The True Error of Galaxy of Heroes in 2016
Protection is not the issue. Mods are not the issue. Imbalanced raid rewards are not the issue. The massive power surge of characters is not the issue.
The issue that this game and the developers are continuing to create is the insurmountable gap between those that can pay to progress, "whales", those who Invest some but not much into the game, "dolphins", and free to play players, "minnows". The difference between these groups is so staggering that the discussion, in game, on the forums and reddit, and even the minimal feedback from the developers to the community as well as their continued pushing of new premium centered content and ignorance of the vocal minority is beginning to mimic the social and economic struggles that the world as a whole is experiencing on the day to day. This is bad business, for everyone.
Let's look at this from the perspective of a minnow. The following is the absolute maximum a minnow can obtain without refreshes on a daily basis from concerted play and should be the baseline for any comparison:
CREDITS:
- 600k from Galactic War.
- 270k From Rank 1 Heroic Rancor (average of total weekly credits)
- 50k from Rank 1 Arena.
- 142,857 From Credits Heist (average of total weekly credits).
- 37,440 from T8 LS/DS Battles.
- 119,957 From level 72 Credits Challenge (average of total weekly credits).
- 84,000 From T7 Squad Cantina (this is used for ease. mod credits are vastly more but variable).
- 30,000 From Daily Activity Rewards.
This totals a maximum of approximately 1.33 million credits, on average, daily, for a Minnow. That's a good amount of credits! Unfortunately, this will never happen. Free to play rosters are not robust, so the rewards values from raids, GW, and arena can be reduced drastically to half of what they would be at max due to an inability to compete. That 1.33 million is now a paltry 874k. But this starts shrinking even more. Farming hard nodes for shards? That cuts LS/DS credits down even more. Are they not farming t8 ls/ds or t7 cantina? This, again, becomes less credits. A less robust roster means no ability to complete credit heist and that is a HUGE chunk of credits gone. On Average a Minnow is lucky to, on any given day, actually max out around 650k credits. This is less than half of the maximum. This means 2 days, minimum to 7* a character from 6*.
To put this into perspective a whale can spend a paltry $5, proc a single 3x reward on one of the 8 and has just made more credits in 30 seconds than a single Minnow can manage in 24 hours. This is NOT OK. It gives any paying player a 24hr Credits advantage, minimum, over the Minnow. And he/she hasn't spent a single point of energy yet.
Credits are the lifeblood of this game. Without them you can do nothing to advance your roster. The credits difference between Minnow and Whale level is beyond acceptable and needs to be be addressed.
ENERGY:
- 375 Energy
- 120 Cantina Energy
These values assume consumption of the 3x daily 45 energy rewards.
This equates to 18-31 Hard Node attempts and 7-15 Cantina Node attempts. Let's assume a 33.33333...% chance of shard drop. This would average 6-10 shards from Hard Node attempts and 2-5 shards from Cantina Node attempts. That seems reasonable. It is less shards than other options but still a boost to get a toon to 7*. For squad Cantina that also translates into 147-195 Cantina Credits. That's 5 shards every 3rd day. 10 per week. So in total we're looking at 9-17 shards a day.
A Dolphin starts edging Minnows quickly in energy. 1 Cantina and 2 Energy refreshes are typical which means they are automatically doubling, if not tripling the character acquiring speed. Whales, again, push this to an extreme and refresh hard nodes farming that single character with multiple (sometimes 4 or more) refreshes. It causes a disparity in roster depth and credits earned.
The character acquisition strength of paying players is to be expected, but doubling the speed of acquisition, all the way to sextupling the speed leaving Minnows in a wake they can not hope to compete with is horrific.
ARENA:
- 5 Arena Attempts
I don't know a single Minnow that refreshes Arena. It is typical for them to sit in the top 1000, maybe 500, and collect one set of character shards (5) a day along with 16k or 18k Credits. This is mainly because it is impossible for them to compete with Dolphins and Whales that have been able to use other means to bolster their rosters. This is simply an area of impossibility that Minnows are penalized for. Dolphins and Whales will manage double or triple the rewards again, just by merit of money.
