Message from the EP

"Preemo_Magin;315510" wrote:

"ImYourHuckleberry;315088" wrote:

”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.

That's exactly the main point. In my post with numbered bullets I preface with me halting any spending whatsoever with the speed change and Poe/Droid destruction.

The problem was not my goal of benefiting from OP toons. The problem was that you plan ahead 2-5 months and things get swinger around trying to find the holy grail of balance.

It does not make any sense to expect anything out of any combination of chars you select.

John, or if any at CG is financially inclined, here's a short reminder (or primer) on why your balancing causes so much damage to your business (on top of frustration and people quitting):

1) People sink money based on an expected
Return.

2) Risk is way to measure the chance of not getting the return expected.

3) Moreover, a risky investment is not like a casino play. It must offer -on average- a higher return that a safer investment, just because we also want to avoid volatility.

4) In a game like this investment is time and/or money that then get committed into a character (any currency and asset ends up being locked in a char sooner or later). The more money and/or more time invested, the higher the expected return.

GOH investment variables:

A) COST: Setting the price for things. CG sets the cost of bundles, shards, etc. across the game. So the cost is relatively well known. CG tries to make this hard to assess by not letting anyone know the probabilities across the game, and creating confusing and overloading currencies. People guess the cost of things. In terms of Time currency people do the same.

B) RETURN. GOH chars have certain return (the chars known performance). Their abilities relative to any other char is how to assess it.

C) RISK. The risk is controlled by the likelihood of the char no having any such performance. The higher the risk, the less valuable the investment, the less anybody would want to invest in that asset (digital or otherwise doesn't matter.

Now this is what you cause...

I) Gear requirement changes: When you change this, you change the costs of things. Now the Cost/Performance is affected, negatively. Had I known of the future change I would have not invested in the same way. This destroys value for the player, even if this change is global (in this case it makes the entire game less attractive, more boring or with lower return). If you make this for some characters, it has a more powerful effect, it makes the cost return higher for some, and lower for some others. Now it's not just lower return, but also a benefit to "enemies" that will not just make things more costly, but more costly just "for some".

II) Global change in balance. Aka as New (more fair or "interesting") Meta. This completely changes the Return across All Investments. It's akin to the SEC shuffling the return of every stock you own randomly. It doesn't matter if Google was producing more return that it should, or if it makes more sense in general. It materializes HUGE RISK, The ones least affected are those with mega huge portfolios, all maxed out. Same if the change is broad enough but not global.

III) Normalizing performance across chars. Unless all chars performance where mostly already normalized, this affects those that had chose a better performing char.

Anyone that is competitive will note the chars that are better, and will be willing to pay more. One way to pay more for this is Chromium (bulk purchases just to get some chars-extremely costly and inefficient but if the char commands an advantage and I am rich or ultra competitive, the return in my mind may be commensurate with the cost). Also hard mode farms are like this. Chars with only 1 hard mode are the most expensive. And those that assess the char performance (a return) as very worthy and that want the return sooner will refresh this mode for 50, 100 or more Crystals every day.

When you normalize performance and make every char as good as any other, you are assigning the same return to assets of extremely different costs. And IG-86 is very LOW COST. It provides little advantage as anyone can have it fast (meaning COST IS LOWEST), and if it is made perform similar or even better to let's say post nerf FOTP (I can use any other char that was initially good, then nerfed severely), then the FOTP return was awful: 10x the cost and now lower return than IG-86. I out this example to make it more intuitive. But basically normalizing return (aka "All chars exactly equally viable in Arena"), you are severely affecting the wealth (and value of investments).

IV) Whenever you make a change, and to the degree that change is significant, you are INCREASING RISK across the board. The more often you change mechanics or chars or balance anything, the more any investment has RISK. If you tell "We'll randomly change chars stats every week randomly " (just to illustrate) then no char can get a value assessment, or return. And then only sensible thing to do under that scenario is to only farm the lowest cost chars, and if you are risk averse, to invest as little as possible...for a person with lots of time this could be deciding to be F2P. For a person with good income and little time this could be "Invest moderately and in commodity chars".

