SWGOH: Q&A w/Producers - 3/17/18
And we're done for the evening, thanks to everyone for participating! We are going home, and will be leaving this open for reference and discussion. Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes Producers here: C...
Forum Discussion
Is TW on the verge of going away?
If it is staying for the long haul, are you open to player input about the match making and rewards structure?
Territory Wars are not on the verge of going away, Territory Battles and Territory Wars were two modes that were intended to satisfy different player types. Battles is where people with collections can show off and Wars is where people who are particularly good at PVP can show off. That's a real simplification of all the intention, but they are meant to be hand in hand in that way.
The ties solution had the objective to be granular enough to really address ties. Some suggestions we pulled from our beta team had different solutions but weren't granular enough to knock them out completely. Ties, btw, are basically gone at this point - but we expect them to come back as players get better and better.
That being said, we are open to player feedback for sure, and part of our communication strategy is going to be about how we can better create two-way dialogue on topics like these.
Are 7 dot mods and level cap increase coming? We have several people dedicating a lot of resources and time into upgrading the already existing content, I believe it is a warranted question to ask to know if this is going to cripple us in the long run.
Both the mod system and level system are designed to accommodate future increases in levels. We are not planning to change either in the very near term, but eventually they will be.
Will we start getting a new beta testing process in place? We know only specific players are given access to the beta gameplay however those same folks are utilizing that time to “test the game” to prepare their own rosters to exploit bugs while they last, not report the bugs the correct ways to your teams, and then reap the benefits until your team fixes it. This is not only an unfair practice to everyday players but also creates an even wider gap between your core player base and the elites that are given this special access. I hope you can understand why this is important to your core player base.
We're constantly looking for more ways to engage with players about upcoming/unrevealed content. There's a balancing act here that's tricky for us, insofar that we have to get enough players engaged so that the results are relevant and we can make useful changes, but also do our best to protect against leaks and other information getting into the general wild before we are ready to deploy. We have recently deployed an unrestricted beta that anyone could sign up for with Territory Wars and deployed a modified "obscured" beta for the Sith Triumvirate. This is an indicator of our desire to find a way that the beta can fit everyone (including us).
Can we please get a constant flow of professional communication? There are various times when we can’t get an answer to important community questions and issues for months. Even if we could just know it’s getting worked on or receive an update once a week on things being addressed/worked on we would all be extremely grateful
Improving the cadence and quality of our communication is a strong desire of the team. What you're seeing tonight is an effort in that direction. In the coming weeks, I will publish an updated plan for how we plan to keep the communication flowing.
what is the point of boosting "galactic hero" potency by 30% when the raid boss stacks 50% each turn? Doesn't this make the bonus a total waste? Why not just make all the bosses immune to tmr like sion. That would open up raid strategies for many more squads as well.
As we recently detailed in one of my posts, Raids are time capsules. As the game changes, teams and squads that were once relevant in the beginning may drop out in favor of squads that have recently become relevant. The Galactic Hero tag may not seem relevant now, but may become relevant later. Regarding why not make all the Raid Bosses immune to TMR, the simple answer is that we intended some to be immune to TMR and others not. Again as the game changes, some strategies that couldn't be executed may become available later.
Here is what I would like to know about:
Any plan for gear that we have THOUSANDS of piled up? Sell back? Trade up? Something?
The game used to have a way to sell gear and other items. We removed it early on for two reasons: 1) Based on the economy, each item sold yielded very little in terms of Credits; 2) Players would sometimes sell valuable items accidentally which wasn't a great experience. With the addition of Territory Battles and somewhat to a lesser extent Territory Wars, there are more reasons to gear up and otherwise progress all of your characters. Given that, were we to allow players to "burn off" some of the lower-tier items and then bring out a feature that incentivized or even required the progression of other characters, that would also lead to a bad experience. Bottom line, we currently have no plans to convert these overages, and the above explains why we currently don't allow conversion. Hope that makes sense.
Any MOD management plans in the future?
