GAC on life support
May 19, 2022 5:14PM
edited May 2022
@CG please please please GAC is in need of serious help. This is the premier game mode for most players and the reason many of us play the game and it has lost its fun factor except for the very top.
IMO 3 greens very positive things came from the GAC changes from 6 months ago. 1- The change in crystal distribution from arena to GAC 2- the elimination of controlling account bloat and 3- competitive fights at the top streamed for fans to watch and/or participate in.
But the down side to the changes is MASSIVE! And the problem isn’t resolving itself over time. In fact it is getting worse. The middle and lower ends of GAC (which 95%+ of us fall into) are seeing larger and larger GP gaps. The smaller GP account is usually the account the wants a good fight and is playing to win. But I never beat an account 2-3 times my GP. Instead he loses to me. There is a difference between those two statements. If the larger account wants to play or half way knows how to play, then that account will win. But if they attack once and collect their under-placed league rewards, move up to face a bigger account and this boring vicious cycle continues. It has been 4 months since I have faced someone anywhere close to my GP. Where is the fun in that?
Now I am not one to rant for the sake of ranting so I will suggest some ideas for improvement and hope others will add their ideas for you to consider. I hope you listen to our plea as fans of SW and this game and try something. We need competition, we need fun.
Ideas to help improve GAC:
Give players that don’t want to play, but want rewards an option to opt out of GAC and give then a lesser reward package than those that participate
Put a cap on GP differentials in the lower leagues. Make it so in a league the skill rating isn’t the only determining factor. Let the 5mm accounts in a league play other 5mm accounts, 4mm accounts play 4mm accounts in that same league, so on and so forth.
Keep Kyber or maybe the top 2-3 tiers of Kyber as it is with no GP differential gaps. Let the cream rise to the top.
These are just some of my thoughts. I would love to hear ideas from the rest of the community.
Best regards
- Inquisitor CT
IMO 3 greens very positive things came from the GAC changes from 6 months ago. 1- The change in crystal distribution from arena to GAC 2- the elimination of controlling account bloat and 3- competitive fights at the top streamed for fans to watch and/or participate in.
But the down side to the changes is MASSIVE! And the problem isn’t resolving itself over time. In fact it is getting worse. The middle and lower ends of GAC (which 95%+ of us fall into) are seeing larger and larger GP gaps. The smaller GP account is usually the account the wants a good fight and is playing to win. But I never beat an account 2-3 times my GP. Instead he loses to me. There is a difference between those two statements. If the larger account wants to play or half way knows how to play, then that account will win. But if they attack once and collect their under-placed league rewards, move up to face a bigger account and this boring vicious cycle continues. It has been 4 months since I have faced someone anywhere close to my GP. Where is the fun in that?
Now I am not one to rant for the sake of ranting so I will suggest some ideas for improvement and hope others will add their ideas for you to consider. I hope you listen to our plea as fans of SW and this game and try something. We need competition, we need fun.
Ideas to help improve GAC:
Give players that don’t want to play, but want rewards an option to opt out of GAC and give then a lesser reward package than those that participate
Put a cap on GP differentials in the lower leagues. Make it so in a league the skill rating isn’t the only determining factor. Let the 5mm accounts in a league play other 5mm accounts, 4mm accounts play 4mm accounts in that same league, so on and so forth.
Keep Kyber or maybe the top 2-3 tiers of Kyber as it is with no GP differential gaps. Let the cream rise to the top.
These are just some of my thoughts. I would love to hear ideas from the rest of the community.
Best regards
- Inquisitor CT
Post edited by Kyno on
2
Replies
I think the OP is suggesting that an opt out is as reward beneficial as being tumour to lower divisions. It's a fair point.
I don't think GAC is on life support though!
I think the OP is not suggesting 'general' matching by GP. Just those that are not playing as part of the system are matched by GP.
If 7/6 million accounts don't play they'll end up at the bottom of Carbonite 5. Then what? New accounts first games are vs these Bozos. Even if they win, that's a terrible experience.
Something does need to be done about the opt outs.
I'm honestly having a hard time parsing that sentence.
I think the idea is it’s healthier for GAC to give people an incentive to not sign up at all if they’re not going to put in the effort, vs what we have now with people joining and not putting in effort but still giving lower division players a hard time.
In my opinion, I don’t see a great way of fixing people’s enjoyment without breaking someone else’s. Skill here is a mix of effort and roster, so if you’re smaller in GP you need to - and often can - make it up in effort (whether into your development or your battling). That’s how GAC is meant to work, and it lets you put in less effort if you want to. You’ll just get less rewards.
Problem: The further down players fall, the harder their teams are to beat.
Example: Player with 4 million gp attacks with any old team once, on auto to get minimum rewards. Never to hardly ever wins doing this and eventually falls to Carbonite 5.
New players reaching level 85 are then paired with this player. They have no way of having a meaningful match up.
The experience isn't what was intended for a competitive GAC battles ; especially for a new player this is pretty damaging.
Solution: Remove players that fall so far below their starting division due to continual lack of activity.
Either A: Group them together.
B: Let them opt out of going through farcical matches.
Thought of an idea the other day which could help. I want to be able to progress and win a few matches (I would be happy with 50% win rate at the moment) and everyone should be able to play how they like. Perhaps larger rosters are not as active and miss some attacks and drop. Life happens. But could these match ups be made fairer?
