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7.0 Conquest Changes


DavidStaats

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Hi all,

 

Following up from Musco’s post last week, I wanted to swing around and chat about some of the 7.0 changes we are making to Conquest. We want to provide you all a heads up on these coming changes, and also go into some of the thoughts and reasoning behind them.

 

Update to the Personal Conquest Goal

As some of you may have noted from our most recent PTS, the goal for Personal Conquest will be increased from the previous 50,000 points to 100,000 points for “Legacy of the Sith”.

 

There are numerous facets to Conquest we have been reviewing:

  • The economic impacts the system has had over the 6.0 era
  • The engagement impacts of the system and how that has affected not just the individual player but how it has affected the greater community as a whole
  • How Conquest is going to be tied into the 7.0 systems and gameplay loops

 

We want to ensure that Conquest remains a viable and enjoyable loop for all types of players, while also ensuring that it is promoting a healthy relationship for players and the connecting systems.

 

We believe the starting point of all of this is in the rate of which Conquest can be completed. This rate has an immediate and direct effect on every facet mentioned above.

  • It contributes to how many additional credits are being generated per week across the game
  • How many Guild Flagship Encryptions can be obtained and thus how rapidly a Guild can progress their Flagship
  • How many characters a player decides to run through the Conquest cycle
  • Which Conquest Objectives players favor in order to maximize their goals

 

All of these are a direct result of the rate in which Conquest can be completed. What we have seen throughout 6.0 was that the rate of Conquest completion was not contributing to these facets in a healthy manner. It was increasing the rate of acquisition for what should be long term goals for players, promoting a playstyle of interruptive play as players hit their Conquest target and then swap out their characters, creating social pressures to participate in Conquest as often as possible, and adding to the on-going economic changes we have seen in the game over the past year.

 

We reviewed various goal amounts, both with their impact on the systems currently and soon to be associated with Conquest, but also with the player experience in mind. After this review, we found that 100,000 was the best bridge between the goals of maintaining the health of these systems while minimizing the impact for all players. We want to maintain that Conquest is an enjoyable system which rewards you for doing virtually anything the game has to offer, while also proactively working to ensure we can provide a healthy and responsible symbiotic relation to the economy, and additional systems and progression tied around it. We want to ensure that Conquest is still a system where players feel that they can run it with multiple characters each week, but that it is not the only way to enjoy Conquest.

 

Update to Objective Rewards

Starting with 7.0, Conquest Objectives will no longer reward experience or credits for completing them. We are making this change to help reduce the number of credits being generated in the game, as well as removing the experience loop Conquest has had in the past.

 

While Conquest is not solely responsible for some of the economic shifts we have seen in the game, it is definitely a strong contributor. The credit amount for individual Objectives was never considered high; however, over time those values begin to add up to a non-zero impact sum.

 

As an example of this, one of the more completed Objectives, “Missions: Story Time”, has generated nearly 64 billion credits into the economy alone. This is not taking into consideration the Credits players earned for completing the Story Mission itself (which could exponentially expand this value). As you can see, the combination of the Objective Credit reward with the Mission Credit reward is generating more credits into the game than necessary.

 

The removal of the experience reward is being done to help contribute toward the health of the leveling process, while also removing a self-generating loop in Conquest where completing Conquest Objectives would grant experience to level a player up. This would complete the ‘Advancement: Gain a Level’, ‘Advancement: Gain 5 Levels’, or ‘Renown: Rank Up’, thus gaining a player more experience. This loop in combination of the impact on the leveling experience are the reasons we are removing experience rewards from Conquest Objectives.

 

We want to maintain that the activity you are doing is the focal point and should provide the Credits and experience reward; not the Conquest Objective itself.

 

We hope this helps shine some light on the intent of the 7.0 Conquest changes!

Edited by JackieKo
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Genuinely have no problem with removing the credits. It's far too easy at low levels to hit conquest anyway. I would prefer a bit of rebalancing to some of the objectives - for example Operations take a lot of time to set up and then run, but reward bugger all conquest points.

