Not too many newer players have a highly leveled or geared Jawas (for an event that no longer exists) - or IG86 for a droid team that is no longer viable, or strong Lumi, or g9 Eeth Koth (had to get GMY back in the day) or a zQGJ, or 7* Lobot or Lando, etc., etc.
All those characters probably helped you win a lot of gear, mods etc. which helped you build your roster to what it is now. I know my jawa helped me gain crit dmg. mods, my IG-86 helped me in the early days (months) of the AAT raid, Lumi helped me in GW, Eeth Koth helped me unlock GMY, QGJ and Lando helped me gain a lot of crystals in arena. I don't regret having those in my roster now. I still enjoy the gear and what not they helped me win.
I still enjoy the gear and what not they helped me win.
Those characters helped you build your roster, just as they helped me build mine. You still benefit from the rewards they helped you win.
The fact that those toons helped you at one time and that you enjoyed them is irrelevant to this topic.
The fact that the reason you chose to fluff up your roster was to earn more rewards in TB is equally irrelevant. You made a choice. Choices have consequences.
They now exist as bloat in your roster that ends up falsely stating your overall roster power and result in getting you matched against newer people who never had to level them.
GP was never a measure of the strength of a character or roster.
If newer players caught up with me and my total roster GP then congratulations to them. They probably spent some money, and I don't see a problem with spenders having an advantage.
Don't know how you define new, but I've been here since march 2017 - just a couple of days late to the Nihilus party. Pushing 4M GP, so I wouldn't define my self as a noob.
He was given the opportunity to make a decision that I was never given.
Totally see your point. But given the large variety of game modes, and the hopeful addition of more, this will be a returning issue.
Every single new game mode, will give new players an advantage to focus on that.
In GA these "newer" players excist in all GP ranges and all of them may very well have the upper hand on the rosters along. But they wont' have as much experience with the game as more seasoned players like yourself. They haven't acquired memorized knowledge of many, many character kits and how they work yet, and that should play to your advantage.
He had the luxury to put most of his top meta teams on defense secure in the knowledge that he could throw additional solid toons at any of my teams to whittle them down and clear them if he failed his first attempt.
So, you get to be more efficient. If he just throws countless numbers of teams at your defenses, you win by being more efficient and having a better understanding on counters, kit interaction and modding.
Not to add to the choir of "they should have known since launch GA would be coming one day and prepared accordingly", but I'm always glad when there is only one GA opponent with a vastly superior roster. That means I can win at least 2 rounds, and so far I've always won at least 2 out of 3 despite my bloated GP.
Still, it would be nice if total playtime / account age were added to the matchmaking equation. A much older account typically has more zetas and vastly better mods, both of which is not adequately reflected by the GP metric.
This. I have never lost more than 1 match, despite being a launch player (i.e. have a major bloating problem...ermm...with my roster.)
Not too many newer players have a highly leveled or geared Jawas (for an event that no longer exists) - or IG86 for a droid team that is no longer viable, or strong Lumi, or g9 Eeth Koth (had to get GMY back in the day) or a zQGJ, or 7* Lobot or Lando, etc., etc.
All those characters probably helped you win a lot of gear, mods etc. which helped you build your roster to what it is now. I know my IG-86 helped me in the early days (months) of the AAT raid, Lumi helped me in GW, Eeth Koth helped me unlock GMY, QGJ and Lando helped me gain a lot of crystals in arena. I don't regret having those in my roster now. I still enjoy the gear and what not they helped me win.
I think people are conflating the terms "fair" and "competitive" when they are not equivalent terms.
There are some mild elements on "unfairness" (the aforementioned roster bloat from the period between TB introduction and TW introduction, general power creep that more heavily hits older players, lack of capital ships), but there isn't really a more "fair" method than matching GPs. We all know the GP calculation, and we can all make decisions that will give us an advantage or disadvantage in Grand Arena.
