What a revolting update!! That is definitely not the way to make the raid more enjoyable or give the impression they understand our general dissatisfaction with unnecessary changes..
Have these changes affected other raids, besides reducing expose damage?
Because we are trying to do a hAAT raid and the damage we are doing is significantly less and the RNG/boss tenacity is more unfavorable to the players then previous times we have cleared the hAAT.
For example,
a) In Phase 3, the Ackbar / Ventress super team keeps losing key members to the Tank attack. It is like the Tank is hitting for a lot more damage than it previously did.
b) The Palaptine lead, Tiepatine team is totally nerfed now... only did 175k damage when I use to be able to do around 750k damage.
c) CLS TMR on Phase 3 boss isn't clearing the turn meter as reliably as it has before... resulting in way more side droids having to be dealt with.
d) In Phase 2, Tank is resisting exposes seemingly more often than before. Retreated and gave up trying to use a non-bb8 resistance team in phase 2. ... looks like putting a zeta on Finn is no longer a good option for raids unless you have and use bb8.
I doubt all these failed attempts are all due to RNG because how many times in a row will RNG treat you badly... I expect 1 or 2 runs biting and thus you retreat, but every single attempt biting... for hours!?
So CG... what else had changed with the raids (hAAT specifically) and the bosses?
It has been mentioned earlier that damage players do varies greatly from phase to phase. Are there any plans to fix this? A player in a guild who waits for phase 2 or 3 for example, will do far more damage with his squads than he possibly could in phase one. I understand that all this damage varies with mechanics, but would it be worth considering to award raid prizes according to a percentage of damage done, rather than the unbalanced flat numbers?
We've had to live with this problem for the AAT raid, and I for one am disappointed that it hasn't been looked at.
All this aside, I can see that a lot of players are still jaded by some previous design decisions, but we all have to admit that this raid is something fresh, beautiful, and incredibly interesting.
No one is having success without JTR? I'm just grateful that one of the most p2w characters has been nerfed to be more reasonable and allow for other strategies to be viable.
Also, the raid just came out! Strategies haven't been developed yet - instead of complaining, get out there, and start solving the puzzle! The same happens with any new content. This raid in particular is more complex than anything we've had so far, and encourages far more complex strategies.
Thanks EACG, this is the best content update I could have possibly hoped for.
@CG_RyDiggs
For such a difficult raid that needs all guild participation and several retries to get favorable rng, for such a time consuming raid, the rewards you get sure dont seem that rewarding.. While the raid difficulty scaled upward the rewards didnt. Your reward system sucks plain and simple. Make it worth the players time and effort for winning your "challenging" raid.
Players lose their interest in playing your raid cuz the rewards arent worth the time and effort that they have invested in.
Don't forget, EA wants you logged in as much as possible. They outlined this strategy in one of their quarterly reports to their investors, then the CFO reiterated it at a tech conference. The belief is, the more youre logged in, the more they can attempt to sell you additional content. So CG will always generate new content that will keep you logged in and find ways to frustrate you into spending money. This is their strategy they laid out to their investors and have been following it to a T since.
I will be contacting Apple for my refund tomorrow. And if I get no satisfaction, I will be contacting my cc company. I’ve invested too much real money in these toons to have them rendered less useful.
When was expose introduced?
Doesn't matter when it was introduced. What matters is that CG "intended" one thing, screwed up, something else happened, and now you get to pay the price (literally! Ha!).
And of course, they failed to make this change before the raid was released because they just never thought to test with JTR. Or maybe they only tested with JTR and didn't realize other teams were so bad? Or maybe they have a roadmap including a series of pay to play characters who will be uniquely capable of countering this raid, and felt JTRey provided a viable alternate path for guilds that didn't involve spending copious amounts of money? I have no clue which is accurate so I will let you pick.
I'm not really gonna complain to be honest. You're giving us JTR so I'm happy. And people complaining about how it's such short notice, it's always short notice, wise up and farm early like I did. Surely if you've been playing this game you've learnt some level of patience and foresight. CLS returned 4 months after his first appearance so this March isn't beyond possibilities of JTR returning
I've been farming them since December. Just to reiterate the atrocious drop rates.
its not a 50% reduction in damage. its a 50% reduction in damage from expose. I know this is a subtle difference but its not as much as you would think.
