Message from the CM

@EA_Jesse Hi! I'm one of the people who pretty much immediately saw the fun/strategy potential of mods; much like your testers, once the sticker shock wore off I very quickly thought the customization options could be a lot of fun. But even as positive as I've tried to be about the last couple of updates, I have a lot of concerns. Here's my feedback:

• Seriously address the credit crunch. To the tune of making Credit Heist a 2x-3x weekly occurrence, or similar, and frankly you'll do even more than that if you're going to leave mods as pricey-to-level as the latest update has made them.
  
• In addition to the credit crunch, you've added a Cantina Energy crunch. It's a pretty rare resource and now it's stretched very thin between mod battles, mod challenges and cantina itself. There should be some kind of a concession made to this major shift, whether it's separate mod energy, faster regen rate for cantina energy, cheaper refreshes, or bonus cantina energy throughout the day, or some combination of the above.
  
• Fix GW. This is, I think, a bug, in that the power of mods is not accurately reflected in the GW opponent-picking algorithm, but yeah, the combination of the recent re-tuning of GW along with the introduction of mods has made GW virtually impossible for many, many people. Today broke my streak of 100-plus consecutive GW wins, and the reason is a final team that was grossly beyond my power range due to their mods. My experience is not rare, and I'll be honest, if I end up quitting over this patch, this, more than anything else, will be the reason why.
  
• Tune GW. If you really expect GW to be a game mode that players don't complete every day, then you need to recognize that GW is the main source of credits in the game and is therefore absolutely necessary to player progression. If we're truly not intended to complete it every day, then GW rewards should be shifted elsewhere, or at a bare minimum, the rewards (credit rewards in particular) should be flattened out so they aren't disproportionately lumped at the end of the war. And if you really want GW to be a game mode that rewards having a deep roster, then GW shouldn't carry over turn meter between fights (this encourages using the same characters from fight to fight, and drastically discourages the use of "suicide squads") and characters should heal up a significant percentage of health and protection when they "sit out" for a fight or two (which would encourage using multiple squads in rotation). Just making it harder, with increased credit rewards still mostly slanted towards the end, doesn't achieve your stated goals for GW, it just makes it an exercise in mandatory frustration.
  
• Put the drop rates on mods back to 100%. Seriously, in your first update to the outraged response over mods, you guys decided to do....something that absolutely nobody was asking for, except maybe your accountants? Don't be like that.
  
• Fix mods. I like mods, I do! But one of the stated goals of the protection update was to slow down the tempo of the game and ensure characters got to take turns. Things like that are, well, if not completely gone out the window now, they are mostly out of your (the devs') control, with mods as they are. Plus PvE content is a mess, with the huge surge in power levels of characters. The gap between whales and casual f2pers is bigger than ever. All these are results of the sheer magnitude of the power boost on offer to characters via modding. TBH, if characters had maybe four mod slots and the "top end" of mod power was about what a level 15, 1-star mod provides now, I think there would still be a lot of room for customization of characters without things being so outrageously game-breaking. (My ideal for mods would be: primary bonuses similar to max-level 1* mods now; mods don't have levels and don't need to be leveled up ; the star-rating of a mod determines the number of secondary bonuses it has; and mod color improves the strength of those secondary bonuses. Still leaves plenty of room for us players to suffer through RNG trying to get that perfect mod.) In any case: tone down mods, adjust PvE content, but, and this is important: Give us advance notice of what you're going to do, and be completely honest, open and transparent about it. No stealth-buffing the Rancor. Which leads into my final point:
  
• Communicate better. To take the potency/scanner nerf: I get that @EA_Jesse is talking to the team, trying to find out what's up with this, and that's great, but Jesse shouldn't have to do that. Stuff like that should've been communicated to us, in clear straightforward terms, before the patch happened. Same with the 6*/7* mods getting added to raid rewards, heck even the outrage about mods themselves could've been significantly mitigated if you guys had done a better job of setting player expectations about mods before they were implemented. A simple "they're going to seem crazy powerful at first, brace for sticker shock" BEFORE the fact would've saved you so much outrage. Instead you keep piling miscommunications on top of bad communication on top of radio silence, with the end result that you've burned a lot of player trust and it's going to take a long uninterrupted period of solid, open, transparent communication with us to regain it.
  

And last I'll finish with some positive feedback: I love multi-sim, I love being able to sim daily challenges, the new Kamino landing pad battlefield is truly gorgeous, and now having gotten to fight General Grievous in some PvE stuff (having never encountered him before in PvP or anywhere), I have to say his model and animations are spectacular. The new characters all look interesting, if totally overshadowed by this Mods debacle. I even liked the gift of Chewie shards, it saves me some Cantina farming once I ever finish Lando.

I am on your side as much as basically anyone here. I want to see this game last for years, at least through all the rest of the newest Star Wars Trilogy. But you guys have a lot of work you need to do, quickly, and the last couple updates did a lot more to make things worse than better.