We know that Mod Management is one of the hottest topics in the community (along with raid tickets which we fixed, and multi-bronzium purchase, which we have not). It's a much bigger solve than something we can do in a Quality of Life update, but know that it is top of mind. We are talking about what we need to do to improve the clarity of the system, make it easier to use, and make it more balanced across all the different mod types.
Cadence of Legendary Events?....everyone was tracking a later date on BB/JTR based on previous ones and got a 2 day warning and were totally unprepared, why does this have to be so random and so last minute
: We absolutely want to clarify the cadence. After we post our communication strategy, we will systematically answer a number of questions that the community has. One of those topics will be the cadence of Legendary events.
Character Release cadence?...it was established at one point and then broken multiple times and now it's just non-existant, especially with a previous road ahead post standing farming for Talzin, Wicket, Nightsister Spirit etc....and still nothing
: Similar to the above, we actually have forthcoming communication coming about the Character Release Cadence. We're not ready to unveil it yet, but I can tell you that we are looking to reaffirm it very soon and better articulate the timings, placements, and why we changed some in the past. This is an important topic to us and we're going to bringing this to the players soon. Regarding Talzin and company, we tried something new with the Heroic Event series and it didn't work the way we intended. We'll have a disposition on them soon.
Sith Raid? Even with the nerf JTR does over 2x more dmg than any other team on any phase basically so without your entire guild having JTR it's just pointless....what is the point of this, our guild won't be able to progress to next tier until next JTR release now since this one was much faster than others, 3-4-5-6 months who knows?
We recently posted about our intentionality around RJT, Expose and the Sith Raid's difficulty. I would say that's the clearest answer to our reasoning around RJT and would refer you to that.
With the changes that have occured with online loot boxes/crates on Apple and others is there going to ever be more transparency on odds of rewards when purchasing a box with a certain amount in it. How about the challenges, it says it's possible to get 7 of an item but I don't think it is possible as noone ever has, isn't this false advertising?
Regarding the Apple policy regarding drop rates, we are aware of this policy and are working with Apple on what that means for our game. We don't have specifics at this time.
Carrie, Eric and Nick,
Thank you for this unprecedented opportunity to ask questions concerning the game. My name is Maegor, and I am an admin on a discord server for guild leaders, named Make SWGoH Great Again, that guild leaders and officers of just shy of 1,000 guilds, ranging from the very top guilds to new guilds.
We have formally written and forwarded three letters to your design team in the past. I guess my first question is have those letters been seen by you and other “higher ups” within CG? And if so, we would appreciate any honest feedback about the content of the letters. Are they helpful to your team and would you like us to continue to send them when there is a consensus of a problem among guild leaders?
Hi Maegor, I'm sorry but I don't know precisely which letters you're referring to. We receive a lot of input and communication from people on our team who work in the forums, with beta testers, influencers, Customer Support, QA, etc. So sometimes we don't know where feedback came from always, but I would need more info to say for sure. The best way to get feedback to our design team is through one of those channels (beta testers, influencers, forums, Customer Support).
Moving on to the sith raid, I feel that currently there is an issue with the amount of health in the T6 and below tiers of the new raid. Please know that my guild is currently running heroic, so this issue does not directly affect me. But many guild leaders are discussing player ennui with the new raid because there is constantly one active. The issue is that as soon as you can defeat a T6 in the amount of time that you can actually deplete your raid tickets, you are ready for heroic. Right now, the rule of thumb is that if you can do t6 in under two resets, you are ready for heroic. I think if t6 and below had a 25-35% cut in health across the board, you would see less frustration with the new raid from guilds that cannot complete heroic.
RE: Sith Raid Health: I appreciate the feedback on the health of the raid. We tried some new things with the Sith Triumvirate regarding mechanics. We want players to engage with these mechanics deeply. In our testing, maximizing the mechanics tends to result in higher performance. This is intentional on our part.
However, we are constantly evaluating the player's experience with the raids through a combination of data we collect on our side and player sentiment through the forums to see if there is drift from our expectations. At present, we're happy with the health of the raid and how players are making their way through it. If we begin to see something that causes major concern, we'll address as soon as reasonably possible.
