State of the Galaxy - 5/11/18

Carrie
122 posts Member
edited May 2018
Hello Holotable Heroes!

It’s been just over a month since we posted the Road Ahead Blog, and while we have been purposefully focusing on some of the upcoming releases – specifically our Title Update 12 that was outlined in the Road Ahead, subsequent interviews with Game Changers, the forthcoming patchnotes for TU12, and our plans around the Star Wars Anniversary and the release of Solo, I wanted to take a few minutes to do some housekeeping on some outstanding follow up items and issues.

Follow Up on Beta Tests
We have talked a lot about expanding the beta program for greater input, but doing it in a balanced way so that it is in a controlled environment and doesn’t put us at risk for major game leaks or confusion around in progress game mechanics and balance. If you’re still interested in pursuing the beta we plan on offering, there will be additional opportunities in the future.
For TU12, we opened up the closed beta to a few new guilds, and we are very happy with all the participation from our beta testers. We had hoped to run a larger beta with everyone who signed up for it in the forums for this update, but that will have to wait till a later test due to the time pressures we are currently under.
A huge thanks to those who participated and gave feedback in this beta test and I believe the game is better for it. We made numerous changes to chat, quests, and ships (along with other features) as a result of their feedback. Special shoutout to BHG members Adir and Drogon for talking to our designers in great length about the ships changes and helping us to improve it.

Communication Plan
Our new Community Manager has started, and he joins us in here in the forums as @CG_SBCrumb. He is still familiarizing himself with the community, but expect to see an intro post from him shortly, and once he’s ramped up, an outline of how we plan to communicate moving forward.
There will be times of increased communication (and times of less communication) depending on where we are in the development cycle, however, we endeavor to keep a steady stream of information flowing through different channels: forums, Reddit, YouTube, and even Discord to be available for concerns, problems, or to listen to what’s going on in the community.
We are in the run up to the launch of a major update and a number of new characters, so during this time, we will also be launching official information like kit reveals and patch notes, but will be doing fewer other types of communications to focus on getting these releases out as high quality as possible.
You can help by focusing bug reports and customer support over at the EA Help Page. This will help minimize the input hitting individual developers.

Sith Raid P4 Bug
Sometime in the past month, possibly since launch and only noticeable once more guilds started to clear the Heroic Sith Raid, we realized an issue where damage is misattributed to the wrong guild member. This issue seems to be especially evident in Phase 4.
This means guilds trying to ensure a certain member places at the top will be unable to do so. I’m very sorry this happened while some of the very competitive guilds were attempting to unlock Traya. We understand how important being the first or among the first to unlock new characters is, and although I don’t have an answer for you on the bug front, we are still dedicated to this issue. We have dedicated staff to resolve it as a top priority and numerous presumptive fixes, logging changes, and mitigants are going to be rolling out in updates over the upcoming weeks. We will keep you posted as we narrow it down.
I also want to thank Beats and Rebel Force Endor (and their alliance) for providing countless screenshots and running the Sith Raid on our timetable so that the engineers could look at their logs while they do it. It has been invaluable. While both devs and players alike are upset about the bug, it’s heartwarming to see how we can work together to uncover and eventually resolve issues.

Support Changes
I just posted here about how we are going to now be supporting limited time zone changes as a result of extreme moves or other conditions that puts a person four hours or more out of sync from where they actually live. Please don’t write support asking for a timezone change because you want a new payout. This service is offered for people who will be proving they live in a different location than their current timezone. Limited/one-time/additional payout changes is something we are investigating for a later date… very cautiously.
This messaging is just a first step in providing clearer, more tailored customer support. I’ve mentioned before, an individual agent is almost never responsible for instances when you feel you have received bad support. Our Customer Service agents are part of a system, and I am the arbiter of it – I will commit to making sure they (CS agents) are sufficiently supported by the team and myself, so agents are better able to support you. We will continue to make policy changes as long as we feel like we can do it in a way that won’t be abused.

The “Ship Shard”
Another one off policy change we are offering involves a single ship shard. Said ship shard happens to be an outlier in terms of population (and no other metrics) Due to the way we originally set up shards, this anomaly meant that quite a number more people were fighting over the same payouts versus all other ship shards. While we love the shard system, this single shard definitely an outlying case and needs to be addressed. We are resolving the issue before the release of the new ship changes. We are in contact with members of that shard – thanks to AJRSuperstar for bringing it to our attention!

Changes to Rebel Assault on the Calendar
From @CG_Tophat: We will be updating the May Event Calendar to move the Rebel Assault instance which takes place from 5/21 to 5/26 to a new, undetermined date. Our upcoming client release (which includes Quests, Improved Chat, Updated Ship Combat, Titles, and more!) will be launching somewhere in that window of time. Given the size and scope of the update, we figured it was more prudent to reschedule the Rebel Assault and make sure that our update didn’t unintentionally collide with guild coordination. We apologize for the schedule change.

And there you have it, a clue about TU12’s release! We’ll talk more about the release schedule, specifically as we reveal everything in the update through the patch notes, and also how we plan to roll out ship changes. As always, dates are subject to change, but this is what we’re aiming for.

Thanks for being such a great community, and as always we’ll see you on the holotables,
-Carrie

<<MEGATHREAD>>
Senior Producer, Galaxy of Heroes
Post edited by CG_Leviathan on

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