Post GA MM Discussion
First - thank you CG. It was a blast.
Try to be civil here.
And cheating discussions are for other threads. Please be realistic and TRY to be objective.
For reference: I am Division 3 at 3.78 GP at start, so at top. Will move up to Division 2 next GA because I'm 3.8M GP now. I have good but not great mods. I have no +25 speed mods. I have DR no Malak, JKR and other normal teams. Traya is 5* and Padme team at 5* g9 when I started. I am very cheap on zetas and I usually only zeta required zetas on required toons. No fluff zetas for me but I do have a fluffy-ish roster with a lot of "collector" toons at g8. Every single one of my toons has mods and I dont de-mod.
So, at least at 3.78Mish GP in Div 3 my personal experience is MM was pretty good and challenging. There were some blowouts first bracket. Second bracket was tighter. 3rd and 4th bracket were really close. I lost a round 3rd bracket when I set "standard" D and the guy got a lot of undersized banners. 4th bracket I won TWO games by ties and having more GP and won the 3rd by 5 banners. Very close and very tough. I did hit Kyber midway through the last match after clearing two zones. I mostly Ignored feats unless it didnt risk a win and completed about 50% of them or somewhere near that. I did go 11-1 but had 2 ties and all other games in 3rd and 4th bracket were decided by about 10 banners.
Random observations:
1. I never faced a Malak or had one in my bracket. Assuming this is because I'm in the fat part of the bell curve and there are more possible matches. Maybe I just got lucky. Perhaps if they split Div 1 and 2 up some more it will reduce this issue for some. Again I might have just gotten lucky.
2. I think the "relevant GP" should maybe be expanded some? Around 20%ish. At my GP half of my g10-g11 NS team, and all of my 5* g9 Padme team were not counted. Probably another 6-8 g10 toons that I use too.
3. I really like feats. I ignored them if I thought they would risk me some banners, but they also guided me into using some teams that I would never have tried otherwise and I learned some things. If I had some more losses would have tried to max them out for more currency.
4. Based on what I have read, which may not be accurate, it seems harder for top Divisions to rank up. So perhaps their points scaling should be tweaked?
5. This is by far my favorite game mode and I hope CG gives it the attention and iterations it deserves. It required a lot of thought and strategy and needing 61 banners on my last battle to tie against a geared NS or Geo team was thrilling.
So, now that you have seen the whole thing, what was your experience?
Try to be civil here.
And cheating discussions are for other threads. Please be realistic and TRY to be objective.For reference: I am Division 3 at 3.78 GP at start, so at top. Will move up to Division 2 next GA because I'm 3.8M GP now. I have good but not great mods. I have no +25 speed mods. I have DR no Malak, JKR and other normal teams. Traya is 5* and Padme team at 5* g9 when I started. I am very cheap on zetas and I usually only zeta required zetas on required toons. No fluff zetas for me but I do have a fluffy-ish roster with a lot of "collector" toons at g8. Every single one of my toons has mods and I dont de-mod.
So, at least at 3.78Mish GP in Div 3 my personal experience is MM was pretty good and challenging. There were some blowouts first bracket. Second bracket was tighter. 3rd and 4th bracket were really close. I lost a round 3rd bracket when I set "standard" D and the guy got a lot of undersized banners. 4th bracket I won TWO games by ties and having more GP and won the 3rd by 5 banners. Very close and very tough. I did hit Kyber midway through the last match after clearing two zones. I mostly Ignored feats unless it didnt risk a win and completed about 50% of them or somewhere near that. I did go 11-1 but had 2 ties and all other games in 3rd and 4th bracket were decided by about 10 banners.
Random observations:
1. I never faced a Malak or had one in my bracket. Assuming this is because I'm in the fat part of the bell curve and there are more possible matches. Maybe I just got lucky. Perhaps if they split Div 1 and 2 up some more it will reduce this issue for some. Again I might have just gotten lucky.
2. I think the "relevant GP" should maybe be expanded some? Around 20%ish. At my GP half of my g10-g11 NS team, and all of my 5* g9 Padme team were not counted. Probably another 6-8 g10 toons that I use too.
3. I really like feats. I ignored them if I thought they would risk me some banners, but they also guided me into using some teams that I would never have tried otherwise and I learned some things. If I had some more losses would have tried to max them out for more currency.
4. Based on what I have read, which may not be accurate, it seems harder for top Divisions to rank up. So perhaps their points scaling should be tweaked?
5. This is by far my favorite game mode and I hope CG gives it the attention and iterations it deserves. It required a lot of thought and strategy and needing 61 banners on my last battle to tie against a geared NS or Geo team was thrilling.
