Critical changes needed in next update. (long)
January 1, 2016 9:52PM
edited January 2016
* Weapon damage, cooldown timer, player health etc etc should all be converted to server side to insure security of data. For some reason unlike your Korean counterparts you guys decided the only thing you would protect on your own servers was anything that involved financial profit of your company. This was a critical error. Your solution to this problem was for us to report fishy activity. To late. Being they were able to bypass the normal slow advancement that requires financial investment to hasten...you now can't tell who is cheating and who is not. By modding they were able to farm gear and shards in areas they would not of had access to advance in with just 6 starting characters. Now they have equal power levels as nothing was done to fix it so they are now unidentifiable.
This breaks the integrity of the game and causes you to have financial loses. Money must not be that great for CG as you can't resub crystal subscriptions or are limited to a certain amount in a month. That means you need us buying the crystals directly for there full USD value as the subscription plan must have been blamed for a decline in crystal sells. Which possibly could have been caused by modders as why do they need to spend money? They can complete the GW every single time, max out the LS and DS, cantina missions and grab a top rank in arena for free crystals with just the free starting characters. So it not only effects the playerbase it effects your bottom line every month.
* The current fard sharming grind using hard missions is fair. But if you have maxed all your chances for the day and choose to recharge for three more tries there should also be a higher % to aqquire the shards. And it should increase with every stacked recharge. This will help your profits and tempt spenders to spend. Would I pay 1k+ crystals a day just to farm a node for a character I really wanted. Absolutely. But currently the rolls favor the house far to biasly to ever spend crystals to recharge nodes.
* In future character packs it's bad bussiness to force the sale of crystals within the packs. You would have sold a ton more Rylo packs if you had dropped the crystals and just charged 50 dollars. If people want crystals they will buy crystals. If they want characters packs...they want characters.
* Taking Dooku out of the starting character pack was a unfair move. Its so rediculously unfair that new players are penalized and not allowed to have all the advantages Dooku provided to a bulk of the player base in leveling and GW. Greedo? Seriously?
*Create a live pvp match making system. This PvP is PvE. Theres no rush, no excitement for a match..it's literally no more fun than the GW...which after 15 times isn't so much fun. Want to make people spend money? Create live pvp matchmaking with a pvp lobby for chat. Men are very competitive and beating a live opponent is a true competition. A competition that can become very profitable for CG. Create live pvp tournaments. The possibilities are endless.
*There's more dev activity on reddit than the games official forums. Bad bussiness. Customers love information. They love being on a direct line with the people they are investing money in.
* Don't delete this post. Don't message me with a threat of ban or by banning me. Everything I have said is constructive with critique..but constructive. Thank you.
This breaks the integrity of the game and causes you to have financial loses. Money must not be that great for CG as you can't resub crystal subscriptions or are limited to a certain amount in a month. That means you need us buying the crystals directly for there full USD value as the subscription plan must have been blamed for a decline in crystal sells. Which possibly could have been caused by modders as why do they need to spend money? They can complete the GW every single time, max out the LS and DS, cantina missions and grab a top rank in arena for free crystals with just the free starting characters. So it not only effects the playerbase it effects your bottom line every month.
* The current fard sharming grind using hard missions is fair. But if you have maxed all your chances for the day and choose to recharge for three more tries there should also be a higher % to aqquire the shards. And it should increase with every stacked recharge. This will help your profits and tempt spenders to spend. Would I pay 1k+ crystals a day just to farm a node for a character I really wanted. Absolutely. But currently the rolls favor the house far to biasly to ever spend crystals to recharge nodes.
* In future character packs it's bad bussiness to force the sale of crystals within the packs. You would have sold a ton more Rylo packs if you had dropped the crystals and just charged 50 dollars. If people want crystals they will buy crystals. If they want characters packs...they want characters.
* Taking Dooku out of the starting character pack was a unfair move. Its so rediculously unfair that new players are penalized and not allowed to have all the advantages Dooku provided to a bulk of the player base in leveling and GW. Greedo? Seriously?
*Create a live pvp match making system. This PvP is PvE. Theres no rush, no excitement for a match..it's literally no more fun than the GW...which after 15 times isn't so much fun. Want to make people spend money? Create live pvp matchmaking with a pvp lobby for chat. Men are very competitive and beating a live opponent is a true competition. A competition that can become very profitable for CG. Create live pvp tournaments. The possibilities are endless.
*There's more dev activity on reddit than the games official forums. Bad bussiness. Customers love information. They love being on a direct line with the people they are investing money in.
* Don't delete this post. Don't message me with a threat of ban or by banning me. Everything I have said is constructive with critique..but constructive. Thank you.
