Conquest Changes in Game Update 5.9

[Darevsool]

The problem for conquest itself wasn't that you could hit your personal conquest goal on a bunch of different alts in a week, but that you could produce hundreds of thousands of points past your personal conquest goal on a bunch of different alts in a week. Time you put into spreading your conquest earnings out among several characters is the same, as far as earning points toward conquering a planet goes, as earning all those points on one character. Except for crafting war supplies -- earning 100,000 conquest points on one character is the same as earning 100,000 conquest points total over five alts. During a crafting week, though, you could stack up as much crafting as eight companions could grind out, then move to the next character. Unfortunately, because the time and/or credits spent to acquire the mats for these crafts happens with no way for the devs to readily measure it with the log tools they have, the devs are unable to see how much time or credits go into the preparation; all they see is 'log in, kick off crafting, log out, repeat', and that scheduling crafting weeks every other week for two months wasn't able to drain the resources of people who'd built up materials reserves over a long period of time or could afford to buy mats from people who weren't crafting.

 

Where the difference between earning all your conquest points on one character and spreading them out among several alts lies is in the rewards; clearly, being able to reach personal conquest on five characters earns you a better reward than earning all those points on one character. And that's where Bioware has fallen down in this revamp; they were so fixated on the 'many alts earning hundreds of thousands of conquest points' issue that they gutted the 'reaching personal conquest goal on several alts' target of the players; by making it impossible for each alt to run hogwild with completing conquest goals, they handicapped the guilds with fewer legacies -- and making the Medium and Large invasion goals a geometrically higher cost for a linearly higher reward, they encouraged the large guilds to participate in the Small invasion targets, handicapping the small guilds even further.

 

 

 

If that is/was the case, all the devs had to do was introduce new code into conquest that reduced the number of points earned by 90% AFTER the toon's personal goal was met.

 

Most players wouldn't keep throwing invasion forces in the crafting queue for 10% of the initial "value"

 

You COULD have just gone and made more alts, but there's actually a hard cap on (newly created) alts.

 

20k X 32 alts = 640k conquest points.

Not many players are likely to have 32 characters capable of doing conquest during the pre 5.8 crafting weeks.

[Ibokagain]

The problem for conquest itself wasn't that you could hit your personal conquest goal on a bunch of different alts in a week, but that you could produce hundreds of thousands of points past your personal conquest goal on a bunch of different alts in a week. Time you put into spreading your conquest earnings out among several characters is the same, as far as earning points toward conquering a planet goes, as earning all those points on one character. Except for crafting war supplies -- earning 100,000 conquest points on one character is the same as earning 100,000 conquest points total over five alts. During a crafting week, though, you could stack up as much crafting as eight companions could grind out, then move to the next character. Unfortunately, because the time and/or credits spent to acquire the mats for these crafts happens with no way for the devs to readily measure it with the log tools they have, the devs are unable to see how much time or credits go into the preparation; all they see is 'log in, kick off crafting, log out, repeat', and that scheduling crafting weeks every other week for two months wasn't able to drain the resources of people who'd built up materials reserves over a long period of time or could afford to buy mats from people who weren't crafting.

 

Where the difference between earning all your conquest points on one character and spreading them out among several alts lies is in the rewards; clearly, being able to reach personal conquest on five characters earns you a better reward than earning all those points on one character. And that's where Bioware has fallen down in this revamp; they were so fixated on the 'many alts earning hundreds of thousands of conquest points' issue that they gutted the 'reaching personal conquest goal on several alts' target of the players; by making it impossible for each alt to run hogwild with completing conquest goals, they handicapped the guilds with fewer legacies -- and making the Medium and Large invasion goals a geometrically higher cost for a linearly higher reward, they encouraged the large guilds to participate in the Small invasion targets, handicapping the small guilds even further.

 

First off on all the toons that I would earn conquest on I wouldn't play just one toon and try to match all those points. Clearly you seem like you don't want to play alts or you just have one toon that you play and enjoy, that's great however don't punish me for being a Founder of this game and having a ton of alts and the fact that conquest made it fun to play my alts. Alll this has done is reduce my game time from 4-6 hours and buying CM stuff to maybe 1 hour every 2 days now and buying NO CM stuff.