On this post:
https://forums.galaxy-of-heroes.starwars.ea.com/discussion/155669/content-update-1-25-2018#latest
you mentioned that Wicket and the NS would be coming to the table as farmable toons in the future. Would it be possible to get an update on when this will be happening?
Above Nick answered a question about the character cadence and that we plan to release more info about that in the coming weeks. We will make sure this specifically is answered then.
Hello,
First I would like to say thank you for taking the time out of your weekend to answer player questions and concerns.
My question pertains to mods, more specifically, why saved mod sets have not been implemented.
Thanks Amish. Mod sets has an answer above, but thank you for taking the time to suggest some ideas, I've logged it for our discussions. We will definitely be asking the community for more input when it is getting closer to the implementation date.
Between the two CG members who engage with the community most often, there is a severe lack of proffesionalism, and this worries me more than anything else in the game right now...
First off, thanks for taking the time to participate in this Q&A. You raise a good topic, and it's something we've worked on really since the launch of the game. There is a lot of passion on both sides of the conversation (from the players and from the team) and this can sometimes lead to elevated levels of emotion. At times, this can be positive, of course. But I also know it can turn toxic. That is something we would really like to fix -- and it's going to take effort from both sides. We're hoping that this Q&A tonight is a good next step in getting to a better level of communication. As tonight progresses and as we keep things moving over the coming days and week, we're hoping that we will be able to achieve a more regular cadence of clear messaging from our side, along with a reduction of angst / anger / toxicity across the board.
Greetings,
I have a couple of DS TB issues that I have posted over at answers and never have gotten a response on.
Issue 1: Dark Side Territory Phase 5 has improper distribution of TB Points required.
Issue 2: Dark Side Squads and Platoons have incorrect point bonuses when compared to light side configurations.
1. RE: TB Point Distribution: As we work with our feature systems, we regularly try new things with new content. What you're pointing to is something we intentionally changed for the DSTB (similar to the number of waves, faction requirements, etc.) and how we reward collection size.
2. RE: Incorrect Point Bonuses: I'd need to see some specifics, but I'm not aware of any bugs with the DSTB Squads and Platoons. We do have QA file bugs that are posted on Answers HQ, so please start there and we will look into it.
We regularly review our larger pieces of content. At some point, LSTB and DSTB will come up and we'll determine if there's any changes we need to make. There are things we like about each and we also like that they're different - later content is intentionally more challenging to match increased power levels, but we don't want it to be prohibitively difficult.
There are a few bugs and AI issues that have been present, both in the past and currently, which I believe should be addressed.
So Q:
What exactly is the timeline in how an AI issue is evaluated and approached? From the time a bug or AI issue is posted on Answers HQ or here, what would be the expected turnaround time for the issue to be fixed?
1. RE: Bugs/AI: I just personally wrote these down and will make sure they're logged in our JIRA (bug tracking database). I don't have an answer for you right now, but I'll look into it.
2. RE: AI Evaluation Generally: It varies, honestly. Length of time depends on if we have a big piece of content we're working on in the background (like the Sith Triumvirate) and whether it is an issue from a design intent perspective and a system capability perspective. So the answer is ultimately it depends, but we largely treat them alot like other bugs. How many people are affected? Is it outside our design? Etc. I can tell you that the design team and I regularly talk about AI priorities and issues on a weekly basis, so it's not something we ignore.
Hello!! Can you provide any clarity on why a more complex TW pairing method is superior to simply matching closely on GP of participating members? Shouldn't GP capture additional factors like # of G12, rosters, etc...?
GP while intended to reflect the overall power of characters doesn't always capture the nuance of good synergies and so while it can be a benchmark for overall power - it is actually not sufficient for something as intricate as matchmaking. Nightsisters are good example of where the GP doesn't reflect the power of the squad.
If we can only get one question, I’d like to talk through raids. Questions in order of priority for me if you can grab more.
1) What is the plan to address raids going forwards, and the time commitment required? As we continue to stack more raids onto our plates, all of which as still have much needed rewards, they become harder to schedule and more time consuming to deal with. An eventual 4th raid and onwards would be even more difficult.
