My biggest question is why we can't get a fix for the Territory Battles while it will still matter? I suspect any make-up would be similar to the compensation given for skipping LSTB a few weeks ago. My guild has yet to earn one IPD shard. We got nothing for shards when instead we should have been unlocking ROLO. This time we would have started getting IPD shards, instead we're not getting the fix while we could be earning them, and we'll have to wait a week to receive nothing again. Updates or hotfixes could be rolled out, but it's gonna be a wait and see for nothing.
To fix hSTR you need to introduce new rewards? You understand this is why we are saying you are increasing the power gap between heroic and non heroic guilds right? At this point of you keep rewards hwereb their at all the top guilds can put their gear 12 stuff on are Jawas and other useless toons because you have already overloaded them with this gear. If you introduce new gear 12 + now shards are going to get even more split. Especially if one of these gear pieces has a speed boost like has been rumored.
Do yourself a favor, and your team a favor, and just pull the gear change from the update until you are ready to update rewards for ALL tiers in the sith raid. That's the only way you can fix that issue.
Thank you, Carrie, and all the devs! Y'all run an awesome game. Nothing like this is ever perfect or free of unexpected glitches, and I appreciate your honesty and candor.
Ok, I'll be "the ****" and ask the questions.
At which point, @CG_Carrie , would you as a producer, say the time for patience is over? At which point do you make it a priority to NOT mess something up with nearly every release, even if it means delaying a character? I know you will say that each update is more complicated than it seems, but everything should be tested before making any live changes, right? You have an entire team to develop and test these changes, correct (funded presumably by numerous purchases throughout the game)? I'm asking because I just simply don't understand why this game has the growing pains of a new released game after years of errors and mistakes. Is the team not learning from these mistakes? Mistakes are ok to make so long as something is learned from them, but from the player perspective, nothing appears to have been learned.
This is why people are nervous about a new raid, or new ship tables, or G12+, or really any other content. Because there is always *something* that goes wrong. Take your time and fix the issues. I'm implore you, delay the new content until you test it in ALL areas of the game.
I'm hoping I'm not crossing a line here, but I feel it needs to be said. If I were producing this game, I'd be embarrassed to admit it.
*climbs down off of soapbox*
There's nothing wrong with your questions, they're fair, and I don't think you're being a ****.
I think it's all a matter of perspective - the issues we are facing now are significantly different, and I believe smaller than the ones we had in the first and second years of development. Each year we (usually), and we know this because we monitor it, have fewer escape defects, and fewer scrambles to patch major issues in the update. Those of you who were around Year 1 will have fond memories (as I did as a Beta/Day 1 player myself), but memories of how tough certain things are fade with time. Things have been, on the whole, much smoother.
That being said, the reason I posted this is because the pattern in the past few weeks has not been good. We are identifying process changes and making them to ensure that this stops now.
As for how long I can ask for your patience, I can only ask. If you choose not to maintain it, then I completely understand. But I think it's more important to indicate that we are aware of our shortcomings, we are incredibly hard on ourselves, and we do want to be better.
The only thing I object to that you said is that I couldn't be more proud to be the Producer of this game. Things don't always go well, and we make mistakes, but I will proudly put my name behind the good and the bad.
-C
Yawn...you’ve all sold us a bill of goods so many times with absolutely zero payoff, that I have more faith in the NY Mets than I do in you, Crumb and the team to do anything right
And finally, the third run of JTR has massively increased her numbers in the lower tiers, and that will definitely impact the completion rates.
-C
You’ve ignored the problem for 3 months, waiting for JTR to return? I’ve got JTR and I’ll tell you the problem did not go away. I’m just 3 months more angry that you’re ignoring us
I just want to know why the very long delay in fixing the rewards in the Sith raid....in all tiers. They are absolutely garbage and do nothing to help us progress to being able to complete the HSTR. Throw us a bone here, we’ve been asking and asking and asking over and over again! Bugs happen, totally onboard with that, but the rewards are entirely in your control!
Crumb touched on this a bit this week, but there are a few factors here. We pulled a LOT of sentiment from the forums about concerns about the STR. Most of which existed in Tiers IV-VI. We also regularly analyze tons of different pieces of quantitative data like completion rates/times/number of guilds in each tier/GP of those guilds, etc.
We were also talking about some tiers needing more of one thing or another, like some might need reward tweaks, while others might require slightly easier gameplay. As others have said in this thread, and believe me after our earlier attempt, I was pretty gunshy, we wanted to take the time to make sure we did this as best as we can.
There were other real world factors - some critical issues in HSTR which we had to fix, one which took way too long to fix, and one which required us to introduce new gear, and which will have a knock-on impact to other tiers, because we tune each tier how it fits in the whole. Our aim being to get people to graduate up to the next one, and the effort/reward to get there.
And finally, the third run of JTR has massively increased her numbers in the lower tiers, and that will definitely impact the completion rates.
