The Biggest Problem With Modern SWGOH
June 6, 2019 4:02AM
edited June 2019
“As the game ages and rosters become more developed, we want to continue to push the challenge of our end game content and give you the opportunity to use your best squads in a challenging PvE scenario.”
CG, you have not provided players with the means to reasonably match the rate of development of their rosters given the rate that content is being added to the game or the rate that endgame content is rising in difficulty.
In fact, you’ve taken steps in the opposite direction by reducing the number of sims per day, adding entirely new pieces of gear that players are required to farm, and assuming that no adjustments will be made to how players farm gear from tier 1-12, by now announcing a 13th gear tier.
As a veteran of the game, I would estimate the time it takes to bring a character from 3-stars to 7-stars is approximately 2-3 months, provided the RNG doesn’t cheat them out of time (and sometimes money) that they could be spending otherwise. This is even longer still if a player wants to get these characters in the competitive range (gear 10 at least). Within that time, at least 2-3 characters have likely been released, reworked, or otherwise made necessary to add to their roster in order to stay relevant in endgame content. That’s at best half a year of farming until you’re able to get what you need, and by the time you do get it, it’s not relevant anymore thanks to your game’s current model. Ever hear of burnout? Because the growing exhaustion with the game as a result of this is palpable in just about every guild and the community as a whole.
“We had concerns that if we generally let any guild go in and participate, and there’s no way to abandon a Territory Battle like a raid, that guilds could get stuck participating in an event for days that they are in no way able to do anything material.”
Again, this problem would be easily solved if players were able to reasonably match their rate of roster-building with the rate that content is increasing and endgame difficulty is rising. Hell, there are still plenty of guilds that can’t even beat Heroic Sith Raid because their rosters are either incomplete, or players are so distracted by keeping up with surmounting frequent waves of content that they aren’t able to focus on what they need for the old.
That is to say, plenty of guilds and plenty of players are in a place where they feel they are unable to do anything material because they have no time and no means to accomplish anything substantial. You’ve pushed a lot of players into a place where the mark for considering themselves to be in the “meta” just keeps getting farther and farther away, and that, to a lot of us, just seems completely unfair and absolutely discouraging considering all the passion and effort people have poured into the game thus far.
CG, please, think about the direction your game is going from the perspective of players at large. Possible solutions? Permanently increase the amount of sims on nodes per day, add more of these characters to stores that require earned in-game currency (not crystals), and/or increase the frequency of events such as double drop (one weekend per month sounds reasonable). With the way things are set up now, constantly raising the difficulty and raising the number of characters that are vital to collect to remain competitive with every new release is just unreasonable to ask anyone to keep up with.
CG, you have not provided players with the means to reasonably match the rate of development of their rosters given the rate that content is being added to the game or the rate that endgame content is rising in difficulty.
In fact, you’ve taken steps in the opposite direction by reducing the number of sims per day, adding entirely new pieces of gear that players are required to farm, and assuming that no adjustments will be made to how players farm gear from tier 1-12, by now announcing a 13th gear tier.
As a veteran of the game, I would estimate the time it takes to bring a character from 3-stars to 7-stars is approximately 2-3 months, provided the RNG doesn’t cheat them out of time (and sometimes money) that they could be spending otherwise. This is even longer still if a player wants to get these characters in the competitive range (gear 10 at least). Within that time, at least 2-3 characters have likely been released, reworked, or otherwise made necessary to add to their roster in order to stay relevant in endgame content. That’s at best half a year of farming until you’re able to get what you need, and by the time you do get it, it’s not relevant anymore thanks to your game’s current model. Ever hear of burnout? Because the growing exhaustion with the game as a result of this is palpable in just about every guild and the community as a whole.
“We had concerns that if we generally let any guild go in and participate, and there’s no way to abandon a Territory Battle like a raid, that guilds could get stuck participating in an event for days that they are in no way able to do anything material.”
Again, this problem would be easily solved if players were able to reasonably match their rate of roster-building with the rate that content is increasing and endgame difficulty is rising. Hell, there are still plenty of guilds that can’t even beat Heroic Sith Raid because their rosters are either incomplete, or players are so distracted by keeping up with surmounting frequent waves of content that they aren’t able to focus on what they need for the old.
That is to say, plenty of guilds and plenty of players are in a place where they feel they are unable to do anything material because they have no time and no means to accomplish anything substantial. You’ve pushed a lot of players into a place where the mark for considering themselves to be in the “meta” just keeps getting farther and farther away, and that, to a lot of us, just seems completely unfair and absolutely discouraging considering all the passion and effort people have poured into the game thus far.
CG, please, think about the direction your game is going from the perspective of players at large. Possible solutions? Permanently increase the amount of sims on nodes per day, add more of these characters to stores that require earned in-game currency (not crystals), and/or increase the frequency of events such as double drop (one weekend per month sounds reasonable). With the way things are set up now, constantly raising the difficulty and raising the number of characters that are vital to collect to remain competitive with every new release is just unreasonable to ask anyone to keep up with.