 

And small guilds are full of alts not just 1 toon per person. Go talk to real small guild speak with the players that actually hit top 10 conquest week in and week out. Now Conquest is dead for my guild we aren't playing it which means we really aren't playing this game, so gl with your group finder queues.

Edited March 30, 2018 by Ibokagain

[Euphrosyne]

Discouraging players from abusing a broken system is a good thing. It was never intended that a single player be able to farm as much Conquest as they used to be able to.

Remarkable that a system that was completely unintended existed for half a decade and formed a significant portion of the playerbase. Almost makes one think that the devs did intend it, or at least that they didn't really care, and that you're making baseless claims.

That point of view is understandable, but not if you’re a business owner who uses a per-account billing system. 1 person who paid you $15 < 19 people who pay you $15 each. That’s why they are leveling the playing field. They want to engage more paying customers by reducing the potential point spread in order to foster competition.

That's not a particularly useful way to look at it, because Conquest doesn't attract new people to play the game. It's a method for keeping people who already play the game, by adding incentives to run old content. In fact, one might say that the sole purpose of Conquest is player retention, like a rewards program for longstanding customers. It doesn't make any sense to evaluate it on any other basis. As such, driving away even one veteran player makes it a bad system - and the Conquest changes in 5.8 and 5.9 have driven away more than just one.

 

---

 

Speaking more generally, and not to any person in particular...

 

This "one person versus nineteen people" example is nonsense for another reason. We're not seeing small guilds made up entirely of alts top the leaderboards every week, and we never have - except on the rare occasions of crafting weeks. The guilds that topped the leaderboards every week were large guilds with good infrastructure, a motivated playerbase and lots of separate accounts.

 

After 5.8, that hasn't changed. The big guilds are still winning Conquest. True, the big guilds do include people with lots of different accounts, and true, they were once able to generate large amounts of points on a single legacy. But that's never been the foundation of their success. They have a lot of people who are in the guild for the primary purpose of capping Conquest each week. They do this through playing the multiplayer part of the game, whether that means running lockouts, forming groups for heroics, queuing for flashpoints, or doing warzones. Since getting people to do those things was the ostensible reason Conquest existed in the first place, one has to say that, in doing that, Conquest was a remarkably successful system, up until 5.8.

 

Trying to prevent groups like that from winning Conquest each week seems counterproductive to me. Limiting the amount of content that one is running also seems counterproductive to me. Disincentivizing alt play might supposedly level the playing field for some guilds, although I have my doubts. (It certainly hasn't worked through the first two weeks.) It will, however, unquestionably result in people playing the game less, increasing queue times; it's certainly frustrated people who play the game a lot and driven players away. All of those are bad things. This isn't like kicking out credit sellers or slicing bots. There's no systematic abuse of a game mechanic going on. They're just driving away dedicated players through a very poorly thought out redesign that makes the game less fun to play for a large amount of people.

 

That the redesign is poorly thought out seems obvious on the face of it. The Commander's Compendium ostensibly incentivizes alt play, by making it more convenient (not cheaper or easier, but let that go) to raise companion affection to 50 - a thing that is primarily useful for crafters. They then made alt play worthless in Conquests and nerfed Conquest crafting into the ground.

 

They touted the benefits to small guilds from the changes, which would supposedly make it easier for smaller guilds to win planets. However, they made alt play worthless for Conquests, which disproportionately hurts small guilds (which usually rely on a small number of people playing multiple characters to get anywhere), and they limited the number of planets available in any given week to three. Total Galactic War used to be the easy way for a load of guilds to get titles, because there would be less competition on any given planet. That is not a thing anymore. Also, since the rewards for winning the big planets are out of all proportion to the effort required to invest in them, larger guilds shifted to easier planets in order to have a more secure chance of winning a planet, which still hoses small guilds.

 

These things clearly indicate that they straight-up did not fully understand the implications of the changes they were making, nor did they understand how Conquest competition worked in the first place. The fact that the overwhelming majority of people in these threads and in other places have correctly identified these problems - because they play the game and are deeply involved in Conquest, so they know what they're talking about - should be some sort of sign.

[IanArgent]

I'm beginning to see why these changes might have been done, but I still think the baby went out with the bathwater.