According to game changers it's about 16-25% in HAAT and 30% in Hsith raid..
its not a 50% reduction in damage. its a 50% reduction in damage from expose. I know this is a subtle difference but its not as much as you would think.
If you make 10% heroic this reduction represents 1 million. How many times can you make 1 million in heroic p1?
I didn't say I like it, or wanted it. I wass just pointing out it's not a 50% reduction in straight damage.
And as we all know this is a guild activity, so if those numbers are true, that means the guild has to be able to put up 0.6% more damage per person.
But over all every still just needs to do 2% per phase and a 5% reduction in health helps...
I am more concerned about guild just entering HAAT this may hurt the growth and even set some back from being able to get heroic on farm. But a little more grind and we are all back on track.
The world keeps turning and we keep grinding (or not). I'm just hear to have fun, and not stress the details.
1) distract people and/or try to appease them in regards to this awful raid.
2) ensure that the backlash from this isn't going to hurt their backpocket by "testing" to see how many much they can get out of jtr this time around in comparison to other toons second release.
I was planning on putting the zeta on Finn so my guild could finally start running the HAAT in a few days... Now that’s he been nerfed to the point of being more useless than a poopy flavored lollipop, think i’ll Zeta someone useful, like Pao or Rose.
All of this will be moot in May when we get level 95 and new mods with a whole new set of ability affecting attributes. That's obviously what the raid is tuned for.
of course, why else would they have amped up the mod store, allowing you to waste all your credits on mod gambling, and then when the average level of credits gets low enough, BOOM! new level cap, higher level mods.
new credit packs in anticipation, people will buy crystal packs to keep up.
"sell me this pen..."
In the other megathread, I believe CyDiggs said that the change to Expose has been in the works for a long time and this is when they decided to implement it. Then this comes out and it says that the expose change was decided "late last week." Am I missing something, or are they actually asking us to trust them while blatantly lying to our faces?
The "Development Manager for Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes" is actually BiggSean66
The biggest problem with this raid that I see is only 2 mechanics actually work. Mcmole's video about the raid was the best analysis I have seen.
Expose with Jedi Training Rey and those damage percentage based attacks that are all being removed like Kylo Ren, and Deathtrooper's Death Mark with this update. Nothing else works due to the crazy high tenacity and other raid mechanics.
The rewards are also pretty poor on T6 at least, which will take even strong guilds 4 or 5 days to complete (minus the cheese tactics like Stormtrooper Han). This just increases the frustration, when one's time and efforts are not being rewarded, especially when the raid itself isn't so fun as nothing except the mechanics I mentioned work.
The 5% damage reduction to offset the changes also seems like more to say you did something to counter it without really doing anything as 5% is pretty negligible. Though, I suppose it is possible I will be pleasantly surprised after the changes take effect.
I'm not really gonna complain to be honest. You're giving us JTR so I'm happy. And people complaining about how it's such short notice, it's always short notice, wise up and farm early like I did. Surely if you've been playing this game you've learnt some level of patience and foresight. CLS returned 4 months after his first appearance so this March isn't beyond possibilities of JTR returning
I've been farming them since December. Just to reiterate the atrocious drop rates.
its not a 50% reduction in damage. its a 50% reduction in damage from expose. I know this is a subtle difference but its not as much as you would think.
According to game changers it's about 16-25% in HAAT and 30% in Hsith raid..
its not a 50% reduction in damage. its a 50% reduction in damage from expose. I know this is a subtle difference but its not as much as you would think.
If you make 10% heroic this reduction represents 1 million. How many times can you make 1 million in heroic p1?
I didn't say I like it, or wanted it. I wass just pointing out it's not a 50% reduction in straight damage.
It’s a 40% reduction in JTR damage in this raid, they reduced hp by 5% this making the raid even harder. So actually you are wrong in thinking it’s not as much as people would think. Maybe you should do the math before trying to defend a stupid decision by the devs?
I feel that with the 5% Nihilus hp reduction I need to say what I have been witholding in the hopes that it would be fixed. Since it wont, I will now say:
Nihlus is the most annoying fight/mechanic in the game, and not in a good way. I finally just put my last 2 teams on auto against him because I could just not do that annoying fight anymore. 5% reduction in his HP will not change the fact that fightong him is just not fun.
All of this will be moot in May when we get level 95 and new mods with a whole new set of ability affecting attributes. That's obviously what the raid is tuned for.