SHIPMENTS:
- 5 Shipment Refreshes
This applies to all shipments. It is not worth wasting crystals on a refresh for a Minnow because they do not have the resources or currency to make use of said resets. Whales can continue farming outside of the standard resets just because.
With all of that said, there is no reason to present issue without possible resolution. These are merely comment/crtitcism/idea and should be taken with a grain of salt.
LS/DS BATTLES:
- What's Right -
Hard Mode Nodes awarding Shards.
Gear and Training Droid rewards scale with energy consumption.
Low initial refresh cost.
- What's Wrong -
Credits do not scale well enough for energy investment and cost of gear crafting.
Hard Node Refreshes. There need to be 5 attempts daily with no refresh option.
Gear drop rates are beyond abysmal from t5 and up.
SQUAD CANTINA:
- What's Right -
High Credit rewards
Character Shards Drop at a reasonable rate.
- What's Wrong -
Shard drop rates need to be unified. 33%-50% chance on all nodes regardless of energy.
Less disparity in credits rewarded. 3k at T1 is reasonable and doesn't feel as harsh a penalty if we want to farm a character like Geo Soldier.
Ability 3's drop rate seems very, very low on higher tiers. Bumping it 10%-15% would incentivise the energy investment.
ARENA:
- What's Right -
Tiered reward system for Credits and Crystals.
-What's Wrong -
Tiered reward system for Arena Marks. Incentivise participating in arena by rewarding 100 marks per arena match. This becomes 700 marks per day with no refreshes.
Tiered rewards can not have such large amounts between them. 500 crystals for first is only making the rich richer (Whales).
DAILY CHALLENGES
- What's Right -
Increasing useful rewards from some of the INT/STR/AGI Challenges.
Training Droid, Credits, and Ability Challenges give excellent value for time investment.
Challenging but not impossible while at proper gear and level.
- What's Wrong -
INT/STR/AGI challenges need a level 80+ variant.
All level 72 Gear Challenges should give gear for acquiring GL9.
GALACTIC WAR
- What's Right -
Increasing credit rewards as you complete more nodes
Carried over Turn Meter from node to node.
- What's Wrong -
Difficulty level makes clearing with a roster of less than 5 teams impossible for the average player. As this is where people earn over 80% of their daily credits (needed for literally everything else) it needs to be completable.
Credit awards need to be scaled much higher than their current state (50% increase on top of the recent 150k buff.)
Protection needs to replenish after every fight. If a toon has 50%-99% protection replenish it by 25%. If 25%-49% replenish by 33%. If 1%-24% replenish 50%.if protection is gone replenish to 25%.
Difficulty spike at 6, 9, and 11. No idea how to fix without reverting to the "easy GW"
Pulling enemy teams from Arena. This is single handedly the worst option available for finding enemies and is what has resulted in the impossible node 9, 11 complaints. This issue has been exacerbated by the release of Mods.
Galactic War has so many issues that it is impossible to fix them without breaking it. I would almost rather see it turned into a mode where you Choose 5 characters and that's it. That is your team for all 5 nodes, you make it work. They are healed to full between nodes and the only advantage you keep is your turn meter gains. Endurance race against opposing teams. But this then just becomes another form of Arena with different rewards.
MODS:
- What's Right -
The ability to customize your characters
Better credits payout than Cantina to make up for loss of Shards (not enough)
- What's Wrong -
*sigh* literally everything. This needs to go back to the drawing board. The gains made, the disparity between Minnow and Whale far worse than it ever was. The ability to acquire and level the mods is night and day, everything is just wrong with it. Mods had the potential to be an amazing side venture to enhance your characters in great ways. But increasing character power by orders of magnitude is not the way to accomplish this. Factor into this the absolutely astronomical cost of Mods, in energy consumption, lost character shards, the amount of credits required to maximize them, the randomness of their rolls, and various other aspects have all just created one giant disaster.
I do not claim to be a game developer. Or have the right answer to things. The quality of life in this game for free to play players is abysmal. It is nearly as bad as a free to play account on SWTOR but that is another EA published title so I'm not at all surprised by this. I enjoyed this game. Still do somewhat...but the direction, the massive power and functionality gaps desperately need to be addressed.
