Conquest Feedback and Upcoming Changes

[BRKMSN]

What about all the people and their alts that did not get the conquest achievement when they performed it? I ran Illum and the Gree event on the same alt 2 days in a row and the first day did not get the heroic objective or points and the second day did not get the Gree objective or points. Ran 6 alts through EV on Tuesday and did not the objective or points on 2 of my alts. Others have fared even worse like 2 out 10.

 

Some things can only be done once daily per legacy. So if you ran the Ilum Heroic on 1 character and then tried it on another later that day, you wouldn't get any points on the second one. On top of that, the Ilum heroic is on a weekly (not daily) reset. So if you ran it and received no points, you won't be able to run it again on that character during the conquest event.

[Lyriel]

Hey folks,

Some snipping...

 

I recommend you start by reading our write-up of the changes that were coming to 5.8. Let’s jump in.

 

I read it, and reread it. It covered nothing of substance, and certainly didn't address any of the specific issues that were rolled out with this change. It did mention encouraging participation and competition in guilds of all sizes, IIRC...

 

The Conquest Revamp – Goals

Some snipping...

 

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.
  

 

Uh, so, about those...

Objectives - I didn't have any issue, as a member of a very small guild, 'working' on Conquest as I played in the time I have available. That is definitely not the case in the new system. The only reason I have ~14k is due to the 10k bug. Otherwise, there is no way in heck even one character was making their personal goal this week. Even if I had the time, I am not grinding a single FP 40 times. Seriously. That's not 'playing,' that's 'grind.'

 

Crafting - I think the math has been done really well elsewhere, so I'll just summarize: I have neither the time for an obscene amount of farming nor an unlimited amount of credits, so while in the past I have helped put my small guild on the board with crafting, that avenue is closed to me forever. And this experience is not unique to me or my guild. You have effectively suppressed one way for small guilds to make their goals.

 

Yield targets - This was totally laughable. How many small guilds have enough regular participants to get 23 characters to their personal goals? The new, lower targets may be better, but we can't tell because you have given no indication about two key things: Will there be adjustments to the currently very low yields for most activities? Are you restricting alts from participating in most repeatable activities? If the alt-unfriendliness is retained, well, then you continue to screw small guilds like mine over. We don't have the numbers to make up for that. Given what you said below, I fear that this will be the case.

 

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.

 

Frankly, this is BS.

 

If you hype something as a revamp before you release it, why would we expect it wasn't exactly what you claimed? If it was not going to be what you claimed, why didn't you say so up front? Why do you think we're going to like being beta testers in a production environment?

 

Also, honestly, either we didn't understand your goals or you didn't - and I think, given the way this was delivered, it's the latter. It couldn't have been less geared to get more rewards/participation/competition if you'd tried.

 

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).

 

Not entirely accurate, but at least you did address the PvE repeatables in a later post. Still missing: Will these be infinitely repeatable, daily repeatable per character, daily repeatable per legacy, etc. And what will the yields be? If the yields are too small, or they are restricted to once/legacy/day, it's not going to be enough.

 

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).
    

 

Again, if you are not upping the yields, and leaving in the once-per-legacy restrictions, this is too little reduction for 'playing' as opposed to 'grinding.'

 

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.

 

I wonder who you listened to about crafting being 'just too good' that you felt this magnitude of unannounced nerf was necessary in conjunction with all the other changes. I wonder if you looked at actual data of how crafting contributed to different sized guilds' participation at all. I suspect not. What I can tell you for sure is that my small guild is now totally squeezed out of this avenue of participation.

 

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.

 

Until you fix things, most especially the uncertainty around yields and limits/bugs on repeatability, I don't think you're going to get a lot of usable data.

 

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.

 

Even after you have posted a few times, we still do not have a clear idea about this. What do you mean by 'daily repeatable' - is that once per character? Once per legacy? My personal experience is the latter, but I can't tell if that's a bug or intended...

 

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.

 

This is the biggest failure to me. This game is built with alts as one of the key means of replayability - it has to be, given the dearth of new content for the past months. Unless you are lowering the targets more and/or raising yields significantly, and doing away with most of the once per legacy per day restrictions, you are punishing small guilds disproportionately by restricting how much alts can contribute to planetary targets. We don't have the numbers to compete without alts contributing a full share. Small guilds shouldn't be punished for working just as hard on multiple characters as bigger guilds are on unique ones - the goals are all the same.

Edited March 23, 2018 by Lyriel

[DragonMsterd]

While I am certainty glad that GF Flashpoint and Ops are going to be re-entering the mix, especially if it is in a "once per toon" and not "once per legacy" if it is once per legacy, this simply is not enough. At the risk of echoing numerous posters prior, it is exceedingly difficult to make conquest, without burning obscene amounts of crafting mats, on more than one or two of your toons. Perhaps if I was on every day for multiple hours doing NOTHING but conquest objectives, I could do 3-4 toons. After that I would be super stressed and burnt out, and then be disappointed by getting purple mats that I already have 400 of sitting in my legacy bay doing absolutely nothing, decos that I have 20+ of each by now, and a paltry sum of green jawa junk. Not worth it.

