Conquest Changes Following 7.4.1

[Anhkriva]

2 hours ago, DeannaVoyager said:

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.

PVE and PVP will never be balanced because the speed of gaining CQ in PVE is constant and depends only on the player, while with GSF it is variable and depends on how often you get matches. One player may have match after match and complete conquest at the speed of light, while another player playing on a server with a smaller population or at different hours has one match every few hours and completes much slower than someone who does heroics. How to balance it?

[Stradlin]

18 minutes ago, Anhkriva said:

PVE and PVP will never be balanced because the speed of gaining CQ in PVE is constant and depends only on the player, while with GSF it is variable and depends on how often you get matches. One player may have match after match and complete conquest at the speed of light, while another player playing on a server with a smaller population or at different hours has one match every few hours and completes much slower than someone who does heroics. How to balance it?

 

Plus each match has 50% of people losing and getting quite modest conquest.

People jumping in matchmaker or queuepool are important to other people in  matchmaker or queuepool. In fact, whether or not up to 15 other people get to do content they enjoy depends on you also wanting to do it. Meanwhile, planetary stuff is always there. Whether or not you choose to solo some planetaries doesn't in meaningful way change the experience of anyone else. - Or at least it isn't a determining factor.

 

 

 

 

Edited March 29 by Stradlin

[Mercielaga]

Don't think that being able to one-click a daily and get on with the parts of the game we enjoy is a bad thing.

Having to waste 20 min. per character on grind and then not having time for the parts we enjoy is game-killing.

[captainbladejk]

1 hour ago, Mercielaga said:

Don't think that being able to one-click a daily and get on with the parts of the game we enjoy is a bad thing.

Can we stop saying the rep think was little more than a "one click daily" for the love of the Force. I get why you said it and the frustration isn't meant to be directed at you. The claims process was simple, but one still had to actually farm out the tokens to generate them first, which was far more than a single click. Saying it was a one click and done thing just gives them more ammo to say they were right to nerf it even though they're objectively wrong. 

[captainbladejk]

1 hour ago, Anhkriva said:

PVE and PVP will never be balanced because the speed of gaining CQ in PVE is constant and depends only on the player, while with GSF it is variable and depends on how often you get matches. One player may have match after match and complete conquest at the speed of light, while another player playing on a server with a smaller population or at different hours has one match every few hours and completes much slower than someone who does heroics. How to balance it?

I'm sorry but that's just granting them a license to do nothing. Variable or not there is zero legitimate reason they can't close the massive gap between pve and pvp in terms of point generation. I don't expect it to be point for point the same between the two game modes and anyone else who thinks logically about it doesn't either. So long as they're within a few percent of each other I don't see the issue regardless of which one comes out on top. Such as if they added the extra objectives they've been talking about and the gap between pvp and pve goes from 478k per week to say 10k per week, that's alot better than before.

To answer how I came up with the 478k I'm going to repost some of the calculations I did over in another thread. Before I post them, there are a few critical assumptions that need to be pointed out, these calculations do not account for time spent waiting in queue as each person's time will be different with no way to quantify it, queues can be bypassed with full groups, and sitting in queue waiting is not work. I'm not going to count neutral objectives available to both sides like the "upgrade a stronghold" stuff as it doesn't effect the overall outcome. Also the point totals are simply what one COULD theoretically generate in a day off the big payers and such, not necessarily what people WILL do. I will also be assuming same amount played between both sides and the goal is pure points generated as how folks divide them up is on them. It also assumes people have the time to complete each thing in a day.

For the big pvp dailies you have the 143k Arena, 143k Warzone, 110k Starfighter dailies. To complete these you need to do the "weekly" quest of completing so many matches, 16 for arena, 16 for warzone, with wins counting for 3 points each. Then for GSF you need to do 7 matches or 4 wins with wins counting for 2 points each. Assuming a person is lucky and racks up win after win, that's a total of 5 warzone matches for 40k conquest (8k each), 5 arenas at 40k total (8k each), and 4 starfighter matches for 44k total (11k each) on top of the big dailies. Total amount of points is 520k per day. For total time spent on the 14 matches I'm assuming an average of 20 minutes. Some could be faster, some could be longer. Total time is 280 minutes or 4 hours and 40 minutes of play. Weekly conquest just doing this stuff once a day would be 3,640,000 total conquest for pvp for 32 hours and 40 minutes of play. 

