Salt on the Wound: A Comprehensive Feedback Review

@EA_Jesse you want people to stop being negative on the forums and just provide constructive feedback. In order to get something, you have to give something.

You say you listen to feedback. Here's some feedback ON feedback being ignored.

Pre-Crafting 1.0

You were informed about the player gear imbalance caused by pre-crafting 1.0. After 2 months of doing nothing, saying nothing, your solution was to put raid gear in shipments. Not all the time, just for 2 weeks a piece in a clear move to force players to refresh using crystals. It was an opportunistic monetisation of your own blunder, it did nothing to solve the problem, it exacerbated it and made you more money in the process.

This is called pouring salt on the wound.

Galactic War Difficulty

You received months of feedback that GW was too difficult for most players and took too long to complete. Your response to that feedback was to make it EASIER - you listened!!! And then 2 weeks later you put the difficulty back in a stealth patch without even bothering to tell anyone. You allowed a 60 page mega-thread to accumulate and then announced that, following all of that unanimous feedback, you would do absolutely nothing to alter GW any further.

More salt poured on the wound.

Introduction of Mods

INRAJ confirmed that the small amount of testing that was done generated feedback pretty much like the community gave you within hours of mods being released. A few days on, that feedback hasn't changed. Mods have more or less erased the advantage that your most dedicated players, your biggest supporters, spent months of time and money on. Team synergy, already fragile, is now pretty much meaningless. It's just a HP/protection and DPS race, a battle of extreme stats.

Once again, you received feedback, from your own QA team no less - and completely ignored it. Leading to...

Pre-Crafting 2.0

This is why we're here today, in this mess. This is the one you probably can't come back from.

As soon as INRAJ made his first post on mod changes, I called it (proof):

https://forums.galaxy-of-heroes.starwars.ea.com/discussion/comment/548403/#Comment_548403

It's the 14th reply on the thread, "Don't create pre-crafting version 2". So with all of that feedback, with players abandoning the game left, right and centre, what did you do? You ignored all of that and "fixed" the ONE thing that NOBODY was complaining about. You made mods harder to get, and you made them more expensive to level up.

The icing on the cake, as if this wasn't enough, is the fact that the tiny, verging on insulting increase in GW rewards is dwarfed by the increase in mod levelling costs.

Is that not enough? Okay, throw in another stealth buff on raid tenacity, nullifying the benefits of the potency scanners you sold us for crystals.

This isn't just pouring salt on the wound, there is actually no metaphor that adequately sums up how ill-judged this decision was. I've never witnessed a company embracing self-destruction to this degree before.

New Problems with Mod Acquisition

• Cantina energy is the slowest to regenerate and the most expensive to refresh
  
• Farming mods makes farming cantina nodes for characters impossible, even though you MUST farm 3 character nodes for daily achievements
  
• Getting a mod from 16 cantina energy is now a small percentage chance, down from 100% - a slap in the face
  
• Getting a 5* mod, rather than a 4* or a 3* mod, is now an even smaller chance, again down from 100% - a second slap in the face
  

Here's the new "circle of life" you've created:

• Many players who have reached the endgame and had available funds, myself included, have pre-crafted over 100 5* mods
  
• Players who couldn't, due to levels or funds, cannot realistically catch up EVER - keep reading
  
• A lack of mods leads to a lack of arena rank, which leads to a lack of crystals, which leads to a lack of cantina energy refreshing
  
• A lack of mods also leads to a lack of ability to complete GW, so also a lack of credits which are needed to level and unslot mods
  

Sorry @EA_Jesse but you do NOT listen to feedback. Time and time again you do the complete opposite. If you do listen to feedback, and you do the opposite regardless, then we are wasting our time providing it.

In your defence, you mentioned buffing Anakin. Please, weigh that statement with the cases illustrated above. There is no comparison.

The biggest whale guild in the game, TI, is going F2P. Are you listening to them? My guild, just one among many, has lost over 10 players this week. Are you noticing or caring? How are chromium pack sales going, how many Codys are there around today?

If you're serious about clearing up these forums and getting the remaining players on-side, it starts with A: listening to feedback and then B: actually doing something positive with it.

Thanks for listening!