So i have a possible change that they should consider. Make it to were Darth traya either gains 100% turn meter or insta-kills a character at 80-100 stacks of bonds of weakness
Almost all of the BoW fixes are esoteric changes. Complexity on top of complexity. The absolute easiest change is Acolyte hits twice instead of attacking twice.
The second easiest is modifying the raid boss behavior of Isolate. Admittedly this doesn't render it impossible for the same interaction to emerge later on somehow but the factors have to line up in a pretty perfect storm (which seems unlikely).
The best BoW related fix would be some kind of stacking bonus that heads this off like a very slight increase in crit resistance, defense, or evasion per stack. But these again begin falling into the category of being esoteric and mentally difficult to track.
Design suggestions for night sister zombie: (disclaimer: this might not get rid of paper zombie) when night sister zombie revives, reduce starting health by 50% of maximum protection and grant tm equal to half the % of health lost. This might need to be placed behind a zeta but should make a maximum geared zombie extremely potent.
For example zombie has 20k protection at the start of battle, dies, revives with no protection, losing 10k health. Zombie originally had 20k health so gains 25% tm. This would not only encourage players to gear zombie, but to nonstop stack protection so that zombie can die fast and move more often, still snagging those taunts.
@CG_TopHat what about the other thread outlining all the issues players actually have with the raid? A horrible patch was rushed in less than a day but the forums have been livid for about 80 days due to the horrible raid mechanics that are way too dependant on rng.
Your predatory business practices got you into trouble and this is not enough to repair the damage done. Please be better in the future through action.
Why not create a “suggestion box” thread for people to submit ideas on how to fix zombie? With such a huge player base, the answer has to be out there somewhere. Personally, I think her health stats should just flip, so at a low gear she has max health, which decreases as you gear and level up
“Rather than scramble and try to add another layer and double down on a bad fix, we’re going to roll back the change and go back to the drawing board. We are still going to be making a change to the raid or to the characters that enable the Critolyte team. However, whatever that change is we will test in house more rigorously and announce to you with more lead time, what change is coming. If we have to make a change to a character we’ll have an open conversation about how we preserve the investment made by people that are significantly, negatively affected by that change.“
While you’re at it @CG_TopHat can you also get the team to work on making the Raid fun, instead of such a tedious chore, and maybe also fix the rewards to make it actually worth the time to work through? That’d be great.
Thank you for taking responsibility for this situation @ CG. I look forward to seeing a well thought-out resolution to this issue. I hope this represents a change in how fixes likes these will be rolled out in the future.
@CG_TopHat this is an easy fix. If any character gets 10 consecutive turns they get inflicted with an undispellable daze for the rest of the encounter. All the engineers need to add to the sith raid battles is one counter and one variable that hold the last character to take a turn. If the next character to take a turn is the same as the last increment the counter otherwise set it back to zero.
Thank you. This rollback was the right call. We don't want infinite loops but demolishing a faction and implementing a bugged fix was not the right solution. I'm sure we will get a legitimate fix out soon.
@CG_TopHat. A fix for this infinate loop and any future ones caused by bonds would just be to have the raid boss gain tm at 100 bonds or 200 bonds or whatever the number you want to set. I would suggest setting it high so it only effects a loop and not other teams. But a 100% tm gain at 200 bonds would end the run because the team in the loop is at low health and they woukd die as soon as the boss takes a turn. The teams could still do good dmg but not ridiculous dmg and it wouldn't nerf any non loop teams.
I hope this further drives home how completely flawed the entire raid is, when it's creators are unsure how to repair it. Honestly, burn it down and salt the earth it stood on. At what point will they have to finally admit, it just is not worth the headache and customer upset to let it continue. Could that point ever happen, or will pride outweigh common sense. If nothing else I truly hope they do not replicate it for future raids.
Why not create a “suggestion box” thread for people to submit ideas on how to fix zombie? With such a huge player base, the answer has to be out there somewhere. Personally, I think her health stats should just flip, so at a low gear she has max health, which decreases as you gear and level up
I'll point you to the 1500+ post STR thread....
