Assault Battles #2: Forest Moon

Tier 2 rewards the same as Tier 1. That is, same first time complete and such. So another million credits and more Ewok shards. The whole "very hard" tier is an experiment. If we do more of these events they may have different rewards, such as an Omega or something else desirable.

Hey Cap,

I really enjoy the class specific events, which force me to focus on underdeveloped parts of my roster. I found it very satisfying to put the time in to get a 7* Yoda on the second try and have enjoyed the other events that required a prolonged build commitment from me.

I think we need more difficulty in the game. T6 raid was more fun than T7. The old GW matchmaking was more enjoyable for me. I don't think we should all be able to finish every event or be able to buy everything available in the game.

And the rewards seem fine to me, but I don't refresh. I'm just a simple man with simple needs. A hot meal, a warm bed, and some Ewoks shards.

My feedback, in no particular order:

I really liked what you did with the last event, with a couple of minor niggling details that I am betting you already adjusted for. The events are interesting, the special mechanics make it more than "just another grind" and they give us a reason to level up new characters.

Adding the extra, hard difficulty is a great idea. For the empire event I had to farm a bunch of rebels from scratch and I got through it, but they weren't really close to maxed, so I could only imagine that people with maxed rebels found it boring.

Players will whine that they can't do the harder difficulty. As long as people with the right teams can beat the hard mode, please ignore them. As others have said, we need challenge in the game. There is little right now.

Shard rewards will always be useless for someone because they have them maxed. But ewoks will, I think, be well received because they are popular now for the raid and several take a long time to farm.

Teebo and Chirpa are the easier farms of the 4 while Scout and Elder are the harder farms. My guess is most players would prefer the latter two not be in the same bucket, but you may have done that on purpose.

1M credits for first-time completion is good (not great, but good). Do these first-time completions reset each time the event returns?

50k for subsequent completions is an inadequate reward for high-level content. I may have to spend 10M credits to get my guys up to snuff. Even with other rewards, the ROI on this is pretty long. 50k is "in the noise". For cap-level content, please give us cap-level-appropriate credit rewards.

If those who can do tier 2 are able to do both tiers (extra completions) then them having the same rewards is IMO fine. If you have to choose one or the other, I think the higher tier needs better rewards from the start. Okay, it's an experiment, so why not also experiment with higher rewards? Even just adding more of the current rewards would be something and it's not like that will break anything.

How many completions/day and will refreshes be possible? I seem to recall for some reason that you couldn't refresh the empire event but I could be wrong.

Gear rewards: these were highly disappointing to me and many others last time. Too few pieces of items that are mostly easy to get (challenges, shipments). This is an event. It should at least reward items that people have to farm.

Green gear: In general, doesn't belong on a reward list for high-level content. But if it is going to be there, it should be items that high-level people need. I forget what the green item was last time, but I do remember I already had enough before the event to last me until the heat death of the universe. There are a few green items that most players are constantly short of because they are used in high-end recipes and aren't on nodes people commonly farm. Examples: Mark 1 Sienar Holo Projector, Mark 5 Blastech Weapon Mod, Mark 2 Laptop, Mark 2 Syringe, Mark 1 Stun Cuffs. These are all items used in high-end gear.

Blue gear: Same. Please give us items we need, not junk we don't. Examples of good blue items: Mark 1 bacta gels, Mark 2 sienars, Mark 3 droid callers (people are activately complaining about these not being in the highest-tier challenge, this would get them off your collective backs a bit), Mark 5 power cells, Mark 6 power cells, Mark 3 detonators. These are the sorts of items people are always short on. I don't need Mark 4 armor mod salvage, I already have over 1,000. :)

Purple gear: Same deal. We don't want purple Mark V laptops. We need stun guns and stun cuffs and mark 3 sienars and the like.

I don't think omegas should be a reward from these sorts of events. Either those are there as a gate or they aren't.

I greatly appreciate your interaction here and on Reddit about the events you work on.

