The state of the galaxy: a player’s perspective

moved to better sub forum for better dev visibility.

The big things that I could say, others already said.

SoccorboyAP-

||||RAIDS||||
- Auto register all guild members when raids are launched
- Recalculate drop rates, Heroic HAAT should drop more gear boxes (3 at low rank, 5 at high rank) even at a lower rank

||||USER INTERFACE||||
- Mod Manager/Mod Sets/Mod Costs
- Balance energy generation/usage/refresh cost (stop making Cantina energy a gate)
- Fix Buff/Debuff markers
- Show Turn Meter on upper right hand corner enemy display (along with protection/health)
- Show #'s on enemy prot/health/tm... a bar isn't sufficient to determine combat details
- PLEASE shuffle the gear each month in the daily challenges... we have THOUSANDS of pieces of useless gear because it's underutilised.... but we keep getting more daily from challenges.

||||CHARACTERS||||
- No New Characters... take a hiatus (6 months minimum.... after TLJ), we are tired of chase grinding
- Don't add more gear levels, change the structure of how all gear is used
- Stop adding more levels to grind out 5 tiers of mods to create one high level gear piece, make a gear piece
associated only to its own level.
- No more OP characters... Thrawn, Palpatine, R2, CLS have all thrown a major rift in the game and drastically shift the balance of power in the game. Also, making these short notice events leaves many people waiting until the next legendary event leaving those players WAY behind the power curve.. CLS is needed for TB but those who missed him are now far less useful in TB.
- Record player combat actions from Arena top matches and use that player generated data to make a smarter AI. The AI for AUTO is very dumb.... both in characters and ships.

||||GUILD||||
- Give guild leaders/officers more tools to manage/track their guilds
- Guild vault, allow guilds to help their members more than just one gear request every 24hrs. Also allow more than just gear to be exchanged; mods, gear, money, shards, store currencies, ability mats, etc

||||GALACTIC WAR|||||
- Adjust the power levels per node, when a player who has NO G12 characters has a node 12 with all G12 characters (plus Zeta's)... this makes GW for the regular player, impossible. Or we are using (taking a lot of time) to run 3, 4, 5 G11/G10 teams to beat Node 12.

Along with The Zebestain-

1. Yes, there's too many Zeta abilities upgrades for not enough Zeta materials available.

2. The gear pieces there are currently used in the game are unbalanced. Too many of one kind, not enough of the other one. Also, there are many holding stages for leveling a character's gear up (too many salvage pieces from level 9 to 10, many more from 10 to 11 and so on) and with each new gear tier, this is going to be increasingly harder. So why not ease the previous gear crunch after the launch of a new gear tier?

3. The Raid rewards are unbalanced. Let's say that 21 people solo the Rancor, they will all have the same amount of damage inflicted (or pretty close) and then two of them get very different rewards because by randomness one is ranked at 1 and the other at 21. Why don't give rewards based on the damage done?

4. The rewards given for a prize box are mostly undesired for many people. And I'm not talking about the possible ones, it's about the one you actually get when you open the box. There should be a smarter prize system where it identifies a disered gear piece based on your favourite list (or something like that)

5. Many people have different commitments and can't login every other hour. But the game has too many cooldowns in various areas or some features need at lot of time to complete (hello territory battle) and this is becoming less player friendly. The Flash Events weren't player friendly either, exactly because if you wanted to do it every time it came around, you'd need to login every now and then.

6. About mods: moving them around should be easier and there should be a separate energy for them, because players who just are relatively new to the game have this huge dilemma "Do I spend Cantina Energy to farm all the characters I need in the the many different areas of the game or do I farm mods to improve this or that character?"

7. The game updates kinda weird as of now. For example, in one forum post, it was hinted that Thrawn would come back along with a Phoenix improvement, but in October's monthly schedule post, there was no mention about this event and then, out of nowhere, Thrawn event was announced return.