 

But yeah, in general it's all fine. Happy with the 100k too, it'll require a bit more effort to get on alts.

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[*]How many characters a player decides to run through the Conquest cycle

 

Ie, you don't want people to play many alts, clearly.

 

And yes, making it much harder because we'll lose the renown CQ goals.

 

I don't care one bit if you remove the exp/credits from doing CQ goals (although bye bye crafting leveling). I do care that you're making it impossible for us to play alts by pretty much nerfing the way of getting CQ points while doing WORTHWHILE activities, as gear fragments will be gated behind very specific activities.

 

It wouldn't be too hard without the horrible weekly/daily design that you want to go with, but all those changes altogether are just going to make the game suck.

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My problem is not the credits or the EXP. It's the fact that I won't have a snowball's chance in Death Valley to get max gear! The highest level of gear that I can reasonably achieve, is vital to my physical well-being playing the game! I really don't think nerfing the credits will do much for the economy, it's like putting a bandage on a ruptured artery. But I can deal with it. But the solo gearing track legit scares me.
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...We want to ensure that Conquest is still a system where players feel that they can run it with multiple characters each week, but that it is not the only way to enjoy Conquest...

 

Wot?

 

I mean, all this language around what you want us to do in the game is becoming rather tiring.

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So, TL;DR here is that you want to make sure the gear grind is a lot slower, and that Conquest as a whole is a lot slower, with worse rewards, to hell with anybody that actually had fun with the current system. Cool.

 

I'm not even gonna give you in depth thoughts here. There's no point. It's like I said in a post yesterday. We'll get more blog posts, more write ups like this, but you're not looking for feedback or player opinions here or you'd have asked for it months ago.

 

I wish I was wrong here, but Bioware's overall silence over the last week to the major issues players are having with 7.0 speaks volumes. The 10 year anniversary was supposed to be exciting, but the way you've packed the final month of it with crap like this has sucked all excitement I had right out. Adding that to your utter refusal to respond to player feedback and it's just been frustration. Even if the story in 7.0 ends up being amazing, it will always be marred for me by how you've handled the build up to it. The utter disdain you've shown towards the players actively trying to give you feedback and make the game better is embarrassing.

 

I'm sorry if this all sounds harsh, but I've tried to be nice throughout this PTS cycle and that's gotten us almost nowhere. You're not going to respond to feedback either way, so I'll tell you how it is so if you actually read this, you'll at least understand the impression you're giving your players for your big 10 year anniversary update. Spoiler: it's not good.

 

I have to wonder how much harder it will be to get to 100k conquest when they are getting rid of renown and restricting what area weeklies we are able to complete.

 

Having gone for the Conquest goal on the PTS for the purposes of testing some of the gearing changes out, I can tell you for certain that it's a very noticeable thing. We won't know how the restrictive weeklies will impact things until we see how restrictive they are, but the loss of Renown rank ups and their points will slow everybody down in addition to the doubled goal.

Edited by The-Kaitou-Kid
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I have to wonder how much harder it will be to get to 100k conquest when they are getting rid of renown and restricting what area weeklies we are able to complete.

 

Not that bad for people who only have one or two characters. You can do the weekly then do dailies heroic or something and get your 100k easily.

 

But it's a massive nerf for alts, as weeklies only count once a day for CQ goals (is it even once a day or once a week?). Basically I'll have to run the same weekly every day for 7 alts (if the CQ goal even resets daily) then run the dailies with the rest hoping to get even close to 100k... which is going to take a while if I have to do, let's say, Nar Shaddaa heroic daily (ugh), to get maybe 50k CQ points out of it (5k per heroic, 5k for the first one, 13k for the defeat enemies goals). You can run other heroics for the rest of the CQ points but you'll get nothing except credits for them... which totally stinks.

 

Gosh I hate this change so much.