For pve I'm going to assume someone goes at it hog ham again. For pve we're going to assume our guy does Socialite 1 (25k), Socialite 2 (47k), makeb patrol (38k), rep token (43k), flashpoint daily bonus for first run (8k) as the static objectives. In order to trigger those objectives you will be required to run a total of 8 flashpoints at 8k each. The actual range is 4k-8k depending on the FP with variances being due to bosses, mobs, and so on but I've assumed the max to keep it fair. For planetary heroics there are 14 planets one can do heroics on, however an individual character can only do 13 of them due to alternative starting planets. However for these calculations I'm going to assume our guy switched to pick up the 14th planet. There is a quest for doing a single heroic on a planet that nets you 5k points. Then there are the Defeat Foes Grade 1 that nets you 3500 points, and Defeat Foes Grade 2 that gives you 7k points. In total that would make each planet worth 15.5k points just for those. Now there are 72 heroics available on imp side across 14 planets, and 70 on republic. Each of them as it sits right now grants 500 points on completion. For this I'm assuming imp side. If a person triggered all objectives listed above, ran all the flashpoints, did all 72 heroics, that gives you 478k points per day assuming pre-nerf of the rep token, and 443k post nerf. Time wise I'm assuming it takes people ballpark of 10 minutes per planet, 20 minutes for the makeb patrol, and 15 minutes per flashpoint. total time spent is 280 minutes or 4 hours 40 minutes a day. In a week of time that's 3,346,000 points pre-nerf and 3,101,000 points post nerf. 

Before the nerf that left a gap of 42k per day in favor of pvp and post nerf that gap widens to 77k per day. In a week that difference becomes 294k at per-nerf values and 539k at post nerf values. 

Now not everyone is going to do all 72 heroics and not everyone has a group to play with to get past the queue times. There are also other patrols people could do besides makeb however makeb pays out the best. The calculations also assume people have the nearly 5 hours to play each day and not everyone does. I would say the average person only spends maybe 2 hours a day if that on the game. So their point potential would maybe be 2/5 of what's actually there in the calculations. Yes I know it's not exactly going to be 1:1 but you get the idea. Now where as I don't mind doing a few heroics, at least the ones I can stand doing and have down to a science, not everyone likes doing that. If you're someone who likes to do heroics, then making that quest infinitely repeatable is a good thing as it dramatically raises the value of heroics and has the potential to close the gap, but only so long as the quest remains active. If they cycle it in and out it doesn't help anyone. And if you despise heroics it doesn't help at all.

In fairness, assuming that the infinitely repeatable heroics stays active all the time and everything else stays the same as is, then that raises the total value of each heroic from 500 points to 5500 points. Assuming you did 72 of them in a day that would be 396k points total vs the 36k now, which could result in a net gain of 318k per day pre-nerf and 283k post nerf. 42k pre-nerf value that's ballpark 8 heroics (7.63~) and the 77k pre-nerf is 14 heroics. Now all of this assumes people can stomach heroics and that they do boatloads of them and the quest is always available.

However at the end of the day I hardly call buffing heroics on its own "wider variety of objectives". And it also brings me to the biggest consideration of all beyond the whole numbers debate and what should/shouldn't be nerfed. Do I want to continue supporting a company who allows its developers to come on here and talk down to the players, belittling their time and effort put into the game, and is going to just be extremely rude, condescending and arrogant. Now I would seriously hope he doesn't intend for it to come off that way, but regardless of whether he does or not, that's how it comes off to me as a paying customer. "We know what you want better than you do". Not to mention the whole trying to stealth nerf things in then try to say "we believe all changes effecting players need to be communicated" then leaves something his massive out and says "oopsie". Had they just owned it and said "yeah we nerfed it and we're sorry it wasn't in the notes" and left it at that without the excuses I wouldn't have been as outright livid as I am now. But I've gone on enough for now. 