I'll believe this is any more than damage control when I see them actually DO what they SAY.
Bravo to @CG_TopHat for owning this. Others at CG can learn from you on how to effectively communicate decisions, and own the poor ones.
Unfortunately, that leaves a fairly lengthy list still to own and explain that the players are still left to assume CG is 100% OK with, as we've not been told any different. So, trust that what @CG_TopHat will actually get done what he claims to want to do, any hope that it will be done in consideration of player experience/investment, or that we'll be getting any actual opportunity to voice concerns BEFORE the trigger is pulled on changes regarding this (or anything else) are just cheap words.
I've said it before, but time for CG to put up or shut up. Given the amount of communication up to this point, I can only assume we've been getting the later and will continue to get more of the same.
Good to know they have at least some sensible people working there. I agree with @Zevox Asajj is definitely not the problem. His suggestion seems sound to me. I have a feeling that they are arbitrarily targeting Asajj because she is one of the most effective leaders against their mind numbingly horrible raid.
I wanted to let you know that we are going to be reverting the Bonds of Weakness change from last Friday today. I also wanted to explain why we’re doing it and reveal a little more insight into our decision to make the change at that time in the first place. But first I’ll underline that it was the wrong call. What we should have done is announced that a change was forthcoming and spent a few days designing and testing the change. We should have then announced to you, the community, what the change was before we implemented it. It can be easy, in the face of the wrong call, to dig in and try to defend your rationale in the first place – but it would be the wrong thing for the game, and we are, like you, first and foremost fans of this game – so I am asking for your faith that, even though we may make the wrong decisions from time to time, if they really are wrong, we will correct it.
We are rolling back the Bonds of Weakness change because the battle system has a bug in it which prevents us from recalculating Max Health as it changes and, consequently, throttling the health percentage correctly (Dev Note: This sort of calculation is not being done elsewhere in the game and only affects this updated version of Bonds of Weakness). This is a client bug that will require an update to the client, which is some ways out. More importantly, beyond the length of time it would take to get the fix out, it also is probably not the right fix. Let me explain.
As a general rule, when we discover an infinite loop that allows players to trivialize end game content, we try to act as swiftly as possible. One of our internal goals is to try to avoid changing character kits in a negative way if at all possible. This doesn’t always work out that way, but it’s a guiding principle. In this instance, the key element that was enabling the loop is Asajj Ventress (and by extension, her synergies with the Nightsisters). Darth Traya is a part of that loop (with her Health Steal Up), but we’ve reproduced a similar team using Qi’ra – so really the problem is Asajj (and Nightsisters) with Health Steal Up mechanics.
In triaging the problem, rather than change Asajj and potentially alter the entire Nightsister faction, we wanted to see if we could change the context where they were facilitating an infinite loop and still leave them really good in the raid (and leave them unchanged everywhere else). This is where we fell down. Our definition of “really good”, especially on the back of a break neck change, is not the same as your definition. On top of it the fix didn’t work. Double whammy.
Rather than scramble and try to add another layer and double down on a bad fix, we’re going to roll back the change and go back to the drawing board. We are still going to be making a change to the raid or to the characters that enable the Critolyte team. However, whatever that change is we will test in house more rigorously and announce to you with more lead time, what change is coming. If we have to make a change to a character we’ll have an open conversation about how we preserve the investment made by people that are significantly, negatively affected by that change.
Thank you for being understanding in this situation and working with us to build a better solution.
As a general rule I usually admit that I'm wrong almost immediately after realizing it, or having it pointed out to me by about half a million people. I suppose realizing you're hemorrhaging your player base is kinda the same thing. I am glad to see someone's taking responsibility.
What about all the money and all the gear I put into the Nightsisters. Will I get that back too when you fix this 10 month old design flaw to zombie. It’s more then zeta’s wasted!
You mentioned in your announcement last week that " Our philosophy on this change is that in a game about progression and powering up your characters, wanting to move backwards is antithetical to the spirit of the game and it creates a significant disadvantage to people who leveled past this point without knowing of the strategy in advance."
