Complete Galaxy of Heroes Overhaul
July 20, 2016 6:01PM
edited July 2016
It's essay time again! Welcome to the reading corner. Today we will be going over communication, general balance, and player progression. TL;DR in list form at the bottom.
Communication
There are a few areas here that need to be addressed. First and foremost, patch notes. Pre-patch notes should be available in full 2 weeks before a patch hits. This both allows the player to provide feedback to the developer, and to help prepare players for upcoming changes. Final patch notes, at minimum by a link if not in full, should be pushed to played in app. In most cases if you are going to patch a patch, for example changing mod upgrade costs and drop rates, this should be announced, in detail, at least a week prior to the change. Hotfixes for game breaking bugs do no need to be announced, but should be detailed ASAP.
Next, known issues and bugs. There should be somewhere for players that use the forum to find a list of all known bugs. This makes bug reporting far less redundant, and easier on both the player and developer. Known issues are less concrete, but should also be listed. These are not flaws per se, but player concerns. In addition to direct bugs, there should also be a listing of known concerns, the current status, and a place to discuss them. All major known issues (basically anything you've attributed a megathread to) should be listed in the issues post as "under review" for as long as it is. Once a month, all under review issues should receive a direct status update in a dev post. Issues about new releases should be addressed more frequently, for example an update on mod status should currently but available at least once a week with an ETA on the next update.
Balance
Starting from the top, mods. The core idea is great, the implementation is difficult and players will likely argue about the proper power. Since the issue is so hot right now, I'll throw my hat in the ring before moving on to other issues. Mods should be set to around 1/3 of the power they were originally released at. I would set them at
Probably still need further tweaks and this is the section of the overhaul I'm least confident about.
Mod sets should also be more interesting, or at least more powerful. Ideally rather than health just giving percent health, possibly add something new and interesting like health regen per turn.
Moving on to older issues. Galactic War should not be based on a player's arena power rating. It should be based directly on the player level. This is not to say it should necessarily be easier, just that the power rating as a bad metric. To start with, the power rating is not a great measure of a squad's actual power, but even ignoring that there is a deeper reason that it is wrong. Scaling difficulty directly with power removes any sense of progress from the player. If making my squad stronger makes my enemies stronger, what was the point? Especially when my power rating is inflated by using a high HP character like Teebo rather than a striker like Rey.
Next up, protection. The overall idea is good, and helps prevent strikers from destroying the game, but it had some (probably) unintended consequences. In almost every case, any skill, buff or debuff related to percent health had its effective power cut in half. Expose deals half as much damage to the effective health pool as protection isn't taken into account. Heals both heal less of the total effective health pool, and cannot be used for half the fight. Trigger skills like Kylo Ren's Outrage basically can never have the desired effect as they now trigger far too low in the effective HP total to ever matter. Solution: put protection behind health rather than in front of it so that effects like health steal, healing, hp triggers and the like can function from the start of a battle again, and then boost the power of direct percent health effects like expose and Barriss' lead ability by 50%. As a side note, this change would require an additional change to Savage Opress' Overpower to not instakill at 25% hp.
On to factions and characters. First, leader bonuses for faction should be stronger than bonuses that effect all characters. Either buff faction only bonuses, or make all "general" lead bonuses into faction bonuses with half effect to all characters. After that, specific characters still need to be addressed. Especially in faction that have only 5 characters, a weak character in the group destroys the ability to run the faction as intended. Al characters dont have to be top tier, but characters like the First Order Stormtrooper fall below even a mediocre rating and need to be tweaked up to passable.
Finally, the gear on many characters makes no sense. Players are forced to spend on gear with potency and special damage on characters that have no application for it. Should be cleaned up.
Player Progression
I touched on this in the Galactic War section, but player progress should feel good for the player. For the most part, this is done well with new events and activities opening up as the player levels, and outside of Galactic War increases character power has a noticeable effect. The other aspect to player prgresson is progression gating, here through credits, shards, gear and mods. There is a balance to strike between the difficulty of progress and the benefit gained. Currently I'm actually pretty happy with most of that balance, but two standouts are mods and Galactic War.
For an endgame player, there is a 1/9 chance to get a useful mod, and around a 1/400 chance to get a specific primary mod. Thats... pretty steep for only getting 7-8 chances a day. Currently the power gained is not remotely proportional to the difficulty of acquiring and leveling a mod. There is again a balance to be struck between mod power and how hard they are to get.
