Cyanide wanted to know how to ease the crunch

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A: CG_Cyanides - No, I haven't forgot and we are planning more. We added Kyros to Daily Activities completion and TW rewards, reduced the crystal and shard shop cost of G12 and added G12+ to shard shop, reduced the energy cost of Ship Energy, increased the refresh rate of Ship energy, and added G12+ to Ship nodes. Actually, my question back is define "easing"? I hear easing a lot, but it is very subjective. Mathematically, we have eased the gear grind, but that doesn't mean that players actually "feel" the easing. This isn't being snarky, I am just genuinely interested in what everyone's definition of easing is to see if I can some how help that feeling.

Firstly this isn’t a call out post, this is a response to a dev asking how we can feel the gear crunch easing so I’d like to answer his question.

The players would feel the gear crunch ease if we had access to more gear pieces of mk3 carbantis, mk5 stun guns, Mk3 stun cuffs and mk8 gold eye balls. We need to have this old gear crunch alleviated to where we don’t feel an accomplishment from getting 1/2 fully crafted stun guns a month.

Currently the only places we can get mk5 stun guns on a regular are the tables, farming. That’s it. We can’t afford to get them in the GET store because we need to horde 10’s of thousands to finish epic characters. Just shy of 70,000 GET. So that’s out. They rarely pop up in the shard shop store and that’s totally random.

How can we ease this crunch? Simple.

Add a new tier to all the challenges. Make guns, cuffs, and the golden eye balls prizes in the last tiers. It’s as easy as that. At the current rates of gear in challenges, if you do that you won’t overload the economy and can actually help your players feel like they aren’t suffocating under a gear crunch.
You get each challenge 3 times. For example, add the mk5 guns to a new mace challenge tier. Make the range 3-5 on how many you can get. On average you get 4. So that’s 20 salvage a Day. 3 times a week gives you 60 salvage pieces. 4 weeks gives you 240 salvage. Just short if enough stun gun salvage for 5 Full pieces a month.

Replies

  • This is a well thought out and acceptable solution. Take the time to add these tiers, get players past the bottleneck, there’s still plenty of other stuff you can monetize..
  • I’d like to pitch in here as well. Cyanides ask why we don’t feel the easing, since this has occurred.

    My 2 cents here are that while gear is more accessible than ever before, we have also got:
    - more toons than ever before
    - New gear tiers (g13 finishers and Relics)
    - New content and game modes which require said top gear tiers to be competitive

    Eg for me part I have a somewhat relic’ed DR arena team.
    Still need R5-7 on most to really be there
    Bugs need to go to relics, only one of them is, ideally need 3 more for fleet, TB, TW and GAC
    Sep droids need a few to be R, for TB and GAS
    Padme team and clones need to be taken to R level for GAS and TB
    Jedis need at least 10 at high R for TB
    And then again, need more pilots at R for fleet, ideally need good PvP teams at R for TW

    For my part I have a backlog for years of playtime, so that will never happen, because new content (toons) is bound to arrive soon.

    This is why I don’t feel the ease, the need for gear with new toons and tiers have increased significantly faster than the gear easing.
  • JaggedJ
    1352 posts Member
    edited December 2019
    Already gave my feedback in the main Q&A thread so won't repeat, but I hope something is done.

    At this point they haven't eased the gear crunch to g12 which is desperately needed, but almost impossible to ease based on the mess they've made from G12 to relic 7.
  • Well if they want to ease the gear crunch the best way would be to not increase the gear crunch by 200% before they ease it by 20%.
  • "Mathematically we have eased the gear crunch by giving you 2 stores you can buy all the good gear in, however, if you do buy gear there then you can't get to second half of the toon you have worked for. You're welcome for us having made your life easier"

    Any data they show in relation to 'easing the gear crunch' (this highest voted problem in the game for years) is contaminated by these stores, thus i do not feel adequately measurable alleviation.
  • Absolutely agree with OP.
    Gear crunch ease = put the guns, cuffs etc. in challenges, that's it.
    Swiss Garde Officer, drop me a message if you're interested joining
  • Ravens1113 wrote: »
    How can we ease this crunch? Simple.

    Add a new tier to all the challenges. Make guns, cuffs, and the golden eye balls prizes in the last tiers. It’s as easy as that. At the current rates of gear in challenges, if you do that you won’t overload the economy and can actually help your players feel like they aren’t suffocating under a gear crunch.
    You get each challenge 3 times. For example, add the mk5 guns to a new mace challenge tier. Make the range 3-5 on how many you can get. On average you get 4. So that’s 20 salvage a Day. 3 times a week gives you 60 salvage pieces. 4 weeks gives you 240 salvage. Just short if enough stun gun salvage for 5 Full pieces a month.

    I agree completely with this. One or perhaps even two more tiers to all the challenges would help out and perhaps make the game more interesting as well.
  • JaggedJ
    1352 posts Member
    Manumicio wrote: »
    Absolutely agree with OP.
    Gear crunch ease = put the guns, cuffs etc. in challenges, that's it.

