We've tried...

Hiya @Muadib

We hear you. Every time we build and release new features, we learn more and this no exception. No feature has come out perfectly and we're admittedly ambitious in what we want to give our playerbase. Even so, there are things we can improve upon and feedback like yours is vital. We can and will do better.

We still have plenty of work to do, but we've come a long long way and we're super excited over what we have coming up for the rest of this and next year.

"vegoman;c-1368057" wrote:
We asked that you not lock TB territories at 3* but let officers determine a lock point.


What a thing to be upset over.

It's a long story, and since you've only posted 5 times maybe you're aware and maybe you aren't... but about a dozen officers from various guilds got together and started a thread and asked for some very specific tools to help manage TB's. What they ended up giving us wasn't close to what we asked for and this one thing specifically was way off the mark from our ask. Then there was the thread where they told us what we'd get and (we actually logged responses) 98.5% of the hundreds of responses asked for/supported this very specific ask - That they not lock them at 3*.
I know it sounds funny in a vacuum, but almost everyone who participated in this discussion asked them not to do this and they did it anyway. When nearly 100% of your active/involved player base asks you not to do something and you do it anyway....

"leef;c-1368181" wrote:
Can anyone remember that longwinded thank you post where everyone seemed to agree that the devs were awesome? 22 pages or something.
Why? because they changed the hoth rebel soldier requirements back to 5 stars.
Good times, good times. Try to remember and love the devs once more !

It was good time! I'm in that very thread thanking them for hearing us! I've done quite a bit of thanking the devs and Kozi for hearing us over the past two years. If the game/experience was all bad, even the SW franchise wouldn't have kept us around. There's lots to love about this game! (And while I've been frustrated at times by them, I do love a good Kozi meme)
I thanked them when they listened to us and moved TB phases from 12-24 hours.
I've thanked them for picking up communication with us in the past.
I've also been (admittedly) overly critical and snarky to them in the past.
But it's this same cycle over and over (think about all the buggy stuff I didn't list like mod gate, modgate 2.o, the Rancor rewards issue, LS TB SM rewards not coming through, and others I've forgotten at this point). And at some point, you have to get off the ride and what I hear in these forums, on reddit, in various Discord servers is... a lot of people are very frustrated right now. A lot of people are leaving the game. I don't have concrete numbers... just knocking on the sky and listening to the sound.
I think what you're missing from my post is... this is not a complaint post. Not really. I love the game and I enjoy playing it.
This is a "hope" post. Here's hoping they listen and care enough about what we think to improve the user experience.

So months ago there was a response that didn’t involve posts immediately being closed and moved to archive. It didn’t involve content being sprung upon us without massive bugs and crashing that completely took away your ability to participate.
There was back and forth communication.
Not people trying to draw attention to a massive flaw and the only immediate response that wasn’t moved or closed posts. Was the news that the malfunctioning content would be immediately repeated after this iteration ended. And then please just wait a day once more and don’t report the fact that people still haven’t received what ever TB reward the faulty content allowed your guild to earn. With no mention of the compensation promised to be announced in a week, a week ago now.
Why would anyone ever be upset with this state of affairs?

"CG_Kozispoon;c-1368208" wrote:
Hiya @Muadib

We hear you. Every time we build and release new features, we learn more and this no exception. No feature has come out perfectly and we're admittedly ambitious in what we want to give our playerbase. Even so, there are things we can improve upon and feedback like yours is vital. We can and will do better.

We still have plenty of work to do, but we've come a long long way and we're super excited over what we have coming up for the rest of this and next year.

As always Kozi, I appreciate you reaching out and commenting. Even if you did tag the wrong Muaddib (we are legion) B)
The ask here really boils down to... please don't rush content. We want it! But we can be patient and wait for when it's done. (as someone else said, the August joke has always been a joke just like the Chewie shards) Well, for the most part - I looked at the calendar post and there are plenty of salty people wanting to know why Rey is the login character and why isn't the Jedi Rey event on the calendar. Some of us can do the math I promise!

I think you're wrong about the 3* lock. Lots of people said they had no problem whatsoever with it. It seems pointless to me to worry about it for a ship territory or light side phase 1, since it doesn't hurt anything to let people continue, but in the other phases it helps to have it and causes zero problems whatsoever. None of the reasons people have given for loathing this move make any sense from an objective perspective of seeing a TB as a guild activity that you do collectively for collective rewards.

In our guild, the reason we would keep track of people's total contribution is because we didn't have individual contributions per phase. Now that we do, the total for the entire TB is irrelevant. We want to know if people are skipping out when they are needed, not whether they contributed ships to a phase that they weren't needed in, or (perish the thought) showed up so late that the already finished phase 1 didn't list them for a contribution. It's totally unnecessary to let people do damage or add points that won't accomplish anything, in a game mode where individual contribution doesn't matter.

