Conquest Feedback and Upcoming Changes

[Kilzeus]

/sign

Good ideas.

 

In my opinion this would only result in new ad-hoc guilds being made by the members of bigger conquest guilds to game the system and go for certain planets to get the achievements.

[Auricuroo]

Well clearly the intended changes to conquest were very poorly thought out and I doubt I'll even bother with that aspect of the game going forward unless dramatic rollbacks are made. This bodes poorly for my continuing as a paid subscriber.

 

What I have not seen in the discussions (other than about getting credit for bosses not killed) are reports of what I experienced - zero credit for rampage on Ilum kills and zero credit for a 'Crafting: Many War Supplies.' So, even if the system were not intentionally broken, it appears the coding handling the tallies was rolled out without adequate testing.

 

I suppose my fantasy at this point would be the EA suits doing a 'force choke' on the SWTOR game runners for their disappointment in the effect on their quarterly results - as we see so often in the SW movies - in a modern, socially acceptable corporate manner - of course!

[Storm-Cutter]

I agree with these limitations. I would not eliminate choice but would rather put restrictions to selecting yeilds based upon guild level as follows;

 

Small guild <=25 unique accounts -

100%CQ points multiplier for selecting a small yeild

125% points multiplier for selecting a medium yeild and

150% points multiplier for selecting a large yeild.

Medium guild =>26 <=49 unique accounts

75% multiplier for selecting small yeild

100% multiplier for selecting medium yeild

125% -II- large yeild.

Large guild >=50 unique accounts

25% cq points on small yeild

50% cq points on medium yeild and

100% cq points for large yeild

 

This would scale down huge differences in guild sizes when it comes to completing CQ. It would give small guilds a chance to go after large yeilds and would pretty much force guilds to stick to theirs CQ brackets.

 

This goes some way to leveling the field, But I think you'll find there are a lot of very small guilds ( <25 people) who would like to compete but still can't get the scores to compete with guilds 5x or 10x their size. - consider a 5 player guild vas a 30 player guild. - The latter has potentially 6x the manpower.

 

BUT IDK why the crowd can come up with elegant solutions, but BW can't - or indeed why they can't throw it open to the players and let them come up with the crowd-sourced solutions. - Probably pride- or apathy - or maybe both.

 

- which is precisely why there isn't much of a sense of association and a partnership. - An angry mob is not a community. - And antagonizing them is not leadership.

Edited March 23, 2018 by Storm-Cutter

[CaptRogue]

A roll-back will take you one hour maximum, if you have a single braincell left shared between your "development"/"customer-service"/"socialmedia event" team or whatever you are calling your two unpaid interns these days. I left out "test team" that would have been pushing it!

 

Um NO. It's not happening. And that's a good thing.

A roll back affects a crap lot more than your precious conquest changes. People have leveled, ranked in CXP, achievements, Izax stuff, etc...

They've stated they're going to fix stuff, let it be & see what they change. Plus they also stated that each week will be different. So just live & let live. Quit trying to screw things up for those who've made a lot of progress without conquest.

[Damask_Rose]

Yes and no. If you're unguilded and have no idea where things form then yes it will take a while. If you are in a guild, or are a part of say for example (just an example) the achievement hunter discord server. It would take you no time at all to form a group for anything under the sun.

 

Also my numbers are NOT with full stronghold bonus. I am at 125 and I think the cap for that is 150. So I probably have higher amounts than most, but not as much as a lot of conquest oriented people that are up in arms (assuming they are which from this thread I'd be probably pretty close to the truth)

 

edit: I'm not trying to say this is a perfect system. I agree that the move to reduce the points required for personal capping is needed. I agree that the point totals for activities should rise. I however don't believe this is some incredibly nasty update that's ruining the game and everyone should quit.

 

I’m in a conquest guild that does a lot of raids. It took up exactly 30 minutes to form for an 8 man Xeno last night. I know because that was all the time I had and had to leave before we started.

[Palaemus]

People do conquest for different reasons but mine is to get the titles/achievements and blue flagship plans, everything else like whether you get 100k or 50k credits or some decos you have gazillion of is worthless. All your idea would result in would be ppl in big conquest guilds creating smaller ad-hoc guilds to go for planets they want and still get rewards for sticking inside the brackets thus splintering large guilds.

 

I think the issue is devs don't realize why conquest guilds select certain planets, if people in that guild need an achievement they will go for it no matter if it's yield x or y. Only way to change that is by giving out achievements or blue flagship plans for different yields, that would change the calculations. To me those are the only two valuable rewards from conquest.