 

Per character scoring on per legacy goals is weird - but that was always less obvious when most of the points could be scored infinitely. Moving more of the points to per-legacy brought that out into the open. And it doesn't work.

 

Could the per-legacy goals be redone somehow to per-guild? If you could repeat the once-per legacy items once on each character, but they only get scored to the guild that character is a member of once per legacy? (You'd have to limit guild-hopping to avoid some obvious abuses, or not reset the scoring if someone drops from one guild and joins another).

[DWho]

Remarkable that a system that was completely unintended existed for half a decade and formed a significant portion of the playerbase. Almost makes one think that the devs did intend it, or at least that they didn't really care, and that you're making baseless claims...

 

The part that was broken was not the ability to generate multitudes of CQ points on alts by actually playing them. The part that was broken was that you could initiate activities that generate conquest points as soon as you log in days or even weeks ahead of time (although this was something that was "possible" from the start, the abuse of that ability intensified over the last two years or so which resulted in a proliferation of crafting only alts that were only played during crafting weeks and generally used to "start" the conquest week with hundreds of thousands of points only minutes into the week). The other piece that was somewhat broken was the last boss lockout (as far as conquest was concerned not its intended purpose to take care of players who could not finish an OP in one sitting). Both could have been fixed without the mega nerfs to all activities. For the last boss lockouts you could do what they are doing in the next patch (last boss kill is worth less conquest points than a full run) and by creating a system of diminishing returns for alts crafting within the same guild (Maybe full credit for the first 40, 1/2 credit for the next 40, and 1/4 credit for all the rest).

[DWho]

....You'd have to limit guild-hopping to avoid some obvious abuses, or not reset the scoring if someone drops from one guild and joins another.

 

A good way to stop that would be to make it so your points went with you and only the guild you were in when conquest ended would get the benefit of them.

[Euphrosyne]

The part that was broken was not the ability to generate multitudes of CQ points on alts by actually playing them. The part that was broken was that you could initiate activities that generate conquest points as soon as you log in days or even weeks ahead of time (although this was something that was "possible" from the start, the abuse of that ability intensified over the last two years or so which resulted in a proliferation of crafting only alts that were only played during crafting weeks and generally used to "start" the conquest week with hundreds of thousands of points only minutes into the week). The other piece that was somewhat broken was the last boss lockout (as far as conquest was concerned not its intended purpose to take care of players who could not finish an OP in one sitting). Both could have been fixed without the mega nerfs to all activities. For the last boss lockouts you could do what they are doing in the next patch (last boss kill is worth less conquest points than a full run) and by creating a system of diminishing returns for alts crafting within the same guild (Maybe full credit for the first 40, 1/2 credit for the next 40, and 1/4 credit for all the rest).

I agree, to an extent.

 

I didn't really see anything wrong with the way crafting was done before, because while you could set up your crafting weeks in advance, there was literally no benefit to doing so compared to setting it up the night before crafting week began. (And I wasn't even in one of the crafting guilds!) The real power that crafting guilds had was their organization (in being able to coordinate "crafting bombs") and individual resources (to finance crafting in the first place), and it was the one thing that let them reliably put up points on the relatively few crafting weeks that existed. If the choice is between a) the big Conquest-oriented guilds that win most weeks or b) the crafting guilds that only really have a chance on crafting weeks, then I feel like giving option b a chance on the few crafting weeks that did exist is actually fine. I genuinely don't understand why those guilds got hosed the way they did.

 

Like, on Star Forge/Shadowlands, Exsanguinate was a guild that relied on pvp and crafting to put up points and could even outproduce UW on crafting weeks. Now, with these changes, it's virtually a dead guild. Why target that? Who gains?

 

As for lockouts, what I took from the 5.9 announced changes is that they're saying lockouts are fine (extra points for the last boss of an op) so long as you don't have multiple characters in a legacy doing them (daily repeatable per legacy rather than per character), which is the worst of both worlds. Adding points to each individual boss in an op, but making them repeatable per character, would've been awesome. It'd have to be balanced such that the extra investment of time in a given segment of an operation would be worth the points, which would require some significant playtesting on their part, but if done correctly, it might've properly incentivized running the entire op, which I think is great. Now, they're basically telling people not to run the whole op, and also not to play most of their characters ("Why waste your time playing SWTOR when you could be doing...uh...something else?"), which I think is dumb.

