Leave GA alone

"Liath;c-1869575" wrote:
I did get Malak that way, and so did 881 other people, so please try again.

More than that. The 881 are the gold star F2Ps who never spent a dime on the game. That leaves out the people who spent some amount of money in the past but did not spend on Malak.

And that's out of about fifteen thousand Malaks. So over 5% of the Malaks in the game were gold star F2P, and more than that were effectively F2P.

"Voltarc;c-1869351" wrote:
To Yae and Liath: I have 3.4 GP and currently 10 gold geared characters (up from 6 or 7 at start of Grand Arena.). I have been playing just under 2 years and think I’m doing just great thank you. I have spent about 20 bucks on this game and probably won’t spend any more because like I said it seems to be a hole to waste your money. It would cost thousands to make a significant change. I agree the problem is me...I have not spent nearly enough money. I just scanned through the other 7 players. Two have 46 gold gear characters the weakest looking player has 21 gold gear. When I say I have about 20 effective fighters I mean that I have about 10 characters or so that are not gold gear that I can use to sometimes use to kill the defensive characters. Most of these players should be able to slaughter most any defense I put up, but sometimes I get lucky (or they mess up) and only clear a few areas. I got the phonix squad fairly early and was able to get Thrawn fairly fast mainly because I watched the show and they appeared to be pretty good. Was still gearing up an emperor lead sith team. So I got lucky twice when they added thrawn and reworked the emperor. So other than the classic emperor lead making up 5 of my gold gear characters the rest are crew for my arena ships. I got biggs early with a maxed out Ackbar capital ship. (Don’t laugh it got me to top 50 in arena) and my main mistake was I should have switched to my maxed out Chimera faster when Bosk’s ship became a thing. (I currently have a gold gear Bossk). So if I had focused all my grinding on old republic I might have gotten Jedi Revan by now but to do that I would not have been able to work on my arena ships. (Which had priority prior to Grand Arena)

My opponents REALLY have about 4 Jedi Revans, Malik, about 3 Treyas, etc and in most cases those characters are also gold gear. As far as I can tell I was right in line with what I was supposed to do... and in fact got very lucky and twice focused on critical teams before they became meta changers. Some people ignored ships and maybe that is what a mostly free to play player should do though I believe the ship arena scores were well worth the effort. However even there I am feeling the squeeze: already took on an all Rebal team with the falcon which does seem to be the new top meta team. My current chimera team with Bossk is probably the second best meta team, but I happen to have most of the rebel ships close to were they need to be...if I can upgrade two bounty hunter ships a bit more I’ll have the falcon also.

You have several facacies in your arguements.

1. At 3.4 mil gp, you don't see that many malak teams. I'm at around 3.5 mil go and got darth revan ftp. And I usually only see maybe one other darth revan team in my ga and usually it doesn't have malak. So it isn't like all you opponents are whales with malak.

2. You don't have to spend money to have several good maxed teams. It just takes focus. I'm 100% ftp and I have enough good teams to win at you level easily enough.

3. At 3.4 mil gp and two years playing you should have jkr and traya by now. No excuse not to. And you should have their teams maxed. Traya has been out for almost a year and a half as a raid reward and revan's event has run 3 times. If you didn't decide to focus on the two best teams that are ftp available that's on you.

4. Focusing on ships doesn't mean you can't win in arena or ga. I have focused on ships and have had top arena teams in ship arena for well over a year and a half. I'm pretty sure the 400 crystals a day for taking 1st more than pays for the gear on a fleet arena team.

5. You don't have to have the newest meta to do well in arena and ga. There are counters. The most recent 3 metas or so work pretty well. I get top 5 daily with no malak. I use dr to do so but jkr can still get up there as well with the right mods/strategy.

So from your comments I can tell it isn't the matchmaking that is your problem.

"Voltarc;c-1869361" wrote:
It is hard to explain this to some players: when I look and see all my opponents have not geared almost 100 characters it is clear that these players are focused on grand arena and keeping their GP low. I don’t want to fight them! Their GP should be at least twice mine. I feel great disgust at the suggestion that I should keep my GP low so I also can victimize players. Keeping your GP artificially low should not be they key to winning in Grand Arena. If your going to bracket everyone to GP then the rewards for whining with high GP should also be higher. Because the brackets start is not based on winning or losing...you are literally saying the high GP players are “better” and should only play others on the same level. This will encourage players who should be high GP to do something other than handicap most of there team just so they can compete against weaker players. If you are constantly trying to fight the weakest players your not really proving your the best. When you target the best and you beat them...then you are the best. So there should be greater rewards for a high GP...or use something besides GP to determine the bracket.