 

I dont think they would get CQ in aad-hoc smaller guild, you underestimate smaller guilds with much more commitment. And this is exactley what we need, decentralization. How can smaller ones compete otherwise? I do not need a 500 member guild with basically 450 alts getting everything every single time. Either stick to your bracket or waste time and effort AND risk trying to bypass this. Its fair and square.

 

E.g. we have laws that prevent monopoly bro..

Edited March 23, 2018 by Palaemus

[Shwarzchild]

I’m in a conquest guild that does a lot of raids. It took up exactly 30 minutes to form for an 8 man Xeno last night. I know because that was all the time I had and had to leave before we started.

 

Well then....my budget of 45 minutes is probably pretty close to accurate. Even so my original outline did not call for any of the one off stuff like Xeno. I know it takes far less time to grab a group from achievement hunters discord. Regardless, bump it to an hour. That still leaves a full hour of play if someone is playing the quoted 3 hour time limit.

Edited March 23, 2018 by Shwarzchild

[Darevsool]

"Forcing" guilds into one of the conquest ranges based on guild size is not the answer.

The way it is set up right now some of the historically "rare" planets (Rishi for example) is in the medium level bracket. For players seeking the Galaxy Conqueror title, regardless of the size of the guild you're in, that's the planet/bracket to invade when Rishi comes around.

 

The only way to prevent the large guilds from dominating each and every time that planet pops up is to either make it pop up more frequently, or change the planet rotation system to make every planet rotate through all 3 brackets.

 

To do that effectively you'd need to have more planets to choose from each and every week.

 

If, for example, for non-event weeks, a guild could have two choices for invasion...which planet, and which difficulty level (bracket), that would help out as far as the availability for title collecting by players.

 

However, that hypothetical system probably involves WAY more coding than they're willing to pay for.

[Stellarcrusade]

If you want to make it more even between guilds then create conquest brackets. You have access to the number of

people in a guild, make brackets where conquest is the same as ever, but guilds are competing with other guilds with reasonably the same number of members. This is JUST an example but say all guilds with 1 to 250 members are in 1 bracket and they can win a planet and get a title, then the next bracket is say 251 to 500 members, then maybe another 501 to 750, etc. I am sure you can pull numbers to figure out break points.

 

Why do people keep coming up with the idea that number of players has anything at all to do with how well they can compete in conquest? Whats to stop the enourmous guild from just sliding its best 249 conquest characters into a "small planet" sub-guild. The 249 big-guild actives would get easily over 5M, and the real small guilds that have between 20 and 249 players with say, 8 actives would end up with 100k. Not to mention the big guilds want to rotate titles on the small planets too, so they have incentive to do just that. Your plan has just made it easier for big guilds, not harder. With each of these suggestions, think what you would do if you were the guild master of the enourmous guild with unlimited numbers of players and resources.

 

Number of players has nothing to do with how well a group competes. If you wanted to even it out, you could divide all conquest gains by average daily player hours or something, not perfect but better than using number of players. The best is just to have a ceiling number. 200k gets you top10, 400k gets you the planet, no matter how many other guilds also got the same planet that week. The sooner people realize it is impossible to create ANY system that gives a fair conquest shake to small guilds, the sooner we can just remove the #1 competition and allow everyone to work towards the planet conquer.

[PorsaLindahl]

I work 12 hours a day. Monday through Saturday. Such is the blessing and the curse of restaurant ownership.

 

Let's break it down. One Gree Event mission takes what...5-10 minutes. We'll say 10.

If we include Xeno analyst - 20 minutes for that.

One Illum Heroic - 5 minutes.

Battle of Illum Master Mode FP - 30 minutes

One Invasion force - just log in hit a button and craft it.

 

Thats 1,688 + 293 + 743 + 6750 + 1,688 + 4500 = That's 13,974 in an hour. You still have one hour left to play for the day.

 

edit: You won't be able to do 10-20-30 characters like days of old. That was identified as an issue and I tend to agree with that assessment. My personal opinion is the goal post should be 4-5 characters for conquest caps per legacy. Your personal opinion can vary. Just try not to insult people with the whole "play x amount of time" argument.

 

Your times on things like the Gree event must be based on ideal circumstances. If there are other players it can take up to a half hour or longer to complete the missions. The same with that single Ilum Heroic.

 

Battle of Ilum can be done with 2 stealthers in about 10 minutes if you only do the 2 boss fights that unlock the clickies for the force fields, then the final boss fight.

 

One invasion force. If you have to craft the war supplies then that takes longer. Not everyone has all the crew skills to make those, let alone keep a stock of them to craft invasion forces just to turn around and basically delete them for CP.