My assumption is basically EA/CG views this is disadvantage of players who levelled up zombie, but in general players who levelled up zombie were whales and dolphines, and most of them probably already got 7-star Traya, and EA/CG just took away the "fun" immediately from them by nerfing Critolyte which should be a small portion of players in this game. Moreover, by introducing nerf last week, EA/CG also took away the fun part from broader player base who didn't upgrade zombie but invested 4-5 zetas and gears on those NS. I think EA/CG was killing all player base from whales to fishes by introducing nerf on NS last week.
I have been playing this game for 2+ years with 2 accounts, and have gone through numerous stages of the game from nerfing Cody on Pit raid, nerfing Clone to prevent solo on HAAT P4 (adding healing immunity on toons after tank enrage), nerfing Nute team on HAAT, and then nerfing STH, Clone Baze on HSR and then now NS. It also took like forever for EA/CG to fix 600/600 raid ticket bug and also Teebo stealth bug. Even with all these negative experience in this game, I do see EA/CG is changing, at least I see you and @CG_Carrie both apologized in different announcement. You both earn my respect. I sincerely hope for next upcoming update, you can at least maintain the quality of product without bugs. The track record is pretty bad lol Again, thanks for the transparent message, and I hope you will survive
many thanks, the rollback is the first good news since the invention of TB
but i fear the good news won´t last long, because you still plan to nerf the sisters^^
@CG_TopHat@CG_Carrie
Bravo on the quick fix, and owing up to it not being the right one. That's something I respect a lot. I hope you guys can find a good solution to both the infinite loops (in STR and LSTB) and to less important paper zombie issue.
Somewhere in between those issues though, can you find the time to make the raids, particularly STR, actually worth the time? The rewards are horrendous for the effort. Flattening the gear rewards, removing the challenge gear and making store currency and shards the main difference between ranks was a great idea; the issue was the rewards were flattened to a level near the bottom, not where we were told it would be. Raids are cooperative afterall, we shouldn't feel like we need to keep a team for where they'll score the most points, rather than where they'll do the most good for the guild.
Secondly, raid rewards should help build players up towards taking on the next tier. Instead, for non-Heroic STR in particular, rewards are only useful for characters who are so much lower on gear levels they'll never make it into the 5 teams you can send a day. Tiers 1-3 are effectively useless. Tier 6 is only useful for unlocking heroic, and never gets touched again.
Flatten the gear rewards as originally intended, shift T4's rewards to T1 & 2, T5's to T3 &4, and T6's to T5 & 6, have the lower tiers approximate at least the current rank 10-20 box, the higher tier approximate rank 1-3 (with smoothing as needed so T2 isn't better than T3 rewards wise), and you'll have a lot of much happier people. The rewards still won't really justify the effort, but at least we'd be getting useful gear.
From the first implementation, and subsequent hero nerfing as a result of this "mechanic", it became clear, as it has become more clear now that you do not want any abilities interacting with it. A mechanic that we are not intended to interact with is not a mechanic, it is an enrage timer. I suggest, that since we already have plenty of enrage timers already built into the STR, and since there are like 18 things that kill us before Bonds of weakness gets to kill most teams anyway, that maybe it should just be removed.
Badabing! no more game breaking loops. The problem was never Stormtrooper Han, KRU, Savage Opress, ObiWan, K-2SO, Traya, or Nightsisters
it was always bonds of weakness.
I know most people have not invested in NS Acolyte as heavily as in the other NS. But there are people who did (like me), specifically to use her in arena, along with Zombie. Her double attack with the increased chance to remain stealthed is vital there in order to keep her viable. Please do NOT remove this. (saying this even though she's not on my arena team any longer. )
On the other hand, while I can understand the outcry about the NS nerf to a certain extent, I don't really see the problem. Any guild with some 8-10 NS Teams was still able to finish P4 easily. I am in a 127m GP guild that just finished its third heroic Sith raid. If there was any effect, it was that some more people got a chance to throw in their NS Teams, do some decent damage and get a piece of that cake that before was shared by some 4-5 players only who managed to finish their runs first.