Or they only gear teams that they use for something. For example, once you can beat every pve event, do well in the raids (4 good hstr teams since there isn't time to run many more than that in a competitive guild anyway) there is little to focus on other than building good ga or tw teams.

And if you build one or two teams at a time you usually end up with a lot of un geared characters. I have been doing it this way far longer than ga has been around. Mostly because I found that having a roster full of g5 or g7 characters did nothing to help me do better in any part of the game and usually only led to me having to waste energy farming a new character's low level gear because I had wasted it on a character I'm not using.

"DarkHelmet1138;c-1869650" wrote:

"Voltarc;c-1869351" wrote:
To Yae and Liath: I have 3.4 GP and currently 10 gold geared characters (up from 6 or 7 at start of Grand Arena.). I have been playing just under 2 years and think I’m doing just great thank you. I have spent about 20 bucks on this game and probably won’t spend any more because like I said it seems to be a hole to waste your money. It would cost thousands to make a significant change. I agree the problem is me...I have not spent nearly enough money. I just scanned through the other 7 players. Two have 46 gold gear characters the weakest looking player has 21 gold gear. When I say I have about 20 effective fighters I mean that I have about 10 characters or so that are not gold gear that I can use to sometimes use to kill the defensive characters. Most of these players should be able to slaughter most any defense I put up, but sometimes I get lucky (or they mess up) and only clear a few areas. I got the phonix squad fairly early and was able to get Thrawn fairly fast mainly because I watched the show and they appeared to be pretty good. Was still gearing up an emperor lead sith team. So I got lucky twice when they added thrawn and reworked the emperor. So other than the classic emperor lead making up 5 of my gold gear characters the rest are crew for my arena ships. I got biggs early with a maxed out Ackbar capital ship. (Don’t laugh it got me to top 50 in arena) and my main mistake was I should have switched to my maxed out Chimera faster when Bosk’s ship became a thing. (I currently have a gold gear Bossk). So if I had focused all my grinding on old republic I might have gotten Jedi Revan by now but to do that I would not have been able to work on my arena ships. (Which had priority prior to Grand Arena)

My opponents REALLY have about 4 Jedi Revans, Malik, about 3 Treyas, etc and in most cases those characters are also gold gear. As far as I can tell I was right in line with what I was supposed to do... and in fact got very lucky and twice focused on critical teams before they became meta changers. Some people ignored ships and maybe that is what a mostly free to play player should do though I believe the ship arena scores were well worth the effort. However even there I am feeling the squeeze: already took on an all Rebal team with the falcon which does seem to be the new top meta team. My current chimera team with Bossk is probably the second best meta team, but I happen to have most of the rebel ships close to were they need to be...if I can upgrade two bounty hunter ships a bit more I’ll have the falcon also.

You have several facacies in your arguements.

1. At 3.4 mil gp, you don't see that many malak teams. I'm at around 3.5 mil go and got darth revan ftp. And I usually only see maybe one other darth revan team in my ga and usually it doesn't have malak. So it isn't like all you opponents are whales with malak.

2. You don't have to spend money to have several good maxed teams. It just takes focus. I'm 100% ftp and I have enough good teams to win at you level easily enough.

3. At 3.4 mil gp and two years playing you should have jkr and traya by now. No excuse not to. And you should have their teams maxed. Traya has been out for almost a year and a half as a raid reward and revan's event has run 3 times. If you didn't decide to focus on the two best teams that are ftp available that's on you.

4. Focusing on ships doesn't mean you can't win in arena or ga. I have focused on ships and have had top arena teams in ship arena for well over a year and a half. I'm pretty sure the 400 crystals a day for taking 1st more than pays for the gear on a fleet arena team.

5. You don't have to have the newest meta to do well in arena and ga. There are counters. The most recent 3 metas or so work pretty well. I get top 5 daily with no malak. I use dr to do so but jkr can still get up there as well with the right mods/strategy.

So from your comments I can tell it isn't the matchmaking that is your problem.

Amazing...everything of which you just said was wrong.

