Complete Galaxy of Heroes Overhaul
It's essay time again! Welcome to the reading corner. Today we will be going over communication, general balance, and player progression. TL;DR in list form at the bottom.
Communication
There are a few areas here that need to be addressed. First and foremost, patch notes. Pre-patch notes should be available in full 2 weeks before a patch hits. This both allows the player to provide feedback to the developer, and to help prepare players for upcoming changes. Final patch notes, at minimum by a link if not in full, should be pushed to played in app. In most cases if you are going to patch a patch, for example changing mod upgrade costs and drop rates, this should be announced, in detail, at least a week prior to the change. Hotfixes for game breaking bugs do no need to be announced, but should be detailed ASAP.
Next, known issues and bugs. There should be somewhere for players that use the forum to find a list of all known bugs. This makes bug reporting far less redundant, and easier on both the player and developer. Known issues are less concrete, but should also be listed. These are not flaws per se, but player concerns. In addition to direct bugs, there should also be a listing of known concerns, the current status, and a place to discuss them. All major known issues (basically anything you've attributed a megathread to) should be listed in the issues post as "under review" for as long as it is. Once a month, all under review issues should receive a direct status update in a dev post. Issues about new releases should be addressed more frequently, for example an update on mod status should currently but available at least once a week with an ETA on the next update.
Balance
Starting from the top, mods. The core idea is great, the implementation is difficult and players will likely argue about the proper power. Since the issue is so hot right now, I'll throw my hat in the ring before moving on to other issues. Mods should be set to around 1/3 of the power they were originally released at. I would set them at
Probably still need further tweaks and this is the section of the overhaul I'm least confident about.
Mod sets should also be more interesting, or at least more powerful. Ideally rather than health just giving percent health, possibly add something new and interesting like health regen per turn.
Moving on to older issues. Galactic War should not be based on a player's arena power rating. It should be based directly on the player level. This is not to say it should necessarily be easier, just that the power rating as a bad metric. To start with, the power rating is not a great measure of a squad's actual power, but even ignoring that there is a deeper reason that it is wrong. Scaling difficulty directly with power removes any sense of progress from the player. If making my squad stronger makes my enemies stronger, what was the point? Especially when my power rating is inflated by using a high HP character like Teebo rather than a striker like Rey.
Next up, protection. The overall idea is good, and helps prevent strikers from destroying the game, but it had some (probably) unintended consequences. In almost every case, any skill, buff or debuff related to percent health had its effective power cut in half. Expose deals half as much damage to the effective health pool as protection isn't taken into account. Heals both heal less of the total effective health pool, and cannot be used for half the fight. Trigger skills like Kylo Ren's Outrage basically can never have the desired effect as they now trigger far too low in the effective HP total to ever matter. Solution: put protection behind health rather than in front of it so that effects like health steal, healing, hp triggers and the like can function from the start of a battle again, and then boost the power of direct percent health effects like expose and Barriss' lead ability by 50%. As a side note, this change would require an additional change to Savage Opress' Overpower to not instakill at 25% hp.
On to factions and characters. First, leader bonuses for faction should be stronger than bonuses that effect all characters. Either buff faction only bonuses, or make all "general" lead bonuses into faction bonuses with half effect to all characters. After that, specific characters still need to be addressed. Especially in faction that have only 5 characters, a weak character in the group destroys the ability to run the faction as intended. Al characters dont have to be top tier, but characters like the First Order Stormtrooper fall below even a mediocre rating and need to be tweaked up to passable.
Finally, the gear on many characters makes no sense. Players are forced to spend on gear with potency and special damage on characters that have no application for it. Should be cleaned up.
Player Progression
I touched on this in the Galactic War section, but player progress should feel good for the player. For the most part, this is done well with new events and activities opening up as the player levels, and outside of Galactic War increases character power has a noticeable effect. The other aspect to player prgresson is progression gating, here through credits, shards, gear and mods. There is a balance to strike between the difficulty of progress and the benefit gained. Currently I'm actually pretty happy with most of that balance, but two standouts are mods and Galactic War.
For an endgame player, there is a 1/9 chance to get a useful mod, and around a 1/400 chance to get a specific primary mod. Thats... pretty steep for only getting 7-8 chances a day. Currently the power gained is not remotely proportional to the difficulty of acquiring and leveling a mod. There is again a balance to be struck between mod power and how hard they are to get.
For Galactic War, in addition to difficulty scaling directly with your power rather than level, the rewards do not scale at all. The difficulty stays mostly constant, but the reward decreases in relative value as you progress through the game. In addition to scaling difficulty with level (not power), the reward should also scale with level.
Last up, as the player progresses they can join guilds. This isn't a direct progression issue but once you are in a guild, a social community, you should NOT be competing with those players. You should be competing with OTHER guilds. The current raid reward system really hurts the ability to build up camaraderie with other players in your guild, and that should matter from the developers end as it directly impacts player retention. Guild communities are a big factor in player retention, and this is the usual goal for games adding guilds in the first place. I can't stress enough how poor of a decision I think the current reward system is.
And here is the promised TL;DR
edited for some grammar and clarity on patch/pre-patch notes.