Hi medetec - One way in which time should be reduced for Raids is that Guilds should "level up" as they progress in the overall game and thus the Rancor Raid Heroic can go on farm mode while the Guild is still challenged by the AAT Raid. And, then once the AAT Heroic goes on farm mode, the Guild can tackle the Sith Triumvirate Raid. This is something I've taken from many years in MMO games.
Beyond that, we are talking about other ways to make Raids easier to manage for the guild leaders and the guild members. We've just posed a question to our beta testers about an idea we have for raid management auto-join and auto-start. This doesn't mean that work is imminent, but usually when we feel good about something we want to do, the next step is to ask for feedback from our beta group and influencers, and then we go about figuring out when it's going to be in the game.
Also we are reviewing Raid rewards, but are not ready to share any changes there.
QUESTION: AaronBurrSir] Is there a technical reason in why we can't do Bronzium multipulls?
The technical answer is that handling a massive number of drops is not currently supported in the game. That said, it would be possible (with work) to enable that. We have been talking about what to do with the Bronzium packs and system overall, and haven't yet landed on where we think this aspect of the game should go yet. All that currency was introduced with the tournament system and was intended to be used for that. We weren't prepared for it to be used only for bronzium packs, so it will be more challenging than simply enabling that functionality.
Hey CG,
What precautions will you put in place to protect players, especially minors, from the gambling aspects of the game...particularly anything where the odds aren't clear and money is involved...crystal drops for characters, etc?
This is obviously a very touchy subject. Aspects of chance and random outcomes have existed in games and collection activities throughout the ages. Consider baseball card packs, or collectible card games like Magic: The Gathering, or even rolling dice in D&D or other table top games. A fundamental theme to these types of games -- both in the collection of characters and items as well as in the combat or gameplay -- is randomness and chance. Our game is a hybrid RPG / CCG (Role Playing Game / Collectible Card Game). And, like its predecessors, we likewise have random outcomes woven throughout the experience.
QUESTION: Rak_Frondar] Can you guys talk about your plans for ships?
The short answer is not at this time. The reason we don't answer direct questions about things we are planning on working on sometime in the future is because after we start implementation, we can cause missed expectations if we need to change plans. However, we are presently evaluating/re-evaluating the whole feature and should have something to share in the coming months.
If it is staying for the long haul, are you open to player input about the match making and rewards structure?
Territory Wars are not on the verge of going away, Territory Battles and Territory Wars were two modes that were intended to satisfy different player types. Battles is where people with collections can show off and Wars is where people who are particularly good at PVP can show off. That's a real simplification of all the intention, but they are meant to be hand in hand in that way.
The ties solution had the objective to be granular enough to really address ties. Some suggestions we pulled from our beta team had different solutions but weren't granular enough to knock them out completely. Ties, btw, are basically gone at this point - but we expect them to come back as players get better and better.
That being said, we are open to player feedback for sure, and part of our communication strategy is going to be about how we can better create two-way dialogue on topics like these.
Are 7 dot mods and level cap increase coming? We have several people dedicating a lot of resources and time into upgrading the already existing content, I believe it is a warranted question to ask to know if this is going to cripple us in the long run.
Both the mod system and level system are designed to accommodate future increases in levels. We are not planning to change either in the very near term, but eventually they will be.
Will we start getting a new beta testing process in place? We know only specific players are given access to the beta gameplay however those same folks are utilizing that time to “test the game” to prepare their own rosters to exploit bugs while they last, not report the bugs the correct ways to your teams, and then reap the benefits until your team fixes it. This is not only an unfair practice to everyday players but also creates an even wider gap between your core player base and the elites that are given this special access. I hope you can understand why this is important to your core player base.
We're constantly looking for more ways to engage with players about upcoming/unrevealed content. There's a balancing act here that's tricky for us, insofar that we have to get enough players engaged so that the results are relevant and we can make useful changes, but also do our best to protect against leaks and other information getting into the general wild before we are ready to deploy. We have recently deployed an unrestricted beta that anyone could sign up for with Territory Wars and deployed a modified "obscured" beta for the Sith Triumvirate. This is an indicator of our desire to find a way that the beta can fit everyone (including us).
