CG, eat this sandwich and tell us how it tastes.

Forsworn

Fellow forum readers, if you agree, please “+1” in the comments.
(Bread slice) I love this game
Carrie and Capital Games you have one of the best Star Wars games of this generation and have proved the success of battle collection games across mobile and hopefully AAA (one day). Thank you for opening this market, I’m excited for the future of this genre, and thank you for keeping a little bit of Star Wars in my everyday life.
(Rotten ham) Sort yourselves out
Live service games have foundations to balance for success, I believe these to be; planning, mechanics, community.
Planning
What works:

• Consistent content updates with relevant, varied content.

What doesn’t works:

• A year+ of the a single focus/faction dominating content updates, and game modes (KoToR).
• Huge content drops in a short time period, making the rest of the year stale (Legendary Events).
• Removing player investments (post-event Malak changes, TW locked characters).

Mechanics
What works:

• Keeping to the pillars of your game.
• Rock, Paper, Scissors.
• Collecting everything. We’re Star Wars fans, we want all the Star Wars. TB is a mode which rewards large collections.

What doesn’t works:

• Big Rock, thin wet paper, scissors.
• Mechanics which forces Star Wars fans not to want to 7* and G12 everything (GA matchmaking which conflicts against Territory Battles).
• Character design which removes natural counter viability or team synergies (your taking away from the player again).

Community
What works:

• Trust, following through to your word.
• Recognising community.
• Engagement

What doesn’t works:

• Stating a purpose and executing against it (Rock, Paper Scissors intention – same week removing Palpatine viability).
• Not acknowledging community opinion, not utilising gamechangers effectively.
• Not acknowledging your failure (my impression is that you are firefighting broken internal processes).
• A Q&A session without being prepared and humble enough to address your demons (as suggested in the Road Ahead post, not a good idea if you ignore the obvious questions).

Summary

• Don’t blame EA or your neighbour, sort yourself out, you are responsible as a live service games team.
• We’re all seeing guildmates, shardmates, and friends (or rivals) leave the game because of the above.
• You’re not working on a AAA game so your pipeline can’t be that long, I genuinely hope that you can react in time to retain some of those still considering leaving and rebuild respect for your studio, no one wants what is happening today.

(Bread slice) The nice bit to end on

• The Clone Wars is coming! A new focus which so many fans are fanatical about.
• The next few years are going to be massive for Star Wars with all the upcoming content there is so much for you to build on and keep us engaged with.

It’s not too late to learn from the blunders of this year, hold that mirror up to yourselves and start down a path of change and self-recognition (you’ll feel better for it).

EduardoCadav

yes to all of the above.

In my opinion you bring up much bigger problems here than any spenders moaning a character isn't good enough or non-spenders moaning they can't beat the new expensive meta. Unfortunately those seem to be the complaints others (including CG) have fixated on.

But things like you mentioned affect us all no matter how we play the game. Especially this,

Forsworn wrote: »

Stating a purpose and executing against it.

as an additional example to yours, saying they will reduce reliance on speed mods and introducing a meta that's dependent on tiny speed differences.

and this

Forsworn wrote: »

Removing player investments

especially with regard to Sith Assassin as the most recent example (so glad I didn't get to properly gearing her yet).

JMA

Agreed

My guild has lost 5 long term (3 years or so) members since these new events and I'm sure more are on the fence.

Nikoms565

JMA wrote: »

Agreed

My guild has lost 5 long term (3 years or so) members since these new events and I'm sure more are on the fence.

Yep, we lost a couple of launch whales in our guild Ave had several launch arena mates quit in the last two weeks.

Excellent post by the OP, with the caveat that Carrie took over less than 2 years ago. That's simply to say that much of the core of the game was already in place. To be fair, many of the issues pointed out are on her watch, while a few have always been the case.

trooper521

Agree fully with everything above. Sad that content changes totally break the experience. Like the change in hard node from 8-5 makes farming your favorite faction or characters roughly twice the time not even counting rng. I farm some things because they are meta and needed and some cause I like them. The inflated market for digital content is rediculous. Whether that's crystals or money. Stars Wars has a huge fan base and to say that they are taking advantage of the love is an understatement. There are plenty of elements I like about this game, and some that are just downright sleezy business practices. I regularly spend a small monthly amount mostly crystals only to continually have content more restricted and less obtainable. I haven't been playing as long as some but my experience thus far has been at best 50% good 50% bad. The bad as noted above by the greed of making a buck ruining the pace of the game. Current changes put it more like 20good/80bad.