8. Recently, there are too many legendary events. Aren't these supposed to be a rare occasion?

9. Character cadence is really lackluster as of now.

10. Some commented that all solutions that were said on this video don't give money to the developers directly, but I disagree. Because this is kinda scaring people away. I started playing the game with about 5 other friends. Now, we are 2. And those who left, said basically that they weren't happy with the game anymore

MOD sets won't happen. Everyone just needs farm more mods. MOD sets would be similar to moving character shards between characters...

It would be like being able to move gear between characters, basically everyone would only need one set of gear or MOD Set to just move between whichever 5 characters they are using for a raid, arena, TB, or challenge etc.

Keep farming until every character has their own MOD set. Problem solved.

Very nice video.

"Rogee;c-1309597" wrote:
MOD sets won't happen. Everyone just needs farm more mods. MOD sets would be similar to moving character shards between characters...

It would be like being able to move gear between characters, basically everyone would only need one set of gear or MOD Set to just move between whichever 5 characters they are using for a raid, arena, TB, or challenge etc.

Keep farming until every character has their own MOD set. Problem solved.

It wouldn't be like moving gear. Gear is permanent. Mods can be moved. It's just a giant time draining pain in the kitten to move mods around. Saving sets that can be removed with a click, and moved to another toon would be a nice time saver. Any reason why you like arbitrarily forcing people to waste time?

"JacenRoe;c-1309609" wrote:
Very nice video.

"Rogee;c-1309597" wrote:
MOD sets won't happen. Everyone just needs farm more mods. MOD sets would be similar to moving character shards between characters...

It would be like being able to move gear between characters, basically everyone would only need one set of gear or MOD Set to just move between whichever 5 characters they are using for a raid, arena, TB, or challenge etc.

Keep farming until every character has their own MOD set. Problem solved.

It wouldn't be like moving gear. Gear is permanent. Mods can be moved. It's just a giant time draining pain in the kitten to move mods around. Saving sets that can be removed with a click, and moved to another toon would be a nice time saver. Any reason why you like arbitrarily forcing people to waste time?

Don't forget wasting credits as well, since it costs credits to move each mod. Be nice if there was a bit of an easier time earning credits, instead of relying on a possible credit heist every other week, that may or may not pay anything good.

I kinda agree with many suggestions in that vid.

Ditto. He explained a great way to solve many of the issues without sacrificing profits.

Some alternatives/different ideas.

Challenges: Change this to the more away team style of SW:tor, Where you can assign characters to it and they collect gear/credits/mats/etc over time. Though this is a much bigger change than mcmole's suggestion, it would allow people to inattentively direct grind.

Mods: instead of dropping useless mods that we then need to sell, have a setting that would allow a minimum accepted mod, ex. 5pip purple, if that doestn't come up in the rng reward just give extra credits/cantina credits/mats.

Zetas: I actually don't mind the zeta crunch, I think these "Ultimate Abilities" should be few and far between. I would like to see more purple drops though, as I am running out of these all the time trying to power up for TB.

Gear: As McMole said, there is no point to having thousands of one piece of purple gear and next to none of another. I suggest a way to sell/trade gear in for desired gear. Maybe, a gear store similar to the shard shop, where you can sell gear for credits for the store.

Stores: Speaking of stores, is there really a need for nine stores? How bout one store for each thing, Gear Store, Character Shard Store, Ship Shard Store, Mod Store, Mat Store?(Do we really need a training droid store?)

Organization: This is huge, TB was released to be an inclusive guild participation event that required a lot of guild coordination and communication. Absolutely no tools were given to this end. In game chat is garbage, character roster information non-existant, etc. CG is relying on the good people at swgoh.gg to hack their game to give anyone any information at all instead of providing it to the community in an accessible manner. I wrote scripts to help with platoon assignments, let alone the 20 minutes of data entry to type the 270 characters for each day, so my guild doesn't waste characters on platoons that won't get filled because they require 7* lobots and Paywoks. Now they are talking about guild v guild and DS TB when we don't have good tools to accomplish the original release. I like TB, I like that it could make guilds coordinate better. But, please make it a bit easier for the open source community to organize around the game. Even a paid "guild account" to give access to an api, would be acceptable so I can pull platoons down instead of typing them out, or write image recognition software to parse 18 screenshots...

