Conquest Changes Following 7.4.1

[colemak]

I'm not sure what the purpose of this change is. This pushes alt conquest from from reputation token to buffed heroics. Is this supposed to artificially increase play time to impress some investor? I just can't see how this change is going to make the game better. 

Edited March 29 by colemak
to be more specific

[LJ_Gibbs]

9 minutes ago, colemak said:

I'm not sure what the purpose of this change is. This pushes alt conquest from from reputation token to buffed heroics. Is this supposed to artificially increase play time to impress some investor? I just can't see how this change is going to make the game better. 

Yes... yes it is.  Funny part is... it will LESSEN my playtime.  I am doing only one toon CQ now.

[captainbladejk]

1 hour ago, theJudeAbides said:

Wow, the response to this is baffling to me.  When I saw the change, I honestly thought it was good.  To me, that was just another objective that was once again unfairly helping newer players with easy points while screwing over older players like myself with the vast majority of the rep tracks maxxed out LONG before the original conquest changes.

What's baffling to me is this kind of attitude here. You being maxed and unable to do certain objectives is NOT a punishment. People having an easier time than you or I did when we were new is NOT punishing veteran players like us. It used to be if folks wanted to level way back in the day they had to do nearly every single quest on a planet in addition to their class story, and sometimes even that wasn't enough. Thankfully it's much better than it was before and folks can still go back and do the other stuff later. 

With that said, although my legacy is maxed out, I'm not calling for nerfs to that objective because some newer player benefitting from it has ZERO effect on me. Likewise if you're maxed out on reps and couldn't benefit from the 43k but another could, their ability to do so has ZERO negative effect on you. They're not stealing resources from you, they're not locking you out of anything, it's just you are farther along than they are. Season rep gave people like you or me that have completed alot of the reps the ability to benefit from that 43k again which is why it was foolish to remove it as it completely negated the whole "i'm maxed out on everything" argument. Suggesting you are somehow negatively impacted by someone else benefitting from the 43k is just plain foolish. 

I just do not get why some people feel so threatened by new player coming along and earning the same stuff as you, but having an easier time with it. Them completing some of the same achievements doesn't take yours away or diminish yours in any way. For example I popped a white color crystal out of a pack at one point, yet if they were to add them to a vendor for credits that doesn't effect me negatively at all. It doesn't take away the fact that I got mine from a pack, or steal my ability to use the crystal. Honestly I have to ask, how are you personally hurt if someone was still able to benefit from something you maxed out ages ago? 

[VegaMist]

Just wanted to add to my previous post since it really baffles me.

So, they wasted company resources on implementing a change which resulted in a way over-average customer dissatisfaction, a loss of customers, and a loss of revenue (from both subscriptions and Cartel Market). Then they tripled-down on the said change which resulted in an even more customer dissatisfaction, an increased loss of customers, and a larger loss of revenue. Please someone make it make sense from a business perspective.

What would have been a better approach (in my humble opinion) is as following:

1. Start with an apology for not just what you've done, but for how it was done (stealthing it in was almost as bad if not worse as the deed itself).
2. Do add Heroic mission Conquest Objectives as you discussed since that without a doubt will increase the number of players visiting those areas and as a show of good will.
3. Return Reputation Conquest Objective to where it was since that change was a mistake to say the least (tripling-down on the said mistake doesn't make it any less of a mistake, regardless of the reasoning).
4. Bring back Galactic Season's reputation track - the structure is already there, so it can't be too complicated of a change (though it may potentially take longer to implement than 2 and 3 - only dev team can know for sure).
5. Promise, and keep that promise, never to stealth in significant changes ever again - you really didn't need to include the "floating bottle" in your patch notes, but something huge like Reputation Conquest points nerf should have been communicated, not just in the patch notes, which come out a day before the patch, but, at a bare minimum, two weeks in advance (ideally, earlier).

Edited March 29 by VegaMist
Typos (it's always typos)

[theJudeAbides]

Listen, if you want super easy conquest points from doing nothing, you only need to do it in the BW approved way: Pick up the GSF weekly, queue into matches, then fly around in circles and crash into your capital ship.  Make sure to contribute in no way to helping your team win.  And in just 4 easy matches of doing this, you'll have MORE than enough points to complete your weekly.