[LJ_Gibbs]

While we are at it... Why don't we nerf this to 50K

[LJ_Gibbs]

9 hours ago, DWho said:

Perhaps they looked back at their data over the last several years

 

They don't look at their data.... they make up their data.

[Stradlin]

@captainbladejk

 

^ You keep ignoring the  most important thing  to everybody who is determined to bring several characters per week  to conquet target. Huge conq drops in GSF and PvP land on one single character. In PvE, you can distribute your conq haul across your legacy with high precision.  Spend 4 hours doing PVE for conq on Saurday. Spend 4 hours doing PvP for conq on Sunday. You end up with 1-2 more characters on conquest target with PvE on Saturday. IF you get matches and IF you win most of them, you'll have bit more conquest via PvP on Sunday, but all of that conquest came in twohuge  payouts to two characters. You can't distribute it like you do with PvE objectives.

This being the state of matters even  now, before this freshly announced obscenely massive buff which will only widen this already existing gap in this regard.  All of  multiplayer content needs to be popular enough to even happen. It'll  become less popular because of this. Planetaries that in no way benefit from becoming more popular will become more popular.

 

 

Edited March 29 by Stradlin

[DawnAskham]

The real problem is the game hasn't gotten a legitimate expansion in forever, yet is still trying to use the endless treadmill MMO design principle.

Add an expansion akin to anything from ESO to FFXIV to WoW with all new zones (full sized - not some small instanced map), new classes or major systems, updated combat systems, updated crafting, new reputations, new story, new flashpoints, new operations, and most players would not complain about the typical MMO endless treadmill style grinds.

But simply increasing the level cap another 5 levels and resetting gear every time an hour's worth of content is added every few years and then dribbling out content at a snails pace WHILE expecting players to grind decades old content WHILE padding out the decades old content such that it takes longer to complete for fewer rewards is a sure fire way to alienate a large portion of the core base.

[captainbladejk]

1 hour ago, Stradlin said:

@captainbladejk

 

^ You keep ignoring the  most important thing  to everybody who is determined to bring several characters per week  to conquet target. Huge conq drops in GSF and PvP land on one single character. In PvE, you can distribute your conq haul across your legacy with high precision.  Spend 4 hours doing PVE for conq on Saurday. Spend 4 hours doing PvP for conq on Sunday. You end up with 1-2 more characters on conquest target with PvE on Saturday. IF you get matches and IF you win most of them, you'll have bit more conquest via PvP on Sunday, but all of that conquest came in twohuge  payouts to two characters. You can't distribute it like you do with PvE objectives.

This being the state of matters even  now, before the obscenely massive buff which will only widen this already existing gap in this regard.

 

I've already acknowledged that it's easier to distribute points on the pve side, so not sure what else you really want beyond that. As I said above how one distributes their points is on them. If they take all 3 quests on one toon, that's on them, that's not the fault of the game. Point being as it sits right now the pvp guys still have far more raw points than the pve guys by basic math. We can argue how one should be able to distribute those points but that's a completely different can of worms than actually generating them. As as I said I'm not going to get into queue times as that can't really be quantified as it will be different per person and even day to day, and even then it's not work. You may not be able to distribute the points as easily but you can absolutely distribute them. 

[captainbladejk]

1 hour ago, LJ_Gibbs said:

While we are at it... Why don't we nerf this to 50K

Don't give them ideas. But seriously if they're going to whine about the 43k conquest tokens, why are they giving those things out.

[Traceguy]

 

15 hours ago, recalcitrantIre said:

galactic rampage and taskmaster are an enormous amount of conquest points

 

Toons under level 50 in your legacy already get daily access to taskmaster, every day, all year long. It definitely wouldn't hurt anything to allow level 80s in our legacy to participate.

  

15 hours ago, LD_Little_Dragon said:

The new daily areas don't even have decent conquest.  The old weeklies and heroics were fun ... 10 years ago.  Sort of fun 5 years ago.

100%. The dailies on Ruhnuk are a complete PITA compared to Oricon for example. I maxed Ruhnuk rep, and now I have no intention of ever going back to that planet for dailies.

 

  

13 hours ago, Engeopathichero said:

For everyone saying "do the math Broadsword" I highly doubt you all have done the math either. Heroics do not take that much time, as a matter of fact you probably did a few while getting the rep during galactic seasons.