 

Honestly, this week, I got conquest on my main toon, so I could see what the new vendor offered, was underwhelmed by the selection, and shocked at how expensive they are, considering how much it takes to make an invasion force now.

 

Something that I forgot to address in the previous post on the last thread, the credits issue. I am rather confused by the changes made... you increase the tax on the GTN as well as increase the required credits to remove gear pieces off of shells, in order to "combat inflation." Yet in the same update, decide to put credit rewards on all conquest objectives? Most confusing...

 

How to fix said issues...

 

Like I said, definitely at least make the GF Ops/FP/PVP/GSF if not infinitely repeatable, at least repeatable on each toon Daily, AND, have these objectives on EVERY conquest, as they were previously.

 

Increase point values for the repeatable missions, as they are ALL far far too low to be worth the effort/cost needed to complete them.

 

As I said in my post on the previous thread, crafting was just a mistake, the new schematics are insanely expensive in terms of mats, and to be quite blunt, I do not have the time to devote to this game to collect around 2000 mats to make ONE invasion force for 5000 conquest points that can only be done once during the week. Reset the schematics to where they were before. If you are concerned about how many points crafters put up in conquest, then make a cap on how much points they can earn for that objective per day or whatever, don't punish those of us or used the crafting as a way to make conquest on an unloved alt, and not as a primary source of conquest points.

 

Also concerning crafting in a way, the "donation" of invasion forces. I think that just basically disintegrating them is a horrible idea, especially with how expensive they are, makes me feel that the long effort of crafting the assembly components/cell grafts, etc, then the war supplies, then the invasion force, was all for nothing, *cough 500ish conquest points for all that work X10... totally not worth it currently*. perhaps there should be a drop box on fleet we could put them in somehow, and it would, in return, give a tokens of some sort to use at the new conquest vendor, instead of us using said invasion forces there as well.

 

Concerning the tier system for invasion, intended to equalize things for large/medium/small guilds, I honestly do not know how you can fix this as it sits. there is absolutely nothing preventing a large guild from invading the small guilds planet (say if their motivation was to obtain the title for that planet), which would basically shut down all smaller guilds chances of winning that planet. And the Medium and Large planet Tiers, at least on Star Forge, I can see the possibility of 5-6 guilds IN BOTH TIERS making the required sum. Even lowering it to the values that were stated I feel would not help this enough, and would only make the lowest planet that much more enticing to larger guilds who want to not have to put in a lot of effort.

 

Honestly if you had expressed your intentions and asked for feedback PRIOR to implementing this, I feel that much of this drama and backlash could have been avoided. I understand trying to hype something up and create excitement for it, but this did not seem the right time nor place for that.

 

I wish you all the best, and really hope that this gets fixed quickly and does not force many of my guildies to quit out of frustration, some of them play for the sole purpose of conquest, and are EXTREMELY frustrated with all of the changes.

Edited March 23, 2018 by DragonMsterd

[Bothan]

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.

 

War supplies can be used for purposes other than conquest. By making this change for conquest, and by changing the recipe for Dark Project MK-1, you've made it extremely difficult to acquire ships for strongholds. I'm sure a lot of players will see this as unimportant, but for me it's irksome.

Edited March 23, 2018 by Bothan

[DanNV]

I gave up on conquest ages ago. There is nothing about it worth the time and effort. However, ti seems that now BW has made it worse.

 

Eric, how is it a professional development team can take something that needs fixing and has needed fixing for ages and make it worse? Why no PTS? Why only closed PTS? Why push out garbage without testing and expect anything but a mess?

[PennyAnn]

UGH.

 

Please, don't try to force players into activities they dislike. You say the activities were too homogenized. I say they weren't homogenized enough. But there was often enough for people to do what they liked--Ops, Heroics, PvP, Flashpoints, GSF--to make their goals. If you try to force PvPers to run flashpoints or PvE'ers to PvP or solo players to run Ops, you're going to lose them for good.

 

Options are GOOD. Letting people do what they like is GOOD. If you want to give different weeks/invasions flavor, make bonuses for doing those activities, or add very specific activities in addition to the more generic ones. But leave the other options in place and let them be repeatable.

 

As for guild size and planet invasion size, unless you start giving away very valuable things (CM Crates for example) then the rewards will make almost no difference to them. They will still go after planets based on what specific planets they want to win. Big guilds will always have new players missing a planet here or there, and so that is what they will go after. The only real cure for this--unless you want something radical which I am happy to suggest--is to make more planets available each week, allowing more winners, and eventually fewer guilds making all-out efforts to win a planet thus giving someone else a chance.