So, now that you have seen the whole thing, what was your experience?
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Leaderboard
Pros: Its nice to talk with my guild members where they are and competing everyday with friendly banter. I liked seeing how top end players were progressing, checking what kind of characters they had. League promotion animation is great and the new banner screen is cool.
I do like how most of the players who actually try the game mod can reach Aurodium, so losing is not too bad but for highly competitive players, Kyber is a fun goalpost
Feedback: They should display the total number of players currently in a given divison and league. Hard to tell how many players are Kyber and Aurodium when you can only see top 50, and how many players are in division 1,2,3, ... 12
Feats
Feats are good. I like most of them. I don't think you can reasonably expect every single feat to be liked by an individual. I think it would be better if some of the feats were introduced at the start of the week rather than in the last round of the bracket but its whatever. I'm not a fan of 1 day feats but I can live with it.
Its a good feature, and I hope to see more new feats. GR / Seps are hot right now, but they will be outdated soon and I'm curious how often they will update feats or treat it like weekly shipments where they stop caring after a few weeks
Matchmaking
Eh. I didn't really run DSR bots to compare my roster with my opponents, if my opponents had better mods, or roster its too late to do anything about it other than do my best
I don't think there were any matches where I lost and matchmaking is to be blamed. All my losses were my own fault. For context: I think I lost 5 out of 12 matches and in my last bracket everyone had g13 Darth Malak, so its not like i was speedrolling every player and had easy opponents.
Matchmaking is fine imo
Progression and Rewards
Probably very controversial. There are a lot of problems here I think
1. Setting 1 defense is a problem
2. sort of RNG on what kind of defense your opponent plays. They can just give up and put everything solid on defense and not attack and prevent you from a full clear
3. I understand that easy kyber access helps lower level players but they are getting a lot of GAC Tokens and are able to obtain more Kyrotechs than end game players. They'll end up with a lot leaner and stronger rosters when they move up divisions and mid-game players will suffer I think. I think higher divisions should have more final GAC token rewards because higher GP should be encouraged
4. Rewards need to be upgraded. They removed the 12 Mk II slicing gear from winning a round and nerfed it from 36 to 25. They should make the end of bracket rewards 12/24/36 instead of 15/20/25 again
5. I think the GAC Token for winning should be increased. I feel like the gear for token exchange is very high while the supply is low. Maybe its just me
I'd say that's pretty even matchmaking.
Was just matched up against the 40th ranked division 1 player with over 5 million GP and G13 Bugs SithEmpire Nightsisters Rebels and SepDroids.
Didn’t even bother attacking the last round. Matchmaking is beyond broken.
-Match only on division
-Match on 120 characters not 80
-Increase GP gain from G13
Easy fixes to make GAC playable again.
I absolutely LOVED GAC. Definately my favorite part of this game thus far (I have been playing for roughly a year). I was in D-7; I currently have 1.56m GP, 932k characters. I will add that i also went 11-1, got to Khyber, and currently ranked top 250. So my experience may be colored by how well I did. But regardless, this mode was by far the best part of my entire SWGOH experience.
I don't have any journey characters or Padame. I have all 7* legendary, except 6* chewie and bb8. 7* Han, 6* GK, 5* Wampa and 6* hoda. No Traya. I also don't have a grevious team.
I am entirely F2P and I felt for the first time that I was really being challenged within the game itself and not just b/c I either didn't spend money or don't have hero characters. A lot of the game has gone stale and that is really disappointing, which all the more makes me love GA and GAC specifically.
The GAC mode itself is just so perfect b/c as I move up the ranks I am put against harder and harder teams not just b/c they had a revan, but b/c they put a lot of skill and thought in how they played. By the last round I was one of only two people that didn't have a Revan and the only one without any hero/journey characters.
Nevertheless, I really enjoyed myself and still came out 2-1 this last round. The people I fought against were equally as committed as me and thought a lot about how to play this mode.
Finally, watching Ahnaldt & MG's streams (sometimes catching them live like today) made me feel connected to larger community that also loves this mode and all the theory crafting, strategy, & fun that comes along with it.
The cheating stuff is frustrating and demands action. I didn't face any cheaters and even if I did, it didn't matter, lol.
@CG_SBCrumb & @CG_TopHat please do not let this cheating mess take away this game mode or make players like us be punished b/c of some rotten apples. Even if Cheating is purvasive, don't let the majority suffer b/c of the minority.
I agree. I am in Div 2 and lost just one time. Finished every feat but the GG one. Missed Kyber by 350 points.
The amount of D your opponents place is a big factor in this unfortunately.