 

Not everyone has the time to run operations. Not everyone is able to exploit (yes I think it's an exploit) the lockout system on operations to switch around and get completion multiple times on a single operation.

 

And you mentioned the Ilum Rampage in an earlier post. You obviously weren't affected by the bug with it resetting halfway through. People are getting to around 100 kills and it's resetting back to 0/250. Yeah, that makes it easier to complete. Kill 1000 mobs and maybe you'll get lucky enough to get credit for 250.

 

The system is seriously flawed even without the new bugs introduced. It wasn't perfect before, but it was a damn sight better than it is now.

[olagatonjedi]

I’m in a conquest guild that does a lot of raids. It took up exactly 30 minutes to form for an 8 man Xeno last night. I know because that was all the time I had and had to leave before we started.

Did you work on other conquest tasks during that time, or waste it standing around like other people complaining?

[Screaming_Ziva]

Hey folks,

 

In this thread we want to cover a few things about Conquests: our goals for the revamp, the feedback we are hearing from all of you, and what we are changing (and when). I recommend you start by reading our write-up of the changes that were coming to 5.8. Let’s jump in.

 

The Conquest Revamp – Goals

We had a few things in mind that we wanted to address as we moved from the old system into the new one. First and foremost were rewards. This includes ensuring that the new system delivers the rewards you earn, but also increasing the overall rewards for participating in Conquests. Here are is what you receive now when you and your Guild complete a conquest:

• A large amount of Credits and CXP via completion of Objectives
  
• Personal rewards, including crafting materials, credits, and more
  
• Invasion rewards, including crafting materials, credits, Encryptions, and more, which is now rewarded to all Guilds who meet the invasion target.
  
• Access to the Fleet vendor which sells special decos and the Master Compendium (Companion Influence boost)
  

 

Here are some of the other areas we were aiming to address:

• Objectives and their points – Conquests are meant to be an activity that someone can work on throughout the week as they play the game. Previously, Conquests were very homogenized in that there was very little diversity among each week. We used this opportunity to spread out what objectives were available in each Conquest.
  
• Crafting - Crafting is a key part of Conquests, and we certainly did not want to remove that. However, we know the use of War Supplies and crafting was contributing too much to the overall competition of Conquests. For that reason, we reduced the overall effectiveness of Crafting, but added new functionality to War Supplies that they can be consumed to add Conquest points. Allowing you to get points out of them twice if you want, or you could craft them on one character and then move them to other characters to gain conquest points.
  
• Yield Targets – Competition among different sized Guilds has always been a problem in Conquests. We introduced yield targets to assist in separating out Guilds by various sizes, as they have differing targets and rewards.
  
• Interface – We gave the interface a facelift (as outlined in the other post) to make it easier to find activities you may want to complete.
  

 

Your Feedback

We never saw this revamp as being a perfect change out of the gates, but it is a first step for us in crafting an improved Conquest system. Your feedback is incredibly valuable as we can immediately start making changes to get things to a great place. Now that you understand what our goals were, let’s talk about the things we are hearing from you.

 

Changed / Missing Objectives

This feedback was most commonly expressed from PvP’ers who saw a daily objective for winning a Warzone, but not one for participating. Our plan to combat the old system’s homogenization was to spread out all Objectives. This week may not have participation as an Objective, but it isn’t gone, it is just in a different Conquest. However, this information was not clear and breaks too far from the old system.

Plan: We are going to add a repeatable GSF and Warzone Participation Objective into all Conquest weeks. This will go into our next patch (possibly next week).

 

Objective Points Too Low

With the rebalance to Conquest Objectives, there is a general sense that completing your Personal Conquest takes too long and by proxy, Guild Invasions as well.

Plan: We are going to lower the Personal Conquest target to 15,000 per week (down from 20,000). We are also adjusting the Planetary Yield Targets to be:

• Small is now 200,000 (down from 460,000)
  
• Medium is now 550,000 (down from 1,380,000)
  
• Large is now 1,130,000 (down from 2,530,000)
  
  • This will happen in our next patch (possibly next week).
    

 

Crafting Changes Too Harsh

Crafting in Conquests was just too good prior to 5.8. There is a feeling though that we cut a bit too deep on its overall impact to Conquests. The War Supply schematics were combined which made them harder to craft, and their point contribution went down, even with the added functionality of being able to consume them.

Plan: We are going to give it some time and monitor the impact of these changes, and then we will make any needed adjustments in 5.9 or beyond.