 

As for crafting: yes, it was too dominant, but only on weeks where it was repeatable. But what these weeks did was allow even very small guilds to have a chance to win with enough preparation, especially because Total Galactic War had so many planets. In fact, I say that it didn't go far enough: EVERY SINGLE PLANET should be available in Total Galactic War, and with reasonable, repeatable crafting, thus giving every guild a chance to win every planet if they are dedicated enough. That wasn't the case in the old system, and it laughably impossible even with your suggested revisions to the new conquest. This is discouraging, and makes Conquest seem a lot more pointless with the Galactic Conqueror title/achievements out of reach. Players will either give up on their guilds and slink away to join the giants, or give up on their guilds and the game altogether.

 

Alas, I predict that it will be very similar to Command XP: you'll tweak and adjust and a year from now you'll have a system very much like the old system, only more clumsy.

 

This post is very good. And I predict the same ending as the OP here.

 

NONE of your goals for CQ were met with this implementation, and they will still not be met with proposed changes.

 

NONE of your proposed changes fixes the fact that you have shut out anyone who isn't level 50 or higher, level 500 or 550 crafting or higher from conquest entirely.

 

NONE of your goals and ambitions for "improving" the conquest system excuses the fact that you TOOK AWAY crafting schematics that we PAID TO LEARN and did so without telling us that change was coming so that we could prepare in advance (especially when it comes to dark projects). This was straight up shifty and a serious disservice to your player base worthy of a mass exodus of subscribers just on it's own.

 

 

• Rewards: You have no reason to hesitate. Giving people more "rewards" that aren't worthwhile in the first place is not working. Monitor all you like, but that's a fact. The "crafting material" you so proudly reward us isn't used to make anything of value since 5.1. The jawa scrap is about the only thing with any merit, but even that isn't worth much when you won't put current materials on the jawa vendors. You are out of touch here, and it's painful to recognize just how out of touch you are.
   
   
  
• Objectives & Points: The adjustments to yield is a good start. The adjustment to personal goal is not good enough unless you also bring the points values for some items back into a more reasonable range. This is especially true for alts, when SO MUCH of the objective list is not repeatable more than once per LEGACY per day. Take the "legacy" out of that and THEN you would have a good start.
   
  Adding back the ability to do PvP, GSF, Flashpoints, etc. in a repeatable fashion is good, but only if you let us repeat it on single characters and multiple characters also. No more "one match per day per legacy". That isn't how ANYONE plays PvP, and it isn't worth the points. If you don't add it back to every conquest the way it worked before, then you did NOT hear our feedback.
   
   
  
• Crafting: You do not need to monitor crafting. It is BROKEN. Not worth doing now. Far too expensive even for those who are desperate for points. The only reason ANYONE burned Invasion Forces on "donating them" by destroying them are the mega guilds who had thousands upon thousands of these previously completely un-useful items. Now that these are so expensive to craft, you can be sure no one will repeat that objective unless they don't understand what they are doing and how much it is costing them to just throw these items away for a minuscule amount of points.
   
  You went from what you considered "too easy" (which I would argue was only true on "crafting weeks") to completely absurd and overboard. There isn't a "feeling that you cut a bit too deep" - it is fact. Look at ANY of the posts that took the time to mathematically calculate the absurdity of your changes (something you should have done before you implemented it).
   
   
  
• Yield Targets: The adjustments to the points required is great, and just looking at the conquest boards this week - probably more realistic in terms of what even large guilds can meet. However, you have not even remotely solved the problem of larger guilds going after smaller yield planets. Instead, the change in yield requirement will just encourage them to do this even more. Unless you improve the rewards to CURRENT crafting materials (at minimum), the yield target changes will not give you the forced behavior you desire.
   
   
  
• Interface: Thanks for the explanation of what the icons are SUPPOSED to mean. However, due to the bugs in the system, anything with a blue triangle ("daily repeatable") is NOT always repeatable daily. It is also resetting mid-day sometimes (250 kills for instance), and just adding to the confusion. You will have to fix the bugs for the fly text and icon changes to do any good at all. Oh, and also you might want to let us know BEFORE we have to figure it out for ourselves if you want us to feel comfortable with your roll-out what the symbols mean. You have tons of real estate on the screen now that you've removed the grid of objectives (which most of us found preferable to the scrolling list of bland), you should use it to help clarify the entire thing... which right now is very confusing.
  

 

In summary: You still have a VERY long way to go to fix this, and waiting until next month (5.9) to start fixing some of these things will be far too late. I would rather have the old system back and be forced to wait for a mail with my rewards and earn zero CXP than have this debacle of a rework continue for another single day.

Edited March 23, 2018 by PennyAnn

[Axe_Von_Gimli]

Bioware,

 

I'd love to give you some sort of feedback that was positive but I can't. This is the worst update you have pulled since I started playing 5 years ago.I regularly put through 5 - 10 players for their conquest objectives. As a pub side player, I enjoy PVP and GSF as well as Flashpoints and Operations. Now that losing gives no incentive, why would I ever want to queue for PvP on pub side. This week, I'll probably make 0 toons through conquest unless I do nothing but craft.