This is all while running development on a number of other things in the pipeline. I hope you understand I'm not trying to make excuses, but trying to walk you through my thought process. It doesn't excuse what has happened more recently, but we are trying to be deliberate and do the right thing.
-C
Complete rates do not mean anything if the rewards are still garbage. I want My guild to be able to gear toons to meet the challenge of the HSTR, but we can’t do that when we always get challenge gear we that I have THOUSANDS OF! Nothing is worse then restarting several times to get a good run over the course of three days to do t5 only get get slapped in the face by horrible rewards. I cross my fingers every time, but get disappointed way to much. We have to beg people to just do their autos. BEG!
They hear the issues, they say “we’re listening, we’ve got it! We’ll do good by you” and then they ignore every actual problem/issue and then break 3 other parts of the game
@CG_Carrie , thank you for addressing my post, I asked the questions to get something hopefully moving in the right direction. As a (now retired) CFO of a large corporation, I know that there are many issues being dealt with at any moment, and I'm sure you are also answering to many bosses.
For the record, I've been playing since December 3, 2015, and I (surprisingly vividly) remember how difficult things were in the beginning (remember when the raid rollout broke nearly every game mode?). I am willing to forgive and forget those growing pain issues, I only bring it up so that you know that I DO understand the obstacles you have overcome.
But saying it again, this has been said time and again, so I'd love to hear what the plans are to address this clearly recurring issue, offline, of course, because that doesn't need to derail this particular subject. I'm a big believer in a "When your actions contradict your words, your words are meaningless" philosophy, so I'm more inclined to believe what you put in place in actuality vs. what is promised. (FYI- I'm pretty good at seeing issues that MIGHT have popped up but were fixed beforehand, so I give you And your team a lot of credit for what you do that we, as a player base, never notice).
-Q
Over the past few weeks as CG_SCrumb has been ramping up, I have been taking a little bit of a step back, and I am so appreciative of the support of this community in helping to bring him into the fold, despite sometimes having frustrations with me stepping back too swiftly as we figure out how we want to communicate going forward. The number of personal messages I receive on the forums, Reddit, Discord, Twitter, and through other channels is unmaintainable with the responsibilities I have running this game. We are looking for ways to ensure you get timely responses to as many of your questions and concerns as possible, and Crumb is picking up more and more of those responsibilities very quickly.
Also, the timing of this transition isn’t ideal, because as we end a quarter, there is less we can say about the future. However, as promised, we will be doing a Road Ahead Blog for the upcoming months in the first couple weeks of the next quarter, so early July we will be blasting info once again. And we are committed to outlining the regular cadence of communication moving forward so you know what to expect and when. While we can’t post as frequently or on as many topics as everyone would want, it is my sincere hope that we are in a significantly more trusting place than we were a year ago.
I say all of this to explain that I wanted to be the one to post today, because as the Senior Producer on Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes, there are times I need to bear responsibility for things that go wrong. We will not all agree (if ever) about whether or not something should work one way or another, and while we have read all the posts about Ships, the Sith Raid, and the changes to GXII, we believe we can work together between devs and the community to ensure that we address concerns, while striking a balance to maintain a healthy game.
However, in the recent weeks, we’ve had a number of issues in the live game that were not intended, such as the bugs yesterday and today in the Territory Battles. To have these issues off the back of issues in the past three TBs, is really unacceptable. I want to sincerely apologize and ask for your patience while we sort out what caused these issues to escape into the wild in the first place.
I usually just hover and lurk, but feel that I had to make an account because I have a few issues with what you've said here and I have highlighted them in bold. I also removed some of your original text, but only so people don't have to read the entire thing again. We do pay attention when we get communication on prominent issues.
First off, I want to say that I respect your outstanding courage in taking charge and owning up to mistakes that are made. It is never easy, and you regularly handle such instances with a high degree of class. I say this not to catch you off guard, but to genuinely compliment you on a very positive character trait. That being said I will start off with the issues in your post.
I cannot agree with your assessment that @CG_SBCrumb has been "ramping up" over the last few weeks. He has certainly been vocal today, but if we look at the last month we see a lack of communication similar to when it was at its worst.
For example, the Sith Triumvirate Raid Feedback Thread. This thread was started by our newly appointed Community Manager on May the 14th. He popped back in to let us know we would be getting an update "EOW" (End of Week is what we all assumed) on the 21st of May after two short posts and then there was complete silence until today where he presented us with the intended changes that are to go live tomorrow. This is not the only thread he has abandoned. Not exactly what one might call "ramping up" nor would one consider this a "timely response."
The problem with these changes are a great many that can be summed up in one sentence. The dev team seems to have ignored all our feedback. I say this because CG_SBCrumb said "These are also not the final changes to the rewards and gameplay. We are looking into other small changes to accomplish other goals of ours, as well as some concerns expressed by players, however these are the only changes we are making in the near future." This was in the Dev Announcement he posted today. If the dev teams use of the word "soon" is any indication, then "near future" sounds quite a long way off.
