New Conquest System: First Impressions

[Paulsutherland]

but but arcann romance

 

**** him ... he can always come back later.

[inoutallabout]

Here are my two cents.

 

Conquest points awarded per single activity must be revisited, there are too many activities that aren't simply worth the time to complete, compared with points earned. Warzones, GSFs and more probably.

 

Conquest activities must be "reorganized". First some stuff must be included again, daily FP, GSF and warzone dailies and weeklies. This is only a first list, maybe the team should look at all the activities and organize them to be included.

 

Speaking of Operations I think that the content shouldn't be limited at one per Legacy, on daily basis, but the conquest points should be awarded only for completing the whole operation not for only killing the last boss. Acceptable would be, in my opinion, to scale the conquest points rewards on bosses killed eventually, but we don't need the one per legacy cap.

 

Speaking about the different guild sizes and rewards I think that the process is good, but it miss two points. First one is the rewards. If you don't consider the title, conquest isn't appealing. Boost the rewards a bit, maybe a grand chance cube for each toon capped for the guilds that enter the leaderboard. Or other stuff, maybe a single cartel pack of the current ones, a bunch of cartel coins maybe too. Just to give to the players something interesting to play for. 50k credits is the reward you get from 3 heroics, without even bothering with the bonus, the green-blue-purple scraps doesn't have any value, since the nerf of the crafting in conquests (nerf needed in my opinion) and that they will not grant tier 10 materials.

Second and last one is a more complex and in depth change. Small-Medium-Large planets should remain as designed, but there is a needed change for how conquest points will be totalized. A small planet conquest should sum only the points of the top 25 (50? other value?) toons, regardless on how many toons in the guild where capped. A medium planet should sum the top 50 (75? other value?) toons and a large one every toon, like it is now. With a system like this one the large guilds will not invade the small or medium planets or if they do the small and medium guild will have a chance to compete without being simply overrun by the force of brute numbers.

 

I'm absolutely against mixing cartel coin rewards with in game rewards. FIrst off, they already have grand chance cubes as a possible reward from cxp boxes. Mostly, if it goes one way then it will end up going the other. If you're able to get cartel coin rewards from doing in game challenges, then it won't be long before they make in game challenges aided by real life money purchases.

 

Not only that, but it hits their bottom line. People still spend money on CC packs. I don't know why because the prices are jacked up so ridiculously high, but people will seriously drop over 60 usd for hypercrates, and Bioware needs that money. I'm fine with just getting normal rewards for crafting, credits, and cxp stuff. That's great. Just make it so I can actually do conquest on more than a few toons without making this game a full time job. Bring back the incentives to do group content.

[DarthSpuds]

You were aiming to be inclusive, especially of small guilds, and your implementation did the exact opposite.

 

And that shows just how little any of them play the game. It's OK for them playing in closed servers with "cheat codes" to get all the resources they want, reset lockout timers etc; and playing like that may give a completely different impression of these changes.

 

But those changes have to work "at the coalface" they have to work as intended, how we are required to play. If they don't the patch, and those that developed it have failed.

 

All The Best

[omaan]

More and more peoPle are unsubbing because you killed pvp. Time to answer devs - http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=9563230#post9563230

[Morteistno]

This is probably exactly why they made this change. ^

 

Seeing that their change doesn't fix this issue as now players simply duck out of losses since there is no reward to be had, they will roll back this change, right?

 

My biggest issue has always been the lack of communication on this games behalf as well as their total inability to acknowledge mistakes they make when they patch stuff in that clearly is not for the betterment of the game.

 

They NEVER back track, and will simply roll with the pile of dung packing it with future patches no matter how dumb or ill-conceived the change is.

 

This is either out of total ignorance, or having a supreme ego refusing to believe they make any mistakes. Couple this behavior with a lack of communication this only frustrates people more which is why so many have quit swtor over the years.

 

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

[Andryah]

It will be truly interesting to see what happens when only 2 or 3 guilds get any rewards at all on ANY of the planets (high/medium/low) because even those in the top 10 aren't hitting the minimum yield for any of them. You will actually be rewarding LESS players/guilds than you were before 5.8 for bothering to do conquest.

 

And their data will clearly back this up when they pull it at the end of the week to look at it.