 

Large Yield Target Rewards Aren’t Good Enough

We are seeing concerns that the Large (and possibly Medium) Yield rewards simply aren’t good enough to warrant the extra points required. That this may cause most Guilds to simply filter down into Small Yields, which is counter-productive to the goal of getting Guilds to split a bit by Guild size.

Plan: This is something we are sensitive to but without seeing actual participation data around Conquests, we are hesitant to make changes just yet. We will monitor in the coming weeks and make any needed changes in 5.9 and beyond.

 

New UI Confusion

There definitely is some confusion around the iconography in the new UI, especially for Objectives. For quick reference right now, Yellow icon means infinitely repeatable, Blue means daily repeatable, no icon means once per week.

Plan: With 5.9 we will be adjusting some text along with adding tooltips to ensure that is a bit clearer. We’re also going to be swapping the yellow/blue to be consistent with the rest of the game. In addition, we’ll be adding some additional fly text for Conquest Objective completion.

 

Punishing to Alts // Legacy

With the rebalance of Objective points and the reclassification of some Objective types, there is some concern over the ability for a player with multiple characters in a Legacy to be competitive in Conquests. Additionally, there are similar concerns for folks with characters within a Legacy in more than one Guild.

Plan: One initial step to resolve this is the lowering of the Conquest targets as highlighted above. Also, by adding more repeatable Objectives (like PvP participation) as noted, this should give players more ways to gain points and make it easier to achieve targets. Beyond that we will continue to monitor data and your feedback to seek other possible changes in 5.9 and beyond.

 

That is most of the major points of feedback we have seen coming in regarding the Conquest revamp, but we know it isn’t everything. Let us know your thoughts on the changes we have planned. Also, even after these changes are out the door please keep your feedback coming. We are committed to getting Conquests to be enjoyable, challenging, and rewarding.

 

Thanks everyone!

 

-eric

Nothing about why you decided to make the Commander's Compendium bind on pickup instead of bind to legacy? I'd like to hear your thought process on that because it makes zero sense to not have these bind to legacy.

[Lularapio]

Keep the new interface, bring the old conquest back.

[TTuck]

Still nothing on whether the daily repeatables are meant to be once per character or once per legacy or a mix. If they are a mix please put a different symbol on each and tell us which is which. Even if we only intend to get personal conquest on 3 or 4 char we may want to do some stuff that is repeatable per character several more times to help our guild hit the threshold. Currently they are per character for some people, per legacy for others, and others of us can log in and out a few times and they reset. It would be nice to know what was intended.

[TUXs]

Well played...

 

Yes...lowered, but satisfied.

[Morteistno]

To all the people suggesting linking the size of a guild to which tier planet you can go for.

 

One consequence of this for sure would be that guilds will start being extremely selective in their membership.

 

Ie you don't contribute enough conquest points -kicked.

 

You are inactive for a short time - kicked

 

I do not believe the general atmosphere in a guild or the game in general would improve because of this. It risks turning guilds into extremely competitive environments themselves and just reinforce one of the main issues with this update, ie turning conquest from a fun side effect of normal play into a chore.

Edited March 23, 2018 by Morteistno

[TUXs]

To all the people suggesting linking the size of a guild to which tier planet you can go for.

 

One consequence of this for sure would be that guilds will start being extremely selective in their membership.

 

Ie you don't contribute enough conquest points -kicked.

 

You are inactive for a short time - kicked

 

I do not believe the general atmosphere in a guild or the game in general would improve because of this. It risks turning guilds into extremely competitive environments themselves and just reinforce one of the main issues with this update, ie turning conquest from a fun side effect of normal play into a chore.

Well said - I absolutely agree!!!

[rmejia]

Screw it, just make every week a Total Galactic War.All planets and all activities in the game give conquest points.

[Savej]

We used to be able to brute force conquests by doing warzones. With the new system that is currently not possible. Is that changing?

[dynosian]

So here is some feedback from a smaller sized guild, the type of guild that's really just a group of friends who casually play the game, the type of group you guys 'supposedly' want to target/help out with these changes/balances.

 

Absolutely nothing you changed was positive for us, it didn't help smooth things over, it didn't help us feel like we could actually compete. You nerfed crafting, which was the primary way we ever even got on the conquest boards in the first place. You've made the whole crafting system so horrid that several folks are now planning on leaving if we don't see some sort of emergency revert in crafting, they see these changes as a neon sign of a sinking ship. This of course drags others with them on the way out the door, effectively killing our group off when it comes to our involvement in SWTOR. Combined with the fact that we're still competing with the larger guilds (since tier can be chosen on a whim), we'll never have a chance to amount to anything in conquest , or have our members feel like they contributed in a meaningful way. So, congratulations, I guess, your changes had the exact opposite effect as you planned.

