Conquest: Feedback and Solutions

[Jawsnap]

Hi all,

Well as I'm sure we're all aware, Conquest was absolutely fantastic - to begin with. By that I mean, it was great before it was exploited and now we have hundreds of Rank 50's running around only because of the problem with spawn camping another base.

Anyhoo, I've played a lot of conquest over the last week and I think various elements and situations need to be addressed to make Conquest a more viable gameplay section.

The map and Spawn Points.

In my honest opinion, Trion, you'd eff'd up on the map. Stillmoor is a great map, but for this kind of combat, a new map with elevated spawn points, inaccessible by other factions should have been created. But since Stillmoor is the map to go with now, that's fine. Here's how I would fix the situation with spawn camping.

And, please bare with me, I've played on all 3 factions and it seems to be Nightfall that head straight over to Oathsworn - to which I've played on both teams and analysed as much as possible throughout the ordeal.

Firstly; each spawn should ideally have cannons on various sections where accessibility to each spawn point is possible. These cannons should be on sections where there are hills - right on the brow of them. Otherwise, the attacking players will be able to get too close.

Which, wouldn't be an issue Trion, if you deleted Fan Out, tbh. But since all the classes can AOE at some great distances, the cannons need to be not even more powerful - just further away from the spawn point, with more HP... a lot more HP. Or just make them immune to damage, even better. Each cannon should hit for 20% HP and do so, every 2 seconds. We use a percentage because hitting for 1k on a Warrior with 25k hp, is like firing a thousand feathers at him/her. Percentages hit harder and will deter folks from even attempting to spawn camp, since they won't be able to get near them to begin with.

Each spawn camp, should have a small turret, also immune to damage. This turret would heal you by 100% of your maximum HP, every second. The range would be nulled when you get to a certain distance, ideally - to the turrets. This way - if you ran towards the turrets, which would be further away from the spawn point, then the buff would be removed from you. That'll help with the camped team becoming the campers, so to speak.


Conquest durations

12,000 kills is nice... it means the game will go on for ages, but in all honesty - I think it's too long. I was in Conquest for nearly 3.5 hours yesterday, and just on the grounds that I was being a stubborn fother mucker - I didn't leave it and fought through it all. I do not play for 3.5 hours solid, ever. People like me have better things to be doing and so 3.5 hour matches are ridiculous. I could cope with 2 hours to be honest, and I think everyone else would agree that a 2 hour battle would be more than sufficient.

Add a timer on. 10,000 kills or 2 hours. Whichever expires first, kicks the countdown timer off for whoever owns the most real estate. Hey presto, quicker matches, that don't drag out.

User Interface and sh*t.

There's nothing worse about the Rift Map UI than your party/raid member location icons hiding behind elements on the map, such as locations (or in the case of conquest) extractor icons. Bring the icons for players, up to the top level - so they can be seen OVER extractors.

With even 20 people in a raid - it's hard to see where everyone is going. More often than not, you'll see your raid following a bunch of other people who arnt in your raid, and then it just looks on the map like there's just two people against a group of say, 10-15. What would be ideal is if you could see EVERYONE on your faction. So, the icons would be the same little cyan dots, but you could just see everyone. This way - we can organise even 3 or 4 raid groups effectively. See where people are, and join the fight if needs be. We would ONLY need the dots, please for the love of god don't include waypoint indicators. Maybe a smaller dot for people not directly in your raid - or even a slightly different colour one, maybe just the colour of the conquest faction, eg; oathsworn would be orange dots, nightfall would be dark blue (or purple, whatever colour it is) dots and dominion would be just silver or white dots.

Loading lag, etc.

There are serious issues with loading lag. Running towards 60 players, you don't even know why you're getting pummelled - because it looks clear. Until you're dead, and then all of a sudden 60 red names load up.

I understand that you guys did the green aura around NPC's/Players who hadn't loaded up yet. That's great, but it's still not cutting the crumpet well enough. Something needs to be done about general loading times when you teleport/arrive in conquest/die and various other loading issues with high quantities of players.

I'm not sure how you'll go about tackling that, other than limiting the amount of players allowed in a conquest match, but then - that kind of defeats the point of large scale PvP.

Rewards

For the duration that conquest actually went on for, I only got 9k Favor. In a 3.5 hour match. And I got the achievements for 1000 kills in conquest, and participated in tons of extractor captures. 3.5 hours. 9k Favor? It's a waste of time. The prestige was okay, one match I got just shy of 20k - AFTER you made the 'fixes' to spawn camping, which by the way, didn't work. 20k prestige... 9k favor... yeah that's not right.

Not enough Marks either. You can't put items in a vendor that cost 300 marks, and then have 1.5 hour queue/prep times, and 3 hour matches that only deliver on average 6-10 marks. That's ridiculous. The Favor needs increasing to be on average - to make the conquest worth while - about 10k Favor per hour you spend in there. However you work it out, that's what you're after. In weekend warfronts, without pots - you can get 10k favor in half an hour of Port Scion. Hell, I got 26k favor in one match of Scion on the last time it was weekend warfront.

I'll add more stuff to this I guess as I go on. Discussions, comments, changes, feedback welcome.

[Pett]

The only thing i would change in what you say is regarding the spawn point cannon damage.

Forget all the 20% or 1k or whatever.... make them hit 50k, continuously, in a fanout style. You dont want a tweak, subtle hints to the reward system didnt work. Do this, problem is gone. Come close and you're raid gets wiped. I challenge anyone to spawn camp with that going on.....

Its unfortunate that so many people in Rift would rather spawn camp than to try compete on even terms with another team. I deliberately queued into the side being camped yesterday, i suspect that the people being camped got more kills than the people trying to camp.

