Message from the EP

”CG_JohnSalera” wrote:

We’ve been watching the forums closely today. @EA_Jesse and the mods have been working hard to keep the extremely active pace of conversations organized to the best of their abilities. (Thank you guys!)

There have been a lot of strong opinions expressed today on the forums about the tuning changes in particular. Some players are clearly upset about the tuning changes, and some are very happy with them.

I’m hoping you can all give the update a few days of play before locking into your opinion.

This was a big set of changes, and one we needed to do for the long-term health of the game.

Why?

Well, a couple of reasons:

At the level 70 cap, the top end of the game was very much focused on speed and quick burst damage. There were fairly constant complaints on the forums about the domination of this particular strategy, and complaints that there were not enough viable squad builds.
As we were working on building out the level 80 cap increase, and even projecting beyond level 80, that “speed meta” only got significantly more dominant. This was leading to cases where one party could demolish the opponent before they got a chance to move. Not good.
Furthermore, the number of viable characters and squad builds also got narrower. Also not good.


So, we had to make changes. And they had to be fairly widespread. If we hadn’t made these changes the game was going to devolve into nearly instant combat.

Our goals were to move the game away from that speed-only outcome, and instead make more characters and party compositions viable. We wanted to create interesting interplays between different strategies – providing counters of one type of party against another. Based on our testing, there should be a lot more diversity showing up in the game in the near future as players start experimenting with different builds.

John,
I don’t question your intentions, as I know they are for the betterment of the game. Clearly the game was/is broken with speed-only high-dps outcome from a narrow pool of toons. This was a result of what I believe was the initial roll out of the game that was rushed in order to coincide with the release of “The Force Awakens”. This is capitalism at its best, and so I don’t begrudge that decision to make money. It also did allow me and others to have access to the game earlier. But now we are living with the results of that rushed roll out.
Since the roll out, we have had many toons changed. Some include:
 Barris (who had a package for sale to acquire)
 Old Ben (who was only available in packs)
 Dooku (his evasion was fixed, but that fix really broke it again).
Then we had the major rebalancing to fix speed-only outcomes, not to mention the many glitches/errors.
The problem that I am having, and I think many others might be having, is the amount of time and resources it takes to develop a toon in an environment that has the rules changing. It’s as simple as that. Playing fairly under the current rules, I have developed my toons to maximize my game experience. This development has in some cases taken a month or more. The suddenness of changes, and the huge impact, has left me scrambling to redevelop new toons, and has put me significantly behind in the arms race of competitive advantage.
Perhaps, we can think outside the box.
• Is there some way to adjust the development process of a toon? I wonder if giving players a one time option to “undevelop” a toon and recapture core resources that can then be redeployed into new toons of our choosing? I heard this idea on the message boards, and I gave it some thought. There might be some merit to this.
• ‘Retooling’ shards can be acquired from un-developing a toon, that allows for like characters to be bought within a certain time limit.
• Hard mission retooling shards can buy current hard mission shards,
• Arena retooling shards can be used to buy current arena shards, and so on.
• In addition, we could then pick and pull the materials, so that new materials can be developed.
I can see a place where changes to the core game for the long term health of the game would not penalize long time players with sudden major changes to the game.