 

I know I don't speak for everybody else in my guild, but I know that many of us were thinking that the abovementioned change would've possibly been part of 5.8 before the patch, and some of us were genuinely excited about it. Wrath only does lockouts because they generate efficient conquest and cxp. Make it worth our time to run more of the operation, and we'll do it. The new system is, from what I understand, the exact opposite.

 

I freely admit that I may have misunderstood the announced changes, however.

Edited March 31, 2018 by Euphrosyne

[Ibokagain]

The part that was broken was not the ability to generate multitudes of CQ points on alts by actually playing them. The part that was broken was that you could initiate activities that generate conquest points as soon as you log in days or even weeks ahead of time (although this was something that was "possible" from the start, the abuse of that ability intensified over the last two years or so which resulted in a proliferation of crafting only alts that were only played during crafting weeks and generally used to "start" the conquest week with hundreds of thousands of points only minutes into the week). The other piece that was somewhat broken was the last boss lockout (as far as conquest was concerned not its intended purpose to take care of players who could not finish an OP in one sitting). Both could have been fixed without the mega nerfs to all activities. For the last boss lockouts you could do what they are doing in the next patch (last boss kill is worth less conquest points than a full run) and by creating a system of diminishing returns for alts crafting within the same guild (Maybe full credit for the first 40, 1/2 credit for the next 40, and 1/4 credit for all the rest).

 

 

Crafting was never an issue back when the conquest schedule was set crafting conquest came maybe once every four months. Guilds and players that planned for these conquest put in many hours farming mats, and buying the white crafting matts to stockpile and get set up. It wasn't broken, those people chose to spend "their" time in doing this, just because you didn't chose to do so doesn't make it broken.

[DWho]

Crafting was never an issue back when the conquest schedule was set crafting conquest came maybe once every four months. Guilds and players that planned for these conquest put in many hours farming mats, and buying the white crafting matts to stockpile and get set up. It wasn't broken, those people chose to spend "their" time in doing this, just because you didn't chose to do so doesn't make it broken.

 

What you failed to comprehend was that I did not say crafting itself was broken. What was broken was the ability to initiate crafting of items before the event even started and then get credit for them once you logged in. Anything you started crafting during the event, you earned.

 

Edit: Let me put this in a "real world" example. There is a fishing contest tomorrow and you catch a whopper of a fish today. Is it fair to the other contestants for you to bring that fish in the next day and receive credit for catching it during the event when you didn't. That is what starting crafting of objectives before the event is equivalent to.

Edited March 31, 2018 by DWho

[captsmash]

The conquest in this game is broken. Crafting has been broken. Nothing sustains long time players, it's all about trying to get in new players into the game and make money on the Cartel Market.

 

I've spent so much time and money on this game only to see it go completely to the trash can! I love Star Wars and have been here for three year...four years now, can't remember, longer than I can think back at this point and the changes that they've made really make it impossible for an end game player to still have any fun.

 

I've never played a game as long as SWTOR. I love coming online and chatting with people while running a raid, and we even waited over a year for a new raid. But now it's like why even bother to log on.

 

You can't run several toons of your own through conquest. You can hardly find a good raid team. Even PVP now seems slow since it only counts if you win. Comeon Dev's pull your heads out of your ***** and stop messing with a system that isn't broken.

[olagatonjedi]

You're correct. Casual players shouldn't be the focus on how the game is changed.

 

You don't put in the effort and get beat by one person peeing in a jar all week, you don't deserve to win conquest.

 

Take your participation trophy and move on.

If 20 people max out their conquest, they are hardly "not putting in the effort."

[Ibokagain]

What you failed to comprehend was that I did not say crafting itself was broken. What was broken was the ability to initiate crafting of items before the event even started and then get credit for them once you logged in. Anything you started crafting during the event, you earned.

 

Edit: Let me put this in a "real world" example. There is a fishing contest tomorrow and you catch a whopper of a fish today. Is it fair to the other contestants for you to bring that fish in the next day and receive credit for catching it during the event when you didn't. That is what starting crafting of objectives before the event is equivalent to.