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I've only ever spent £20 on this game and it was a decent investment but by God it was wasteful money and overpriced. Honestly the fact this game clearly succeeds in this method you mention is pretty vile and disgusting especially with the prices... Honestly I'd love to see the average payments they receive per player and the most someone has poured into this game for such little reward
Than they removed it and posted they have something better in progress. But nothing came back. I am pretty sure that was the time when they decided to focus only big whales.
Well as developer myself (not game but still) i know that often the decision which path will game go and what gets priorities is on management and bosses, developers have little to say in that. And in the end it is all about profit. As long as focusing on big whales will be extremely profitable, nothing will change in mobile game industry.
The visible problem to me is the one track mindset of releases that developed starting from the release of Chewie. One can't afford to not pursue the latest team anymore as they are essential in one area of the game, or they will be essential for what comes right after. And ofc in the process you have to build a whole team to grab them. Most of those team while not as essential as the hero/legs that are raining are substantial.
So we are left with almost no options to backtrack in our rosters, fill out the gaps and just build what we enjoy. That type of movement room is closing both due to the nature of the releases and their schedule. I enjoyed being ahead of the wave being able to grab almost everything during this period, but now I'm feeling stressed and bored.
And soon we'll have a whole roster to consodilate with the 12+6 piece. That would also make us rush through the first 5 pieces which were decent even somewhat substantial but one can do without on most occasions. The gear tier wrapup will probably make an outcome level difference between two teams with and without it.
We'll also have new TB specific stuff to build by the nature of the thing which we otherwise wouldn't bother with just like the raids.
If the new release/rework pace also persists through this period, many will fall of the wagon getting more and more intimidated.
Some points they should have in mind before taking such decisions:
a) The revenues from swgoh are actually half of what they got a year ago!
To repeat it:
EVEN with all of this really expensive new content they made just half of the money they got before!
Instead of taking care of every segment of players they decided it is a good idea just to pamper their whales. But even players with a lot of money in the back aren't stupid. They absolutely know why cg is doing what they are doing - to milk them as much as possible until the game shuts down. The ones who have the money normally know the difference bitween an investment and a money grab
b) The game loses players, a lot!
It may not that big of a problem in top guilds with their end game capable players, but in smaller guilds you see a dramatic loss!
I am in a 80m guild, and a year ago we got a new player as soon as someone has gone, almost immediately. Today we're 40/50, and searching desperatly new members. We are a open guild, no invite only, but in the last three month we just got ONE new player! That is a huge difference to one year ago.
I don't think our guild isn't any special so i suppose that many others suffering the same issues. You can now think that it may be some kind of consolidation, guilds should merge and kick inactive players out, but what's next? The casual players? The f2p ones? It leads more and more to some kind of elite-like toy where everyone not belonging to this specific group will be pushed out.
c) Too much content in short time!
Up to the point when JKR was released you had the chance, or at least it was in sight, to catch up some day with the so called meta defining toons like CLS, JTR, EP, GAT etc. Ok, Traya was a bit special because she was the first one locked behind a wall. Up to this date only about 200k players may have her or have the chance to farm Traya shards. All others are still locked out from doing HSTR because they are in non-elite guilds, and can't do it. Everytime smart players discovered a way to make some points within this raid more trivial, cg nerved the specific toons. It is now almost 1,5 years after releasing Sith-raid, and less than 5% of all players (active and inactive) can take their hands on the "end game content"?
But back to my point. Until JKR came into this game catching up wasn't impossible. NOW it is if you do not want to throw a lot of money into it! For me i restarted playing in spring '18 (my account was from beginning '16), and end '18 the only big toon i missed was JTR. And then came JKR, shortly after Chewie, 3PO, Falcon, DR and Malak! More new legendaries/journeys than in all years before - within 6 month. If you are close to the point to get the next big one, they releasing another 4 or 5 (last Padmé). It feels like running and seeing the finishing line but you can never reach it. And, more annoying, the finish will move further away the longer you run.
So it is frustrating for players like me to participate in a game if you feel you make no progression.
d) Make the gap even great(er) again!
Instead of lowering the barriers for developing players, cg decided it would be a good idea to set them on a higher level instead!
With introduction of G13, and the Geonosian TB, they locked every single player, who isn't in a HSTR-capable guild, out of it! 3 of 6 G12+ pieces are farmable, 2 you can ONLY get from the HEROIC STR, and the last one by doing this new TB with your guild. Instead of a G12+5 gap, we will now have a full G13 by this 5% elite players (as i mentioned in part (c) - you can easily check these statistics with google and swgoh.gg if you think my calculations are incorrect, in fact i guess its much worse than i predicted here).
That means:
Every low spender has now absolutely no reason anymore to put money into this game! The few bucks here and there will have no influence to his guild members and their ability to finish T7 of Sithraid, which is still the bottleneck, and not because Traya shards, because of these exclusive gear you need to get your toons to G13 someday!