And you can rest assured that BioWare will never change this, because they're more likely to give every item on the CM away for free than they are to touch anything GSF related.  If you're gonna complain about something, complain about literally any of the following: Class balance being complete garbage & PVP and GSF rewarding potatoes who contribute nothing to their teams.  Don't worry, it will be equally ignored, but at least you're complaining about something relevant.

[LJ_Gibbs]

4 minutes ago, VegaMist said:

Just wanted to add to my previous post since it really baffles me.

So, they wasted company resources on implementing a change which resulted in a way over-average customer dissatisfaction, a loss of customers, and a loss of revenue (from both subscriptions and Cartel Market). Then they tripled-down on the said change which resulted in an even more customer dissatisfaction, an increased loss of customers, and a larger loss of revenue. Please someone make it make sense from a business perspective.

What would have been a better approach (in my humble opinion) is as following:

1. Start with an apology for not just what you've done, but for how it was done (stealthing it in was almost as bad if not worse as the deed itself).
2. Do add Heroic mission Conquest Objectives as you discussed since that without a doubt will increase players visiting those area and as a show of good will.
3. Return Reputation Conquest Objective to where it was since that change was a mistake to say the least (tripling-down on the said mistake doesn't make it any less of a mistake, regardless of the reasoning).
4. Bring back Galactic Season's reputation track - the structure is already there, so it can't be too complicated of a change (though it may potentially take longer to implement than 2 and 3 - only dev team can know for sure).
5. Promise, and keep that promise, never to stealth in significant changes ever again - you really didn't need to include the "floating bottle" in your patch notes, but something huge like Reputation Conquest points nerf should have been communicated, not just in the patch notes which come out a day before the patch, but, at a bare minimum, two weeks in advance (ideally, earlier).

Unfortunately... they do not care. 

[VegaMist]

1 minute ago, theJudeAbides said:

Listen, if you want super easy conquest points from doing nothing, you only need to do it in the BW approved way: Pick up the GSF weekly, queue into matches, then fly around in circles and crash into your capital ship.  Make sure to contribute in no way to helping your team win.  And in just 4 easy matches of doing this, you'll have MORE than enough points to complete your weekly.

And you can rest assured that BioWare will never change this, because they're more likely to give every item on the CM away for free than they are to touch anything GSF related.  If you're gonna complain about something, complain about literally any of the following: Class balance being complete garbage & PVP and GSF rewarding potatoes who contribute nothing to their teams.  Don't worry, it will be equally ignored, but at least you're complaining about something relevant.

I don't play GSF (I prefer PVP), but if I ever had to resort to tactics like this to complete objectives, I'd rather play a different game.

[VegaMist]

2 minutes ago, LJ_Gibbs said:

Unfortunately... they do not care. 

Unfortunately... you're probably right.

[Ryukomaru]

@EricMusco If reputation advancement is low effort content, why has most of the content from 7.0 to the current patch been centered around repeated reputation grinds?  

Rep tracks are gone, no easy tokens for bare minimum, so why nerf low effort content like ruhnak, manaan, ord mantell?  That low effort low reward content is now pointless as it gives no gear, no xp.    Even WoW was smart enough to reward players for boring rep grinds.

I think there is low effort, and I think its pretty telling it isn't on the players end.

Edited March 29 by Ryukomaru

[captainbladejk]

1 hour ago, theJudeAbides said:

Listen, if you want super easy conquest points from doing nothing, you only need to do it in the BW approved way: Pick up the GSF weekly, queue into matches, then fly around in circles and crash into your capital ship.  Make sure to contribute in no way to helping your team win.  And in just 4 easy matches of doing this, you'll have MORE than enough points to complete your weekly.

And you can rest assured that BioWare will never change this, because they're more likely to give every item on the CM away for free than they are to touch anything GSF related.  If you're gonna complain about something, complain about literally any of the following: Class balance being complete garbage & PVP and GSF rewarding potatoes who contribute nothing to their teams.  Don't worry, it will be equally ignored, but at least you're complaining about something relevant.

