Conquest Feedback and Upcoming Changes

[JediJoy]

SNIP

Your view point on crafting is completely incorrect the previous crafting helped smaller guilds be able to win conquest when it came up. The way you have it set up now is smaller guilds with numerous alts can not participate in crafting due to the cost, large number of mats required and the time to try to obtain said mats.

SNIP

 

They do not have ANY clue as to what it takes to contend and win crafting conquest weeks. If they had that many people complain about it, they should have spread the crafting weeks out further (they used to be every 2-4 months, after DvL it went to every 2-4 weeks, it finally just calmed down to once a month average). Crafting weeks was literally the only chance for small and medium sized guilds to go after large guilds and win. Crafting before 5.8, involved a ton of planning, prepping, farming, heroic runs and gtn sales to pay for white bits, more crafting and prepping, more farming etc. rinse and repeat daily.

 

Everyone assumed that those large crazy crafting bomb numbers came from large guilds. They rarely did. Those were the small and medium sized guilds unloading their saved up mats. My guild planned and strategized in great detail: which planet to take during which crafting week and how much we needed to prep to do so. We didnt go after a win every crafting week, not unless we got very very very lucky on our planet pick, which was quite rare. This was the only way we could help our member go after their conqueror achievements.

 

Now its literally impossible for small guilds to even compete during crafting weeks. I chose the word impossible because you try to go farm grade 2 and grade 3 crystals on a mass scale, hell you cant do it on a small scale.

 

Someone mentioned earlier about "donating" invasion forces was like trashing millions of credits: donating 10 was like trashing 25mil. With this new way of crafting you are looking at between 30-50mil for every 10 invasion force donated. You are using enough mats to make 4 different war supplies then just to make 1 war supply now.

[AlrikFassbauer]

Tulak Hord :

 

Goal : 460.000 points, small planet !

 

First place guild right now : 1.086.442 points

Second place guild right now : 870.062 points

Third place guild right now : 677.198 points

Fours place guild right now : 605.386 points

Fith place guild right now : 488.150 points

Sixth place guild right now : 454.307 points

 

And there are still 3 days left.

 

Great. Big guilds squeezing out small guilds. As predicted.

 

 

Goal : 1.380.000 points, middle planet.

 

First place guild right now : 1.081.897 points

Second place guild right now : 900.343 points

Third place guild right now : 647.431 points

Fourth place guild right now : 556.029 points

Fifth place guild right now : 553.330 points

Sixth place guild right now : 450.089 points

 

 

Goal : 2.530.000 , big planet

 

First place guild right now : 1.865.722 points

Second place guild right now : 682.431 points

Third place guild right now : 644.454 points

Fourth place guild right now : 600.874 points

Fifth place guild right now : 537.609 points

Sixth place guild right now : 531.477 points

Edited March 23, 2018 by AlrikFassbauer

[AlrikFassbauer]

Everyone assumed that those large crazy crafting bomb numbers came from large guilds. They rarely did. Those were the small and medium sized guilds unloading their saved up mats. My guild planned and strategized in great detail: which planet to take during which crafting week and how much we needed to prep to do so. We didnt go after a win every crafting week, not unless we got very very very lucky on our planet pick, which was quite rare. This was the only way we could help our member go after their conqueror achievements.

 

Our guild is very small, but also very tight, and we got most points from FPs and group content - crafting had only a middle or minor role in that.

 

We never conquered a plamnet anyway, but we were happy is we were in the middle of the Leaderboard (which sometimes happened, depending on the conquest).

Some conquest planets were of course dominated by large guilds.

[Mournblood]

I think you are right about them not being able to force guilds to not invade smaller yield planets with bigger guilds unless they indeed FORCE it (by taking away the ability to invade elsewhere), I have issue with using the number of "qualifying accounts" to set these limitations.

 

I would add ACTIVE to the "qualifying accounts" so that you do not further punish small guilds who keep inactive members of their community in the guild rather than removing them just because they don't play the game in an ongoing fashion. Many in my guild have left and will not be back until there is a significant amount of new content to play through, and 90+ days of inactivity is not unusual. Don't make me remove my friends from the guild they call home just so that I don't get punished in conquest by not being allowed to invade a low yield planet.

 

That's a good point, and an improvement on my suggestion. I agree that active accounts based on "last played" should be the criteria used for Yield Target qualification.

