@EA_Jesse I would like to give some constructive feedback. We all love the game before mods. It was amazing, we all sunk tons of time and money into this game. There were individual strengths and weaknesses to each character, the upgrade system with gear + stars + training was deep but not overly complex.
But we're all justifiably upset because Mods just threw the whole checkerboard off the table. Mods would be fine if all the characters were similar, the other upgrade systems didn't exist, and it was a fully-customizable game, but we're used to each character having their own strengths and weaknesses, and we all loved that. What we wanted was more battles, more content like the raids which were great.
Mods threw all of our hard work on gear and getting the right characters for various activities into the dumpster. And today's update took all the hard work of building raid squads and threw the entire dumpster into the ocean.
We're frustrated because we spent time and money on something that was great, and it's all been entirely changed. There's no just dealing with Mods or enjoying the other parts of the game like we did when GW got too frustrating. There's no going back, PVP, raids, GW, everything has been affected in a major way.
I know you all worked hard on mods, and thought it was a great idea. But many of us, as players, disagree, right, wrong or indifferent, we like what we had. We spent money and time because we liked it. This update didn't just change a few things, it completely changed everything that we liked about it. The mods, the potency changes today were epic disruptions, and for many of us, the game that we like is entirely gone.
We're not trying to disparage your work, we're just asking for you to give us back the game that we all loved. We love what you created before mods and we want that back. I personally have never spent money on a mobile game, but spent more on this game than I do on full console titles because I loved it.
First off, thanks for posting @EA_Jesse. I honestly think you care about the game and want to make people happy, despite what a lot of people here apparently seem to think. I think communication is key, especially when there is a massive update like Mods so keep it up!
I'm legitimately at a bit of a loss for what to do to fix this on a macro level. I think there are a few things regarding this update would certainly help to calm people, so I'll start with those. I also apologize for the long post, but I'm trying to be constructive and offer legitimate feedback.
Credits. Credits are used for leveling, crafting gear, promoting characters, and now building and upgrading Mods. The recent slight increase to GW was something, but not nearly enough to make a dent in modding one character, let alone the 5 required for Arena. Adding more credits to Daily Activities, increasing the frequency of events (such as the current Scoundrel event or a modified Force Champion event), boosting the GW credits (there are still not much higher than they were when tuned for level 60), and slightly decreasing the cost to upgrade mods will certainly ease some concerns over the revitalized Credit Crunch.
Galactic War. This has been a concern in the forums and in my Guild for the last few weeks and has really come to a head with this update. Having fully geared teams with Protection starting halfway through was rough enough, but now those teams are all Modded. The Credit payout per battle has only slightly increase (very recently) and the battles have gotten substantially more difficult. Adding a larger boost to Health/Protection regeneration after the battle, as well as allowing Protection to regenerate when your Health is maxed at the end of the battle, will make it much more bearable to complete. Also, I've always been a proponent of having your characters recharge Health/Protection and reduce Cooldowns while benched since, realistically, it makes complete sense - when you rest, you recharge. Finally, I totally understand that it's meant to be difficult, but it is very time consuming and boring to fight roughly the same teams on each node. I understand that major changes like this would take time, but just throwing a suggestion out there: decrease the amount of nodes and have each node be a different faction. This would break up the monotony of having all Meta teams and make it a bit more enjoyable. Echoing what I said above, increasing the Credit payout would also help.
Cantina Energy. Prior to this update, Cantina Energy was a great way to farm new characters, which allowed for more experimentation and potentially new Arena comps and meta shifts. Requiring Mods to use that same energy, all while making Mods more powerful than even Gear, makes it virtually impossible to rationalize shard farming through Cantina over Mod farming. This also means that getting characters for the Mod Challenge Battles is near impossible for F2P and a pain for moderate spenders (see below). I really see two main ways to fix this: 1. Model Cantina Energy after normal Energy: Increase the refresh time to 6 minutes, give bonus Cantina Energy, and decrease the cost of Crystal refreshes; 2. Create a separate "Mod Energy" unique for farming Mods and leave Cantina energy as it is now. There are pros and cons to each, but I like option 2 as unlocking new characters is integral to the game and is what a majority of the players enjoy most.