Another interesting thing he mentioned in a post in the subsequent megathread from his announcement of the raid reward changes is "We want to see the results of the return of Rey’s Hero’s Journey which doubled the number of JTRs in the wild and should result in a significant boost to raid progress."
This is a de facto admission that Rey (Jedi Training) is indeed one of the very few viable teams in the sith raid. This is in blatant contradiction to what @CG_TopHat said in his Dev Announcement from the 12th of March where he said "After testing, we believe moving Expose from .0004 to .0002 will keep Rey (Jedi Training) teams competitive in the Rancor and AAT (and will also keep Finn Zeta Leader Ability teams competitive as well) but will mitigate them being overpowered in the Sith Triumvirate raid. Additionally, the gap between Expose and other emerging strategies is less pronounced, which we believe will help spur on additional, lively theorycrafting." This quite literally means that the Expose nerf was nothing more than a nerf and in fact not intended to promote other team development for the raid. A nerf on your most recent flagship toon that many had spent quite a bit of money to unlock, gear, mod and improve the abilities of.
This all ties in to your comment about us being in a "significantly more trusting place" and the fact that we have hardly been given a reason to trust the dev team any more now than a year ago. This also ties into your assertion that we may not agree on where we are landing on big issues such as changes to ships, the sith raid and others of equal magnitude. From what we've gathered, you left those who are not in a guild completing Heroic Sith Raids out in the cold.
In a reply to Iy4oy4s you said "There were other real world factors - some critical issues in HSTR which we had to fix, one which took way too long to fix, and one which required us to introduce new gear, and which will have a knock-on impact to other tiers, because we tune each tier how it fits in the whole. Our aim being to get people to graduate up to the next one, and the effort/reward to get there."
This simply doesn't fit what players have said in the 29 pages of the Sith Triumvirate Feedback Thread. If anything, it is quite evident that each tier of this raid is at best helping to improve toons that are ineffective in the raid. The teams used in lower tiers are already at a gear level that is beyond the gear rewards. It has been mentioned more times than I can count that the rewards are only good in the heroic tier. We don't see the knock-on impact you mentioned because this raid forces entire guilds to farm exactly the squads that have been proven to work. No other teams are effective due to the mechanics, speed and maddening tenacity that took all our previous work and flung it out the window.
To summarize: your apology is well met, but there are far too many inconsistencies for us to take what you and the rest of the team has said in the last few months seriously.
@CG_Carrie the biggest issue I see is that the original lower tier raids were poor. Putting aside the mystery box issue, you increased the currency rewards (which benefited my guild because we were running T4 and we went from no GEC to some GEC). And then after one or two runs with the new rewards, the rewards were rolled back and we lost our improved currency. And it's been months now (I think, I've lost track of time) and not only has it not been addressed, the hSTR now awards new gear while nothing is done for the lower tiers. And @CG_SBCrumb said in his post that there's no plans to change anything in the near future (which based on past history pretty much means never).
How are us lower tier guilds supposed to feel about this? Is it really supposed to make my T4/T5 guild feel incentivized to get to the highest tier, when the rewards we need to do so aren't upgraded at all? Or is it just supposed to make us feel dispirited, with the guild eventually breaking up, some people quitting, and some people finding a new guild because this broke the old guild...?
I'm possibly exaggerating a bit, but this has really left a sour taste in my mouth. I defend the game constantly against the daily complaints, but this is just too much.
@CG_Carrie I sympathize with you. You have the undesirable task of communicating to the player bases about things that we do not want to hear. I believe that your words are carefully chosen and reveal only about a tenth of what you truly know to be true, which is: these changes are in support of the bottom line for CG, they have little to do with any forum comments, and there are worse changes heading our way.
The success of this game can be a burden, as I am sure your boss expects results equal to or better than last quarter. The problems we all have are the direct result of the P2P nature of this game. As a F2P player, I am always chasing, and I am a part of the majority. I know the position you are in @CG_Carrie but I don't accept what you say at face value. I have peeked behind the curtain and seen the driving nature of the messes you guys make. Congrats on success you have had, but the empty apologies won't work here.good luck with a rabid community and the emerging competition in recently released mobile games.
Lots of double speak and inconsistent logic here @CG_Carrie. Unfortunately, this type of message has become the MO from CG. You've almost certainly burned any trust you may have fostered of late. It seems like you can't stop shooting yourselves in the foot.
To be fair, I know that the name of the game is to make money. Fine. However, stop coming here saying you value our feedback then making changes directly in opposition to it without explaining WHY the changes we suggest are implausible. Right now, we can only assume they larger vision precluded what we are asking for. If this is truly a multi-year journey to implement, I fear the game will die before you get there at this rate.
TLDR; "healthy" games actually require players, and feedback to improve them. You're making it less likely to get either lately.