Come on Trion, stop using persuasion to stop spawn camping, make it impossible to. You could even put the cannons on the walls rather than at spawn.

[Voidmind]

^^ Agreed, all they need to do is have the cannons destroy everything within 50 meters, gg spawn camping.

[Jawsnap]

Haha, yeah, insta-death headshot cannons. I like it.

[Adastra]

I'll agree that 12000 kills required may be too much for normal play (non-farm). While the old limit of 2500 was too small, 12000 seems to be too much, but it might have boiled down to the play style. People would just run around capping as many extractors as they could, not even bothering to defend them.

Of course, that's assuming that people actually play Conquest normally, which hasn't happened since Wednesday/Thursday. It's pretty lame that I wasn't even able to play Conquest normally, as that would only net you at most a few kills from random soloists out there and pretty much a waste of time as far as prestige/favor goes. I also spent a lot of time playing Codex almost all day on Saturday and Sunday, and the hours I spent playing Codex was equal to about 5-10 minutes of sitting next to a spawn camp.

I'm not asking to nerf prestige/favor from kills in Conquest, I'm asking that Conquest needs to be fixed so people will play the game normally instead of every game being a rush to farm whichever faction is nearest to you.

Right now Conquest is basically this for my battlegroup:

Join Dominion to farm Oathsworn -> after game ends kill Death Idols -> Attempt to Kill boss

Join Oathsworn to farm Nightfall -> after game ends kill Death Idols -> Attempt to Kill boss

Join Nightfall to run out of base asap -> cap to 60% asap -> Drag end boss up in some tower -> AoE anyone that tries to come up the tower

TLDR version: Join Dominion/Oathsworn if you need Prestige/Favor, once rank 50, join Nightfall for Marks of Conquest.

[Stokesey]

I'm in agreement with the suggestion on increasing the payout on marks/cp/favor/prestige. I even submitted in game feedback suggestion the very same. For a 2 hour wait between games that seem to only last about 20min with the current state of conquest, it just doesnt feel rewarding. There is not really any incentive in takeing nodes, you get a few CP and thats it, i think i might have gotten 1 mark for taking one and this was over several games since 1.9 dropped.

Also there needs to be a better system in place for when a match ends and the losing factions sit around and wait to get killed or booted. The whole kill idols and NPC bosses is rather anti climatic for conquest. I would suggest incorporating some kind of Fortifying your keeps defenses and have the factions go at each others throats after the match ends. Once your keep is taken by a Faction thats it, game over for the losing faction. The winning Faction will be given a FOB (Forward operating Base) to spawn from (i'm thinking in the Eye of regulos since its centrally located on the map) and both this base plus their original will need to be taken before they will be forced out the map. Conquering a enemies base after the match will give bonus marks.

Put a better emphasis on gathering empowered sourcestone. Use this as the resource to build up your keeps defenses and send out NPC squads to capture a control point (sort of like the Planar ability). Hell give each faction a General or Commander NPC that sits in the base and helps defend it. Have this NPC be the "end" boss of Conquest.

Make the rounds of Conquest actually mean something and award the winning team of each round 5 marks, losing teams get 2. The rounds should look like something like this:
Round 1: Capture extractors (ie its current form) -Winner declared- move to round 2
Round 2: Maintain control of map resources and fortify your keep(s) defenses/offenses using sourcestone. Attack opposing factions keeps, destroying the keep and killing their general/commander will force the faction to concede battle.
Round 3: Bonus Round- The hostilities of conquest have drawn attention from beings beyond the ward. Mini Invasion type event.
End Game.

I've got a ton of ideas of how i would envision conquest, and these are just a tidbit of those. As always I look forward to the devs refining what they have in place and improving upone it. Sorry if my post is not totally fluid, running with no sleep for a while.

[Durango]

In my honest opinion, Trion, you'd eff'd up on the map. Stillmoor is a great map, but for this kind of combat, a new map with elevated spawn points, inaccessible by other factions should have been created. But since Stillmoor is the map to go with now, that's fine. Here's how I would fix the situation with spawn camping.

Stillmoor as a map is fine. Raised spawns are meh. Don't really solve any real issue.

Which, wouldn't be an issue Trion, if you deleted Fan Out, tbh. But since all the classes can AOE at some great distances, the cannons need to be not even more powerful - just further away from the spawn point, with more HP... a lot more HP. Or just make them immune to damage, even better. Each cannon should hit for 20% HP and do so, every 2 seconds. We use a percentage because hitting for 1k on a Warrior with 25k hp, is like firing a thousand feathers at him/her. Percentages hit harder and will deter folks from even attempting to spawn camp, since they won't be able to get near them to begin with.

Really if they are going to use cannons, they need to be close to 30-50 of them covering every wall and every entrance and exit, they need to make tanks go WTF in 2s and make everyone else go WTF in 0s.

Turrets need 50m range, with a 50m AoE radius. If you don't want them to insta-gib, then they should put a dot on everyone within AoE range: 20% health ever 2s, -100% incoming healing, 8s duration, stacks infinitely with cannons firing every 2-3s. Also cannons should ignore LoS.

The other option is slightly weaker cannons and anti-enemy debuffs: +500% incoming damage, -90% incoming healing, 10% Max HP reduction every second, stacks to 10, applies every 5s.

[Tyvoka]

Hi everyone,

We already have several ongoing discussions about this topic. If you'd like to share your thoughts, you'll find the main discussion threads here:

http://forums.riftgame.com/rift-gene...-conquest.html

We're going to close this thread and ask that this discussion continue in one of the threads linked above so we can keep the discussions about this topic a little better consolidated.

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