I have fought at least 1 (sometimes 2) Maliks in Grand Arena since the day he was released.
YOU got Darth Revan free to play (NOT MAXED?) and you usually only see 1 other Darth Revan? You need to check the rosters, not just the defense, of the 5 other players...though that still means there are two Darth Revans...Not to mention all the other gear 12s. You should have several players with about 40 gear 12s.
You COULD have saved all the gear and crystals needed to outright buy Darth Revan but at the cost of upgrading a lot of other stuff. Not the normal way to FTP but possible. With a really awesome guild you could make up for some of the gear you would have sacrificed to do that...but you would not have the most recent 3 metas either(I assume you mean Malik, Jedi Revan, and Padmae? Grevious? Chewy and C3PO?). Need some cash to get all that fully geared up and modded properly. The Emperor is NOT beating ALL of that. (I hope your not trying to say Emperor Palpitine is one of the 3 recent metas)

TO ALL OF YOU STILL trying to say you don’t need a potential couple of THOUSAND DOLLARS cash to climb to the top of Grand Arena:
in an interview the developer literally said you might need several thousand dollars to catch up! Gotta give credit for being honest, and appreciate the effort to fix things so the (I think...gotta wait and see I guess). Heck I even blew another $20 on energy recharges...gotta take advantage of those double rewards lol. Still I am concerned that the match ups might be deliberately setting recent cash spenders against FTP players. Apparently the developer says this has not been done...but EA literally has a patent on the tech to do this....matchups can be based on purchasing to make sure the players gets someone they can beat.
This kind of stuff makes me very queasy. EA had to publish the payout rates because some states consider it online gambling. But tech that does matchmaking based on purchasing would undermine this.
In my opinion EA must also publish anything that then changes matches based on purchases because that is also then a purchased advantage. I will believe the developer for now...but I have been so consistently burned by grand arena I am very suspicious. (Kind of wonder if I should have spent that $20)

That's not what Carrie said.

"Voltarc;c-1881364" wrote:
Amazing...everything of which you just said was wrong.

I have fought at least 1 (sometimes 2) Maliks in Grand Arena since the day he was released.
YOU got Darth Revan free to play (NOT MAXED?) and you usually only see 1 other Darth Revan? You need to check the rosters, not just the defense, of the 5 other players...though that still means there are two Darth Revans...Not to mention all the other gear 12s. You should have several players with about 40 gear 12s.
You COULD have saved all the gear and crystals needed to outright buy Darth Revan but at the cost of upgrading a lot of other stuff. Not the normal way to FTP but possible. With a really awesome guild you could make up for some of the gear you would have sacrificed to do that...but you would not have the most recent 3 metas either(I assume you mean Malik, Jedi Revan, and Padmae? Grevious? Chewy and C3PO?). Need some cash to get all that fully geared up and modded properly. The Emperor is NOT beating ALL of that. (I hope your not trying to say Emperor Palpitine is one of the 3 recent metas)

TO ALL OF YOU STILL trying to say you don’t need a potential couple of THOUSAND DOLLARS cash to climb to the top of Grand Arena:
in an interview the developer literally said you might need several thousand dollars to catch up! Gotta give credit for being honest, and appreciate the effort to fix things so the (I think...gotta wait and see I guess). Heck I even blew another $20 on energy recharges...gotta take advantage of those double rewards lol. Still I am concerned that the match ups might be deliberately setting recent cash spenders against FTP players. Apparently the developer says this has not been done...but EA literally has a patent on the tech to do this....matchups can be based on purchasing to make sure the players gets someone they can beat.
This kind of stuff makes me very queasy. EA had to publish the payout rates because some states consider it online gambling. But tech that does matchmaking based on purchasing would undermine this.
In my opinion EA must also publish anything that then changes matches based on purchases because that is also then a purchased advantage. I will believe the developer for now...but I have been so consistently burned by grand arena I am very suspicious. (Kind of wonder if I should have spent that $20)

No developer ever said that in an interview. You are referencing a twitter reply from Carrie. One which people love taking that small piece of that tweet completely out of context and ascribing things Carrie did not say to it. She did not put forward the number, that was an unaffiliated Twitter user, and was with respect to the nebulous idea of "catching up," which is inherently absurd in Galaxy of Heroes where every PvP mode is instanced or tiered by power or start time. There is no "up" to catch. If you choose to obsess over having the newest shiny immediately but don't manage your resources effectively, you can spend large amounts of money if you so choose, but are under no obligation to do so and can perform well without it.

Or you can use the time between the first instance of an event and the second to see how well it works and how much you want it, and prepare for the second or third coming of the event.

Yes, preparing for these events has an opportunity cost that you could put toward other projects. Those other projects have an opportunity cost you could put toward preparing for these events. Everything has an opportunity cost. It's about deciding which projects are worth your while. If you cannot choose, and you spread yourself too thin, you end up bad at everything and have nothing.

The matchmaking is being refined for GAC, but the algorithm at this time is very simple, based almost entirely on GP. Not spending. You have managed your resources poorly, created a poor roster with poor tools, defined achievable goals as the realm of whales as an excuse to abandon them then wrongly dismiss fellow F2Ps who achieved those goals as anomalies and whales, and then blame CG's matchmaking for you playing badly.

