Promising changes in SWTOR 7.0 Conquest

Way back in May 2020, we looked in-depth at Conquest in Star Wars: The Old Republic, around the time it revamped Conquest in update 6.1.1. Now that Conquest will be revised again in the upcoming 7.0 update, we are pleased to see changes tackle some of the issues we talked about.

Conquest as the reward, not rewards for Conquest

From the developer post by David Staats: "We want to maintain that the activity you are doing is the focal point and should provide the Credits and experience reward; not the Conquest Objective itself."

In our May 2020 post, we warned against Conquest as a "reward multiplier", giving out way too much loot and a ruinous levelling experience. So we were pleased to see various changes to cut back on this quite severely, and the dev post cites many reasons and a few staggering statistics, such as a single Conquest Objective contributing almost 64 billion credits. That's ONE objective only. Going forward in 7.0:

• It will be harder to qualify for a per-toon weekly Conquest reward.
• Credits and experience points will be removed from Conquest Objectives.

Addressing "Interruptive Play"

From the developer post: "What we have seen throughout 6.0 was that the rate of Conquest completion was not contributing to these facets in a healthy manner. It was increasing the rate of acquisition for what should be long term goals for players, promoting a playstyle of interruptive play as players hit their Conquest target and then swap out their characters, creating social pressures to participate in Conquest as often as possible, and adding to the on-going economic changes we have seen in the game over the past year."

The term "interruptive play" is a great way to summarize several points we raised in our May 2020 post about how per-toon Conquest undermines the game. So we are very glad to see some mention of this issue, alongside how Conquest is affecting the new-player experience (and in fact they asked players on the Public Test Server to specifically play a character from level 1 to experience the feel in gameplay).

However, we feel that "interruptive play" will continue without much change so long as Conquest is a per-toon mechanic. While they are making it theoretically take longer to qualify for per-week Conquest rewards, likely it will remain fact that it will still not take very long to reach target and feel common-sense pressure to switch to another toon.

As well, per-toon Conquest can have the effect of reducing overall play time. If players become fixated solely on per-toon Conquest rewards, once all toons have hit Conquest totals, they may just play less or stop entirely, maybe logging in only for daily login rewards (especially since Galactic Seasons will essentially shift to weekly objectives, with only a token daily objective). [also see note 1 at the end of this article]

This said, of course it needs to be recognized that overhauling Conquest into a per-Legacy / per-server account activity would require significant resource as well as testing and data-gathering. Nevertheless we feel that something along these lines would be a significantly better move and also address developer concerns about Conquest loot.

An intermediate measure would involve:

• NO immediate rewards during the conquest week.
• This allows some processing before actually paying out for Conquest, for various circumstances. For example, if it is later discovered that certain activities were broken and exploited, those points could be reduced or removed. But if players have already been "paid" it will be harder to recover that loot.
• Removing all "interruptive play" objectives, such as the daily Conquest objectives to complete one or two Heroics on a planet (which encourages planet hopping and jig-sawing these points onto various characters each day).
• Tallying the Conquest Points accumulated by all characters over the week at the end of the Conquest week.
• This means players can completely avoid "interruptive play" by choosing which character they want to develop over the week and/or which guild they want to help win Conquest.
• Players will receive Conquest rewards whether they are in a guild or not.
• Adjustments to points for various activities can occur here, as well as adjusting the sliding scale according to what the Conquest Point totals look like for that week so as not to give out too much loot.
• Comparing that per-Legacy total to a diminishing returns scale to determine the total reward payout for the player's Legacy.
• This diminishing returns scale can be adjusted from week to week as they continue to analyze data on how much reward is given out and whether it is a healthy amount. If players exceed a certain threshold, the Conquest Points required to reach the next reward tier might be exponentially higher than the last, in order to slow down loot given out.
• No matter how the scale is structured, there remains a compelling reason to accumulate as many Conquest Points as possible -- To help your guild win a planet during that Conquest week.
• However, even this is subject to "interruptive play" because players in smaller guilds who see they have no real chance of winning a planet might still just get their toons only to qualify for weekly CQ rewards. The only real way to encourage unlimited CQ gains is changing how Conquest is won, such as making it faction-based.

Overall, the direction of developer thinking feels positive as they are addressing core gameplay and player experience issues, and prioritizing healthy outcomes for both.

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[1] As an aside, we may expect similar do-the-minimum behavior with regards to gearing currency caps (either on earnings or total bankable).

We recommend no caps on earning or banking currency, but instead cap weekly spend and adjust this allowance according to whether gearing needs to be sped up or slowed down.

This largely avoids a negative feeling of loss for players who want to play more but feel they are losing currency. Further, it lets players have flexibility in their schedule -- for example, if they can't play as much in certain weeks due to work or vacation, they might at least be able to log in briefly and spend their banked currency instead of feeling they are falling behind in gear upgrades.