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Replies
- As @CG_AaronNemoyten promised in a post a couple of weeks ago, dedicate a thread to bugs and issues related to characters and dedicate a dev to going through all of them and fixing them.
- Review some of the utterly broken team combinations and fix them. Starting a fight with someone who supposedly has comparable "power" to you and being beaten before you can do anything is not fun.
- Tone down the increased AI proc rate. Frustration =/= challenge.
- Give some sort of mode of play that we can do that doesn't require energy and is just for fun. Even if it has no rewards. Most players have less than an hour of actual gameplay per day right now. Bored players wander away, which costs you money.
- Run sales on crystals once in a while. You will make more money.
- Make packs that provide good value. You will make more money. I haven't been offered a pack that even remotely tempted me since I was about level 30.
- If a live PvP is system is too much work in the short run, then make sensible adjustments to what you have now. Fix the sniping bugs and sniping ranges.
- Aaron has said he's working on improving customer support. Please continue this as we still are reading horror stories on a daily basis.
1. Be able to see your own stats
2. No cap on allies or at least higher cap
3. More relevant shipments
4. GW balance
Which is stu-pid. Who abandons their own officially forum for an unofficial one. Anyone can pretend to be a mod or Dev on reddit. I wouldn't trust a single "offical" response that isn't posted on their own forum.
This is a sad reality. They'd have to scrap and rebuild the whole app and make the server side changes. Maybe they'd do it only if money is on the table that is sufficiently above the cost. To EA, it's all dollars and cents...
Is it not feasible because it was designed around not being server sided during SwGOH development? Is that what would make a restructure expensive? I honestly don't know.
Because if thats the case and modders will always have there way with the game and its doomed from a PvE for PvP experience in the arena there's really no point is there? Have you not seen all the mobile games abandoned and sitting in the wasteland because it was overran by modders? Plenty. I truly hope that's not the case.
the proc and dodging. Litearlly i had a sid go to 0 hp from a DOT. Which sucks b/c i had to spend another attack killing him. Guess what? dodged my first attack, ok whatever i'll just suck it up and attack him again.....Nope, took 5 tries to kill a sid with 0 hp. I eventually lost that fight b/c it was our #1 guy on the server and when you're packing leia, tie pilot, qui-gon, sid and kylo. Not killing one of them in 1 turn usually means you're losing someone on your side.
I think they should have designed the game all server side Day 1, that's the problem. They did a mixed setup for some reason, maybe performance reasons. In the end, I've complained similarly and I got grief in return. I agree with you and support your post, the question, does EA/CG....
I can see this from both sides, as a developer. Personally and especially with a bit of investment capital I would have used server side calculations and return the results to the client (mobile device) but this is expensive and would create a reliance on steady network connections in order to operate fluidly. With a bad server connection lag could result in stalls between rolls and/or "rollbacks" that could cause some irritation.
At this point it is a pretty big project to shift it all server side. I would add in some checks that could verify client and server agreement though (I'm sure some are present already) and then actively and publicly ban offenders. If you can't stop the hacks, at least show a very public deterrent in banning the offenders.
While I do not work for CG I have worked on some similar concepts. It's not easy either way and they seem to be a decent team. Give it time to establish a rhythm in the new project.
Game used to be fun when it wasn't a grind... if I wanted a grind I would have went and played old school Everquest or some Korean MMO!
Just wanted to clarify a few things here.
Cheaters – We know about them, we’re observing them, and we will take action on them “very soon”. Every game has to deal with people who hold their personal integrity so cheaply they would trade it for the appearance of skill or intelligence. And hackers are going to hack, that’s what they do. There’s nothing new here. It’s going to be an on-going arms race for the life of the game. The community can help by reporting suspected cheaters per Jesse's Forum Guideline thread here: https://forums.galaxy-of-heroes.starwars.ea.com/discussion/1186/star-wars-galaxy-of-heroes-forum-guidelines#latest. But the community is the not the only solution as you indicate.
The crystal subscriptions will return. We are in the waning days of a promotional period which is causing a hiccup in their availability. That will be resolved, likely next week. There is also no limit of purchases of subscriptions per month as I've seen indicated here and elsewhere. Unless, of course you currently have a subscription active. So the rest of this argument falls apart.
You may be right here. It could be fun. It would be a *much* slower experience, of course. Figure each player would have 10/20/30? seconds to make a single move. That might kill the fun. And while I never say never, this would be a pretty large technical undertaking. The engineers like to say nothing is impossible, it's just a matter of development time.
There were a couple of folks from the team posting on Reddit, and they still do from time-to-time. We have no official rep on Reddit, so they were filling in. Here we have @EA_Jesse, who spends a lot of his days / nights / weekends on the forums. However, that being said, I and others are planning to spend more time directly interacting on the forums. To be super clear, this has *nothing* to do with who spends or not -- I actually have no idea where more spenders post nor how I could figure that out. Nor would I really want to. Please don't leap to these kinds of negative assumptions about us. We're really not bad folks.