 

Yes I get what you saying the craters would queue up what they had aka matts on Sunday/Monday and not log back in until conquest started. This isn't broken, technically you can still do it so whats your point. Again I get it you didn't spend the time to gather matts, you didn't spend the time to buy white matts, you didn't craft I understand so maybe you should stop commenting on it then.

[Ibokagain]

If 20 people max out their conquest, they are hardly "not putting in the effort."

 

When you get banned from the forums what will you do?

[DWho]

Yes I get what you saying the craters would queue up what they had aka matts on Sunday/Monday and not log back in until conquest started. This isn't broken, technically you can still do it so whats your point. Again I get it you didn't spend the time to gather matts, you didn't spend the time to buy white matts, you didn't craft I understand so maybe you should stop commenting on it then.

 

Maybe you should stop making assumptions about what other players do and do not do. Don't give me the bull about not knowing about the time needed to gather materials and craft the components I do that every time I play. Completing objectives outside the event and gaining points for them inside the event is wrong whether it is crafting, or heroics, or operations, or whatever activity). It is broken and needed to be fixed. Unfortunately, Bioware did not fix the problem with pre-crafting they just made crafting useless.

[StormForceDax]

As a solo player, I have gone down to just one character per sever being able to complete the personal conquest objective. Not good at all. Also feel that the cartel decoration(s) I paid real money for to get the conquest bonus was a total waste. Also I never understood the reason behind this "One-time - Can be completed one time, per Legacy, per Conquest" I would assume that most players would have both Republic and Imperial characters. OK not all players will but I'd be willing to bet more do than don't. Seems illogical to me in having this set up. Sure safeguards would need to be set up to stop guild jumping but still. Crafting weeks was only every what 1 in 4? was it really that bad? It took me 3 weeks just to gather enough mats across the different skills just to do that one week. The removal of the original Dark Project was also a poor decision.

 

Overall very disappointed in the new conquest system. As a solo player BW has yet again removed an element of the game form me.

[Ibokagain]

Maybe you should stop making assumptions about what other players do and do not do. Don't give me the bull about not knowing about the time needed to gather materials and craft the components I do that every time I play. Completing objectives outside the event and gaining points for them inside the event is wrong whether it is crafting, or heroics, or operations, or whatever activity). It is broken and needed to be fixed. Unfortunately, Bioware did not fix the problem with pre-crafting they just made crafting useless.

 

Sounds to me like crying over knowing you could get your matts and like all crafting set them to craft and then log in when conquest crafting week started. Not a big deal, unless you're one of those players that wants to craft something and stay logged in?

[Ibokagain]

The conquest in this game is broken. Crafting has been broken. Nothing sustains long time players, it's all about trying to get in new players into the game and make money on the Cartel Market.

 

I've spent so much time and money on this game only to see it go completely to the trash can! I love Star Wars and have been here for three year...four years now, can't remember, longer than I can think back at this point and the changes that they've made really make it impossible for an end game player to still have any fun.

 

I've never played a game as long as SWTOR. I love coming online and chatting with people while running a raid, and we even waited over a year for a new raid. But now it's like why even bother to log on.

 

You can't run several toons of your own through conquest. You can hardly find a good raid team. Even PVP now seems slow since it only counts if you win. Comeon Dev's pull your heads out of your ***** and stop messing with a system that isn't broken.

 

It's only going to get worse as well, as new players will hardly spend as much money on CM as some of my former guildies have done.

[Euphrosyne]

Maybe you should stop making assumptions about what other players do and do not do. Don't give me the bull about not knowing about the time needed to gather materials and craft the components I do that every time I play. Completing objectives outside the event and gaining points for them inside the event is wrong whether it is crafting, or heroics, or operations, or whatever activity). It is broken and needed to be fixed. Unfortunately, Bioware did not fix the problem with pre-crafting they just made crafting useless.

Yeah, but what was the issue with pre-crafting? That's just one crafting bomb. It only took 75 minutes per character to set one off. Those extra weeks of preproduction did them little real good. Besides, since everybody had Mondays off from Conquest, any guild could set up a crafting bomb to go immediately after the Conquest reset. You wouldn't be giving up playing time (or, more importantly, Conquest points generation time) in order to do it - just set aside an hour before you log off on Monday night (or whenever).