Then that is when they should have released the raid. I expected a level increase with this raid since they did with each of the other raids.
This change does not make any other team more effective in any way relative to the actual damage done. The only change is relative to what a JTR team can do, and that is frankly irrelevant. While you have correctly identified that RJT teams being so dominant is the big issue, you have incorrectly identified the actual reasons behind it.
Expose damage is not the issue with RJT teams being the best, but rather the irresistible aspect of it. Teams are neutered not because they can't compete with percentage health mechanics (some of them rely on it, e.g. Vader), but because the high tenacity prevents them from doing anything.
This raid disallows debuffs because of tenacity, disallows buffs because the boss steals them and recover protection, disallows bonus attacks because they get defense down and lose protection or getting dazed or shocked, disallows healing by the constant barrage of damage. It's fine if a few of these strategies are restricted, but not all of them at the same time.
I would be surprised if even some of the top guilds can complete the raid again.
@CG_RyDiggs -- is that event calendar update accurate that JTRey comes back in 3 days?
Correct, but off topic
It’s even worse than the nerf.
Nerfing a legendary alike character that has disappeared from arena and requires two 16 energy Cantina node farm right before it returns 50 days early than cadence. This was literally the worst thing ever happened in this game.
So the excuse for the changes is that players have found toons and squads whose abilities work well together in a particular part of the new Sith raid. Then the addition of gear 12 and zeta abilities have made the heroic rancor and haat to easier. You've known about this for quite sometime and now with the release of the Sith Raid, you've come to the realization that certain toons and mechanics need to be nerfed in order to keep game balance. This was inevitably going to happen and no one should be to surprised by this. After all it is part of the game rules to keep balance in the game. Although with the changes that will effect all raids is this really fair to newer players to the game?
Like the release of the haat raid, the Sith raid seems to be geared toward whales. Which is fine by me as the game does need to make money in order to keep evolving. After 3 to 4 months have gone by their most likely will be a new toon added (wishful thinking Meetra Surik) that will make the Sith Raid easier and then maybe an increase to level cap. So be patient guys and gals eventually the Sith Raid will become easier.
On the bright side there will be more new content coming to the game and new toons as well. I've been playing the game from the beginning and have spent some money on the game during that time. I'm no whale though. When the haat was released me and my guild mates stayed patient and eventually the haat became easier. Since haat was added Territory Battles and Territory Wars have been added along with ships.
As much as this nerf hurts and my initial reaction is wow that's crap but then I took a step back and thought about it...and my inner ranger raged up and I'm really looking forward to Wednesdays night live stream anticipating a rangerj1999 meltdown and even if they release our Lord and savior revan I would NOT buy.
#stillnothingontwmatchmaking
I'd be interested in seeing a meta idea or tweak/buff that made jedi the go to for the raid. Its a fit with the lore and all those hero abilities seem like they should be good for something.
The STH thing had to go, that was clearly silly and honestly good for no one.
Your "solution" is not solving anything. It's making things worse. How about this:
Change expose to deal X%, capped at X (based on attacker power, matching pre-nerf haat levels) Let the boss gain X% tenacity on each debuff/TMR attempt, not on each hit, and let it last to the end of the encounter instead of resetting Let the Sith Lords ignore the irresistible keyword
Some reasoning:
Percentage mechanics can't be solved with coefficients. Half of infinity is still infinity. Next raid with twice the hitpoints will have the very same problem with expose again. What happens if level and gear increases make expose the dominant mechanic in the arena? Is it up for another nerf then?
The obvious simple fix for the expose problem would be to put a cap on the damage. You can put the cap on the HP on phase 2 in HAAT, and it wouldn't affect any old content, and it wouldn't be overpowered in the new one. Can we please get an explanation why this solution wasn't considered more carefully? The same should be applied to Deathmark, Thermals and all other percentage effects. You could even base the cap on the character power somehow to allow for character progression.
The stacking tenacity in itself isn't a bad idea, though the values are totally off and the implementation is wrong. The current solution makes it a one-off to use debuffs, and if one of your non-debuffers happens to go directly after the boss, he will block your debuffer's chance anyway.
The reasonable way of implementing diminishing returns would be to put it on the effect itself, not on something else. And not more or less randomly. If you want to stifle debuffs, increase the tenacity by less, do it on the debuffs (even resisted ones), and let it stick throughout the whole encounter instead of having it "randomly" reset. That way there could be strategic decisions on how to handle it, like stacking potency and/or maximizing usage of debuff teams before tenacity runs out of control.