Seems there is lots of tumault in the Star Wars Universe today, unrest here with the announced changes either not wanted or not coming, Movies on hold, and so on. Surely this makes life behind the scenes more chaotic when you wonder where all if this is going. Fans have become very vocal lately, and not all of it is good or justified but the anger continues. They have also realized to the shagrin of any promoting SW Property, that they (the fans) hold the power. Power that comes from spending or not.
Carrie, I suggest one thing, if this is a bandaid and will only result in more rhetoric, and unfullfilled promises, please go back to ignoring us. I do not wish to be rude, but as one of many trying to hold their guilds together, promises with no chance of being delivered are going to make keeping things together even more difficult. I accept, albeit begrudgingly, that the top 1% is your focus, just don't offer any more false hope.
Can we please talk about why, in June 2018, in this day and age of the game (sorry, I'm going to shout for a bit), I AM STILL GETTING USELESS CHALLENGE GEAR IN MY RAID REWARDS.
We players have been complaining about this for a very long time. A year maybe? Longer? And after a long time of us being ignored and told to just eat our gruel and like it, you finally acknowledged that this is a problem, and you tried to address it.
And then after that was a disaster for other reasons, you rolled everything back and tried to say that there was no possible way to roll things back but keep the challenge gear out.
First, I have a very hard time believing there was no way to do that. I'm not a coder or anything, but I assume that somewhere in the code is a list of what rewards are possibilities for each raid tier. Why is it impossible to just delete the useless challenge gear from that list?
And how many months ago was that? Three months? Some blithe promises were made about revisiting this, but as of now, I haven't seen any evidence of this.
So now we're back to where we started with years of complaints about insultingly useless raid rewards, and (sorry to shout again) NOTHING HAS HAPPENED.
Admittedly this isn't completely relevant to all the recent errors. But I want to put this forward as one of a number of examples of why many in the community don't trust that we're actually being heard and valued. I want to believe that our feedback matters, but the fact that I'm still here getting useless challenge gear is evidence to the contrary.
I don't really understand why everyone is complaining. As a SWBF2 player i think you're doing an amazing job, as compared to that game, youre communication is great! You produce hotfixes really quickly and then apologise for them! Also, i'm completly F2P ,as is a lot of others, so everything you do for this game is positive. You have made a really great game and continue to provide good updates regularly, so i can't see why people are creating angry posts. I understand the game isn't perfect, but it is the closest i've seen.
Thank you
Carrie, with all respect, but the concerns of the players ARE about the health of the game. Making it appear as if these two issues are in competition or opposed to each other is intellectually dishonest
And finally, the third run of JTR has massively increased her numbers in the lower tiers, and that will definitely impact the completion rates.
-C
It's not the completion rates that is the problem. It's the discrepancy in rewards versus effort for non-heroic tiers. There is no progress feeling in doing them since the payout for the effort is essentially non-existant and so does not help towards the goal of doing Heroic at all. If 20% more guilds can do heroic with a few more Reys, fine for them, but the guilds who didn't get enough Reys are still as shafted as before.
Pretty much all progress towards heroic has been waiting for Rey event and doing anything but touching the lower tiers of the raid. Guilds have to stay at lower tiers than they can complete because they risk losing players who are fed up with chipping away for days at a higher tier for nothing, or who are fed up with doing all the work because half the guild are too fed up to even do auto attempts every day.
That can't possibly be a good design when the best progress path for a raid is to stay away from it as much as possible?
You're just lucky Foxnext are even worse than you at providing value for money or you'd all be "reassigned".
Putting the nodes back to 8 attempts permanently would be a solid olive branch as the drop rates are equivalent to dropping a 1 million buck bet on a 1 legged rocking horse in a race full of rocket sleds. 5 days straight with no drops of Sabine on a single hard node is unacceptable.
A few concessions in your cash grab won't hurt your bottom line all that much. You have more than enough whales to cover it.
Oh and no I'm not paying 10 quid for half a character either. I can buy 2-3 full games off of GOG for that price.
Best way to apologise for things is either don't do the thing you're apologising for in the first place and/or correct it, fast. Don't say anything, just fix the problem(s).
I've only been playing for a shade over 2 months and I'm already eye rolling over the inane design choices you've made. I know you have the overlords to feed with fat stacks of cash but there's a breaking point.
Gamers/customers are always going to complain but there's a ratio and this one has tipped into overwhelming majority to negative. That's not accounting for all the silent people who just quit without saying anything either.
TY for post, it seems sincere.
I want to write my sincere thoughts then. I hope blizzard makes a similar game, until that time i havent another option.
First I would like to say thank you very much for your message @CG_Carrie and your acknowledgement!
it's very important and reading such message is great!
Now as you said, we need to stay patient to see you and the CG team solving these issues.