Mod Challenge Battles. Right now, only mega-whales will be able to complete all of these, thus creating an even greater divide between F2P/dolphins and whales. Optimizing the battles for a team of 3 characters (albeit leveled, geared, etc.) would make them more accessible for wider range of the player base, while still giving people a challenge and encouraging the development of more characters. The Omega battles were a great example of this, though I would imagine the Mod Battles would be a bit more difficult.
Mod Balance. I love the ability to customize characters to try to cover their weaknesses or enhance their strengths, but there needs to either be a cap to how much a stat can be increased or have some sort of drawback to using a more powerful mod. Having characters like Rey with more Health/Protection than Royal Guard, plus more Speed and Strength than she had without mods doesn't make much sense.
Mod Preview. I would love to get some insight on what the secondary stats may be for a mod before we pay to upgrade it. Dumping 400+ thousand credits into a mod, only to find that it's not great is extremely disheartening. I'm not even suggestion you display everything, but at least some sort of teaser of what stats may be affected.
Daily Challenges. I think with the new and robust "grind" the we now have in Mods, decreasing some of the stress/frustration of farming gear would go a long way. Add a new tier to the Daily Challenges which slightly increases drop rates and includes all gear from previous tiers would be awesome. The AGI Challenge is a prime exmaple with the Mk3 Droid Callers and Mk 6 Syringes being locked to two different tiers, while both being required in large quantities for high level gear upgrades.
I know that was an extremely long list, but I think I offered constructive feedback with feasible solutions. There are a lot of things this update did right, including things the community has asked for. Using Sim tickets for Challenges, mass Sim battling, better Gear search-ability, and the overall UI modifications are all fantastic and show that you do listing to at least some feedback.
In all honesty, I'm strongly considering calling it quits. I love this game and have played since mid December, spending a moderate amount of money along the way. I've met great people in my guild and have enjoyed a lot of the features the game has; but at this point, I'm nervous that nearly everything I've worked towards over the last 7-8 months is rapidly being devalued by the Mods and frankly, I'm not really interested in a steep uphill grind for them. I know that I'm a mere forum poster and have no sway in this, but I hope you at least read some of my suggestions. I'm not throwing in the towel yet, but there are a lot of things this update has done to make this game far less enjoyable and I look forward to seeing what will be done to address our concerns.
Thanks to those who took the time to read this!
@EA_Jesse If you haven't already, please read this post thoroughly and share with your Dev team. This post outlines the major concerns with the games current state as well highlighting the positive points about the recent update.
I know that a number of you are upset with the latest series of updates, but know that we have heard you.
We are upset because not only do we not feel heard, when we do feel heard, you do the opposite and upset us. We feel like you're trolling us, not listening.
Now, in regards to all of the posts on the forums, we need to adjust the approach being taken by a number of posters. I’m going to ask that you please stop posting threads that do nothing to help the state of the game, I don’t want to remove anyone because they keep breaking the TOS and Forum Guidelines.
Do not create posts bashing EA, CG, the dev team or the moderators. Again, this does nothing to help the game.
Posting threads telling people to quit, to stop spending on the game or to lower their review scores. This does nothing to help the state of the game. What helps us is seeing feedback on why you don’t like a certain feature and how it affects your enjoyment of the game.
Posting threads telling people to quit, to stop spending on the game or to lower their review scores. This does nothing to help the state of the game. What helps us is seeing feedback on why you don’t like a certain feature and how it affects your enjoyment of the game.
You mention wanting constructive feedback but you have given your players very little reason to believe that you listen.
If you communicate with us, we will communicate with you. If you passive-aggressively ignore your players, of course they're going to lash out at you.
Continuing to ignore us just makes us louder and angrier. You want it to stop. Prove that you want to listen. Communicate back.
Do not create posts on how the game is dead, or how it’s going to die, or anything along those lines.