Nothing deleted. No messages sent. I really want to thank *you* for taking the time here and elsewhere to share your thoughts on the game.
Still the plan. Hopefully next week unless there's some other fire drill.
Tuning is consistently a top priority. We'll keep reviewing team configurations for anything broken or buggy.
I've seen this rumor of "cheaty AI". There's *nothing* like that as far as I know. I've even seen people accuse us of ramping up AI proc rates in order to get people to spend more. Not sure why folks assume us to be that manipulative / immoral, but unless there's some crazy bug, there should be no difference in proc rates between player and AI. I'll ask someone to confirm this early next week.
I've definitely seen this ask on various threads. I need to discuss this with the team, though, before determining how to address it. Stay tuned.
I'm not going to say never to crystal sales, but we currently aren't planning to do these. They can generate a spike in revenue, but they also cause dips after the sale. And ultimately they lead to unstable / wobbly economies.
Good to know. We will keep crafting new offers and see which ones resonate well with different types of players.
I'd like to hear more about these sniping issues. Is this covered in a thread I missed?
There have been some improvements, and we're watching this situation closely.
For 1, have you tried tapping the little circle under the 3D characters in their details screen? That brings up a panel that shows all the stats for that character with a description of what the stat means. We don't currently teach that button in the tutorial as it's a more advanced feature.
For 2, we aren't planning on increasing this. I haven't seen many requests to do so. Also, we needed to put some limit on it for performance reasons but wanted to give people "enough" allies to provide strategic options. Is 35 limiting your play somehow?
For 3, stay tuned.
For 4, there is an on-going effort to fine-tune the challenge of GW. It's meant to be difficult, but not impossible if you have a sufficiently deep bench. I've seen threads expressing that it may be too hard right now. I need to review the data for completion rates before giving a clear answer.
Whew! Long post. Hope that helps. Happy to discuss further!
Then the admin started to ban people for the slightest likelihood of cheating. Needless to say, my account of several thousand dollars (made most of it back from in game trading...phew) got banned.
That game lost all credibility and totally crashed and burned.
So I agree with WhipIT something needs to be done, but EA/CG needs to be careful how they manage this.
I believe @aspenstar was referring to arena stats (won, loss, defends, etc..). Currently the only way to see these stats are to share your ally code, have someone else add you and take a screen shot of your ally page. A user cannot see what an ally sees stat-wise.
I would love to be able to see my own won/loss record agains how many successful defenses.
It will be interesting to see how long the line is held on crystal sales.
Great post. Another concern of the community's is the availability of toons. There shouldn't be any toon that is not available outside of chromium packs. The difference between p2w and f2p should be how quickly these toons are acquired. Those who spend obviously climb the power curve much faster than f2p.
Another concern is the current lottery system. The moral debate of IAP lotteries aside, the current odds are stacked far too heavily on the side of the house. MANY players who want to spend money on packs refuse to do so, or are too scared to do so, from a combination of bad personal experiences and horror stories from other players.
The overall cost of IAP is of major concern. Have you folks considered what we as players, many of whom want to spend money on this game, think when we consider the cost of what it takes to acquire/level existing toons while also knowing new toons will be released fairly regularly? It's going to scare all but the wealthiest of the wealthy away.
I truly hope we can have a candid dialogue about this subject as it is one of the most important factors for the longevity of the game. How do you generate an income for the game while at the same time ensuring its players don't feel gouged? Right now, I don't think the current model is viable for a long term healthy game.
Lastly, happy new year!
Communication and knowledge is a beautiful thing between developers. It eases the ignorance most of us have about current issues. I know I at least "assume" many things when I dont have the available information. EAjesse has done a great job informing us the best he is allowed to.
If I could choose one issue that is gamebreaking it would be the modding. As you stated hackers will hack. But these aren't hackers. These are people that install an apk. Very simple to do by anyone. Thats the problem. If they had to actually "hack" into your servers..we wouldn't have cheaters...the amount of people that could actually hack a server are few and far between. But almost anyone can install a modified APK.
So what has happened is people that never would have cheated have started using the mods as well. Its the "can't beat them join them" mentality. Why deal with the restrictions of the game when modders don't have to. So what was once a small % of modders has ballooned daily into a large amount. I went from rank #1 in arena to rank 200ish in 24 hours with a 22.5k power synergized team. I logged on and was surrounded by 12-14k power teams using Chewie as lead. Cmon man lol. That's rediculous.