But as said by several before, the feedbacks from players are very important, not just analyzing raw data, completion rates, etc. I'm very happy to be in an Heroic Sith Guild, but when I look at the rewards for Tier 1-6 of Sith raid... it's really discouraging... I hope you'll make these rewards better so players have more incentive to do these while getting ready for Heroic.
Here are 2 suggestions that I think would be beneficial without damaging the economy of the game:
- For Heroic Sith raid rewards:
The new change clearly favors better ranking... which is good on the paper but which could very likely lead to more selfishness, make player leaves, etc.
With the new change, getting into Top 3 and then top 10 are even more important than before! Otherwise it means falling behind the others who get there... which may be a big issue in arena for exemple.
In a competitive Heroic sith raid guild, it's hard to get into top10 and very hard to get into top 3... and the new rewards give all incentive to get top3 / top 10 even if someone already has traya and was going to step down a bit to let other players get more shards.
In my guild I know some players may leave because they feel they would fall behind as they can't get top3 / Top 10 (and in the new reward system it's a lot more impactful than it was before!) while they could quite more easily achieve that in less HSR competitive guilds... a new reward system that incentive dedicated players to leave their guilds or make them feel bad is a bad outcome!
A solution for that would be to include for rank 11 - 40 with 100% an extra reward that gives non G12 highly needed gears (Carbs III, Stun Gun 5, Biotech Implant 8, Stun Cuff 3) - for exemple 20 salvages with a chance for full piece -. That way, these in rank 11-40 would feel better about not being top10 and at the same time players would still have an incentive to do damages in order to not be in ranks 41-50
- For hard to get challenge gears
Simple, just increase the minimum that can drop by 1 while also increasing the average by 1 for each challenge gear. For exemple Carb III wouldn't be 3-7 with most drops being 3-5 but 4-7 with let's say an average around 5.5 or 6 (I don't know exactly the current average, only mine which is around 4/4.5 I think)
That would be an amazing move, but that wouldn't remove all the grinding needed. Spending crystals to gear faster would still be as important/impactful as it is now
@CG_Carrie Please don't take a step back, when you were in charge, things were a lot better it was only for a short time, but communication and general updates were going a lot smoother. Ever since the new person has taken over its just gone back to how it was last year, if not worse. Next to no communication, Ridiculous bugs and terrible changes to the structure of the game. Really thought things were going somewhere but it feels like 1 step forwards and then 2 steps back
If only the developers of health service machinery, trains, planes, cars, power stations, etc. were as competent at rolling out updates to their software - then there would be much fewer complaints because half of the worlds population would have been wiped out long since. Sorry, your testing regime is not working, instead of pushing the "game changers" (a misnomer) you should be looking to get some good beta testers instead...
However, it is still nothing but Chimera out there. There is no balance at all. Just look at the top 20 in virtually any shard.
You guys really need to either nerf Chimera or raise the abilities of the other capital ships. There’s nothing fun about having one ship dominate the entire game mode.
However, it is still nothing but Chimera out there. There is no balance at all. Just look at the top 20 in virtually any shard.
You guys really need to either nerf Chimera or raise the abilities of the other capital ships. There’s nothing fun about having one ship dominate the entire game mode.
Basically you nerfed the kitten out of it again and are hoping we won’t go up in arms again.
Depends how bad the nerf is though I suspect we are getting tired of trying to convince you guys what we think fun is and how it differs from your ideas of fun.
More trust then last year? That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard in ages. I trusted your development decisions a lot more back then. Given the last 3 months and their results the only thing I trust is that you’ll make a change that annoys me at least once a month minimum. More then likely 90% of the changes will annoy me.
Donations in guild chat I can’t turn off, chat not defaulting to something besides the goofy broken guild chat window (word wrap fails miserably). Chat groups have no control mechanisms so are useless. Constant attempts to nerf raid drops. Nerfing any team that’s fun in the sith raid. Designing a raid that has raid specific abilities. I suspect this was primarily to prevent autoing. Shall I go on? Oh right I almost forgot. I still don’t like Tb or tw. Especially Tb when you randomly decide to change something that worked (ls fleet battles). That reminds me. I don’t like the changes to fleet the starting fleet of three seriously sucks.
Get the idea? The only thing I can think of that I liked lately was we can buy things from the find menu if they are available and we can see in the shops if something is needed in favourites. Oh and seeing that a character has zetas is helpful.
Bottom line? Nope I definitely do not trust you. Not even slightly. And I did last year.
This kinda sums up how I feel about the direction you guys are taking at this point.
For one moment, step back from completion rates, quantitative data, numbers, data and all the "technical jargon" and ask yourself this...
Are the players happy with what we've done?
Seriously do us all a favour and consider this. We are getting insanely sick of pretty words that add up to loads of posted words that mean exactly kitten.
I think we’d all trust you more if you said we think x change will make players spend more money on y so we are going to try that. I mean I’d be stupid if I thought you were making the game fun because you wanted to. The whole idea of the game is that I have fun and want to spend money on it so that you get a fat paycheck. I mean let’s be real here. Maybe telling us things like that might build trust that you seem so skilled at disposing of.