There are some ways to make the matches more competitive though:
1) Readjusting the GP calculation to give more points to G11/12 gear and 6E mods and less points to * level would help, as the current formula is pretty arbitrary and not terribly reflective of utility. This would probably be very unpopular with P2P players though, as they'd all end up facing each other after the adjustment.
2) Having more tiers with diversified rewards would also help significantly, as there would be less motivation to artificially suppress GP. It sounds like this is part of the long term plan for Grand Arena, as mentioned in the last Road Ahead post.
3) Reworking more characters would help, as it would mitigate the penalty for having fluff toons. The reworks to OG Ahsoka and Anakin are a step in the right direction, and additional reworks to Geonosians, Nute, Mace, Dooku, Clones, etc. would go a long way to making deep rosters more viable.
4) The ships portion of GA needs to go away until there are more capital ships. While you can at least use every character on your roster (in theory), you can only use 28 ships because of the dearth of capital ships. Having two more capital ship options and placing two fleets on D would help a bunch (people with lots of goods ships would actually, y'know, have an advantage). Currently it's just Han's Falcon mirror matches and not very interesting, and the GAs with ships are actually *more* unfair to people with good ships than the one's without. Ships are 40% of my GP, but account for 20% (or less?) of the available points; if I get matched with someone who has same GP, but better characters/worse ships, I'm suddenly at a massive disadvantage.
For people complaining about CG not doing anything - items 2 & 3 are happening, and 4 is highly likely to occur eventually. Matches should become more competitive over time. You can also take steps to become more competitive by only gearing and zetaing useful characters. However it's going to be a gradual process.
I do think it's important to strike a balance between competitive and fair though, as there's not much interest or fun in non-competitive matchups (even if they are fair). That said, there are a lot of whiners in the forums; I have a massively bloated roster and I can usually win 1-2 rounds in GA anyway through thoughtful strategy.
Not too many newer players have a highly leveled or geared Jawas (for an event that no longer exists) - or IG86 for a droid team that is no longer viable, or strong Lumi, or g9 Eeth Koth (had to get GMY back in the day) or a zQGJ, or 7* Lobot or Lando, etc., etc.
All those characters probably helped you win a lot of gear, mods etc. which helped you build your roster to what it is now. I know my jawa helped me gain crit dmg. mods, my IG-86 helped me in the early days (months) of the AAT raid, Lumi helped me in GW, Eeth Koth helped me unlock GMY, QGJ and Lando helped me gain a lot of crystals in arena. I don't regret having those in my roster now. I still enjoy the gear and what not they helped me win.
I still enjoy the gear and what not they helped me win.
Those characters helped you build your roster, just as they helped me build mine. You still benefit from the rewards they helped you win.
The fact that those toons helped you at one time and that you enjoyed them is irrelevant to this topic.
The fact that the reason you chose to fluff up your roster was to earn more rewards in TB is equally irrelevant. You made a choice. Choices have consequences.
They now exist as bloat in your roster that ends up falsely stating your overall roster power and result in getting you matched against newer people who never had to level them.
GP was never a measure of the strength of a character or roster.
If newer players caught up with me and my total roster GP then congratulations to them. They probably spent some money, and I don't see a problem with spenders having an advantage.
Start date should be definitely be taken into account.
In the group of 8 I'm currently battling, there is one player with 48 G12 toons while everyone else has about 12 to 15. As a measure of time he has 7640 GW battles won. I have 5562. Others have 7379, 6719, 5680, 6299, 7327, and 6852. So, maybe the 7379 and 7327 belong there, but I am definitely fighting above my weight class.
I think people are conflating the terms "fair" and "competitive" when they are not equivalent terms.
There are some mild elements on "unfairness" (the aforementioned roster bloat from the period between TB introduction and TW introduction, general power creep that more heavily hits older players, lack of capital ships), but there isn't really a more "fair" method than matching GPs. We all know the GP calculation, and we can all make decisions that will give us an advantage or disadvantage in Grand Arena.
