More Conquest Tweaks

Tuesday's patch was mostly about the Rishi stronghold and PvP changes, but there were some tweaks to Conquest as well, which are shaping up to have a bigger impact on me than I originally expected.

On the plus side, it looks like Bioware finally, finally managed to fix the reset bug on their third attempt, which had previously allowed people to repeat objectives that were meant to be limited to once a day ad infinitum. As I noted when I originally analysed the Conquest revamp, one of its major goals seemed to be to actually get people working together and to reduce the impact that a single person could have a guild's score, but this bug effectively negated that. Someone who was both "in the know" and willing to cheat the system could still carry their guild pretty heavily, potentially skewing its results upwards by quite a bit. So it will be interesting to see what the scoreboard will look like by the end of this week, which will effectively be the first week of the new system working as intended. And if it turns out that the scores awarded for certain objectives are still too low for comfort (or even too high), at least we'll all be on the same page about it.

What came a bit out of left field for me was the part of the patch notes that stated that the downtime between Conquest events was going to be reduced from 24 hours to a single hour on Tuesday evenings. I was surprised by how dismayed I was to read this.

I've always perceived the Monday Conquest "downtime" as a pleasant break intended for those who had given Conquest their all in the previous week, giving people time to reflect on what had worked and what hadn't, as well as to study the final scoreboard to see how their guild held up compared to the competition. In my own guild I'd gotten into the habit recently of spending Monday evenings noting down people's individual scores to give them credit for their efforts on the guild forums - while there is a top five display on the revamped guild Conquest tab, the fact that it's character- instead of legacy-based makes it heavily biased towards people with no or few alts, while the guy who scored exactly 15k points on fourteen alts gets no recognition within the game itself.

With this change to the system, things like my manual calling out or even rewarding of players for their Conquest contributions will have to become a thing of the past. Hell, I won't even know the guild's final placement on the scoreboard, since it will only be visible for an hour during a time when I'm still on my way home from work, and by the time I'll get home Conquest will already have reset.

I guess that's a niche problem to have, but it still makes me a bit sad and I can't help but wonder what was wrong with allowing for a day of rest and reflection between Conquests.