Can we please get a constant flow of professional communication? There are various times when we can’t get an answer to important community questions and issues for months. Even if we could just know it’s getting worked on or receive an update once a week on things being addressed/worked on we would all be extremely grateful
Improving the cadence and quality of our communication is a strong desire of the team. What you're seeing tonight is an effort in that direction. In the coming weeks, I will publish an updated plan for how we plan to keep the communication flowing.
what is the point of boosting "galactic hero" potency by 30% when the raid boss stacks 50% each turn? Doesn't this make the bonus a total waste? Why not just make all the bosses immune to tmr like sion. That would open up raid strategies for many more squads as well.
As we recently detailed in one of my posts, Raids are time capsules. As the game changes, teams and squads that were once relevant in the beginning may drop out in favor of squads that have recently become relevant. The Galactic Hero tag may not seem relevant now, but may become relevant later. Regarding why not make all the Raid Bosses immune to TMR, the simple answer is that we intended some to be immune to TMR and others not. Again as the game changes, some strategies that couldn't be executed may become available later.
Here is what I would like to know about:
Any plan for gear that we have THOUSANDS of piled up? Sell back? Trade up? Something?
The game used to have a way to sell gear and other items. We removed it early on for two reasons: 1) Based on the economy, each item sold yielded very little in terms of Credits; 2) Players would sometimes sell valuable items accidentally which wasn't a great experience. With the addition of Territory Battles and somewhat to a lesser extent Territory Wars, there are more reasons to gear up and otherwise progress all of your characters. Given that, were we to allow players to "burn off" some of the lower-tier items and then bring out a feature that incentivized or even required the progression of other characters, that would also lead to a bad experience. Bottom line, we currently have no plans to convert these overages, and the above explains why we currently don't allow conversion. Hope that makes sense.
Any MOD management plans in the future?
We know that Mod Management is one of the hottest topics in the community (along with raid tickets which we fixed, and multi-bronzium purchase, which we have not). It's a much bigger solve than something we can do in a Quality of Life update, but know that it is top of mind. We are talking about what we need to do to improve the clarity of the system, make it easier to use, and make it more balanced across all the different mod types.
Cadence of Legendary Events?....everyone was tracking a later date on BB/JTR based on previous ones and got a 2 day warning and were totally unprepared, why does this have to be so random and so last minute
: We absolutely want to clarify the cadence. After we post our communication strategy, we will systematically answer a number of questions that the community has. One of those topics will be the cadence of Legendary events.
Character Release cadence?...it was established at one point and then broken multiple times and now it's just non-existant, especially with a previous road ahead post standing farming for Talzin, Wicket, Nightsister Spirit etc....and still nothing
: Similar to the above, we actually have forthcoming communication coming about the Character Release Cadence. We're not ready to unveil it yet, but I can tell you that we are looking to reaffirm it very soon and better articulate the timings, placements, and why we changed some in the past. This is an important topic to us and we're going to bringing this to the players soon. Regarding Talzin and company, we tried something new with the Heroic Event series and it didn't work the way we intended. We'll have a disposition on them soon.
Sith Raid? Even with the nerf JTR does over 2x more dmg than any other team on any phase basically so without your entire guild having JTR it's just pointless....what is the point of this, our guild won't be able to progress to next tier until next JTR release now since this one was much faster than others, 3-4-5-6 months who knows?
We recently posted about our intentionality around RJT, Expose and the Sith Raid's difficulty. I would say that's the clearest answer to our reasoning around RJT and would refer you to that.
With the changes that have occured with online loot boxes/crates on Apple and others is there going to ever be more transparency on odds of rewards when purchasing a box with a certain amount in it. How about the challenges, it says it's possible to get 7 of an item but I don't think it is possible as noone ever has, isn't this false advertising?
Regarding the Apple policy regarding drop rates, we are aware of this policy and are working with Apple on what that means for our game. We don't have specifics at this time.
Carrie, Eric and Nick,
Thank you for this unprecedented opportunity to ask questions concerning the game. My name is Maegor, and I am an admin on a discord server for guild leaders, named Make SWGoH Great Again, that guild leaders and officers of just shy of 1,000 guilds, ranging from the very top guilds to new guilds.