I know that quite a lot of people expressed this at the time, and I'm sure far more didn't say it even though they thought it, because people who don't have a problem with what is done are far less likely to be moved to say it, whereas people who are upset are far more likely to express it. So even if there are more posts agreeing with you, that doesn't mean it's a majority view, and we know from psychological studies that we have cognitive biases to pick up more on information that supports our own view. I didn't do an objective count of how many said what, but it did seem to me that a lot of people were on both sides, and the side that has less motivation to keep saying what they thought may have been less, but we have reasons to expect that. So I don't think we have good reasons to think your view is the overwhelming majority view, by any means. And there are actually important problems that I'd rather have them working on, such as the ticket counter and all the new problems with the DS TB.

"Parableman;c-1368233" wrote:
I think you're wrong about the 3* lock. Lots of people said they had no problem whatsoever with it. It seems pointless to me to worry about it for a ship territory or light side phase 1, since it doesn't hurt anything to let people continue, but in the other phases it helps to have it and causes zero problems whatsoever. None of the reasons people have given for loathing this move make any sense from an objective perspective of seeing a TB as a guild activity that you do collectively for collective rewards.

In our guild, the reason we would keep track of people's total contribution is because we didn't have individual contributions per phase. Now that we do, the total for the entire TB is irrelevant. We want to know if people are skipping out when they are needed, not whether they contributed ships to a phase that they weren't needed in, or (perish the thought) showed up so late that the already finished phase 1 didn't list them for a contribution. It's totally unnecessary to let people do damage or add points that won't accomplish anything, in a game mode where individual contribution doesn't matter.

I know that quite a lot of people expressed this at the time, and I'm sure far more didn't say it even though they thought it, because people who don't have a problem with what is done are far less likely to be moved to say it, whereas people who are upset are far more likely to express it. So even if there are more posts agreeing with you, that doesn't mean it's a majority view, and we know from psychological studies that we have cognitive biases to pick up more on information that supports our own view. I didn't do an objective count of how many said what, but it did seem to me that a lot of people were on both sides, and the side that has less motivation to keep saying what they thought may have been less, but we have reasons to expect that. So I don't think we have good reasons to think your view is the overwhelming majority view, by any means. And there are actually important problems that I'd rather have them working on, such as the ticket counter and all the new problems with the DS TB.

Well... that's just like... your opinion man. B)
Seriously tho... You make an excellent point about confirmation bias and guilds like ours where we can do very well. It doesn't matter for the guild success to go over 3*. But, as many people said in that thread - there are two issues with locking at 3*: First, the majority of officers/GL's said we wanted to be able to lock contribution at 1 or 2 stars based on what our guild goals were (or lock platoons specifically that we couldn't fill). Like in phase 6, we would want to lock the middle territory at 1 star to make sure our people are focused on 3 stars in the south. Not being able to do that has the potential to waste guild resources and could prevent us from our goals. Second, the majority (and again, we did count responses - we wanted to see if we were on an island with our ask and if we were, we'd let it drop) of non officer responses were based around the... "I'm in a different time zone from the majority of my guild and if it locks at 3* I can't participate at all" idea. It is taking gameplay away from players. Which seems silly to me.
Others mentioned they liked the inter-guild competition of going for a full 114 or guild bragging rights. Again, seems silly to me to take that opportunity away from your players. Does it matter for the overall stars your guild will get? No. But again, that was never the issue.
Again, we asked for a very specific tool that would help us... and we got something that didn't really help at all in any way.
I 100% agree with you on the ticket counter.... I've started those posts as well.

I like the way this was done, over waiting for this new content I rather be released in this way. At the end of the day a picture is worth 1000 words, I rather experience a beta new TB and get rewards over waiting for it to show up perfectly. I'm glad many of you want a final form but you ask for comunication....interpret the TB as a beta test for learning purpose and you will love it

Great job ovearall @CG ,small nitpicks but I loved the last week!

"Muaddib;c-1368263" wrote:

"Parableman;c-1368233" wrote:
I think you're wrong about the 3* lock. Lots of people said they had no problem whatsoever with it. It seems pointless to me to worry about it for a ship territory or light side phase 1, since it doesn't hurt anything to let people continue, but in the other phases it helps to have it and causes zero problems whatsoever. None of the reasons people have given for loathing this move make any sense from an objective perspective of seeing a TB as a guild activity that you do collectively for collective rewards.

In our guild, the reason we would keep track of people's total contribution is because we didn't have individual contributions per phase. Now that we do, the total for the entire TB is irrelevant. We want to know if people are skipping out when they are needed, not whether they contributed ships to a phase that they weren't needed in, or (perish the thought) showed up so late that the already finished phase 1 didn't list them for a contribution. It's totally unnecessary to let people do damage or add points that won't accomplish anything, in a game mode where individual contribution doesn't matter.