[Ibokagain]

http://www.swtor.com/community/showpost.php?p=9563994&postcount=203

 

I agreee 100%

[Lyshar]

I'm sorry everyone, I made a miscalculation before, since a win is 85 points at the moment for a repeatable GSF mission it's safe to assume a participation one will be 42.5 points if it's repeatable, likely rounded down or up to 40 or 45, 50 at the most. But lets compare it all with the possibility they'll adopt the 85 points the win has at current. And if Warzones are repeatable they'll match these points unless they are half as they have been before 5.8. So I'll start best to worst case and even throw in the 25 point extreme if I feel like it.

 

Current GSF win objective score:

Baseline: 85

Current objective score: 20.000, new score 15.000

20.000 / 85 = 236 matches (rounded up)

15.000 / 85 = 177 matches (rounded up)

 

Lets translate this to time.

177 matches / 6 days = 30 matches / day (rounded up)

30 matches * 0.5 hours (wait in queue and play a match) = 15 hours/day

Even if you have all instant pops you maybe get to cut that time in half leaving you with a full time job, and with the current conquest they have to be all wins.

 

New GSF win estimated repeatable objective scores:

Baseline: 40/45/50

15.000 / 40 = 375 matches (exact)

15.000 / 45 = 334 matches (rounded up)

15.000 / 50 = 300 matches (exact)

 

Lets translate this to time.

Do I need to, pretty sure you can eat and sleep, other than that you have to have constant instant pops.

 

Now to see if my worst case scenario is as bad as I estimate, shall we?

WZ participation score is half the GSF participation score:

Baseline: 25

15.000 / 25 = 600 matches (exact)

 

Lets translate this to time.

600 matches / 6 days = 100 matches / day (exact)

100 matches * 0.5 hours (wait in queue and play a match) = 50 hours/day

Wait that can't be right...

100 matches * 0.25 hours (wait in queue and play a match) = 25 hours/day

Almost there...

24 hours / 100 matches = 0.24 hours per match

0.24*60 = 14.4 minutes, guess if we can finish the match in 10 minutes, have 4 minutes for loading screens and save those 24 seconds each match to sleep.

 

Welcome new player, have you met our conquest system yet?

 

They don't really want to address the abysmal scores on repeatables so they probably won't fix that. And if that's the case I have one message for the Dev in charge of that and his or her direct supervisor: "Get back to pre-school or at least out of the gene pool.".

 

And if you think SH bonus...15.000/213 (rounded up)=71 (rounded up) meaning still needing 12 (rounded up, one day you can save 1 ) matches a day. But it's meant to make it easier, otherwise you use that as baseline so everyone should get it, and then you should do away with the SH bonus because you're only hurting people that can't afford SHs. I want to know what I get without my SH it helps when talking to people regarding conquest.

[Gidrea]

If you want to help smaller guilds, remove the once per legacy restriction on Ops. Ops have lockouts anyway, so we would only be running them once per character. Let our alts get points, too!

[KendraP]

Ok, I double checked and this is not an issue for future Conquests. All of the above content Objectives should be in for all Conquests after our next patch.

 

-eric

 

So not a problem of too much "homogenity" but a bug now eh.

Guess it doesn't matter, I'm happy spammable group content is returning. But seriously nice backpedal.

[Craydingus]

Would it be too much to ask to make each PvP match one (more than one a day) Count towards conquest? And make my stronghold bonus count on it? PvP is my and a lot of other players' mainstay in the game and some of us invested big bucks into those SH's.

[Morteistno]

Tulak Hord :

 

Goal : 460.000 points, small planet !

 

First place guild right now : 1.086.442 points

Second place guild right now : 870.062 points

Third place guild right now : 677.198 points

Fours place guild right now : 605.386 points

Fith place guild right now : 488.150 points

Sixth place guild right now : 454.307 points

 

And there are still 3 days left.

 

Great. Big guilds squeezing out small guilds. As predicted.

 

 

Goal : 1.380.000 points, middle planet.

 

First place guild right now : 1.081.897 points

Second place guild right now : 900.343 points

Third place guild right now : 647.431 points

Fourth place guild right now : 556.029 points

Fifth place guild right now : 553.330 points

Sixth place guild right now : 450.089 points

 

 

Goal : 2.530.000 , big planet

 

First place guild right now : 1.865.722 points

Second place guild right now : 682.431 points

Third place guild right now : 644.454 points

Fourth place guild right now : 600.874 points

Fifth place guild right now : 537.609 points

Sixth place guild right now : 531.477 points

 

Well yes it was predictable. Also take into account that a huge part of these numbers are coming from the 10k bug and the other conclusion to easily draw is that even the lowered planet targets (next week?) will mean that less guilds than ever will receive the conquest rewards at all. Which just shows how badly they missed the mark on giving more guilds the opportunity for the rewards.