I'm fine with the rewards (but would like more of those guild store mod thingies), but my main complaint is that they should revert the MM to how it was in the normal GAs, before any of this GAC.
Match-making: vast improvment on the prior system but the number of toons factored into the pairing needs to be expended.
League/ tiers: with the disparity in effort between reaching Auridium and Kyber ranks i believe that they either need to be rescaled or to have another tier introduced here. If you participate you will get Auridium, you have to excel to get Kyber.
Feats: hit and miss here, i am not a big fan of feats that arent in GA, just have more versatility here imo, e.g. "use an undersized CLS team in Grand Arena" etc. I dont see what spending credits or using a bad fleet in arena shoild have to do with it (looking at you endurance).
Rewards: if you're winning your groups, the zetas, omegas, and mod salvage l, the rewards are great. For winning your individual fights, the rewards are immensely unsatisfying because the rewards, even in Kyber are abysmal.
Once more for emphasis, if you get into kyber, you get enough tokens to buy yourself about half a piece of gear from the GAC store. It is an absolute Slap in the face to the people who put in a months effort and had it pay off.
Overall GA had better rewards.
Fun: GAC was very enjoyable for a mode still (hopefully) in it's early stages, it was nice seeing where you get ranked amoungst others and does give a sense of pride and accomplishment to the player.
Just fix the kitten rewards.
Under the new system I went 1-2 in the first two rounds, learned a better defense strategy and went 2-1 the rest of the way. The matches I fought were close and fun and I played against people whose rosters looked an awful lot like mine--sure, maybe they had Traya and Darth Revan while I still don't, but they also had broad rosters with some fluff, unlike the anorexically slim rosters I'd seen before the change. I managed to beat a couple of those players, too, or at least come close when I lost.
There were a few matches where I rolled my eyes so hard that they almost stuck that way, it looked like I'd get pulverized and do nothing on offense. Those wound up being startlingly close, and thanks to Feats I still had an incentive to try.
All things considered, I really love the new matchmaking. I know people with narrow rosters are upset because they used to win all the time and now they're facing mostly other folks with equally narrow rosters, so only one can win. But at least they've got a recourse--build up that fluff, use some of those 40 zeta mats you've got socked away for whoever the next hot character is on characters that exist. I couldn't do that under the old way. I can't de-level or ungear characters. You can level and gear them and then you'll be fine.
I’m in Div 3 and almost made kyber. I went 2-1 in each bracket. The first two bracket had a couple guys that clearly had better rosters than everyone else, I was in the middle, and there were a few people that wouldn’t be able to beat my typical defense.
The third bracket, I had the best roster, but I messed up attacking and lost a match by a few points. The other two matches weren’t very close.
The fourth bracket had much more competitive matches, but there were still a few people that were clearly better than the others (which is why they started in the top 2000 of aurodium while I was 7500).
All in all, there were a couple matches where the opponent was clearly better but I managed a tight win. There were 3 matches where the opponent was clearly better and the result showed it. And there were a few matches where I was clearly better and it showed. The MM has improved, but I’d like to see the GP scores changed for MM and see the leagues do more to divide people by their relative skill in GAC.
Most of the arena feats were unattainable for me as well as the undersized wins but did get most of the 1st attack clear and zone cleared ones as well as the particular faction needed ones.
So all in all, not looking forward to it again "a kin to seeing the dentist" but I guess I need to for my long-term goals.
Overall I think the GAC is awesome. GA was already my favorite game mode, so being able to do more of it is not something I'm going to whine about.
Matchmaking seemed pretty good for my part.
I've primarily been matched against higher GP players - some as high as 5,2m GP.
And most of my competition has been against Div 1 players.
For the most part my matchups roughly had the same toons as me, some slightly better geared, some slightly less. Some missed a key toon or two, but had more zetas or faster mods.
Most rounds were close, most both I and my opponent fully cleared each others zones, and I had no occurances of the missing button bug or any app crashes.
So, yeah, so far I think GAC is great, and I can't wait for the next one.
Generally a very enjoyable experience.
I managed to complete all the feats that opened up to me, some fun challenges amongst them.
Most matchups seemed fair, if you scout the other players roster, you can see where they've gone against the path you've chose.
I only had one matchup that made me question how was I facing this guy.
It was early on, I only had Grevious at G13 my opponent had four G13 toons, Grevious, DRev, BShan and Malak.
Even after splitting rosters down, I couldn't fathom how we were against each other.
Good chats with opponents, fun challenges and working on whether to go defensive or offensive for fights, all a good experience.
