Developers Q&A FAQ

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drklrdbill: Can we get a practice arena mode?
We answered this recently in the last Q&A, but our disposition is that we don't want to put in a practice mode. Our theory is that even a mode that didn't have rewards could potentially balloon session time and we think that could ultimately lead to a negative experience for players. The Galactic War is still a place to do a fair amount of this, even though we understand you can't tailor it exactly to your needs.
Can we please have a practice mode for PVP?

At the moment we have no plans to build a practice mode for PvP. There are two reasons for this:
1. There are other features that, we feel, are higher impact/priority to the playerbase. We know this is a common request, but we think there are some more "fun" things that we can produce instead. If we ultimately find that we have room and nothing competing in priority, we'd consider picking it up.
2. A practice mode (at least what we see commonly requested for) would be unbounded in its time commitment (meaning you could play it all the time and unlimitedly). We are aware of the current time the game requests of player, we are hesitant to add more to it at this time.
3. Having added Simming to Galactic War, we are looking at how much people play through it voluntarily, as it is a leading indicator of how much people want to play something like a Practice Mode.

Territory Wars

Animefangod1: I was wondering if it was possible and if you guys ever would add a feature where you could watch your battles with other players so you could see where you are having trouble in things like arena and TW?
We had battle replays and consequently being able to watch other allies battle in the scope for Territory Wars, but unfortunately they had to come out of our update in order for us to get it done in time. There is significant tech work required for synchronous gameplay events which we just don't have at the moment but would really love to do in the future.

Sparrow: You mentioned battle replays are still a ways off, as a stop gap would it be possible/easier to let us see the team that attacked us in TW and its end state?
Would love to, but some of the tech required to preserve the history of the team that attacked you is needed as well. When we realized we couldn't get the battle replays in, we didn't want to ask the engineers to do the underlying tech first.

Why can we not change/edit/move Defense squads in TW during the setup phase?

Matchmaking is done after setup to ensure your guild is accurately matched up against another guild. If you can change your defensive squads after moving into the offense phase, then it would be optimal to pull all your mods off characters and not level characters up and only do it after the attack phase has started. That encourages a different type of play, one based around faking out your opponent, and while we certainly want to offer different game experiences, it is not the intent of Territory Wars at this time.

Thanks for answering my question, but I was asking about changing TW defense squads DURING the setup phase, not after it has concluded.

Characters lock at the end of the preview phase, so there would be no way to move mods, upgrade toon, or things like that. I think we all understand why that's important.

I'm asking about changing squad lineups/positions on the field during the setup phase BEFORE offense phase starts. Can we not get the ability to move or change squad lineups?

My bad, here’s your redo.

I don’t know but I think it was something we didn’t think of before TW launches (it’s not always easy to think of all the ways people will use or have issues with a system. And since then it hasn’t surfaced to be a pervasive issue. I’ll put it down on our QoL list though and see how much work it would be (it would require client work to select and undo a squad and possibly some other edge cases I’m too tired to think of right now.)

I’m sure you saw we did take defaulting most powerful squads into the TW select squad screen because we saw a lot of people accidentally hitting deploy with the wrong squad autopopulating. That is the first step to this fix and is an indicator that we will continue to improve this system.

Thanks for the clarification!
-C

legitimationcrisis: What happens when there is an odd number of guilds participating in TW?

The guild with the lowest participant GP, while still meeting the 25 member requirement will be considered the "odd man out" and will receive an Inbox message stating that we couldn't find them an opponent and 1st place rewards for their bracket (which likely is the lowest bracket).

Is TW on the verge of going away?
If it is staying for the long haul, are you open to player input about the match making and rewards structure?

Territory Wars are not on the verge of going away, Territory Battles and Territory Wars were two modes that were intended to satisfy different player types. Battles is where people with collections can show off and Wars is where people who are particularly good at PVP can show off. That's a real simplification of all the intention, but they are meant to be hand in hand in that way.

