4/14 Update - Thank you for your feedback

JohnSalera

Hello everyone.

For those of you who don’t know me, my name is John Salera and I’m the Executive Producer of Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes.

I wanted to talk for a moment about the updates we published today, explain some of the rationale for them, and let you know we’re actively reading your feedback and discussing it internally.

Today we put out a series of updates which included:
1. An Ewok-themed event in support of the World Wildlife Fund

• 100% of the proceeds from the two one-time Ewok packs will go to WWF.
• This is an Apple-exclusive event and is part of Apple’s big #AppsforEarth campaign.
• If you’d like to learn more about WWF and their great programs and initiatives, please go here: https://worldwildlife.org/. You may make donations to them directly there if you so choose.

2. A new series of Events featuring the new Omega ability material

3. A significant tuning change which we started communicating about a month ago. Please see Jesse’s Community update from March 18th here: https://forums.galaxy-of-heroes.starwars.ea.com/discussion/21365/community-update-3-18-16#latest

We’ve been watching the forums closely today. @EA_Jesse and the mods have been working hard to keep the extremely active pace of conversations organized to the best of their abilities. (Thank you guys!)

There have been a lot of strong opinions expressed today on the forums about the tuning changes in particular. Some players are clearly upset about the tuning changes, and some are very happy with them.

I’m hoping you can all give the update a few days of play before locking into your opinion.

This was a big set of changes, and one we needed to do for the long-term health of the game.

Why?

Well, a couple of reasons:

• At the level 70 cap, the top end of the game was very much focused on speed and quick burst damage. There were fairly constant complaints on the forums about the domination of this particular strategy, and complaints that there were not enough viable squad builds.
• As we were working on building out the level 80 cap increase, and even projecting beyond level 80, that “speed meta” only got significantly more dominant. This was leading to cases where one party could demolish the opponent before they got a chance to move. Not good.
• Furthermore, the number of viable characters and squad builds also got narrower. Also not good.

So, we had to make changes. And they had to be fairly widespread. If we hadn’t made these changes the game was going to devolve into nearly instant combat.

Our goals were to move the game away from that speed-only outcome, and instead make more characters and party compositions viable. We wanted to create interesting interplays between different strategies – providing counters of one type of party against another. Based on our testing, there should be a lot more diversity showing up in the game in the near future as players start experimenting with different builds.

But I know change can be hard to accept at first. Earlier today, there were several polls asking whether people thought the update was good or bad, even before the updates were fully published. And now that the update has been out for about 9 hours, there are some calling it the best or worst thing to happen to the game.

We do believe this update is the right direction for the game, and hope you will come to agree (if you don’t already). I just hope you’ll give it more than a few hours before making your determination.

As I mentioned earlier, we are actively listening to the feedback, taking notes, and discussing things as a team. As you have a chance to play the game more, please don’t hesitate to let us know what you think, especially if your impression is trending positively or negatively from where it is now.

Thank you all for playing the game, and thank you for taking the time to come to the forums and express you opinions. Whether it be positive or negative your feedback is extremely important to us and a key part of making the game better over time.

Thanks!