This is a partly PvP game. Half the players in any match lose. You manage that chance with skill, by playing well both short and long term. You are playing badly. Therefore you perform badly. And it is your fault. Which is a good thing; because it is your fault you have the power to fix it. Or, you can continue to embody this meme:

https://i.imgur.com/Dj8sI9K.jpg

I am at a lower GP than you, and free to play. I have JKR, 3PO, and Chewie. I do not have Drevalak or Padme, though I am preparing for both. My Grievous is a work in progress. I am doing well. You do not need to have the latest, the greatest, the newest shinies in order to do well. You are surrounded in this thread by other people of comparable power, play time, and spending who ALSO do well.

Also, yes, Palpatine is one of the 3 recent metas. 3PO, Chewie, Grievous, and Padme were never a dominant meta. The current meta is Drevalak. The meta before that is JKR. The meta before that is Sith, which yes, is a Palpatine dominant meta. Palp lead beat Traya. Traya lead beat Bastila. Bastila lead beat Palp, but with the most difficulty, leading Palp to dominate. The last major meta before that was Titans; JTR and Nightsisters didn't really lay down roots.

"Voltarc;c-1881364" wrote:

"DarkHelmet1138;c-1869650" wrote:

"Voltarc;c-1869351" wrote:
To Yae and Liath: I have 3.4 GP and currently 10 gold geared characters (up from 6 or 7 at start of Grand Arena.). I have been playing just under 2 years and think I’m doing just great thank you. I have spent about 20 bucks on this game and probably won’t spend any more because like I said it seems to be a hole to waste your money. It would cost thousands to make a significant change. I agree the problem is me...I have not spent nearly enough money. I just scanned through the other 7 players. Two have 46 gold gear characters the weakest looking player has 21 gold gear. When I say I have about 20 effective fighters I mean that I have about 10 characters or so that are not gold gear that I can use to sometimes use to kill the defensive characters. Most of these players should be able to slaughter most any defense I put up, but sometimes I get lucky (or they mess up) and only clear a few areas. I got the phonix squad fairly early and was able to get Thrawn fairly fast mainly because I watched the show and they appeared to be pretty good. Was still gearing up an emperor lead sith team. So I got lucky twice when they added thrawn and reworked the emperor. So other than the classic emperor lead making up 5 of my gold gear characters the rest are crew for my arena ships. I got biggs early with a maxed out Ackbar capital ship. (Don’t laugh it got me to top 50 in arena) and my main mistake was I should have switched to my maxed out Chimera faster when Bosk’s ship became a thing. (I currently have a gold gear Bossk). So if I had focused all my grinding on old republic I might have gotten Jedi Revan by now but to do that I would not have been able to work on my arena ships. (Which had priority prior to Grand Arena)

My opponents REALLY have about 4 Jedi Revans, Malik, about 3 Treyas, etc and in most cases those characters are also gold gear. As far as I can tell I was right in line with what I was supposed to do... and in fact got very lucky and twice focused on critical teams before they became meta changers. Some people ignored ships and maybe that is what a mostly free to play player should do though I believe the ship arena scores were well worth the effort. However even there I am feeling the squeeze: already took on an all Rebal team with the falcon which does seem to be the new top meta team. My current chimera team with Bossk is probably the second best meta team, but I happen to have most of the rebel ships close to were they need to be...if I can upgrade two bounty hunter ships a bit more I’ll have the falcon also.

You have several facacies in your arguements.

1. At 3.4 mil gp, you don't see that many malak teams. I'm at around 3.5 mil go and got darth revan ftp. And I usually only see maybe one other darth revan team in my ga and usually it doesn't have malak. So it isn't like all you opponents are whales with malak.

2. You don't have to spend money to have several good maxed teams. It just takes focus. I'm 100% ftp and I have enough good teams to win at you level easily enough.

3. At 3.4 mil gp and two years playing you should have jkr and traya by now. No excuse not to. And you should have their teams maxed. Traya has been out for almost a year and a half as a raid reward and revan's event has run 3 times. If you didn't decide to focus on the two best teams that are ftp available that's on you.

4. Focusing on ships doesn't mean you can't win in arena or ga. I have focused on ships and have had top arena teams in ship arena for well over a year and a half. I'm pretty sure the 400 crystals a day for taking 1st more than pays for the gear on a fleet arena team.

5. You don't have to have the newest meta to do well in arena and ga. There are counters. The most recent 3 metas or so work pretty well. I get top 5 daily with no malak. I use dr to do so but jkr can still get up there as well with the right mods/strategy.

So from your comments I can tell it isn't the matchmaking that is your problem.