 

Broadly speaking....instead of quitting, threatening to quit, demanding rollbacks, etc. etc. if players would simply NOT touch Conquests until they fix the issues that have been clearly identified by multiple objective player comments... the data will match the angst expressed in this thread.

 

If everyone grumbles and threatens to leave, etc. etc. yet continues to play Conquests.. then the data till not match the expressed discontent. And like it or not... they do compare their actual data analytics with player complaints... seeking to find a trend/consensus between player allegations and player actions.

 

In our guild, in general we have the same observations of issues as others have presented AND we have all reported the issues via bug reporting. Until they are addressed... we as a guild have tabled Conquests for now..... and it's not like there are not plenty of other things for the guild to focus attention on. Nobody in my guild has threatened to quit over it, we simply see it as a poor use of our collective time until they get things fixed.

Edited March 22, 2018 by Andryah

[Nightblazer]

Going forward Keith / Eric I strongly recommend you start utilizing the PTS server to it's full capacity. Every aspect of a patch should be made available for testing and feedback on the PTS. I'd rather wait longer between patches knowing that they are fully tested in on the PTS before they go live and I would think I'm not the only one who feels that way.

 

This whole situation with the Conquest system revamp could have been avoided if the PTS was used, allowed players to provide feedback and make said changes before it goes live. I see no reason to not utilize this at all.

 

Please once this whole mess is fixed up please use the PTS server going forward for patch 5.9, 6.0, 6.1 etc. There is no reason to not use it at all. These features need to be fully tested and feedback provided before hitting live. The PTS should be available for anyone who wants to use it and test these features. It should not be limited to just a few players / influences or NDA used because you don't want information released before the patch.

 

These is nothing wrong with people knowing what is coming out and the feedback from it. Other MMOs do this without issues because it provides good insight before something is released.

 

While I know a PTS will not catch everything at least it will get as much as possible before it comes out which as I mentioned before could have avoided this whole situation all together. Please going forward use the PTS for any and all game updates. Patches for bug fixes don't count but I'm talking about actual game updates especially if they include major changes to an existing system or even something completely new. Again I'd rather wait longer for an update to come out vs coming out sooner with issues such as this.

[DarthSpuds]

Broadly speaking....instead of quitting, threatening to quit, demanding rollbacks, etc. etc. if players would simply NOT touch Conquests until they fix the issues that have been clearly identified by multiple objective player comments... the data will match the angst expressed in this thread.

 

But things are so bugged right now you can get Conquest Points just for logging in.

 

So they'll read that data as just about everyone did "some" Conquest, so it must be fine.

 

All The Best

[vadess]

hey eric,

 

please bring back the repeatable random flashpoint and remove the pvp win per day. put it back as it was. thanks.

 

Agreed, please?

[TrixxieTriss]

But things are so bugged right now you can get Conquest Points just for logging in.

 

So they'll read that data as just about everyone did "some" Conquest, so it must be fine.

 

All The Best

 

This is true. I got the Illum boss done while doing a Korriban Heroic... seemed ledgit

[ZXuR]

A full roll back to the original is needed. no tweeks, no anything but a full rollback. and maybe a couple days off for the employees that designed this and thought this was a good idea.

I am the GM of a 400+ qualifying account conquest guild called The Courageous and all 400+ say this is horrible. Odd no one remembers being asked anything about what needed changing on conquest, so much for the promise to listen to the players? Or if people were asked, who were they? So first impressions: the silly UI is junk and very unclear, the grind is unreasonable, alts are pointless, story mode ops are now not worth the time, pvp is a "just leave if you are losing" setup but only do 1 match a day regardless, gsf is great but no points. This is all from a conquest point of view and if pvp is your thing for example, and that is what you log in to do, then conquest points for it are irrelevant but there will be a lot of people dropping groups.

Log in and hit your conquest on 1 toon and the time spent in game is dramatically reduced is the direction we all feel we are being herded. unless you want to wait for your non repeatable missions to reset and then repeat them and then you can still spend a lot of time in game, but I guess that is working as intended?

Changes are made to bring in new people, not drive the existing ones away. I understand there is always growing pains with new patches, and there is always those that don't care for change in any way, but this one is really bad.

[ShadowGovernator]

But things are so bugged right now you can get Conquest Points just for logging in.

 

So they'll read that data as just about everyone did "some" Conquest, so it must be fine.

 

All The Best

 

No need for their paying customers to wait for BioWare to review their faulty data - before they decide to act on it.

