Are Territory Battles Too Much & Too Late?
I am always looking to hear from other players, officers, leaders, guilds, alliances. I want to expand my knowledge on the community as much as I can.
I'm a leader in a 7 guild alliance, in numerous community line and discord groups and on these forums. As I see the frustrations pooling from the last weeks, I want to hear from you all in different perspectives.
Players/members: is TB too much to going on for you? Are you a casual or more hardcore player? Are the time constraints of this game affecting your real life?
Officers- are you feeling burnt out? Are members not paying attention? What are you all using to communicate? What's working what's not?
Leaders- are people leaving guilds? Leaving the game all together? And why? Any tips or warnings concerning TB?
Will 12 hours help or hinder? (I see both sides)
I feel at this time with so many things unknown, unsaid, and misinterpreted we should all pool together and help one another.
I'm a leader in a 7 guild alliance, in numerous community line and discord groups and on these forums. As I see the frustrations pooling from the last weeks, I want to hear from you all in different perspectives.
Players/members: is TB too much to going on for you? Are you a casual or more hardcore player? Are the time constraints of this game affecting your real life?
Officers- are you feeling burnt out? Are members not paying attention? What are you all using to communicate? What's working what's not?
Leaders- are people leaving guilds? Leaving the game all together? And why? Any tips or warnings concerning TB?
Will 12 hours help or hinder? (I see both sides)
I feel at this time with so many things unknown, unsaid, and misinterpreted we should all pool together and help one another.
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Replies
Recruiting solid 3mil+ GP players, pm for info
Also upsetting it's just one more thing focused on LS esp rebels, and is a continuous kick in the acorns for those who didnt get luke. (Not to mention getting cholo halts all farming on old ben). If we even got a dev to say DS were coming even without an exact time it would go a long way.
I do understand and overall appreciate that the rewards system is equal among all, but maybe there could be bonuses for those who participate more than others... Rather than just deploy willy-nilly and move on without any sort of coordination. Would also be way to bridge the gap for newer players who work hard.
Idk...just a few thoughts...ya know, since ya asked
This week I can only say we must be in the middle of a huge collective slump. It has been like pulling teeth trying to chase people to complete Combat Missions and to fill the Platoons. Discord and communication on the whole has been subdued and I really do believe that people are seeing the effort versus rewards for a weeks work and balking at it. I ran a poll asking if use of 3rd party applications such as discord and swgoh.gg was asking too much. I'll post the results when it finishes.
I think everyone is feeling a bit burned out.
It doesn't mater if you're new or old - when faced with a $10000 paywall that's demoralizing.
The game crashing all the time because the servers can't handle the load of TB processing and thousands of counter attacking squads that's costing guilds rewards that's frustrating and cause of reduced participation.
Right now half the people just deploy and forget because it's not worth it to try.
We're lining up for 2 more stars but it's a slow creep. I hope we can add 2 or 3 more to that next time as we were down to 42 members this last go.
The rewards are pretty good but people need to look towards the future - you can't see the g12 gear until you have g12 toons. This isn't to get you to g12 its to max your toons when you do. If you don't blow your wad all in one go you can definitely get one piece of gear for a toon each week if you're scoring in the 20s.
I have to take care of my arena toons because that's where the purples are. I also want to gear up my rogue one (phx will forever stay at g8 because it's a nightmare to get them to 11 and you can't rely on rancor at all)
I was at first all for a DS TB but as I looked over my ds characters there are factions that are certainly lacking - geos, Tuscans, ns. At this point I would rather stick to ls tb so at least I'm farming certain things for a certain goal. Add that to the fact I'm asking my guild to farm res phx r1 and other ls for platoons. I feel a ds tb anytime soon would create more problems. How's everyone's imperial troopers? What happens when it's an imperial trooper mission and we need 18 Veers in platoons etc. I'm afraid all of this will really burn out players and end up hurting the game more than helping it. I am lucky that I can play and chat during work hours many do not have that same luxury.
My officers and I are trying our best to set up a structure - hold off on everything - officers review platoons- look through who has what (off spread sheets from data pulled) what platoons can we do which we cannot. Give the ok and no go for certai n platoons. Know when we reach that threshold of ok platoons are over do combat. Wait to deploy. Meanwhile our members are saying hey where can I deploy because I have to do rl things and cannot wait anymore. Am I to expect my officers to do this everyday?
Phase 3 requirement is fill power generator platoons to 2/6 before you go if you have weak teams. It should be 6/6 before the phase is over but I take a look over the platoons and call out which platoons are unfillable (it'll be obvious which ones have the P2P toons) this takes me about 10 minutes each phase.
I guess if you're really trying to min/max it you could do more but that's asking for an ulcer trying to herd that many cats (it reminds me of 40 man raids of BWL or Naxx before BC).
