DEV POST"CG_SBCrumb;d-192437" wrote:Hi Holotable Heroes,Thank you for all your feedback on the event and for joining us as we experiment with mixing up the Territory Wars formula. This in an ongoing process that we will continue to iterate on. The Territory Wars after this one will have a different structure but we want to let you know that this something we will continue to change over time and is definitely not set in stone.Now the exciting conclusion! And the winner of the Community Poll is… BoatyMcboatFace… no that’s not right but we have the results for who you want to include in this Territory War! (Don’t worry, we removed all the bot votes for Boaty and Ugnaught.) Please note that the January Calendar has been updated and the the preview phase for this special Territory Wars event will start on January 14th. See the updated calendar DEV POST

THE ACTUAL PROBLEM WITH TW: THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN GAME STRUCTURE, TIME, AND ENERGYI've liked TW since it started. The premise of it is wonderful, bringing a team dynamic to the game that's sorely missing. The other modes like raids and TB either have guilds competing internally for rewards (fun in a different way) or pulling together against a set challenge. As with any game mode, these things can get stale. None of these modes are immune from the inevitability that over time you end up running largely the same comps, the same way, over and over again. New toons, different bonuses, etc. all work to keep things fresh and prevent the game from feeling like a drain or chore.But TW is a drain and feels stale for a very distinct reason that none of the proposed or past tweaks have addressed.As someone who likes the mode and helps manage it in my guild here is the real problem:It is way too time consuming to take seriously, and becomes a drain on energy, morale, and motivation over time. This is true even if you're like me and love PvP and would probably do it without rewards - just to play the game and get bragging rights. In every other mode, from solo PvE events, Grand Arena, Arena, raids, etc. you can take these modes very seriously and play to win within time windows that fit into your real life, or that you can plan around. Trying to take TW seriously, whether for rewards or the competitive thrill, can be a 24 hour event. As someone who manages it in a competitive guild this is what it means in that context: you keep logging in to check when a territory is down, you keep rallying people to get in, the map is so expansive and so reliant on enough people having to actively participate that you are rallying people or having to dive into the game the entire 24 period offense is open. It is structurally too demanding, and de-emphasizing it as a zone of real competitive and instead making it a place of "fun" is a contradiction in the format. You have to knock down territories to keep having "fun," competition and playing the game is fun, and as a microtransation game the sense of fun is all wrapped up in building or buying things and using them. If you do that well, you get rewarded, and the rewards are disparate depending on who did it best. Creating a sense of disorder with faction bonuses (or more controversially eliminating toons from use) help deal with some of the naturally occurring staleness of any game - clearly faction bonuses that let you use new toons or shift the standard defensive/offensive logic are more popular. But none of that fun sense of disorder deals with the fact that this mode is way too demanding to sustain a high level of interest from most players over time. Even dramatically increasing the rewards would only provide a short-term activity boost that would ultimately be defeated by the fundamental flaws of the game mode. Even now, my sense is that many of the competition oriented guilds are already divided between a smaller group of TW diehards and other competitive players who take every other game mode very seriously but have lost all sense of romance about being invested in the 24 hour slog. This is not because they don't get to use their Lobot they geared two years ago anymore or because they don't think it's fair to face toons they haven't acquired. It is not even because it can be boring to battle the same comps over and over again. It's because the mode is at odds with the kind of relationship people want to their phones, their own time, and the game. HOW TO FIX ITThe structure of the event itself needs to be changed. Changes to toons and factions are important in dealing with the mundane problems that come with making a game interesting, and should continue to be discussed, experimented with, debated, etc - but TW has foundational problems in its design. No amount of toon tweaks will keep this mode alive or stem its growing dispopularity over time. I personally think it should be fixed rather than scrapped, we need a competitive teamwork mode in the game. I'm sure many people can come up with better solutions than what I'll suggest, so take it only as a template that gestures in the direction of the actual problem. 1. Use the exact same time format (24 hour preview, 24 hour defense, 24 hour offense).2. Use the exact same map with the same number of territories. 3. Have the game randomly assign members of the guild to specific groups of territories where only they can deploy, and have those same groups randomly assigned to offense territories. 4. Let the chips fall where they may and total up all the offensive and defensive points each guild has earned overall and the guild with the most wins. Ships would take a little more thought, but it wouldn't be hard to come up with something that helps achieve these goals and lets people use their fleets.All of the sudden, like every other game mode, you can log in at a specific time, spend your half an hour or hour or two hour - however somebody serious about the game already spends their time - do your battles and be done, you can schedule when you'll do it ahead of time as one may be doing with raids. No more ongoing slog within a 24 hour period. Just like every other mode. The guild as a whole can still come up with guild-wide strategies for defense, suggestions, etc. and still get be invested in how their friends battles are going. Individual rewards are still dependent on how your team mates do, and all the incentive to pull together and coordinate and have all that lovely banter is still there. All of that good stuff while maintaining the exact kind of relationship to the game and one's phone a gamer already has for every other game mode.