The ties solution had the objective to be granular enough to really address ties. Some suggestions we pulled from our beta team had different solutions but weren't granular enough to knock them out completely. Ties, btw, are basically gone at this point - but we expect them to come back as players get better and better.

That being said, we are open to player feedback for sure, and part of our communication strategy is going to be about how we can better create two-way dialogue on topics like these.

Hello!! Can you provide any clarity on why a more complex TW pairing method is superior to simply matching closely on GP of participating members? Shouldn't GP capture additional factors like # of G12, rosters, etc...?

GP while intended to reflect the overall power of characters doesn't always capture the nuance of good synergies and so while it can be a benchmark for overall power - it is actually not sufficient for something as intricate as matchmaking. Nightsisters are good example of where the GP doesn't reflect the power of the squad.

Territory Battles

catharsis478: Are there any plans to add a review period to Territory Battles?
We would definitely consider it. We are evaluating the frequency of both TB and TWs as it relates to player time and guild management expense though.

Character Releases

QUESTION: Rak_Frondar] Can you guys talk about your plans for ships?

The short answer is not at this time. The reason we don't answer direct questions about things we are planning on working on sometime in the future is because after we start implementation, we can cause missed expectations if we need to change plans. However, we are presently evaluating/re-evaluating the whole feature and should have something to share in the coming months.

Nauros: What is your policy concerning Legends/Expanded universe characters? Obviously, KOTOR is an acceptable source of new content, but what about the older novels and all the other stuff that is outside the official canon?
The policy is that all characters and content is evaluated on a cases by case basis. We partner closely with Lucas to find the characters and content that best make sense for the game. At the moment I can't speak to characters coming from sources other than what we presently have in the game.

DoomAkaStarkiller: Is Porkins coming to the tables?


lester68: Where is Padme?
We can't speak to when she'll be arriving.

BellamyNao: When rework jedi, when shaak ti ?
We can't speak to when she'll be arriving.

Viserys: While I know there are a great many characters people want, I’m a big fan of some of the recent comics for Star Wars and wanted to know what the prospects for characters originating from the comics might be (Terex, Aphra, Sana, etc)?
I personally love Dr. Aphra, BT, and 000 and would love to see them in the game. However, we can't speak to if or when they may be coming into the game.

TheMegaSage: Are there any plans for more Last Jedi characters, and more specifically for "meta defining" First Order characters?
We can't speak to when anymore Last Jedi characters will be coming to the game.

Barashin_Mokushi1: Is there any plan in the future for the TIE Defender to be added to Ships?
The TIE Defender looks cool as heck! We can't speak to when specific ship will be coming to the game.

lovemat: Any plans to add 4lom and /or Zuckuss in future?
We can't speak to when specific characters will be released into the game.

Also are you guys done with the new Star Wars movies, what I mean by that is are we going to get more First Order/Resistance Characters in the game (Ex: Snoke, Husk, etc.)?
just putting it out there that with the show Rebels ending, we're missing main/recurring characters such as Kallus, Azadi, Hondo, Old Man Rex, Pryce, and others I can't think of off the top of my head. We're also missing key TLJ characters such as Hux, Paige Tico with her bomber, Snoke, his guards, the Finalizer, and DJ. When can we expect some of them to come to the game? Or will they be a surprise like the vets were?

We aren't done with the ongoing trilogy. We schedule characters to satisfy a lot of different Star Wars fans; original trilogy, prequels, Clone Wars, etc. We hold off on often asked for content so that we can revisit the era again later and refresh factions from that period. As for when all the above are coming, we don't reveal our full content roadmap for a variety of reasons, but primarily it's because it can change and we don't want to miss player expectations if a fan favorite character needs to moved for some reason.

Gear & Farming

Barik_Edo: Any plans on slightly increasing the amount of Omegas that drop from the Omega Battles?
No plans to increase Omegas from current Omega Battles. Plans soon to reward more Omegas from other sources.