As many has pointed out, the high tenacity makes all teams without irresistible effects working very bad or not at all. Rey teams aren't stronger than others due to expose damage, they're stronger due to being able to use debuffs at all. I assume the irresistible function exists in the first place as a counter to tenacity up, which in turn is a quite bad design. It would be a good thing to start looking at the root cause instead of trying to patch it with another bad solution on top.
The long term fix would be to sort out potency/tenacity once and for all. As a short term fix, you can simply allow the Sith Lords to resist irresistible effects. That would of course require a change in the boss tenacity, or the few teams that can do something now would be as useless as the rest.
As a side effect on fixing the irresistible TM reduction with a proper stacking tenacity solution, you can also remove the +speed on damage the bosses get. If you want them to get turns faster, it would be simplier to increase the +5% TM on taking damage than to add another mechanic to do the same thing circumventing the irresistible TM reduction.
I'm sorry, but seems that CG completely lost touch with the community. I don't know why they keep ignoring the people, but I think its because they still earn a lot from the whales. Every update add frustration and sadness to the playerbase. I can't do anything, like most of us. But surely I will stop give them money until they'll start to listen to the players.
We're trying to let you know what we do and be more transparent on why we do it when we can. If this still isn't meeting expectation, know we'll keep working to do so as best we're able. As always, we'll be considering the overall long-term good of the game in every change and addition we make.
We're trying to let you know what we do and be more transparent on why we do it when we can. If this still isn't meeting expectation, know we'll keep working to do so as best we're able. As always, we'll be considering the overall long-term good of the game in every change and addition we make.
Tks for the support!
What a crock of cow paddies. Transparency hey just wait until we have to panic farm for the next event we will see who's "transparent" I don't have Jtr but I feel sorry for those who spent there hard earned cash on something that's been changed because the player base worked out your raid quickly. Not our fault your design team ****
Testing indicates Rey (Jedi Training) remains one of the most effective squads in the Sith Triumvirate Raid...
Our perspective is that an overwhelming single-solve undercuts what makes the game interesting, and presents a threat to the future of the game.
I would just like to point out that, if you also been actively tracking damage output, you undoubtedly realize that the two quotes above are in direct opposition to one another. JTRey IS the single-solve undercut for the Sith Raid. And, despite the slight nerf, JTRey teams are still 5 times more effective in dealing damage than any other team, regardless of RNG, strategy or synergies.
And, if you have been tracking player and guild behavior, as you claim, you know this to be true by virtue of the fact that many guilds and guild alliances are shuffling players to maximize the number of JTRey teams per guild.
Please stop trying to pay lip service to the "many strategies" and "lively theorycrafting" nonsense when you have intentionally set up a "have" and "have not" system designed to punish players who did not panic farm JTRey.
I may be misinterpreting what they say, but if it's a threat to the future of the game, why do people still play the other two raids when there is 'single solve undercuts' for them aswell? More people will play if they're able to complete the raid(particularly tier 4 and above where the rewards become some what ok), than if they can't complete it.
I must confess, all the rage obviously ignored by CG/EA is almost entertaining...
I see they are trying to improve the communication (poor excuses compared to annoying gifs) and i believe CG remind me at every possible occasions (i.e. each update) why becoming full f2p was the best decision i made this year so far, thank you!
Replies
Because we are trying to do a hAAT raid and the damage we are doing is significantly less and the RNG/boss tenacity is more unfavorable to the players then previous times we have cleared the hAAT.
For example,
a) In Phase 3, the Ackbar / Ventress super team keeps losing key members to the Tank attack. It is like the Tank is hitting for a lot more damage than it previously did.
b) The Palaptine lead, Tiepatine team is totally nerfed now... only did 175k damage when I use to be able to do around 750k damage.
c) CLS TMR on Phase 3 boss isn't clearing the turn meter as reliably as it has before... resulting in way more side droids having to be dealt with.
d) In Phase 2, Tank is resisting exposes seemingly more often than before. Retreated and gave up trying to use a non-bb8 resistance team in phase 2. ... looks like putting a zeta on Finn is no longer a good option for raids unless you have and use bb8.