For Galactic War, in addition to difficulty scaling directly with your power rather than level, the rewards do not scale at all. The difficulty stays mostly constant, but the reward decreases in relative value as you progress through the game. In addition to scaling difficulty with level (not power), the reward should also scale with level.
Last up, as the player progresses they can join guilds. This isn't a direct progression issue but once you are in a guild, a social community, you should NOT be competing with those players. You should be competing with OTHER guilds. The current raid reward system really hurts the ability to build up camaraderie with other players in your guild, and that should matter from the developers end as it directly impacts player retention. Guild communities are a big factor in player retention, and this is the usual goal for games adding guilds in the first place. I can't stress enough how poor of a decision I think the current reward system is.
And here is the promised TL;DR
edited for some grammar and clarity on patch/pre-patch notes.
Communication
There are a few areas here that need to be addressed. First and foremost, patch notes. Pre-patch notes should be available in full 2 weeks before a patch hits. This both allows the player to provide feedback to the developer, and to help prepare players for upcoming changes. Final patch notes, at minimum by a link if not in full, should be pushed to played in app. In most cases if you are going to patch a patch, for example changing mod upgrade costs and drop rates, this should be announced, in detail, at least a week prior to the change. Hotfixes for game breaking bugs do no need to be announced, but should be detailed ASAP.
Next, known issues and bugs. There should be somewhere for players that use the forum to find a list of all known bugs. This makes bug reporting far less redundant, and easier on both the player and developer. Known issues are less concrete, but should also be listed. These are not flaws per se, but player concerns. In addition to direct bugs, there should also be a listing of known concerns, the current status, and a place to discuss them. All major known issues (basically anything you've attributed a megathread to) should be listed in the issues post as "under review" for as long as it is. Once a month, all under review issues should receive a direct status update in a dev post. Issues about new releases should be addressed more frequently, for example an update on mod status should currently but available at least once a week with an ETA on the next update.
Balance
Starting from the top, mods. The core idea is great, the implementation is difficult and players will likely argue about the proper power. Since the issue is so hot right now, I'll throw my hat in the ring before moving on to other issues. Mods should be set to around 1/3 of the power they were originally released at. I would set them at
- Speed - 20
- Accuracy - 18%
- Offense - 18%
- Health - 18%
- Protection - 27%
- Critical Avoidance - 36%
- Critical Chance - 18%
- Critical Damage - 36%
- Defense - 18%
- Potency - 27%
- Tenacity - 36%
Probably still need further tweaks and this is the section of the overhaul I'm least confident about.
Mod sets should also be more interesting, or at least more powerful. Ideally rather than health just giving percent health, possibly add something new and interesting like health regen per turn.
Moving on to older issues. Galactic War should not be based on a player's arena power rating. It should be based directly on the player level. This is not to say it should necessarily be easier, just that the power rating as a bad metric. To start with, the power rating is not a great measure of a squad's actual power, but even ignoring that there is a deeper reason that it is wrong. Scaling difficulty directly with power removes any sense of progress from the player. If making my squad stronger makes my enemies stronger, what was the point? Especially when my power rating is inflated by using a high HP character like Teebo rather than a striker like Rey.
Next up, protection. The overall idea is good, and helps prevent strikers from destroying the game, but it had some (probably) unintended consequences. In almost every case, any skill, buff or debuff related to percent health had its effective power cut in half. Expose deals half as much damage to the effective health pool as protection isn't taken into account. Heals both heal less of the total effective health pool, and cannot be used for half the fight. Trigger skills like Kylo Ren's Outrage basically can never have the desired effect as they now trigger far too low in the effective HP total to ever matter. Solution: put protection behind health rather than in front of it so that effects like health steal, healing, hp triggers and the like can function from the start of a battle again, and then boost the power of direct percent health effects like expose and Barriss' lead ability by 50%. As a side note, this change would require an additional change to Savage Opress' Overpower to not instakill at 25% hp.
On to factions and characters. First, leader bonuses for faction should be stronger than bonuses that effect all characters. Either buff faction only bonuses, or make all "general" lead bonuses into faction bonuses with half effect to all characters. After that, specific characters still need to be addressed. Especially in faction that have only 5 characters, a weak character in the group destroys the ability to run the faction as intended. Al characters dont have to be top tier, but characters like the First Order Stormtrooper fall below even a mediocre rating and need to be tweaked up to passable.