[Shwarzchild]

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.

 

You are right. I am basing my times off what I can do which isn't really relevant to anyone but me. But, it shows that these things can be done and are being done in similar fashions.

 

I haven't mentioned the rampage...cause yeah i got hit with the bug too. Got to 220. Reset to 0. But I digress

 

I philosophically do not agree with your next part. I do not subscribe to the notion that just because someone doesn't have the time to do something in one sitting that things should be changed to accommodate them . If an operation is the creme de le creme for conquest points and someone doesn't have the time to do it then they don't get the points. Period. End of story. If they don't have the time to do X they don't get the rewards for doing X. If they are unwilling to do the things that they could do to make their gaming life easier then I'm sorry I won't just say sure no problem you can get the rewards. I do not like cow towing to people who want their cake and eat it too. If Conquest is an end game function (which some argue it is) then no they have to do the necessary things so that they can conquest with the best of em. I'm just so not ok with making it super duper easy to always cap 10 characters or more. If they can't play more than they can't cap more. I know it's not a popular opinion, and I'm sure I've written it wrong in places, but overall I just don't like the notion that just because someone logs in for 5 minutes a day means they should get the entire swtor world dropping at their feet without any effort whatsoever.

[Kyrielan]

I hate to say it, but I was afraid the larger guilds would go for the small yield planet as well, still not allowing my small guild to make it to the top 10 yet again. I did notice one of the large guilds the first day, but the rest I did not recognize. We will keep trying and hopefully once the goal is lowered we might make it, if the large guilds go after the large yield planets as they should. Maybe even the medium guilds will give us little guys a break. Thank you.

[JattaGin]

Tulak Hord :

 

(...)

 

Goal : 2.530.000 , big planet

 

First place guild right now : 1.865.722 points

Second place guild right now : 682.431 points

Third place guild right now : 644.454 points

Fourth place guild right now : 600.874 points

Fifth place guild right now : 537.609 points

Sixth place guild right now : 531.477 points

 

Even with the new numbers, only one single guild on your server would meet the threshold. I doubt that the 2nd guild gets much more than 1M.

 

Any guild that choses the top tier next week is either crazy, very self-confident or they were on holidays this week and haven't heard yet.

 

(...)

Lets translate this to time.

600 matches / 6 days = 100 matches / day (exact)

100 matches * 0.5 hours (wait in queue and play a match) = 50 hours/day

Wait that can't be right...

100 matches * 0.25 hours (wait in queue and play a match) = 25 hours/day

Almost there...

24 hours / 100 matches = 0.24 hours per match

0.24*60 = 14.4 minutes, guess if we can finish the match in 10 minutes, have 4 minutes for loading screens and save those 24 seconds each match to sleep.

 

Lol @ whoever had this great idea at BW. It reminds me of other great ideas like one crate per 30 minutes or similar bullocks.

[LordTurin]

I hate to say it, but I was afraid the larger guilds would go for the small yield planet as well, still not allowing my small guild to make it to the top 10 yet again. I did notice one of the large guilds the first day, but the rest I did not recognize. We will keep trying and hopefully once the goal is lowered we might make it, if the large guilds go after the large yield planets as they should. Maybe even the medium guilds will give us little guys a break. Thank you.

 

Top 10 doesn't matter, the only thing that matters is 1st place (for title) and beating the threshold (for guild invasion rewards). You can be number 55, and as long as you beat the small guild threshold, you are rewarded exactly like number 2.

[TheRachMonster]

I don't think it's fair how you have 3 objectives for star fighter and 1 for pvp. As someone who mainly pvps I feel like there is very little I can do for conquest. Please bring back more objectives for PVPers!! And for goodness sake some more repeatables, like we had before for pvp/pve. Thank you.

 

 

At the very least allow us to get conquest points for doing the daily for unranked. Please?!??

[Kyrra_T]

Well yes it was predictable. Also take into account that a huge part of these numbers are coming from the 10k bug and the other conclusion to easily draw is that even the lowered planet targets (next week?) will mean that less guilds than ever will receive the conquest rewards at all. Which just shows how badly they missed the mark on giving more guilds the opportunity for the rewards.

 

Anyone who meets the goal whatever their place gets the rewards. So not sure where you are going there. But yes, the ones getting the title for the planet won't change.

 

The conquest goals they implemented didn't work even as they intended them to. They failed to award points randomly due to their buggy nature. The design choices they made that were punitive to large guilds affected small guilds even more than large guilds.