I doubt all these failed attempts are all due to RNG because how many times in a row will RNG treat you badly... I expect 1 or 2 runs biting and thus you retreat, but every single attempt biting... for hours!?
So CG... what else had changed with the raids (hAAT specifically) and the bosses?
We've had to live with this problem for the AAT raid, and I for one am disappointed that it hasn't been looked at.
All this aside, I can see that a lot of players are still jaded by some previous design decisions, but we all have to admit that this raid is something fresh, beautiful, and incredibly interesting.
No one is having success without JTR? I'm just grateful that one of the most p2w characters has been nerfed to be more reasonable and allow for other strategies to be viable.
Also, the raid just came out! Strategies haven't been developed yet - instead of complaining, get out there, and start solving the puzzle! The same happens with any new content. This raid in particular is more complex than anything we've had so far, and encourages far more complex strategies.
Thanks EACG, this is the best content update I could have possibly hoped for.
Don't forget, EA wants you logged in as much as possible. They outlined this strategy in one of their quarterly reports to their investors, then the CFO reiterated it at a tech conference. The belief is, the more youre logged in, the more they can attempt to sell you additional content. So CG will always generate new content that will keep you logged in and find ways to frustrate you into spending money. This is their strategy they laid out to their investors and have been following it to a T since.
Doesn't matter when it was introduced. What matters is that CG "intended" one thing, screwed up, something else happened, and now you get to pay the price (literally! Ha!).
And of course, they failed to make this change before the raid was released because they just never thought to test with JTR. Or maybe they only tested with JTR and didn't realize other teams were so bad? Or maybe they have a roadmap including a series of pay to play characters who will be uniquely capable of countering this raid, and felt JTRey provided a viable alternate path for guilds that didn't involve spending copious amounts of money? I have no clue which is accurate so I will let you pick.
I didn't say I like it, or wanted it. I wass just pointing out it's not a 50% reduction in straight damage.
And as we all know this is a guild activity, so if those numbers are true, that means the guild has to be able to put up 0.6% more damage per person.
But over all every still just needs to do 2% per phase and a 5% reduction in health helps...
I am more concerned about guild just entering HAAT this may hurt the growth and even set some back from being able to get heroic on farm. But a little more grind and we are all back on track.
The world keeps turning and we keep grinding (or not). I'm just hear to have fun, and not stress the details.
1) distract people and/or try to appease them in regards to this awful raid.
2) ensure that the backlash from this isn't going to hurt their backpocket by "testing" to see how many much they can get out of jtr this time around in comparison to other toons second release.
of course, why else would they have amped up the mod store, allowing you to waste all your credits on mod gambling, and then when the average level of credits gets low enough, BOOM! new level cap, higher level mods.
new credit packs in anticipation, people will buy crystal packs to keep up.
"sell me this pen..."
The "Development Manager for Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes" is actually BiggSean66
Expose with Jedi Training Rey and those damage percentage based attacks that are all being removed like Kylo Ren, and Deathtrooper's Death Mark with this update. Nothing else works due to the crazy high tenacity and other raid mechanics.
The rewards are also pretty poor on T6 at least, which will take even strong guilds 4 or 5 days to complete (minus the cheese tactics like Stormtrooper Han). This just increases the frustration, when one's time and efforts are not being rewarded, especially when the raid itself isn't so fun as nothing except the mechanics I mentioned work.
The 5% damage reduction to offset the changes also seems like more to say you did something to counter it without really doing anything as 5% is pretty negligible. Though, I suppose it is possible I will be pleasantly surprised after the changes take effect.
It’s a 40% reduction in JTR damage in this raid, they reduced hp by 5% this making the raid even harder. So actually you are wrong in thinking it’s not as much as people would think. Maybe you should do the math before trying to defend a stupid decision by the devs?
Nihlus is the most annoying fight/mechanic in the game, and not in a good way. I finally just put my last 2 teams on auto against him because I could just not do that annoying fight anymore. 5% reduction in his HP will not change the fact that fightong him is just not fun.
Then that is when they should have released the raid. I expected a level increase with this raid since they did with each of the other raids.
Expose damage is not the issue with RJT teams being the best, but rather the irresistible aspect of it. Teams are neutered not because they can't compete with percentage health mechanics (some of them rely on it, e.g. Vader), but because the high tenacity prevents them from doing anything.
