The current state of the Conquests System

[WoW]

Dear Devs and PG Community,

Thank you for your time reading my discussion. I would like to highlight some issues that we are having with the conquest system and which the community is unhappy about. We can agree upon the current CQ system is better and more balanced than before but due to the discard of the alliance system, the CQs have diminished in size. Where we had, 20 to 25 players showing up for the CQ, now we barely get 5 to 8 players enlisting.
Therefore, more planets are left unregistered and subsequently become OTB planets. This brings us to the 2nd problem which includes players joining without the right tech (sometimes no tech on their ships and armor) and sometimes going afk or not landing during the landing window. Also, other factors that contribute to this is communication barrier or unable to follow the easiest instruction. Due to these problems, players keep enlisting and delisting to filter out bad players to one side. Hence, this leads to really imbalanced teams and this ruins the CQ for everyone.

Therefore, I would like to make some suggestions, if implemented which can help the conquest system a lot. In the case of OTBs, there should be a randomizer in place, that automatically enlists a participant to a random team and locks them in that team for the whole OTB. Also, there should be a penalty for the participants that go inactive during the OTB.

The 2nd suggestion that I would like to mention is the re-introduction of the alliance system. which allows the opportunity for alliance members to support allied clans in CQ and enlist on their side while keeping the enlistment process the same and balanced. This will give the possibility for more people to join the CQs and be more lively.
An alternative to this can be removing the clan cooldown timer for players to move freely from one clan to another to join for CQ like in the PTR and currently in Korell server.

Anyways, this discussion is only made for suggestion purposes. if anyone else has additional ideas or things they would like to suggest, feel free to list them. If you agree with some of these ideas or that there should be some improvement in the current CQ/OTB system. Please react and leave a comment, so Devs know we need help on this matter. Thank you all for your feedback.

 

[Vesperion]

What happened to the "organized OTB" rounds around half a year ago? Did they go after TC4 droped or went it really that downhill after a while?

Anyways in terms of AFK players i think it can be hard to determine if and when a player can be considered as AFK. Should it be based on a timer of not moving/collecting/self-rezing/shooting at least once/etc. A player that is "technical moving" (even when just putting a weight on the W-key) is "not AFK per se" so the game may not recognize him as AFK player as "he is moving so no AFK" so this may be the hardest challenge to counter in any way i assume.

According to my knowledge players who not land in time will also not get any reward at the end of the OTB at all but in return diminish the number of players on the respective team what in return can lead to an unfair advantage of the other team. So here the question would be how should this be handled? Rndmly remove a player that landed from the OTB and force him to orbit with worst case scenario chance that it also can hit a SQ-Leader?

In case of the tech the difference between having Top Blue/Gold or Ancient Tech my only idea i have would be to simply "equal all tech to the same level (aka Ancient balanced tech)" as it is in theory the Ancient Tech is for each System (TC excepted) the final tech were mostly the having of Strong Tech is better then any other Tech and player may not had the luck or time invested in Siri to have said tech already.

So if a CQ/OTB happens all tech will be treated as the respective Ancient balance Tech of the System the CQ/OTB takes place so that the typical situation "You have not the proper tech so leave" will occur as then the main difference should be strategy and skill on each site rathen then "who has more of the bigger guns".

 

[KillerSoldier_]

What happened to the "organized OTB" rounds around half a year ago? Did they go after TC4 droped or went it really that downhill after a while?

In short words: It died.
There have always been some players who did not listen to the "randomizer/balancer" and joined wherever they wanted. And even if the teams looked balanced on the paper, there were some unexpected high wins, causing the balancer to be blamed for this, so after a while one balancer after another lost the motivation to do this job, because it´s not worth loosing long-yeared ingame friends that way.