 

The changes to crafting, which are not going to even be looked at until after 5.9 are going to effectively kill crafting. If they intended to do that, good job. I wasted a lot of time and effort over many years now getting my crafters to where they are. I also know that I have no intention of gathering mats for ALL levels all the time and that is what it would take to craft now and make war supplies. I'll make augments for myself and beyond that I'm done with crafting. I'm far from the only crafter who has made that decision. That decision will impact the gtn and the market. I tend to think it would be negative but who knows, I could be wrong. I've certainly been wrong before.

[TheRachMonster]

Keep the new interface, bring the old conquest back.

 

 

 

This 200%

[genealogymaster]

While this post is a valiant effort to salvage some of the over-the-top changes, I can not help but feel the "tweaks" currently outlined are done more to appease the angry horde than to actually address the underlying problems

 

Adding repeatable PvP and FP content? If their omission was a bug or an oversight rather than intended this was always a non-issue and therefore a non-measure.

 

Reducing the personal conquest target by 5k? While a step in the right direction is still fails to provide a solution for the shere lack of fun conquest activities. Most repeatable activities are far too grind-y to be enjoyable for longer than an hour. You promised us more things to do but instead it feels like we ended up with less.

 

Un-punishing alts? As far as I can tell, nothing is going to change here. I did not hear a single word about reverting some of the once-per-day-per-legacy activities to once-per-day-per-character. Only that change will give people a reason to play their alts. Running a FP or running an ops, that is fun. Endlessly running BOI or uprisings because it is one of the few infinitely repeatable activities? I really don't want to do that, so I haven't even touched my alts this week.

 

I really wanted to give you guys the benefit of the doubt, allow you time to formulate a plan to address all the current conquest issues. But the changes you outlined for next week are simply too little to make even a dent in the current mess that is conquest. What remains is hanging around, hoping that you will make some more changes with 5.9. I'm sorry but there has been far too much waiting on QOL changes in the past year (remember GC?). My patience has ran out and my sub will remain cancelled. Something which I truely consider a shame, because until 5.8 I was really enjoying the game. Now I feel hard-pressed to find anything fun to do after an hour or two on my main. I have a full-time job, I don't need another when I come home, I just want to have some fun.

 

Spot on the changes outlined are too little, we need more variety in the conquest, I personally don't want to the Battle of Ilum so many times . We need repeatable stuff for heroics flashpoints and more daily areas. These are just some things that need to change. I was hoping that my sub money wasn't going for Anthem, but this update leads me to believe, that my sub money is wasted. I feel like its going to Anthem and I don't want that a game I will never play and yet its suckiing up all the resources.

[genealogymaster]

We need a fix now and not next week. Conquest is not enjoyable anymore.

[Master_Morak]

Hello Eric,

 

your planned changes are not enough to repair what this "awesome" patch had done.

 

It is not scceptable that you dont change the crafting disaster. There is no time and no need to Monitor anything.

Everyone knows what the outcome is - you to nothing, so stopp tell us lies about Monitor and changes.

Just roll back that garbage.

 

Hey folks,

 

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.

 

-eric

[Lyshar]

Lol @ whoever had this great idea at BW. It reminds me of other great ideas like one crate per 30 minutes or similar bullocks.

 

It's an extreme possibility, but the current WIN GSF objective may as well mean the same thing if someone tried to rely on it. In my opinion if you do the math to estimate a needed time on a (repeatable) objective people should at least be able to get one character to the personal cap without SH bonus within a reasonable time.

 

What's a reasonable time? 2 hours per day? people with real life obligations may have trouble there still.

 

If you have a repeatable GF ops with full SH bonus it was easy to get conquest on just that. And the hardest part in most ops is to get people to work together and to follow tactics, with a good group that's no effort at all.

 

I don't think it's fair how you have 3 objectives for star fighter and 1 for pvp. As someone who mainly pvps I feel like there is very little I can do for conquest. Please bring back more objectives for PVPers!! And for goodness sake some more repeatables, like we had before for pvp/pve. Thank you.

 

 

At the very least allow us to get conquest points for doing the daily for unranked. Please?!??

 

There are multiple for both PvP & GSF, they generally haven't all always taken place in the same weeks. PvP has more in terms of fewer times higher reward ones. In general I agree to add rewards for the dailies.

 

And that brings us to ops. An ops gives 3000 I believe, how many bosses does an average ops have? What if the ops conquest was divided into two parts? A rewards per boss, say 250 and one for completing the ops through GF, but say less, like 1000. Maybe add a little bonus to specific bosses depending on the conquest that week. What does this do?