The time to act is now - Roll it back.

[PorsaLindahl]

And their data will clearly back this up when they pull it at the end of the week to look at it.

 

Broadly speaking....instead of quitting, threatening to quit, demanding rollbacks, etc. etc. if players would simply NOT touch Conquests until they fix the issues that have been clearly identified by multiple objective player comments... the data will match the angst expressed in this thread.

 

If everyone grumbles and threatens to leave, etc. etc. yet continues to play Conquests.. then the data till not match the expressed discontent. And like it or not... they do compare their actual data analytics with player complaints... seeking to find a trend/consensus between player allegations and player actions.

 

In our guild, in general we have the same observations of issues as others have presented AND we have all reported the issues via bug reporting. Until they are addressed... we as a guild have tabled Conquests for now..... and it's not like there are not plenty of other things for the guild to focus attention on. Nobody in my guild has threatened to quit over it, we simply see it as a poor use of our collective time until they get things fixed.

 

They want to check data. Check my account. Check my characters data. They'll see that on most weeks I complete conquest with a minimum of 5 characters. Sometimes 8. Sometimes more. I've been one of the top 2 or 3 contributors in my main guild for months, pulling in anywhere from 50-100k points on 1 of 5 alts in that guild, just from doing FP and PvP dailies/weeklies and heroics if they're part of it. I only play around 15 hours per week, maybe 20 if I'm lucky.

 

This week I've gotten exactly 10835 points on ONE character, and that's because of the bug with the Ilum bosses. I got the 835 points from testing if Battle of Ilum was repeatable. And since it is repeatable it becomes my only option for that specific character. I'd have to run it 63 more times to meet the personal conquest goal. If that sounds fun to you, then you're one sick and twisted individual.

[Tarbuch]

Going forward Keith / Eric I strongly recommend you start utilizing the PTS server to it's full capacity.

 

The Command kerfuffle was on the PTS, BioFail ignored all reports/comments on the issues, patch went live regardles.

 

It took BioFail 11 months to get to the current state of the Command system.

 

Bug reports seem go to the trash bin directly withouit anyone even reading them.

 

The state of the Conquest revamp update clearly shows that it was not tested at all.

BioFaill do not seem to have any resources left to implement, test or design any kind of rehaul of the game.

 

The game is now more broken than it was before the 5.8 fiasco.

[DarthSpuds]

No need for their paying customers to wait for BioWare to review their faulty data - before they decide to act on it.

The time to act is now - Roll it back.

 

Oh I agree.

 

Should've been rolled back last night before anyone committed any resources to it.

 

My Guild Leader just logged in, took one look at it and decided there's no pint even trying now.

 

So much for getting smaller guilds more involved - this pile of crap does the exact opposite, it prices smaller guilds out of conquest completely.

 

All The Best

[CaptRogue]

But things are so bugged right now you can get Conquest Points just for logging in.

 

So they'll read that data as just about everyone did "some" Conquest, so it must be fine.

 

All The Best

 

*rolls eyes* Come on now. That's a big exaggeration & you know it. lol

They know that Ilum boss is a bug & have stated so. That won't factor into their stuff.

And even if it did, that's small toss in the bucket apposed to what normally hits with conquest.

[TrixxieTriss]

Going to quote myself from a different thread:

 

This whole conquest change is like a soup sandwich. If you don't understand what that means, google it and check urban dictionary.

 

It’s a very interesting read. But it makes you wonder if he knows what’s going on in his own house.

 

For a studio like Bioware, which works on huge games like The Old Republic, Mass Effect and Dragon Age, that means ensuring that new designers "fit the culture" - a culture based on a specific set of values. According to Ohlen, those values are "Quality in the Product" and "Quality in the Workplace," but both are observed "in the context of humility."

 

"I think humility is a key attribute not just for a designer at Bioware, but as a creative in any industry. When I talk about humility, I don't mean lacking confidence, or not putting yourself out there, or not having drive. I mean you recognise that there is always a better way to do something; that there are many answers to a problem, and that your answer is just a single answer, and it's probably not even the best answer."

 

And the best answer will often come from someone else. The designer's job is not to ensure that their own ideas make it into the game, Ohlen said, but that only the best ideas do, regardless of their source.

 

I’m pretty sure Ben Irving didn’t understand that last part.

