How to make tournaments work.
In general I think tournaments are going in the right direction. You've made a lot of changes that have helped, but there's still room to grow. (There's a tl;dr at the very bottom if your eyes start glazing over at the wall of text.)
First, rewards:
The problem with tournament rewards right now is that only a few players get the character, the rest get a fraction of what's needed to unlock the character and have to wait all the way through the period until the character becomes farmable to use them (So, first they hit the Shard Shop, then they hit the Chromium pack, then some indeterminate time later they finally become farmable) this can take a couple months--taking this long reduces the incentive for free-players and low-spenders to participate meaningfully. In theory, these players would be more likely to participate because they need to place highly in order to get the character--but, in practice, people feel discouraged and just don't. They set their defensive team, play a handful of battles to hopefully get out of the lowest bracket, then go do something else.
The solution to this is to unlock the character at lower reward tiers. I'd say as low as top 1000. When it's the bottom-tier of unlocking (as in, 501-1000, in this case) unlock them a 1* version. This seems dumb and worthless, but there's a psychological difference between getting 15 shards and actually getting the character. Having them, even at this low a level, will allow you to level them up, gear them, and get ready for the farming. The shards given from 200-500 would likely be enough to get the second star, and if there's a second tournament for the same character you can potentially rank them up to something approaching usefulness. This'll also benefit lower-level players who just need any character to fill up their roster slots.
In terms of gear and credits, character tournament rewards are fine as is. Ship tournaments need a rework--from memory, they gave blueprints and enhancement droids. I forget if you got building materials. What I remember, however, is being extremely disappointed with the rewards. Right now, the shortage isn't with droids it's with building materials--so we need lots and lots of building materials to motivate us to compete. (For reference, I have so many enhancement droids that if I used them all it would cost me over 5 million building materials; I have just under 5000 building materials. I've been running the T1 droid challenge and the T3 building material challenge, and my rate of gain is still heavily skewed towards droids. At this point I would purposely avoid an activity that only gave droids...) The lack of a gear box is another disincentive to compete. I know you want to only give ship-related things for ship-related tournaments (makes sense!) but the rewards for a Boarding Action tournament are straight-up less, and that's a demotivator. I know ships don't use gear, but until astromech droids (or whatever the little blank spot under the pilot's portrait is) are added, this is probably the best motivation we can get.
Second, time investment:
You guys are on the right track here by cutting the last couple tournaments down to 1 day events. That's a great start, but it doesn't quite go far enough. The problem is that we still have to invest a lot of time in order to advance, and that much of that advancement is moot unless it's within a very specific, short time window. To be more exact, if a tournament ends at 2:00pm, then you have to cram in as many battles as you can between noon and 2:00pm, because that's what everyone else will do. It's a classic prisoner's dilemma: The optimal course of action is for everyone to do their attacks around their schedule, but because we all know that other players will wait until the last minute to get in their last attacks, now we all have to. I think the way to fix this is to set a hard cap on the number of refreshes a character can have in one tournament.
Refreshes are a bigger issue, but there's an aspect to them that fits here. Because you can do as many refreshes as you can afford, you can do a lot of attacks in one day, which takes a lot of time, which leads to a lot of frustration because if you're not attacking you're losing ground. By putting a hard cap on the number of refreshes per day, you're effectively putting a hard cap on the number of attacks per day. Let's say, for the sake of argument, the cap is 5. Under the most recent refresh costs, it's a total of 26000 ally points to do 10 attacks with the same team. That's practically nothing. I had 150k points saved up for the Jyn and Cassian tournaments (plus whatever I gained in the time between the two), so I could do 10 attacks with three teams for each one, and my 150k was on the low end--there's folks out there with ally points in the millions. Assuming the average attack is 3 minutes (roughly how long Arena lasts; potentially these fights take longer because there's no time limit, allowing you to hem and haw and take your sweet time determining your next move) we're looking at 90 minutes a day just fighting--not counting the time taken to find an opponent, which probably isn't more than 30 seconds, but that's still another 15 minutes cumulatively. A hard cap of 5 would halve the time for me, but reduce it drastically for others. This has an added benefit. One of the design goals of the tournaments is to encourage people to invest in all their characters, not just their top dozen or so. No cap on refreshes encourages people to rely on a handful of teams instead of investing in everyone. A hard cap would reward players who have invested.