The feats felt somewhat disconnected and inconsequential. The ones that were "this battle only" - and required winning with a specific team took away strategic options and should be eliminated (or at least allow more time to decide when to use them). Also, having random feats continually popping up instead of being listed at the start limits strategy and feels unnecessarily random.
I found the rewards to be similarly disappointing.
Overall I was extremely disappointed in GAC. I was looking forward to a new and interesting game mode. Instead we got 4 weeks of bugged content, with scoring discrepancies, cheating, poor match making and weak rewards. All of which was really just a series of repackaged GA's with some pasted on feats.
I'd prefer they simply go back to regular GA matches with that reward structure. GAC felt like a poorly executed and miserably failed experiment. I'd be fine if never came back.
In game guild: TNR Uprising
I beat the REAL T7 Yoda (not the nerfed one) and did so before mods were there to help
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The lack of transparency in matchmaking is troubling. At least in the old model, it was really easy to understand how to be successful; build 12 excellent teams. It's unclear now how to build a roster to be good at GAC and it seems like it's all really up to the secret sauce in the matchmaking algorithm.
They needed to be more forthcoming with squad requirements. The change from 6 teams to 8 teams without any communication around it was problematic. We had been building our rosters expecting to need one number of teams only to have that number increase by 1/5th to 1/3rd without any notification. If we had known we needed more teams, we might have changed the way we were building our rosters in the months leading up to GAC.
Scoring is far too dependent on what your opponent sets on defense. Sometimes you'll get an auto defense, someone might be generous and give you jawas so you can get feats, sometimes you'll get 6 or 8 of the top defensive squads. People love to talk about law of large numbers here to even out RNG, but 12 or 15 samples isn't enough to overcome that opponent that wants to set a single defense and hurt your chances at reaching a higher league.
It got monotonous. Four or five straight weeks of prior GA would have at least yielded multiple formats (ships, 3v3, different territory structure, etc.). I understand why a GAC can't do that, but it added a lot of repetition to the mode that wasn't there before. I always enjoyed the varying formats. As much as I used to love GA, week after week of 5v5 could get boring.
Feats are interesting, but I would suggest that they just include currency or gear rewards, or at least exclude specific factions. That just adds to the scoring randomness in the end result. People that had viable GR ships could clear a feat that others couldn't, even though ships aren't even part of this particular GAC. It didn't make a lot of sense to include them in the "championship" scoring.
I think the overarching goal of a global leader board has value and is interesting, but they conflated this feature with "fairness in matchmaking" and tried to relate two inherently unrelatable things. If they had called it something like "Progressive Grand Arena" and not labeled it as a championship with all of the Division, League and Feat fluff, maybe I would have received it differently.
Moving forward I think they should either 1) move back to regular GA with the current matchmaking intent (create compelling brackets each and every GA) or 2) scrap the finite GAC with starts and ends and move to a persistent league feature that is based on a rolling number of prior GA results (5 / 10 / 20, whatever) where leagues are defined by the sum of your score over that time (allowing you to move both up and down between leagues). This would be similar to how a handicapping system works in principle.
Matchmaking:
First, my idea of similar roster has nothing to do with meta teams, zetas, or mods, rather it is about investment in characters and distribution of said investment(focused vs fluff). Maybe I am just a naive player, but I feel that the most objective way to measure investment is with GP. This is not to say GP is not flawed (how is G13 only worth 210GP???), but it is much less subjective than saying "Meta toon X is worth way more than Old Toon Y so they should count more". Such a system would have to constantly change and ignores the fact that your decisions on who to power up/unlock should matter in a competitive game mode. I am sorry if you have not unlocked the Revans/Malak/Padme/Traya/etc, but if you have put a similar investment into your roster as another player who does, than you need to live with the choices you made.
Overall, I thought this mm was a step forward in the iteration. Better than looking at all character GP for gauging a similar roster as it works on separating the focused player from the fluffy collector. it seemed to work ok at the lower levels, however the big problems came in Divisions 1 and 2 where there is less differentiation in the Top 80 values. I think that the next mm iteration needs 4 things: more leagues and divisions, factor in division, factor in league/performance, and add a weighted value for toons outside the top X.
Example: Group by Division, then group by performance (score or league if we get more), then group by GP
General Thoughts:
Liked feats, but wish that 1 day feats didn't exist. Also think that they are rewarded appropriately, meaning that they are nice to do but not so important that you cannot skip them.
The overall rewards do need some kind of boost, the end of GAC rewards are very poor for a month long event, the end of GA rewards are lower (without being made up in the end of GAC), and advancing leagues was underwhelming gear wise.
This idea of a continuous GA sounds really intriguing
@cannonfodder_iv What do you mean by this? Why do you think its wrong? Do you have evidence for the claim?