Communication
There are a few areas here that need to be addressed. First and foremost, patch notes. Pre-patch notes should be available in full 2 weeks before a patch hits. This both allows the player to provide feedback to the developer, and to help prepare players for upcoming changes. Final patch notes, at minimum by a link if not in full, should be pushed to played in app. In most cases if you are going to patch a patch, for example changing mod upgrade costs and drop rates, this should be announced, in detail, at least a week prior to the change. Hotfixes for game breaking bugs do no need to be announced, but should be detailed ASAP.
Next, known issues and bugs. There should be somewhere for players that use the forum to find a list of all known bugs. This makes bug reporting far less redundant, and easier on both the player and developer. Known issues are less concrete, but should also be listed. These are not flaws per se, but player concerns. In addition to direct bugs, there should also be a listing of known concerns, the current status, and a place to discuss them. All major known issues (basically anything you've attributed a megathread to) should be listed in the issues post as "under review" for as long as it is. Once a month, all under review issues should receive a direct status update in a dev post. Issues about new releases should be addressed more frequently, for example an update on mod status should currently but available at least once a week with an ETA on the next update.
Balance
Starting from the top, mods. The core idea is great, the implementation is difficult and players will likely argue about the proper power. Since the issue is so hot right now, I'll throw my hat in the ring before moving on to other issues. Mods should be set to around 1/3 of the power they were originally released at. I would set them at
- Speed - 20
- Accuracy - 18%
- Offense - 18%
- Health - 18%
- Protection - 27%
- Critical Avoidance - 36%
- Critical Chance - 18%
- Critical Damage - 36%
- Defense - 18%
- Potency - 27%
- Tenacity - 36%
Probably still need further tweaks and this is the section of the overhaul I'm least confident about.
Mod sets should also be more interesting, or at least more powerful. Ideally rather than health just giving percent health, possibly add something new and interesting like health regen per turn.
Moving on to older issues. Galactic War should not be based on a player's arena power rating. It should be based directly on the player level. This is not to say it should necessarily be easier, just that the power rating as a bad metric. To start with, the power rating is not a great measure of a squad's actual power, but even ignoring that there is a deeper reason that it is wrong. Scaling difficulty directly with power removes any sense of progress from the player. If making my squad stronger makes my enemies stronger, what was the point? Especially when my power rating is inflated by using a high HP character like Teebo rather than a striker like Rey.
Next up, protection. The overall idea is good, and helps prevent strikers from destroying the game, but it had some (probably) unintended consequences. In almost every case, any skill, buff or debuff related to percent health had its effective power cut in half. Expose deals half as much damage to the effective health pool as protection isn't taken into account. Heals both heal less of the total effective health pool, and cannot be used for half the fight. Trigger skills like Kylo Ren's Outrage basically can never have the desired effect as they now trigger far too low in the effective HP total to ever matter. Solution: put protection behind health rather than in front of it so that effects like health steal, healing, hp triggers and the like can function from the start of a battle again, and then boost the power of direct percent health effects like expose and Barriss' lead ability by 50%. As a side note, this change would require an additional change to Savage Opress' Overpower to not instakill at 25% hp.
On to factions and characters. First, leader bonuses for faction should be stronger than bonuses that effect all characters. Either buff faction only bonuses, or make all "general" lead bonuses into faction bonuses with half effect to all characters. After that, specific characters still need to be addressed. Especially in faction that have only 5 characters, a weak character in the group destroys the ability to run the faction as intended. Al characters dont have to be top tier, but characters like the First Order Stormtrooper fall below even a mediocre rating and need to be tweaked up to passable.
Finally, the gear on many characters makes no sense. Players are forced to spend on gear with potency and special damage on characters that have no application for it. Should be cleaned up.
Player Progression
I touched on this in the Galactic War section, but player progress should feel good for the player. For the most part, this is done well with new events and activities opening up as the player levels, and outside of Galactic War increases character power has a noticeable effect. The other aspect to player prgresson is progression gating, here through credits, shards, gear and mods. There is a balance to strike between the difficulty of progress and the benefit gained. Currently I'm actually pretty happy with most of that balance, but two standouts are mods and Galactic War.
For an endgame player, there is a 1/9 chance to get a useful mod, and around a 1/400 chance to get a specific primary mod. Thats... pretty steep for only getting 7-8 chances a day. Currently the power gained is not remotely proportional to the difficulty of acquiring and leveling a mod. There is again a balance to be struck between mod power and how hard they are to get.
For Galactic War, in addition to difficulty scaling directly with your power rather than level, the rewards do not scale at all. The difficulty stays mostly constant, but the reward decreases in relative value as you progress through the game. In addition to scaling difficulty with level (not power), the reward should also scale with level.
Last up, as the player progresses they can join guilds. This isn't a direct progression issue but once you are in a guild, a social community, you should NOT be competing with those players. You should be competing with OTHER guilds. The current raid reward system really hurts the ability to build up camaraderie with other players in your guild, and that should matter from the developers end as it directly impacts player retention. Guild communities are a big factor in player retention, and this is the usual goal for games adding guilds in the first place. I can't stress enough how poor of a decision I think the current reward system is.
And here is the promised TL;DR
- Pre-patch notes 2 weeks in advance
- List known bugs and issues
- Tweak mod and set power
- Change GW matchmaking to scale with level rather than power
- Put protection behind health
- Make factions stronger
- Clean up useless gear (special damage, potency etc. on chars that don't use it)
- Review mod drop rates
- Scale GW rewards with player level
- Make raid rewards not intra-guild competitive
edited for some grammar and clarity on patch/pre-patch notes.
