Back in My Day: Conquest

"Back in My Day" is an (extremely) irregular series in which I muse about how certain aspects of SWTOR have changed over time. Today I'd like to talk about Conquest, a system that heavily influences the way I play the game. On any character I'll play in a given week, I try to accumulate at least 100k Conquest points to hit my personal target, and on the flip side, I often see hitting my personal target as a cue to switch to playing a different character. This wasn't always the case, however, and I think it's interesting to think about how this system has evolved over time.

The Early Days: A Different Time

Conquest was added to Star Wars: The Old Republic when it was less than three years old, with patch 2.9 in August 2014. It was part of the Galactic Strongholds update that introduced housing to the game, and to this day I wonder a bit just how these two systems ended up being bundled together, as their connection through the guild flagship - which is both a type of housing and required to take part in guild Conquests - is rather tenuous. I can only guess that the original plan for guild warfare was perhaps a bit more involved than what we ultimately ended up getting.

This original iteration of Conquest was quite different from what we have today, with the most important difference being that there were no guild targets, so the "guild component" of Conquest was entirely a matter of PvP. The guild in first place on the scoreboard would be the official conquerors of the planet, and the other nine on the board would get a consolation prize, but for everyone else there was nothing beyond their personal rewards.

Objectives and scoring were also somewhat different. As you can see in the above screenshot, everything about Conquest was contained in a single window. The personal target score varied from one event to the next from what I remember, with some weeks requiring as little as 20k points, while Total Galactic War required a whopping 50k.

Earning those points was also quite a bit harder due to the dearth of objectives (and completing objectives was the only way to earn points). There were only two types: one-time and endlessly repeatable. "Once per day per legacy" wasn't a thing yet, and the few objectives that existed were very limited in number. Crafting war supplies and running warzones were present pretty much in every event, but aside from that there tended to just be a few items like killing a specific world boss or running low-level heroics (which I thought was very pointless and boring, as this was before level-scaling, so you were literally going back to low-level planets just to farm grey mobs).

The one exception to this state of affairs, which weirdly made hitting your personal target even easier than it would ever be again later on, was crating war supplies, which as mentioned above was one of the endlessly repeatable objectives. So if your character was a crafter and you were interested and/or wealthy enough to accumulate all the right materials, you could basically send all your companions out to craft war supplies, log off for a few hours, and then come back to a completed conquest target.

The invasion bonus you got for invading a planet wasn't a flat percentage but rather a multiplier (usually 2x or 3x) tied to certain objectives. These varied per event and planet and were supposed to be loosely thematic I think, so if the event was "Clash in Hyperspace" there were bigger multipliers on GSF, or if the Nar Shaddaa world boss was a one-time weekly objective, you'd get a bigger multiplier if you'd invaded Nar Shaddaa than if you'd invaded another planet. These connections were fairly tenuous though, and most of them didn't make obvious sense to the same degree as the examples I just cited.

Other differences to today's system were that your stronghold bonus was based on how much furniture you had in your home, leading to people with no interest in decorating to stuff their houses with nothing but chairs or posters just to get the numbers up.

Also, each event only lasted six days, as the scores would lock in on Monday at reset time, followed by 24 hours of "downtime" until the next event.

The initial response to Conquests as far as I could tell was bemusement and slight confusion (my own first post about the subject was called "Conquests - what are they good for?") but the system got its hooks into people pretty quickly. I noted that "one of my guildies commented that he can't remember how he used to spend his time in the game before he started grinding conquest points" and for a while it was pretty exciting, but I think for most people a sort of disillusionment set in after a few months, as - crafting aside - Conquest did not mesh well with other in-game activities. The limited number of objectives meant that you had to play in a pretty repetitive way to earn points, and wanting to do other things like level an alt or play group content with guildies was not supported by the system. Obviously people still took part, but my general observation from the leaderboards at the time was that participation seemed to be decreasing, and my own interest kind of dropped off a cliff when the Shadow of Revan expansion came out (because there basically seemed to be a hundred other things to do than Conquest).

I then basically stopped paying much attention to Conquests for the next two years or so, except when my guild managed to secure a spot on the leaderboard a couple of times a year, but even about that I don't remember that much. The devs made the occasional tweak to the system, but it just wasn't that interesting to me anymore.

