Update to Raid Reward Changes - 4/11/18

Replies

  • SP4C3Z
    29 posts Member
    I am wondering why CG organizes Q&A if it is to say something, then implement something different ?:

    https://forums.galaxy-of-heroes.starwars.ea.com/discussion/165064/dev-blog-sith-triumvirate-raid-rewards-4-2-18

    "Given the difficulty of the raid, we will be increasing the rewards a bit. Skip down to the meat of the post for this info, along with a Q&A based on expected questions we think you may have. The credit for all of this information goes to our data & analytics specialists who are too shy to introduce themselves in the forums...for now."

    Sith Raid Reward Changes
    "1. Improved Underlying Quality of Gear Drops" "Across all Sith Raid Tiers, and especially beginning in Tier 4, the underlying contents of the Sith Raid mystery boxes have been revamped."

    "Q: Is the overall increase in rewards meaningful?
    A: Yes. We’ve intentionally scaled both quantity and quality as players move up the non-Heroic tiers, to fit gear rewards more closely with what players need."

    "Q: Will players be happy with the normalization of gear Mystery Boxes?
    A: We think so."


    So:
    - the Data & Analytics specialists didn't do well?
    - or Q&A is pointless?
    - or whoever thinks knowing the player actually don't know anything?
    - or everything?
  • Oh boy! Rancor gear in the HSith Raid :confused:
    #CloneHelmets4Life...VICTORY!!!! :smiley: "I don't like sand. It's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere." The more you tighten your grip, CG/EA, the more whales will slip through your fingers (and go F2P or quit).
  • I think the 40% chance of a full piece includes purple, so I guess we should expect the same odds for a full g12 piece to be similar to those of 7 carbantis from a challenge, $10,000,000 from credit heist or 145 shards from a character pack. I have read it a bunch of times and I think this is a really hefty nerf disguised as something that is good for the game.

    Sorry guys if I'm reading ot wrong.
  • Don't roll it back, the changes seemed completely fair from the prespective of a guild that can't do heroic. Watching my shard mates post full armatek pulls twice a week was getting pretty depressing since my guild had to step down from t6 to t5 because participation is starting to suck. As much as we'd love to replace some of the people that aren't participating, the well of recruits has mostly dried up because we can't do heroic.

    You should never nerf something so significantly in a game like this. I agree that the heroic raid rewards were too high relatively to lower tier rewards, but the answer to the problem was to increase the gear for lower raid completion. This approach just discourages people from moving forward and investing their time in this already very difficult raid.
  • gatormatt
    304 posts Member
    edited April 2018
    I truly appreciate how much honesty you put in your post @CG_Carrie . But when this post is put in context with your original Raid Rewards post on 4/2 it's very discouraging.

    https://forums.galaxy-of-heroes.starwars.ea.com/discussion/165064/dev-blog-sith-triumvirate-raid-rewards-4-2-18

    "Given the difficulty of the raid, we will be increasing the rewards a bit."

    "After monitoring how guilds are progressing through the challenging Sith Triumvirate Raid, we've significantly revamped the rewards across all Raid tiers."

    Direct quotes from the 4/2 post. From the 4/2 post you lead us to believe that you were revamping, i.e. improving the rewards (improved for who??? The players or CG? ) because they were not in line with the difficulty of the raid. Removal of Challenge gear, increased odds of the gear we truly need... It was all in that original post.

    The truth is you were not honest with us in your original 4/2 post as to why you(CG) were "revamping" the rewards, specifically Heroic Sith. If the player base knew your true intentions in that original post, specifically HSith guilds, we would not have praised that post one bit.

    In my opinion, your response today is inadequate.
  • Nebulous
    1476 posts Member
    End game raiding, g12 itemization, shouldn't be rewarding launch date equipment when successfully completed.

    If you really wanted to help players who need/want carbs, guns or cuffs, then that is what Hpit and Haat should be for. We already have a perfect avenue for those gears. This is the first game I've ever played where end-game content can award beginning-game equipment.

    Players completing heroic will not want to get, even though we need them still for some reason, carbs, guns or cuffs over fully crafted g12. This will never be the case.