Finally, the gear on many characters makes no sense. Players are forced to spend on gear with potency and special damage on characters that have no application for it. Should be cleaned up.
Player Progression
I touched on this in the Galactic War section, but player progress should feel good for the player. For the most part, this is done well with new events and activities opening up as the player levels, and outside of Galactic War increases character power has a noticeable effect. The other aspect to player prgresson is progression gating, here through credits, shards, gear and mods. There is a balance to strike between the difficulty of progress and the benefit gained. Currently I'm actually pretty happy with most of that balance, but two standouts are mods and Galactic War.
For an endgame player, there is a 1/9 chance to get a useful mod, and around a 1/400 chance to get a specific primary mod. Thats... pretty steep for only getting 7-8 chances a day. Currently the power gained is not remotely proportional to the difficulty of acquiring and leveling a mod. There is again a balance to be struck between mod power and how hard they are to get.
For Galactic War, in addition to difficulty scaling directly with your power rather than level, the rewards do not scale at all. The difficulty stays mostly constant, but the reward decreases in relative value as you progress through the game. In addition to scaling difficulty with level (not power), the reward should also scale with level.
Last up, as the player progresses they can join guilds. This isn't a direct progression issue but once you are in a guild, a social community, you should NOT be competing with those players. You should be competing with OTHER guilds. The current raid reward system really hurts the ability to build up camaraderie with other players in your guild, and that should matter from the developers end as it directly impacts player retention. Guild communities are a big factor in player retention, and this is the usual goal for games adding guilds in the first place. I can't stress enough how poor of a decision I think the current reward system is.
And here is the promised TL;DR
- Pre-patch notes 2 weeks in advance
- List known bugs and issues
- Tweak mod and set power
- Change GW matchmaking to scale with level rather than power
- Put protection behind health
- Make factions stronger
- Clean up useless gear (special damage, potency etc. on chars that don't use it)
- Review mod drop rates
- Scale GW rewards with player level
- Make raid rewards not intra-guild competitive
edited for some grammar and clarity on patch/pre-patch notes.
Post edited by medetec on
0
Replies
Well written
Great post!
Eloquently written. I give you an A+.
But reality is, EA already pushed the plunger on the GoH toilet. The spiraling whirlpool is already in action. Many financial contributors have entered the dark abyss, and likewise, my wallet was first to go. I'm close to saying good bye to GoH. The disappointment and frustration far outweighs the entertainment aspect.
Guild: Paradigm of Virtue (PoV)
Line: GohYouth
The only addendum (and probably simply needs elaboration) is a 2 week forewarning on patch notes isn't realistic in a software development environment. Firstly, patch notes are typically the very last thing to get organized, and they're generated by "what changes were made in the system" (and things get overlooked). Secondly, if they did that they'd have to stop development on that patch otherwise they'll get "but the patch notes said this".
But, I think what would be beneficial would be some sort of PTR realm where players can test new content in advanced. Sort of fits with the 2 weeks thing (PTR patch notes), and allows for player testing and feedback. Although, I only know of this for full length computer games and the like, I don't play enough mobile games to know if this is done or doable on this format (would it require a second, separate app, or something in-game to switch to PTR?)
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It's funny that some many people know how to make the game more enjoyable, which would keep player base.
But THEY don't care about making us happy.
Run away
They don't give us advance patch notes because they want us to spring on crystal packs to gear up new teams in a couple days. Take mods. If you didn't have millions of credits and crystals for energy already, you had to buy them to get your arena team up to par in a hurry. Just one of many examples.
Communication I totally agree with. Time to prepare and give feedback. The bug issue is great too. Search and add your claim to it.
Balance, Mods. This is how I feel they should have been handled. Diminished but not crushed. This has enough power to make currently not relevant/viable characters, viable. Your Mod set idea is a home run. Health gives say x % turn regen. Awesome.
GW. I agree on the arena power, but doing it flat level 80 could make it much worse for many. There are some at 80 that have only a few at 7*, let alone heavy geared, if they drew say, me, they'd never pass the node. Say they pulled me on node 6, or another whale who has been at 80 forever and is heavy gear, omega, and modded? They would not touch us.
Maybe incorporate it to where it is off the average 5 character power of all ones level 80's. Now of course that will make it incredibly more difficult for me and fellow whales, but hey we have wanted challenge,lol. Much tweaking I'm sure is needed.