What if each division was limited so you select a max number of squads to use in battle. Smaller divisions could have tighter limits so you are not overwhelmed by the falling giants rosters. So yes they can have 2M more but they have to select their characters. There’s no issue with worrying about GP bloat by match making based on GP. And they can pick their best characters so not restricting using big investments. But this would create a more competitive match up at lower divisions.
In my case I have higher banner efficiency but tap out. I have enough squads to attack each defence once, if I drop a battle that’s it I can not clear a sector. But my defences can defend multiple battles and they still beat me once’s they break through clearing zones, I have defended 5 battles with one squad and still lost as they eventually whittled it down. If there was a max number of squads to select it would promote better battle efficiency and be competitive for matches rather than larger roster sizes just out gunning in multiple attempts.
As you go up higher divisions you already need more defence so the max number of squads for attack could also increase. Promoting more success for bigger rosters higher up the divisions and therefore reward for investment.
Would this be fair from the perspective of players with larger rosters?
Well I understand what the problem is, and agree that it is a problem. I just don't see how any opt-out mechanism like what OP proposed would work. I mean, the point of opt out is that someone has to choose to stay out. People who join but do the bare minimum obviously choose to do that, so the only way for them opt out would be to make the rewards for staying out of GAC better than those for playing but doing bare minimum. That would just be unfair to the participating players.
Yikes, sounds like an awful idea… no thanks
Then people continue to collect A5 rewards even though they deserve to get less?
There needs to be a way to limit how far they can drop, while still continuing to reduce rewards.
Here’s the thing about fairness: the “problem” is the large-GP players who don’t put in effort and thus lead to unsatisfying wins for smaller players. Is getting rid of that fair? Because you’re getting rid of boring wins, but you’re also getting rid of a bunch of wins. So you’re trading enjoyment of the gamemode for the actual reward levels. That doesn’t seem fair.
So in our game a person with a 15 handicap, wouldn't be playing a person with a 5 handicap. So there's no need to handicap.
The scenario here is a golf no handicap match. Yet a person with a 2 handicap being drawn vs a person with a 20 handicap. The person with the 2 handicap is notorious for not showing up.....or showing up playing the first hole then going home. Every now and again they do play the full 18 and of course win comfortably.
The chances of the guy with a 20 handicap of winning are high, yet there's zero chance of having a fun competitive game...........is that how we want the game to be played?
Any floor on how low a player can drop based on GP brings back the specter of roster bloat - that's why they won't do this. Anything that they do that respects GP puts players back in a situation where they have to control the size of their roster to maximize rewards. This is the opposite of what CG wants - CG wants people to spend money to grow their roster as big as possible.
I agree that something needs to be done to make the experience better for people in the lower divisions, but nearly anything that's based on GP is a bad, bad idea in my opinion.
What part of the game do you like? If you don't want to play the main competitive part of the game, in what part of the game are you becoming irrelevant?
As to a solution...I think that initially, they should have made it take longer to move up or down. I've had times where I moved up (and down) twice after a single match. Should be one movement at the end of the week. But we'd still get to this situation, it'd just take longer.
A possible solution now would be to give a bonus to the lower GP player, for example +10% health, protection and offense per 10% difference in their GP. A million GP difference would give more bonus at low GP (1 million vs 2 million) compared to at higher GP (8 million vs 9 million). Unfortunately, this would require some testing to get those numbers right and fair and we're the testers and nothing changes from our feedback.
There has been plenty to do before GA was created. Plenty of things to do after as well.
After crystals went to GA I stopped all spending. I will slowly start to fall to the bottom of this game and it will then be the end for me.
It's a temporary problem, though. After a few of these match-ups, the lower-GP player will advance beyond the inactive players and into the promised land. Unfortunately, even though it's temporary this stretch of time will get longer the more and more inactive players there are.
Some sort of hybrid solution might be possible. Someone mentioned a floor earlier, so the solution might be to give a minimum guaranteed reward if someone doesn't sign up that's higher than the reward for going 0-3 in their current "floor." Of course, that'll only solve the problem of people who are inactive because they like the rewards but not the mode, and not do anything about the people who are inactive because they're jerks and just like the idea of new players seeing they're matched up against someone with 6m GP and despairing--which, I'm sure, is still a lot of people.
But what is it you dislike about GAC? Did you find arena a more compelling way to get rewards? I'm just trying to understand the people who dislike GAC considering it offers the most use of our rosters that we work hard to build.
My favorite suggestion I've seen in this thread is to provide an opt out option. Players who choose this can get rewards that scale to their GP and equate to 33% win rate in whatever GAC division is deemed appropriate for their GP.
People who don't want to play and opt out will get more crystals than they get now but less than if they actually participated. And they won't ruin the experience for those early- and mid-game players trying to climb the ranks.
It's temporary for that player. It's not a temporary problem though.
Absolutely not. We have situations of 1.2 mil players legitimately beating players of 4.5 million; I'm sure there are bigger examples.
GP is a highly inaccurate way of measuring GAC competitiveness. Also you've told players that min-maxing doesn't matter anymore; then to say yeah, now it does. Gives an eventual advantage to newer accounts.
I can't think of anything worse you could do to the GAC than GP handicapping.