Character stragety confusion....
May 17, 2019 11:37PM
edited May 2019
Okay I though I would get others thoughts as I'm confused about what is actual "core" tenet. So we they are addressing the GA matchmaking and I would like to thank them for that as it has seemed to me to need more tweaking. But I noticed something that seems to disagree with a prior ruling and character change. Here is the new announcement:
"Over the last few months, we’ve leaned much more heavily into Galactic Power as a matchmaking component because we saw that many players were concerned about the fairness of going up against a player with a meaningfully different collection size. This has resulted in a lot of fun, close matches, and very few “blowouts”, but it has also led to a bit of a disconnect in some players’ expectations, and resulted in some degenerative behavior patterns as a result."
I'm not sure I agree with the "very few blowouts" but I digress....
"Specifically, we’ve heard a lot from players who feel that GA matchmaking penalizes them for “going broad” – for building out a wide, diverse collection of characters and ships – and reduces the incentive to explore building up new squads, new mod sets, and new priorities. This is not something that we want to proliferate, and starting with the next update, we’re going to address it."
Totally agree! Right on the money there!
"Starting with the first Grand Arena Championship, we are going to slightly reduce the weighting of pure GP in the matchmaking system for GA, in favor of a larger set of variables intended to make players feel less like Grand Arena is punishing players for going broad. If you are working on newer or lower-powered squads, the matchmaking system will be much less likely to count those efforts towards matching you with an ideal opponent, and you will be less likely to be paired up with a player who a) looks just like you GP-wise, but b) has instead spent all of their efforts optimizing a smaller handful of squads. (Those players will still be rewarded for their strategy in Grand Arena, but they’ll be matched up against someone who looks more like them.)"
Okay I'm going to stop right there. Here is my confusion. How is not leveling characters a strategy? Didn't they just say that they want people to level their characters so they can try new teams and match ups? So wouldn't this "strategy" be against the "core tenets" of the game. Here is my example...remember the whole paper zombie fix? No? Here is part of the write up:
"We recently announced our intention to rework Nightsister Zombie during our changes to prevent the “Critolyte” strategy in the Sith Triumvirate Raid. Our decision to change Zombie is to prevent an investment/gameplay strategy referred to as “Paper Zombie”. For those not familiar, Paper Zombie is a strategy in which Nightsister Zombie is purposefully left underinvested (gear primarily) so that she will be defeated much more frequently and easily (in both PvP and PvE contexts). Being defeated frequently is made all the easier since Zombie taunts a lot. In being defeated more often, Zombie is able to activate Asajj Ventress’ Unique, Rampage, more often, giving Asajj a tremendous amount more Offense and Turn Meter, and consequently results in Asajj doing a lot more damage.
At its core, this strategy primarily breaks a core tenant/rule of the game - investing more deeply in a character should always be better in terms of gameplay outcomes; more health, more damage, more functionality, etc. This is a game about strategic resource management and you should be rewarded for strategically investing in a character. People who did this investment were then punished, because there is no way to “level down” a character. This doesn’t always perfectly hold up, but we do our best to hold to the spirit of that core pillar as much as we possibly can."
See right there they said that not leveling zombie was against the "core tenet/rule of the game" Let me say that again..."core tenet/rule of the game".....so not leveling your zombie was breaking the rules of the game and so they penalized people for doing it. So my question is how is not leveling/gearing your characters now a game strategy? Shouldn't by the prior rules, people should be penalized for not doing this? Thoughts?
"Over the last few months, we’ve leaned much more heavily into Galactic Power as a matchmaking component because we saw that many players were concerned about the fairness of going up against a player with a meaningfully different collection size. This has resulted in a lot of fun, close matches, and very few “blowouts”, but it has also led to a bit of a disconnect in some players’ expectations, and resulted in some degenerative behavior patterns as a result."
I'm not sure I agree with the "very few blowouts" but I digress....
"Specifically, we’ve heard a lot from players who feel that GA matchmaking penalizes them for “going broad” – for building out a wide, diverse collection of characters and ships – and reduces the incentive to explore building up new squads, new mod sets, and new priorities. This is not something that we want to proliferate, and starting with the next update, we’re going to address it."
Totally agree! Right on the money there!
"Starting with the first Grand Arena Championship, we are going to slightly reduce the weighting of pure GP in the matchmaking system for GA, in favor of a larger set of variables intended to make players feel less like Grand Arena is punishing players for going broad. If you are working on newer or lower-powered squads, the matchmaking system will be much less likely to count those efforts towards matching you with an ideal opponent, and you will be less likely to be paired up with a player who a) looks just like you GP-wise, but b) has instead spent all of their efforts optimizing a smaller handful of squads. (Those players will still be rewarded for their strategy in Grand Arena, but they’ll be matched up against someone who looks more like them.)"