Disclaimer: I'm not the guild leader just the TB leader.
For sure- it's in our hopes that the busy work will lineasen as more get accustom to it. And everyone will have more of a feel of who has what in future tbs. and it has shown signs of progress. No one has platooned with out the ok on this 2nd go around.
Love it
I actually like TB overall, but very much yes to this. I know that there are guilds out there that get to say things like "Phases 1-4 are **** easy." But that's just not the case for everybody. In an ideal world you can have everybody do the missions first and have nobody deploy until they are all done. I understand there are guilds doing that. But that wouldn't work for us because everybody is on at different times and they aren't all available on a schedule that would allow it. 12 hour phases would make it even more disastrous.
Yes. Burnout/stress is real We have a third-party chat, but not everyone checks it. It's gotten better, but it's imperfect.
We had one person quit the game. Felt the grind was becoming too much.
12 hours will negatively affect our star count. There's just no way we can coordinate and expect the level of necessary participation in 12 hours to do this. The other problem is that there are stars that, at this point, are very tight for us to get. To do so, we are pretty frequently monitoring our point progression, and adjusting as necessary. That's going to be harder to do in a condensed window. On the other hand, it might help with the burnout issue, as we just say "screw it" and settle for fewer stars. Which may result in people leaving. And thus swapping the burnout from TB to recruiting.
It's not all that easy when you have a bunch of rare characters in platoon requirements, or heavy requirements for a single character. With the bugs, we had one phase with 18 Leias required. And while she isn't a rare character, she is used by a lot of people, so finding 18 who could sacrifice her might take some coordination.
And as far as platoons, even if that isn't so bad, the deployment is a huge issue. Our second stars in the two character territories in P5 were achieved by a combined overage of 1.5m the first go-around and about 4.5m this morning. It took monitoring and frequent adjustments to do so.
Hopefully some things get ironed out and they can implement good and smart things to help with tb management. Giving leaders and officers a bit more control over phases and battles would be great.
The light side bias almost made me quit as well, and I know a couple people that quit over it. I feel like I have to work on a lot of teams at once that are lightside for territory battles and all my zetad dark side toons feel worthless in this game right now, which I am not happy about. The level of investment to get a character to t11, 7*, and zetas is huge so I feel shafted to have put so much effort into dark side toons. I do like the level of difficulty in territory battles though.
I know another person that quit cause of the power creep, and after Commander Luke he had enough. I know one other person that quit cause this game is becoming too time consuming, and isn't as casual as it was.
That's part of the reason for burnout, too, I reckon.
Can't use DS - fine, sort of.
But on top of that, you can't use average LS toons either - even in early phases, maxed 2,3 or 4 star toons probably won't be able to complete CMs.
And that's just the CMs you aren't forced to use a particular subfaction.
' use your whole roster ', my kitten.
My top issues...
Forced Shard Grind:-
Phoenix Squad and the Heroes Journey character requirements for Thrawn & CLS.
Rogue One for Territory Battles and subsequently having to obtain characters such as Hoth Soldier and Captain Solo. Then there's the whole Platoon requirements with multiple Baze, Lobot, Bistan, Pao and Bhodi. Which ultimately clashes with the need to star level up your ships.
Terrible Drop Rates:-
Wasting large amounts of energy for gear level 8/9/10. Basically spending 300 energy for 1-2 mid level gear salvage such as Cuffs & Stun Guns.
Going weeks without a single Zeta dropping.
Going weeks without seeing 'forced grind' characters appearing in fleet shipments and sometimes the raid shop.
Stealth SIM Ticket Reduction:-
At some point a few months back I went from having hundreds of SIM tickets to suddenly having none. Whatever was changed has reintroduced the most annoying element of the game.
We are not anymore. Over 10% of our guild stopped playing including 2 in our top 10.
Why?
- they were dark side heavy and suddenly couldn't be as useful on TB
- Couldn't choose which character to grind, had to go for rebel or hurt the guild (and who really want to farm Lobot and hrs in hard nodes instead of gear + they are both on shards with worthless gear)
- Too much time consuming for super lame rewards
- GXII wall being unrealistic. Even carbantii are now a HUGE problem.
- 111 waves of the same fight. Each phase is EXACTLY the same as the previous one.
On the officers side, we decided to give up. We were trying to steer the contribution of our guild in the right direction but bathroom break can only last for so long. For one more star (33 to 34), it's not worth the effort + we now have to rebuild the guild (5 people to replace in a week, never saw that before).