We have formally written and forwarded three letters to your design team in the past. I guess my first question is have those letters been seen by you and other “higher ups” within CG? And if so, we would appreciate any honest feedback about the content of the letters. Are they helpful to your team and would you like us to continue to send them when there is a consensus of a problem among guild leaders?
Hi Maegor, I'm sorry but I don't know precisely which letters you're referring to. We receive a lot of input and communication from people on our team who work in the forums, with beta testers, influencers, Customer Support, QA, etc. So sometimes we don't know where feedback came from always, but I would need more info to say for sure. The best way to get feedback to our design team is through one of those channels (beta testers, influencers, forums, Customer Support).
Moving on to the sith raid, I feel that currently there is an issue with the amount of health in the T6 and below tiers of the new raid. Please know that my guild is currently running heroic, so this issue does not directly affect me. But many guild leaders are discussing player ennui with the new raid because there is constantly one active. The issue is that as soon as you can defeat a T6 in the amount of time that you can actually deplete your raid tickets, you are ready for heroic. Right now, the rule of thumb is that if you can do t6 in under two resets, you are ready for heroic. I think if t6 and below had a 25-35% cut in health across the board, you would see less frustration with the new raid from guilds that cannot complete heroic.
RE: Sith Raid Health: I appreciate the feedback on the health of the raid. We tried some new things with the Sith Triumvirate regarding mechanics. We want players to engage with these mechanics deeply. In our testing, maximizing the mechanics tends to result in higher performance. This is intentional on our part.
However, we are constantly evaluating the player's experience with the raids through a combination of data we collect on our side and player sentiment through the forums to see if there is drift from our expectations. At present, we're happy with the health of the raid and how players are making their way through it. If we begin to see something that causes major concern, we'll address as soon as reasonably possible.
On this post:
https://forums.galaxy-of-heroes.starwars.ea.com/discussion/155669/content-update-1-25-2018#latest
you mentioned that Wicket and the NS would be coming to the table as farmable toons in the future. Would it be possible to get an update on when this will be happening?
Above Nick answered a question about the character cadence and that we plan to release more info about that in the coming weeks. We will make sure this specifically is answered then.
Hello,
First I would like to say thank you for taking the time out of your weekend to answer player questions and concerns.
My question pertains to mods, more specifically, why saved mod sets have not been implemented.
Thanks Amish. Mod sets has an answer above, but thank you for taking the time to suggest some ideas, I've logged it for our discussions. We will definitely be asking the community for more input when it is getting closer to the implementation date.
Between the two CG members who engage with the community most often, there is a severe lack of proffesionalism, and this worries me more than anything else in the game right now...
First off, thanks for taking the time to participate in this Q&A. You raise a good topic, and it's something we've worked on really since the launch of the game. There is a lot of passion on both sides of the conversation (from the players and from the team) and this can sometimes lead to elevated levels of emotion. At times, this can be positive, of course. But I also know it can turn toxic. That is something we would really like to fix -- and it's going to take effort from both sides. We're hoping that this Q&A tonight is a good next step in getting to a better level of communication. As tonight progresses and as we keep things moving over the coming days and week, we're hoping that we will be able to achieve a more regular cadence of clear messaging from our side, along with a reduction of angst / anger / toxicity across the board.
Greetings,
I have a couple of DS TB issues that I have posted over at answers and never have gotten a response on.
Issue 1: Dark Side Territory Phase 5 has improper distribution of TB Points required.
Issue 2: Dark Side Squads and Platoons have incorrect point bonuses when compared to light side configurations.
1. RE: TB Point Distribution: As we work with our feature systems, we regularly try new things with new content. What you're pointing to is something we intentionally changed for the DSTB (similar to the number of waves, faction requirements, etc.) and how we reward collection size.
2. RE: Incorrect Point Bonuses: I'd need to see some specifics, but I'm not aware of any bugs with the DSTB Squads and Platoons. We do have QA file bugs that are posted on Answers HQ, so please start there and we will look into it.