 

I am really hacked off and am considering moving to another game. Changes need to come and soon, or I am moving to a new MMO.

[DarthEnrique]

I just want to know the conquest points for flashpoints were removed. That seemed reallt stupid and makes doing the weeklies pointless now.

[Tahana]

so daily fps will come back... yay. I loved doing those.

I'm looking forward to the changes. This week I'll be happy if I manage the goal on at least on of my chars. (and that with the bug that gave me 10k free points) *sigh*

 

Edit: also isn't the Master Compendium a bit expensive. I mean for 4.25mio I can buy a loooot of gifts to feed to my companions.

 

With the legacy increase it currently takes 478 of the purple 10k gifts to raise a companion from level 0 to 50. So that is 4,780,000 credits. At 4.25M you're saving a little more than 500k in credits or 50 gifts. No clue on the costs of the DP MK-1's though as I don't buy mats I harvest my own.

 

Good question, Flashpoints are in that list as well. Basically, here are the Objectives that should be consistent for content in every Conquest:

• Group Finder: Operations
  
• Group Finder: Flashpoints
  
• PvP: Participation and Winning
  
• GSF: Participation and Winning
  

It was a bug that this wasn't the case for the Gree Conquest. Let me find out the details on if this is an issue with other Conquests or not and if it is, when it will be addressed.

 

-eric

 

Good news.. Thanks.

Edited March 23, 2018 by Tahana

[Forgora]

I'll just echo what some others have said: homogenization was not a bad thing. It meant that I could complete Conquest by doing what I like to do, rather than having to dabble in a bunch of stuff that I don't really care for (or have to sit in queue for for 45 minutes). Moreover, specializing the different Conquests runs counter to the stated goal of helping smaller guilds. Some content necessarily requires more players to complete. If someone works the night shift and can't get into Ops or GSF, well, they're basically up the creek.

 

Reducing the importance of crafting was a good idea. But as you said, you went way overboard. All you had to do was limit the amount it could contribute per character / Legacy. The changes to the recipes was absurd. I suspect that there was a secondary motive for that: to give people something to spend that Jawa junk on and to reduce what's probably an excessive economy-wide stockpile of the lower-grade materials (same reason you upped the GTN tax, really). But there are better ways to do that.

 

And finally: next time, let's have this conversation before the bombshell patch. You would have blunted many if not most of the complaints if this post had gone up on Monday instead of Thursday.

[SithScorp]

The more I discover about this update as I play, the less I want to continue playing.

 

Is this the end game for the development cycle of this game? To make it less playable?

 

Please let the rest of us know.

[ShadowGovernator]

Roll-back this turd BioWare.

The old system was way way better.

Bring it back or lose your Conquest playing and paying customers.

[PennyAnn]

Not only that, it majorly nerfed the ability of crafters to participate significantly in conquest crafting. All the war supplies require grade 8 and 9 intermediate components now. Previously, if a character got to skill 150 on their crafting skill, they could craft the low-level intermediate mats and make war supplies from them, earning conquest points. Now, the best they can do is craft the low-end intermediate mats and feed them to other characters, or have other characters feed them the higher-level intermediate components.

 

Rather than make crafting much more painful, if it was necessary to reduce the effect that wide-open crafting had on conquest, stretch out the goals as one-and-done by character: Conquest goal, craft a war supply or invasion force. Next tier of conquest goal, craft five war supplies or invasion forces, giving twice the conquest points that crafting a single one did. Next tier, craft 25, again giving twice the conquest points that the previous one did. You can stretch the list out as far as needed. The point award for each tier can be fiddled to produce the desired use of crafting to contribute to conquest, and a particular conquest week might not have all of them -- a 'standard' week only has the 'make one' goal; a 'light crafting' week might have the 'make one' and 'make five' goals, and a full-on crafting week would have all of them.

 

Another great post! Read this one for sure!

[PennyAnn]

Hi Eric,

 

The spirit of what you have outlined in this thread is good. It is good to see there is a dialogue and the points being raised about this system are registering with you. It is also good to have more depth on the thought process you have used to arrive at the changes to date, that helps immensely in offering suggestions that keep with your goals, but address the problems the community has with the changes (and frankly, with the old conquest system too, a revamp should come out better than the original after all, else why do it).

 

This is going to be a long post. Apologies for that in advance. Before I get in to the meat of my points, I'd like to first review what you've told us here and provide my thoughts.

