Conquest is the newest game mode in Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes, and as an endgame player, I have found it to be somewhat entertaining before September 2021. When my real life is crazy, and it has been much of 2021, I find that my gaming suffers and that is when choices have to be made. My own experiences with Conquest have seen me get to the second highest crate every time, as I could not justify the extra time to bring out the last few tickets and get the maximum reward. In hindsight, I wasted opportunities as a result. However, as I write this as my game is on auto play fighting Conquest, I want to share my experience with Conquest and SWGoH of late. I do want to note that I am writing this with little influence from the community, having watched a video last week from AhnaldT101 last week and after seeing a “pep-talk” post from a guild leader referencing the negative state of the game thanks to Conquest changes. Aside from that I have not been very connected to the community’s vibe in the past week at all.

As I mentioned above, I started this article with my game on auto. Why would I do such a thing? Because on Tier 2 of this month’s Conquest you need to score at least 20 critical hits in a row against the Mother Talzin Nightsister team to earn 4 tickets. If I could track my Crits this would be great, but the usability of Conquest (and Galactic Challenges) is poor at best. It is clear a usability expert does not reside inside the walls of Capital Games, and if anyone with that kind of expertise ever talks to CG, they are being ignored. While I could argue that this had been clear for years, today I got the battle down to two Nightsisters, set the game on auto attack with basic abilities only, and allowed it to attack Nightsister Zombie for 8 minutes straight. This basic lack of tracking on a game of numbers and stats makes me feel like an idiot for having to play this way, hoping that at some point I can get those 20 straight crits and knowing that I have almost no way of knowing if I have while in battle. Almost 10 minutes later I have 4 of the 375 tickets I need fro Max Rewards, and I wonder why I bother…

I bring things like this up for a reason. When guys who love Star Wars and have played this game daily for nearly 6 years are asking “why bother” that is nothing but a bad thing. Earlier today a shard mate of mine in the Arena called it quits, to which another regular Top 10 replied “(I) will be as well soon… CG really f%$#ed this thing up.” Another stated “I don’t have time to do Conquest. It’s hard mentally.” And then I added the word “tedious” to the conversation. All of these players spend, and all have been top players in my December 2015 shard for as long as I can remember. This is just a very, very small sample size.

So what is the exact problem and what can be done? Well the problem is the way Capital Games continues to run SWGoH on, what appears from the outside, a minimal budget and staff, and with no regard for the players themselves. Nobody is asking for a handout here, and making the Conquest game mode a bit more difficult is fine, but changes like this show just how out of touch the studio truly is. While CG is here making enough changes to ruin one of the best things they had going in SWGoH, Boundless Entertainment is monetizing their Marvel Strike Force game in a FAR better way – having new characters, refreshing old content, adding new events and adding more ways to power characters up. In fact, if you want to get down to number estimates, I was able to count 20 characters who are new to SWGoH since the November 2019 Road Ahead where the Journey Guide and the Hyperdrive Bundle were announced, just a month before Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker. SWGoH’s ~20 new characters (all of which need gear, ability mats and Relics – key monetization elements) in nearly 2 years is about 5-6 months of new content for Marvel Strike Force. And don’t think for a minute that Capital Games is not aware of what is happening in MSF as it was a HUGE point of contention with our contacts at the studio when the SWGoH GameChangers program was still a thing. The GameChangers were highly encouraged, borderline threatened, not to cover MSF along with SWGoH given the competing nature of the games, taking potential money out of the pockets of myself and my fellow content creators, all while CG was also working to phase the GameChanger program out…

Above I mentioned that I have not really looked into the community’s response to Conquest, so now I am going to go to the forums and Reddit for the first time in months. Typically I stay away to avoid the toxic environment of negativity they both are, but I feel confident that 5 minutes of research will provide a lot of fuel for this fire.

Topic titles on the official SWGoH Forums – General Discussion:

• Conquest Is Rigged w/ Hidden Buffs & Stats
• New Data Disks are boring
• Sector 5 inflict death mark isn’t working
• Conquest Shutdown Part 2
• Two conquest matches not counted to feats
• So now kills don’t always count as kills?
• Conquest Sector 4 Bug: Not registering Crush Them feat!
• SLKR Stuns not counting

…and that is just on the first page. In total there was one positive topic and about a 10:1 ratio of bad or problem to good on the forums.

Meanwhile, over at Reddit, where “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious. ” Topic titles on the SWGoH Reddit include:

• Dear CG, you should watch this movie. It’s really good. (A meme about CG tightening their grip on monetizing SWGoH’s die-hard players
• CG, you’ve made your game a lot less fun
• Yet another reason to hate Conquest now (that I haven’t seen mentioned yet.) Wandering Scavenger no longer offers G12 gear at a discounted rate using crystals. In previous Conquests I would load up on gear…not anymore
• What it is about Conquest that makes people quit…maybe
• I can honestly say this was so much less fun than every other iteration we’ve done so far. Some feats were better some were much worse. It’s such a grind.
• Now that I’ve played Conquest for a few days… (clicking through and reading this post really sums it up…)
• Sector 5 death mark not tracking?
• Evidence the game might actually be dying?
• 5 people with 3+ years in game quit last week from my guild.
• SCAMQUEST SECTOR 1 NORMAL BOSS HELP

That, too, is just the first page of topics, but I will say that Reddit is a bit more positive and has more players asking for advice. Either way, that is a LOT of negativity on a topic that needs to be addressed – if CG likes to continue to make millions of dollars each month.

In conclusion, the issue is how the game is run and the lack of caring about the players. Capital Games has shown disinterest in what we thought/felt as a community for years, and the recent changes to Conquest further prove this. Life is about actions and the actions of the studio continue to communicate that they want to do as little as possible to squeeze more and more money out of the people that have been keeping the lights on in their building(s). If the product were continually getting better it would be one thing, but it clearly is not which only makes me ask again, “why bother?”