So, I think the nerf (that affected NS only in the STR and nowhere else in the game) was actually good and made the raid more fair. As Skelturix said in his comment video, a cap to 30 or 40 BoW stacks would have been better (and of course, the healing/max health still needs to work as announced), but the idea of the approach was not bad at all in general.
Deploying it on a Friday afternoon without thorough testing (which would have revealed the healing bug for sure) was not the best idea, of course. Thanks and kudos for admitting that mistake.
TLDR: Leave the Acolyte double attack alone, it is important for her stealth mechanism in other game areas. Do nerf the NS in the Sith raid, it will give more players a chance to participate in P4.
I hope this further drives home how completely flawed the entire raid is, when it's creators are unsure how to repair it. Honestly, burn it down and salt the earth it stood on. At what point will they have to finally admit, it just is not worth the headache and customer upset to let it continue. Could that point ever happen, or will pride outweigh common sense. If nothing else I truly hope they do not replicate it for future raids.
They can't axe it now, the people who don't have traya will be **** and if they make her easier to farm the people who got her through the raid will be ****. The raid is here to stay the only thing they can do now is somehow make it not suck.
Replies
Almost all of the BoW fixes are esoteric changes. Complexity on top of complexity. The absolute easiest change is Acolyte hits twice instead of attacking twice.
The second easiest is modifying the raid boss behavior of Isolate. Admittedly this doesn't render it impossible for the same interaction to emerge later on somehow but the factors have to line up in a pretty perfect storm (which seems unlikely).
The best BoW related fix would be some kind of stacking bonus that heads this off like a very slight increase in crit resistance, defense, or evasion per stack. But these again begin falling into the category of being esoteric and mentally difficult to track.
Design suggestions for night sister zombie: (disclaimer: this might not get rid of paper zombie) when night sister zombie revives, reduce starting health by 50% of maximum protection and grant tm equal to half the % of health lost. This might need to be placed behind a zeta but should make a maximum geared zombie extremely potent.
For example zombie has 20k protection at the start of battle, dies, revives with no protection, losing 10k health. Zombie originally had 20k health so gains 25% tm. This would not only encourage players to gear zombie, but to nonstop stack protection so that zombie can die fast and move more often, still snagging those taunts.
Great work on cleaning up this mess!
Your predatory business practices got you into trouble and this is not enough to repair the damage done. Please be better in the future through action.
May not be worth much, but you have my respect.
While you’re at it @CG_TopHat can you also get the team to work on making the Raid fun, instead of such a tedious chore, and maybe also fix the rewards to make it actually worth the time to work through? That’d be great.
I'll point you to the 1500+ post STR thread....
I'll believe this is any more than damage control when I see them actually DO what they SAY.
Unfortunately, that leaves a fairly lengthy list still to own and explain that the players are still left to assume CG is 100% OK with, as we've not been told any different. So, trust that what @CG_TopHat will actually get done what he claims to want to do, any hope that it will be done in consideration of player experience/investment, or that we'll be getting any actual opportunity to voice concerns BEFORE the trigger is pulled on changes regarding this (or anything else) are just cheap words.
I've said it before, but time for CG to put up or shut up. Given the amount of communication up to this point, I can only assume we've been getting the later and will continue to get more of the same.
Prove me wrong.
As a general rule I usually admit that I'm wrong almost immediately after realizing it, or having it pointed out to me by about half a million people. I suppose realizing you're hemorrhaging your player base is kinda the same thing. I am glad to see someone's taking responsibility.
Thanks for the update.
You mentioned in your announcement last week that " Our philosophy on this change is that in a game about progression and powering up your characters, wanting to move backwards is antithetical to the spirit of the game and it creates a significant disadvantage to people who leveled past this point without knowing of the strategy in advance."
My assumption is basically EA/CG views this is disadvantage of players who levelled up zombie, but in general players who levelled up zombie were whales and dolphines, and most of them probably already got 7-star Traya, and EA/CG just took away the "fun" immediately from them by nerfing Critolyte which should be a small portion of players in this game. Moreover, by introducing nerf last week, EA/CG also took away the fun part from broader player base who didn't upgrade zombie but invested 4-5 zetas and gears on those NS. I think EA/CG was killing all player base from whales to fishes by introducing nerf on NS last week.