 

These are good intentions and we're all happy to hear them, but you've missed the mark on delivering improved rewards because you've lengthened the track to get the rewards for everyone by a geometric factor. By my math, players are earning about eight and a half times fewer conquest points on average than they were before. Some examples:

 

Starfighter Match - base conquest point yield went from 500 points to 130 points AND planetary invasion bonus was removed AND the objective requires a win instead of participation. Generously assuming a 50% match win rate it takes fifteen times longer to earn conquest points by playing starfighter than it did before.

 

Warzone Win - base conquest point yield went from 500 points to 330 points AND planetary invasion bonus was removed AND the objective went from fully repeatable to once per day PER LEGACY. It takes players three times longer to earn conquest points by winning war zones than it did before, they no longer earn them by participating, and you can earn a maximum of less than 6000 points for the week for your entire legacy doing this activity, which previously, could account for your entire conquest on any number of characters.

 

Crafting War Supplies - requirements increased from 1 war supply to 10, materials cost increased 2.5 times. Even assuming rank 50 companions doing the crafting this is twenty times more expensive to do for the same yield. Crafting was good, it was not 20 times too good. (more on crafting later)

 

So lets start with making conquests less homogenous and encouraging players to branch out into new activities. It is never a good idea to promote a path or course of action by removing the alternatives. It is easy to accomplish this by having all your baseline conquest activities (heroics, uprisings, flashpoints, warzones, GF ops, GSF, etc) as repeatable objectives and then add daily or one time objectives with large yields to the activities that you want to promote with that conquest. Lets say you wanted relics of the gree to promote GSF and Uprisings. A daily uprising, and GSF match win objectives that trigger in addition to the repeatable ones that give you a pile of bonus conquest, some CXP, and Credits. This promotes without removing the paths for those who are really averse to the particular content you are promoting. Nobody loses in this system, while many communities lose when objectives are taken away for certain weeks. Have a baseline, make the stuff you are promoting more attractive, you remove the homogeneity, you don’t piss people off by taking out their preferred content every other week.

 

Crafting - I only want to make three points here. First, you didn’t reduce the overall amount crafting can contribute to conquest, you increased it, and then you made it vastly more expensive and more tedious. You nerfed war supplies by 20-25 times depending on how high companion influence is. Crafting war supplies, was at max, 5000 points a conquest, so ¼ of 1 character’s conquest. I have no context for what you’ve done to crafting weeks, if they exist anymore, or what their changes are. Second, you’re changes to war supplies and dark projects outside of conquest have far reaching detrimental implications. Everything that costs invasion forces or dark projects went up in cost significantly. Dark projects are a critical means for guilds who could not compete in conquest previously to expand their flagship, and that path became much longer as collateral damage to the conquest crafting nerfs. If you want to nerf crafting for conquest, nerf it for conquest, not in general. It doesn’t need nerfs in general. Also, I don’t know why you think crafting was a big part of relics of the gree.

 

As I’ve stated in other threads, the changes to yield targets this week will result in far fewer guilds getting encryption rewards than the leaderboards would have before the changes. The reason for this is that your targets are out of sync with the changes you’ve made to the objectives. Earning conquest points is 8-10 times harder now than it was before 5.8, your targets don’t current reflect that, and under the old conquest objectives, might have been reasonable. Your small planet objective is particularly egregious, because it is the ground on which guilds too small to compete before are supposed to be able to compete now. Those guilds don’t have the amount of players you think they do. Your game isn’t that popular, sorry.

 

And flashpoints? And GF Ops? And Heroics? And weekly quests in GSF/Warzones/Flashpoints? You removed a hell of a lot more paths to conquest than just Warzone/Starfighter participation, and you nerfed several more into oblivion by making them daily, deleting their planetary bonuses and flat out nerfing their point yield. Do you plan to fix any of that?

 

Do you math? Let me do some simple math for you:

 

200/15 = 13.3

 

THERE ARE NOT 13 ACTIVE CONQUEST PARTICIPANTS IN MOST SMALL GUILDS.

 

Repeat after me:

 

SMALL. GUILDS. DON’T. HAVE. THIRTEEN. PLAYERS.

 

More math

 

15/20 = 0.75.

2 * 500 * 3 * 2.5 * 7 = 52500

1 * 330 * 2.5 * 7 = 5775

5775/52500 = 0.11

 

You’re planning to reduce the target value by 25%. Heroic Missions on Ilum (a planet with only 2 heroics) were nerfed as a conquest objective by 89% if you only consider one character. Every alt you add increases the size of the nerf by 100% because you can only earn the reward once per legacy. Heroics were in my analysis one of the most lightly nerfed objectives. Others, like starfighter and crafting were nerfed by a factor of 15 or 20. Lowering the conquest target by 25% ridiculously inadequate compensation for the level of grind that was introduced to conquest this patch.

 

Do you plan to fix the negative economic impact your conquest changes have had to flagship construction through crafting, decorations, or anything else that cost invasion forces or dark projects?

 

So this is not a grip at the changes, because this was a terrible wart of the old system as well, so let me just ask that you answer a few theoretical design questions:

 

• Does it make sense for objectives that track absolutely everything about them by character, to be limited per legacy?
  
