Fair play, CG - any chance of even more improvements to the game?

I'm glad to see that the team took player feedback seriously, and I think the changes to Galactic Challenges are the right way to go. Not quite as generous as people might have hoped, since Episode 3 onwards will have 3 F2P feats and 2 P2W feats rather than the 4 F2P/2 P2W structure suggested by my (and other) posts.

But still a major improvement compared to the current situation. Praise where it's due, they did actually take our comments about how the game feels vs how it plays mathematically seriously. The increased cap on episode currency is good for people who want to buy the episode pass - it doesn't interest me at the current price point, so I won't see any benefits other than maybe if they send out compensation for something in the future, but it is a good change to make, and highly requested.

So props for that too, and the extra slot with 2 extra omicron mats per week is a solidly excellent addition that wasn't even asked for directly - people asked for more useful stuff to buy, but didn't explicitly state omicrons, so major props for picking two (mod re-roll mats as the second) highly valuable and useful items to add.

It's a lovely feeling to be able to post so many words of positivity, and I hope the team know that their decision to make these changes is appreciated and well-received. Long may it continue!

To that end, I feel like this is a good time to address some commonly recurring issues which are affecting player enjoyment/engagement: GAC and TW. Taking the latter first, the problem as it stands is two-fold: a lack of ways to prevent "sandbagging" matchups, and an overfull top-end matchmaking bracket.

Again, taking the latter first: the brackets for TW matchmaking have not been updated in months, possibly over a year at this point - I don't even remember the last time they were changed, if I'm honest - while both player and guild GPs have continued to increase massively. Case in point, the current top TW bracket is for guilds with 380M+ GP. The top guild in the game as of writing this post, MAW Chromium, has 741M guild GP - that's nearly double the GP needed to compete in the top matchmaking bracket.

Although the matchmaking system is unlikely to match a guild at 380M GP with a guild like that, the possibility is there, and it is becoming more and more common for mismatches to occur - with recent TWs in my own guild, we've been almost consistently outmatched in nearly every way, to the point that even officers in the guild are just shrugging their shoulders and saying "well, we don't stand a chance anyway, why bother trying?"

To be clear, this isn't a 380M vs 390M matchup, more like a 450M vs 540M matchup. But worse, at least from the metrics the CG team needs, is that last bit. "Why bother trying?" becomes "Why bother playing?", which in turn leads to a consistent reduction in player screen time.

Which negatively affects the metrics that the team at CG need to report to their superiors, and in turn potentially causes knock-on negative effects for the team, whether that be a reduction in staffing, a realignment of the team's goals, needing more time to achieve, or simply being told to "increase engagement" with no actual guidance for how to do so - trust me, I've had managers like that too.

Luckily, this is a problem with an easy solution: add more brackets. Simple as that, sure it might need some code added to the matchmaking algorithm, but "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure". Add new brackets at the top end, and suddenly a major source of player dissatisfaction disappears.

If you don't want to have the brackets be 10M per bracket at the top end, increase that to 20M or even 30M - a matchup of 380M vs 410M can be overcome with good strategy and sufficiently engaged guild members - and the new structure will be sorted. You could even make the highest brackets 40M if you really want to. As an example (ignoring lower GP brackets):

380-409.9M GP
410-439.9M GP
440-469.9M GP
470-499.9M GP
500-539.9M GP (Above 500M guild GP, brackets switch to 40M slices.)
540-579.9M GP
580-619.9M GP
620-659.9M GP
660+M GP

And from there, just revisit the brackets once every fiscal quarter (3 months for non-finance folks reading this) to add new top-end brackets. Obviously this doesn't address the second issue with TW, which is "sandbagging", where a guild in a higher GP bracket intentionally doesn't have all their players join TW so they drop into a lower bracket for an easier matchup.

That issue is more difficult to handle, frankly. And honestly, I'm not entirely sure how to do so, so fair enough that CG haven't been able to sort it either. It might just be something inherent to matchmaking based PvP, sadly. It's a scuzzy thing to do, though, so I'd like to think that people playing a mobile game would have the decency to not do it, but given the number of times it happens, that might be a bit too much faith in humanity to have.

With TW addressed, we should move on to GAC, where somehow, the opposite problem exists: players are getting squished out of the top brackets more and more, because for some reason the top end divisions here, despite being theoretically infinite, are in practice not.

Full disclosure here, the system for GAC is massively more complicated to me, and my understanding of it limited in comparison to the more straightforward system of TW. As a result, any suggestions I make are inherently less likely to be viable. With this disclaimer made, let's continue.

The biggest complaint I've seen be made consistently about GAC, as it stands, is that the "skill squish" makes it harder for players to reach or remain in the top Divisions (Kyber 1 through Kyber 3, for clarity), with fewer players in these brackets in each season despite the overall skill level of players remaining roughly consistent between seasons - as an example, a player in season X might obtain Starkiller at the end of that season, but in season Y, they haven't really had a chance to figure out how his team works in GAC.

Alternatively, a player might get a handle on a team or datacron set during one season, and be ready to use it more efficiently in the next season. But because high-end players have been "squished" out of the higher Division and down into the first player's Division, they suddenly become unable to compete, because they are playing at a Kyber 3 level (as an example) but their opponents are experienced at playing against opponents in Kyber 2.

And when this repeats enough times, eventually you get players with maxed out rosters who should realistically be playing in Kyber 1 facing players who are just playing in Kyber 3 for the first time. A few more repeats, and suddenly the majority of opponents a player faces outskill them, despite ostensibly having the same skill level from a numbers perspective.

And what happens when a player is consistently outmatched and unable to win their matches? That's right, they get frustrated, then angry, and then decide "If I can't win, why bother trying?". And as discussed before with TW, that just leads them to not play that game mode, which reduces screen time, reducing engagement metrics, making your managers angry at you, CG.

As I said, the setup for GAC Divisions is much more complicated to me than TW brackets, and thus I don't know how to address the situation as effectively. Adding a new set of divisions above Kyber 1 is certainly possible, but merely delays the situation until further down the line, as with TW brackets. But a delay still buys you time to brainstorm a fix that is both equitable to the full playerbase, and also able to be scaled continuously.

I'm sure other players on the forums have also suggested workable solutions, so a review of these would potentially lead to identifying a method for long-term stability and (more importantly to management) improving player engagement.

Territory Wars are a far easier fix, and could be fairly easily implemented in the new year - this would have the added benefit of also buying significant player goodwill, even more so if you added a line to the announcement to the effect of "The team is also aware of player concerns regarding Grand Arena matchups, and are investigating possible solutions. We will communicate further on this issue in a future forum post.", and has the bonus of improving player engagement metrics just in time for the end of a fiscal quarter - nice bit of ammunition to be able to say "We took player feedback on board, and engagement increased massively. We should do that more." to management.

The extremely positive response to player feedback on the new Episode/Era system is a fantastic step in the right direction, and I'm pleased to see CG acting on player feedback to improve the game - both the players and CG want the game to be around for a long time to come, after all - so I'm far more optimistic than in my previous feedback post that CG will take at least some of the feedback in this post and others like it on board.