05/05/2015

Conquest Fatigue?

Last week we had another Total Galactic War, and me and a couple of other guildies had diligently saved up crafting materials to make a push for first place on the planet of our choice again. We waited a bit with choosing a target to invade and eventually decided to go for Ilum, which seemed very quiet at the time. Within only a couple of hours, we had a good lead of about 500k points... which was when two other large guilds suddenly decided to join us. Since they were so much bigger than us and it was obvious that we didn't stand a chance, the whole excitement was over before it had even begun.

I still hit my personal target on five different characters and felt nicely rewarded for my efforts, but the whole thing certainly left me with a slightly awkward feeling in my gut. It only makes sense that I'm not nearly as enthused about conquests as I used to be when they were introduced. Trying to tailor my play around earning as many points as possible week after week was just not sustainable in the long run, not when I still wanted to play alts and spend time crafting non-conquest items.

But I have been enjoying taking part in the occasional event, especially Total Galactic War, and I had prepared for this one for weeks. To see the competition come to such a premature end so quickly was a bit disheartening, for me anyway. At the same time the number of people in my guild that seem to have any interest in conquest whatsoever seems to be going down as well. The hardcore achievers moved an alt into some bigger guild ages ago and get their achievements that way. The middle-of-the-road players on the other hand, the ones that I was previously able to coax into making an effort at least occasionally, seem to see less and less of a point in it and feel increasingly burnt out by the whole concept.

I thought that this may just be my guild, however I was struck by how many empty slots there were left on the scoreboard on The Red Eclipse at the end of this Total Galactic War. During the first event of this type, I expressed some surprise that ten slots remained unoccupied at the end but chalked it up to not enough guilds having a guild ship yet. When the event came around again a little more than a month later, all slots were claimed within days. However, since then, overall participation seems to have decreased again, and this week's event once again ended with nine empty slots on The Red Eclipse's scoreboard.

A few months ago I felt that a slighty decreased interest in conquests was part of their "maturation process" and not a bad thing, but now I kind of wonder... how far can said interest decrease before it becomes a bad thing? I've heard of guilds not even bothering to invade a planet anymore to give their members the benefit of the bonuses (which even my small guild always does, just to give any individuals who are working towards their personal target a leg up). Has the whole system become too predictable already, with big guilds causing smaller ones to immediately give up as soon as they arrive?

It's certainly something that I will continue to keep an eye on.

10 comments :

  1. We don't bother invading planets anymore because there just wasn't enough guild interest. During Round 1, a lot of members (myself included) were highly invested in Conquests. During Round 2, we made a couple concentrated tries. Large guilds that had already conquered planets were doing it again, not through any concentrated effort of their own but the daily actions of their members contributed naturally. There's just no point to doing them right now.

    Currently, we keep the guildship parked over Rishi for the bonus/ease of travel for ops.

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    1. Heh, we do the exact same thing with Rishi.

      In hindsight, maybe Bioware should have put Rishi on the quick travel menu. In that case, we probably would have invaded something random because we could.

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    2. You can actually invade your planet without parking your guild ship there. And Rishi does have the legacy travel option...

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    3. I don't have officer permissions to move/invade, but from what I understand of the whole process, the ship was mostly moved to let players off at a specific outpost. A lot of members liked doing heroic speed runs and there were definitely advantages to picking one over another.

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  2. My guild is still doing conquests. We deliberately try and choose planets with less bonuses (especially crafting) that we think will have less competition and just try and get in the top ten. I think it usually is influenced by how well we start the week. If we are on the board or very close people will work towards staying there but if we are well off the pace then people do other stuff. This last week was our very first 1st place placing where we managed to beat Despair for the number one spot on Belsavis which was a huge achievement for the guild and really was amazing to see everyone work really hard together to get there. I do not think that is sustainable week on week though.

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    1. Congratulations on 1st place! Sounds like your guild must still be pretty sizeable though...

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    2. I'm not sure what counts as sizable. We have about 8-10 people logged in most week nights which swells to 16 or so when its the weekend. Most on at one time I have seen is 22. Would be interested to see where that stands with other peoples guilds.

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  3. We try to invade a planet each week, because, as you say, it does give that bonus to whoever still cares. I sort of forgot about it, though, and haven't made the personal conquest goal for weeks now. It's a shame my guild forgot about Total Galactic War, though, as it would've been cool for a small guild such as ours to just end up on the leaderboard (even as number 10).

    As far as I'm concerned, the whole system was predictable already from day one. Conquests is primarily something for large guilds, and they even have the tendency to make large guilds even larger. Maybe it's good that it all has slowed down a bit; maybe the smaller guilds can not profit from the system as well (as far as they haven't forgotten all about it, like mine :P). Sorry to hear last week didn't work out well for you, though.

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    1. I don't know, I just thought the system had so much potential when it came out. I didn't expect it to devolve into quite this level of "same old, same old".

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    2. Fair enough, I was enthusiastic about it at first, too. Less so once I realized how much easier it was for large guilds to be successful at it.

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