V) Unexpected Acrions (i.e. Things that the investor was not expecting, regardless of what you had or not in mind) make people feel robbed. They cause request for refunds and lots of anger and bad feelings. Whenever something isn't communicated with a lot of advance time and properly, or made clear (e.g. "we will make good chars bad, and bad chars good, every month. We will not care if a char costs more, or if you thought the char was balanced. We have our own opinion and you must expect any char to suddenly change in performance". Or "We will monja-nerf this char 3 Montes from now. Be warned"...as examples). All this things are just so bad for the investor/player. Very very negative.

VI) COST INCREASES. every price hike makes the return more costly. This helps monetize harvesting the players that have invested a lot. Like selling a sport car at a cheap price and then having ever more costly repair parts, or increasing maintenance costs. The performance of the car (or game "fun") gets eroded as the return on investment (Fun/Cost) changes. At every threshold you cost, people quit. Eg. A subscription game that stays the same cost (Spotify?) has a constant relation. When you make things suddenly more expensive, you have people or reassess who they are (Whale, Dolphin, Fish, Krill, F2P). The more you increase prices without creating more fun (however the player defines it) the more people change their spend. If you increase fun and sell IAP for content, it's just a purchase. If you enhance the game and make it a bit more expensive to do things you may make a large reward. If the fun goes down and the price up, people reassess their investment levels.

Now, I see huge risk in GOH, and shift to "make every char viable" (normalization), a lack of wanting to provide a lot of advance details on upcoming changes (the detail is important), I see communication that contradicts what is said (slow char gets more damage or HP and fast char gets less damage or HP)- misdirection that ENSURES A BAD investment, I see sudden unexpected nerfs, I see that EXPENSIVE chars are made equal or worst than very easy farms (turning high price items to provide lower return than cheap items-sigh-, I see sudden devaluation of assets and new very expensive ways designed to continue gaining functionality (Purple Matt not needed anymore, new Omega matts), I see new mechanics introduced that make it harder to assess the value of chars, I see constant price hikes as a trend ("economy balances@) like lower return for Miney or Droid events, bug fixes of GW that today require Crystals for refresh (bug or not bug doesn't matter, that's your explanation but it doesn't avoid the price hike), Yoda lowered returns, Droids removed from shipments, etc, etc, I see gear reque changes (price hike), etc. I see more time needed to complete things (if the activity is n't fun and it is grind, this lowers our return!), and I see think like no real improvement in you ability to help users better assess how things will exactly change with sufficient advance time (RISK + Unexpected changes)...

Then I see CG wasting a huge amount of money -in spite of how tremendously successful it has been in making money so far there much more left in the table- and a huge disappointment of thousands of players that is totally counter to your retirement plans, that causes frustration and anger of people -just the opposite of what your goal in life should be for a game company (yes, if a doctor can make money and make patients worst, it's no doctor but something of the worst kind....) that...

...why not reassess the level of risk you want to cause (no more swings, ninja nerfs), the way that risk is communicated (early advance note or very clear rules on the frequency and degree of expected swings), the expected pricing of things (should we expect refresh costs to maybe triple in the future? etc), the level of normalization you seek (every char washed out)...as a starter.

Reassess the RISK of chars, the commitment to keep COST predictable (sudden changes), the direction of COSTS (will everything go up), and the level of commitment to keeping individual chars performance rather stable.

Otherwise, High Risk, Dimisishing rewards, Washed out game....we'll all Be F2P or rather doing something else.

Why can't you be like Suoercells and make money and be loved?

That's a big post, dealing with many aspects of investing. BUT it doesn't offer any solutions. The status-quo is not a solution.

Overall, I like where John is taking us. I am only suggesting an alternative path that minimizes player loss.