• Is there a reason it should be harder to complete a legacy objective on the second or third character than on the first?
  
• Does this restriction improve the gameplay or prevent abusive gameplay in any way?
  

 

Thanks for taking the time to respond to the feedback. I hope changes can be made quickly to bring the conquest system up to its potential.

 

Beautifully put, reasoned, and detailed to point out the flaw in the design and the thinking of what will "fix". Read this post, PLEASE, so that it doesn't take a year to figure out what is printed here today.

[Mournblood]

I'm not going to berate the developers for this anymore than they have been. It's ultimately unproductive, and it appears to me at least that they realize there are serious issues with the new Conquest changes and are working to correct those.

 

That said, I am concerned about Eric's post where he mentions waiting to see metrics on such things as Yield Targets. All you need to do is log into the game and you'll see which guilds are top ten for each category, then have one of their developers do a database query to look up how many members each of those guilds have. I think the answer will be obvious at that point that larger guilds are dominating the smaller Yield Target because they can. For example, currently on SS, the top two guilds in the small Yield Target (Ilum) have over 1 million Conquest points, when the requirement is only 460k. For the large Yield Target where the requirement is 2.5 million, only one guild is close to achieving that. We're only two days into the Conquest week.

 

While I understand the purpose of the changes you intended for Yield Targets, I don't believe that you'll be able to achieve that goal if you give guilds the choice. Even if you lower the Conquest requirement and increase the rewards, larger guilds are still going to choose the small Yield Target because it will be easier and more likely for them to win the contest for #1 there. Incidentally, I do think the rewards need to be dramatically increased for large and medium Yield Targets, but I disagree with lowering the Conquest requirements.

 

Here's my suggestion, if you're willing to consider it: base the Yield Target options on guild size. In other words, if a guild has 50+ accounts (you'll want to count unique accounts, not characters, given the number of characters in a guild won't accurately reflect the number of actual members they have playing), limit them to large Yield Targets. If a guild has 25+ accounts, limit them to medium Yield Targets. And if a guild has less than 25 accounts (again, this is referring to actual players in their guild, not the number of characters), limit them to small Yield Targets. This is the only way to ensure that guilds of all sizes are fairly competing at the appropriate Conquest level. And while some might argue against removing the choice of Yield Targets, it's really no different than a matchmaking system that queues up players of equal levels, rather than allowing a level 70 to queue against a level 60. As long as you allow the choice, guilds are going to take advantage of that.

 

I hope you find the feedback helpful.

[YlliyaXor]

Dear employee,

 

I am sorry you feel having to work more for less pay is "unfair", your complaint about having to work in accounting despite being hired to be a graphic designer is noted, and as soon as i feel like it you may or may not be moved to the art department.

 

To facilitate your adjustment we will be moving you to a small cubicle.

 

Yours Truly

 

Boss

 

P.S. If you want to do extra unpaid work in your free time don't hesitate to ask.

[ShadowGovernator]

We've just given you 70 pages of feedback that you've pretty much totally - except one or two token gestures - thrown back in our face and said "we don't care, like it or lump it".

 

And if you genuinely wanted Conquest to be fun 5.8 would've been binned BEFORE it went live.

 

You keep "talking that talk", but no one at Bioware seems even slightly interested in "walking the walk".

 

Let me remind you of the impact of that arrogant attitude over the last few years:

2011: 200 Servers.

2018: 6 Servers.

 

All The Best

 

BioWare keeps trying hard to destroy their own AAA Star Wars game.

The loss of servers is a good indication of how bad things really are.

Of course they try to hide the poor population numbers these days, because "they can be inaccurate" they say.

 

When Swtor finally blows up in their face - EA will lose their precious Star Wars licence.

 

Anthem will tank and BioWare will be on the chopping-block next.

 

Who wants to hire a former BioWare employee after all this - I sure wouldn't.

 

Do your job BioWare listen to your paying customers and roll-back this turd you just pushed out.

[ThadiusMoor]

Well... This is going to be one long friggin post, guaranteed.

 

I guess the the first thing I should do is tell you this... You obviously are NOT listening, but that's ok. We tried to get your attention nicely, but that didn't work, so now it's time to tear your post apart and point out the obvious failures directly.

 

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)
  

 

• The credits/CXP is nice, but it's a disguise to hide how bad the system is.
  
• The personal rewards are the same as before, so they aren't special or good compared to before.
  
• The rewards for guild are barely worth the time invested to do the conquest.
  
• The vendor is nice, but hiding it till you complete conquest is kind of dumb.
  

 

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.
  

 

• You took alot of the core functionality away and made the tasks stupid. It was perfectly fine before. Now, it's just broken and horrible.
  