Anyways in terms of AFK players i think it can be hard to determine if and when a player can be considered as AFK. Should it be based on a timer of not moving/collecting/self-rezing/shooting at least once/etc. A player that is "technical moving" (even when just putting a weight on the W-key) is "not AFK per se" so the game may not recognize him as AFK player as "he is moving so no AFK" so this may be the hardest challenge to counter in any way i assume.

According to my knowledge players who not land in time will also not get any reward at the end of the OTB at all but in return diminish the number of players on the respective team what in return can lead to an unfair advantage of the other team. So here the question would be how should this be handled? Rndmly remove a player that landed from the OTB and force him to orbit with worst case scenario chance that it also can hit a SQ-Leader?

I don´t think it´s hard to determine if a player can be considered as afk as the game does this by itself already (inactive players) and in my opinion there shouldn´t be a difference between a player who went inactive on the surface or someone who didn´t even land. In both cases there should be the same penalty, maybe something like a block on OTB/CQ for (as an example) three days and longer block if it happens again. This shouldn´t be too difficult to implement...

In case of the tech the difference between having Top Blue/Gold or Ancient Tech my only idea i have would be to simply "equal all tech to the same level (aka Ancient balanced tech)" as it is in theory the Ancient Tech is for each System (TC excepted) the final tech were mostly the having of Strong Tech is better then any other Tech and player may not had the luck or time invested in Siri to have said tech already.

So if a CQ/OTB happens all tech will be treated as the respective Ancient balance Tech of the System the CQ/OTB takes place so that the typical situation "You have not the proper tech so leave" will occur as then the main difference should be strategy and skill on each site rathen then "who has more of the bigger guns".

I think WoW wasn´t talking about the tech-difference itself. He was more talking about players that land with empty tech-slots or without any armor installed, what happend quite often in the last couple weeks. Best example are the last two OTBs in Mizar (today and last thursday) where a player (ingame already called a "horseman") landed in Hornfels without Corruption Cloud and Damage Inverter.
According the armor i don´t think there can be any restrictions be made like "only deluvian armor allowed" as it would be unfair against new players who maybe don´t have the level to buy the armor, but there can (or better must) be a restriction, that only a full equipped ship should be able to participate on OTB and CQ, no matter if it´s only the lowest system tech or ancient one.

 

[Nicoredje]

Personal vendetta, NO not Iscaac's one! The maps are also kinda boring. They are designed with the old conquest system in mind. The only one that is more interesting is Cetecea. Split zones, Cloud zone comes to mind. Something no other map has...

The allies system. In the current system. What is even the point of having allies? Please let allies join and not just clan only. It is literately the only benefit the allies system had.. Oh, yes sure you have a allies chat... Who cares?

When it comes to OTB itself. It is mostly a player base issue. We had a randomizer. I think killer-soldier explained clearly enough why it no longer exists.

Maybe we should at the very least make it every ship has to have all equipment slots filled. This will also solve the issue with Mercurcy where lava is king above parasec storm ship despite missing cloud or not having thermo-blaster. It is kinda stupid...

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Perhaps we could try making conquest planet tier randomized. So when we get a CQ on Desai. Be it OTB or Clan vs Clan. It be either Gemini or any other system tech? We be playing the old maps again but it will be more interesting for a while too.

 

[dragonarh]

I'm sure most would agree that the state of OTBs is getting worse to the point that if some more people stop attending them there is a chance they'll die out; at least talking about Askone. Most people are getting annoyed and leaving because certain players keep enlisting without basic tech and armour, so introducing some requirements to play conquests would probably make most of the community happy.

Say for example in Draconis requirement for attending could be having r70 tech and deluvian armour ship that also has to be fully fitted without any tech missing, in Sol it would be r60 and ect.. I'd agree with Nicoredje that the same idea would also solve some issues with Mercury conquests. Perhaps we could also get a system that would randomize players on different sides of the OTBs. This would reduce the chance of all good players purposefully stacking on one side just for the sake of winning, and would also make the conquests less predictable thus more fun.