Neo2551: Why are the gear requirements so unbalanced? Mk3 Carbanti, Mk5 stun guns, mk3 cuffs, mk8 biotech balls, mk4 comlink? Are there any plans to relief the burden in the short future?
We've substantially improved gear income for most players piece by piece over the last several months, but we know that there is more work to do here. Our next step for adjusting gear income is going to come out of looking at the impact of the raid rewards changes. Specifically, while most top-end gear will get a little easier to acquire as a result of these changes, we suspect a few pieces will still need some additional loosening, and we will have more to share on this once we get initial feedback and data.

dogwelder79: Are there any plans to alleviate the gear crunch problem?
I believe the answer to Neo2551's question covers our next steps for the gear economy. We have lots of plans and will always be working on this.

Are 7 dot mods and level cap increase coming? We have several people dedicating a lot of resources and time into upgrading the already existing content, I believe it is a warranted question to ask to know if this is going to cripple us in the long run.

Both the mod system and level system are designed to accommodate future increases in levels. We are not planning to change either in the very near term, but eventually they will be.

Here is what I would like to know about:
Any plan for gear that we have THOUSANDS of piled up? Sell back? Trade up? Something?

The game used to have a way to sell gear and other items. We removed it early on for two reasons: 1) Based on the economy, each item sold yielded very little in terms of Credits; 2) Players would sometimes sell valuable items accidentally which wasn't a great experience. With the addition of Territory Battles and somewhat to a lesser extent Territory Wars, there are more reasons to gear up and otherwise progress all of your characters. Given that, were we to allow players to "burn off" some of the lower-tier items and then bring out a feature that incentivized or even required the progression of other characters, that would also lead to a bad experience. Bottom line, we currently have no plans to convert these overages, and the above explains why we currently don't allow conversion. Hope that makes sense.

What’s the philosphy on characters being harder to farm than others? For example, shoretrooper is much harder to farm than most characters. He’s been in the game over a year. Is there a cadence at work here or is he so good that he will stay hard to get? That’s one example of many (nihilus, baze, etc.).

Characters serve a lot of different functions in the game. Some are key for Legendary events, others for PvE events (raids, TB, etc). And some are just good in PvP. In addition to the "where you use them" conversation is how powerful they are. We do our best to evaluate each time we release a character to the board, where all they are used, what's our intent around player use, and how powerful the character is. Some characters are intended to be chase characters and difficult to get because they are powerful.
However, as the game changes, power levels change and desirability can change. It's difficult for us to update locations of nodes because a variety of players may be actively farming a location and then be upset if we change the rules around it. It's something we'd like to tackle though and are actively thinking about it. I don't have a schedule yet, but we're looking into it.

It's not really a question, but more of a beef. I hate the way drop rates change on needed characters for events. Pretty greedy, guys.

We do not adjust drop rates based on when / whether characters are required for events, or otherwise adjust them dynamically based on player experience. See our answer to Rubberb0y for some more details on our philosophy around how RNG & probability can make players feel sometimes.

Mods

GoldieJames: can CG do something positive in regard to secondaries of speed being made decent and having an increased chance to roll?
We have no plans to make adjustments to Speed secondaries as it is right now. However, as discussed in the recent Q&A video with Halfface01 we are discussing ways to improve the overall Mod feature and that would include developing a richer array of strategic options beyond what we currently see in Mods.

Why do I have so much bad rng in this game? I know how to play it (3.2 million gp) but I constantly have REALLY bad luck when it comes to for *e.g. in raids I Solo the Pit and end up way down the bottom of the payout list (worst prizes) every time.* Can’t seem to get good stats on mods either just to name a few. I contacted EA about this and they said they’re aware of this and gave me 200 crystals (which I never received) I don’t care about the crystals, I do care about this problem though. Please can something be done.

