How About That Conquest Rollback?

Now that Conquest is, well, mostly stable, and Trion has spent quite a bit of time fixing the issues players experienced since its release, one important question remains to quite a few players– will we see a rollback from the early farm-fest sessions? Which farm-fest sessions, exactly? The ones during the first two days of Conquest’s release, when some players were able to go from rank 1-50 in a weekend, or gain 15 or more ranks within a couple hours.

This is a tricky situation, obviously, and Trion has been kind of avoiding it so far, but it is a continued issue for many players. Earning PvP ranks in RIFT is intentionally grindy, so when players were able to suddenly rush through them like it was nothing, players knew something wasn’t quite right. But as I said, it’s tricky. The players flying through ranks really did nothing wrong exactly– they simply took advantage of the mechanics in Conquest and the current boosted reward levels.

But then again, isn’t ‘taking advantage’ of game mechanics kind of wrong to begin with? Many players think so, especially when Trion’s intentions for Conquest were obviously miles away from what actually happened during those first couple of days. But are actions taken against the intended mechanics enough for Trion to provide a punishment or rollback? That’s another question entirely.

There have been numerous community threads about rollbacks, but here is the most recent. Players are split on both sides of the coin regarding the issue, which makes it especially hard for Trion to provide a response. Here are some thoughts from the community:

“Trion aren’t going to do a rollback. They just aren’t. It’s not going to happen. Too many people farmed. I farmed people, and was briefly farmed myself. I went from Prestige 20 to Prestige 34 very quickly as a result, and my PvP gear went from being a complete joke, to being fairly decent.

But the overwhelming majority of people were farming. Regardless of what you thought about the farming, you would have been stupid not to jump about that train.

The thing is, it was blindingly obvious that this could happen. Why do you think Warfronts have (mostly) unattackable spawn points? It’s not as if Trion didn’t notice this – they just failed to do anything for their new PvP mode.

And failure is the key word here: Conquest has been one failure after another and in many cases, Trion’s solutions have compounded failure with failure. Trion failed hugely with patch 1.9, although that’s another story.

To do a rollback would imply that, somehow, the playerbase is responsible for Trion’s completely inadequate designs. We weren’t. We just did what was the obvious thing to do.”

A ton of players took part, which not only makes the ethical issues regarding rollbacks a problem, but also the simple fact that Trion would have to do a lot of rollbacks. Also, Trion would have to somehow distinguish between warfront favor and Conquest favor when doing rollbacks, which might prove difficult considering this all occurred during a warfront bonus weekend. And what about players who didn’t abuse spawn-camping during Conquest that weekend? The whole thing gets rather mud-covered.

Here’s the flip side:

“While I’m generally not a fan of rollbacks, the whole thing is messed up. 99% of the ranks gained in the past week are not due to PvP actions but exploiting a design flaw. While you could say they weren’t breaking an actual mechanic, the point is that camp farming probably wasn’t on Trion’s design as a potential outcome of the battle.

Exploit – to take advantage of (a person, situation, etc), esp unethically or unjustly for one’s own ends

I would argue that camp farming is unethical because it’s not PvP to just sit there and zerg a spawn spot. It’s weak and those that do it are generally not very good at PvP anyways. I think the ranks should be pulled.”

Another opinion:

“If nothing is done then basically what is happening is the playerbase that played as intended are being punished for being decent and honest. While the exploiters get away with it, this pretty much is a bad move and tells the player base that exploiting is not wrong and will make more and more players look for exploits.”

For players supporting rollbacks, it seems to be more of an issue on principle. It would definitely look better on Trion’s behalf if they at least came out and said something about all this. But then, the more time that passes– the less likely it seems that Trion will do anything.

There’s this opinion, too, which seems to make a lot of sense:

“The best solution is just to increase the pvp gains across the board so those of us who didn’t take advantage of the situation Trion created can get to the same level as those who did without the months of painful grinding it looks like it’s gonna be with the current state of things. Rollbacks are never the answer, they do more harm than good to everyone.”

Rollbacks certainly aren’t pretty. And with Storm Legion approaching, this may be the best route for Trion to take at this point. It would even out the PvP scene quite a bit, and help bring players of all ranks to the same level. We’ll have to see.

Feel free to chime in with your opinions!