We probably should consider that everything we suggest here to be implemented also takes time for the dev team to think about and perhaps program in, so asking for a rework would be too much after we already had a conquest update. Some small quality of life changes to OTBs can obviously be made though, and that would please a lot of people in my opinion.

 

[Jaax]

I agree that we need a randomize for a more optimal and balanced conquest experience

 

[Gladiator]

An alternative to this can be removing the clan cooldown timer for players to move freely from one clan to another to join for CQ like in the PTR and currently in Korell server.

This was removed from Korell with Introduction of the OTBs. Reason for no time limit at clan changes was that we actually did OTBs before they were actually introduced. Greetings from Korell.

In short words: It died.
There have always been some players who did not listen to the "randomizer/balancer" and joined wherever they wanted. And even if the teams looked balanced on the paper, there were some unexpected high wins, causing the balancer to be blamed for this, so after a while one balancer after another lost the motivation to do this job, because it´s not worth loosing long-yeared ingame friends that way.

This is why we stop fighting on korell 2min30s before ending when we have an organized CQ to equalize ore standings to almost 50:50, so nobody has a disadvantance in terms of cryonite after the CQ.
But yes, Team balancing was also discussed quite often at the Teamspeak when both teams meet again after CQ. Specially when new people join or when there are people who isnt be part of it very often, its very difficult to have a good balance.

 

[WoW]

Meanwhile in askone.

 

[KillerSoldier_]

Just to make sure: This Mizar-OTB yesterday was the first one that ended with auf 100% win, but it wasn´t the first OTB ruined by three players (viktor, Ani & ybie4a). Same thing happened a couple times already. There are a couple problems leading to these stomps, here are two examples:

• incomplete ships:

in nearly every system they join with ships missing some techs. I´m not talking about missing some rare or ancient BPs, no, they don´t even have normal versions installed then. As an example i can tell you about the last OTB in Sirius, where ybie4a joined in Ancient Legionary without any Collector, Aggrobomb and Stundome. Ani enlisted in thermograde Ghost with Drac-BPs installed causing her/him to be unable to land. And even if Ani was told about this a couple times ingame, Ani stayed enlisted, what made the team being down by one already at the start!​

• missing communication / teamplay:

as long as only one of them three joins to an OTB the team can handle it mostly, but if there is more than one enlisting (to the same team!) players, especially teamleaders can´t handle it any more, because they don´t listen to anything being said in teamchat and barely join to any teamfights. More than once we had the experience that both teams were fighting each other and these pilots were exploring the planet or sitting afk somewhere far away instead of helping their team.​

I know there is nothing much that can be done by the devs to solve the second problem, but this problem leads to what we see in Askone at the moment. There are still enough people in orbit to make a 10v10 or higher possible, but as soon as these pilots from above show up and enlist all to one team, the already enlisted ones on that team start to leave, because they already know they´ll have no chance to make it a fair fight.
The only way devs could solve this is the automatic randomizer which was already spoken about in this thread. Sure, even this could cause them all to be on one team, but it´s better than having them always on the same team.

The first problem i mentioned above can or better must be handled by the devs! Here are two of my ideas how to handle it. Any yes: I know both ideas will be hard restrictions for Mercury, as a couple RDX-ships (e.g. Blazing Lava) can´t be used there any more...

• hard restriction before you can even enlist:

If there is an OTB happening in Mizar, you can only enlist if you´re already in a Mizar-Ship, which is fully equiped. This might the harder for the devs to implement, as it would also mean you can only switch to a systemship once you enter the hangar after enlisting to a team​

• check before OTB starts:

Another idea I´m thinking about is a deadline by the system to change into a fully equiped ship to be able to participate. This deadline could be 60 seconds before the OTB starts and everyone who is not in a matching ship will be removed from the enlisted players​

​

I know there won´t be a fast reaction by the devs due to Eastern at the moment, but please let us at least know you see the current problems on OTBs when you´re back in the office...