Protection. Reversing it to go under health I do like. While it is meant as a "shield" it nullifies far too many things. Maybe a compromise where every hit does x% to protection and x% to health. Protection is like armor. Not sure how many others have fought with any kind of armor. While it can mitigate devastating blows you do take damage as it does.
I agree with your latter points as well on the investing in things that do not pertain and such.
Great post I loved the read.
@armyhutchings To that point, while 100% finalized pre-patch notes aren't doable, running PTR/PBE notes are. Their isn't a public beta environment for GoH, but there is an internal testing server and while we don't have access to it we certainly could be given information on what's being tested. There also should be a lag between the patch being finalized and sent to testing, and its push live. While it's being tested to make sure everything is working as intended there should be time for updated information. I don't expect pre-patch notes to be 100% accurate but I do expect them to be pretty comprehensive. Post-patch notes should be near 100% accurate and well detailed, and have not been.
Companies like Blizzard are Riot manage to get plenty of information out on upcoming patches long before the patches hit the live servers.
Are you talking about the chance to get a good endgame mod? I'm basing it on a rough equivalent of shard drop rates, so ~1/3 chance to get a mod, and ~1/3 chance for that mod to be a mk5 assuming equal chance to get mk3 -4 -5 if you do get a mod at all. Unfortunately it's all theoretical, I haven't run enough sims to get reliable numbers. Even if lets say its a 50% chance to get a mod and its weighted so its a 50% chance to get a mk5, that's still a 1/4 chance to get a "good" mod and a ~1/200 chance to get a specific primary out of the set of 6 different shapes and 12 primary options.
I'd love to do a real study on mod drop rates but I only do a single cantina refresh and that's a long term project to get viable data, and a topic all to itself. I was trying to be a bit more general here.
Also, disagree with putting protection behind health, as that doesn't make much sense to me, it's meant as a shield. Your argument for putting protection behind health sounds exactly like the argument for why protection came to exist in the first place.
I have wanted to see Heroes with abilities that nullify/buff/regen/heal/bypass protection, so that's more important to me.
@Mynd I wasn't particularly confident on the mod numbers, it was more that I felt they were currently weak especially compared to their difficulty to obtain and level. I wanted to throw something out there as a starting point for discussion and the numbers I put up are what felt right to me. Of course and balance changes should be playtested and numbercrunched for balance.
For protection, the stated goal we to reduce 1 turn kills. Flipping protection to be behind health should not change that in any way, it just allows healing and certain trigger skills to be usable from turn 1 of a battle rather than only after all protection was removed. In case it wasn't clear, the total effective HP would remain unchanged, but a character would be defeated when they ran out of protection, rather than health. You could still add skills / effects that did bonus damage to protection, healed protection or interacted with protection in interesting ways.
Accuracy - 18%
Offense - 10%
Health - 12%
Protection - 21%
Critical Avoidance - 28%
Critical Chance - 18%
Critical Damage - 32%
Defense - 15%
Potency - 22%
Tenacity - 28%
Communication, in general I really think honest dialog and discussion would go a long way to resolving many issues. People will never completely agree but real back and forth and explaining the logic behind decisions frequently makes disagreement much less disagreeable. Hopefully after all this they'll start to see the value genuine communication brings.
Patch notes, agreed - and it is reasonable - depending on they're environment they could know what the goals are for a release weeks or months in advance. The key here is to communicate the difference between expectation and reality. Without fail they'll be hammered on "broken promises" but as long as they're clear that the initial notes are "intended" with the release and subject to slippage, that's fine. And of course the change notes need to reflect all the player relevant changes.
Mods, don't think they need any further balancing now but 1/3 of what they were would be a solid goal for future release(s). There's still a lot of tweaking to be done, including to drop rate/odds, before then imo.
Protection, another possibility is to rework certain skills to ignore (some percentage of) protection.
Factions/characters, agreed, much more could be done with synergy. Obviously some of that could already be on the drawing board with new characters, but seeing existing characters brought back to fundamental relevance would be great.
Gear, agreed, plus making all gear farmable - players shouldn't have to chose between guild loyalty and advancing.
GW, current roster state adapted nodes with associated drops possibly further modified by level/need/player selection.
Guilds, a lot could be done here, and judging by the amount of currently greyed out tables, maybe it will be. But agreed, guilds should be about building players up and mutual benefit and success not scrabbling against one another for increasingly needed resources.
Keep up the good work @medetec!