 

The real test was whether guilds could drop many such bombs over the course of the week. Most of the good crafting guilds could: they had deep enough resources and good enough organization to outproduce the competition on a consistent basis. I'm sure you already know this, but for everyone else's benefit, the good crafters had a rotation: about thirty seconds per character to set up a passel of war supplies, then switch characters and queue up war supplies for the next 75 minutes, stopping to acquire mats as necessary. In theory, they'd pump out many more points over the course of the week than they would with the first bomb. In practice, that was often unnecessary, because few guilds really got into crafting knife fights. If a guild saw that it was behind after the first day, they'd keep their powder dry for the next crafting week, and that meant that the leader could also take its foot off the gas (to mix metaphors), albeit not as much.

Edited March 31, 2018 by Euphrosyne

[Constantious]

Hey folks,

 

With the 5.8a Conquest changes out the door, let’s talk about what we have planned for 5.9. We hope to address concerns over the viability of completing Conquests on alts, points for crafting, and ability to run Operations more frequently. We are going to address this through a few different changes:

• Increasing points gains for Objectives for repeatable and daily repeatable Objectives.
  
• An additional buff for GSF, Warzone, and Flashpoint Participation Objectives.
  
  • The “Play a Flashpoint” Objective is being changed to “Play a Flashpoint or Uprising.”
    

  [*]The “Kill X Enemies” Daily Objective will now be split into three Objectives. Kill 50 / 100 / 150. Additionally, progress on this Objective will not reset everyday (if you killed 40 enemies, it won’t reset back to 0).

  [*]We are going to introduce a new repeatable Daily Objective for completing 3 and 5 Activity Finder Activities (FP, Op, WZ, GSF, Uprising).

  [*]We are introducing a new Daily Repeatable Objective to “Defeat the Final Boss in an Operation.”

  [*]We are introducing a new repeatable Objective for “Craft 50 items."

  • This Objective gives another path for crafters to earn points and is also a mechanism for characters of any level to participate. We will monitor the number of items required to craft closely and will make changes in the future if it is too high, or too low.
    

 

The goal of these changes is that if you complete the bigger value one-time Objectives on a given character, you have a lot more ability to earn points via repeatable Objectives. Not only are there more Objectives to work towards, they are worth more points as well. One of our goals is to encourage that you play multiple types of content and so that will always remain the most optimal path to Conquest points. However, these changes will allow a player to more easily get their Conquest points even if they just play one type of content on repeat.

 

As always, keep your feedback coming! We will continue to monitor the state of Conquests and make changes as needed. Thanks everyone.

 

-eric

 

Detailed breakdown of changes:

 

Each Objective falls into one of three categories: Repeatable, Daily Repeatable, and One-time. Inside of each category, there are three point tiers: low, medium and high. Here are the new values (these are base values, without including Stronghold bonus).

 

Repeatable

• Low is now 120, up from 85
  
• Medium is now 180, up from 130
  
• High is now 290, up from 205
  

 

Daily

• Low is now 400, up from 330
  
• Medium is now 600, up from 500
  
• High is now 825, up from 750
  

 

Repeatable Objective Changes

• Complete a Warzone Objective is now worth 180, up from 85
  
• Complete a GSF Match Objective is now worth 180, up from 85
  
• Complete a FP or Uprising is now worth 290, up from 130
  

 

New Objectives

• The “Kill 50 enemies” Daily Objective will be worth 400 points
  
• The “Kill 100 enemies” Daily Objective will be worth 600 points
  
• The “Kill 150 enemies” Daily Objective will be worth 825 points
  
• The “Complete 3 Activity Finder Activities” Daily Objective will be worth 400 points
  
• The “Complete 5 Activity Finder Activities” Daily Objective will be worth 825 points
  
• The “Kill the Final Boss of an Operation” Daily Objective will be worth 825 points
  
• The “Craft 50 Items” Repeatable Objective will be worth 120 points
  

 

PS - Usual disclaimer that these could change prior to 5.9, but I will let you know of any updates I hear.

 

This is just not enough when it comes to crafter's, either do better or watch your subscriptions and your cash cow "The Cartel market" dwindle to nothing. I can not nor do i feel the need to reiterate the rage crafters have in regards to this. You should not have "fixed" what was not broken ! The only thing that was broken previously for crafters was the rewards for what was actually put in. But pointing this out to you is like pointing something out to someone who is deaf and blind.