 

Also yeah, get your 150% stronghold bonus ASAP...

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Focusing on underleveled players getting extra credits/experience while most of the wealth sits with the top .1% of players who have guild banks and legacy banks full of credits. Big hmm. The value of CC went up when the changes to player referral went into effect and made everything insanely expensive on the GTN. Now that credits are nearly worthless, these changes make those small amount of credits harder to obtain. I mean, 64 billion credits over 2 years to lots of low level players as opposed to the billions of credits up on the GTN today for gold augments.

 

We should keep rewarding lower level players for completing objectives and doing their story. The credits acquired during the story are nothing compared to the amount of credits it costs to do anything in this game. Instead, try to redistribute some of the wealth by REWARDING players for finishing first time story quests and continue to value tasks like gathering skills that require time from low level players, but give them an actual opportunity to make some credits back from the market.

 

And the experience loop is something that's a lot of fun. It's like the rush you feel when hitting a slot machine. Why take something away that is actually exciting and takes the grind out of some of the leveling process? Just lower the experienced gained from that specific objective rather than remove something fun from the game.

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I have to wonder how much harder it will be to get to 100k conquest when they are getting rid of renown and restricting what area weeklies we are able to complete.

 

They are not outright restricting the weeklies. All weeklies will still be available to complete at any point, they are just making some of them give better rewards (ostensibly upgrade-based, although we don't have full details on this - likely only these missions will drop the Aquatic Resource Matrices) each week.

 

From the post of "Changes and New Features in 7.0": "You can still access Missions that aren’t a part of the rotation if you choose, they will just have reduced rewards". If you want to go run Oricon even if Ziost and Yavin are the highlighted weeklies, you can, and still get CQP for doing so.

Edited by Skarkdahn
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I understand the credit inflation problem, but this is not going to help out newer players. This post already states that players are unlocking flagship plans way too fast (which small guilds are not and it takes forever sometimes even years). They're removing easy credit gains for said players. And with a smaller amount of plans on the market, the price goes up. Making things even more expensive and out of reach for most players and definitely small guilds.
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They are not outright restricting the weeklies. All weeklies will still be available to complete at any point, they are just making some of them give better rewards (ostensibly upgrade-based) each week. From the post of "Changes and New Features in 7.0": "You can still access Missions that aren’t a part of the rotation if you choose, they will just have reduced rewards". If you want to go run Oricon even if Ziost and Yavin are the highlighted weeklies, you can, and still get CQP for doing so.

 

those missions may be available, but that doesn't mean there will be any CQP tied to doing missions out of their "specially" selected missions for the week

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those missions may be available, but that doesn't mean there will be any CQP tied to doing missions out of their "specially" selected missions for the week

 

Maybe not, but it does seem like a lot of work for BW to code each and every single CQ week to account for the highlighted weeklies where applicable, given how many daily zones there are CQ objectives for. It's just easier for them to leave in all the points as they are and not touch the general board beyond that.

Edited by Skarkdahn
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Maybe not, but it does seem like a lot of work for BW to code each and every single CQ week to account for the highlighted weeklies where applicable. It's just easier for them to leave in all the points as they are and not touch the general board beyond that.

 

I'm sorry but please tell me you're joking with this response...

 

It would have been easier to improve our current gearing system (removing rng); would have been easier to let classes keep their abilities; would be easier to leave conquest as it is. Bioware hasn't chosen the easy way, they've chosen their way (with input from their nim raiding buddies). Their is 0 reason to believe that they've left the general board alone. And they already have different boards for different weeks so it really wouldn't be different except for 1 major way... it will be more restrictive and hurt small guilds and solo players

Edited by CrazyScruffy
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I'm sorry but please tell me you're joking with this response...

 

It would have been easier to improve our current gearing system (removing rng); would have been easier to let classes keep their abilities; would be easier to leave conquest as it is. Bioware hasn't chosen the easy way, they've chosen their way (with input from their nim raiding buddies). Their is 0 reason to believe that they've left the general board alone.