I dont agree or disagree - just dont understand the statement or reasoning behind it. Thanks.
I’m curious who this was directed at (not that anyone needs to answer). I didn’t read all of everyone’s post, but it seemed like a very civil and on topic discussion. If anything, it was odd forum arguments hadn’t started in relation to GAC matchmaking lol.
I made aurodium with 4.1k off Kyber
Until last GA (first of aurodium)I faced similar roster Opponents and managed to get first in all but 1 second place as I couldn’t attack one day due to phone problems. With similar rosters and final score differences less than 200 points. Then I faced lots o g13 with both Revan and Malak, ended 7th on last with not being close at all: full wipes from enemies.
So I have seen both sides of the MM. it can be close and it can be severely unbalanced. Needs a fine tune but overall I think it’s much better than before
One thing about GAC that I don’t like at all is the duration, too much time frame for an event.
@VonZant First off, thank you for the thread. Best thing I've seen on the forum.
I play(ed) three accounts. 3.9M GP (main), 3.0M GP (jr) and 2.5M GP (iii). main and iii were what would be considered lean. Both had lost a single GA round each in the entirety of GA (I forgot to sign up for a few). Jr. usually finished a healthy mix of 3 wins (estimating 1/3 to 1/4) and 2 wins. Jr. didn't have JKR until the most recent event. Main was probably the "butt-end of the tip of the spear" (JKR, DR and Malak all first appearance), and iii was a very lean "2nd pass" account.
Here are the relevant character GPs for two of the accounts.
Jr was generally middle of the road in its GAC brackets. Never the highest GP. Never the lowest GP. the 2.5M GP account was always the lowest, usually giving up anywhere from 500k to 1.2M overall GP and at least 200k character GP. It routinely got matched against multiple DR/Malak teams with multiple G13s (it doesn't have a single one), and generally top 20 arena ranks (it had stopped climbing by the time GAC started so its own arena rank didn't seem to come into consideration in MM - it was clearly up against very diligent players). As you can see, top 60 is within 1000 points of each other. Top 80 within 10k, but Jr is higher and didn't see the level of competition that iii did.
Also, I checked out the bracket for the (3.9M) main account in the first round of the full exhibition, then searched through other guilds for players with equivalent top 80 GP. I found multiple (something like 12 accounts in looking at just three guilds) that had a closer top 80 to me than the 4.5M GP accounts that were in that first bracket, strongly indicating that other factors were in play in MM than just pure top 80 toon GP.
The common thread between the two "lean" accounts that were getting noticeably outsized competitors in just the first round when everyone was still in Carbonite was that they had more success in prior GAs. This is consistent with the new MM philosophy of providing "competitive" matches. Unfortunately for me, the lent itself to being matched against much deeper rosters against players of similar skill level and diligence.
I don't have enough data to perform any sort of modeling (and really don't care about GAC as a feature anymore). But, the information above is the basis for the comment you asked about.
I saw the post that had to be removed or at least the initial post and rebutal. I imagine it might have had a few more back and forth to necessitate a removal that I didn't see. But it was the standard lean vs fluff debate and how it used to be a thing to build multiple squads needed for multiple events. Then switched over to a more streamlined hyperfocused approach and it's effect on the old ga mm compared to this newer gac mm. I happened to give the rebutal a thumbs up due to how well he/she countered the initial "spark" so to speak and agreed with that point of view, which happened to explain why many of us are in a "fluff" situation. It was straight and to the point with no ugliness I could read into. But what happened after that I don't know lol.
I really enjoyed the game mode. Every match I had the results were pretty close. I got no sense of cheating and each match was enjoyable. I won 10/12 and both losses were people I could've beaten. I'm very lean so I was faced against people with substantially higher gp but things still felt even simply because of how heavily invested in mods I am.
Social experience
First, I feel the format really needs clarification of intent. Typically, higher scores are a result in uneven matchups. And very close matchups may result in lower scores. And this is where mm hits heads with scoring. The only possible solution to both that I can think of would be switching to an elo system.
Second, rewards felt very anti climatic. Currently this can be excused since it was an exhibition.
Third, cheating needs dealt with and the decisions regarding whistleblowers may need reevaluated.
I'm kind of surprised, too, since it was my post and I don't recall being rude or attacking. That said, I haven't checked the board again until just now, so for all I know the person to whom I was replying was rude and attacky. *shrugs*
I wish they'd edited out my quote of the original post, if that's what caused the deletion--I think I made some good points about how the game has evolved over time and why there are legit reasons to be in favor of the new matchmaking. Oh well. Maybe I'll just post those a second time later on--can't do it now, got a territory war to do