• Crafting was the core of conquest. Changing it, and thereby making it totally the most expensive aspect of conquest has literally crippled players' ability to do conquest in an efficient and timely manner. So dumb, I can't even understand this change at all.
  
• The conquest yield was fine, and while I like the increases, the effort to get those rewards is so totally out of balance with the rewards themselves, they are not even close to worth trying for.
  
• The interface is goofy and over-thought... The old interface was just fine and people could easily read and use it, but now, they have to really, really read it, and even then, they probably won't understand it quickly or easily.
  

 

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.

 

Not perfect? Are you high? This system is so broken, you can't even use the word perfect in any context to describe this system. It literally is a disaster and a heap of trash. If you want to convince us you are listening, get rid of this whole system and go back to what we had that was working quite fine before you went and crapped on it and threw it in a trash can.

 

 

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.

 

If you leave participation points off conquest for WZ's/FP's/GSF's and only include them in some conquests, then you are still literally crippling the community and making conquest a total waste of time. Either add them in every single conquest or there will never be a point to doing conquest at all. Not everyone wants to be forced to do old content that already sucks in order to get points towards a conquest week that has crappy tasks and includes none of the things those players want to do. Forcing people to play your way will not make people want to play the game at all.

 

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).

 

It must be next week. Delaying more than that will simply prove the point that you really aren't listening. Either put it in immediately or don't bother. The longer you delay, the less anyone will care about conquest. Do you really want your community hating you for longer than a week? Do you like it when people think your team is retarded? Fix it before you really do cause your community to think that of your team, if they haven't already.

 

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).
    

 

The points values aren't the problem. The objectives that are literally stupid are the problem.

It's becoming obvious you have no clue what is going on, so I'll give you a heads up...

Your conquest objectives are stupid.

Lowering the end-requirements to compliment stupid objectives is only putting a band-aid on a gapping wound.

*shakes head in disbelief*

 

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.

 

If you leave this garbage in the game past this week, then it just shows you guys have absolutely no concept of what your community likes and does weekly. Monitor away... Noone is going to throw money down the drain doing the new crafting cause it is stupid. You took something that was perfectly fine and broke the hell out of it. For what? Who the hell knows? No plan to fix it until 5.9 or beyond? Wow... You guys really are dumb. By the time you fix it, noone will care or even bother to look at it again.

 

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.

 

Lol... What's to see? The rewards are garbage compared to the effort required to get them. It is simple as that... What more do you need to know? I can't believe you 'need to monitor the situation' to get a sense of how trashy the rewards are compared to the effort to get them.

 

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.

 

The interface is meh... Compared to the old one, it is actually a down-grade. It isn't intuitive, or readily easy to use or interpret. It looks shiney and new, but once you really, really look at it, it sucks. The old one was 100% better.

 

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.

 

This whole new system is entirely hateful to the idea of alts, just like Galactic Command when that first came out... You guys just can't help yourselves from ruining alt-running, can you? The old system was perfect for alt-ing, but this new system punishes you by totally cutting alts out entirely. Either put it back immediately, or forget ever having people play their alts. I cannot understand how you people continually attack game systems that are alt-friendly and make them the exact opposite to the point that having alts is virtually pointless.

 

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

 

Overall, I highly doubt your words saying you are listening... This post proves that you actually aren't listening, but rather cherry-picking what you like out and scrapping the rest, just like you did when you trashed the old conquest system and put this major-league failure in its place.

 

If you want to convince us that you are listening, then scrap this new system and bring back the old one. After that, you can spend as long as you like screwing around with your new system, but don't put it back into the game until it actually is BETTER than the old system.

 

Right now, this new system is a piece of trash. Simple as that.

Edited March 23, 2018 by ThadiusMoor

[PennyAnn]

While I understand the purpose of the changes you intended for Yield Targets, I don't believe that you'll be able to achieve that goal if you give guilds the choice. Even if you lower the Conquest requirement and increase the rewards, larger guilds are still going to choose the small Yield Target because it will be easier and more likely for them to win the contest for #1 there. Incidentally, I do think the rewards need to be dramatically increased for large and medium Yield Targets, but I disagree with lowering the Conquest requirements.

 

Here's my suggestion, if you're willing to consider it: base the Yield Target options on guild size. In other words, if a guild has 50+ accounts (you'll want to count unique accounts, not characters, given the number of characters in a guild won't accurately reflect the number of actual members they have playing), limit them to large Yield Targets. If a guild has 25+ accounts, limit them to medium Yield Targets. And if a guild has less than 25 accounts (again, this is referring to actual players in their guild, not the number of characters), limit them to small Yield Targets. This is the only way to ensure that guilds of all sizes are fairly competing at the appropriate Conquest level. And while some might argue against removing the choice of Yield Targets, it's really no different than a matchmaking system that queues up players of equal levels, rather than allowing a level 70 to queue against a level 60. As long as you allow the choice, guilds are going to take advantage of that.

 

I hope you find the feedback helpful.

