Planetary Conquest is Dominated by LARGE Allied guilds

There's still incentive to reach the weekly goal even if you don't happen to be in the guild's top 50. I didnt get the guild rewards on the characters I didnt contribute with the first week (not sure if this is intended or a bug) and I most certainly didnt get the personal rewards. I don't think a top 50 system would change much, in terms of activity, other than that all the "fluff points" from the less active members of huge guilds would be excluded.

I don't know, I personally just think it's boring to see the same three guilds top the charts every week and have my own guild sit around and wait to invade a planet, for increased chances, until the other guilds have landed somewhere. I expect a lot of guilds to give up on the whole thing, knowing that they won't stand a chance anyway. I already see a dip in my own guild despite that this is a week where it's extremely easy to earn points.

It was pretty obvious from the start that a system allowing guilds to conquest planets was probably going to favor larger numbers. Predicting that wasn't exactly something to write home about. In fact I made a comment on one of the "50 million is too much" threads that as soon as the people complaining about there guild being too small to afford the ship would immediately switch to "we're too small to conquest". Every MMO I've ever played that had large scale events were slanted toward larger guilds, again this wasn't surprising.

And you may have suggested a solution, as did a lot of people, it's just that most of them are just as full of problems as the current system. But by all means what was your great solution?

I proposed weeks ago that once a Guild places on the Leader board, they get a Debuff to go along with their success equal to whatever week of the month it is, preventing them from invading for a few weeks.

Short version:

Place/win on the Leader Board on Week 1 of the month = 4 weeks of rewards all at once and a debuff that keeps you from earning Conquest points beyond your weekly goal for 4 weeks. Your guild cannot Invade nor place on the Leader Board for the next three weeks.

Place/win on the Leader board on Week 2 of the month = 3 weeks of rewards and debuff lasts 3 weeks.

Same thing with Week 3, only it only lasts 2 weeks and you get you 2 weeks worth of rewards.

Last week of the cycle and you get the basic rewards and no debuff.

First week of the new cycle and everyone competes again.

This would give a huge incentive to play to win in Week one, but removes those winners from the Leader Board for the rest of the month, but doesn't penalize them for winning. It just clears them out of the system to let smaller guilds compete in the following weeks.

You all laughed, but I knew it! I KNEW IT! I knew we would argue over something today. I made that prediction back in 2011. I KNEW IT!!!

Back on topic I'm not a fan of cross faction guilds working together, but I like the conquest system as is. I feel like, as usual, many of you are jumping the gun and getting all heated up over menial issues that will erode with time, but due to your collective impatience(I know it is hard in 2014) you all just have to incessantly argue over big guilds. On JC there are about 5 really big guilds who dominate. That leaves on average 25 slots to fight over. I like those odds. And it is clear that those guilds will be swallowed up by drama, exhaustion, identity crises etc... and falter like every other big guild eventually does. And for those that don't? They deserve to be on top because they have good leadership. I don't understand why the denizens of the sky is falling SWTOR forums are unhappy about the existence of big guilds. Usually bodes well for the game's population and life.

27 of the slots won't give you the achivement.

Problem is those "fluff points" as you call them can add up. That fact encourages EVERYONE in the guild to participate as much as they can, as opposed to just the top performers. As I stated I personally did WZ's with guild mates that I would not have done if your system was in place. And honestly I'm glad I did, even though I didn't even make my personal conquest goal (I think I had almost 30,000 points) it ended up being so close that if a few of the people like myself providing "fluff points" didn't participate we would have probably not won.

Again the system isn't perfect, but no system will be. IMO it's about the best option they have.

OK yeah I remember that thread. And I'm sorry but that is waaaaaay worse than what's in place.

It absolutely does punish guilds for winning by locking them out of the content for 3 weeks. Again if they implemented this the boards would be just as full of complaining, just from different people.

So yes you suggested an idea, however it falls pretty short of solving the problem IMO.

This is a bad analogy. It implies that the conquest winners are somehow more skilled. A better analogy would be referring to all of the above as high school/college level players (at best), but the big guilds get to play with 50 more people on the field. That all seems fine to me. My problem is when the NFL-tier players do enter the equation (NiM-caliber players). In reality, I would assume a basic NFL team could still crush a team of high-schoolers even if they had 100 people the field. But the conquest system doesn't currently work like that. The skill difference between an NFL player and a high-schooler amounts to nothing in the current system. If they want to compete, they still need to bring the same numbers.

On one hand, larger guild should have some sort of an advantage. I mean, when conquering a planet, having a giant army is pretty advantageous. On the other hand, the Dread Masters were 6 people, and they were dominating the crap out of both the republic and empire at the same time. Sure they had soldiers, but considering they were forcing most of their soldiers into obedience with their massive power, they still get credit for being 6 against the entire armies of the other factions.

The easiest way to rectify this is rewarding tons of points for NiM and even HM ops. But that doesn't have much to do with the conquest planets themselves. The best solution would be actually adding new content to every planet specifically for conquests, rather than having it all just be the existing boring-*** heroics and whatever other queues that also have nothing to do with the planet. Make some of that content legitimately difficult and reward lots of points for it, and you're good to go. Imagine something like the Gree event on every planet whenever it's in the conquest rotation, except with a higher range of difficulty.

However, given that this was a " " " "free expansion" " " ", you can't expect that level of content. However, 3.0 or whatever will not be free as far as I know, so maybe it will come with a massive conquest upgrade.

Don't let the PvP'ers catch wind of that, they'll show up with torches and pitchforks.

So, what does everyone think these mega guilds are going to do after they've got their "conquer of the galaxy" titles? Are they going to push really hard to take over planets they have already taken over and earn titles they've already earned? Or, are they going to refocus their efforts elsewhere giving other guilds a chance to earn those titles.

So what if you don't win the first time around, that doesn't mean you'll never win.