You don't need to do anything to keep it fresh and fun. Leave it as it is.

For doing literally the exact opposite of what the community wanted we said we liked the buffs on toons that are normally not viable not once did anyone say hmmm let’s take away toons I geared literally just for tw

lmao they closed the mega thread for Territory Wars ? ?

Shocker, revan Treya imp troopers, half of ns first order and bh not available. Absolute garbage idea, and to think you developers who apparently play the game also thought this would be the next best thing since sliced bread. What’s the next tw idea... ban all characters released since 2017?

Community Territory Wars Poll Results [MEGA]

1,349 Replies

templarphoenix
Seasoned Ace
7 years ago
"Whatelse73;c-1747274" wrote:
"Ultra;c-1747130" wrote:
"Aethrwolf;c-1747121" wrote:
Choices literally removed EVERY decent team I currently use. I totally don't care if we don't get enough guild members joining this time.
Be creative. For example:

First Order Officer is banned but you can replace him with zeta Bariss or Dark Side Bastilla (gives +50% Defense/Tenacity to KRU)

I'm not going to give more ideas because I'm saving a lot of them but there is a lot of interesting toons you can use that you wouldn't use before

Not sure if Ultra is trying to sabotage other players by screwing up two potential teams, or truly doesn't know that Kylo Ren isn't Sith. Fallen Bastila's leader support ONLY applies to Sith in the leadership slot.

And First Order Officer AND FO Stormtrooper are both out. So that'll make the FO team a bit tricky, but if you've trained up FO SF Tie Fighter, then that's a potential option to maintain a full FO team. Captain Phasma being a generic leader is an option for a whole other team. So far I've been able to piece together about 15 teams I can use in this TW. But we shall see how that works across my whole guild.

Not to say this situation doesn't make me grumble, because it does. Giving us bonuses for certain characters is a cool thing, but taking away a substantial group of characters is bad juju.

Seems no sith leader required for 50% defense and tenacity.
GhostTrucking
7 years ago
"Whatelse73;c-1747274" wrote:
"Ultra;c-1747130" wrote:
"Aethrwolf;c-1747121" wrote:
Choices literally removed EVERY decent team I currently use. I totally don't care if we don't get enough guild members joining this time.
Be creative. For example:

First Order Officer is banned but you can replace him with zeta Bariss or Dark Side Bastilla (gives +50% Defense/Tenacity to KRU)

I'm not going to give more ideas because I'm saving a lot of them but there is a lot of interesting toons you can use that you wouldn't use before

Not sure if Ultra is trying to sabotage other players by screwing up two potential teams, or truly doesn't know that Kylo Ren isn't Sith. Fallen Bastila's leader support ONLY applies to Sith in the leadership slot.

And First Order Officer AND FO Stormtrooper are both out. So that'll make the FO team a bit tricky, but if you've trained up FO SF Tie Fighter, then that's a potential option to maintain a full FO team. Captain Phasma being a generic leader is an option for a whole other team. So far I've been able to piece together about 15 teams I can use in this TW. But we shall see how that works across my whole guild.

Not to say this situation doesn't make me grumble, because it does. Giving us bonuses for certain characters is a cool thing, but taking away a substantial group of characters is bad juju.

Not sure about you , but a simple glance at bastila fallen’s unique clearly states the char in the leader slot gains the def and tenacity, THEN. Goes on to talk about IF that chat is Sith, the rest applies,. .so . . . .
paulhartun43
7 years ago
Banning characters this TW is literally rendering me completely useless to my guild thus TW (which I'm new to due to a recent change).