 

That math is simple. Rep gain was 45k. A heroic is 5k. That means 9 heroics = 1 rep token. Now, per week, that's 9 * 7. Which means to match the conquest point loss, we have to do 63 EXTRA heroics per week... Math. It just works.

  

13 hours ago, TahliahCOH said:

No, it doesn't. No serious cq PVEer goes near Tat.

As for heroics, Pirate Bullies (Republic) and Prison Labor (Empire) are dailies for me on tatt. Also, I know a spot there where I can knock out 75 enemies in maybe 6 minutes.

 

[Estelindis]

@EricMusco Thanks for your detailed post.  Based on your summing up of what you see as the positions on this topic, to me it sounds like you've listened to players a lot.  At the same time, the conclusions you've reached don't make complete sense to me. 

Let me try to frame this from a business point of view.  The rep token objective, at the previous level of conquest point reward, was a loss leader.  Just as loss leader products at a store help to get people in the door, the rep token objective helped to get players to log in.  Some players would just log in and use a token, just like some people just go to a store and only buy the loss leader products.  But more people do other stuff when logged in, just as more people buy other products from the store while they're there.  Accordingly, greatly reducing the efficiency of this objective, out of a sense that it offered a disproportional reward for the time invested, can result in many other activities that offer a "more proportional" reward not being completed by players who are no longer logging in.

Isn't it okay for people to get the satisfaction of a "bargain"?  Doesn't allowing this satisfaction contribute to a wider sense of happiness and goodwill, which helps to promote engagement? 

I think your ideas about allowing all legacy characters to access daily areas is good, but I also think that the rep token conquest reward should be returned to something close to what it was before.

[Traceguy]

2 hours ago, captainbladejk said:

For the big pvp dailies you have the 143k Arena, 143k Warzone, 110k Starfighter dailies. To complete these you need to do the "weekly" quest of completing so many matches, 16 for arena, 16 for warzone, with wins counting for 3 points each. Then for GSF you need to do 7 matches or 4 wins with wins counting for 2 points each.

Couple things here.

The weekly for Warzones requires 12 points, not 16.

The weekly for GSF is 4 points, which means you need to play at least 4 matches, not 7. But to maximize your CQP, you need to play a 5th match to get the "play X ship 5 times" objective.

Edited March 29 by Traceguy

[SoontirMorillo]

43 minutes ago, captainbladejk said:

Don't give them ideas. But seriously if they're going to whine about the 43k conquest tokens, why are they giving those things out.

The difference is, that one thing is designed as a reward for paying subscribers once a month.

And the other one is a daily repeatable objective that was designed to be in line with other ingame activities and was blown out of proportion regarding time invested and output.

Just in case this was an honest question.

[Traceguy]

19 hours ago, EricMusco said:

The “Complete a Heroic Mission” Conquest Objective is now worth 2000 Conquest points (up from 1650).

19 hours ago, EricMusco said:

Conquests is definitely a place we are continuing to pay close attention to and plan to make more changes in the future so keep the feedback coming.

 

That's something that should have been done on day 1. It's welcome, but that doesn't really balance things yet from the loss. Please finish this list. Please make:

• Defeat Enemies 1 => 2,000
• Defeat Enemies 2 => 4,000
• Taskmaster => Available to level 80s.
• Flashpoints => infinitely repeatable 2,000 per any flashpoint
• Stronghold Bonus cap => 200%

Note that above list doesn't reflect a 150% bonus.

 

 

 

 

[DWho]

8 hours ago, Saeten said:

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).

You have misquoted me here. What you quoted is actually Stradlin's comment

[captainbladejk]

1 hour ago, SoontirMorillo said:

The difference is, that one thing is designed as a reward for paying subscribers once a month.

And the other one is a daily repeatable objective that was designed to be in line with other ingame activities and was blown out of proportion regarding time invested and output.

Just in case this was an honest question.

The question was rhetorical. Yes I know they give those out every so often to people. The point was if they're going to whine about "one click and done" why are they giving out something that is quite literally a one click and done for a character. It's pure hypocrisy be it a subscriber reward or not. 