I know that quite a lot of people expressed this at the time, and I'm sure far more didn't say it even though they thought it, because people who don't have a problem with what is done are far less likely to be moved to say it, whereas people who are upset are far more likely to express it. So even if there are more posts agreeing with you, that doesn't mean it's a majority view, and we know from psychological studies that we have cognitive biases to pick up more on information that supports our own view. I didn't do an objective count of how many said what, but it did seem to me that a lot of people were on both sides, and the side that has less motivation to keep saying what they thought may have been less, but we have reasons to expect that. So I don't think we have good reasons to think your view is the overwhelming majority view, by any means. And there are actually important problems that I'd rather have them working on, such as the ticket counter and all the new problems with the DS TB.

Well... that's just like... your opinion man. .

But it's the right opinion.

After losing 3 billion players may actually have their ear. Let's make sure it's stuff people actually care about.
200 posters = .000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 percent of game population.

"Muaddib;c-1368263" wrote:

"Parableman;c-1368233" wrote:
I think you're wrong about the 3* lock. Lots of people said they had no problem whatsoever with it. It seems pointless to me to worry about it for a ship territory or light side phase 1, since it doesn't hurt anything to let people continue, but in the other phases it helps to have it and causes zero problems whatsoever. None of the reasons people have given for loathing this move make any sense from an objective perspective of seeing a TB as a guild activity that you do collectively for collective rewards.

In our guild, the reason we would keep track of people's total contribution is because we didn't have individual contributions per phase. Now that we do, the total for the entire TB is irrelevant. We want to know if people are skipping out when they are needed, not whether they contributed ships to a phase that they weren't needed in, or (perish the thought) showed up so late that the already finished phase 1 didn't list them for a contribution. It's totally unnecessary to let people do damage or add points that won't accomplish anything, in a game mode where individual contribution doesn't matter.

I know that quite a lot of people expressed this at the time, and I'm sure far more didn't say it even though they thought it, because people who don't have a problem with what is done are far less likely to be moved to say it, whereas people who are upset are far more likely to express it. So even if there are more posts agreeing with you, that doesn't mean it's a majority view, and we know from psychological studies that we have cognitive biases to pick up more on information that supports our own view. I didn't do an objective count of how many said what, but it did seem to me that a lot of people were on both sides, and the side that has less motivation to keep saying what they thought may have been less, but we have reasons to expect that. So I don't think we have good reasons to think your view is the overwhelming majority view, by any means. And there are actually important problems that I'd rather have them working on, such as the ticket counter and all the new problems with the DS TB.

Well... that's just like... your opinion man. B)
Seriously tho... You make an excellent point about confirmation bias and guilds like ours where we can do very well. It doesn't matter for the guild success to go over 3*. But, as many people said in that thread - there are two issues with locking at 3*: First, the majority of officers/GL's said we wanted to be able to lock contribution at 1 or 2 stars based on what our guild goals were (or lock platoons specifically that we couldn't fill). Like in phase 6, we would want to lock the middle territory at 1 star to make sure our people are focused on 3 stars in the south. Not being able to do that has the potential to waste guild resources and could prevent us from our goals. Second, the majority (and again, we did count responses - we wanted to see if we were on an island with our ask and if we were, we'd let it drop) of non officer responses were based around the... "I'm in a different time zone from the majority of my guild and if it locks at 3* I can't participate at all" idea. It is taking gameplay away from players. Which seems silly to me.
Others mentioned they liked the inter-guild competition of going for a full 114 or guild bragging rights. Again, seems silly to me to take that opportunity away from your players. Does it matter for the overall stars your guild will get? No. But again, that was never the issue.
Again, we asked for a very specific tool that would help us... and we got something that didn't really help at all in any way.
I 100% agree with you on the ticket counter.... I've started those posts as well.

Totally agree about the 1 & 2* lock. We've never gotten 3* so that's useless 2 us. At only 50gp we need to manage wisely. Saying orders on chat doesn't cut it as people still don't listen & waste resources going over 2* in 1 territory when we don't have 2 in the other for eg. Yeah I can lock deployment now, BUT that can only be done manually after we get 1/2 stars. I'm not there 24/7 to do it at the exact moment it's needed. Its OK for the massive guilds to say its not needed. Same with the nonexistent platoon lock. Also essential as people don't listen & put things in platoons we'll never be able to fill as they need high star new toons/ships no-one has yet.

+1
Look, devs, if you need more time to put out a feature but you're afraid that we're getting bored, just tell us! Send out an in-game mail or something saying 'We're sorry it's taking a long time for the next TB to come out, but we're still bug-testing.'

If you just tell us what's happening, most people will just accept it! I would have infinitely preferred to just wait a few more weeks than get the DS TB as it was. No content is better than bad content, and some of the things in the DS TB made it feel like bad content.