I think in addition to looking directly at the event there is another issue. Since you cancelled the Kit Fisto event, people are quite worried that other events, "if received poorly" will also be cancelled. For instance, regarding bounty hunters, I heard from many. Ok, if I invest 5 million in this event. I get 1 million today. But what if it gets cancelled because no one else has bounty hunters. Then as the F2P player I am screwed.

The same of course holds for this event. I think you need to be very clear that this is a repeating event that will not go away.

As for the event itself, 1 million is a low payout for the amount of investment this will take for many players. I think most have a good RG and a good IG-86. After that, it will be spotty. Some will have IG-88. But that is probably about it. Vader has been useless so far, so most have not invested in him. Therefore, this would be a really high investment event for a lot of F2P players. This is especially the case if it is like the last event, where it is all or nothing. Beating 8 rooms with characters you have not invested in is a tall order.

Therefore, the bottom line is that if you expect people to invest heavily in these characters, they need to be assured that this event is not going away. The Kit Fisto cancellation set a really bad and frightening precedent that you will have to work hard to smooth over.

I really like the idea of these themed events. I hope they continue over time. They are a great way to reward Vader shards to players and bring relevancy to heroes we may not use as often.

Giving the events a second tier with a higher difficulty will satisfy heavier pay players that thirst for a challenge. Providing the achievement at the lower level is a great tradeoff for the lower geared / leveled players. This seems like a good balanced approach.

Much was already covered above so I won't repeat it, but I do want to call out Tiny's feedback concerning cancelling an event. I have seen a good deal of trepidation to build Scoundrels by players as a result of the Kit Fisto event. I think it also set a bit of a bad precedent because now every event is getting threads looking for comments as if it's up for judgement - so it gives the rage bunnies on the forum incentive to flame and try to drum up a mass of trolls if they don't like it. Some statement in general on these events about longevity would be good.

Thanks for the feedback guys. I can't wait for you to get a hold of the event Monday. A few points:

• The higher difficulty tier isn't aimed at P2P. In fact, I don't design anything specifically that way. The events repeat specifically so that f2p player can choose to farm characters for them or not. If people want to spend to do it NOW, I'm not going to say no. But foremost on my mind is putting events into the game so people have a wide variety of interesting and challenging content to do.
  
• As for rewards, these aren't intended to fix the credit crunch. We launched Credit Heist to help with that. The million credits is just meant to be a meaty reward for completing it.
  
• The reason you're getting greens and blues and lower level purples is so you can use them on new characters you might want to try, like say, all those Ewoks you're about to get shards for. Or the Empire/Droids characters you will need to level up to try alternate strategies. The items this time are the same as last time, but in the future I'll mix it up. Anything that isn't raid exclusive should be safe to add, in theory. But that's a collaboration between myself and another department that owns the game economy.
  
• Thanks a ton for the kind words. There's a lot of negativity in online communities, it's refreshing that you guys are so upbeat.
  
• The Force Champions events were cancelled for a lot of reasons, some of which were... "under the hood" and I can't talk about. Suffice to say we learned a valuable lesson or five from those. And while they won't be coming back, that doesn't impact these, Credit Heist, Yoda, etc... I'll see if maybe there's a way Jesse can message that to the wider community at large.
  

Thanks for the reply. I won't respond in detail but did want to address this:

"The reason you're getting greens and blues and lower level purples is so you can use them on new characters you might want to try, like say, all those Ewoks you're about to get shards for. Or the Empire/Droids characters you will need to level up to try alternate strategies. The items this time are the same as last time, but in the future I'll mix it up. Anything that isn't raid exclusive should be safe to add, in theory. But that's a collaboration between myself and another department that owns the game economy."

It's fine to give us blues and greens but for a high-end event they should be blues and greens that we need. The blues and greens last time (and this time, it seems) were mostly useless. Why? Because we already have 100s of them from bronziums and/or as "bycatch" from farming purples.

