8 months until the next raid - some ideas
Like many I'm not gripped by the new raid. Something's been tried and there are positives but there's lots of negatives being thrown around too.
One of the things that could have made this a lot better would be phases - you have to accomplish xyz to move to the next phase, it doesn't have to be a guild wide phase. Here speeder bike -> ??? -> destroy shield generator ... maybe the shield generator attack is in 2 phases, distant forest fighting, then up close bunker invasion. It seems that in an effort to keep dev costs minimal someone decided just to recycle content.
Had this raid gone that far, then the next raid could have been the space invasion above Endor on DS2. First fleets face off and try to survive in a "we'll last longer than we will against that death star" style battle. The next phase here now can be a continuation of the Endor land raid as above in 1 or 2 parts, the third phase can use this motion mechanic to race to destroy the reactor. Look now naturally ship battles come into raids. Now, CG has to add some sort of power up that expires so we have a reason to feed panic and money into ships since they don't have relic levels, but hey, that's another issue.
The variety of phases keeps it fresher. Some will criticize the idea that the phases only move if you advance them, but frankly from past raids we had a lot of people sit back and get minimum points and let a few players push the raid to completion ... I don't think we want to go back to soloing. 8 months to invest in some characters to get rewards ... as long as every toon isn't a new creation then this isn't so bad, and it continues to advance the CG "how do we incentivize levelling useless characters into high relic levels to sell more crystal packs" agenda.
In the last few months I think we've seen some effort on CG's side to be friendlier to the player base, but that effort has been plagued by absolutely numbskull level coding farkups. You guys really need to pay the 20/month and upgrade to GPT4 and stop relying on the free version. Every single major deployment has been plagued by a miscalculation and requisite revision. This year's anniversary gift seems generous to me and seems to acknowledge some of the tough changes this year.
So let's move forward.
One of the things that could have made this a lot better would be phases - you have to accomplish xyz to move to the next phase, it doesn't have to be a guild wide phase. Here speeder bike -> ??? -> destroy shield generator ... maybe the shield generator attack is in 2 phases, distant forest fighting, then up close bunker invasion. It seems that in an effort to keep dev costs minimal someone decided just to recycle content.
Had this raid gone that far, then the next raid could have been the space invasion above Endor on DS2. First fleets face off and try to survive in a "we'll last longer than we will against that death star" style battle. The next phase here now can be a continuation of the Endor land raid as above in 1 or 2 parts, the third phase can use this motion mechanic to race to destroy the reactor. Look now naturally ship battles come into raids. Now, CG has to add some sort of power up that expires so we have a reason to feed panic and money into ships since they don't have relic levels, but hey, that's another issue.
The variety of phases keeps it fresher. Some will criticize the idea that the phases only move if you advance them, but frankly from past raids we had a lot of people sit back and get minimum points and let a few players push the raid to completion ... I don't think we want to go back to soloing. 8 months to invest in some characters to get rewards ... as long as every toon isn't a new creation then this isn't so bad, and it continues to advance the CG "how do we incentivize levelling useless characters into high relic levels to sell more crystal packs" agenda.
In the last few months I think we've seen some effort on CG's side to be friendlier to the player base, but that effort has been plagued by absolutely numbskull level coding farkups. You guys really need to pay the 20/month and upgrade to GPT4 and stop relying on the free version. Every single major deployment has been plagued by a miscalculation and requisite revision. This year's anniversary gift seems generous to me and seems to acknowledge some of the tough changes this year.
So let's move forward.