If we're assuming 10 attacks from 3 teams under the current system, that's 90 minutes of fighting. In comparison, my galactic war takes 45 minutes. So I'm effectively doing an additional two galactic wars every time there's a tournament. I'm not against time invested being rewarded with rank, but there's the earlier problem: The only time that really matters is the time spent at the very end. The #1 guy on my shard in the Cassian tournament had about 5k points (Note: I didn't check at 1:59pm, so it's very possible their final score was 6k or even 7k, but that's not the point). Had they scored all 5k points within the first two hours of the tournament and left to go do something else, they wouldn't have finished in 1st place. They probably would have been in the top 100, but even that's doubtful. Players don't play to have the highest score possible, they play to have 1 point higher than the highest score on the board. So if they see 5000 points at #1 in the first two hours, they're going to grind away until they have >5001. In short, no lead is safe, unless it's the lead you have in the final few hours and you spend those final few hours defending it. Unfortunately, because of player psychology, I don't think you can really fix that directly. Not without also changing scoring so you somehow gain points while on defense (which, while it might sound like a good idea if you're reading this, stop to consider how people already collude with their friends and how people could feed friends points by throwing garbage teams at one another--so, no, don't do this unless you can police it.). An indirect fix would be to use a method that other games use for their tournaments. I'm specifically thinking of Marvel Puzzle Quest, which gives you a list of start/end times to choose from before a tournament starts, so that you can at least set that last hour so that it happens when you're ready for it. I like this because my tournaments end at 2:00pm my time. I'm at work at 2:00pm. It's impossible for me to do more than 30 minutes of attacks when I take my lunch--at 11:00am. So the last possible points for me are at 11:30, more than two hours before the thing ends, and even then I'll only get 3-4 fights in. If I could time-shift the tournament so that it ends in the evening, I can do these fights while watching Survivor, or whatever.
It's possible this would lead to collusion where people pick weird start/end times because they don't want to compete against their friends or guildmates. ...Thing is, they already do this. It's a known fact that the top guilds stagger their tournament entries so they're spread out. I have no problem with this, I don't mean to sound like I'm judging them or anything. What I'm saying is that it already happens, so preventing this sort of collusion doesn't really hold up as a reason to not do a selected start/end time.
Third is the frequency:
I like tournaments. I helped playtest tournaments. I enjoy the things. That said: OH MY GOD THERE ARE JUST TOO **** MANY OF THEM. Off the top of my head, including the cancelled ones, I think we had 9 tournaments? I'm sure I'm forgetting some, but let's say, for the sake of argument, that there were "only" 9. We were averaging one every two weeks for a while, but with the cancelled ones factored in we were about to have one a week for a time. That's an awful lot, and it sure felt like a grind. Reduce the frequency down to one a month. One a month is an event, two a month is a routine.
Finally is variety:
Partly because of frequency, tournaments get stale because we keep fighting roughly the same teams. The meta changes, for sure, but it doesn't change very fast. Since we only put out one defensive team, you tend to play with a variety of teams, but play against a homogenous meta. I had a Rebel, a Droid, and a hodge-podge team that were up to snuff to use for most attacks--and a variety of weird weak teams I could throw together if I found exactly the right opponents, but that didn't happen often--but every tournament I would run into what I call the Wall of Wiggs. That is to say, a certain point where I've run out of non-meta teams to face, and now I'm only facing some combination of Biggs, Wedge, Lando, and two others--but usually Anakin and Stormtrooper Han. The worst part of this is that I only had one team that could reliably compete against the Wall of Wiggs, so later battles consisted of me repeatedly sending out the exact same squad against practically the exact same squad. This gets boring.