This is a valid concern to us. It's a game with a long time-horizon, and people have put a lot of money into this game on the assumption it'll be around a long time. When people are seeing 20% of their guild leave overnight, this causes a lot of sphincter tightening because all of a sudden the looming threat of losing time and money invested into this game is happening right before our eyes.
hahaha please comment on the T7 raid dropping 7er mods yesterday for a short amount of time. You had such an backlash on the precrafting issue but still managed to do a precraft 2.0 and precraft 3.0 in just one single update. I'm impressed. The 6er atk% mod gives 1% more atk then the 5er for double the money. And the 7er are overpowered as hell (81 speed anyone? =D). How do you guys come up with this, where is your balance team?
hahaha please comment on the T7 raid dropping 7er mods yesterday for a short amount of time. You had such an backlash on the precrafting issue but still managed to do a precraft 2.0 and precraft 3.0 in just one single update. I'm impressed. The 6er atk% mod gives 1% more atk then the 5er for double the money. And the 7er are overpowered as hell (81 speed anyone? =D). How do you guys come up with this, where is your balance team?
"It was only .00001% of players who got the accidental t7 mods so it doesn't matter".
Civility goes both ways.
I will keep it civil, if you stop insulting my intelligence. Either all these changes were malicious and very much deliberate or your team is beyond incompetent and clueless about their own product and how their changes impact it and your clients.
Either way is very disappointing.
The mess created these past 2 days is made worse by the lack of communication, ignoring feedback (actually I would say actively mocking feedback by making sure you do the opposite). Whatever little communcation there is, comes in a condescending or arrogant tone. You took over 6 weeks to acknowledge pre-crafting problem, doing so in an arrogant post posting statistics trying to show how much of a non-issue it was and you offered a "solution" that involved us paying you more money.
You took months to acknowledge credit crunch, despite it being obvious to anyone familiar with 4th grade math, considering the daily credits are roughly the same since November 2015, while the costs of leveling a character have scaled exponentially.
I'm looking forward to the formal open apology and the rollback or massive fix. Also for the explanation about yesterday's change, the fact that tier 3 mod challenges barely ever drop tier 5 mods, the fact they drop 1/3 of the time now and the fact their price more than doubled after your premium customers were set (the ones spending thousands of gems instafarming mods on day one).
Also looking forward to understanding the thought process behind making all pre-mod game meaningless by releasing a progression system so broken that makes all others completely obsolete, breaking character's roles/ charisma/ style, as well as synergies, by overwhelming all stats and making them meaningless.
I'm especially looking forward to the math about how you thought the best way to fix credit crunch was adding mandatory mods that cost +500k each (so over 15 MILLION credits for ONE full team) and how you planned to offset that gigantic new paywall with an insulting 60k daily credit increase in GW (made even more pointless by the fact you also made GW impossible for anyone that did not rush to farm mods on the first day).
On the bright side, pokemon was released in my country today, so i have an alternative collecting game that doesnt treat customers like clowns.
Dear Jesse,
Just as you would like to see from us what you call a civil response, do keep in mid that civility is also demonstrated by you when:
- You address the feedback, not just plainly say that you are aware of it.
- State the form or manner in which you would like to recive feedback, not just stating what you would not like to see in posts.
- Establish a channel in which both of the points above are exchanged with EA.
Keep in mind that most ouf the responses from users are, at this point, based on frustration, because, let's just say that, we like to play... And we haven't heard from you. I appreciate your taking the time for the note above, but that keeps raising more questions.
Take in consideration that a note that reads "we see your posts and we are addressing it" doesn't say much about the energy, in-game credits, crystals, shards, time and effort, and money, that we have spent in the game and that whatever that bought is being overpowered/nulified by the recent changes in the latest update.
So, to request a constructive feedback, do give constructive acknowledgement of all issues, because as politically correct as you want to be, these are issues that affect both the product we bought and,thus, your job.
I'm assuming no communication means y'all are just hoping things die down and people stop being upset. I doubt it, but hey guess you may as well try right.
Here are a couple of things that I’d like to see stop:
Posting threads telling people to quit, to stop spending on the game or to lower their review scores. This does nothing to help the state of the game. What helps us is seeing feedback on why you don’t like a certain feature and how it affects your enjoyment of the game.
It seems to me the only way to 'help the state of the game', which should't be in this state be begin with, is to do just that. Constructive criticism, concerns, and suggestions have been ignored repeatedly, so why should anyone think that will change now?