[Spiritbrook]

Not sure where to post this, but it is kinda related to the new material.

 

My Mission Log/Conquest Tab/Codex Tab which all used to be tabs on the same window have disappeared entirely. No response to L or Shift-L and cannot get them to spawn from the menu either. I even tried reassigning the hot key. Can someone advise me as to which file to delete for force it to install a new one?

 

I tried searching this thread and forums in general.

[Stellarcrusade]

Ok, I have to make a comment about the points values and the unrealistic planet goal values. My guild has 2000 members (1000 each faction). We are a conquest guild, and we would get top 10 on both sides nearly every week, over 1M on each side with the old system.

 

Now with the new system it looks like the guild will probably never be able to get the bottom threshold on the small planets on either faction ever again. After day 1 it seemed possible, but I find out thats just because of people getting the 10k from that bug. Now it looks like the best we will be able to do in a week is about 200k total divided between both factions. That's 1/10 what we would get easily before.

 

Were the changes designed to force all small and medium conquest guilds to simply close up shop and quit the game? There really has to be some serious changes to the points. I mean seriously, did anyone even do the basic math here? Let me break down the problems with the changes:

 

1.) They took away the guild ship invasion bonus which amounted to probably over half of all conquest gains, so they should have immediately DOUBLED all points to compensate for this. Instead they got rid of nearly all ways to make points.

2.) Since PvP/GSF pays on wins only, no-one will ever do those again, especially not pub side (PvP). So now all points need to be 100x to compensate for those losses.

3.) Too many things are not repeatable, no more random flashpoint filler, nothing is worth any points.

4.) People were used to looking for certain amounts to get excited about, and ignoring items that didn't seem worth it under the old points system. Well, before if something would take 30 mins and would award 1000 points, it wouldn't even get done. But if it were 2000 or 3000 for 30 mins playtime, people would do that. Under the new points system, I look, I see nothing worth even doing, and thats it, time to play another game for the day. You need to make the points about 1000 per 10 mins of playtime to get people to do them.

 

Really, under the current points system if you leave it as is, you'll need to change personal conquest to 2k, and the planet minimum threshold for small planet to 80k or the whole system is now ONLY for the enourmous guilds.

 

If nothing dramatically changes with points, I see no alternative my guild and all its players will really have no reason to continue on SWTOR. I cannot imagine the goal was to get thousands of players to leave the game really? I am not kidding about this, I will close my guild because conquest guilds that have no conquest to do anymore have no reason to remain.

Edited March 22, 2018 by Stellarcrusade

[dryving]

Our guild is small, but for the crafting conquests we would prep for months so we could win a planetary title we needed. It was a bit grindy, but we had fun with the challenge and it was fun to be able to take on the big guilds in something. The new system has made this impossible for us and has our guild members looking at other games we could move to. It has also made getting individual conquest so tedious that we ran the math and are not really bothering to try. Too much investment for too little rewards.

[KendraP]

My Guild Leader just logged in, took one look at it and decided there's no pint even trying now.

 

So much for getting smaller guilds more involved - this pile of crap does the exact opposite, it prices smaller guilds out of conquest completely.

 

All The Best

 

As the guild leader of a smaller guild, i did the same thing on tuesday. I capped my main thanks to the bug, and have been using the double exp event to get some alts up in hopes they fix this nightmare. In the unlikely event people get on and want to do so, I've been encouraging xeno runs as well. Get rep and the gree currency things for guildies who need it.

 

The large guilds will always have the advantage i get it - i dont expect to come in first. At least, in the old system, the effort i went to in capping 10 toons a week was rewarded (well unless it was iokath or a different crafting week, in which case i generally decided not to try). Now my one toon is capped, and my guild of pvpers has little chance at making the (small) planet cap to get encryptions.

 

I used to get 5-15 encryptions a week from just myself. Now, I probably won't get one. So much for expanding the guild ship

[DisposableHeero]

3 days (43%) of the conquest week in the books so lets do a little math.