    Please consider squashing the full gear pool to include only g12 and if you want to include non-g12 stuff, the g11 finishers will work--not just carbs, cuffs or guns.
  • JaggedJ
    1352 posts Member
    If you want to prevent HSR guilds from pulling away how about adjusting the raid so it isn't mind numbingly boring at lower levels and reasonably sized guilds can do tier 5-6 and work towards heroic in a reasonable timeframe.

    It keeps getting mentioned that the lower tiers are a long slog, but the reason they're a long slog is that participation is low because a lot of people find it boring.

    I would bet that a lot of guilds not completing 5 and 6 aren't doing so because of an inability to do it. They're not completing because it's too time consuming and not fun enough to parricipate in.









  • RonHere420
    11 posts Member
    edited April 2018
    Sorry but I have to say you guys are really bad at this communication and transparency thing. You only come out when the community catches up to the deception.

    If you had been up front about the nerf earlier in the month, then we could understand the problem and offer solutions by the community. The fact is you guys decided to lie to us about how this is going to be an improvement. It's not. It's a nerf because you said in your post that the heroic raid is being farmed too quickly and people are getting too many precrafts pulling away from the rest of the population so this is why we have a nerf. Instead of telling us that you intend to nerf. You decided to go on a pr stunt with game changers and making these communication q and a interviews nonsense about raid rewards changes making it sound like we are getting a boost.

    The solution could have easily been changing the ticket cost of the raid to be 150k to slow the rate if loot being handled out. Instead it was a nerf bat.

    This is an example of why the community doesn't trust cg. Why didn't all this reasoning come out sooner. You always have to wait for the back lashes and do damage control.
    Post edited by RonHere420 on
  • How about this: scrap the Sith raid entirely. Success is not achieved without failure and this is a catastrophic failure. Learn from it and move on. As for Darth Traya, put out some absurdly expensive packs for people to buy, because they will, and that will suffice. Then back to the drawing board. Use what you’ve learned from this debacle and give the players something good. Like really good. Blow our minds.

    Okay, go.
  • Viggy
    10 posts Member
    edited April 2018
    As someone who's in a guild that just managed to complete the heroic for the first time one day prior to this nerf this is just..well you know.

    While I understand that heroic rewards were super high, maybe even a bit too high, you waited with this nerf just long enough to make people spend money on gear etc in order to complete this raid after seeing the immense payoff by those who were able to do so early on.

    Would I have paid money on this just to get the good rewards once and then basically haat rewards? Hell no. Did you know that? Hell yes.

    This is a next level scam, with the cherry on top being your original post about these changes being an improvement.

    I'm left speechless.

    {EA_Lanna: Profanity removed}
    Post edited by EA_Lanna on
  • If it wasn't such a tiny player base that could beat HSTR then this wouldn't be a problem. Many more players could get the sweet loot and many more could grow.