The Big Conquest Revamp of 2018

Everything changed in March 2018, when patch 5.8 brought with it a big revamp to the Conquest system that largely made it what it is today (one of the few great things to come out of Knights of the Eternal Throne). Changes included:

• Conquest being split into two windows in the UI, one for objectives and personal progress, and one for the guild invasion
• The introduction of planetary guild targets
• Lots of new objectives, including ones you could complete once per day per legacy
• Invasion bonuses for specific objectives were removed
• Stronghold bonus being based on the stronghold's expansion (how many rooms you'd opened up) instead of decoration percentage 
• Completing Conquest objectives also gave XP and credits
• The endlessly repeatable war supplies objective was no longer there all the time (and had also been nerfed I believe, though I don't recall the exact numbers)

This wasn't without hiccups - going back to what I wrote about it at the time, I'd forgotten that initially the devs had been so conservative with how many points were awarded for the new objectives that during the first couple of weeks of the new system, almost no guilds on the large and medium planets even managed to hit their targets, but this was quickly rectified in subsequent patches.

The following months actually turned into a bit of golden age for my guild in terms of Conquest, as we'd just absorbed members of another guild that were quite interested in Conquest, and our collaborative efforts to pursue the new objectives together were very successful - also largely due to the fact that it turned out that crafting had, in fact, not been nerfed nearly as much as everyone initially believed. Patch 5.10 in December 2018 also added guild perks and guild levelling, which was also based on Conquest point gains and added that extra cherry on top of our successes. 

This was not to last, however. While there hasn't been another change to Conquest as big as the revamp of 2018, some smaller changes that were made further down the line still ended up having a pretty big impact on the experience.

Conquest Points for Everything

Possibly the biggest of these came with patch 5.10.3a in June 2019. (It was actually meant to launch with 5.10.3 a week prior but had basically crashed the servers, so they needed to make some modifications before pushing it live again.) As of this patch, a "percentage of all experience earned [was] converted into Conquest Points". This included Galactic Command experience at the level cap, and kind of made Conquest objectives obsolete overnight, as you'd get more points than you would ever need just by doing dailies or killing random mobs. I was very dismayed by this, as actively being strategic about earning Conquest points no longer mattered - all you had to do was play any way you liked (as an individual) or make sure you were the biggest guild in town (as a guild).

Fortunately Bioware made further adjustments with the launch of Onslaught in October of the same year, not by nerfing anything but by massively increasing the points required to hit your personal target (from something like 15k to 50k) while also boosting the points earned from objectives, in order to put them back on the map as something that was worth pursuing.

Things swung slightly the other way again with patch 6.1.1 in April 2020 when the devs introduced the three different level brackets for Conquest objectives and added a ton of new objectives that were often ridiculously easy to complete. Again, I was personally kind of uncomfortable with this and ended up playing less since Conquest had been a big motivator for me and I could easily reach my personal target just by logging in and pressing a few buttons. My guild also went back to not being competitive outside of Total Galactic War since effortless point gains from just levelling and doing the story were too much to keep up with.

One degenerate practice that developed over the following year was that of "newbie farming" - creating a guild that invited low-level players to generate easy points, and then the GM would boot them again the moment they became inactive. Bioware eventually addressed this by making it so your personal points no longer counted towards the guild target during your first week, as well as changing it so that getting kicked would also remove that person's contribution from the guild total.

Stabilisation in Legacy of the Sith

With Legacy of the Sith, the pendulum swung slightly back the other way one more time as the devs decided to rein Conquest rewards in again ever so slightly:

• Personal Conquest targets were doubled from 50k to 100k, because people were basically overshooting their targets constantly as it was.
• Credit rewards were removed from Conquest objectives as they were apparently a massive contributor to inflation.
• Conquest objectives and completing your personal Conquest also no longer awarded XP. In the previous iteration, it had been possible to get into a loop where you earned XP for completing Conquest objectives, then got more Conquest credit for levelling up, which resulted in yet more Conquest objective completion, and so on and so forth. (One of my own alts made it most of the way to the level cap just by standing in her Coruscant apartment that way.)
• With Season 2, Conquest also became an integral part of Galactic Seasons, with the daily objective requiring you to earn 25k points. (In Season 1, all seasonal objectives had simply required you to complete distinct activities, independent of Conquest.)

And that's more or less where we've been for the last four years. It's honestly been nice to have some stability in that area of the game, and while I still feel wistful for the times when Conquest objectives were more limited and required active pursuing, I can't deny that I've had a lot of fun competing in Total Galactic War for the past few years.

We'll see whether Broadsword will feel the need to tinker with the system again when 8.0 comes around, or even with Galactic Season 10, which is supposed to mix things up in some form as well.