I hate these new timesinks called Tb/tw. Annoying features.
Replies
Survey says no...
Do yourself a favor, and your team a favor, and just pull the gear change from the update until you are ready to update rewards for ALL tiers in the sith raid. That's the only way you can fix that issue.
Really? We're being promised regular a regular cadence... Again? You guys tend to start out well and then quickly go back to crickets.
Why not just stop promising this?
Yawn...you’ve all sold us a bill of goods so many times with absolutely zero payoff, that I have more faith in the NY Mets than I do in you, Crumb and the team to do anything right
They hear the issues, they say “we’re listening, we’ve got it! We’ll do good by you” and then they ignore every actual problem/issue and then break 3 other parts of the game
For the record, I've been playing since December 3, 2015, and I (surprisingly vividly) remember how difficult things were in the beginning (remember when the raid rollout broke nearly every game mode?). I am willing to forgive and forget those growing pain issues, I only bring it up so that you know that I DO understand the obstacles you have overcome.
But saying it again, this has been said time and again, so I'd love to hear what the plans are to address this clearly recurring issue, offline, of course, because that doesn't need to derail this particular subject. I'm a big believer in a "When your actions contradict your words, your words are meaningless" philosophy, so I'm more inclined to believe what you put in place in actuality vs. what is promised. (FYI- I'm pretty good at seeing issues that MIGHT have popped up but were fixed beforehand, so I give you And your team a lot of credit for what you do that we, as a player base, never notice).
-Q
Hello @CG_Carrie,
I usually just hover and lurk, but feel that I had to make an account because I have a few issues with what you've said here and I have highlighted them in bold. I also removed some of your original text, but only so people don't have to read the entire thing again. We do pay attention when we get communication on prominent issues.
First off, I want to say that I respect your outstanding courage in taking charge and owning up to mistakes that are made. It is never easy, and you regularly handle such instances with a high degree of class. I say this not to catch you off guard, but to genuinely compliment you on a very positive character trait. That being said I will start off with the issues in your post.
I cannot agree with your assessment that @CG_SBCrumb has been "ramping up" over the last few weeks. He has certainly been vocal today, but if we look at the last month we see a lack of communication similar to when it was at its worst.
For example, the Sith Triumvirate Raid Feedback Thread. This thread was started by our newly appointed Community Manager on May the 14th. He popped back in to let us know we would be getting an update "EOW" (End of Week is what we all assumed) on the 21st of May after two short posts and then there was complete silence until today where he presented us with the intended changes that are to go live tomorrow. This is not the only thread he has abandoned. Not exactly what one might call "ramping up" nor would one consider this a "timely response."
The problem with these changes are a great many that can be summed up in one sentence. The dev team seems to have ignored all our feedback. I say this because CG_SBCrumb said "These are also not the final changes to the rewards and gameplay. We are looking into other small changes to accomplish other goals of ours, as well as some concerns expressed by players, however these are the only changes we are making in the near future." This was in the Dev Announcement he posted today. If the dev teams use of the word "soon" is any indication, then "near future" sounds quite a long way off.
Another interesting thing he mentioned in a post in the subsequent megathread from his announcement of the raid reward changes is "We want to see the results of the return of Rey’s Hero’s Journey which doubled the number of JTRs in the wild and should result in a significant boost to raid progress."
This is a de facto admission that Rey (Jedi Training) is indeed one of the very few viable teams in the sith raid. This is in blatant contradiction to what @CG_TopHat said in his Dev Announcement from the 12th of March where he said "After testing, we believe moving Expose from .0004 to .0002 will keep Rey (Jedi Training) teams competitive in the Rancor and AAT (and will also keep Finn Zeta Leader Ability teams competitive as well) but will mitigate them being overpowered in the Sith Triumvirate raid. Additionally, the gap between Expose and other emerging strategies is less pronounced, which we believe will help spur on additional, lively theorycrafting." This quite literally means that the Expose nerf was nothing more than a nerf and in fact not intended to promote other team development for the raid. A nerf on your most recent flagship toon that many had spent quite a bit of money to unlock, gear, mod and improve the abilities of.
This all ties in to your comment about us being in a "significantly more trusting place" and the fact that we have hardly been given a reason to trust the dev team any more now than a year ago. This also ties into your assertion that we may not agree on where we are landing on big issues such as changes to ships, the sith raid and others of equal magnitude. From what we've gathered, you left those who are not in a guild completing Heroic Sith Raids out in the cold.
In a reply to Iy4oy4s you said "There were other real world factors - some critical issues in HSTR which we had to fix, one which took way too long to fix, and one which required us to introduce new gear, and which will have a knock-on impact to other tiers, because we tune each tier how it fits in the whole. Our aim being to get people to graduate up to the next one, and the effort/reward to get there."