    But you know, do your thing and keep upsetting your sub 120M GP guilds with ridiculous mechanics and HP, and now the whale guilds with the reward revamp. The Sith raid is such a catastrophe.
  • Mr_Green
    93 posts Member
    edited April 2018
    Kyno wrote: »
    CG_Carrie wrote:
    Hello everybody,
    With today’s raid reward changes, many people noticed that the chance of receiving a full piece of gear in the Heroic Tier had been lowered. This was an overcorrection and we are partially rolling it back. Now anybody who completes the Heroic Tier will get one guaranteed full piece.
    Below is our explanation, forgive the wordiness but in order to explain the reasoning for this, we need to get into some heady topics.
    ---TL;DR Version---
    We had changed the droprate from a tiered percentage chance to a flat 40% to accommodate an additional two slots of Gear XII coming in May exclusively to the Heroic Tier. In the spirit of communication, we did say why because we don't want to promise something too early and then not end up delivering it on time. However after reviewing internally we feel confident that we can hit the May date, and we are rolling back the chance of a full gear piece from the Heroic Tier to 100% across all ranks, until the new rewards are live, at which point we will reevaluate. All of the other changes remain the same (including the flattening of rewards across ranks, the expansion of the full piece pool beyond strictly GXII, the removal of many pieces of low-demand salvage, and the changes to Guild Currency and Guild Event Tokens), and we will continue to monitor the impact of these other changes as players continue to launch & complete raids.
    We will make this change sometime in the next two weeks and ensure that a makegood, equivalent to roughly 2-4 pieces of full gear pieces, is provided to anybody who has completed the Heroic raid during this time period.
    Thanks for your feedback during this rollout.
    ---Longer Version---
    First, we'd like to apologize for one piece of improper expectations-setting in our announcement of the raid rewards changes. Specifically, for the Heroic Tier, the Guild Currency & Guild Event Token "steepening" was never intended to fully offset the reduction in value of all of the gear changes for top-ranking players. It was intended to preserve some incentive for finishing in the top ranks, since we reduced that incentive by flattening gear rewards (for the overall well-being of guilds and of the game).
    We made an oversight in wording in the initial announcement of the changes, and while the top-ranked Guild Currency and Guild Event Token rewards are significantly better than before, it doesn’t fully make up for the full piece odds drops, especially for ranks #1-3.
    Second, in our initial tuning, we overshot the mark in the odds of full GXII piece drops. Players who have the Sith Heroic Raid on farm, completing it twice a week without fail, consistently getting 1 or more full GXII pieces (emphasis on GXII because of the immense value of those gear pieces in combat), will pull away from the rest of the population in a way that is truly detrimental to the long-term health of the game.
    Without diving too much into the underlying value of the various pieces of the gear economy, we have been looking at internal data from the first few weeks of Heroic results, and we had settled on a 40% flat chance of a full complete piece, in the Heroic Tier, across all ranks, as a reasonable long-term goal for the value of the effort of completing the Heroic Tier when you include the expansion pieces of Gear XII.
    Third, we have changed the full piece pool from Gear XII, to a broader array of desired pieces. Despite its combat utility and theoretical demand, Gear XII is not as all-encompassing a concern for some players as concerns about Mk3 Carbantis, Mk5 Stun Guns, some formerly AAT-exclusive pieces, Gear XI finishers, etc. All of which are now in the complete piece pool.
    However, it's clear that the aggregate amount of effort (gear & ability investment, time, offline theorycrafting, and coordination) required to complete the Sith Heroic Tier is still too high to lower the complete piece odds at this time. Our target for the long run remains a 40% chance of a full gear piece (GXII, GXI finishers, highly pinched Raid Gear, or a handful of other high-demand pieces), plus the rewards from the expansion of GXII but until:
    We have had a chance to reevaluate Heroic reward results once the new gear is out.
    We see sustained evidence that players have their teams ready to go and are deploying them to consistently beat Heroic in larger numbers, we'll keep the complete piece chance at 100%.
    Players will receive advance notice from us in the future when we are ready to make this change.
    To our Heroic raiders: please take some time over the next couple of weeks and take a look at the aggregate GP lift among your guildmates, your aggregate result in Territory Battles and Territory Wars, and the rate of growth in ALL players' ability to complete the raid, over the coming weeks, as a result of these changes (including the rollback to 100% which we will deploy inside of the next two weeks). Know that your efforts will result in early access to the next release of gear. Know that we are always looking for more ways to reward you, and will be rolling out changes that reward the level of cooperation and cohesion that you have already established and that the vast majority of players are still working towards. We know that the adjustment may be painful for top-performing guildmates at first, but we are confident that this will be a net positive for players and for the game in the long run.
    Thanks to everyone for your feedback and we'll see you on the holotables,
    -Carrie

    <<DEV Post>>

    Appreciate the “Communication” but I have a quick question and would appreciate it if you could reply, there is a talk almost everywhere I see where everyone wants to post a 0 and get “Similar” rewards to the one in 1st.

    Is there anyway instead of straight out flattening the rewards, could you incentivize the top 3 with an extra rewards box..??

    Also we used to get not 1 but 2 full G12 pieces for the top 3 along with a full G11 piece.


    It’d be a motivator for the rest
  • Banth
    158 posts Member
    Liamtbqh wrote: »
    Kyno wrote: »
    CG_Carrie wrote:

    ---TL;DR Version---
    We had changed the droprate from a tiered percentage chance to a flat 40% to accommodate an additional two slots of Gear XII coming in May exclusively to the Heroic Tier.

