First Impressions of Conquest

1.9 hit live shards and with it came a plethora of amazing updates.  With seven years of WoW to my (dis)credit, I was, yet again, pleasantly surprised by how smooth patch day transpired.  The servers came down at exactly 8:00AM PST, just as announced, and were literally back up by 9:00AM PST, with 1.9 ready to play.  Partner this with the fact that 1.9, in and of itself, is one of the single largest patches to an MMO I've seen in over 13 years of MMO gaming, and you have yourself a worthy cause for admiration and excitement.  To be clear, here's an overview of what was included:

• 10m raid called Primeval Feast
• Open-world, three faction PvP system called Conquest
• Mentoring system
• Barber shop
• PvP Prestige ranks 41-50
• New tier of PvP gear
• World Event: Summerfest
• Instant Adventure for Freemarch, Stonefield, Gloamwood and Silverwood
• Cross-shard chat and friending

As if the above list wasn't enough, tack on countless "quality of life" improvements pushed into the game such as the automatic inventory sorting or the separation of random normal dungeon rewards from random expert dungeon rewards and you simply have to tip your hat to Trion.  Sure there were a few hitches such as Instant Adventure being disabled for a while as they looked into a couple related issues but pushing a major patch live in roughly one hour and people being able to log right in and start enjoying much of the new content is quite the accomplishment on today's MMO scene.  Further, it gave me the opportunity to take part in several games of Conquest.  With this post, I intend to share my thoughts regarding this new addition to Rift.  However, let's begin with a brief explanation of how Conquest works so the argument can begin upon a level playing field.

Conquest is set in an alternate Stillmoor where three factions are vying for control of the area.  Within the zone itself, each faction has their own starting location and, spread out across the vast terrain, are roughly 30 "extractors" which are purposed with the task of extracting sourcestone from the very soils of Telara (a planet that was created out of sourcestone by the way).  At the start of the game, all three factions begin with 0% control of Stillmoor where control is measured by the amount of active extractors in that faction's possession.  As the match transpires, factions take control of extractor locations and can eventually upgrade them with defensive turrets.  The game continues until one of the following conditions is met:

1. Any one of the three factions achieves 60% control of Stillmoor at which point that faction is immediately victorious
2. The maximum number of kills, across all three factions, has been reached - at which point a 2 minute countdown begins and the team with the most control of Stillmoor at the conclusion of that timer is victorious

Controlled extractors dig up Empowered Sourcestone around the nearby area that can be gathered by anyone and returned to a stockpile at your starting point.  Here, there are crafting recipes spanning most crafting professions that give crafters the ability to provide faction-wide buffs in the way of extra hit points, extra damage, faster mounts and more.  Lastly, there are portals that are capturable at noteworthy locations such as Zareph's Return and Briarcliff that can be used for rapidly traversing the map..

Now that we have an understanding of how Conquest is played, I can move on to the pros and cons of the system.  For each con, I'll propose a solution.  Let's get started:

Pros

• Successfully satisfies the need and desire for open-world, large-scale PvP
• Offers ample opportunity for strategy.  You can zerg around if you'd like but the more successful teams are going to be those who strike a fine balance between defense and coordinated offense.
• Incorporates crafters in a meaningful and noticeable way.
• Succeeds in reducing the PvP gear grind quite a bit by offering substantial favor and prestige gains compared to other forms of PvP.  As an example, I was a block or two into prestige rank 32 upon starting my first Conquest match.  We won that time around and I had hit prestige rank 33.
• By and large was very enjoyable and stands as a great addition to Rift's ever-growing PvP arsenal.

Cons

• Quite clearly demonstrates what may be a core engine issue resulting in draw/render problems.  Any truly "large scale" battles (i.e. 30-40 or more people at once) where clunky and resulted in very slow (as much as 10 full seconds at times) draw times for characters.  I'm fairly certain I died several times just in my first Conquest match to players that were completely invisible to me.  This is, by far, the most significant issue.
• Portal camping quickly became an issue and was especially noticeable at Zareph's Return wherein one faction would hang out by the portal without capturing it to farm those porting in before much of the fight could even be rendered to the screen.  This has actually prompted Trion to temporarily disable the ZR portal altogether while they work on a solution.
• Faction balancing is still a bit fickle and it is very easy to achieve a substantial numbers advantage before the system updates to disallow any further applicant to that faction.
• Building further upon the above issue about faction balance, an issue related to early zerging quickly became apparent as the moment Conquest became available everyone poured into the first faction, Dominion, and immediately began zerging the map to achieve a sizable % advantage before any meaningful opposition could even be mounted.  This resulted in the Oathsworn (given the location of their starting point) always immediately heading southwest to salvage back as much as possible from the Dominion.

So what can be done about all this?  There are undoubtedly many possible solutions but here I'll outline how I, personally, would go about it:

Draw/Render Time Lag Issue

This was the most easily-identifiable issue and, also, has a straightforward but perhaps not-so-easy solution.  That being said, the solution is simply this: fix it.  Being that we don't have any insight into Trion's Rift server architecture, nor do we have any deep understanding of how they've altered the Gamebryo engine to suit Rift, we can only loosely speculate as to what needs to be done in this department.  Some artificial solutions present themselves in the way of capping population count in Conquest or providing more objectives with which to potentially break up the groups a bit but either of these would simply be band-aids atop a deep wound.  Trion claims to have some optimizations on the way that will improve this particular deficiency so, for now, we can only wait and see.

Portal Camping Issue

My proposed solution to this issue is a bit unique.  I would like to see the portals removed altogether but mount speeds increased by 25-40% while in Conquest.  I would then like a new crafting recipe made available that creates a one-time use portal that would allow members of that faction to teleport to that location.  Upon teleporting, that player would be given a debuff that prevents teleportation for the next 1-2 minutes (to be adjusted as necessary).  This would allow for strategic portaling and opens up a plethora of opportunities for strategy.  Imagine a savvy Conquest faction charging a particular, under-defended extractor that is rapidly swarmed by an army portaled in, only to immediately portal out themselves to another extractor across the map.

Faction Balancing Issue

The current mechanism in place, which denies application to a faction that is "full" handles the issue admirably but the problem is simply the speed at which it updates.  So, simply put, Trion needs to ensure the existing balancing mechanism updates as quickly as possible to prevent blatant faction flooding.  Which brings me to the final 

and related issue:

Faction Flooding and Zerg Issue

The solution to this issue is, in my mind, a no-brainer: put a countdown on the start of the Conquest match much the same as is done in Warfront but make it a bit longer than Warfronts. During this time everyone would be contained within their starting area to provide time for factions to reasonably balance out, for strategy to be discussed and for people to visit the Conquest vendor without having to do so during the heat of battle and, thus, be a wasted raid spot.


All in all, Conquest is loads of fun but, as is to be expected with any new feature to a such an expansive game, there is always room for improvement.  Beyond resolutions to the aforementioned issues, some quality of life enhancements such as icons beside player names to quickly identify their faction without having to read their tooltip would be a plus.  Further, coordinating strategy within Conquest is currently very challenging as you are more or less resigned to waypoints and text chat.  I could propose some improvements in this area but I feel Kyera, over at the official Rift forums, took care of this admirably.