There are some ways to make the matches more competitive though:
1) Readjusting the GP calculation to give more points to G11/12 gear and 6E mods and less points to * level would help, as the current formula is pretty arbitrary and not terribly reflective of utility. This would probably be very unpopular with P2P players though, as they'd all end up facing each other after the adjustment.
2) Having more tiers with diversified rewards would also help significantly, as there would be less motivation to artificially suppress GP. It sounds like this is part of the long term plan for Grand Arena, as mentioned in the last Road Ahead post.
3) Reworking more characters would help, as it would mitigate the penalty for having fluff toons. The reworks to OG Ahsoka and Anakin are a step in the right direction, and additional reworks to Geonosians, Nute, Mace, Dooku, Clones, etc. would go a long way to making deep rosters more viable.
4) The ships portion of GA needs to go away until there are more capital ships. While you can at least use every character on your roster (in theory), you can only use 28 ships because of the dearth of capital ships. Having two more capital ship options and placing two fleets on D would help a bunch (people with lots of goods ships would actually, y'know, have an advantage). Currently it's just Han's Falcon mirror matches and not very interesting, and the GAs with ships are actually *more* unfair to people with good ships than the one's without. Ships are 40% of my GP, but account for 20% (or less?) of the available points; if I get matched with someone who has same GP, but better characters/worse ships, I'm suddenly at a massive disadvantage.
For people complaining about CG not doing anything - items 2 & 3 are happening, and 4 is highly likely to occur eventually. Matches should become more competitive over time. You can also take steps to become more competitive by only gearing and zetaing useful characters. However it's going to be a gradual process.
I do think it's important to strike a balance between competitive and fair though, as there's not much interest or fun in non-competitive matchups (even if they are fair). That said, there are a lot of whiners in the forums; I have a massively bloated roster and I can usually win 1-2 rounds in GA anyway through thoughtful strategy.
While I agree with most of your statement, I think the reason you see so many complainers about GA is because takes so long to fix such obvious problems. For example, I along with many others pointed out from during the trial GA that matchmaking was bad because it accounted for ship GP when ships aren’t available to use. It took 4 months for CG to make that adjustment...4 months. Why 4 months???
Almost everything you’ve talked about has been mentioned on these forums and reddit since December. Prior to December, we didn’t know about these problems. So why does it take CG longer to discover a problem and roll out a simple solution (remove ship GP from the calculator) than it takes for the gamers to spot it and offer a viable solution? It feels like CG just rolled out a quick game mode with no real thought or testing to go behind it. After months of hearing complaints, they’re finally working on fixes to the problem.
These are all rhetorical questions, so you don’t have to answer. And I wasn’t taking any shots at you.
I think everyone is missing the obvious.
If they actually made it fair then lots of whales would be knocked out of the running for the top spots right out of the gate. That would cause dissent and a loss of income. So what it appears they have done is put one whale in with each grouping of 8. It's then on that whale to simply remember to play to get first and move up. There also seems to be 1 out of the 8 who is seriously outclassed. Not sure what the thinking is there.
So in this tier system they're using, the heavy hitters are only getting grouped together later in the GAC. They have been allowed to run up their scores and complete feats to ascend on the backs of the F2P guys and Dolphins. It would be extremely difficult for whales to garner all those extra points if they played each other from the start. The losers would fall below lots of players from lower divisions and with lower GPs. Players that the whales could destroy. A bit of an insult to people that spent tens of thousands.
So they went ahead and put the whales in with the bait in the beginning.
I think everyone is missing the obvious.
If they actually made it fair then lots of whales would be knocked out of the running for the top spots right out of the gate. That would cause dissent and a loss of income. So what it appears they have done is put one whale in with each grouping of 8. It's then on that whale to simply remember to play to get first and move up. There also seems to be 1 out of the 8 who is seriously outclassed. Not sure what the thinking is there.
So in this tier system they're using, the heavy hitters are only getting grouped together later in the GAC. They have been allowed to run up their scores and complete feats to ascend on the backs of the F2P guys and Dolphins. It would be extremely difficult for whales to garner all those extra points if they played each other from the start. The losers would fall below lots of players from lower divisions and with lower GPs. Players that the whales could destroy. A bit of an insult to people that spent tens of thousands.
