other intention I suggest you need to hire different staff.

 

All The Best

 

Exactly and it has worked for me. I just canceled. Tired of the constant poor performance from BW.

 

GC was horrible and took months to fix.

BW constantly adds bugs to the game and never fixes.

Balancing was done poorly.

Conquest is last straw for me...

[Nireesh]

I haven't read everyone's posts, so I'm sure this is covered, but here are my impressions:

 

First of all, I don't do conquests very often and I had trouble finding where the heck it was in the interface! Add a menu item so it can be found easier from the top menu (ie, where you can find chapters, companions, etc). Also, why is it in the 'journal' menu as a tab? I personally think it would be better in its own window

 

Next, I found it hard to tell what was repeatable. I still don't know for sure

 

Crafting targets are confusing, it says to 'turn in the invasion force', but when I crafted one it was completed.

 

It'd be nice to get rewards (albeit less) for losing like you used to in PVP (GSF, and reg pvp)

 

I really like most of the other changes like having small/medium/large guild goals.

[Nightblazer]

so it took me two days but finally figured it out. I wish this was included in the patch notes or something to make it more obvious.

 

Objectives without any arrow shaped triangle are once and done missions

Objectives with a grayed or dark color arrow triangle are the dailies

Objectives with a yellow arrow triangle are the ones you can keep repeating.

 

Again not obvious and needs to be made more obvious or something to tell you what they mean.

[ThomasStarWars]

so it took me two days but finally figured it out. I wish this was included in the patch notes or something to make it more obvious.

 

Objectives without any arrow shaped triangle are once and done missions

Objectives with a grayed or dark color arrow triangle are the dailies

Objectives with a yellow arrow triangle are the ones you can keep repeating.

 

Again not obvious and needs to be made more obvious or something to tell you what they mean.

 

so put pvp participation on yellow triangles with a higher amount of points, also random flashpoints under that banner, with higher points as well.

[HKtheindomitable]

I must mention that I was only taking into account the personal goal. The guild goal didn't occur to me, or actually didn't even show up despite having invaded (so for some reason I didn't think there really was one). That goal, especially with missions involving multiple missions, that can only be completed once per day per toon per legacy or account, whether bugged or not, is not really reachable with the current numbers.

 

Fixing the bugged ones would make it easier, but in light of that goal, small guilds wouldn't be able to reach it in time. Maybe if they did nothing but the conquest missions, but that's not fun.

[Zarahemla]

I am happy to see some changes to conquest. I am particularly happy about the nerf to lock outs. That is one of the parts to my suggestion # 27 in my suggestion thread found here

 

I like how you are playing with the UI, trying to make it better. I particularly like how you are trying to give bragging rights to players who are top conquest earners. I also like how you are trying to make small guilds competitive, and able to earn the Galaxy Conqueror title.

 

Here are a few suggestions on how to improve what you already have.

 

1) Improve the UI further.

 

a) Under the "Conquest Tab" where you have the drop down arrows for "Sort by Points," "Sort by Name," "Sort by Repeatable," and "Sort by Percent Complete," change that to have the drop downs be "Sort by Points (All objectives)," "Sort by Legacy (One time objectives, some people on this thread recommend getting rid off this category completely)," "Sort by Character (Once per toon per week) objectives," "Daily objectives (Once per toon per day)," and "Repeatable objectives (multiple times per day per toon)"

 

b) Make the top five character contributors for conquest be the top five legacy contributors. Players can already see who the top five character contributors are for conquest, by hitting G for guild, and then changing the drop down window from "Guild Rank" to "Conquest Points." Changing it to legacy would save players the time of having to sort through names and do addition.

 

 

2) Make earning points easier (more points per activity) or Improve rewards (multiple ship plans if you invade a medium or large yield planet). I recommend making earning points easier since that helps alts earn conquest. After all, this is an alt friendly game, might as well make your alts work for you.

 

 

3) Make it so you earn points for participating in Player vs. Player (PvP) and Galactic Star Fighter (GSF). Win or lose, you should earn points to encourage people to que, but winning should award more points.

 

 

4) Bring back conquest points for doing a random flashpoint, with more conquest points for doing a random Hard Mode (HM) flashpoint, to encourage progression.

 

 

Here are some suggestions that would also improve conquest.

 

1) My suggestion #27: TL;DR - Give points for killing a Story Mode (SM) Boss, more points for killing a Hard Mode (HM) Boss, and even more points for doing a Nightmare Mode (NiM) Boss, with bonus points awarded if it is the daily operation. This will encourage progression.