Please, for the love of Star Wars, the game, your player base, and all of the possibilities this game has, reevaluate and stop the madness and gaps before it's too late.
The issue that this game and the developers are continuing to create is the insurmountable gap between those that can pay to progress, "whales", those who Invest some but not much into the game, "dolphins", and free to play players, "minnows". The difference between these groups is so staggering that the discussion, in game, on the forums and reddit, and even the minimal feedback from the developers to the community as well as their continued pushing of new premium centered content and ignorance of the vocal minority is beginning to mimic the social and economic struggles that the world as a whole is experiencing on the day to day. This is bad business, for everyone.
Let's look at this from the perspective of a minnow. The following is the absolute maximum a minnow can obtain without refreshes on a daily basis from concerted play and should be the baseline for any comparison:
CREDITS:
- 600k from Galactic War.
- 270k From Rank 1 Heroic Rancor (average of total weekly credits)
- 50k from Rank 1 Arena.
- 142,857 From Credits Heist (average of total weekly credits).
- 37,440 from T8 LS/DS Battles.
- 119,957 From level 72 Credits Challenge (average of total weekly credits).
- 84,000 From T7 Squad Cantina (this is used for ease. mod credits are vastly more but variable).
- 30,000 From Daily Activity Rewards.
This totals a maximum of approximately 1.33 million credits, on average, daily, for a Minnow. That's a good amount of credits! Unfortunately, this will never happen. Free to play rosters are not robust, so the rewards values from raids, GW, and arena can be reduced drastically to half of what they would be at max due to an inability to compete. That 1.33 million is now a paltry 874k. But this starts shrinking even more. Farming hard nodes for shards? That cuts LS/DS credits down even more. Are they not farming t8 ls/ds or t7 cantina? This, again, becomes less credits. A less robust roster means no ability to complete credit heist and that is a HUGE chunk of credits gone. On Average a Minnow is lucky to, on any given day, actually max out around 650k credits. This is less than half of the maximum. This means 2 days, minimum to 7* a character from 6*.
To put this into perspective a whale can spend a paltry $5, proc a single 3x reward on one of the 8 and has just made more credits in 30 seconds than a single Minnow can manage in 24 hours. This is NOT OK. It gives any paying player a 24hr Credits advantage, minimum, over the Minnow. And he/she hasn't spent a single point of energy yet.
Credits are the lifeblood of this game. Without them you can do nothing to advance your roster. The credits difference between Minnow and Whale level is beyond acceptable and needs to be be addressed.
ENERGY:
- 375 Energy
- 120 Cantina Energy
These values assume consumption of the 3x daily 45 energy rewards.
This equates to 18-31 Hard Node attempts and 7-15 Cantina Node attempts. Let's assume a 33.33333...% chance of shard drop. This would average 6-10 shards from Hard Node attempts and 2-5 shards from Cantina Node attempts. That seems reasonable. It is less shards than other options but still a boost to get a toon to 7*. For squad Cantina that also translates into 147-195 Cantina Credits. That's 5 shards every 3rd day. 10 per week. So in total we're looking at 9-17 shards a day.
A Dolphin starts edging Minnows quickly in energy. 1 Cantina and 2 Energy refreshes are typical which means they are automatically doubling, if not tripling the character acquiring speed. Whales, again, push this to an extreme and refresh hard nodes farming that single character with multiple (sometimes 4 or more) refreshes. It causes a disparity in roster depth and credits earned.
The character acquisition strength of paying players is to be expected, but doubling the speed of acquisition, all the way to sextupling the speed leaving Minnows in a wake they can not hope to compete with is horrific.
ARENA:
- 5 Arena Attempts
I don't know a single Minnow that refreshes Arena. It is typical for them to sit in the top 1000, maybe 500, and collect one set of character shards (5) a day along with 16k or 18k Credits. This is mainly because it is impossible for them to compete with Dolphins and Whales that have been able to use other means to bolster their rosters. This is simply an area of impossibility that Minnows are penalized for. Dolphins and Whales will manage double or triple the rewards again, just by merit of money.
SHIPMENTS:
- 5 Shipment Refreshes
This applies to all shipments. It is not worth wasting crystals on a refresh for a Minnow because they do not have the resources or currency to make use of said resets. Whales can continue farming outside of the standard resets just because.
