CG_SBCrumb wrote: »
Hi Holotable Heroes,
We are excited to announce Title Update 14 is here! Can you prove you are the best in the Grand Arena? Unlike Squad and Fleet Arena, you will now be able to fight anyone in the game in an 8-player struggle to earn some awesome prizes! Here you can compete against players of a similar Galactic power from around the world . We’re kicking off Season 0 with a special Exhibition event that starts soon, so make sure to get the latest update and get ready to play!
In the meantime, why not customize your profile to show off your top achievement and display your favorite Star Wars character as your portrait?
Last but not least, in addition to fixing numerous bug and making many improvements, we’re also debuting the most requested quality-of-life feature: Change your payout time! Choose which time zone up to two times a year. Check out our timezone calculator in-game to see which timezone fits your ideal play time.
Read on to find out more about the Grand Arena and rest of today's update
PATCH NOTES:PATCH DETAILS:
- Grand Arena
- Portraits
- Time Settings
- See below for a detailed breakdown of the changes!
GRAND ARENA
Get ready for Grand Arena, the ultimate test of skill!
- Unlock: Grand Arena is a new table that unlocks at level 85. Similar to other timed features, a shortcut will display on the cantina home’s HUD when a player can participate in a Grand Arena event.
- Matchmaking: Leveraging the new Matchmaking changes, players are placed into a group of 8 opponents that have similar collections so that all players have fun and challenging fights throughout the entire Grand Arena. Once players are in a group, matchmaking pairs players with a similar number of wins rising the highest skill players to the top of the group.
- Matchmaking avoids players that have already fought whenever possible.
- Grouping Edge Cases: In the instance that the number of participating players is not divisible by 8, we create 8 person groups starting with the strongest collections to the weakest collections. The final two groups are then split such that both groups have 4 or more players. For example, if there are 9 players between the final 2 groups, they will have 5 and 4 players respectively.
- Byes: In the instance of an odd number of players in a group, one player will receive a bye each round. Matchmaking continues to try to match players based on wins, but that will not always be possible.
- Schedule: Each Grand Arena event is a week-long event that consists of a series of 3 rounds against different opponents. There are seven 24 hour phases: Join, Set Defense (Opponent 1), Attack (Opponent 1), Set Defense (Opponent 2), Attack (Opponent 2), Set Defense (Opponent 3), Attack (Opponent 3)
- At the end of the join period, a snapshot is taken of the players collection that will be used throughout the length of the event. This means that further improvements to units including changing Mods will not affect the Grand Arena event for any of the rounds.
- Gameplay: Grand Arena is meant to be the ultimate test of skill, so we don’t have any plans currently to have combat bonuses. That said there are a variety of events including a differing number of territories and some events that have 3 unit squads.
- Scaling Defensive Squads/Fleets: To provide a fun experience for all players, the number of defensive squads/fleets scales based on the GP of the lowest player in the group.
- Banners: Similar to Territory Wars, banners are earned for setting defenses, successful attacks, and conquering a territory. The one new aspect is that Ties are no longer possible. We’ve taken steps to both mitigate ties and remove them entirely.
- Existing ways to earn banners in Territory Wars will also exist in Grand Arena. This includes # of attempts, surviving units, and unslotted units. However the value of using unslotted units has been increased to emphasize the risk/reward of using an undersized party.
- Full Health/Protection: We have added two more criteria to further mitigate ties. An additional banner is earned for each unit at full protection and another banner for each unit at full health. This further identifies not only that the squad/fleet won, but how well it won. Bonus protection does not count and units that enter battle with no protection will automatically earn the protection bonus (ex. Nihilus lead, and low gear level units)
- Tiebreakers: In the rare occasion of the event ending with tied banners, the player with the higher GP will win. In the extremely rare chance of equal Banners and equal GP, a random player wins.
- No changes have been made to Territory Wars at this time.