Edited March 31, 2018 by Constantious

[CelynthePhoenix]

I hardly ever post here but if it's feedback you want, well.

 

I'm the GM of a small, very casual guild on Darth Malgus, present on both factions (I know technically it means two guilds but it doesn't for us, most of our members have all their characters in both guilds)

Most of our members are adults with a full time job, or children, or both.

 

We never actively participated in conquest. A good amount of our members liked getting their personal goal for the week, some every week, some only the weeks favoring their favorite activities (usually flashpoints and heroics or PvP) so we would invade a planet each week to help them with that but that was it. Those of us who did try to get their personal goal usually did it on several characters.

But we never tried for the top 10 because we knew there wasn't enough interest and as a GM I refuse to force my guildies to play in a way they don't want to.

 

I've cancelled my sub and barely logged in since a bit before 5.8 (because I'm feeling very neglected as a player with a Jedi Consular main right now but that's another story) but the feedback I've gotten so far is:

- We don't like the new system

- Some will only get it on one, maximum two characters now (instead of 6 or 8)

- Some (including me) have stopped trying altogether.

 

I used to get my personal goals on 2 or 3 characters by doing the master mode flashpoint weekly with guildies who like doing flashpoint then get the rest of the points mostly with heroics and if needed that once per legacy crafting objective and rampage.

I have 20 alts, and before the change, I could get my pesonal goal on more than 3 of them easily if it wasn't for lack of time.

 

So our guild never tried for conquest, only made it once to the top 10 (during a crafting week and through the work of mostly one member!) but what we still wanted was to have a fully unlocked flagship even if we were to take the slower path for that aka crafting dark projects.

 

I had hoped that 5.8 would give us an additional way of getting encryptions to unlock the flaghsip since it wouldn't be tied to the top 10 anymore. Instead, we just kissed our dream to fully unlock our flagships goodbye.

 

By changing the recipes for dark project, invasion forces, holocron of strategy, etc, you have made it insanely difficult and/or expensive for small and/or casual guilds to unlock their flagship(s)!!!

 

I cancelled my sub for other reasons than 5.8 and it will take a lot to get me to renew it. This is a big step in the wrong direction!

[Lyriel]

Now, this could mean that when we reshuffled, we ended up with too many Objectives which had Legacy restrictions. That would hamper the viability of alts which definitely seems to be the feedback we are hearing. We can continue to address that by adding more Objectives which can be infinitely repeated. This would directly mirror the alt viability of the pre-5.8 system, which was separated only by repeatable and once per Legacy.

 

I think what is most helpful for us (and many of you on the forums have been doing this) is providing specifically what you felt you could do on alts previously, that you can't do now. This way we can look at the areas where you feel the changes are impacting your daily play and ability to play multiple characters.-eric

 

I don't understand why you need our feedback about what we feel we could do on alts previously, when you yourself laid it out in the preceding paragraph: Anything that was not a one-time objective in the old system. There’s no feel about it, but there are factual differences. Since we can only compare two Conquests presently (because we have no idea what changes you've made to the rest yet - only you have that information) - I guess we need to duplicate data you already have?? Fine.

 

(White Knights, please note: This feedback is geared solely and directly at Musco’s request for information on what we could do on alts before that we cannot do now. It is not a comprehensive review of the system. Please refrain from shifting the goalposts or erecting strawmen.)

 

Relics of the Gree:

What we could do on alts before; i.e., the old 'repeatables.' (All values without invasion bonus, though that's not a true reflection of how we'd have earned at least some of them – in practice, guilds invaded so there were going to be bonuses on some activities.):

 

Unranked Warzone: The Front Lines - 250

Warzones: Total Domination - 500

Warzones: Critical Missions: - 1000

Starfighter: Conquer the Skies - 500

Starfighter: Critical Missions - 1000

Group Finder: Flashpoints - 1000

Group Finder: Operations: - 2000

Critical Missions: Galactic Flashpoints - 1000

Ilum: Heroic Missions - 500

 

5.8 Version (infinitely) repeatables:

 

Crafting: Aid the War Effort - 205

Flashpoint: The Battle of Ilum - 130

Group Finder: Uprising - 130

Starfighter: Dominate the Stars - 85

Starfighter: Seize Control - 85

 

I’m not sure how you can look at the difference and not see the problem. There are half as many repeatable objective categories (of which, in the old system, several had discrete components - e.g., there were two each for unranked and ranked PvP, and rather a lot less than half the points possible without trying to get into the probability of winning a match versus participation. Some mitigation is offered in that, in theory, if one wanted to spam BoI 8 times per day, or mix in some Uprisings, one could still make the equivalent of the former system’s base 1000 points for a random GF FP – but not in the same amount of time. (The changes in 5.8a also addressed some of the uncertainty of needing a win versus participation, but not in a repeatable fashion so it's not really germane to this discussion.)