So say you drop the ban hammer and start banning people left and right. You design a program that catches unusual activity. You're going to be surprised how much of your playerbase is doing it. It's not a morale issue, no crystals are being outright stolen. So there isn't a right or wrong to it in many peoples eyes. If the data is there to be manipulated on the mobile device..there will be people that will do it. So you have to treat modders as you would a child and "take" there ability to use a modded apk away. Banning is not going to help if the ability to do it all over again with a new account is still there. The modders will just mod the mod to fool whatever program is in place to catch it. Something as simple as removing the cooldown timers on specials would be gamebreaking. So even if they could no longer add 10k damage per hit they could just mod the cooldowns. How would you catch that to even ban them? Hopefully you see my point that this will be a problem that could cripple the future of the game in the long term.
Mobile games is a fickle bussiness and games are thrown into the wasteland everyday and new ones are released everyday. You have PC publishers and development studios moving into the mobile gaming genre so competition is about to get serious. I like your game and can see a bright future for it. But if modding isn't wiped out I honestly don't see how you will stay profitable.
I will end with this last statement. Look at all the top grossing RPG games on google. Almost all are completely server sided. The ones that are not and mods are readily available for them...well you have to scroll and scroll down the list to find them...if you even can find them. And that's not some players rant. That's actual fact.
This is for others, not you, John.
Even setting aside the technical issues, I've played a game with "real PvP" and it is not the nirvana some imagine it to be. First, it is really boring because of the delays John mentioned -- you spend at least half your time sitting there doing nothing, and if the other guy is slow, you might spend 90% of your time doing nothing. The battles, instead of taking 5 minutes, could literally take a half hour each. And then there's the problem of disconnects, because this is a smartphone game. How do you handle them? You have to be fair to people who honestly lose connection, but also not open up the possibility of cheaters closing the game. It is NOT a simple problem and this other game I used to play has never solved it even after three years.
Thank you.
This is somewhat of a generic response, I am sure you always keep reviewing stuff, but I wanted you to be aware that there are some very broken combos right now that are leading to some teams destroying others before they can even act. This needs addressing ASAP, IMO.
No accusations here, but the increased proc rates on AI are pretty noticeable to most people. Today in GW I will actually track some of my and my enemy char's procs and see how they add up.
Thanks for at least giving a direct answer on this, it is appreciated.
Thanks, but tell me: do you honestly think that "year end bundle" was a good value for most players, especially since we got close to nothing during the holidays? Most games ran discount specials on currency and had extensive giveaways. We got 10 shards for a character that 90% of people can't unlock, and nothing else. Then I see a "year end bundle".. and it's full of shards for starter characters?
One issue is that because of the hard deadline, the only way to have a chance to get good rewards is to be active between 5 and 6 pm. People with "real lives" are often at work, commuting, dealing with kids or making dinner during this time. This means many players literally have no chance of competing.
The second issue is that the sniping ranges are uneven. If you are rank 11 to 20, for example, you can move up 9 slots at once, but if you are rank 10 and above, only 3 slots. This means someone can spend several battles to get into the #2 position only to have the guy in #11 take it in the last 5 minutes. The range of how far you can move up on each battle should be something like "greater of 3 or 10% of your current rank rounded up", something like that. This would be more fair and gradual.
I believe she's talking about being able to see your PvP stats. You can't, only people you send ally requests to can do so. See this thread: https://forums.galaxy-of-heroes.starwars.ea.com/discussion/3315/post-code-and-ill-post-your-stats
It's limiting the social aspects of the game. I turn down ally requests every day simply because my list is full. This is a multiplayer game and 35 is a small number compared to other games.
ETA: One other fairness-type request: if at all possible, can you please arrange for the end of all programs/specials that depend on your platform? They really are not fair, given that we all compete against each other, and sow discord in the community.
Edited!
Thanks!!
Suggestions with logical explanations next to them gain some weight, adding a context makes sense, but some of the things I keep reading on this forum just makes my eyes bleed.
In other times I just scream in laughter when I see stuff like this: "Men are very competitive and beating a live opponent is a true competition. "
Succinct writing gets the point across more than long tl;dr ramblings.
e.g. Whipit's post without all the unnecessary rant/emotions/whining/assumptions
* Combat data should be converted to server side to insure security of data to be able to pinpoint cheaters using mods.
* Increase the shard drop % when using a recharge to reward spenders.
* Remove crystals from character packs to lower their cost
* Offer Dooku pack to all new players
*Create a live pvp match/tournaments making system to foster competition between players
* Bring the reddit dev on the forums to merge all player activity in a single location
Just so this one does: @CG_JohnSalera , do you guys have any control over the software that runs this forum? Some basic improvements it could do with include an ignore list, and the ability to delete unwanted drafts.