Don't speak for me. I'm enjoying this game now more than ever. This update worked wonders for under utilized toons, which is something I thought a lot of people wanted before. Characters like Boba Fett, Mob Enforcer, and Cad Bane can actually crack the upper echelon of arena now. I consider that a good thing! Diversity in arena is finally possible.
I just did a tier 3 Health Mod Challenge...first try I got nothing. 16 cantina energy wasted. Second try I received a MKIII Mod!!!!!
It's supposed to be an MKV Mod as described. Before getting **** at my usage of bold, understand that I've said "Please" so many G D times on here only to have you all ignore it. I've not heard a reply from you Once in the seven months I've been playing and posting reviews and issues. I've pointed out the issue with Teebo for months now. You said you guys were "working" on it but the fact that you've rolled out so many updates since and still have done nothing about it....how can you say you listen to us?
Saying you updated Anakin upon our suggestion is bogus. That's you tweaking on your own whether we said anything or not because you'd clearly be able to tell no one used him.
I'm a PAID customer. I've spent THOUSANDS on this f*ing game so you should listen to me and the MANY other paid users and not insult us with telling us not to post anything negative. What a slap in the face!! Also, so long as no one is threatening you, you can't just ban people for saying they don't like a crashing app or one that changes the entire game on you once you've invested thousands.
Ive been patient. I've been polite. Now I'm angry.
Fix Teebo.
Adjust Mods back to getting them 100% of the time. That's what users want, so listen to us. Spending so much energy that takes 12min to replenish each just to waste it with NOTHING to show for it?! No one wants that. Not one. A troll may say otherwise.
You require us to waste at least 24 cantina energy a day for the daily requirement on cantina battles, when we'd rather use it for mods.
People posted on the forum about hating GW, and devs doubled down on it.
People posted on the forum about the credit crunch, and you added mods that cost between 500k to 1.7 million to fully upgrade and countered that with an extra 100k on GW. That didn't help us catch up, it put us further behind.
LOOK at these great ideas that you have. People are constantly post hoping you, yes YOU will put some feed back or respond. So respond, show us you don't lack public relations. They want to be heard and appreciated for their contribution.
This is a major problem for you guys, Show some RESPECT! Your time is not more valuable than anyone elses on here.
It’s been a while since I’ve posted a message to you all that is directly from me, one that isn’t patch notes
I know that a number of you are upset with the latest series of updates, but know that we have heard you. As many of you saw, CG_NotReallyAJedi made a couple of posts recently addressing some of the concerns with Mods. We should have more to discuss tomorrow, but know that the team is doing quite a bit of work on Mods to change them. I want to avoid giving any specifics since all of the changes we’re looking at are being tested still, but know that adjustments will be made to Mods. There are also some other concerns you all have that I won’t list out here, but know that I’m talking to the development team about them as well.
Now, in regards to all of the posts on the forums, we need to adjust the approach being taken by a number of posters. I’m going to ask that you please stop posting threads that do nothing to help the state of the game, I don’t want to remove anyone because they keep breaking the TOS and Forum Guidelines.
Here are a couple of things that I’d like to see stop:
Posting threads telling people to quit, to stop spending on the game or to lower their review scores. This does nothing to help the state of the game. What helps us is seeing feedback on why you don’t like a certain feature and how it affects your enjoyment of the game.
Do not create posts bashing EA, CG, the dev team or the moderators. Again, this does nothing to help the game.
Do not create posts on how the game is dead, or how it’s going to die, or anything along those lines.
If any of the above is done after this posting action will be taken against your forum account, and we really don’t want to have to do that, so please, keep it civil and constructive so we can clearly see your feedback.
Thanks,
Jesse
If the "other problems" don't include relieving the credit crunch and getting mod battles onto a different energy source, then it probably won't be enough.
Don't know if this is the place to say this, but I'm horrified that Raid VI/VII rancor raids are giving Tier VI/VII Mods. It used to be their only benefit was faster accumulation of the same raid gear we could get for Tier V, and Han Solo shards. Now it's the only way to get otherwise unattainable mods. I was hoping you would save the VI/VII mods for the reward for the Grevious Raid, giving everyone a chance to equalize with level V mods. Now, the gap between Guilds that raid T6/T7 and T5 is greatly increased.
the right to freedom of expression is everywhere and should not be censored
You might want to go back and re-read the First Amendment. Private entities can do as they please when it comes to "freedom of speech/expression."