Conclusion
It seems that CG is focusing all their efforts to their big spenders, while they make this game more and more frustrating for everyone else. I don't think that this strategy will pay off, whether for CG nor the whales. When someday the whales have to play only with themselfes the days of this game are counted. In fact, they are now, and i don't think the players aren't the only ones who are forced to panic farm something
The new TB may be very hard for some guilds, but as with the first two TBs, guilds will evolve and progress through the content - disregarding wether there are 8 or 5 daily attempts on hard nodes.
Assuming a 33% drop rate and no refreshes it's more likely 5-6 months (50 shards per month). Half if doing one daily refresh.
However, if farming several characters at the same time, the total time to get them all to 7* is unchanged. Daily attempts on each node without refreshing is not the limiting factor here - total amount of attempts (energy spent) is.
You still collect gear while farming shards (shops, raids etc.). You can hace the character at g11 already before reaching 7*.
The context of your discussion is PvE - not PvP. Current characters don't become irrelevant unless the mechanics of the content change or the characters are reworked. Time for farming changes nothing.
That's not much different than if a guild launches a raid of higher tier than they are able to beat. Yes, a raid can be abandoned and a new launched, but the tickets are spent and it's still a raid and rewards 'lost' (experience gained). Those rewards won't ever be regained. Just like in the new TB. Notjing to solve here.
Decision, decisions. Manage your resources. Plan your farms.
Those new characters are often also strong in those raids or PvE content. JKR, Bastilla, Jolee, JTR, 3P0, Chewie etc. are all strong in heroic STR f.ex.
Keeping up with the META in PvP and PvE content are two different things. In PvE, once you improved a character or a team, this improvement doesn't become irrelevant.
Where as before not having the arena meta wasn't that much of a problem, but currenty it (potentially) the deciding factor in 3 different game modes.
Especially with GA championships comming up, which seem to have great rewards and also scale up quite a bit, the difference between the "have's" and the "have not's" will get even worse and the "have not's" will probably feel they can never catch up.
In conclusion; i don't think keeping up with the game is a problem. The problem lies in having to keep up with other players who don't struggle to keep up with the game at all.
You say this like you are only farming shards for one character at a time. Since that isn't the case, this isn't actually a problem. I am not seeing any difficulty in keeping up with farming units that are farmable. Quite the opposite -- I am running of characters and ships to farm.
I don't see the incompatibility with keeping up with new content vs. completing heroic sith. The new essential teams (particularly JKR) are also great in HSith, and a guild of people working on building 50 JKR teams will simultaneously be making their HSith aspirations easier to reach.
Yes, if you have 50 members with a similar active attitude to the game, you are right. But such players aren't the ones we mentioned here
If in your guild only 2 or 3 using wikis or how-to-videos etc. than their progression will NOT be enough to help the guild beating HSTR. The fact is, only a really small minority of swgoh-players are doing HSTR! The huge rest is not capable nor will it be any time soon. So even IF they could manage to get all necessary toons to beat it, there will be one huge issue left to solve: coordination!
It may be normal for you that within a guild there is a discussion- and sharing-atmosphere. That's how it works in the so called "elite"-guilds. To be on top you need to focus and develop teamplay. Nothing against that but we are talking here about a MOBILE GAME!!! This isn't a long-running mmorpg or moba. Players play it because they have less time, need some relaxing things while having a busy day,...Most of them do not want to talk to any stranger! Most players aren't very happy that this game forces them to be in guilds with others! They want to play stressless and without any communication, and that's whats happening in most of all guilds, except the Elite ones. So me as an officer in one of these mediocre guilds, i am glad to get one or two answers if i am writing sth. into guild chat. And i am also happy if a few read important notes i made for TB, TW and so on. Coordination of a HSTR i can dream of
I highly doubt that is in fact a fact.
I know that comparing a single month does not say anything but there are enough revenue tables out there, including numbers of downloads etc. that let you make some predictions for the future (analysts doing it the whole day btw). Year 2018 was a decline compared to 2017, and what we saw in the first few months 2019, even with all these new toons are released, looks not so good to me (and i guess also not to EA^^).
Of course you can close your eyes and daydream of the shiny future swgoh has, and perhaps the release of Ep.9 will adjust their numbers a bit to shadow the downs from the beginning of the year, but on long term bases it would be more wise not to catch the falling knife
I get that the numbers must work out that way, but I am nonetheless surprised that they would rather get $10,000 from one player instead of 20 bucks from everyone. That's why I joined this game in the first place: 80 bucks and I had a full sith team out of the gate to keep myself competitive for months.
Now that 80 wouldn't do much at all except help me panic farm shards for the latest pre-made meta team, with nothing left over for gear.
Its endgame greed, nothing more. I would have rather spent 20 or 30 a month for a crystal subscription but the amount it takes for it to make a difference is getting steep.
Very true. Sorry for sharing your pics, Mr. 12000 posts.
Ooooh we got an old-fashioned post count throwdown in this here thread. Yee-hah!