 

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.

[Vercundus]

I'm sorry if I'm repeating someone's statement, but I can't read all 22 pages.

 

This feels like BW tried to push to absolute limits with nerfs to see how far then can go and then they will try to revert back some of it. Ofc blaming on the bugs is the optimal strategy, better to think they are incompetent then planning a disaster.

 

From the plan Eric posted all I see some potential, but I will reserve my judgement once I see changes in place. I wouldn't be happy if they bring FPs back and each is worth 300 points or so. Such thinking would be even worse.

[hirophantix]

so you're not going to change what it takes to craft the cq stuff like the holocrons or vehicles ect? and if you do it wont be until the 5.9? thats disgusting, you have broken something that worked rather well, all you had to do was lower the point value, some weeks were done for crafting guilds others for pvp or ops guilds tbh i would much rather you worked on giving us new content instead of making a trainwreck out of content that made us play the game so much i loved alot of what you did with the game making it better for crafting and introducing new lvl system ie the command crates and stuff and the legacy locker holding creds fro all alts but this new cq idea sucks, i mean common legacy based points so you cant do them on alts that i paid actual money to have as many alts as i have. its just rude what you have done to our beloved game, i'm starting to think that you have a mole from another mmo feeding you some really bad ideas to get you all fired and the game closed down, pls pls pls get the whole thing sorted fast so i can feel passionate about this very beloved game thx

[Tarbuch]

Mostly from PvPers? No. Flashpoints also was mentioned and took a hit. Goes to show Bioware is not paying attention to all the players.

 

 

EDIT: Okay, you said Flashpoints is being part of the change as well in a later post. But would have been nice that was mentioned in the first post. When the thread gets longer some people will respond to what you had in the first post.

 

The reason this was not mentiopned is that no one at BioFail had any idea what tne patch contained, some clueless intern wrote the changes by instructions: change Conquest somehow.

 

Add to this; no testng done by anyone.

Result:

Chaos, bugs and mayhem.

[aryss]

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.

 

You could've simply reduced the amount of conquest points from crafting. But no, you instead choose to make the change without saying anything first - so as to avoid the uproar this would cause - and now you come and say that you're gonna "monitor the impact of these changes"?

Please, we all know you're not gonna do anything to get it back the way it was.

Sorry, but this is not good enough. And a lie by omission is still a lie. You knew full well you were gonna screw us over with this changes, but you simply choose to avoid a headache of pages and pages of people raging about it by not saying anything.

And all the grand declarations you've made about how you were gonna be transparent with all the upcoming changes were, once again, completely false.

Edited March 23, 2018 by aryss

[ThadiusMoor]

You could've simply reduced the amount of conquest points from crafting. But no, you instead choose to make the change without saying anything first - so as to avoid the uproar this would cause - and now you come and say that you're gonna "monitor the impact of these changes"?

Please, we all know you're not gonna do anything to get it back the way it was.

Sorry, but this is not good enough. And a lie by omission is still a lie. You knew full well you were gonna screw us over with this changes, but you simply choose to avoid a headache of pages and pages of people raging about it by not saying anything.

And all the grand declarations you've made about how you were gonna be transparent with all the upcoming changes were, once again, completely false.

 

Were you really all that shocked that they lied to us, yet again?

 

I've come to the conclusion over the last 10 years that every company lies to their customers in order to garnish more of their customers money and then screw them over.

 

Oh sure, they make all kinds of large-scale promises to change their ways and be more transparent, but in the end, this is always a lie and everytime people get conned with this line of crap, the company wins and is not compelled to actually follow through with actually changing their ways.

 

The only way you will ever compell a company to change their behavior is to simply stop paying them.

 

I have a subscription that is entirely based off one-time payments, and that time is nearly used up, at which point, I will not be buying further game time. I will also black-list the cartel market from my wallet as well.

 

They will not get one more penny from me until they either bring the old system back or make this system function just like the old system with actual added benefits above and beyond the old system. Either way, the conquest system has to work as good or better than the old system before I will spend another cent on this game.

 

It's really that simple. My wallet will do the talking here and you better be listening or it's your loss, big time.

 

I have 52 days left of sub time as of this post. They have that amount of time to fix this crap or I'm done, down-graded to Preffered until that runs out, and then downgraded again to Free-To-Play.

Edited March 23, 2018 by ThadiusMoor

[ArkonCh]

I am not here to test your patch, if you want me to work for your company you will have to pay me.

My sub remains cancelled, you have until it runs out to convince me it is worth resubbing.

After all the previous ****ups (years of no group content, Command Crap) I am done giving these people a chance.

Instead of *********** it up and then taking your time to fix it, why not just TAKE YOUR TIME TO FIX IT?

 

EDIT: Also, do not forget they are trying to bury another thread with 84 pages on this subject by locking the thread and starting this one.

Edited March 23, 2018 by ArkonCh