With all of that said, there is no reason to present issue without possible resolution. These are merely comment/crtitcism/idea and should be taken with a grain of salt.
LS/DS BATTLES:
- What's Right -
Hard Mode Nodes awarding Shards.
Gear and Training Droid rewards scale with energy consumption.
Low initial refresh cost.
- What's Wrong -
Credits do not scale well enough for energy investment and cost of gear crafting.
Hard Node Refreshes. There need to be 5 attempts daily with no refresh option.
Gear drop rates are beyond abysmal from t5 and up.
SQUAD CANTINA:
- What's Right -
High Credit rewards
Character Shards Drop at a reasonable rate.
- What's Wrong -
Shard drop rates need to be unified. 33%-50% chance on all nodes regardless of energy.
Less disparity in credits rewarded. 3k at T1 is reasonable and doesn't feel as harsh a penalty if we want to farm a character like Geo Soldier.
Ability 3's drop rate seems very, very low on higher tiers. Bumping it 10%-15% would incentivise the energy investment.
ARENA:
- What's Right -
Tiered reward system for Credits and Crystals.
-What's Wrong -
Tiered reward system for Arena Marks. Incentivise participating in arena by rewarding 100 marks per arena match. This becomes 700 marks per day with no refreshes.
Tiered rewards can not have such large amounts between them. 500 crystals for first is only making the rich richer (Whales).
DAILY CHALLENGES
- What's Right -
Increasing useful rewards from some of the INT/STR/AGI Challenges.
Training Droid, Credits, and Ability Challenges give excellent value for time investment.
Challenging but not impossible while at proper gear and level.
- What's Wrong -
INT/STR/AGI challenges need a level 80+ variant.
All level 72 Gear Challenges should give gear for acquiring GL9.
GALACTIC WAR
- What's Right -
Increasing credit rewards as you complete more nodes
Carried over Turn Meter from node to node.
- What's Wrong -
Difficulty level makes clearing with a roster of less than 5 teams impossible for the average player. As this is where people earn over 80% of their daily credits (needed for literally everything else) it needs to be completable.
Credit awards need to be scaled much higher than their current state (50% increase on top of the recent 150k buff.)
Protection needs to replenish after every fight. If a toon has 50%-99% protection replenish it by 25%. If 25%-49% replenish by 33%. If 1%-24% replenish 50%.if protection is gone replenish to 25%.
Difficulty spike at 6, 9, and 11. No idea how to fix without reverting to the "easy GW"
Pulling enemy teams from Arena. This is single handedly the worst option available for finding enemies and is what has resulted in the impossible node 9, 11 complaints. This issue has been exacerbated by the release of Mods.
Galactic War has so many issues that it is impossible to fix them without breaking it. I would almost rather see it turned into a mode where you Choose 5 characters and that's it. That is your team for all 5 nodes, you make it work. They are healed to full between nodes and the only advantage you keep is your turn meter gains. Endurance race against opposing teams. But this then just becomes another form of Arena with different rewards.
MODS:
- What's Right -
The ability to customize your characters
Better credits payout than Cantina to make up for loss of Shards (not enough)
- What's Wrong -
*sigh* literally everything. This needs to go back to the drawing board. The gains made, the disparity between Minnow and Whale far worse than it ever was. The ability to acquire and level the mods is night and day, everything is just wrong with it. Mods had the potential to be an amazing side venture to enhance your characters in great ways. But increasing character power by orders of magnitude is not the way to accomplish this. Factor into this the absolutely astronomical cost of Mods, in energy consumption, lost character shards, the amount of credits required to maximize them, the randomness of their rolls, and various other aspects have all just created one giant disaster.
I do not claim to be a game developer. Or have the right answer to things. The quality of life in this game for free to play players is abysmal. It is nearly as bad as a free to play account on SWTOR but that is another EA published title so I'm not at all surprised by this. I enjoyed this game. Still do somewhat...but the direction, the massive power and functionality gaps desperately need to be addressed.
Please, for the love of Star Wars, the game, your player base, and all of the possibilities this game has, reevaluate and stop the madness and gaps before it's too late.
