TOPIC: General
Q: Will live PVP ever make its way to the game? I know its a big change but I enjoy the game and would like to keep playing after doing dailies and anything else.
- A: CG_Tophat - It could one day, but it's not on the development roadmap at this time. I know there's a number of people on the team that have an interest in it. The number of times it's come up as a conversation over the years is too many to count. So why haven't we done it? It comes back to something I wrote about in the sandbox mode response (and that I've said in a number of the Dev Q&As): it's all about tradeoffs. In our earliest conversations, we had a feeling that the characters we were making at the time were not diverse enough to make for a robust enough live pvp system (and we still needed to make guilds and raids). Over time the question then transitioned to, are there enough places for everyone to play (beyond the hardcore pvpers) and we tended towards making more general features. We made GAC because the play patterns were similar enough to other modes in the game that we believed generalized well for both pvp-ers and pve-ers alike. This is a very long winded way of saying I don't think the conversation about live PvP is dead by any stretch of the imagination, but it's a ways out if it ever comes to Galaxy of Heroes.
Q: Before a new month starts you guys put out a calendar of events. Is there a way we can have a calendar of events for the GAC quests? It’d be nice to know if an arena quest is coming up so we can save all 5 for that day
- A: CG_Miller - This is a great idea, and I will talk to CG_SBCrumb about what this could eventually look like for the players.
Q: About "What Kinds of Data do Guild Officers Want?" Topic, when we gonna get some responses?
- A: CG_Tophat - Just spoke to Crumb about this. I just asked him to put a meeting on the books for next week for us to review. Hopefully we have something new to share shortly. Thank you everyone that's added information to the thread.
Q: Why is Star Wars.com releasing new content info before It’s being revealed on SWGoH forum?
- A: CG_Tophat - As a game we work very closely with our Lucasfilm partners and part of that partnership is the release of information. Since we're part of an ecosystem of Star Wars content, sometimes the scoop comes out Star Wars.com.
Q: GL KYLO T6: can you explain why Rey’s event is pretty easy while even with using your very late “hint” and in-game feature to bolster Kylo in his own event as apparently his normal ,design isn’t enough to tackle Rey, Kylo,s event has ANY loss rates? it is beyond frustrating to lose tickets that take days to accumulate. Days— that’s even using crystal refreshes.
- A: CG_Coffee - Kylo's event is intended to have similar difficulty to Rey's. We noticed that players were struggling with his Tier 6 so put out the hints for strategy and squad. With the right squad giving Kylo turns and protecting him and heavy use of the event special on Kylo we internally have very high success rates. We hope these help to improve the win rate but will keep monitoring.
Q: Why do the galactic legends characters have such a rigid attack priority instead of a more random one?
- A: CG_Coffee - As the game has evolved we've gotten better tools to use when designing a character. For characters as powerful as Galactic Legends having them be a bit smarter allowed for us to focus on more streamlined abilities and avoid ending up with bloated kits.
Q: Why is Star Wars.com releasing new content info before It’s being revealed on SWGoH forum?
- A: CG_Tophat - As a game we work very closely with our Lucasfilm partners and part of that partnership is the release of information. Since we're part of an ecosystem of Star Wars content, sometimes the scoop comes out Star Wars.com.
Q: Hi CG! Have you guys thought of adding skins to already playable characters? Seeing the same characters in pvp all the time gets pretty boring and monotonous. Maybe different skins for characters could fix that? Ways of unlocking skins could be like portraits and titles, by completing events, quests, or achievements. Thank you for your time and I hope you all have a good day.
- A: CG_Coffee - This is a really interesting question that pops up internally as well. A challenge for us is that we already have multiple versions of the same character so we're concerned about it being confusing which one is being used. Secretly I do wonder how many different Han models we could get in.... We are also experimenting with things like we did for Galactic Legend Kylo where his appearance changes during his ultimate. There's also interesting design space for these character iterations - often they behave differently in a different outfit and we like highlighting that character diversity in another kit.
Q: When will Facebook connect feature will be back or at least u can bring back Ally code link technique that was used before FB?
- A: CG_Coffee - It's temporarily disabled while we fix an issue but will be back in a future update. In the meantime to link accounts you'll need to go through the Support team.
Q: Do you have any future plans to expand guild involvement? Such as weekly guild challenges, a trophy room, or something we can throw resources toward to build
- A: CG_Tophat - We've discussed it. We're actively working on shoring up solo play in the short term, but we've got an eye towards how that expands to group play in the future.