That sounds pretty crappy. And I get how it can feel like the game is punishing you, even though we have no system in place to pursue or punish players and give them bad drop rates. RNG is a fickle mistress which can make us feel targeted even though it's purely probability sticking it to us. All I can offer is to stick with it. Results tend towards the mean.

Quality of Life

Prudkoan: Do you plan to renew the graphics engine in the future? Or is it will be only in the Galaxy of heroes 2?
We have not immediate plans for a major graphical overhaul. We intentionally keep the asset size small to reduce the overall footprint on players' devices and to ensure the game performs well on a variety of device profiles. That said, we certainly could come back around and update the look of the game. It's more a question of priority and player feedback.

Goodgil: Between events, TB, TW, two arenas, and 3 raids, the amount of time needed to play this game to always be increasing. What are your plans on this subject?
We have a history of a doing things to lower the amount of time that players spend in game as the develop mastery over our different areas. We most recently added simmable Galactic War and will continue to do things to ease the time burden. I can't speak to specifics right now, but we hope that our development history demonstrates that we are constantly addressing it and making changes.

Can you please release a public API so that we can build other community tools around the game?

I'll talk to our engineering about what we can reliably make public and not. The more likely thing is that we will partner with people (like swgoh.gg) that we can have a relationship with and make sure that there is a two-way street in case there are any issues. For example, some player-created scanning tools have been responsible for two of our outages in recent months, so this is something we need to guard closely.

egtrip: Have you considered adding a players Personal Daily Raid Tickets, xxx/600, to the screen with player level, in game name, energies, credits, crystals, to help a player know when they have completed the daily 600 and help guild leaders mange the 30,000, players who have not completed the 600 are missing 10-50 tickets?
The personal Daily Raid Tickets are currently displayed in the lower left of the Guild Activities tab. Info about a guild member's Daily and Lifetime Raid Ticket contribution may be found under the Guild -- Manage screen, including sorting highest-to-lowest and lowest-to-highest. We have no plans to put this info at the top of the home Cantina screen.

QUESTION: AaronBurrSir] Is there a technical reason in why we can't do Bronzium multipulls?

The technical answer is that handling a massive number of drops is not currently supported in the game. That said, it would be possible (with work) to enable that. We have been talking about what to do with the Bronzium packs and system overall, and haven't yet landed on where we think this aspect of the game should go yet. All that currency was introduced with the tournament system and was intended to be used for that. We weren't prepared for it to be used only for bronzium packs, so it will be more challenging than simply enabling that functionality.

What precautions will you put in place to protect players, especially minors, from the gambling aspects of the game...particularly anything where the odds aren't clear and money is involved...crystal drops for characters, etc?

This is obviously a very touchy subject. Aspects of chance and random outcomes have existed in games and collection activities throughout the ages. Consider baseball card packs, or collectible card games like Magic: The Gathering, or even rolling dice in D&D or other table top games. A fundamental theme to these types of games -- both in the collection of characters and items as well as in the combat or gameplay -- is randomness and chance. Our game is a hybrid RPG / CCG (Role Playing Game / Collectible Card Game). And, like its predecessors, we likewise have random outcomes woven throughout the experience.

Shard Arena

Dr_Alan_Grant: Is there any thought about having a players highest rank throughout the day count for their payout?
The answer is no. This sort of system ultimately doesn't reward the play pattern we believe drives competition, which is players should battle for the top spot at a specific payout time. This also likely facilitates collusion behavior that we think is detrimental to the game.

NovaPrime: Are you aware of what many consider "Arena Mafias" that basically kill competition at the top 50 and people outside of those groups to be specifically targeted and excluded, forcing them to waste more crystals than they should due to their skill level just because a group of people want the easy way of getting those rewards?
We're aware that some players communicate and coordinate with other players in their respective Arena Leaderboards. As of now, we have no plans to intervene in that behavior. It's a fine line between malicious behavior and cheating, we have several cheating experts who monitor the community and their behavior, but we also don't want to go overboard.