 

 

2) Make it show the top 10 Legacy contributors for conquest, instead of the top 5 characters for conquest, so it can mirror the top 10 conquest guilds. This is for the same reason you show top 10 guilds, to encourage competitiveness, even at lower levels.

 

 

3) Change PvP and GSF to be "Repeatable Objectives" (by the definition in this post).

 

 

Again, great job nerfing raid lockouts that was an exploit that needed to be squashed. .

[Nightblazer]

More feedback:

 

Under the Personal tab, have a sub tab to separate Incomplete / Completed Objectives. Once an objective is complete such as the one-time / dailies they are moved to the complete tab, then moved back on a reset such as the daily objectives.

[Quraswren]

The way I'm reading this makes it sound like these changes were deliberate and you have no intention of amending them.

 

Thats exactly what it means.

 

They had every intention to screw over gamers with these changes. Changing them will be like what they did to GC and year long wait just to get it to something just barely acceptable but still screwed up at it's core.

 

I'm strating to believe that bioware really doesn't know what they are doing after all this time. The stealth changes, the added grind, the massive hit to alt toon play.

 

Just terrible and at this point know why bioware screwed this up helps no one.

[Morteistno]

My biggest objection is the huge nerf to last boss lockouts which was clearly intentional.

I was skeptical when I started running last boss lockouts.

But I have come to really enjoy them and they are my favorite way to earn conquest points.

And if you really want to incentivize running the whole ops, instead of nerfing, you should add a repeatable objective for killing any ops boss.

There are so many advantages to a last boss lockout: you as devs may be missing:

1. If you miss out on a run there is another starting in 10 minutes. This is not only great for busy people with kids and jobs, It keeps guilds together by keeping people from being left out and getting them on voice chat.

2. You get to play different alts and learn different roles in a low pressure environment.

3. You get to skip the "pugkiller" bosses that you may or may not be able to carry the weaker members of your guild through.

4. Contrary to popular belief, this is one of the best ways for small guilds to compete. A guild of just 8 dedicated people could put up a million points a night under the old system.

5. Ops allow the most people to participate, which is the whole point.

If you tied ops objectives to killing bosses instead of (or in addition to) completing groupfinder,

guilds would start running 16 man groups and even hardmodes to make points.

It's a bit frustrating to me that my CQ guild won't tackle VOTMG, but nerfing lockouts into oblivion isnt the way to fix it.

 

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

[ThunderWalker]

Serious questions (I doubt it'll get answered, though):

 

You guys (everyone at BW that is involved with the game) are getting paid, right?

This game is your job, right?

If you destroy your job, what reason do the big bosses have to keep you guys around?

 

I know you all have heard the term "Sh*t rolls downhill."

 

Pissing off your customers is going to result in cancellations & less revenue for Big Daddy and Uncle Mickey.

 

Uncle Mickey's gonna get pissed and jump all over Big Daddy. Big Daddy then gets pissed off and starts kicking his idiotic employees to the curb because they don't know the first thing about customer retention.

 

Think on that.

 

 

I wish I could upvote / star / favorite / make sure you know I felt this was both humours and very chillingly accurate at the same time. Well written and as you have a precedence (aka Disney coming down on EA over Star Wars Battlefront 2 2017) maybe this is EA's way of telling Disney to find a short pier to take a walk off of?

[DisposableHeero]

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.

Edited March 22, 2018 by DisposableHeero

[olagatonjedi]

Obviously, I haven't spent a ton of time looking at this, but I do have some immediate reactions:

 

Crafting Changes

This feels like it was slipped in under the radar in an attempt to bottleneck the ability of large guilds to manufacture victory easily. The trouble is that it also hamstrings smaller guilds even more. Requiring so much more investment to create the same old stuff should have also been announced so that GTN sellers could have reacted appropriately to the new value of finished goods.

 

Work vs. Reward

The difference in guild rewards between tiers does not seem proportional to the amount of additional grind.

 

Lack of Information

Add some tooltips. Improve some task descriptions. Why are some of the repeatable icons silver / gray and others gold? Where do we donate for Crafting: Aiding the War Effort? (On that note, why does throwing away 10 Invasion Forces, which now cost a lot more to make, only give a few hundred points?)

 

Individual Rewards

Adding credits and CXP to tasks makes working them into limited play time more appealing. Thanks!

 

Accessibility for Smaller Guilds

The concept seems excellent, but if the aforementioned work vs. reward balance isn't addressed, then there's no point to pursuing medium or large yield planets, except to earn titles, so I suspect most guilds will continue piling on the small yield conquests, defeating the purpose.