The fact that you're resorting to the whole "doing nothing" bit in relation to the rep token shows me you don't know what you're talking about. They don't magically appear in your inventory, you still need to farm them out. Whether it's 5 minutes or 5 hours I put in the work to the standard THEY required. If I farm 10 tokens from 10 flashpoints, heroics or whatever, I did the work they required, but now suddenly that's a problem and not enough? Are you kidding me dude? If I wanted to do GSF or pvp I would queue for it. They do not get to dictate to me I must do GSF or pvp. That's not happening. I will leave before that happens. If I want to play that stuff I will do so on my own accord or go play CoD. 

[MsViolet]

For me at least, this changes nothing.

The reason that Advancement : Reputation was so valuable was that it allowed us to skip some of the boring, tedious farming of the same material that we've already done to death. If the game had newer, fresher material, it wouldn't be so bad.

So they completely obliterate the value of Advancement : Reputation, so now we're faced with a long, tedious grind to meet our Conquest goals, and their solution is to ... 

... have us do the long, tedious grind to meet our Conquest goals. See the problem?

If we enjoyed doing Heroics, we'd be doing them already. Replacing Advancement : Reputation with Heroics doesn't make the game more fun, it makes it more boring.

They want us to play the game more. I have a better idea ... I'll just find another game that I actually enjoy doing.

[Mercielaga]

5 heroics at 5000 cq (assuming full bonus) to get the daily 25,000 cq is not going to bring back the people doing multiple servers who have dropped out, or keep those who are considering dropping out.

Seriously, Galactic Seasons should have brought a boost in activity, and instead, it has cratered, not just in our guild, but server-wide. Granted, Satele Shan is facing more issues than just this, but it is most certainly not going to help.

And honestly, what is wrong with a way to quickly complete a daily target? Some days, you're busy and don't have the time to do, say, 5 heroics.

If you can't reverse the rep token nerf, even partially, then lower the daily.

[Traderunner]

Quote

trying to herd us to heroic now, like we are kids needing direction on what to do next

You know, the developers in this game sometimes remind me of those parents who argue with their children about what the kids like to eat.

"But sweetheart, you like mashed potatoes ... Yes, you do ... Yes, you do ... Yes, you do ... "

"Don't worry, you like doing Heroics ... Yes, you do ... Yes, you do ... Yes, you do ... "

[Ryukomaru]

Just now, Mercielaga said:

If you can't reverse the rep token nerf, even partially, then lower the daily.

They 100% could, they are just refusing to because they know what WE the customers want, more than we the customers do.

[Gwena]

Oh boy, more CQ points for heroics, those are my favorite thing to do in game! Gosh, I just love doing the same heroics I've been doing for the better part of a decade. Definitely more fun than getting caught up on the story, playing Space Barbie, decorating my Strongholds, or boring stuff like that!

Jesting aside . . . the changes to CQ points for heroics is nice I suppose, but for me at least the big appeal of getting so many points from reputation tokens was NOT having to run as much old, grindy content such as, y'know, heroics. 😒

It is very nice that we will be able to access daily areas on alts that haven't done story for them, though.

[Mercielaga]

What this is, more than anything, is taking a lot of time away from the things we WANT to be doing in game. Period.

[Ryukomaru]

Everything implemented since 7.0 have been solutions looking for a problem. 

 

[RushNFour]

My how far we have fallen from "Play your way."

[DWho]

5 hours ago, Stradlin said:

In a situation where single player content& content that needs other people to even  happen give approx as much conquest as fast, then single player  content is always vastly superior by the very nature of it: single player content is always available,100% reliable and entirely predictable. Much of multiplayer content is basically unavailable for you for 12-14 hours a day..on busiest servers. When it IS available, it is unpredictable. In GSF/PvP,  every match has precisely 50% of people participating  losing the match  for starters!

This once again pushes conquest towards being a single player activity. Every multiplayer aspect of this game will  greatly suffer for this change.    

Idea was to appease the crowd  who wants to do very  " short sessions",  but this will prolly have massive effect on everybody who enjoys conquest, no matter how short or long their sessions.

Nothing that takes group finder or matchmaker can ever compete with simply soloing some planetaries, when said planetaries are as rewarding as this.