Now unlike the those 100k tokens they give you from time to time, the 43k rep tokens didn't just magically appear in your inventory for doing nothing. You still had to play the content to earn rep tokens to pop for that 43k. As I've said plenty of times now, if I farm out 10 tokens from 10 flashpoints, heroics, or whatever, it makes no difference whether I use them all up in 10 seconds, or over the course of 10 years, the result is the same and I still did the work to earn those tokens that was demanded of me by the game itself. You know who determines the drop rate of the rep tokens, the dev team. Them nerfing the rep token is like buying a car for $30k then the dealership coming to you after you paid it off and saying "yeah so we actually undervalued the car when we sold it to you and we need you to pay us another $5k to make that up." The only sane answer should be "sorry you made a mistake at the dealership but that's not my problem" as you hang up the phone. 

In this instance the devs had the standard for years that it was 43k for the rep token and only demanded x amount of work for it. Yet now suddenly after the fact they're like the dealership coming back and saying "yeah so you knew that car was worth $35k so we're repossessing the car until you agree to sign this new agreement of $35k instead of $30k." They don't get to create a problem, have me agree to their asking price, then come back afterwards and whine about how I supposedly took advantage of them and demand more. In this instance, they clearly think rep tokens are valuable yet they choose to sell them at prices below value. Then after people bought them out at below value prices, they turn around and whine and belittle the players afterwards for "little effort" when they're the ones that set the bar that low to start with. Like dude if you know they're that valuable but sell them below their market value, that's your own fault. To finish the analogy, if they thought rep tokens were being under-valued they should've sold them at higher asking prices making them harder to get. Instead they chose to sell me 43k credit starship engine, then decided they gave me too much and repossessed that engine and replaced it with an 8k credit engine. thus stealing 35k worth of engine from me. That is the issue. 

[damonskye]

Well, this is a giant NOPE for me.

Musco and the dev team may think they're being accommodating, but as I've said before... this was a nonsense "problem" that they "solved" simply by making it more tedious.

There is nothing whatsoever engaging about heroic missions, not to those of us who have been playing for over a decade.  Nothing.  I've done every single heroic mission in this game more times than I can count.

I want to emphasize that word.  Engaging.  This is the true problem SWTOR has: there might be plenty of content going back to its original release, but there is no engaging content for those of us who have already done everything.  Yes, SWTOR has a small dev team; yes, it's pretty much in maintenance mode.  But none of that excuses the lack of engaging content.  Many of us pay for subscriptions, we've bought cartel market items... what does that revenue stream have to show for itself?  More cartel market things to buy, 30 minutes of content every 6 months (or longer) and system reworks that are a total waste of time.

I've asked this before: when they get my money, despite all of this lack of engaging content, why do they care what I'm doing with my time?  There was NO HARM DONE with getting 45K conquest points from logging in and using a rep token.  Absolutely none.  It was something that got me to go into the game and do things.  But since the change, I think I've logged in once.

And I won't be subscribing again.  This is the end for me.  My time is my own, and I'm not doing a bunch of non-engaging content I've done for many years, just to achieve the same goals I had before: to get tech fragments to upgrade my characters' gear.

Devs, I hope it was worth it.  I really do.  But I think it wasn't.  Certainly not for me.  

I wish you all well, but I am done.

[Samcuu]

18 hours ago, ObiWanStefann said:

Wow --- so having people complete conquest (even with the rep boost) feeling a sense of accomplishment is a bad thing?   Your post seems to micromanage players like you are so concerned about people getting to the path of completing conquest.   Why should it matter to the developer team and why create extra hoops for people to jump through?  Please understand that most people in the TOR community are grown adults working and playing swtor is for fun and NOT a second job.  I do agree with the above post about the team not being honest with the players by telling us about this ahead of time.   Trust is a very powerful thing!   GREAT job on making most of your player base upset over this change.   I used to log on every single day, but after this change, i barely log on.   I spent hundreds of dollars last year in the cartel market and probably will not do that going forward with the current thought process of the dev team.  

Make players happy and stop doing petty things to upset everyone.   I want to see swtor succeed but not fail over petty developer team decisions that makes everyone upset.   Lastly, please start actually listening to the people that play and pay for this game.