 

The following addendum includes my subsequent posts on this topic for the purpose of consolidation:

 

Isotope Stabilizers

As an addendum to the crafting changes, I notice that Dark Projects can only be made using Refined Isotope Stabilizers now. Is there still a use for Exotic Isotope Stabilizers?

 

Winning vs. Participating

I'd like to echo the sentiments of others here. In the past, participating in PvP content earned points, even though winning earned more. For those of us who will probably never be great at PvP and frequently join the solo queue, there's no incentive to participate anymore. I can get CXP from PvE content without the frustration of fighting skilled premade PvP groups.

 

One of the areas in which SWTOR is horribly lacking is some kind of training area where friends can actually teach each other to PvP in a controlled environment. It's difficult to learn and improve if one is mercilessly beaten down over and over. Nevertheless, it was worth doing for giggles if a player could help his guild by merely giving his best effort. Now our efforts are meaningless, and there's absolutely no way we're ever going to be able to compete with dedicated PvPers.

 

Multiple Characters

As a smaller guild, we have relied on several dedicated players to meet their goals with multiple characters each week in order to be competitive. I personally do 4 characters per week; I have guildmates who do up to 9. Due to the rewards being so low now and the frequency that they can be claimed reduced significantly, it is impractical to try meeting the personal goals with more than one or two characters, particularly if the people behind them have limited play time.

 

Even if my guild miraculously manages to meet the guild goal, I will personally only earn 1 or 2 encryptions instead of 4, which greatly hinders our ability to expand our flagship. The flagship grind was already extremely slow for small guilds who don't have the cash to simply buy materials outright. Coupled with the increased material costs of dark projects, this is a crippling blow in achieving our community goals as a guild.

 

Review: Day 1

I started earnestly around 3 PM Eastern time. I had no idea that some tasks could only be done once per legacy, so I rotated through my 4 characters and set them to crafting invasion forces using war supplies that were leftover from the last crafting week. I set them up so that the 10th one would earn the points for a particular character with whom I always struggle to earn my goal.

 

My first character (set for 3 invasion forces) made 5 items due to critical successes. To my delight, all 5 counted toward my goal, not just the 3 jobs. My second character was also making 3 but turned out 5, and I realized I got the achievement with him and it was marked complete. I quickly checked my other 2 characters and realized it was complete for the whole legacy, so I cancelled further production to avoid wasting materials for no points.

 

Two guildmates and I stormed Ilum. We first did the heroic mission, during which we were erroneously awarded credit for the two world boss tasks. After finishing the heroic, we did a single Relics of the Gree mission, then headed over to kill 25 champion turrets. Finally, we ran around killing things to earn the rampage points.

 

One guildmate and I decided to do Hoth heroics because we wanted to do something productive while earning the Hoth rampage points. We did 8 of the 9 heroics (I normally only do 6), killing everything in sight to earn our conquest points.

 

At this point, I took a break to eat. I worked on this thread a bit, ordered a pizza, and relaxed for a while. No points accrued for eating the pizza, unfortunately.

 

I returned to keep grinding. I entered a warzone and prayed for a win. The Lord favored me; my team won the Huttball match, and I got my points for the day. I thought I'd test the Lord in GSF. I played 7 matches. I finished my weekly goal. I did not earn a single conquest point for the effort, however, because Imperial pilots dominated every match.

 

In all fairness, I'm usually the worst player on the GSF team. I struggle with visual impairments, but I typically do it because I enjoy flying spaceships and grabbing a few points to help my guild. To do the entire weekly mission, however, and get nothing for my guild out of it was extremely disheartening.

 

I've worked for about a year to build a little guild to the point where a handful of motivated players have been putting in the hard work to get us on the leaderboard. Prior to the server merger, we had only made the board twice. Recently, though, we have made the board for the past 4 consecutive weeks.

 

It's after midnight now. After spending a majority of the past 9 hours grinding away at SWTOR, I've managed to get one character to 18,513 points (due to a free 10k from a bug) and another to 5,000 (due to the crafting points falling to the wrong character). My guild has 90,362 points.

 

Needless to say, this has been a disappointing first day under a system that I thought would really help smaller guilds like mine see MORE reward for our efforts, not less.

I will start with the preface that I have ywt to spend any consideravle time on conqiest since the update, but the first thing I thought of whej I read your post is that you are disappointed and/or frustrated with the conquest system because you immediately went i to it with the same mindset from the old conqiest knowing full well that it had been changed.

 

When a system is restructured, it is your responsibility to restructure your understanding of how it works, your approach, and the expected outcome.

 

Give it more than one day.

 

Furthermore, if your guild was affected quite a bit using multiple toons to improve chances of completing and/or competing, then much larger guilds were affected exponentially more.