So they went ahead and put the whales in with the bait in the beginning.
Except the bolded isn't happening. This round is the same as the first 2. 4 guys with 8+ g13 and full GR/Malak teams and 4 guys who don't have him....or more than 2 g13...or the maxed Geos the Malak owners have...or the full g12/g13 GG+Seppy droid teams the Malak owners have either.
In this round, there is a guy in my bracket with 13 g13 toons. I have 2, another guy has 3. He also has a FULLY g13 Geo team (yes, including a g13 zBA). Only one other guy of the 8 even has ANY g12 Geos. lol.
It's a joke.
ETA: Sorry - I misspoke. There are 2 whaley whales with full g13 Geos and full g12/g13 GG+Sep droids - and 6 non (not just 1 to 7).
So no, there is no "improvement over the course of the GAC" algorithm. It's all just disconnected GA matches with a running point total. Lame.
In game name: Lucas Gregory FORMER PLAYER - - - -"Whale blah grump poooop." - Ouchie
In game guild: TNR Uprising I beat the REAL T7 Yoda (not the nerfed one) and did so before mods were there to help
*This space left intentionally blank*
Replies
Those characters helped you build your roster, just as they helped me build mine. You still benefit from the rewards they helped you win.
The fact that the reason you chose to fluff up your roster was to earn more rewards in TB is equally irrelevant. You made a choice. Choices have consequences.
GP was never a measure of the strength of a character or roster.
If newer players caught up with me and my total roster GP then congratulations to them. They probably spent some money, and I don't see a problem with spenders having an advantage.
Don't know how you define new, but I've been here since march 2017 - just a couple of days late to the Nihilus party. Pushing 4M GP, so I wouldn't define my self as a noob.
Would you say this has occured often? Or just a few times? I guess this is the risk of being close to 5M GP.
Totally see your point. But given the large variety of game modes, and the hopeful addition of more, this will be a returning issue.
Every single new game mode, will give new players an advantage to focus on that.
In GA these "newer" players excist in all GP ranges and all of them may very well have the upper hand on the rosters along. But they wont' have as much experience with the game as more seasoned players like yourself. They haven't acquired memorized knowledge of many, many character kits and how they work yet, and that should play to your advantage.
So, you get to be more efficient. If he just throws countless numbers of teams at your defenses, you win by being more efficient and having a better understanding on counters, kit interaction and modding.
Adapt and overcome...
All those characters probably helped you win a lot of gear, mods etc. which helped you build your roster to what it is now. I know my IG-86 helped me in the early days (months) of the AAT raid, Lumi helped me in GW, Eeth Koth helped me unlock GMY, QGJ and Lando helped me gain a lot of crystals in arena. I don't regret having those in my roster now. I still enjoy the gear and what not they helped me win.
....
Nope, not possible.
https://forums.galaxy-of-heroes.starwars.ea.com/discussion/190063/ig-86-why
A thread from december '18? Completely irrelevant. You do know that 'the early days (months) of the AAT raid' were more than 2 years earlier, right?!
(pssst.....joke)
There are some mild elements on "unfairness" (the aforementioned roster bloat from the period between TB introduction and TW introduction, general power creep that more heavily hits older players, lack of capital ships), but there isn't really a more "fair" method than matching GPs. We all know the GP calculation, and we can all make decisions that will give us an advantage or disadvantage in Grand Arena.
There are some ways to make the matches more competitive though:
1) Readjusting the GP calculation to give more points to G11/12 gear and 6E mods and less points to * level would help, as the current formula is pretty arbitrary and not terribly reflective of utility. This would probably be very unpopular with P2P players though, as they'd all end up facing each other after the adjustment.
2) Having more tiers with diversified rewards would also help significantly, as there would be less motivation to artificially suppress GP. It sounds like this is part of the long term plan for Grand Arena, as mentioned in the last Road Ahead post.