 

Total Galactic War

What we could do on alts before; i.e., the old 'repeatables.' (All values without invasion bonus, though that's not a true reflection of how we'd have earned at least some of them – in practice, guilds invaded so there were going to be bonuses on some activities):

 

Crafting: Crystal Capacitors - 250

Crafting: Holocron of Strategy - 250

Crafting: Starship Weapons - 250

Crafting: Infantry Supply Kits - 250

Crafting: Armored Vehicles - 250

Crafting: War Supplies - 500

Unranked Warzones: The Front Lines - 250

Warzones: Total Domination - 500

Warzones: Critical Missions - 1000

Starfighter: Conquer the Skies - 500

Starfighter: Dominate the Stars - 1000

Starfighter: Critical Missions - 1000

Starfighter: Medal of Bravery - 1000

Group Finder: Flashpoints - 1000

Group Finder: Operations: - 2000

Critical Missions: Galactic Flashpoints - 1000

Critical Missions: Operations - 1000

 

5.8a version of (infinitely) repeatables:

 

Crafting: Aid the War Effort - 205

Ranked Warzones: Total Domination - 205

Group Finder: Flashpoints - 130

Group Finder: Uprising - 130

Unranked Warzones: Total Domination - 130

Starfighter: Conquer the skies - 85

Warzones: The Killing Fields - 85

 

This one is not exactly apples to apples, in that it was a crafting-oriented theme in the old system, with a much higher personal goal in recognition of the repeatability of crafting objectives. Still, the repeatable non-crafting objectives took a substantial nosedive. And this does not take into account the increased cost and time involved in the new crafting recipes, or the fact that lower skill level crafters are effectively locked out of crafting some recipes at all).

 

Again, I’m not sure how you look at the difference in the number of objectives (especially combined with the points values for said objectives) and still question why we feel we can’t do nearly as much on alts as before. It’s not a feeling. It’s a fact. Several of the previously repeatable objectives were moved to one-time objectives, and others to once per legacy per day.

 

You characterized Conquest as legacy-based, but it simply was not under the old system – which you yourself just acknowledged by noting no such distinction existed previously. Nothing in the information given out prior to 5.8 suggested that it was going to suddenly become legacy-based (which has been more accurately described as ‘legacy-restrictive’). In fact, other than trying to read between the lines in a small series of vague posts, there was no official indication it was so based until you said it today. How, then, are you surprised that you are getting pushback? If I give you the benefit of every doubt I’ve ever possessed (we will not discuss whether such is deserved), the best-case scenario is that you have failed majestically at communicating an intended goal to make the system legacy-restrictive when it wasn’t before.

 

If it is your goal to make it punishing for alts by making it legacy-restrictive, you're succeeding wildly. Just come out and tell us so honestly, rather than hiding behind disingenuous language after 160+ pages of relatively clear feedback. Be honest and we'll plan accordingly, each according to their own game-play needs.

[olagatonjedi]

> runs one flashpoint

> currently has more cq points than 19 people who didn't log in this week

> game broken biovar pls fix

 

Your example is nonsense.

Context my friend. Learn about it one day.

[olagatonjedi]

Exactly maybe we should start a go fund me so we can send him a participation trophy.

My guild wins conquest every week.

[olagatonjedi]

When you get banned from the forums what will you do?

Im not the one name calling and harassing. You should be asking them that question.

[olagatonjedi]

The 1 vs 19 was a small example, so those discounting it because the number of players I used are purposely ignoring the whole issue with it. It could be 1 vs 19, or a guild of 50 vs 10000. A game is not balanced or inviting of new players is the system is favorable to a small number of people who can abuse it.