 

I've taken a best guess at the amount of active time it requires a player to repeat each type of objective, and scored that against the point yield to come up with an expectation of conquest points per minute. Accounting for the bugged world bosses giving free points, the optimal points per minute when all activities are available is 422.6. With all of the one time content removed the points per minute is reduced to 60.6. At this point I make a couple assumptions in my model. The first is that approximately 1 day is spent on the low hanging fruit for conquest contributors before it is gone. So players operate at an efficiency of 422.6 points per minute for 1 day, and 60.6 points per minute for the remaining time, at the top end of the leaderboards any way where we can expect player routines to be optimized and adapted to completing conquest. We are for now going to ignore the effect of stockpiled invasion forces and Crafting: Aid The War Effort, because that is not going to be indicative of the system beyond the first few weeks while invasion forces are sunk into flailing against the nerfs and pretending everything is ok until they are gone. However, the existence of these means the totals we see on the leaderboards are highly inflated.

 

Our model of 1 day at 422.6 and 6 days at 60.6 for the conquest week means that in all likelihood, close to 69% of the conquest points to be earned this week have already been realized. Using that number and checking the leaderboards that suggests the following:

 

Only one guild is on pace to meet the large planet conquest goal. The current leader is setting a pace to hit about 2.8 million points. The second place guild is on pace to get 1.9 million conquest points.

 

On the medium leaderboard, 6 guilds are on pace to meet the conquest goal. The top guild here is actually just on pace to meet the large planet goal.

 

On the small leaderboard, 7 guilds are on pace to meet the conquest goal. The top 2 guilds on the small leaderboard are on pace to meet the medium leaderboard.

 

So this week, we can expect about 14 guilds, instead of 30 to earn encryptions. I suspect the number to be higher than that, but not by much. Guilds that are close will dig into their invasion force stockpiles to push over the top at the end of the week, further depleting them.

 

If large and medium targeted guilds down rank, you can add another 1 medium winner and 12 small winners would be possible. So if people target the right planets, you'll see close to the 30 winners that would have happened before, but just barely. 10th place on the large leaderboard is 46,000 points ahead of the pace required to meet the small planet goal, and the 10th place on the medium leaderboard is 508 points ahead of that pace, so it is unlikely there are a significant number of guilds below top 10 that would make the cut for small if they downranked.

 

What this data reinforces is that the conquest point goals are poorly fit to the rate conquest points are earned, to the point where they are rewarding fewer guild rewards than just a top 10 for each planet. I'm pretty sure the design intent was to allow a larger pool of guilds to be competitive.

[casirabit]

Oh I agree.

 

Should've been rolled back last night before anyone committed any resources to it.

 

My Guild Leader just logged in, took one look at it and decided there's no pint even trying now.

 

So much for getting smaller guilds more involved - this pile of crap does the exact opposite, it prices smaller guilds out of conquest completely.

 

All The Best

 

I don't think a roll back is correct. Changes yes. But what about those individual that have gotten the last operation boss and from what I have understand that is not easy to do, should they lose their achievements and rewards because of the conquest?

 

A roll back doesn't just affect one part of the game but other parts and while something should be done with the conquest doing a rollback affects more than just conquest and that would not be fair to those that have done the operations (and no I haven't done it) and achieved the achievements and rewards. I would hate to see anyone lose that because of one part of the game needs fixed.

[Quraswren]

 

"And the best answer will often come from someone else. The designer's job is not to ensure that their own ideas make it into the game, Ohlen said, but that only the best ideas do, regardless of their source."

 

I’m pretty sure Ben Irving didn’t understand that last part.

 

There is no way that has been bioware philosophy for a very long time.

[Kurj]

As the guild leader of a smaller guild, i did the same thing on tuesday. I capped my main thanks to the bug, and have been using the double exp event to get some alts up in hopes they fix this nightmare. In the unlikely event people get on and want to do so, I've been encouraging xeno runs as well. Get rep and the gree currency things for guildies who need it.

 

The large guilds will always have the advantage i get it - i dont expect to come in first. At least, in the old system, the effort i went to in capping 10 toons a week was rewarded (well unless it was iokath or a different crafting week, in which case i generally decided not to try). Now my one toon is capped, and my guild of pvpers has little chance at making the (small) planet cap to get encryptions.

 

I used to get 5-15 encryptions a week from just myself. Now, I probably won't get one. So much for expanding the guild ship

 

I think flagship encryptions will be a serious issue. They’ve tied them to the mats rewards now, so they can’t independently regulate either. I don’t see a downside to plentiful encryptions, and it seems like bad PR to make it really difficult for a new guild to acquire a flagship. But I’m not so sure whether we want the supply of mats to be abundant or scarce for the health of the economy.