    Does this mean in May the Heroic tier will have 2 extra existing G12 gear or should we expect new G12 pieces?

    We should expect the absolute worst outcome that can be construed from what they said. That’s how they operate. “Top tank players may notice a slight decrease in fully crafted rewards (especially in heroic)” means we’re nerfing the raid to the point that you need to buy gear again in CG speak so we can safely assume that the two new g12 pieces will replace two existing chances at best. So it won’t be an extra chance for new g12s like they’ll try to let us believe. It’ll be a chance for new g12s in lieu of the old ones.

    That’s CG doublespeak 101. Just like “We’re releasing this extremely powerful toon as a special event only character that might have a tiny off chance of going to chromiums some day in the distant future” is CG for “Whale now and after we have yr money in a month or two we’re going to pull a 180° and put this character in shipments to milk more cash out of her then make her f2p.”
  • Ender22
    1194 posts Member
    Within 2 weeks.. so, could be between now and April 25th.. then, the lesser rewards we get (100% drop though..), will be reverted to 40% (the lesser rewards!) in May.

    We are only guaranteed a 5 day window to receive these lesser rewards before they get worse.. yayyyyyyyyy..............

    They giveth, then they taketh away.. it’s a rough way to run a business.. would be nice if it was done right the first time.
  • puru
    161 posts Member
    It is pretty much worthless now to spend hours on getting a top rank in sith raid. I wont be surprised if guilds fall out of heroic due to lack of participation. Oh wait traya shards are now supposed to motivate everyone to do endless retreats for a high score. Good luck with that.
  • What have you been thinking, the steepening of the rewards will rip guilds apart. A lot of people are switching to Marvel Strike Rorce for a reason, for one they do seem to have someone whi hasn‘t flunked out of the game theory course at university and they have almost flat rewards in their much more cooperation enticing raids. Intheir raid design no solo runs are even possible as there are separate paths to take - and the amount of coordination which put‘s a lot of strain on the guild management is much much lower....
  • Strubz
    429 posts Member
    I reserved judgement about the changes today until I heard the response. I dont like it. At all. The roll back to today's change is going to take up to two weeks to implement which will be the end of April. Then in May the changes get rolled back again to purposely make rewards worse.

    This is not subjective. This is a fact. They are purposely making rewards worse and flat out lied to us in the April 2 posting about reward reworks. Nothing about this is better. I've been around since the beginning and I'm getting exhausted by everything. Small glimmer of hope the past week or so with the commication stuff to repair the past 2 years of just...garbage communication. Trust was very low. It remains low.
  • @CG_Carrie well where should I start?....

    First off, thanks for the communication. That’s the only positive part of this post.

    Now...you roll out the rewards rework, you know the one you said the players would like, and it turns out to be a NERF. You implement a 40% drop rate for full gear (like the 40% escape rate for HAAT pffft) and increase the pool to include gear crunch items like guns and cuffs. Yikes. So you kill the rewards for HST.

    Then you come back and say that it may take up to two weeks (don’t see how) to roll back the changes to make it 100% of a drop rate for a full piece. That full piece still including cuffs, guns, and carbantis. Hmmm ok. But then say it’s temporary and will reinstall the new changes pushed today in May with new G12 slots to be filled....well that’s a few steps back isn’t it?

    I’m going to help you out here. This is how you can fix this absolute disaster you and the rest of the devs have created after damage control from RyDiggs’ meltdown. Ready?

    Instill the full piece drop guarantee in every single heroic raid and tune that gear piece based on the raid. For example, the full gear piece dropped in Heroic Rancor should be mk5 furnace, cuffs, guns, carbantis, etc. The full piece in HAAT should be mk6 thermals, mk4 holo’s, mk8 eyeballs etc. And HST? Fully crafted G12 gear since it’s an END GAME RAID. But that’s up to you guys to instill. I laid out another blueprint and if you guys read through the hundreds upon hundreds of posts since this update pushed hours ago, you’ll see even more ideas on what to do to fix this. Actually doing so though? Is up to you.

