Pirate Incursion Conquest

After I expressed some concerns about the idea of Conquest points being awarded based on a percentage of regular XP in my last post, I actually felt vaguely vindicated when this change went live on Tuesday and literally crashed the servers - it was causing them to lag so badly that this particular part of the patch had to be reverted during an emergency maintenance to make the game playable again. It vaguely reminded me of the time when the automated group finder for operations was meant to be changed to 16-man. Whatever happened to that anyway?

But I digress. According to those who were actually able to play a little during the big lag fest, Conquest points for straight-up XP were ridiculously overpowered. If I understood it correctly, some of my guildies were doing an operation at the time and everyone in the group basically hit their personal target just from killing trash. While the change has been reverted for now, Eric said on the forums that they're still planning to bring it back eventually - but I hope that if they do, they'll at least consider tweaking the numbers a bit, because as I said in my last post, I don't really want Conquest to become another bar that you just fill mindlessly and automatically.

Anyway, the patch also gave us Dantooine and I have thoughts on it, but I want to spend some more time playing there before I actually write anything down. (I've had a limited amount of time to play over the last couple of days.) In the meantime I'd simply like to express some love for the Conquest event that this new planet is tied to, "Pirate Incursion", because this event feels like it was designed specifically to address some issues with the current Conquest meta.

First off, there's the fact that it features seven planets instead of the usual three (nine if you count Balmorra and Taris twice for being split into separate Republic and Imperial versions). Actually winning first place on any planet still remains a challenge largely due to the fact that no more than three or four guilds on the whole server can do so in an average week. That's why I love Total Galactic War so much, and I'm sure I'm not the only one: With more than twenty planets up for grabs at once, it's a whole different (and much more inclusive) game.

Pirate Incursion isn't quite Total Galactic War, but more than doubling the available number of planets is still a big deal, and since this is going to be a recurring event along the lines of Relics of the Gree and the Rakghoul Resurgence, it should happen reasonably often as well, giving a whole number of guilds additional opportunities to call themselves Conquerors for once.

The planets featured in the event seem to have been chosen with care as well. Dantooine was a given of course, but Taris as the other large option was clearly not a coincidence either: out of the previously existing seven large planets, it was the only one that had only been available during a single event (apart from Total Galactic War), and a not particularly frequent one at that (Flashpoint Havoc).

A similar pattern can be seen among the medium and small yield additions. Like Taris, Balmorra had previously only been available during Flashpoint Havoc, and Ossus had only been a target during the Rakghoul Resurgence on Alderaan. Likewise, the Black Hole had only been available to be conquered during the Rakghoul Resurgence on Corellia, and Ziost could only be invaded during the Balance of Power Conquest. The choice of Rishi is the only one that isn't entirely obvious to me, as it was already featured in three other Conquests outside of Total Galactic War, but who knows - Bioware's internal metrics might well have shown more players still missing the Conqueror of Rishi title than the ones for other planets.

The objectives are also noteworthy because at last we have planetary objectives for Balmorra and Taris! Until now they were the only two planets that didn't have any Conquest objectives associated with them to kill mobs or do quests (aside from Quesh, but there's little to do on Quesh). This was noticeable to me as I like to kill two birds with one stone whenever possible and would sometimes use rampage or daily objectives as inspiration for which alt to play in a given week - e.g. if Alderaan Rampage was an objective during an event, I would choose to play a character who's currently doing her class mission on Alderaan. So it was very noticeable to me that Taris and Balmorra were effectively dead ends with that approach because they never featured - until now that is.

Finally, this event is just crazy generous in general. Just doing the Dantooine weekly on any character is enough to hit your personal target and then some, because for some reason all the daily quests on Dantooine grant more than three times as many Conquest points as you would usually get for different dailies during other Conquest events.

So thanks for paying attention and showing some love to your planetary conquerors, Bioware!