I've been playing for under 6 months, am level 84 with just over 500k GP. I reached this GP by focusing hard on a select few teams a sopposed to boosting a ton of teams due to limited resources resulting from beung new-ish to the game. I havent had the in game energy to farm back up toons for my teams to reasonable star/gear levels, and havent had the credits to level up the few back ups i have to respectable levels. The teams i've focused in are as follows:

Jango lead Bounty Hunters (main arena team). 6* zeta Jango (banned) 7* dengar (banned) 7* boba 7* Cad and 7* Greedo
-Only toons i can afford to lose here are cad/greedo, as zam and embo can replace them. The fetts and dengar are my key members that are actually useful, the others are placeholders until i can farm bossk and finish embos farm
-crippled by loss of Jango AND Dengar, literally my 2 highest GP toons.
-Team is dead this TW.

Bastila lead jedi
-crippled by loss of General Kenobi and Jolee. Havent been able to farm enough other jedi to replace both of them so...
-team is dead this TW

Nightsisters (low *s due to farming bounty and jedi primarily, so not viable defense)
-Asaj and Zombie banned. Zombie lets the team survive to kill at least 1 toon usually and sometimes secure a full win. Asaj was the only one 7* on the team. Wasnt a great team yet, but was my 3rd or 4th best in TWs.
-Team is 100% dead this TW

Misc. grab bag team
- not a great team, b7t usually good for sniping a low-mid gp team and saving guild mates one of their squads, which are usually better
- 5* Palp lead, 5* Thrawn, 7* Vader, 5* Han, 5* Chewy. Not amazing, but surprisingly effective for an emergency/tertiary situation. Losimg Han effectively kills Chewy as well, and dont have anything leveled/geared/modded/starred enough to be a suitable replacement other than a 6* C.Starck (slowly working on troopers via non-crystal shipments, but its been slow with shipment luck) i could sink resources into... oh wait, he's banned too...
- team is effectively dead

Phoenix
-literally just finished the shard farming and have been too busy gearing BH and Jedi to get them past gear 7-8. Currently level 75, goal was 7* thrawn/Palp on next rotation
-team was never viable due to low levels given guild's high gp leading to stiff competition

I've been rendered literally useless this TW, which us particularly concerning to me as a new guild member, since being inactive/useless in my first TW withthus guild could lead to me being kicked.

Tell me CG: how is this "more fun"? How is it "more fun" to be completely removed from a TW due to having zero remaining good teams? How is it "more fun" for me to have to worry about my security in a guild becasue forces outside my control rendered me useless? Please. Someone, anyone at CG tell me how this is gonna be "more fun"?
AntiFunn
7 years ago
To what toons, chars is this applicable to?
generalshadowz
7 years ago
No one said we wanted this. I'm pretty sure that 99% of the community said they didn't want this. And yet you've heard our pleas to not go forward with this TW banning characters and just go back to giving us different "Faction" bonuses. And you have just basically said the following:

"We at CG have heard all your concerns about the upcoming TW.. But... We don't give a flying crap what you want. We are going to go ahead and ban all the characters that you have invested so much time (and some money) into."

We have worked hard to gear and level specific characters and now you are banning them from what "used" to be the best game mode. You are turning TW into a joke and we, the community despise you for it.
HateNewTWIdea
7 years ago
Been playing for 2 and a half years and EA has undone all my hard work in one move. Thanks guys(!)
truedave
7 years ago
I think they have made a fundamental error. Let’s say 5% paid Revan, (95% did not) their voting system basically means the group most upset will be the big spenders because although everyone with revan wants him kept 95% don’t.
As a business model it’s basically biting the hand that feeds them.
Nytoh
7 years ago
peharps I lost something... 15 pages of disusted comments and no CG reply?!?

Yes, there is still a problem of lack of comunication...
MasterVers
New Adventurer
7 years ago
Just don't do it. There wouldn't be any better way to show that you listen to the community
SydneyRoughD
Rising Traveler
7 years ago
This TW reminds me of the plan http://web.mnstate.edu/alm/humor/ThePlan.htm