    My wallet was opened again after the updates, communication and good will gifts. After this fiasco? It’s been slammed shut and I will not be opening it back up again any time soon. I’ve regretted the $700 or so I’ve spent on the game since launch in the past but things were usually alleviated at some point. After this? I can’t I’m good consciousness spend another penny on this game. That’s just me though.
  • People are happy with CGCarrie to come here and talk after another fiasco, but, honestly, you guys believe that they didnt know the player base would loudly scream after this hudge nerf?
    For me they had all prepared, after the release and the reaction of the community they would explain (what they should had done in first place) why the changes and would say we will make a little update in 2 weeks.
    If they said this before they wouldnt be alowed to launch it.
    So, I dont believe in this media training, this action is one more like several we already had in this game that they knew what was intended and knowing the bad reactions in the player base they just choose to misinform us, again.
  • Banth
    158 posts Member
    edited April 2018
    Two weeks and then reverting in May isn’t good enough. You are failing the playerbase and it’s borderline offensive to think we’re dumb enough to just roll over and take that. That we’re so dumb that we don’t see that “two weeks” to impliment the change means the 100% drop chance hits on April 26th and then reverting in May give us 4 days to get 100% drops so really you’ve done nothing to remedy this at all. I know it seems like I’m being extreme but if the past with CGs tricky announcements has shown us anything it’s that we should expect the worst possible from what they say. At the very, very best due to some sort of unforeseen miracle the 100% drops will be active for 2-3 raids. Which is nothing considering the rest of the nerfed gear is so incredibly bad and the fully crafted pieces aren’t going to be g12. Remember expect the worst and they never specifically said the fully crafted gears would be g12 or even g11. So they will almost certainly be useless. So once again all this is for naught and just smoke and mirrors to try to placate the playerbase after screwing them over for the millionth time. No. This isn’t enough. Roll it back for heroic, add the new gear to the drop pool in May. That’s the only way yr saving this. The only way yr stopping a p2p exodus to either f2p or just the game itself.
  • JPBrunel
    821 posts Member
    edited April 2018
    Dear @CG_Carrie ,
    I'm sorry to tell you this, but your post today makes you a liar. In your post on 4/2, you CLEARLY stated that you would be IMPROVING rewards across all tiers. We were all very happy when we read this, but after today, I must say you have lost all trust and credibility. Good luck getting it back. It won't be impossible, but you'll have to make REAL efforts and quit trolling the player base. Here's a quick tip to get you going in the right direction: telling us what we want to hear, then doing the exact opposite 9 days later isn't the way to go.
    Post edited by JPBrunel on
  • Tactyou
    756 posts Member
    Last time i checked dictionary is improvement = happy feeling. Did they nerf the dictionary?
  • This seems to be a "wounded warrior" project. There are so many ways of handling difficult situations the best way to go about it is to do what's right. Passing on your efforts ;)
  • Which one of these statements is a lie? Hint: Both of them.

    "Given the difficulty of the raid, we will be increasing the rewards a bit."

    "We made an oversight in wording in the initial announcement of the changes"
  • Strumpoo
    90 posts Member
    edited April 2018
    Wow, the most uninteresting and painful part of the game is now having its rewards taken away. I am in a guild that beats heroic 2xs per week. The rewards are the ONLY thing keeping me any bit interested in this terrible raid. It is so **** time consuming to get right (in terms of team comp and damage output) that it is painful. Hours and hours of playing by each player straight to get good damage totals and to progress in the raid is just stupid. Especially since it came during a "quality of life" update lol. This poor raid design has me starting to HATE a game I have put tons of time and tons of money into. Now you want to take the rewards away? From my guild and all the other guilds who struggled to crack your ridiculous and lazy "immunity to everything puzzle"? We say yousa musta be crazy.
  • Vinniarth
    1859 posts Member
    Better communication? Hmmm... I need to check BH kits one more time or look when it is come... wait...
  • Alright, I was willing to be patient and wait for an official response, and now that we've had one--and I've actually worked up the will to respond to it properly--not so much. The idea that these loot boxes were as intended across the board--though this response is only directed at Heroic level players--is just... gross. And the idea that you--CG--plan to expand this change across all raids is abhorrent.