Amazing...everything of which you just said was wrong.

I have fought at least 1 (sometimes 2) Maliks in Grand Arena since the day he was released.
YOU got Darth Revan free to play (NOT MAXED?) and you usually only see 1 other Darth Revan? You need to check the rosters, not just the defense, of the 5 other players...though that still means there are two Darth Revans...Not to mention all the other gear 12s. You should have several players with about 40 gear 12s.
You COULD have saved all the gear and crystals needed to outright buy Darth Revan but at the cost of upgrading a lot of other stuff. Not the normal way to FTP but possible. With a really awesome guild you could make up for some of the gear you would have sacrificed to do that...but you would not have the most recent 3 metas either(I assume you mean Malik, Jedi Revan, and Padmae? Grevious? Chewy and C3PO?). Need some cash to get all that fully geared up and modded properly. The Emperor is NOT beating ALL of that. (I hope your not trying to say Emperor Palpitine is one of the 3 recent metas)

TO ALL OF YOU STILL trying to say you don’t need a potential couple of THOUSAND DOLLARS cash to climb to the top of Grand Arena:
in an interview the developer literally said you might need several thousand dollars to catch up! Gotta give credit for being honest, and appreciate the effort to fix things so the (I think...gotta wait and see I guess). Heck I even blew another $20 on energy recharges...gotta take advantage of those double rewards lol. Still I am concerned that the match ups might be deliberately setting recent cash spenders against FTP players. Apparently the developer says this has not been done...but EA literally has a patent on the tech to do this....matchups can be based on purchasing to make sure the players gets someone they can beat.
This kind of stuff makes me very queasy. EA had to publish the payout rates because some states consider it online gambling. But tech that does matchmaking based on purchasing would undermine this.
In my opinion EA must also publish anything that then changes matches based on purchases because that is also then a purchased advantage. I will believe the developer for now...but I have been so consistently burned by grand arena I am very suspicious. (Kind of wonder if I should have spent that $20)

I do check tge rosters. And out of the GAs that have sice darth revan, Ihave seen another darth revan about a third of the time and usually only one other player has them.

That means in my gp 6 to 7 out of 8 do not. So you can't be facing only darth revans.

And there is opportunity cost on everything. But if you focus you can get metas the first time ftp. It does require hoarding and focus. And probably getting to the top of arena. But that is all possible ftp. And yes I am in a great guild but I contribute to it as well. I get top 3 in most raids and do well in tw as well as beating all combat missions in tb.

Once you reach a certain gp, you learn not to level everything. Right now I'm sitting on. 15k in crystals again because there isn't anything worth spending them on. If it won't improve my performance somewhere in the game, I don't use crystals for it. (except for the energy refreshes and normal farming but I have a surplus after that.) It's as simple as that. Once you start putting resources only to characters that help you do better, you'll do better.

To Yae and Dark: Can’t see your match ups but you both seem to be underestimating the characters in the 3.4 to 3.6 range. But none of that matters anymore...sandbagging for easy wins has been HEAVILY discouraged by GA Championship which puts you in a division based on GP and the new prequels territory that requires the guild to get 80 million GP! I also can’t prove how good I am at managing resources (its a matter of opinion anyway) but in general hoarding resources does not work so well when you can use them to grow faster. The strategy you suggest works for those spending in the short term...and looks like the tide has turned. I really have not been playing that long and am ahead of the curve for GP with the bottle neck of gear being part of the problem and the fact I was mostly free to play and focused on ships burning me in GA. But EA is really encouraging you develop every viable team you can....with the only place this hurts you bad being Grand Arena...guess that is fair. I expect less people will be trying to keep Galactic Power ultra low and hope to have more even match ups.

"TVF;c-1881515" wrote:
That's not what Carrie said.

If you mean that the podcast interviewer said it....and she agreed with this...so she did not “say it” than your right. Not sure why we are now arguing about the fact that you can’t get to the top of the meta without money (or maybe hacks?). We have YouTubers who show the most effective way to buy the top level characters. As in the CHEAPEST way to get to the top.

If your trying to argue that a free to play player can’t get to 3.6 million...your wrong.

If you are trying to argue that fee to play player should have kept his GP lower...your wrong

If your trying to argue such a player is not getting matched against a majority of heavy hitters who have paid for multiple meta teams which are unbeatable (unless said heavy hitter is brain dead and does not put enough on defense or offense)...your wrong....you’ll have to trust me maybe but it happens

However I have been somewhat satisfied with the new shift to GA championship and the 80 million requirements for separatist territories so maybe this all works now...keep your low GP and I’ll keep growing as much as I can.

The feats are more crippling than anything