Okay I'm going to stop right there. Here is my confusion. How is not leveling characters a strategy? Didn't they just say that they want people to level their characters so they can try new teams and match ups? So wouldn't this "strategy" be against the "core tenets" of the game. Here is my example...remember the whole paper zombie fix? No? Here is part of the write up:
"We recently announced our intention to rework Nightsister Zombie during our changes to prevent the “Critolyte” strategy in the Sith Triumvirate Raid. Our decision to change Zombie is to prevent an investment/gameplay strategy referred to as “Paper Zombie”. For those not familiar, Paper Zombie is a strategy in which Nightsister Zombie is purposefully left underinvested (gear primarily) so that she will be defeated much more frequently and easily (in both PvP and PvE contexts). Being defeated frequently is made all the easier since Zombie taunts a lot. In being defeated more often, Zombie is able to activate Asajj Ventress’ Unique, Rampage, more often, giving Asajj a tremendous amount more Offense and Turn Meter, and consequently results in Asajj doing a lot more damage.
At its core, this strategy primarily breaks a core tenant/rule of the game - investing more deeply in a character should always be better in terms of gameplay outcomes; more health, more damage, more functionality, etc. This is a game about strategic resource management and you should be rewarded for strategically investing in a character. People who did this investment were then punished, because there is no way to “level down” a character. This doesn’t always perfectly hold up, but we do our best to hold to the spirit of that core pillar as much as we possibly can."
See right there they said that not leveling zombie was against the "core tenet/rule of the game" Let me say that again..."core tenet/rule of the game".....so not leveling your zombie was breaking the rules of the game and so they penalized people for doing it. So my question is how is not leveling/gearing your characters now a game strategy? Shouldn't by the prior rules, people should be penalized for not doing this? Thoughts?
Post edited by DavionThunder on
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Game will become really bad fast if they keep listening to those people.
Tw bonus were bogus and needed to go if they couldn't find some form of balance.
In the case of nightsister zombie adding investments of gear and credits etc. categorically made her (specifically) worse. When you take 5 random characters up to level 85 and gear level 8, you are not technically making your roster worse although in the current matchmaking you are liable to result in having more challenging opponents.
But focusing on a narrow number of useful characters and not leveling the fluff in your roster should certainly be considered a strategy in my opinion. The 6 mil credits to take a character you don't need for something to level 85 is a conscious decision to say "I don't want 2 potentially great mods from the mod store" or "I don't want to level 10 grey mods to reveal the secondaries and see if one of them has speed".
The problem (which hopefully the change will readdress) is that the GP calculation is weighted towards the lower inputs with 2 gear 8 level 85 characters being almost as much as 1 g12 character. Since the resource investment for 2 gear 8 characters is much less than the resource investment for 1 g12 character the matching currently pits opponents that have used much fewer resources (but have large GP from fluff) against opponents that have used much more resources (but have lower GP due to highly focused g12 rosters with lots of g1 lvl1 characters).
So to reiterate, if a character gets worse when leveled up then that is against their desired philosophy. If a player chooses to invest the resources they have in specific areas and leave other areas under developed, that is not the same thing. If the GP ballance / matchmaking were better tuned you would see that a more even distribution of G12 / G11 characters for people of the same GP is going to result in closer matches. The people that focused narrowly on small parts of their rosters are still likely to come out on top though because they are almost certainly focusing their resources just as much on modding correctly and focusing on competitive PVP.
I'd just like to say I'm very pleasantly surprised by this change (although I was also perfectly happy with a consistent stream of mod slicing materials) and I think the only aim behind this change is to try and make matches more fun and engaging and I think CG devs should be credited with putting work in with that as their aim.
Not everyone has been playing for a long time. There are players that have been playing for a shorter period of time and have "grown up" in a game where they could solely focus on very core toons that have been needed and benefit them in modes like TB and now TW. Older players that had wider rosters that have been playing for longer and built rosters without much thought to this lean type of build.
it is not against the tenant of the game, its not like players that have these lean roster are just loaded in huge amounts of gear they could use to have a bunch of useful toons, many are just in a different development cycle due to when they started playing the game and where there focus was when they started.
Not putting resources into a crappy character and saving them for the next great release is indeed a strategy. This is a resource management game.
How do you know if a character is fluff or useful if you are penalized for trying things? If you can't then all you do is follow the meta based on what other players do without adding new ideas to the meta.
Well if you look at it that way then the "older" players are being penalized. There wasn't always a great, huge selection of characters. You had to farm whatever was left after you set up the "good" characters. So it was either farm and gear what was available or do nothing. Now there is so much to farm it is literally overwhelming lol.
My point is the announcement correctly promoted people to try new characters and combinations. But if you guess wrong then you are "stuck" with this characters. If you really want to promote people trying new combos as was said, I suggest you allow players to be able to move gear between characters to try things. After all gear isn't bonded to their bodies lol.
