Conquest Rebalanced

The last time I really talked about Conquest was back in June, when I expressed severe disappointment about the change to award Conquest points for anything, not just completing Conquest objectives. It's not that I hated the concept, but the implementation was severely lacking in my eyes and effectively made the pursuit of Conquest objectives pointless.

I was properly annoyed with this, but even so I was kind of surprised when I realised that it was actually contributing to me playing less than before. The logic for this is a bit strange and unlike many a forum warrior I won't make any claims to represent a significant number of players, but for me it effectively felt like the game was telling me to play less.

What I mean is this: When I'd log onto an alt to make some story progress, I'd hit my Conquest target barely two missions into their current chain and find myself thinking: "Hm, any additional points I earn on this character are going to be wasted... I should probably relog to a different one." However, I didn't actually feel like playing a different character, so in the end I'd just log off.

All that said, I didn't expect Bioware to nerf point gains again, because as I said in the post I linked at the beginning, nerfing things and taking away people's free stuff is never popular. However, Bioware surprised me in a good way by nerfing point gains from regular play indirectly with Onslaught's launch, which still had some people up in arms but probably a lot fewer than if the numbers that pop up on screen when you kill things had actually gotten smaller.

What they did was apply a multiplier to both Conquest targets and objectives, meaning that the contribution from doing random content became smaller, which in turn put objectives back on the map as something meaningful to do.

Aaand I'm loving it! Now it actually feels to me the way I wanted it to be in the first place: allowing you to attain your Conquest goals without doing objectives if you spend enough time playing that character, but making it so that completing objectives is the most efficient way to reach your Conquest target if that is your main priority.

Since Onslaught launched I've regularly capped three to four characters a week again, often with limited effort involved. Last week though I hit my target on five characters, and for the first time in months I actually logged in specifically to spend some more time on two of those characters to make sure they'd earn enough points before the reset. It was a goal to pursue and felt really good.

As a bonus, the application of the multiplier also makes it easier to level smaller guilds now, as the XP requirements for guild levels have not been increased the same way as far as I'm aware, meaning that the same amount of Conquest activities completed will gain your guild more XP than before. Even our little Imperial alt guild is up to level 35 by now.

So all I can say about this one is: Thank you, Bioware!

(And before anyone comments about last week's Conquest event lacking objectives, the way I read Eric's response on the forums it doesn't sound to me like that was an intended part of the plan. Bugs and mistakes are something else.)