This simply doesn't fit what players have said in the 29 pages of the Sith Triumvirate Feedback Thread. If anything, it is quite evident that each tier of this raid is at best helping to improve toons that are ineffective in the raid. The teams used in lower tiers are already at a gear level that is beyond the gear rewards. It has been mentioned more times than I can count that the rewards are only good in the heroic tier. We don't see the knock-on impact you mentioned because this raid forces entire guilds to farm exactly the squads that have been proven to work. No other teams are effective due to the mechanics, speed and maddening tenacity that took all our previous work and flung it out the window.
To summarize: your apology is well met, but there are far too many inconsistencies for us to take what you and the rest of the team has said in the last few months seriously.
Regards,
Weirdornothology
How are us lower tier guilds supposed to feel about this? Is it really supposed to make my T4/T5 guild feel incentivized to get to the highest tier, when the rewards we need to do so aren't upgraded at all? Or is it just supposed to make us feel dispirited, with the guild eventually breaking up, some people quitting, and some people finding a new guild because this broke the old guild...?
I'm possibly exaggerating a bit, but this has really left a sour taste in my mouth. I defend the game constantly against the daily complaints, but this is just too much.
The success of this game can be a burden, as I am sure your boss expects results equal to or better than last quarter. The problems we all have are the direct result of the P2P nature of this game. As a F2P player, I am always chasing, and I am a part of the majority. I know the position you are in @CG_Carrie but I don't accept what you say at face value. I have peeked behind the curtain and seen the driving nature of the messes you guys make. Congrats on success you have had, but the empty apologies won't work here.good luck with a rabid community and the emerging competition in recently released mobile games.
To be fair, I know that the name of the game is to make money. Fine. However, stop coming here saying you value our feedback then making changes directly in opposition to it without explaining WHY the changes we suggest are implausible. Right now, we can only assume they larger vision precluded what we are asking for. If this is truly a multi-year journey to implement, I fear the game will die before you get there at this rate.
TLDR; "healthy" games actually require players, and feedback to improve them. You're making it less likely to get either lately.
Carrie, I suggest one thing, if this is a bandaid and will only result in more rhetoric, and unfullfilled promises, please go back to ignoring us. I do not wish to be rude, but as one of many trying to hold their guilds together, promises with no chance of being delivered are going to make keeping things together even more difficult. I accept, albeit begrudgingly, that the top 1% is your focus, just don't offer any more false hope.
Can we please talk about why, in June 2018, in this day and age of the game (sorry, I'm going to shout for a bit), I AM STILL GETTING USELESS CHALLENGE GEAR IN MY RAID REWARDS.
We players have been complaining about this for a very long time. A year maybe? Longer? And after a long time of us being ignored and told to just eat our gruel and like it, you finally acknowledged that this is a problem, and you tried to address it.
And then after that was a disaster for other reasons, you rolled everything back and tried to say that there was no possible way to roll things back but keep the challenge gear out.
First, I have a very hard time believing there was no way to do that. I'm not a coder or anything, but I assume that somewhere in the code is a list of what rewards are possibilities for each raid tier. Why is it impossible to just delete the useless challenge gear from that list?
And how many months ago was that? Three months? Some blithe promises were made about revisiting this, but as of now, I haven't seen any evidence of this.
So now we're back to where we started with years of complaints about insultingly useless raid rewards, and (sorry to shout again) NOTHING HAS HAPPENED.
Admittedly this isn't completely relevant to all the recent errors. But I want to put this forward as one of a number of examples of why many in the community don't trust that we're actually being heard and valued. I want to believe that our feedback matters, but the fact that I'm still here getting useless challenge gear is evidence to the contrary.
Thanks for listening.
Thank you
This needs to be said again.
It's not the completion rates that is the problem. It's the discrepancy in rewards versus effort for non-heroic tiers. There is no progress feeling in doing them since the payout for the effort is essentially non-existant and so does not help towards the goal of doing Heroic at all. If 20% more guilds can do heroic with a few more Reys, fine for them, but the guilds who didn't get enough Reys are still as shafted as before.
Pretty much all progress towards heroic has been waiting for Rey event and doing anything but touching the lower tiers of the raid. Guilds have to stay at lower tiers than they can complete because they risk losing players who are fed up with chipping away for days at a higher tier for nothing, or who are fed up with doing all the work because half the guild are too fed up to even do auto attempts every day.
That can't possibly be a good design when the best progress path for a raid is to stay away from it as much as possible?
Putting the nodes back to 8 attempts permanently would be a solid olive branch as the drop rates are equivalent to dropping a 1 million buck bet on a 1 legged rocking horse in a race full of rocket sleds. 5 days straight with no drops of Sabine on a single hard node is unacceptable.
A few concessions in your cash grab won't hurt your bottom line all that much. You have more than enough whales to cover it.