In a free-for-all tournament the way we've had so far, I don't think there's much that can be done about this unless there's a meta shakeup. Personally, I think we're in the beginning of one, now that certain characters are becoming more common, so I'm open-minded for future tournaments. But another way to address the monotony is to run special event tournaments that have specific squad requirements. Think of them kind of like Brawls in Overwatch--standard games, but with non-standard rules that change the way a standard game plays. A tournament, for example, where only tanks are allowed; or a tournament where everyone's defensive and offensive squads have to be a specific faction--for example, you can only set a First Order defensive team and only use Resistance characters when attacking. Or Only Nightsisters for both offense and defense. Or only characters with the letter F somewhere in their name--whatever. Get real, real weird with it. Bonus: This will give you guys an opportunity to sell some real weird bundles. The one thing I'd say about these Brawl-esque tournaments is that if you're going to do them, you must announce what the squad parameters will be well in advance. Just imagine the wailing and gnashing of teeth you'll get if players find out the day of the tournament that they can only use Nightsisters, but they only have Talia at 3* and no one else... I'd also say that since these tournaments would be real-real weird, maybe don't introduce an entirely new character for them every time. Perhaps give people their choice from a handful of preset rewards. So if there was a First Order/Resistence-themed event like the one spitballed earlier, give people the option of which character's shards they want to compete for at the start of the event.
An unintentional side effect of rewards like this is that some tournaments simply aren't worth the time: But that's kind of the point of them. Right now people throw hours into a tournament because they feel they have to, and then they grow to resent the game for "forcing" them to grind away at a thing. If the stakes are lower, the incentive to grind is lessened and instead of being a chore the tournament becomes a hobby again.
TL;DR:
--Expand the reward brackets that unlock the character, unlocking the character at a lower rarity with the lowest brackets.
--Add ship building materials to Boarding Action tournaments.
--Add gear boxes to Boarding Action tournaments for now, until something ship-related is introduced.
--Introduce a hard cap to the number of refreshes per character per day, keeping a scaling price per refresh.
--Allow players to select the start/end times of their tournaments.
--One tournament a month.
--Continue to influence the meta to break up monolithic teams.
--Occasionally run tournaments with different rule sets to prevent monotony.
--Consider offering a variety of rewards and allowing players to choose what they want.
First, rewards:
The problem with tournament rewards right now is that only a few players get the character, the rest get a fraction of what's needed to unlock the character and have to wait all the way through the period until the character becomes farmable to use them (So, first they hit the Shard Shop, then they hit the Chromium pack, then some indeterminate time later they finally become farmable) this can take a couple months--taking this long reduces the incentive for free-players and low-spenders to participate meaningfully. In theory, these players would be more likely to participate because they need to place highly in order to get the character--but, in practice, people feel discouraged and just don't. They set their defensive team, play a handful of battles to hopefully get out of the lowest bracket, then go do something else.
The solution to this is to unlock the character at lower reward tiers. I'd say as low as top 1000. When it's the bottom-tier of unlocking (as in, 501-1000, in this case) unlock them a 1* version. This seems dumb and worthless, but there's a psychological difference between getting 15 shards and actually getting the character. Having them, even at this low a level, will allow you to level them up, gear them, and get ready for the farming. The shards given from 200-500 would likely be enough to get the second star, and if there's a second tournament for the same character you can potentially rank them up to something approaching usefulness. This'll also benefit lower-level players who just need any character to fill up their roster slots.
In terms of gear and credits, character tournament rewards are fine as is. Ship tournaments need a rework--from memory, they gave blueprints and enhancement droids. I forget if you got building materials. What I remember, however, is being extremely disappointed with the rewards. Right now, the shortage isn't with droids it's with building materials--so we need lots and lots of building materials to motivate us to compete. (For reference, I have so many enhancement droids that if I used them all it would cost me over 5 million building materials; I have just under 5000 building materials. I've been running the T1 droid challenge and the T3 building material challenge, and my rate of gain is still heavily skewed towards droids. At this point I would purposely avoid an activity that only gave droids...) The lack of a gear box is another disincentive to compete. I know you want to only give ship-related things for ship-related tournaments (makes sense!) but the rewards for a Boarding Action tournament are straight-up less, and that's a demotivator. I know ships don't use gear, but until astromech droids (or whatever the little blank spot under the pilot's portrait is) are added, this is probably the best motivation we can get.