Sincerely,

A concerned player on the verge of quitting

I care far less about the conquest points than this exact point. You mentioned the term micro-managing which is exactly what it is. Ppl were logging in to play the game and enjoying conquest because it wasn't too overbearing as far as time demands are concerned. Again the decision to do it is one thing but the thought process behind it is far more alarming to me.

Swtor is in a sad state, pvp is completely ignored for example, we can't even get class balancing, and we've got the devs over here concerning themselves with busy work as opposed to ya know actually making the game better...please get ur priorities straight and start making changes that benefit us instead of being obsessive about stuff like this thats mostly inconsequential besides of course alienating your player base😬😬

[DeannaVoyager]

6 hours ago, Anhkriva said:

How to balance it?

You balance them by nerfing gsf/pvp or buffing pve points. 

You think HM and MM ops can be completed without finding a group of 8 competent people first? Those people actually need to know how to play and they need to know the mechanics unlike gsf/pvp players who get their points by accepting the pop.

2 hours ago, Traceguy said:

Toons under level 50 in your legacy already get daily access to taskmaster, every day, all year long. It definitely wouldn't hurt anything to allow level 80s in our legacy to participate.

This. And if I may point out: the taskmaster doesn't complete itself. The mobs don't kill themselves. None if is free points, as some people seem to think. 

[Advocatis]

15 hours ago, VegaMist said:

Oh wow. So while choosing between a hurt pride and a revenue stream for his company, @EricMusco decided his pride (and the prides of the rest of the decision makers) was more important. I hope he has an equally "well written" letter (or perhaps a prepared speech) to justify to his higher ups how sacrificing a portion of revenue (only time will tell how significant) over a reputation token nerf was worth it.

From my personal working experience whenever revenue drops, everyone at the top of any given company notices and they always ask questions.

I’m sure his “we stuck a fork in our customer base” letter will go over well.  

[DeannaVoyager]

2 hours ago, Stradlin said:

Huge conq drops in GSF and PvP land on one single character. In PvE, you can distribute your conq haul across your legacy with high precision. 

This is another good reason to nerf GSF points. Then you people could also enjoy this precise distribution of conquest points. Thank you for pointing it out!

[captainbladejk]

1 hour ago, Samcuu said:

I care far less about the conquest points than this exact point. You mentioned the term micro-managing which is exactly what it is. Ppl were logging in to play the game and enjoying conquest because it wasn't too overbearing as far as time demands are concerned. Again the decision to do it is one thing but the thought process behind it is far more alarming to me.

Swtor is in a sad state, pvp is completely ignored for example, we can't even get class balancing, and we've got the devs over here concerning themselves with busy work as opposed to ya know actually making the game better...please get ur priorities straight and start making changes that benefit us instead of being obsessive about stuff like this thats mostly inconsequential besides of course alienating your player base😬😬

I will agree that it's micromanaging because it absolutely is. 

As for them ignoring pvp and class balancing, that's what the whole ability pruning junk was supposed to be is class balancing. Pvp also has far far more points available than pve does. They need to close that gap between the points which they've not yet done. 

With that stuff said it's not surprising to me that certain individuals are too proud to admit they got it wrong. Typical corporatism. 

[Toraak]

2 hours ago, Traceguy said:

 

 

Toons under level 50 in your legacy already get daily access to taskmaster, every day, all year long. It definitely wouldn't hurt anything to allow level 80s in our legacy to participate.

  

100%. The dailies on Ruhnuk are a complete PITA compared to Oricon for example. I maxed Ruhnuk rep, and now I have no intention of ever going back to that planet for dailies.

 

  

 

That math is simple. Rep gain was 45k. A heroic is 5k. That means 9 heroics = 1 rep token. Now, per week, that's 9 * 7. Which means to match the conquest point loss, we have to do 63 EXTRA heroics per week... Math. It just works.

  

As for heroics, Pirate Bullies (Republic) and Prison Labor (Empire) are dailies for me on tatt. Also, I know a spot there where I can knock out 75 enemies in maybe 6 minutes.

 

I'd add black Box impside as well is fast. Skip the bonus and go to the tent. Very Fast.