 

I am 100% not joking. I do not see any reason why BW would do that to the Conquest board, as there are just so many Daily Zones etc. as part of it that trying to account for specific ones being highlighted alongside specific activities for each of those weeks would just be a convoluted thing to work in. At least right now on the PTS, all daily zone objectives are available still and I do not think that there is enough time for them to do another pass and radically change things up.

Edited by Skarkdahn
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Removing the extra xp and credits from conquest goals is fine. I like that change. Levelling is way to fast as it is and hitting those conquest goals (without trying) makes it even harder to stay on-planet level for those players who don't like outlevelling story content.

 

I'm not sure why you had to double the number of points for personal goals as well as removing the xp/credit rewards though. Just removing the credit rewards would be enough to help with inflation, and still allow smaller/new guilds to play catch-up to the older guilds. Flag encryptions don't add credits to the game.

 

Although it does slow down gearing considerably for solo players who have multiple alts. Which is probably the goal, especially combined with forcing resets on weeklies.

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I am 100% not joking. I do not see any reason why BW would do that to the Conquest board, as there are just so many Daily Zones etc. as part of it that trying to account for specific ones being highlighted alongside specific activities for each of those weeks would just be a convoluted thing to work in. At least right now on the PTS, all objectives are available still and I do not think that there is enough time for them to do another pass and radically change things up.

 

again you're joking lol. Look at the mess they've already made. I do not believe for 1 second that conquest objectives will be as plentiful as it is now. Heck, even in their post they've already talked about which ones they are removing. nothing is stopping them from restricting it more. Because again, their words, we're achieving conquest too fast

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again you're joking lol. Look at the mess they've already made. I do not believe for 1 second that conquest objectives will be as plentiful as it is now. Heck, even in their post they've already talked about which ones they are removing. nothing is stopping them from restricting it more. Because again, their words, we're achieving conquest too fast

 

They have already removed those particular objectives. I think if they were going to restrict it further they would already have done.

 

We shall just have to wait and see, but I would be very surprised if you couldn't do any Daily Zone and still get a solid amount of CQP for it even with the highlighted activities.

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I think the change to 100k conquest is a good one. Everything else is a bad idea. People who have been hit hard by the economy, now also are hit hard by removal of ways to make cash/xp. Whereas the abusers of the economy still will happily run it up. All the while we log in and get 1k credits, sometimes....really?
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This is a miss.

Conquest is NOT the reason the economy is what it is.... what your doing now is punishing the little guy and doing nothing to those with all the credits.

Taking the XP out is equally mistaken, as that affects nothing in this sense.

This will not solve the issue at all.

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All the while we log in and get 1k credits, sometimes....really?

 

Right, those log-in credit rewards. How many credits have they added to the game? All for doing nothing in the game.

 

It would be better to remove the log-in credit rewards and take off the 'BoL' on the log-in dye rewards. Give new players something they can sell if they want credits instead of just dumping more credits to the economy.

 

We need ways to re-distribute credits from the wealthy to the poor, and cosmetic and tradeable items are a good way of doing that. (such as flag encryptions. Or so many things that are now BoL instead of tradeable (aka: the bounty hunter certs).

Edited by LD_Little_Dragon
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These change don't slow down Conquest, they bring it to a screeching halt. If the plan is to make it so no one can afford anything on the GTN as a way to drive down prices, at least it has a chance of working though.

 

These changes need to go on the PTS immediately, so everyone can evaluate how onerous they are going to be.

Edited by DWho
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How does this bring conquest to a screeching halt? so it takes you an additional 15 minutes to get the extra 50k per alts. Big deal. It's not like they are reducing conquest points for all of the activities. So people won't necessarily get 30-40 characters through conquest each week. Now they'll get 15-20 with the same amount of work. It's not really a big deal everyone. Doing 15-20 conquest a week is still very alt friendly.
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