Pricing: As someone who has spent some money on the game, your pricing is ridiculous. I have spent far more money on Mechwarrior online, because their pricing models are sane. I do not mind spending money on a game to support developers. But, I really don't want to support games that obviously phish for people to spend money ignorantly. MWO and LoL have superior business models and neither use gachapon style reward systems, neither have any RNG for that matter.

I do realize that some of my ideas are not easy changes, from a coding perspective, but I love Star Wars and I love the idea of this game. I want you to make it better. Let players invest their "grind" into assured rewards and not E. Skinner style suspicions off of rng. I know it takes effort to make a good game, but I hope you put forth that effort. Listen to some game designers when they talk about input/output randomness, what grinding is good for, information horizons, gachapon reward structures. My two biggest issues with the game are the randomized rewards(gachapon) and lack of organizational tools. I do hope you listen to your player base on this.

Thanks,
Damanar

Some alternatives/different ideas.

Challenges: Change this to the more away team style of SW:tor, Where you can assign characters to it and they collect gear/credits/mats/etc over time. Though this is a much bigger change than mcmole's suggestion, it would allow people to inattentively direct grind.

Mods: instead of dropping useless mods that we then need to sell, have a setting that would allow a minimum accepted mod, ex. 5pip purple, if that doestn't come up in the rng reward just give extra credits/cantina credits/mats.

Zetas: I actually don't mind the zeta crunch, I think these "Ultimate Abilities" should be few and far between. I would like to see more purple drops though, as I am running out of these all the time trying to power up for TB.

Gear: As McMole said, there is no point to having thousands of one piece of purple gear and next to none of another. I suggest a way to sell/trade gear in for desired gear. Maybe, a gear store similar to the shard shop, where you can sell gear for credits for the store.

Stores: Speaking of stores, is there really a need for nine stores? How bout one store for each thing, Gear Store, Character Shard Store, Ship Shard Store, Mod Store, Mat Store?(Do we really need a training droid store?)

Organization: This is huge, TB was released to be an inclusive guild participation event that required a lot of guild coordination and communication. Absolutely no tools were given to this end. In game chat is garbage, character roster information non-existant, etc. CG is relying on the good people at swgoh.gg to hack their game to give anyone any information at all instead of providing it to the community in an accessible manner. I wrote scripts to help with platoon assignments, let alone the 20 minutes of data entry to type the 270 characters for each day, so my guild doesn't waste characters on platoons that won't get filled because they require 7* lobots and Paywoks. Now they are talking about guild v guild and DS TB when we don't have good tools to accomplish the original release. I like TB, I like that it could make guilds coordinate better. But, please make it a bit easier for the open source community to organize around the game. Even a paid "guild account" to give access to an api, would be acceptable so I can pull platoons down instead of typing them out, or write image recognition software to parse 18 screenshots...

Pricing: As someone who has spent some money on the game, your pricing is ridiculous. I have spent far more money on Mechwarrior online, because their pricing models are sane. I do not mind spending money on a game to support developers. But, I really don't want to support games that obviously phish for people to spend money ignorantly. MWO and LoL have superior business models and neither use gachapon style reward systems, neither have any RNG for that matter.

I do realize that some of my ideas are not easy changes, from a coding perspective, but I love Star Wars and I love the idea of this game. I want you to make it better. Let players invest their "grind" into assured rewards and not E. Skinner style suspicions off of rng. I know it takes effort to make a good game, but I hope you put forth that effort. Listen to some game designers when they talk about input/output randomness, what grinding is good for, information horizons, gachapon reward structures. My two biggest issues with the game are the randomized rewards(gachapon) and lack of organizational tools. I do hope you listen to your player base on this.


Helpful links:
input/output randomness
gachapon

Thanks,
Damanar

Pretty sure I posted this video in the main section and now I am being redirected to this section (which I never knew existed). I hope people come here an blow it because McMole2 made some very good point and offered good answers.