So do you wait for others to tell you what is good in your life also lol. Go out and try things...just like in the game
There's different ways to play this game. I wait to let others discover if a team or a toon is worth spending resources on. If you prefer to find out yourself, that's fine, but you can't then turn around and expect to be saved from that decision if it turns out to be a bad one.
Well for sure you'll only get that info either from seeing what others are doing or by taking said character to gear 12 anyway. For HAAT full solo you are going to need a g12 team, for sith raid top 10 you'll need 4 g12 teams. For mythic and galactic bounties you are going to need g12 (g11 at a push). For legendary events (nowadays at least) you need gear 11 minimum. For the current TB you have teams already to clear every phase. For PvP you need equivalent gear level to your opponent (i.e. g12 because that's what your opponent has almost certainly). So everywhere in the game whether it's PvP or PvE you need g12.
So in my opinion the only way you are going to find out if a character is any good is by seeing what others are doing or by reading the ability descriptions, checking the mechanics and damage multipliers carefully in swgoh.gg and then taking a gamble yourself and investing in the character until it's g12.
And again, you are "penalised" for only half trying it if you leave the character at g8 or g9 vs taking it to g12 or for choosing to g12 a character that turned out not to be a good investment rather than another character or mods etc. and the clear aim of this planned changed is exactly to reduce the amount you are penalised to make the matches more fun.
Max gear everything immediately or be punished. Sounds like TI talk to me.
This game has room for P2P and F2P both. A player should not be punished for broadening their roster or inflating their GP as many did when TB started. This issue that they are finally addressing started with TW, and was brought to their attention during TW beta test. It's about time they did something.
Wonder why they choose now to finally act.
That zeta on your unique ability is awesome. You just 1-shot me for 80000 HP with your massive wall of text.
Except this ignores the very real fact that characters that might be" crappy " now - 3 years into the game - were not only useful at an earlier time period in the game's history, but at one time might have been needed, because other options did not exist.
As a very simplified example, one would only have to look at the jedi used to unlock grand Master Yoda in his event. I used QGJ, Jedi Counselor, Ahsoka Tano, Lumi and Eeth Koth. Why those "crappy" jedi? Because the "good" jedi didn't exist in the game yet. There was no Ezra, Jolee, Hoda, Bastila, eyc. How many new players have Lumi or Eeth Koth at 7*?
There are also characters that were required for events that don't even exist a anymore.
Yes, it's a resource management game . But some players have been playing long before some of the "choices" even existed. They shouldn't be punished for choosing what might have been the only options that were available at the time.
Arguing that point only demonstrates a lack of understanding of the history of the game.
In game guild: TNR Uprising
I beat the REAL T7 Yoda (not the nerfed one) and did so before mods were there to help
*This space left intentionally blank*
Exactly. Matchmaking is a mess, and I don’t see this helping much. At higher GP we have also reached the problem where we simply don’t have enough slots. I just finished my current GA, cleared the board with 4 losses, and I still had 6 g12 characters left.
The great thing about GA was encouraging depth, and it’s actually at a point for me where it’s now doing the opposite. It’s all about the top handful of elite teams. Developing anything else just inflated my GP while giving me little else to work with, because it just kicks out something else that was useful.
I would also like a ship-only version that allows you, depending on GP, to use up to 4 fleets on D and all of them for O too. Again a nice change of pace and would reward fleet builders. I'm approaching near half of my GP in ships.
I agree, except for getting to use ships on offense and defense. CG needs to flood the board with more ships of all type while ramping up the amount used in GA.
Exactly. Apparently, CG thinks demodding to gain GP advantages and intentionally not gearing or leveling toons to do the same is all good sportsmanship and in the spirit of the game.
This GA I have faced 2 DR/Malak rosters out of 3 matches. I have neither. GG CG. Thanks for the fun. Oh and yes, I know it's beatable - I do so every day in arena - but you have to break up 2 teams (weakening your other offensive or defensive teams) and get lucky RNG and hope you're not out speed modded to pull it off. While you're opponent has to do none of that. Nice, level GA playing field.
In game guild: TNR Uprising
I beat the REAL T7 Yoda (not the nerfed one) and did so before mods were there to help
*This space left intentionally blank*
In game guild: TNR Uprising
I beat the REAL T7 Yoda (not the nerfed one) and did so before mods were there to help
*This space left intentionally blank*
Oh dear, revans zeta flashbacks.
GA isnt bad, its a great idea, just that the Galactic p issues are annoying. It goes against the general rules of the game to teach people to not gear the chatacters up at all, which is one of the reasons why they said zombie needed a rework. Then again, how could they decide on which players of a certain level get to fight who?
Beyond level 80, its hard to think of something that effectively leets players fight exact level characters.
I agree. I think if they based it on gear, zetas and maybe even how many legendary characters one has would be a more accurate way to make more fair match-ups.