I have been playing this game for 2+ years with 2 accounts, and have gone through numerous stages of the game from nerfing Cody on Pit raid, nerfing Clone to prevent solo on HAAT P4 (adding healing immunity on toons after tank enrage), nerfing Nute team on HAAT, and then nerfing STH, Clone Baze on HSR and then now NS. It also took like forever for EA/CG to fix 600/600 raid ticket bug and also Teebo stealth bug. Even with all these negative experience in this game, I do see EA/CG is changing, at least I see you and @CG_Carrie both apologized in different announcement. You both earn my respect. I sincerely hope for next upcoming update, you can at least maintain the quality of product without bugs. The track record is pretty bad lol Again, thanks for the transparent message, and I hope you will survive
Sincerely,
cascor
CaptainJackSparrow
I appreciate you admitting it was your call and not burying your head in the sand. Please no more Friday nerfs.
but i fear the good news won´t last long, because you still plan to nerf the sisters^^
Bravo on the quick fix, and owing up to it not being the right one. That's something I respect a lot. I hope you guys can find a good solution to both the infinite loops (in STR and LSTB) and to less important paper zombie issue.
Somewhere in between those issues though, can you find the time to make the raids, particularly STR, actually worth the time? The rewards are horrendous for the effort. Flattening the gear rewards, removing the challenge gear and making store currency and shards the main difference between ranks was a great idea; the issue was the rewards were flattened to a level near the bottom, not where we were told it would be. Raids are cooperative afterall, we shouldn't feel like we need to keep a team for where they'll score the most points, rather than where they'll do the most good for the guild.
Secondly, raid rewards should help build players up towards taking on the next tier. Instead, for non-Heroic STR in particular, rewards are only useful for characters who are so much lower on gear levels they'll never make it into the 5 teams you can send a day. Tiers 1-3 are effectively useless. Tier 6 is only useful for unlocking heroic, and never gets touched again.
Flatten the gear rewards as originally intended, shift T4's rewards to T1 & 2, T5's to T3 &4, and T6's to T5 & 6, have the lower tiers approximate at least the current rank 10-20 box, the higher tier approximate rank 1-3 (with smoothing as needed so T2 isn't better than T3 rewards wise), and you'll have a lot of much happier people. The rewards still won't really justify the effort, but at least we'd be getting useful gear.
Badabing! no more game breaking loops. The problem was never Stormtrooper Han, KRU, Savage Opress, ObiWan, K-2SO, Traya, or Nightsisters
it was always bonds of weakness.
On the other hand, while I can understand the outcry about the NS nerf to a certain extent, I don't really see the problem. Any guild with some 8-10 NS Teams was still able to finish P4 easily. I am in a 127m GP guild that just finished its third heroic Sith raid. If there was any effect, it was that some more people got a chance to throw in their NS Teams, do some decent damage and get a piece of that cake that before was shared by some 4-5 players only who managed to finish their runs first.
So, I think the nerf (that affected NS only in the STR and nowhere else in the game) was actually good and made the raid more fair. As Skelturix said in his comment video, a cap to 30 or 40 BoW stacks would have been better (and of course, the healing/max health still needs to work as announced), but the idea of the approach was not bad at all in general.
Deploying it on a Friday afternoon without thorough testing (which would have revealed the healing bug for sure) was not the best idea, of course. Thanks and kudos for admitting that mistake.
TLDR: Leave the Acolyte double attack alone, it is important for her stealth mechanism in other game areas. Do nerf the NS in the Sith raid, it will give more players a chance to participate in P4.
You applied the word "wrong" five times in your opening.
Yet in the entire post you never used the word "sorry" a single time.
Smh.
They can't axe it now, the people who don't have traya will be **** and if they make her easier to farm the people who got her through the raid will be ****. The raid is here to stay the only thing they can do now is somehow make it not suck.