First amendment says that Congress shall make no law ..... Abridging the freedom of speech.
It most certainly does not give the right to private entities to do so. Perhaps you should read it again. It's pretty short and clear
I'd love to read the case law that supports your theory. Courts, time and again have upheld the right of private companies to curtail the freedom of speech. The First Amendment only applies to the government restricting your freedom of speech, not EA/CG.
At this point skirata, we're probably just grousing among ourselves. EA probably stopped reading these a while ago thinking there's little new going to be posted at this point -- which is probably, mostly true
I woke up, didn't even check the game. Didn't even check my phone before shipment reset.
Fed my dog, made my coffee, went out to my back porch with a Black and Mild and then fired up the game.
Challenges, Check. Make sure I get my guild contribution, check. GW, whatever. Arena rank, whatever. Tokens spent for shards, whatever. Shipments, meh. If Tech Design came in, I certainly wouldn't grab it were my thoughts. What to do next? I have NO idea since everything is in limbo. Talked to my guildmates. Phone back down, enjoyed the rest of my morning before work.
Before today, I was HEAVY into the game. I was involved every few hours, etc. etc. like a lot of us were. Thanks to this update, I've become really ambivalent to the game. Heck, the forums and reddit are more enjoyable right now than the game right now and that's a problem. Again, the update looks gorgeous and I sent some encouraging words to INRAJ because I think he / she deserved it. I guess what I'm saying is this update really broke the stranglehold the game had over me. Now I have more time and money to spend elsewhere, so, thanks CG /EA?
****......Sounds like my morning, only that I wouldn't have been smoking a Black and Mild.....
Replies
This is me as well. Great post.
We are upset because not only do we not feel heard, when we do feel heard, you do the opposite and upset us. We feel like you're trolling us, not listening.
Which didn't address our concerns, it only made things 10x worse. We have trust issues, and it's responses like this that cause it.
You mention wanting constructive feedback but you have given your players very little reason to believe that you listen.
If you communicate with us, we will communicate with you. If you passive-aggressively ignore your players, of course they're going to lash out at you.
Continuing to ignore us just makes us louder and angrier. You want it to stop. Prove that you want to listen. Communicate back.
This is a valid concern to us. It's a game with a long time-horizon, and people have put a lot of money into this game on the assumption it'll be around a long time. When people are seeing 20% of their guild leave overnight, this causes a lot of sphincter tightening because all of a sudden the looming threat of losing time and money invested into this game is happening right before our eyes.
You've made us nervous. And that's not cool.
Most impressive.
"It was only .00001% of players who got the accidental t7 mods so it doesn't matter".
Typical EA response.
In the only defense of them possible, this is their messageboard. they aren't trying to regulate what you say out on the street or anything like that.
Civility goes both ways.
I will keep it civil, if you stop insulting my intelligence. Either all these changes were malicious and very much deliberate or your team is beyond incompetent and clueless about their own product and how their changes impact it and your clients.
Either way is very disappointing.
The mess created these past 2 days is made worse by the lack of communication, ignoring feedback (actually I would say actively mocking feedback by making sure you do the opposite). Whatever little communcation there is, comes in a condescending or arrogant tone. You took over 6 weeks to acknowledge pre-crafting problem, doing so in an arrogant post posting statistics trying to show how much of a non-issue it was and you offered a "solution" that involved us paying you more money.
You took months to acknowledge credit crunch, despite it being obvious to anyone familiar with 4th grade math, considering the daily credits are roughly the same since November 2015, while the costs of leveling a character have scaled exponentially.
I'm looking forward to the formal open apology and the rollback or massive fix. Also for the explanation about yesterday's change, the fact that tier 3 mod challenges barely ever drop tier 5 mods, the fact they drop 1/3 of the time now and the fact their price more than doubled after your premium customers were set (the ones spending thousands of gems instafarming mods on day one).
Also looking forward to understanding the thought process behind making all pre-mod game meaningless by releasing a progression system so broken that makes all others completely obsolete, breaking character's roles/ charisma/ style, as well as synergies, by overwhelming all stats and making them meaningless.