 

We were able to put our name on the boards with crafting before the changes, and even managed to take one of the planets once during one of the mass invasion weeks... but now, with these changes, and the fact you crammed our server with a bunch of massive guilds (the server merger being another horrid choice you guys made) who can just take the lower tiers if they want... this whole conquest system has become pointless. Actually, it's more than pointless, we've been left feeling like you guys actively spat in our face...pointless would feel better.

 

Usually I don't care much about conquest in the first place, it keeps a few of my guild members occupied during the daytime, but you've gone and lit that small shred of happiness on fire, and tossed it in the gutter. Shame on whoever on your development team thought these were good ideas. Though, I'm not sure if this is an issue of bad design choice, or zero forethought, neither of these possibilities bode well for the future.

 

Can we get that question answered? Is the current abysmal situation of conquest (where small guilds are even more punished than before) due to bad ideas or a lack of looking at the bigger picture?

 

I understand that most of the company's employees have recently been shifted around to work on other projects, such as the upcoming Ironman sci-fi MMO, but only having a skeleton crew working on SWTOR isn't really an excuse for taking a system that 'kinda' worked and replacing it with ideas you guys found scribbled down in bits of paper left lying around on the floor after everyone moved out of the office.

 

I'm not one for the doom and gloom of 'ToR is dying' like a lot of people portray, but it's nearly impossible to stay positive about the state of the game when you just admitted that you're now treating the live servers as beta-test servers. Rolling something out with the plan of letting it settle and 'seeing how it plays out' is something you do on a ptr, not live for the life of an entire patch. So not only have you guys made bad design decisions, you're also implementing them in a more amateurish manner than most Indy game developers. We aren't test subjects, we're paying customers.

[ShadowGovernator]

We used to be able to brute force conquests by doing warzones. With the new system that is currently not possible. Is that changing?

 

Yes the moment BioWare pulls their finger out - and roll-back 5.8.

[JediJoy]

SNIP...

 

And while you are at it, get rid of ALL of the current conquest rewards, they are junk no-one wants any more of. I mean, the blue jawa junks were nice before this patch, no longer. If you really wanted rewards that would attract big guilds to do big planets do:

SMALL PLANET: 1 random chance cube, 1 random decoration from the ENTIRE pool of decorations at EQUAL chance, 1 random craft material used to make the 236 augs.

MEDIUM PLANET: multiply small planet rewards by 3.

LARGE PLANET: multiple small planet rewards by 5

 

If they changed crafting back AND added these rewards.... I would actually consider coming back to the game (unsubbed after 5.8 was released and havent logged back in since).

[AlrikFassbauer]

We used to be able to brute force conquests by doing warzones. With the new system that is currently not possible. Is that changing?

 

I get shivers when I see someone using "brute force" as a verb.

This way of "brute force a guild to the top" doesn't sound competitive to me - from its language - it sounds outrigfht like annihilation to me.

 

Number of players has nothing to do with how well a group competes.

 

To me, this sounds like saying "the size of EA has nothing to do with how well this gaming firm competes".

Edited March 23, 2018 by AlrikFassbauer

[Morteistno]

Eric,

 

While your post dealt with some of the pain points nothing was said about:

 

- conquest points for weeklies

- raising the conquest points received for a lot of activities.

- getting rid of legacy restrictions on conquest activities

 

 

There are several posts regarding these topics and some communication would be appreciated.

 

In short:

 

 

- is it a goal to make achieving the personal conquest target much harder to achieve on a single char? Yes/no

 

Lowering the target to 15k is only a small reduction and still leaves a much bigger effort than there used to be if not also the points for the activities go drastically up.

 

- Is it a goal to make it much harder than it used to be to complete conquest on alts? Yes/no

 

The things you listed as actions that will be taken still leave the idea that overall the goal is that conquest will be much harder to do than it used to be even without taking crafting into account. It is unclear whether this is a goal of the update or not.

[Savej]

I get shivers when I see someone using "brute force" as a verb.

This way of "brute force a guild to the top" doesn't sound competitive to me - from its language - it sounds outrigfht like annihilation to me.

 

I'm not thinking of guild objectives, I'm focusing on personal ones. In the tech world "brute force" is when someone tries something basic over and over until it works. Like "guessing" a password by trying all combinations of characters up to the limit. Pvp was never the fastest way to hit conquest objectives but it worked eventually.

 

Regarding some of the "conquest is fast and easy now" comments - I spent an hour two nights ago trying to get into a Xeno group on SF - no luck.