- Auto Deploy: To help players that forgot to set defensive squads during one of the setup phases, the squads/fleets set on a territory in a previous round will auto-deploy if no squad/fleets were deployed that round and squads/fleets had been deployed in a previous round.
- Rewards: There are many opportunities for Rewards throughout the event including:
- Small rewards for every squad that is defeated
- Rewards based on winning/losing a round
- Event Rank based Rewards (number of wins)
- Season 0 Exhibition Event: Our initial event(s) will be 1 round and a group of only 2 opponents to give players a chance to get used to Grand Arena.
PORTRAITS
Portraits is a new feature that lets you show off your accomplishments and express yourself by placing an image next to your name throughout the game. For example you can unlock the Darth Vader portrait for accomplishing the “Sith Master” Prestigious Quest. New Prestigious Quests have been created and some existing quests have been updated to award portraits and new titles.
Many of the existing titles will now have a portrait associated with it. Players that have already earned the title will have the portrait automatically unlocked. (The one exception is the rank 1 in Raids portraits will only unlock for players that have earned rank 1 in the past 6 months)
In addition, Titles will also appear next to your player name throughout the game.
TIME SETTINGS
One of the most common requests is to change the time of the squad/fleet arena payouts or change when daily activities reset. Many players have found that they are not available to battle near their current arena payout time or that it was changed due to daylight saving time and they’d like it to be a consistent time. Time settings allow players to change these times twice a year to whatever they find to be the most convenient for them.
The following are examples of times that are altered when the daily activity reset time is changed:
- Daily Reset Time
- Event Timers
- Squad Arena Reward Time
- Fleet Arena Reward Time
- Free Energy Reward Times
Guild timers are not affected including Guild Activities, Territory Battles, Territory Wars, and Raid Timers.
BUGS
General
- Addressed an issue where the "Go" button for "Mod Energy" Daily Activity was redirecting the players to the Home Screen instead of Mod Battles or Mod Challenges.
- Fixed a problem for several players who completed the onboarding Tutorial but were prompted to progress through the Training Droid tutorial again, thus blocking their accounts.
- Addressed the issue where donations from Guild Chat would appear in Officer only chat when switching between chat rooms.
- Fixed an issue where guild messages were overlapping in chat.
- Fixed an issue where the Boba Fett bundle pop up was triggering on multiple devices and did not grant the stated reward.
- Addressed a cutscene issue where the character animation was sped up if the player's combat UI was also sped up.
- Fixed an issue where the disconnect Facebook button had incorrect text following the first open of the settings menu.
- Fixed an issue where the portrait keyboard appeared instead of the widescreen keyboard on Note S9 on 8.1.0.
- Addressed an issue where long user names in chat would sometimes word wrap behind the player's guild name.
Quests
- Fixed an issue where Light Side Territory Battles didn’t count progress for Imperial Probe Droids defeated during the event.
- Addressed an issue where the "Go" button for the third task in the main quest "Challenges" was directing players to events instead of challenges.
- Fixed an issue where the Mod Quest "Mod Collection" was not tracking progress correctly if the mods needed for the part of the quest were sold from the Inventory.
- Fixed multiple players who were unable to access Quests after getting an endless loading screen when accessing a Mod Quest.
- Addressed an issue where clicking on the "Go" button from the "Guild Quest - Guild Exchange" tab redirected the player to an empty Guild Exchange screen.
Mods
- Fixed an issue where the character mod inventory was reverting to the top row after reviewing mod details on a character.
- Fixed a visual glitch which would sometimes appear on the Loadout screen.
- Addressed an issue where the mod sets would erroneously display "Set Bonus" instead of "Level 15 Bonus."
- Fixed an issue in Portuguese where creating a new Mod load-out using the default set name which was longer than 20 characters lead to an error and restart.
- Fixed an issue where the Mark V-A mod details were not displayed when viewing an Ally or Guild Mate's Inventory.
- Addressed an issue where rapidly clicking on "Create Loadout From" created multiple loadouts.