TB is a HUGE let down in my guild felt by most. And if it goes to 12 hours, people won't even participate anymore. Most of us do have lives to attend to and wives/husbands are already complaining
I still love the game but its been a hard week for us.
we lost one big member. 24h is fine, not everyone had time to do everything.
biggest problem are platoons (ptp toons/ships and 6 the same looking platons) and poor payouts. we had more gp, but 2 stars less than previous time.
in general it could be a better comunication between us and devs, im still thinking that there should be major updates for tb.
i wasnt enjoing tb, i did it just because it affects all other quild members. and we are not chating that much in line anymore.
thanks.
After the first TB it felt like 1 piece of gear from TB per month was kinda mediocre but doable. This week it's like they want us to quit the game.
Anything less than a full salvage piece (not fully crafted gear but just 30/30, 20/20) from the base loot box is going to see TB being the most hated game mode since ships.
More and more people are feeling burnt out and are going to leave. We are trying to consilidate and maybe seperate them by hardcore tb and a more casual approach to tb. Many have said that if it wasn't for the guild/alliance we have they would have quit. Sad to see great people and players go after two tbs.
We're a small guild - we don't even have 10m GP - and so we're not looking to get awesome rewards. What we are looking for though, is some fun while we play. But this TB we couldn't complete any of the Platoons even in the first phase due to the character duplication across them all - we need 20 Landos and 14 Lobots! - and then each Platoon was just duplicated each subsequent phase with just higher character ranks. Well if we couldn't do it them the first wave, we were SOOL ... the first Territory Battle, we were still completing Platoons up to Phase 3. This time, none at all.
And the Combat Missions? Same thing as with the Platoons. Exactly the same just getting harder each phase.
And yes, it's beginning to take a toll on even our small guild. People have quit and nobody is happy.
We are ranked 17th out of all of the guilds. That puts us in the top 1% if not the top 0.5% of all of the guilds. That’s not to brag that’s to preface everything that comes next.
The actual gameplay of TB is fun. I love playing with toons I normally don’t. I don’t necessarily like having to work on those toons at the expense of others that help in the competitive portion of the game but it is what it is.
The part that isn’t so fun is making sure people do what they need to be doing. It’s not fun micromanaging almost every aspect of the game. It’s not fun keeping the phone on me for hours on end to watch our progress and tell people where to go and when. It was a lot of work to make sure we earned our 41 stars.
I’m pretty sure the rest of the post will get edited but it needs to be read. Maybe I’ll get lucky and it will be left intact.
People in my guild are leaving for various reasons. The rewards aren’t worth the grind anymore to them. After seeing our rewards for 41 stars and seeing someone else’s for 37 stars, I’m inclined to agree. I don’t want to see anyone leave. I’ve seen too many people, some of them I’d like to consider friends, and some of them I consider worthy competitors, leave for good. I don’t expect anyone to play forever. Mostly, I think the reasons they are leaving are fixable if the player base is listened to.
We formed a team of ten of us (officers and select members) to hold their deployment so we had 10-15 million GP in reserve. On the later stages where we could only 3 star one ground territory we stopped deployment and combat on the other territory once it reached 2 stars so we could maximize our potential. It worked a treat and we improved our performance by 5 stars (36 total) over last time and very nearly got a 6th extra star.
Once we got into the swing of it, it wasn't all that much work, only the first hour or so. However, as not everyone is on at the same time 24 hours is vital to get this done, I just feel 12 hours will reduce our star count back to 30 or so which would be massively demoralizing and could hurt us in the long run. The only benefit I see to having 12 hour phases is to have more time in between TBs for guilds to recruit new players if necessary. Phase 1 and 2 require less co-ordination so why not make those 12 hours and the rest 24? This would reduce the length of TB by one day but still allow more co-ordination for later phases.
Personally I have enjoyed the new content and in our case it has increased traffic on our Discord server which is always a good thing. The rewards could do with a buff but my main gripe has been the store. I was hoping to use this to finally finish Baze but he has been in there only once since I had currency to spend (funnily enough he was in there 5 times during the first TB when I had no currency!). The rest have been toons you can buy from GW store or are easily farmable which I found annoying. Also the gear available: Mk4 droid callers, are you serious? I have over 3000 of them and gain more every challenge. Please take out useless gear like this or at least tune it to player level, you know like you did when you took out Mk3 Holo Projectors from the guild store once you hit level 75 or whatever it was. Put the rarest toons in there who only have limited farm locations like Baze, Chirrut, Krennic, etc, and add ships that you are asking for in platoons yet cannot be farmed anywhere: Falcon, Reaper, Kylo's shuttle. If people had more to spend their currency on and feel like they were finally making progress they would be a lot less likely to complain about the gear in the prize box not being worth the effort. You promised us this new content would help with the grind so please stand by that and make TB something for guilds to look forward to. You will silence a lot of complaints if you do.