    That you thought setting these rewards as low as you have--when fully crafted gear requires a minimum of 50 pieces, and many guilds can only do one or two Sith raids a week--is a good idea speaks to a fundamental misunderstanding of and a severe disconnect with your playerbase. When the community asks, incredulous, "do you even play the game?" it's to things like this they're referring to. Especially when there are threads such as this one wherein the consensus is "this just isn't fun;" the same consensus which has been repeated in this thread and the ones proceeding it.

    The rewards at higher levels made it--all the work, money, theorycrafting, and general effort put in--worth it for higher end players to go all out and try to beat the Heroic as quickly as possible; to get Traya (though there are those who will say she is a reward in her own right; and they may be quite right). However, it isn't higher-end players I'm talking about here, or at least not exclusively (as I'm certainly not one of those), it's the little guys; the little guys whose rewards have been trash since the beginning. The little guys who take a week, two, to get through tier 4--who, like my guild, decided to move up to T4 because of the announced changes--and, save perhaps the currency, are going to get underwhelming rewards. The reward box for tier 4 says it will award 19--nineteen--pieces of salvage, for a raid that will take my guild approximately a week to finish. A week for 19 pieces of salvage--and, sure, a chance for more fully crafted pieces--and 1,100 to 2,500 guild tokens and 260 to 420 guild event tokens just may not be worth it.

    My guild may get their rewards in a couple days and, instead of working to get faster at it, may decide "screw this" or "can we just go back to T3?" That amount of salvage is paltry--I would go so far as to call it a slap in the face for the work even lower-end guilds put in--especially when you're getting better, more prosperous rewards in Rancor at this point (and the idea that you're going to nerf those rewards, too...). All while claiming that you "are always looking for more ways to reward [us]" is just insulting.

    While I appreciate the effort, I do not appreciate the implementation. I appreciate that you have removed--as you say--"low-demand challenge gear" and have made efforts to make raid rewards more even across the guild (I suppose, considering the results, "flatten" is what really happened here; they got flattened into the earth); I had even been looking forward to seeing my guild grow as a result of these changes. Now I'm trying to figure out what to say to my guild when they see their rewards.

    As a community--though I cannot speak for us all--I can say that we probably would have taken--and probably expected--marginally lower rewards in return for these changes with relatively little fuss. None of us expected that these rewards would be so significantly lowered; that a raid that was already hard to swallow--hard to motivate yourself and your guild-mates for--would become a shard of glass, and has become an unfortunate omen--as per your own communication--for what to expect in the future for other raids.

    You, as a company, have made great strides in recent weeks as far as communication goes, and you have tidily undone all of that good work today. Based off what we were told, not even our worst expectations can hold a candle to the reality--and the kittenshow of this response--of just how far off the mark you are here. "Wait and see; it's good we promise" is a cold comfort--if it is comfort at all--and insults our intelligence. If you want to fix that you're going to have to increase rewards--I'd say get as close to the number of salvage pieces awarded, on average, before this nerf; perhaps just shy of that--and remain consistent with good things--and up-front with the bad things--for the future. If you thought the community was going to like this change, you're quite clearly mad.

    As it is, the community isn't going to trust you for a good, long time. I'm willing to be swayed back, as are many others, but I suspect there--as long as this continues, especially if you apply this change to Rancor and AAT--will be many more who aren't. If you double down, and stick to your guns on this, people are going to lose interest... and not just of the Sith raid.

    My $0.02.
  • How about you put the rewards back to how it was, but just simply remove challenge pieces, is it really that hard?
  • Jookaa
    30 posts Member
    @CG_Carrie thank you for the quick reply. Appreciate the effort on communicating to hot topics and issues within the community. @CapitalGames oh my god, do you want anybody to play the sith raid at all? What is the point of a challenge if you continually move the goal post for the players? Have you considered that there are other games out on the market that do not release half tested content? If you are going to make a mistake, do something to regain goodwill from the player base. I.e., a full g12 piece or something substantial to make up for the horrible vague communication and backhanded nerf tactics. I have never seen a game or company operate so poorly while enjoying such a dedicated and passionate fan base.
  • lesismore
    59 posts Member
    edited April 2018
    SInce Kozi was replaced, there have been only bad news and more bad news, I could actually see all these terrible things coming when Kozi was missing for weeks.
This discussion has been closed.