[PorsaLindahl]

Okay. It's day 2 of the new conquest system. A system that's supposed to be designed to give all guilds an equal shot at conquest. Show me where the equality is here. 1 million points between 2nd and 3rd place. And this is just one example. The point differences on the other 2 planets are nearly as wide (1 million points between 1st and 10th). It sure doesn't look equal to me. Edited March 22, 2018 by PorsaLindahl

[Kyrra_T]

I will start with the preface that I have ywt to spend any consideravle time on conqiest since the update, but the first thing I thought of whej I read your post is that you are disappointed and/or frustrated with the conquest system because you immediately went i to it with the same mindset from the old conqiest knowing full well that it had been changed.

 

When a system is restructured, it is your responsibility to restructure your understanding of how it works, your approach, and the expected outcome.

 

Give it more than one day.

 

Furthermore, if your guild was affected quite a bit using multiple toons to improve chances of completing and/or competing, then much larger guilds were affected exponentially more.

 

Actually not really on the exponentially more. It depends on whether that large guild is large because they have lots of alts OR if they have that many individual accounts. The ones with more individual accounts are far less affected by this change. Again, it hurts alts no matter the size of the guild. It reminds me a bit of the original launch of Galactic Command when their response to the outcry that it was very hard to level up more than one alt was 'you play alts?'. This after they had just forced anyone doing DvL into making 8 alts.

[translucentwolf]

Okay. It's day 2 of the new conquest system. A system that's supposed to be designed to give all guilds an equal shot at conquest. Show me where the equality is here. 1 million points between 2nd and 3rd place. And this is just one example. The point differences on the other 2 planets are nearly as wide (1 million points between 1st and 10th). It sure doesn't look equal to me.

 

Some players are willing to work hard for conquest, and some are not.

[olagatonjedi]

Actually not really on the exponentially more. It depends on whether that large guild is large because they have lots of alts OR if they have that many individual accounts. The ones with more individual accounts are far less affected by this change. Again, it hurts alts no matter the size of the guild. It reminds me a bit of the original launch of Galactic Command when their response to the outcry that it was very hard to level up more than one alt was 'you play alts?'. This after they had just forced anyone doing DvL into making 8 alts.

Somewhat true. It is my understanding that a large readon for the change in systems was because pf large guilds using large amounts of alts to build points and win. Yet another change that the public outcry made, but didnt fully understand that it may not fix things they way they intended it to. Yes, there are many guilds that actually have a playerbase, not an alt-house, so they will obviously, and rightfully IMO, benefit most. The new system seems to be true to guild conquest and not alt-o-holic conquest - the truly larger the guild, the more they benefit.

[Krazhez]

Okay. It's day 2 of the new conquest system. A system that's supposed to be designed to give all guilds an equal shot at conquest. Show me where the equality is here. 1 million points between 2nd and 3rd place. And this is just one example. The point differences on the other 2 planets are nearly as wide (1 million points between 1st and 10th). It sure doesn't look equal to me.

 

The flaw in the system is that more accounts equal much easier points. To my knowledge, that's how most of these big conquest guilds run, huge account total.

Also, If those guilds, in the screenshot, don't hit the target, they don't even get guild rewards do they? So you can make top ten and get no reward for it?

I'd think having yield selections based on account total, not member total could help. But only if its small, medium, large options per planet.

[rmejia]

I will just comment on two issues:

1. All conquest objective points were scaled down, probably using as a guide the target goal for the yield per planet. I think the personal conquest target should also be scaled accordingly to keep things in balance.

2. I completely understand wanting to give more opportunities to different sized guilds, but I don’t see how the current system with just three planets does that. The same 3 guilds that won before are winning now. To me the fault is in just having 3 planets for a very large number of guilds in a server. When Iokath first came out and it was just 1 planet per server the same guild kept winning it each week. I think there should be more planets as a way to create more opportunities. If six planets was the standard then that would double the amount of guilds winning and would allow others to compete. Maybe even more planets in some week, not rarely when the Total Galactic War week happens.

Edited March 22, 2018 by rmejia

[olagatonjedi]

Okay. It's day 2 of the new conquest system. A system that's supposed to be designed to give all guilds an equal shot at conquest. Show me where the equality is here. 1 million points between 2nd and 3rd place. And this is just one example. The point differences on the other 2 planets are nearly as wide (1 million points between 1st and 10th). It sure doesn't look equal to me.

It was a lot worse with the older system.

 

That said, you have given it less than 2 days. Im certain that a lot of guilds need to feel out which tier they will truly be competitive and where they wont. The learning curve eith the new system may be a big part of this.

[DisposableHeero]

Give it more than one day.

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.