I'm especially looking forward to the math about how you thought the best way to fix credit crunch was adding mandatory mods that cost +500k each (so over 15 MILLION credits for ONE full team) and how you planned to offset that gigantic new paywall with an insulting 60k daily credit increase in GW (made even more pointless by the fact you also made GW impossible for anyone that did not rush to farm mods on the first day).
On the bright side, pokemon was released in my country today, so i have an alternative collecting game that doesnt treat customers like clowns.
the right to freedom of expression is everywhere and should not be censored
Just as you would like to see from us what you call a civil response, do keep in mid that civility is also demonstrated by you when:
- You address the feedback, not just plainly say that you are aware of it.
- State the form or manner in which you would like to recive feedback, not just stating what you would not like to see in posts.
- Establish a channel in which both of the points above are exchanged with EA.
Keep in mind that most ouf the responses from users are, at this point, based on frustration, because, let's just say that, we like to play... And we haven't heard from you. I appreciate your taking the time for the note above, but that keeps raising more questions.
Take in consideration that a note that reads "we see your posts and we are addressing it" doesn't say much about the energy, in-game credits, crystals, shards, time and effort, and money, that we have spent in the game and that whatever that bought is being overpowered/nulified by the recent changes in the latest update.
So, to request a constructive feedback, do give constructive acknowledgement of all issues, because as politically correct as you want to be, these are issues that affect both the product we bought and,thus, your job.
Kind regrds.
It seems to me the only way to 'help the state of the game', which should't be in this state be begin with, is to do just that. Constructive criticism, concerns, and suggestions have been ignored repeatedly, so why should anyone think that will change now?
Don't speak for me. I'm enjoying this game now more than ever. This update worked wonders for under utilized toons, which is something I thought a lot of people wanted before. Characters like Boba Fett, Mob Enforcer, and Cad Bane can actually crack the upper echelon of arena now. I consider that a good thing! Diversity in arena is finally possible.
It's supposed to be an MKV Mod as described. Before getting **** at my usage of bold, understand that I've said "Please" so many G D times on here only to have you all ignore it. I've not heard a reply from you Once in the seven months I've been playing and posting reviews and issues. I've pointed out the issue with Teebo for months now. You said you guys were "working" on it but the fact that you've rolled out so many updates since and still have done nothing about it....how can you say you listen to us?
Saying you updated Anakin upon our suggestion is bogus. That's you tweaking on your own whether we said anything or not because you'd clearly be able to tell no one used him.
I'm a PAID customer. I've spent THOUSANDS on this f*ing game so you should listen to me and the MANY other paid users and not insult us with telling us not to post anything negative. What a slap in the face!! Also, so long as no one is threatening you, you can't just ban people for saying they don't like a crashing app or one that changes the entire game on you once you've invested thousands.
Ive been patient. I've been polite. Now I'm angry.
Fix Teebo.
Adjust Mods back to getting them 100% of the time. That's what users want, so listen to us. Spending so much energy that takes 12min to replenish each just to waste it with NOTHING to show for it?! No one wants that. Not one. A troll may say otherwise.
You require us to waste at least 24 cantina energy a day for the daily requirement on cantina battles, when we'd rather use it for mods.
Completely agree.
LOOK at these great ideas that you have. People are constantly post hoping you, yes YOU will put some feed back or respond. So respond, show us you don't lack public relations. They want to be heard and appreciated for their contribution.
This is a major problem for you guys, Show some RESPECT! Your time is not more valuable than anyone elses on here.
You might want to go back and re-read the First Amendment. Private entities can do as they please when it comes to "freedom of speech/expression."
If the "other problems" don't include relieving the credit crunch and getting mod battles onto a different energy source, then it probably won't be enough.
First amendment says that Congress shall make no law ..... abridging the freedom of speech......
It most certainly does not give the right to private entities to do so. Perhaps you should read it again. It's pretty short and clear
I'm very disappointed with this particular issue.
I'd love to read the case law that supports your theory. Courts, time and again have upheld the right of private companies to curtail the freedom of speech. The First Amendment only applies to the government restricting your freedom of speech, not EA/CG.
Just a lot of venting
****......Sounds like my morning, only that I wouldn't have been smoking a Black and Mild.....
Turukano.