Second, time investment:
You guys are on the right track here by cutting the last couple tournaments down to 1 day events. That's a great start, but it doesn't quite go far enough. The problem is that we still have to invest a lot of time in order to advance, and that much of that advancement is moot unless it's within a very specific, short time window. To be more exact, if a tournament ends at 2:00pm, then you have to cram in as many battles as you can between noon and 2:00pm, because that's what everyone else will do. It's a classic prisoner's dilemma: The optimal course of action is for everyone to do their attacks around their schedule, but because we all know that other players will wait until the last minute to get in their last attacks, now we all have to. I think the way to fix this is to set a hard cap on the number of refreshes a character can have in one tournament.
Refreshes are a bigger issue, but there's an aspect to them that fits here. Because you can do as many refreshes as you can afford, you can do a lot of attacks in one day, which takes a lot of time, which leads to a lot of frustration because if you're not attacking you're losing ground. By putting a hard cap on the number of refreshes per day, you're effectively putting a hard cap on the number of attacks per day. Let's say, for the sake of argument, the cap is 5. Under the most recent refresh costs, it's a total of 26000 ally points to do 10 attacks with the same team. That's practically nothing. I had 150k points saved up for the Jyn and Cassian tournaments (plus whatever I gained in the time between the two), so I could do 10 attacks with three teams for each one, and my 150k was on the low end--there's folks out there with ally points in the millions. Assuming the average attack is 3 minutes (roughly how long Arena lasts; potentially these fights take longer because there's no time limit, allowing you to hem and haw and take your sweet time determining your next move) we're looking at 90 minutes a day just fighting--not counting the time taken to find an opponent, which probably isn't more than 30 seconds, but that's still another 15 minutes cumulatively. A hard cap of 5 would halve the time for me, but reduce it drastically for others. This has an added benefit. One of the design goals of the tournaments is to encourage people to invest in all their characters, not just their top dozen or so. No cap on refreshes encourages people to rely on a handful of teams instead of investing in everyone. A hard cap would reward players who have invested.
If we're assuming 10 attacks from 3 teams under the current system, that's 90 minutes of fighting. In comparison, my galactic war takes 45 minutes. So I'm effectively doing an additional two galactic wars every time there's a tournament. I'm not against time invested being rewarded with rank, but there's the earlier problem: The only time that really matters is the time spent at the very end. The #1 guy on my shard in the Cassian tournament had about 5k points (Note: I didn't check at 1:59pm, so it's very possible their final score was 6k or even 7k, but that's not the point). Had they scored all 5k points within the first two hours of the tournament and left to go do something else, they wouldn't have finished in 1st place. They probably would have been in the top 100, but even that's doubtful. Players don't play to have the highest score possible, they play to have 1 point higher than the highest score on the board. So if they see 5000 points at #1 in the first two hours, they're going to grind away until they have >5001. In short, no lead is safe, unless it's the lead you have in the final few hours and you spend those final few hours defending it. Unfortunately, because of player psychology, I don't think you can really fix that directly. Not without also changing scoring so you somehow gain points while on defense (which, while it might sound like a good idea if you're reading this, stop to consider how people already collude with their friends and how people could feed friends points by throwing garbage teams at one another--so, no, don't do this unless you can police it.). An indirect fix would be to use a method that other games use for their tournaments. I'm specifically thinking of Marvel Puzzle Quest, which gives you a list of start/end times to choose from before a tournament starts, so that you can at least set that last hour so that it happens when you're ready for it. I like this because my tournaments end at 2:00pm my time. I'm at work at 2:00pm. It's impossible for me to do more than 30 minutes of attacks when I take my lunch--at 11:00am. So the last possible points for me are at 11:30, more than two hours before the thing ends, and even then I'll only get 3-4 fights in. If I could time-shift the tournament so that it ends in the evening, I can do these fights while watching Survivor, or whatever.