Oh and no I'm not paying 10 quid for half a character either. I can buy 2-3 full games off of GOG for that price.
Best way to apologise for things is either don't do the thing you're apologising for in the first place and/or correct it, fast. Don't say anything, just fix the problem(s).
I've only been playing for a shade over 2 months and I'm already eye rolling over the inane design choices you've made. I know you have the overlords to feed with fat stacks of cash but there's a breaking point.
Gamers/customers are always going to complain but there's a ratio and this one has tipped into overwhelming majority to negative. That's not accounting for all the silent people who just quit without saying anything either.
I want to write my sincere thoughts then. I hope blizzard makes a similar game, until that time i havent another option.
it's very important and reading such message is great!
Now as you said, we need to stay patient to see you and the CG team solving these issues.
But as said by several before, the feedbacks from players are very important, not just analyzing raw data, completion rates, etc. I'm very happy to be in an Heroic Sith Guild, but when I look at the rewards for Tier 1-6 of Sith raid... it's really discouraging... I hope you'll make these rewards better so players have more incentive to do these while getting ready for Heroic.
Here are 2 suggestions that I think would be beneficial without damaging the economy of the game:
- For Heroic Sith raid rewards:
The new change clearly favors better ranking... which is good on the paper but which could very likely lead to more selfishness, make player leaves, etc.
With the new change, getting into Top 3 and then top 10 are even more important than before! Otherwise it means falling behind the others who get there... which may be a big issue in arena for exemple.
In a competitive Heroic sith raid guild, it's hard to get into top10 and very hard to get into top 3... and the new rewards give all incentive to get top3 / top 10 even if someone already has traya and was going to step down a bit to let other players get more shards.
In my guild I know some players may leave because they feel they would fall behind as they can't get top3 / Top 10 (and in the new reward system it's a lot more impactful than it was before!) while they could quite more easily achieve that in less HSR competitive guilds... a new reward system that incentive dedicated players to leave their guilds or make them feel bad is a bad outcome!
A solution for that would be to include for rank 11 - 40 with 100% an extra reward that gives non G12 highly needed gears (Carbs III, Stun Gun 5, Biotech Implant 8, Stun Cuff 3) - for exemple 20 salvages with a chance for full piece -. That way, these in rank 11-40 would feel better about not being top10 and at the same time players would still have an incentive to do damages in order to not be in ranks 41-50
- For hard to get challenge gears
Simple, just increase the minimum that can drop by 1 while also increasing the average by 1 for each challenge gear. For exemple Carb III wouldn't be 3-7 with most drops being 3-5 but 4-7 with let's say an average around 5.5 or 6 (I don't know exactly the current average, only mine which is around 4/4.5 I think)
That would be an amazing move, but that wouldn't remove all the grinding needed. Spending crystals to gear faster would still be as important/impactful as it is now
Just some thoughts that crossed my mind...
Best regards
Regarding Ships - I very much like the rework.
However, it is still nothing but Chimera out there. There is no balance at all. Just look at the top 20 in virtually any shard.
You guys really need to either nerf Chimera or raise the abilities of the other capital ships. There’s nothing fun about having one ship dominate the entire game mode.
My ship shard is full of Tarkins
Depends how bad the nerf is though I suspect we are getting tired of trying to convince you guys what we think fun is and how it differs from your ideas of fun.
More trust then last year? That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard in ages. I trusted your development decisions a lot more back then. Given the last 3 months and their results the only thing I trust is that you’ll make a change that annoys me at least once a month minimum. More then likely 90% of the changes will annoy me.
Donations in guild chat I can’t turn off, chat not defaulting to something besides the goofy broken guild chat window (word wrap fails miserably). Chat groups have no control mechanisms so are useless. Constant attempts to nerf raid drops. Nerfing any team that’s fun in the sith raid. Designing a raid that has raid specific abilities. I suspect this was primarily to prevent autoing. Shall I go on? Oh right I almost forgot. I still don’t like Tb or tw. Especially Tb when you randomly decide to change something that worked (ls fleet battles). That reminds me. I don’t like the changes to fleet the starting fleet of three seriously sucks.
Get the idea? The only thing I can think of that I liked lately was we can buy things from the find menu if they are available and we can see in the shops if something is needed in favourites. Oh and seeing that a character has zetas is helpful.
Bottom line? Nope I definitely do not trust you. Not even slightly. And I did last year.
This kinda sums up how I feel about the direction you guys are taking at this point.
Seriously do us all a favour and consider this. We are getting insanely sick of pretty words that add up to loads of posted words that mean exactly kitten.
I think we’d all trust you more if you said we think x change will make players spend more money on y so we are going to try that. I mean I’d be stupid if I thought you were making the game fun because you wanted to. The whole idea of the game is that I have fun and want to spend money on it so that you get a fat paycheck. I mean let’s be real here. Maybe telling us things like that might build trust that you seem so skilled at disposing of.