This raid disallows debuffs because of tenacity, disallows buffs because the boss steals them and recover protection, disallows bonus attacks because they get defense down and lose protection or getting dazed or shocked, disallows healing by the constant barrage of damage. It's fine if a few of these strategies are restricted, but not all of them at the same time.
I would be surprised if even some of the top guilds can complete the raid again.
It’s even worse than the nerf.
Nerfing a legendary alike character that has disappeared from arena and requires two 16 energy Cantina node farm right before it returns 50 days early than cadence. This was literally the worst thing ever happened in this game.
Like the release of the haat raid, the Sith raid seems to be geared toward whales. Which is fine by me as the game does need to make money in order to keep evolving. After 3 to 4 months have gone by their most likely will be a new toon added (wishful thinking Meetra Surik) that will make the Sith Raid easier and then maybe an increase to level cap. So be patient guys and gals eventually the Sith Raid will become easier.
On the bright side there will be more new content coming to the game and new toons as well. I've been playing the game from the beginning and have spent some money on the game during that time. I'm no whale though. When the haat was released me and my guild mates stayed patient and eventually the haat became easier. Since haat was added Territory Battles and Territory Wars have been added along with ships.
#stillnothingontwmatchmaking
The STH thing had to go, that was clearly silly and honestly good for no one.
Your "solution" is not solving anything. It's making things worse. How about this:
Change expose to deal X%, capped at X (based on attacker power, matching pre-nerf haat levels)
Let the boss gain X% tenacity on each debuff/TMR attempt, not on each hit, and let it last to the end of the encounter instead of resetting
Let the Sith Lords ignore the irresistible keyword
Some reasoning:
Percentage mechanics can't be solved with coefficients. Half of infinity is still infinity. Next raid with twice the hitpoints will have the very same problem with expose again. What happens if level and gear increases make expose the dominant mechanic in the arena? Is it up for another nerf then?
The obvious simple fix for the expose problem would be to put a cap on the damage. You can put the cap on the HP on phase 2 in HAAT, and it wouldn't affect any old content, and it wouldn't be overpowered in the new one. Can we please get an explanation why this solution wasn't considered more carefully? The same should be applied to Deathmark, Thermals and all other percentage effects. You could even base the cap on the character power somehow to allow for character progression.
The stacking tenacity in itself isn't a bad idea, though the values are totally off and the implementation is wrong. The current solution makes it a one-off to use debuffs, and if one of your non-debuffers happens to go directly after the boss, he will block your debuffer's chance anyway.
The reasonable way of implementing diminishing returns would be to put it on the effect itself, not on something else. And not more or less randomly. If you want to stifle debuffs, increase the tenacity by less, do it on the debuffs (even resisted ones), and let it stick throughout the whole encounter instead of having it "randomly" reset. That way there could be strategic decisions on how to handle it, like stacking potency and/or maximizing usage of debuff teams before tenacity runs out of control.
As many has pointed out, the high tenacity makes all teams without irresistible effects working very bad or not at all. Rey teams aren't stronger than others due to expose damage, they're stronger due to being able to use debuffs at all. I assume the irresistible function exists in the first place as a counter to tenacity up, which in turn is a quite bad design. It would be a good thing to start looking at the root cause instead of trying to patch it with another bad solution on top.
The long term fix would be to sort out potency/tenacity once and for all. As a short term fix, you can simply allow the Sith Lords to resist irresistible effects. That would of course require a change in the boss tenacity, or the few teams that can do something now would be as useless as the rest.
As a side effect on fixing the irresistible TM reduction with a proper stacking tenacity solution, you can also remove the +speed on damage the bosses get. If you want them to get turns faster, it would be simplier to increase the +5% TM on taking damage than to add another mechanic to do the same thing circumventing the irresistible TM reduction.
Is the event coming back next month then based on the precedent YOU set with CLS or are you THAT out of touch with the community?
Resource management is as much a part of this game as combat is (maybe more). If you just keep changing the rules ad hoc, this won't work.
I may be misinterpreting what they say, but if it's a threat to the future of the game, why do people still play the other two raids when there is 'single solve undercuts' for them aswell? More people will play if they're able to complete the raid(particularly tier 4 and above where the rewards become some what ok), than if they can't complete it.
I see they are trying to improve the communication (poor excuses compared to annoying gifs) and i believe CG remind me at every possible occasions (i.e. each update) why becoming full f2p was the best decision i made this year so far, thank you!