Update to Raid Reward Changes - 4/11/18

Carrie
122 posts Member
edited April 2018
Hello everybody,
With today’s raid reward changes, many people noticed that the chance of receiving a full piece of gear in the Heroic Tier had been lowered. This was an overcorrection and we are partially rolling it back. Now anybody who completes the Heroic Tier will get one guaranteed full piece.
Below is our explanation, forgive the wordiness but in order to explain the reasoning for this, we need to get into some heady topics.

---TL;DR Version---
We had changed the droprate from a tiered percentage chance to a flat 40% to accommodate an additional two slots of Gear XII coming in May exclusively to the Heroic Tier. In the spirit of communication, we did say why because we don't want to promise something too early and then not end up delivering it on time. However after reviewing internally we feel confident that we can hit the May date, and we are rolling back the chance of a full gear piece from the Heroic Tier to 100% across all ranks, until the new rewards are live, at which point we will reevaluate. All of the other changes remain the same (including the flattening of rewards across ranks, the expansion of the full piece pool beyond strictly GXII, the removal of many pieces of low-demand salvage, and the changes to Guild Currency and Guild Event Tokens), and we will continue to monitor the impact of these other changes as players continue to launch & complete raids.
We will make this change sometime in the next two weeks and ensure that a makegood, equivalent to roughly 2-4 pieces of full gear pieces, is provided to anybody who has completed the Heroic raid during this time period.
Thanks for your feedback during this rollout.

---Longer Version---
First, we'd like to apologize for one piece of improper expectations-setting in our announcement of the raid rewards changes. Specifically, for the Heroic Tier, the Guild Currency & Guild Event Token "steepening" was never intended to fully offset the reduction in value of all of the gear changes for top-ranking players. It was intended to preserve some incentive for finishing in the top ranks, since we reduced that incentive by flattening gear rewards (for the overall well-being of guilds and of the game).
We made an oversight in wording in the initial announcement of the changes, and while the top-ranked Guild Currency and Guild Event Token rewards are significantly better than before, it doesn’t fully make up for the full piece odds drops, especially for ranks #1-3.
Second, in our initial tuning, we overshot the mark in the odds of full GXII piece drops. Players who have the Sith Heroic Raid on farm, completing it twice a week without fail, consistently getting 1 or more full GXII pieces (emphasis on GXII because of the immense value of those gear pieces in combat), will pull away from the rest of the population in a way that is truly detrimental to the long-term health of the game.
Without diving too much into the underlying value of the various pieces of the gear economy, we have been looking at internal data from the first few weeks of Heroic results, and we had settled on a 40% flat chance of a full complete piece, in the Heroic Tier, across all ranks, as a reasonable long-term goal for the value of the effort of completing the Heroic Tier when you include the expansion pieces of Gear XII.
Third, we have changed the full piece pool from Gear XII, to a broader array of desired pieces. Despite its combat utility and theoretical demand, Gear XII is not as all-encompassing a concern for some players as concerns about Mk3 Carbantis, Mk5 Stun Guns, some formerly AAT-exclusive pieces, Gear XI finishers, etc. All of which are now in the complete piece pool.

However, it's clear that the aggregate amount of effort (gear & ability investment, time, offline theorycrafting, and coordination) required to complete the Sith Heroic Tier is still too high to lower the complete piece odds at this time. Our target for the long run remains a 40% chance of a full gear piece (GXII, GXI finishers, highly pinched Raid Gear, or a handful of other high-demand pieces), plus the rewards from the expansion of GXII but until:
  • We have had a chance to reevaluate Heroic reward results once the new gear is out.
  • We see sustained evidence that players have their teams ready to go and are deploying them to consistently beat Heroic in larger numbers, we'll keep the complete piece chance at 100%.
Players will receive advance notice from us in the future when we are ready to make this change.

To our Heroic raiders: please take some time over the next couple of weeks and take a look at the aggregate GP lift among your guildmates, your aggregate result in Territory Battles and Territory Wars, and the rate of growth in ALL players' ability to complete the raid, over the coming weeks, as a result of these changes (including the rollback to 100% which we will deploy inside of the next two weeks). Know that your efforts will result in early access to the next release of gear. Know that we are always looking for more ways to reward you, and will be rolling out changes that reward the level of cooperation and cohesion that you have already established and that the vast majority of players are still working towards. We know that the adjustment may be painful for top-performing guildmates at first, but we are confident that this will be a net positive for players and for the game in the long run.

Thanks to everyone for your feedback and we'll see you on the holotables,
-Carrie

<<MEGATHREAD>>
Senior Producer, Galaxy of Heroes
Post edited by Carrie on
This discussion has been closed.