Q: Will any of the the required Galactic Legends characters thata are older get a rework or touch up, for example Rose or Phasma
- A: CG_Tophat - There are no reworks or touch ups planned at the moment. Also on our list to circle back to.
Q: There are some units who only appear in the Galactic Legends event like Zorii Bliss and the First Order Raider, are these intended to be event exclusive enemies or is there potential to see them adapted for play later as a way to give First Order and Resistance more options?
- A: CG_Tophat - For the moment they are event exclusive, but we're opportunistic if the ability to release them comes open. They aren't available yet, because in general our event kits don't have the same balance considerations our playable characters do. Meaning, we would need to likely update the kit and put it through the balance ringer. Right now Zorii and Raider aren't as high of a priority for us to get out relative to some other things we have in the works.
Q: Is a sandbox in talks at all?
- A: CG_Tophat - Could we see this come to SWGOH? Not at the moment. 1) There's a tremendous amount of UI work that would go into a Sandbox mode. When you start to think about all the different permutations that players would want to be able to try out (pick units, set ability levels, set mods, can event creatures be there, etc), it's very expensive. Now some players have pointed out they'd like to just be able to battle their buddies and whatever their lineup is. That is a little bit more feasible, but still not free and coupled with 2) there's nothing that we've seen that indicates that this would be a high engagement feature. In the past we've released some events with unbounded play and in general we see people's participation fall off pretty quickly. There are definitely hardcore players that we think would engage with this feature - there's no disputing that. But we believe it's a relatively small group. So the calculation we make is - do we make a feature that is incredibly heavy development-wise with a lot of ui and flow iteration (taking away from other things like more event types) for (what we think) is a small group of players, or do we keep development focused on making things that affect all players with either an immediate thing to do or that creates a long term aspiration? In general we tend towards the latter.
Q: Are there any new raid coming to SWGOH? We haven't seen many new guild activities in a while. And please make it hard!
- A: CG_Tophat - We were doing initial development on one last year, but we've paused work on it for the moment. We've been working on something that we think will have a wider impact on the overall playerbase that we'll discuss in more detail in next month's road ahead.
Q: I love how smart the theorycrafting community is. Were there any obvious designed interactions that the community missed? I’m sure there must’ve been. C’mon CG throw us a bone
- A: CG_Miller - It's a lot easier to answer "have there been interactions the community found that the devs missed" because that is an inevitability. It's a few dozen of us against thousands and thousands (and thousands) of you all, so we're definitely not going to be able to conceive of every possible permutation. However, when we have an interaction in mind that the playerbase missed, it's usually because they found a better one, and we're OK with that.
Q: First off, I absolutely love the game so thank you for all the work you guys put in! In regards to character release formats, can we expect more Hero's Journey and Legendary events or will it be exclusively the Galactic Legends event type going forward?
- A: CG_Coffee - Thank you for the kind words! We're happy you enjoy it. We absolutely plan to use Legendary and Hero's Journey type events again. Galactic Legends is a new type of event and character for us to work with but we'll still be doing other types as well.
Q: You mentioned once that Geo TB would go to a 4 24 hour phase cycle, to total 4 days. Is this still planned, or has this idea been scrapped?
- A: CG_Coffee - Personally I love the idea but we've heard conflicting opinions from the community. I'm happy to hear from players which setup they prefer and why.
Q: Will there be more love to epic events, like it was when luke skyewalker came out? The cinematics where absolutely amazing and many events after were not getting close to that format. I miss that stunning moment when you unlock the GL for example.
- A: CG_Tophat - The definition of more love is sort of nebulous, but if you mean more cinematics - yes, there will be more cinematics. We try to create cinematic experiences beyond just cinematics, with play mechanics, intros, etc.
Q: A while ago you mentioned wanting to update the request mechanic, have you considered adding a trade mechanic instead?
- A: CG_Tophat - I wrote about this previously (somewhere) - but our concern with a trade mechanic is that it would likely lead to a real world black market or gray market in Galaxy of Heroes gear. The things we'd have to do to limit that behavior would likely result in something that'd be really difficult for us to maintain and constantly concerned about the potential black/gray market impacts. Not at this time and unlikely ever.
Q: Why are packs a different prices in different regions? In Europe it seems unfair to be paying a higher price I’m what is already a stronger currency
- A: CG_Tophat - It's an exchange rate thing is the simple answer. We don't control the way those play out, but everything is pegged to USD.
Q: Why won't you give us a Princess Leia portrait? The late Carrie Fisher deserves to be honored.