3) Reworking more characters would help, as it would mitigate the penalty for having fluff toons. The reworks to OG Ahsoka and Anakin are a step in the right direction, and additional reworks to Geonosians, Nute, Mace, Dooku, Clones, etc. would go a long way to making deep rosters more viable.
4) The ships portion of GA needs to go away until there are more capital ships. While you can at least use every character on your roster (in theory), you can only use 28 ships because of the dearth of capital ships. Having two more capital ship options and placing two fleets on D would help a bunch (people with lots of goods ships would actually, y'know, have an advantage). Currently it's just Han's Falcon mirror matches and not very interesting, and the GAs with ships are actually *more* unfair to people with good ships than the one's without. Ships are 40% of my GP, but account for 20% (or less?) of the available points; if I get matched with someone who has same GP, but better characters/worse ships, I'm suddenly at a massive disadvantage.
For people complaining about CG not doing anything - items 2 & 3 are happening, and 4 is highly likely to occur eventually. Matches should become more competitive over time. You can also take steps to become more competitive by only gearing and zetaing useful characters. However it's going to be a gradual process.
I do think it's important to strike a balance between competitive and fair though, as there's not much interest or fun in non-competitive matchups (even if they are fair). That said, there are a lot of whiners in the forums; I have a massively bloated roster and I can usually win 1-2 rounds in GA anyway through thoughtful strategy.
I'm out. No reason to play pigeon chess.
While I agree with most of your statement, I think the reason you see so many complainers about GA is because takes so long to fix such obvious problems. For example, I along with many others pointed out from during the trial GA that matchmaking was bad because it accounted for ship GP when ships aren’t available to use. It took 4 months for CG to make that adjustment...4 months. Why 4 months???
Almost everything you’ve talked about has been mentioned on these forums and reddit since December. Prior to December, we didn’t know about these problems. So why does it take CG longer to discover a problem and roll out a simple solution (remove ship GP from the calculator) than it takes for the gamers to spot it and offer a viable solution? It feels like CG just rolled out a quick game mode with no real thought or testing to go behind it. After months of hearing complaints, they’re finally working on fixes to the problem.
These are all rhetorical questions, so you don’t have to answer. And I wasn’t taking any shots at you.
If they actually made it fair then lots of whales would be knocked out of the running for the top spots right out of the gate. That would cause dissent and a loss of income. So what it appears they have done is put one whale in with each grouping of 8. It's then on that whale to simply remember to play to get first and move up. There also seems to be 1 out of the 8 who is seriously outclassed. Not sure what the thinking is there.
So in this tier system they're using, the heavy hitters are only getting grouped together later in the GAC. They have been allowed to run up their scores and complete feats to ascend on the backs of the F2P guys and Dolphins. It would be extremely difficult for whales to garner all those extra points if they played each other from the start. The losers would fall below lots of players from lower divisions and with lower GPs. Players that the whales could destroy. A bit of an insult to people that spent tens of thousands.
So they went ahead and put the whales in with the bait in the beginning.
Except the bolded isn't happening. This round is the same as the first 2. 4 guys with 8+ g13 and full GR/Malak teams and 4 guys who don't have him....or more than 2 g13...or the maxed Geos the Malak owners have...or the full g12/g13 GG+Seppy droid teams the Malak owners have either.
In this round, there is a guy in my bracket with 13 g13 toons. I have 2, another guy has 3. He also has a FULLY g13 Geo team (yes, including a g13 zBA). Only one other guy of the 8 even has ANY g12 Geos. lol.
It's a joke.
ETA: Sorry - I misspoke. There are 2 whaley whales with full g13 Geos and full g12/g13 GG+Sep droids - and 6 non (not just 1 to 7).
So no, there is no "improvement over the course of the GAC" algorithm. It's all just disconnected GA matches with a running point total. Lame.
In game guild: TNR Uprising
I beat the REAL T7 Yoda (not the nerfed one) and did so before mods were there to help
*This space left intentionally blank*