There are tons of hardcore conq farmers who are quite content doing whatever it is that gives them most conquest as fast as possible.  This change pulls them away from matchmaker,out of  queue pool and squarely plants them in Tatooine, doing some 11 year old planetaries instead. Queue pools and matchmaker will have less people wanting to do multiplayer stuff because of this.

 

 

 

 

Perhaps they looked back at their data over the last several years where they have continually reduced the number of CQ points obtainable from "solo" activities and determined that all their "encouragement" of players to do group content as a means to increase subs or maintain subs or at the very least increase participation in "group" activities was completely ineffective and now they are going to try something different.

That said, Operations do need more ways to gain CQ points as they are seriously underrepresented in CQ (ask for them to buff your content not nerf other people's)

[RyvickTheFirst]

In summary:

 

 Here are the 3 biggest problems we heard from you.

 

 To answer here are 3 minor changes that don't address the problems players brought up.

[Saeten]

1 hour ago, DWho said:

There are tons of hardcore conq farmers who are quite content doing whatever it is that gives them most conquest as fast as possible. 

These types of players do heavy PvP, not solo content. They are a minority of what I believe are the majority of subscribers and active preferred and FtP players.  The main pull of this mmorpg has been and should continue to be story content which is a high percentage of players doing solo PvE content. The endgame after story has been encouraged and incentivized into achievements and group content. But, with the staleness of endgame, many people do not enjoy repeatable grind objectives for the small entertainment of a battle pass (Galactic Seasons & PvP Seasosn).

[RaneTheExile]

I just want to take a moment to thank the community for taking the time to speak up and let your thoughts be heard.  It's so important for people to do this or things will never change; I encourage you to ask your friends and guildies to get active on the forums as well when they have grievances or to even share their joy when positive changes happen.  I've actually been thrilled seeing the response from all of you, which let me know I wasn't the only one on the "conquest tipping point."  A lot of joy has been taken out of the game from the slog of doing 'extra' content just to hit conquest.

While the planned 7.4.1c changes noted so far are "nice," things are still heavily out of balance in the conquest world.
Infinitely repeatable heroic mission?  '+1 cookies'
Access to content previously locked behind story progression?  '+1 cookies'
The problem here is you haven't yet made up for the '-50 cookies' with the rep. nerf and overall dissatisfaction of the community.
Also, not having cq objectives for the newest content to the game, like Kessan's Landing, needs to be remedied.
(And hey, R4 is still the least rewarding OP, yet it's the newest; needs some attention!)

People come to swtor to enjoy a Star Wars game.  While playing the game, they enjoy being rewarded for their time spent (however short or long that time may be), conquest usually being the 'main' reward for continued play.  I think the larger issues at hand here are the lack of variety of ways in which to earn conquest as well as an imbalance of value to points given for conquest objectives.  Most of us have been playing for years, which means we've been doing the same heroics for YEARS.  We DON'T want to have to spend the next several years just farming the same old heroics to earn what really isn't that big of a reward for completing conquest.

For my first point on the larger issues: Repetition is boring, and continually gets more boring when you have to repeat the same. darn. heroics. every. day. for. years...!  The conquest board is basically, what 50% of just "go do heroics?"  You're more or less forcing us to be bored of your game.  Try coming up with additional items that let us play with more variety!  Try being kind and give us 2-4 more "gimmies" like the "decorate 5 times" or reactivate "sell junk" for all player levels.  Even a little like that can show you're trying.  Personally, I see no reason why lower leveled toons get more/better reward options than max level toons.  The 'gain a level' alone is enough extra benefit for non-80 toons.

For my second point: If you're essentially extending the value of completing one heroic from ~5k to 10k~, something that only takes ~5-10mins. to complete, then longer, harder objectives, like Weeklies, Flashpoints, Operations, etc. should ALL have a boost in their point value.  This again shows how we're continually being channeled to the same old heroics to make any meaningful progress in conquest in a fair amount of time.

Just throwing these out there but some ideas that came to mind were things such as: Rewarding 5k (@150% SH) for each ops boss defeated.  That would add an additional ~20k-30k to operations, make practically everyone happy, and really have no additional effort.  You could also do something similar for flashpoint bosses.  How about making the Weekly Heroic missions worth some conquest?  Make 'killing enemies on a planet' infinitely repeatable instead of just rewarding for the first 75 (total) killed.  Heck, why not disburse say 50cq points for every 5 minutes a toon is logged into the game (literally rewarding people for their time)?