We regularly review our larger pieces of content. At some point, LSTB and DSTB will come up and we'll determine if there's any changes we need to make. There are things we like about each and we also like that they're different - later content is intentionally more challenging to match increased power levels, but we don't want it to be prohibitively difficult.
There are a few bugs and AI issues that have been present, both in the past and currently, which I believe should be addressed.
So Q:
What exactly is the timeline in how an AI issue is evaluated and approached? From the time a bug or AI issue is posted on Answers HQ or here, what would be the expected turnaround time for the issue to be fixed?
1. RE: Bugs/AI: I just personally wrote these down and will make sure they're logged in our JIRA (bug tracking database). I don't have an answer for you right now, but I'll look into it.
2. RE: AI Evaluation Generally: It varies, honestly. Length of time depends on if we have a big piece of content we're working on in the background (like the Sith Triumvirate) and whether it is an issue from a design intent perspective and a system capability perspective. So the answer is ultimately it depends, but we largely treat them alot like other bugs. How many people are affected? Is it outside our design? Etc. I can tell you that the design team and I regularly talk about AI priorities and issues on a weekly basis, so it's not something we ignore.
Hello!! Can you provide any clarity on why a more complex TW pairing method is superior to simply matching closely on GP of participating members? Shouldn't GP capture additional factors like # of G12, rosters, etc...?
GP while intended to reflect the overall power of characters doesn't always capture the nuance of good synergies and so while it can be a benchmark for overall power - it is actually not sufficient for something as intricate as matchmaking. Nightsisters are good example of where the GP doesn't reflect the power of the squad.
If we can only get one question, I’d like to talk through raids. Questions in order of priority for me if you can grab more.
1) What is the plan to address raids going forwards, and the time commitment required? As we continue to stack more raids onto our plates, all of which as still have much needed rewards, they become harder to schedule and more time consuming to deal with. An eventual 4th raid and onwards would be even more difficult.
Hi medetec - One way in which time should be reduced for Raids is that Guilds should "level up" as they progress in the overall game and thus the Rancor Raid Heroic can go on farm mode while the Guild is still challenged by the AAT Raid. And, then once the AAT Heroic goes on farm mode, the Guild can tackle the Sith Triumvirate Raid. This is something I've taken from many years in MMO games.
Beyond that, we are talking about other ways to make Raids easier to manage for the guild leaders and the guild members. We've just posed a question to our beta testers about an idea we have for raid management auto-join and auto-start. This doesn't mean that work is imminent, but usually when we feel good about something we want to do, the next step is to ask for feedback from our beta group and influencers, and then we go about figuring out when it's going to be in the game.
Also we are reviewing Raid rewards, but are not ready to share any changes there.
QUESTION: AaronBurrSir] Is there a technical reason in why we can't do Bronzium multipulls?
The technical answer is that handling a massive number of drops is not currently supported in the game. That said, it would be possible (with work) to enable that. We have been talking about what to do with the Bronzium packs and system overall, and haven't yet landed on where we think this aspect of the game should go yet. All that currency was introduced with the tournament system and was intended to be used for that. We weren't prepared for it to be used only for bronzium packs, so it will be more challenging than simply enabling that functionality.
Hey CG,
What precautions will you put in place to protect players, especially minors, from the gambling aspects of the game...particularly anything where the odds aren't clear and money is involved...crystal drops for characters, etc?
This is obviously a very touchy subject. Aspects of chance and random outcomes have existed in games and collection activities throughout the ages. Consider baseball card packs, or collectible card games like Magic: The Gathering, or even rolling dice in D&D or other table top games. A fundamental theme to these types of games -- both in the collection of characters and items as well as in the combat or gameplay -- is randomness and chance. Our game is a hybrid RPG / CCG (Role Playing Game / Collectible Card Game). And, like its predecessors, we likewise have random outcomes woven throughout the experience.
QUESTION: Rak_Frondar] Can you guys talk about your plans for ships?
The short answer is not at this time. The reason we don't answer direct questions about things we are planning on working on sometime in the future is because after we start implementation, we can cause missed expectations if we need to change plans. However, we are presently evaluating/re-evaluating the whole feature and should have something to share in the coming months.
