"CG_JohnSalera;50943" wrote:
Hi all –
I wanted to give an update on Galactic War tuning.
Before I get into it, I want to reiterate that the goals of this feature continue to be:
- Provide a real challenge to players. In other words: it’s meant to be hard!
- Provide a place in the game where your entire collection can be brought to bear. Potentially every character can help you succeed.
- Provide a “war of attrition” where health is persisted as you progressed in battles.
- Provide a place where there’s an ever-evolving set of challenges in terms of which characters / parties / builds can be most effective. (As more characters are released, and as more types of builds are discovered and developed by the players, this will become increasingly true.)
Well the way I see it the fundamental issue here is that there's a striking design contradiction between the first and second points here. I can understand if these are intended design pillars, but they're fighting each other and the end result of that is always going to be a muddled execution - a feature that no one, probably including the design team at CG, is entirely sure how it's supposed to feel.
Providing a real challenge is well and good, but in a game like GoH, the GW system can't actually achieve that. First because it relies on the player having sufficiently built characters up enough to complete the battles and to complete them repeatedly. Since the system has to hinge the strength of the opponent teams to some kind of data, this means that pragmatically, the player can only win these fights with the characters they've most built up. The GW nodes are either hard enough to damage the player's top team or they are not. If so, any characters that fall below that threshhold will just get torn to pieces.
As for point two, the player just can't bring his entire collection to bear. Why would the player ever use any characters other than his top line up? Especially since most people don't want to spend 5 minutes or longer per fight, in twelve consecutive battles. The impetus here is clear - win the early nodes as effortlessly as possible. Once you've played long enough, you'll have a reserve line-up, but if the GW node team is strong enough to pose a risk to your top tier team, the reserve characters won't be able to pick up that slack. At the moment you begin to suffer actual losses, you've hit the wall and won't beat the GW series as a result. More strikingly, since the GW uses arena teams as the targets, you see the same series of characters constantly. It's just Sidious, Phasma, Luminara, etc. - over and over. There's such a heavily restrained variety of what you face. If "bringing your entire collection to bear" is a design mandate of GW, then CG has really really missed that mark -- missing the mark on design goal 2, means you inherently miss the mark on design goal 4. The challenges don't evolve, because you're fighting the same types of line-ups on every single node. The only noticeable difference is how strong the team selected is, and that tends to manifest in a "knife's edge" fashion. Either the enemy team will destroy you, or you will destroy them. There's no variety equation to solve here - field your strongest team because you will constantly face the teams built on the meta-in-favor. What teams to run in Arena is an efficiency equation being solved by thousands of players in unison. They'll inexorably arrive at the solution, and do so very very quickly. If the meta changes, the arena teams will change, but the variety problem won't change a bit.
Reading this thread, it certainly seems that recent update may have knocked something in the balancing algorithm out of whack. That seems to be an entirely fixable issue, but the less fixable issue is that pulling arena teams is going to generate exactly the kind of tedious monotony that's described by nearly ever poster in thread. I, for one, would sure like to stop seeing Luminara in 90% of the GW teams I fight. I'd like to see a whole lot less of Vader, Sidious, QGJ, Jedi Consular, etc. There are dozens of characters I might well have never seen in a GW team.
If you ask me (and sure, nobody did, but I'll gamble that CG reads these threads)
--Stop pulling arena teams as the GW squads. This will almost certainly never generate anything but monotonous line ups. Develop an algorithm to compose auto-generated enemy teams by automatically leveling and gearing randomly selected characters to a target difficulty.
--Actually give the player the capacity to field variety within in their own squad without compromising the ability to complete nodes. I'd suggest something alone these lines -- turn the ally leader slot in the squad into a "power up slot". The player can stick any character he owns in this slot and it will be powered up automatically (but only for that particular fight) to be at parity with the GW node team. These would create numerous benefits, not the least of which is letting the player actually use any character he owns, and letting him see what that character will play like once he has powered it up. The strongest delivery on the fielding the whole team notion would be power fixing the player's entire squad here, but that's a compromise I'd be very surprised to see.
--Speed this whole ordeal up by reducing the number of GW nodes and redistributing the rewards.