- Fixed and issue in Russian where the price of assigning a Loadout overlapped with the word Assign.
- Fixed an issue with Mod Battle 9-C endlessly loading for multiple players even after reinstalling the game.
ShipsEvents
- Fixed an issue when searching for a ship in the ship PvE or Arena table, where the character filter was displayed.
- Fixed an issue when viewing an ally's ship inventory it was showing the player's own shard count for non 7-stared ships.
- Fixed an issue where events that grant mods could be completed more than once.
- Addressed an issue where Rebel Roundup Assault Battle was listed as active on the home screen when it had not been unlocked.
Raids
- Fixed an issue where Darth Nihilus could respawn with 0% Health and 100% Protection after the raid reached Phase 2 in the Heroic Sith Triumvirate Raid.
Territory Battles/Territory Wars
- Fixed an issue where players were able to complete Combat Missions in Territory Battles multiple times.
- Addressed an issue where players who had joined the TW were removed once the Setup Phase started.
- Fixed an issue in Territory Wars where the "Join" button was greyed out during the join phase despite being available.
- Fixed an issue where tapping on a deployed Enemy Squad in the Enemy Squad list during the Attack Phase would navigate to an empty Select Attack Squad scene.
Replies
A: The update is currently rolling out across Android servers. iOS will start rolling out this afternoon. We will force an update tomorrow but until then you may not see the update depending on which device or server you connect to. Later this afternoon you should be able to go to your respective app stores and manually download if you have not received it already
A: We have found a bug in the Grand Arena Quest that allows players to complete it early. We are working on a hotfix to resolve this shortly.
A: No, don't forget about Traya's Unique! She cleanses debuff from allied Sith at the start of their turn. At the same time, an enemy Sion trigger's his Taunt as that debuff is being cleansed.
A: Yes, a typical grand arena will take place over several days, and will have commensurate rewards. This first one lined up to start on 12/6 is a single round of the event and therefore reflects the effort. We'll reveal more info around the full reward structure later this week, but we're keen to see how the first exhibition game goes later this week.
My major question is this. Is there a sample list of what type of rewards that we can expect from the Grand Arena?
I like this question. I do like that it sounds like rewards are being given out throughout the battles in addition to the end of the week. It's always nice getting some items daily!
This will require a game update through the app store later today
What do you mean "teammates"?
Yeah I had just finished my TB battle when I was told to restart client. I went back and looked and thankfully at least I had finished my battles just seconds soon enough that it still counted
Ah, OK. My client forced a restart, and I had assumed it was the update, but perhaps it was just having some kind of ill-timed meltdown
As Sandurz mentioned, it's coming! The update will take some time to all roll out to all the servers.
I'm sorry bud. I hate it when this kind of stuff happens.
1. Hope exhibition type Grand Arena is also a regular thing (Time span of 2 days as opposed to 1 week)
2. Portraits is cool. I hope community can suggest portraits too instead of limited to using in-game art as portraits
No.
EDIT: You can do away with it on your own if you like.
i'm appalled as to how mace/STR daily challenge is not THE most requested to change.
I think I misread the description - the way I read it, it sounded like it would be a mini-territory-war with only 8 players on each side. My bad.
The note is unclear on if it's purely based on GP or not.
There were still occasional miss matches of those values but it seemed mostly consistent. By the looks of things specific characters (Traya and Revan) and numbers of mods above a certain speed were still often completely different.
So seems like if you are a collector that has loads of lvl 85 g7 characters you shouldn't be too badly effected if it matches you to someone with a similar number of g11 and g12.
But if you don't have a strong PVP setup in terms of fast mods and OP characters maybe you will see difficult match ups.
Out of 8 people though it's unlikely more than 3 will have traya and revan though so you should still be able win a couple each week hopefully!
Your group of 8 will be based on GP and then who you face (after the first round) is determined by your win/loss record within that group. For example, everyone in your group has around 1mil GP but you lose your first round, you will then mostly go up against other players who lost their first round.