• It makes people more likely to run a complete ops instead of a last boss.
  
• It rewards people for running harder ops.
  
• It provides a participation reward even if a group falls apart halfway through.
  
• It gives a comparable value to a boss, which can be translated to time so you can compare an ops to WZs & GSF and FPs.
  

[genealogymaster]

You are right. I am basing my times off what I can do which isn't really relevant to anyone but me. But, it shows that these things can be done and are being done in similar fashions.

 

I haven't mentioned the rampage...cause yeah i got hit with the bug too. Got to 220. Reset to 0. But I digress

 

I philosophically do not agree with your next part. I do not subscribe to the notion that just because someone doesn't have the time to do something in one sitting that things should be changed to accommodate them . If an operation is the creme de le creme for conquest points and someone doesn't have the time to do it then they don't get the points. Period. End of story. If they don't have the time to do X they don't get the rewards for doing X. If they are unwilling to do the things that they could do to make their gaming life easier then I'm sorry I won't just say sure no problem you can get the rewards. I do not like cow towing to people who want their cake and eat it too. If Conquest is an end game function (which some argue it is) then no they have to do the necessary things so that they can conquest with the best of em. I'm just so not ok with making it super duper easy to always cap 10 characters or more. If they can't play more than they can't cap more. I know it's not a popular opinion, and I'm sure I've written it wrong in places, but overall I just don't like the notion that just because someone logs in for 5 minutes a day means they should get the entire swtor world dropping at their feet without any effort whatsoever.

 

I don't know where you get that but I don't want to one Flashpoint over and over again. I don't ops so again its not the factor of doing an ops or flashpoint its the number of times you have to do it. We are talking about playing far more than 5 minutes. I play for awhile each day and I'm still struggling with conquest. I can't play 24 hours a day. You must have far more time than most of us.

[Braxistari]

It's an extreme possibility, but the current WIN GSF objective may as well mean the same thing if someone tried to rely on it. In my opinion if you do the math to estimate a needed time on a (repeatable) objective people should at least be able to get one character to the personal cap without SH bonus within a reasonable time.

 

What's a reasonable time? 2 hours per day? people with real life obligations may have trouble there still.

 

If you have a repeatable GF ops with full SH bonus it was easy to get conquest on just that. And the hardest part in most ops is to get people to work together and to follow tactics, with a good group that's no effort at all.

 

 

 

There are multiple for both PvP & GSF, they generally haven't all always taken place in the same weeks. PvP has more in terms of fewer times higher reward ones. In general I agree to add rewards for the dailies.

 

And that brings us to ops. An ops gives 3000 I believe, how many bosses does an average ops have? What if the ops conquest was divided into two parts? A rewards per boss, say 250 and one for completing the ops through GF, but say less, like 1000. Maybe add a little bonus to specific bosses depending on the conquest that week. What does this do?

• It makes people more likely to run a complete ops instead of a last boss.
  
• It rewards people for running harder ops.
  
• It provides a participation reward even if a group falls apart halfway through.
  
• It gives a comparable value to a boss, which can be translated to time so you can compare an ops to WZs & GSF and FPs.
  

 

Do gf ops ever actually pop? Serious question. I've never been able to do one, despite trying every time I log on to play. I leveled to 70 back in August, and have never had one pop.

[olagatonjedi]

Pre 5.8 complaints:

The same guilds win all the time

Last boss lockouts are being abused by people with alts

No chance for small guilds (without indicating what is a "small guild)

Crafting conquest is abused

Conquest is too easy

 

Post 5.8

More guilds are in a position to with their respective planet

No more abusing last boss lockouts on multiple alts

Large guilds no longer have the advantage of more players using exponentially more alts; also the distance between a small guild and a large guild within the same planet is decreased

Crafting efficacy reduced

Conquest is harder, requires more time better spent, and requires less laziness

 

There appears to be a grand misperception that 5.8 was going to fix every problem that was mentioned and it would be ideal for every sized guild, from 3-person to 1000-person guilds, with no understanding that it is literally impossible to create a perfect spectrum system like that. They implemented changes that met the major issues requested by the general public, in addition to using internal data to determine values needed to support the system. With improvements in some areas there comes a need to balance things out with nerfs in other areas too. The outrage Im seeing is hot takes of people mad at their own personal experience, not the game wide experience, and expectations that were unrealistic in the first place.

[Lyshar]

Do gf ops ever actually pop? Serious question. I've never been able to do one, despite trying every time I log on to play. I leveled to 70 back in August, and have never had one pop.

 

They do, but even random groups formed on fleet count.