Edited March 29 by RaneTheExile

[chalogalicia]

9 hours ago, Chartnight said:

• Low Session Time Options - Whether this is for someone with a lot of alts or just someone on their main who wanted to dip in for a quick session, that Objective did allow a path for someone to be able to get points during short sessions.

WOW --- so having alts with low session times is a bad thing?   I found that having alts increases players engagement with the game.   Certainly in swtor, it increases cartel market coins to unlock collections for alts.   Why micromanage this  --- why care?   Having people log on should be a win for the game.   Just reading this post makes me scratch my head and makes me even more concerned and upset over the future direction of swtor.   I feel this issue should be elevated to the executive producer.    Making the whole community upset is not a win or the right direction for a game that has been out for greater than 10 years.     If you continue to micromanage every little thing to disengage the community, people will continue to leave.    I think it is a bad business decision when this happens.

 

BTW, I never comment on any post but I feel so strongly about this that I had to.   Very frustrated as good paying customer and advocate of the game.

Hey Dev Team!
This is exactly how I feel as well. 

Since I heard about the changes I've felt less encouraged to both go through GS + login and do Conquest for my alts. 
I understand the need to steer the players into how you want to shape the game, but definitely please look into an alternative that takes into account what was changed.
While bumping what we get from repeatable heroic missions and enabling them for all levels is a good start, the remaining CQ amount from the former "easy one-click" token should be accounted for in other similar ways.

Or please revert this change like you did with the Collection sale back in December

Love you team, thanks for what you do, please listen to the community.

P.S. I also never comment on any post and felt compelled to leave feedback on this topic.    

[DeannaVoyager]

12 hours ago, EricMusco said:

Reminder of what changed and why. In 7.4.1 we reduced the amount of Conquest points earned for the “Advancement: Reputation” objective by a fairly substantial amount. The reason we did this was to reduce the need for more reputation tracks in Galactic Seasons and bring it in parity with other objectives given the relatively low effort required. Since you could (assuming you had rep tokens on hand) simply log in and right click a token for thousands of points. 

If this is the case, why does GSF still give hundreds of thousands of points? It's literally a low effort objective as you can queue up at level 10 without gear, skill or even spaceship, and you don't need to do anything but fly into an asteroid over and over again. 

I don't know where you (the devs) can get reputation items for free, or even with low effort, I've had to play the game to earn them. 

 

Changing heroics back to infinitely repeatable is a good change, and so is unlocking daily areas for all alts, but it's not enough to balance cqp between pve and gsf/pvp. 

- Revert the reputation conquest to it's original value
- Remove all level limitations and bring back the 50k personal conquest goal 
- Multiply conquest points from HM ops with 2 and multiply conquest points from MM ops with 4 to make them equivalent with gsf and pvp content, OR divide gsf/pvp points by 4. 
 

[Stradlin]

4 hours ago, Saeten said:

 But, with the staleness of endgame, many people do not enjoy repeatable grind objectives for the small entertainment of a battle pass (Galactic Seasons & PvP Seasosn).

They just came up with a major change  that heavily pushes people towards most repeatable grinds available. Nothing is as repetitive as doing same   11 year old planetary heroics.  Doing toxic bombs on Balmorra for 1000th  time  spells 'stale' - in capitalized letters.

All multiplayer content is less predictable and less repetitive  due to its very nature...

...Being less predictable isn't exclusively a "nice" thing. Ie, 12 hours a day, all multiplayer content that needs more than 4 people is unreliable at best and a completely closed down  shop at worst.This on the two busiest servers. Such landscapes are even more dire on quieter servers. Does your worklife, RL shcedule, family etc limit you to gaming hours that are like 4-6 hours removed from peak? Tough luck, no content you'd actually like to play  for you.

 

This new change makes content that in no way benefits or suffers from popularity more popular. At expense of content that doesn't even happen if it isn't popular enough.

 

Edited March 29 by Stradlin