WhatIth: Will either arena ever be reworked?
Not sure what the question is asking. If the question is will the actual structure of Arena or Fleet Arena be changed (rank swap, payout times, shard sizes, etc) the answer is no.

*Can you add crystal payouts to the fleet arena for all ranks, instead of just the top 20?* The squad arena has this in place since the beginning and I feel that should be mirrored in the fleet arena.

We added crystal payouts to the top 20 as a first step in updating and improving the Fleet Arena. We've been satisfied with the results so far and are reviewing if any further expansion is needed. I'll point you up to Rak_Frondar as that we are currently looking at the feature largely.

Raids

TheChode: With the upcoming changes to raid rewards is there any possibility of fixing the ties?
We made a change about a year ago where ties in the raid are resolved by randomizing the rank received for all tied players. We still believe in this solution and have no current plans to change it.
We have explored a number of different solutions but they were all exploitable and/or encouraged behavior that doesn't work for everybody or all playstyles.

Yarrg: Is there a plan in the works to "sunset" the older raids for veteran players to reduce time spent?
This is related to Nick's answer to Goodgil on overall time spent in game. We are always looking at how much time people spend and reevaluating how much time it takes them to get things done. One thing that's interesting to note is that when we put in significant time savers, players offer reallocate that time spent to puttering around elsewhere in the game. But it is always top of mind when we put out new content and will continue to be.

If we can only get one question, I’d like to talk through raids. Questions in order of priority for me if you can grab more.
1) What is the plan to address raids going forwards, and the time commitment required? As we continue to stack more raids onto our plates, all of which as still have much needed rewards, they become harder to schedule and more time consuming to deal with. An eventual 4th raid and onwards would be even more difficult.

Hi medetec - One way in which time should be reduced for Raids is that Guilds should "level up" as they progress in the overall game and thus the Rancor Raid Heroic can go on farm mode while the Guild is still challenged by the AAT Raid. And, then once the AAT Heroic goes on farm mode, the Guild can tackle the Sith Triumvirate Raid. This is something I've taken from many years in MMO games.
Beyond that, we are talking about other ways to make Raids easier to manage for the guild leaders and the guild members. We've just posed a question to our beta testers about an idea we have for raid management auto-join and auto-start. This doesn't mean that work is imminent, but usually when we feel good about something we want to do, the next step is to ask for feedback from our beta group and influencers, and then we go about figuring out when it's going to be in the game.
Also we are reviewing Raid rewards, but are not ready to share any changes there.

what is the point of boosting "galactic hero" potency by 30% when the raid boss stacks 50% each turn? Doesn't this make the bonus a total waste? Why not just make all the bosses immune to tmr like sion. That would open up raid strategies for many more squads as well.

As we recently detailed in one of my posts, Raids are time capsules. As the game changes, teams and squads that were once relevant in the beginning may drop out in favor of squads that have recently become relevant. The Galactic Hero tag may not seem relevant now, but may become relevant later. Regarding why not make all the Raid Bosses immune to TMR, the simple answer is that we intended some to be immune to TMR and others not. Again as the game changes, some strategies that couldn't be executed may become available later.

Galactic War

Indominable_J: Now that GW can be simmed, is there any plan to either revert the difficulty, or to offer a "hard mode" for those who want the challenge back?
It's been discussed in the studio and we've done some preliminary ideating on it. It's a trickier design than you may think at first blush. Do we just draw from high GP squads again? Do we curate specific challenges? If we curate specific challenges how often do we change them? What are the rewards for participating? Do we expect everyone to partiicpate? This isn't to say we think it's too hard to figure out, but that it needs some time to be designed and it's a lower priority for us now. However, it could become an important feature in the future.

Teague: Any changes intended for Galactic War? Specifically, I'd like to see it be hard again after the sim option is unlocked. This would give me somewhere to test new teams I'm building. It's far too easy to test anything currently.
I touched on this to my answer to Indominable_J, but the answer is that we're thinking about it but don't have any plans or timeline for putting it in.