Please consider reviewing the lists I provided. Those are specific examples of greens and blues that players would like to get as loot. Giving those isn't an excessive gift, because farming them isn't THAT hard, but at least the items are actually useful. Getting a 417th green or 279th blue item from an event is very dissatisfying.

So after trying it out a bit here's some initial feedback:

This is not only the best event the game has ever had, it might be the best content it has ever had. The fights are interesting, challenging, and require the right characters AND strategy. The first time I went in I got slaughtered. But after some practice and advice from others I was able to figure out how to do it, and that's what a game should be about!

The rewards are pretty darned nice at least for first time completion. 10 and 12 EE and ES shards.. that's a LOT of farming. Thanks. :)

The green item in the rewards list... I literally have over 8x as many as are needed across all characters in the entire game. Please replace it with something on the list I provided earlier. I would be safe in guessing that not a single person who can complete this event will ever need another Mk 4 Loronar Power Cell. And we can't trade or sell them. :(

T1 is not too hard. At all. Please ignore the whining and do not nerf this.

I personally agree with not aiming the T2 difficulty at P2P specifically. In fact I would go so far as to say no content should ever be added that can only be completed by the top 0.01% of the playerbase unless it can both be done with a minimum of effort AND not provide any extra rewards over what mortals can achieve. To do otherwise is IMO a waste of developer resources and will lead to frustration and people quitting the game. So I agree with your general approach here.

That said, I think the delta in the difficulty levels here is too low: they are too close to each other. I had to put a bunch of resources into my droids to beat T1, and then I tried T2 and lost the first time. But I did it again and the second time succeeded. IMO that should not have been possible. I should have needed to level up and/or gear up and/or use omegas to beat T2 with a team that had just beaten T1. Certainly a stronger team would do it more easily, but it wasn't necessary.

Since I don't think the T1 difficulty is too high, and I do believe the gap between them is too low, this implies that T2 should probably be a little harder.

Allowing 3 completions per tier provides a significant incentive for beating T2, but again, my guess is nearly anyone who can do T1 can do T2 anyway.

Because of the relatively low delta in difficulty, and the ability to do both tiers, I withdraw my prior comment about T2 needing to have better rewards than T1.

Finally killing off one EE and then having the other one raise him, upon which he then raises an ES.. cruel! :)


Good work @CapGaSP !

This is my honest feedback.

I stopped enjoying the game.

I have a decent (not maxed) empire based team and cant so tier I. 7*80, 7*80, 7*80, 7*70, 6*68

This event is possibly fine. But a triple combo of ewok, scoundrel, and now this event killed it. I sunk 10mil credits to try and compete. I couldnt finish any of them. Whats the point of events that exclude so many. It adds to frustrations

Im still playing, and plan to keep playing. Going through the motions. No excitement

Thank you for asking for feedback. Im only posting because i still believe you guys listen and need this kind of feedback too..

Cheers

I enjoyed this event - I think it was best we've had.

I think this is hard for many P2P...but that is a loaded definition that spans a huge range. A guy that's spent $2-3k on this game is easily a P2P and by many other players would be seen as a whale and ridiculed on the forum...that's a lot of cash for a game! But $2-3k depending on how you spent it may not get you past this event. Likely few have Empire well built because they aren't very useful outside of RG...so that leaves the factor being whether a given P2P built droids or not. If that answer is no - maybe they focused on Jedi builds to pass Yoda or PVP meta toons (droids just became good in arena with the release of JE) - than they likely can't do this event without focusing on building for it specifically. This seems pretty well balanced to me considering the huge span of player levels that content tries to satisfy. Please do not listen to the whiners and rage bunnies and nerf it. With some work and planning it's passable. Look at this initial flame thread that they guy still wouldn't back off of even once he passed it :)

https://www.reddit.com/r/SWGalaxyOfHeroes/comments/4r64wk/who_ever_comes_up_with_these_events_is_sadistic/

I would like to see the gear a bit better and liked the list that Qeltar mentioned above.