It's possible this would lead to collusion where people pick weird start/end times because they don't want to compete against their friends or guildmates. ...Thing is, they already do this. It's a known fact that the top guilds stagger their tournament entries so they're spread out. I have no problem with this, I don't mean to sound like I'm judging them or anything. What I'm saying is that it already happens, so preventing this sort of collusion doesn't really hold up as a reason to not do a selected start/end time.
Third is the frequency:
I like tournaments. I helped playtest tournaments. I enjoy the things. That said: OH MY GOD THERE ARE JUST TOO **** MANY OF THEM. Off the top of my head, including the cancelled ones, I think we had 9 tournaments? I'm sure I'm forgetting some, but let's say, for the sake of argument, that there were "only" 9. We were averaging one every two weeks for a while, but with the cancelled ones factored in we were about to have one a week for a time. That's an awful lot, and it sure felt like a grind. Reduce the frequency down to one a month. One a month is an event, two a month is a routine.
Finally is variety:
Partly because of frequency, tournaments get stale because we keep fighting roughly the same teams. The meta changes, for sure, but it doesn't change very fast. Since we only put out one defensive team, you tend to play with a variety of teams, but play against a homogenous meta. I had a Rebel, a Droid, and a hodge-podge team that were up to snuff to use for most attacks--and a variety of weird weak teams I could throw together if I found exactly the right opponents, but that didn't happen often--but every tournament I would run into what I call the Wall of Wiggs. That is to say, a certain point where I've run out of non-meta teams to face, and now I'm only facing some combination of Biggs, Wedge, Lando, and two others--but usually Anakin and Stormtrooper Han. The worst part of this is that I only had one team that could reliably compete against the Wall of Wiggs, so later battles consisted of me repeatedly sending out the exact same squad against practically the exact same squad. This gets boring.
In a free-for-all tournament the way we've had so far, I don't think there's much that can be done about this unless there's a meta shakeup. Personally, I think we're in the beginning of one, now that certain characters are becoming more common, so I'm open-minded for future tournaments. But another way to address the monotony is to run special event tournaments that have specific squad requirements. Think of them kind of like Brawls in Overwatch--standard games, but with non-standard rules that change the way a standard game plays. A tournament, for example, where only tanks are allowed; or a tournament where everyone's defensive and offensive squads have to be a specific faction--for example, you can only set a First Order defensive team and only use Resistance characters when attacking. Or Only Nightsisters for both offense and defense. Or only characters with the letter F somewhere in their name--whatever. Get real, real weird with it. Bonus: This will give you guys an opportunity to sell some real weird bundles. The one thing I'd say about these Brawl-esque tournaments is that if you're going to do them, you must announce what the squad parameters will be well in advance. Just imagine the wailing and gnashing of teeth you'll get if players find out the day of the tournament that they can only use Nightsisters, but they only have Talia at 3* and no one else... I'd also say that since these tournaments would be real-real weird, maybe don't introduce an entirely new character for them every time. Perhaps give people their choice from a handful of preset rewards. So if there was a First Order/Resistence-themed event like the one spitballed earlier, give people the option of which character's shards they want to compete for at the start of the event.
An unintentional side effect of rewards like this is that some tournaments simply aren't worth the time: But that's kind of the point of them. Right now people throw hours into a tournament because they feel they have to, and then they grow to resent the game for "forcing" them to grind away at a thing. If the stakes are lower, the incentive to grind is lessened and instead of being a chore the tournament becomes a hobby again.
TL;DR:
--Expand the reward brackets that unlock the character, unlocking the character at a lower rarity with the lowest brackets.
--Add ship building materials to Boarding Action tournaments.
--Add gear boxes to Boarding Action tournaments for now, until something ship-related is introduced.
--Introduce a hard cap to the number of refreshes per character per day, keeping a scaling price per refresh.
--Allow players to select the start/end times of their tournaments.
--One tournament a month.
--Continue to influence the meta to break up monolithic teams.
--Occasionally run tournaments with different rule sets to prevent monotony.
--Consider offering a variety of rewards and allowing players to choose what they want.
Ceterum censeo Patientia esse meliat.
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