    They'll never do that because of the short sighted decision to use that gear in g12.5 pieces instead of creating a whole new set of gear.
  • 100% agree with OP.
    It would be easy and logic (2 words that Devs don’t understand at all).
  • Surely they cannot seriously be surprised that the individual player does not notice a global increase in the availability of such gear when it is probably in the low percentages, if it even breaks a whole percentage point. It is the same as calculating the drop rate for such things, small percentage increases are only noticable in large scale data that the individual player does not have access to.
  • I think the OP's proposal is pushing it. Handing out almost 5 stun guns per month is not "easing" the pain, it's removing that item from the list of bottlenecks. Not that I'd complain - it's just an exaggerated expectation, imo.

    Personally, I'd already be happy if not every new toon (and especially the g12 finishers) required the same gear: Golden eyeballs, mk5 Droid callers, Carbantis of course and the dreaded Kyros.

    Give us some toons that let us use the stockpiles of (currently) trash gear. Turning heaps of trash into relic materials sounds like a neat concept, but limiting what you can put into the converter for a specific material only creates new bottlenecks...

    So in reply to @CG_Cyanides question about the definition of easing: Easing the gear crunch means for me that the gearing process of a new toon actually becomes faster. Especially as nowadays pretty much everything below g12 is trash anyway. "Easing" does not mean replacing one bottleneck item with another (more expensive one).
  • Join all the old stores and make all the gear accessible there at a fair price. It will not get us more gear, but we can cherry pick what gear we want right now.
    Maybe only make it so from lvl 85, but the amount of currencies and shops for end game players is just not justified in any logical way.
  • Great post. I want the game to thrive and make money. I know it needs gates to progression that require us to spend/grind. That being said, they have added bigger gates on top of old ones without lifting earlier ones. They keep pointing to all the little things they are doing to increase gear flow, but not acknowledging big things they are doing to increase requirements of new gear at the same time. That’s either obtuse or disingenuous. It’s like if your boss is also your landlord. He gives you a $100 a month raise and raises your rent $150, then tells you he’s doing you a favor.

    G12 and especially G12+ pieces are still walls. G13 and specifically Kyros as part of that massive finisher that are an entire gear table in one piece are a wall. Signal data is a wall. High end pieces needed for scrap also contribute to the relic wall. With all that, some earlier gates should be lifted. Not slightly eased. Massively eased. Nobody wants to struggle to farm stun guns anymore. Especially when they put them (and pieces like them) in the recipe for G12+ and as requirements for scrap. That’s salt in the wound. We have enough things to struggle with.

    The other thing I would add is that adding 3-500 kyros to new character gear tables ON TOP of all the other difficult to get gear sucks. They should NEVER DO THAT AGAIN. 100 pieces on every character to get to G13 is plenty. And telling us they did that to reduce the need for old gear was a lie. That kind of thing reduces trust in what the devs tell us.

    On a related not, this is what’s needed to get newer players to end game. I have a 4 year old account that is grinding away at end game content, and there are PLENTY of walls there. But I also have a 2 year alt account (formerly my wife’s) that I play. It’s a NIGHTMARE making any headway on cuffs/guns/carbs/golden eyeballs. That is what new players need to get up to speed quickly, NOT a hyperwhale bundle. They need a MAJOR influx of what SHOULD be obsolete gear so they can join vets at the real grind in a year or so instead of constant stagnation.
  • leef
    13458 posts Member
    I much prefer if they made gear easier accessable instead of just handing out bottleneck gear in challenges.
    I haven't really felt the stun cuff crunch in a while now and adding golden balls to the challenges will just result in me running out of the salvages.
    It's not like i couldn't use more of that gear, but i rather have the option to chose what gear i want. increasing the droprate for example, or increasing the store currency income.
    Save water, drink champagne!
  • leef wrote: »
    I much prefer if they made gear easier accessable instead of just handing out bottleneck gear in challenges.
    I haven't really felt the stun cuff crunch in a while now and adding golden balls to the challenges will just result in me running out of the salvages.
    It's not like i couldn't use more of that gear, but i rather have the option to chose what gear i want. increasing the droprate for example, or increasing the store currency income.

    How about increasing gear drops to 40-50% for old stuff like cuffs/carbs/guns? Keep it 20% for Kyros, but double old purples and golds that are used at g11 or below. Maybe add stun guns to the guild store. That would be a huge help.
  • leef
    13458 posts Member
    JacenRoe wrote: »
    leef wrote: »
    I much prefer if they made gear easier accessable instead of just handing out bottleneck gear in challenges.
    I haven't really felt the stun cuff crunch in a while now and adding golden balls to the challenges will just result in me running out of the salvages.
    It's not like i couldn't use more of that gear, but i rather have the option to chose what gear i want. increasing the droprate for example, or increasing the store currency income.

    How about increasing gear drops to 40-50% for old stuff like cuffs/carbs/guns? Keep it 20% for Kyros, but double old purples and golds that are used at g11 or below. Maybe add stun guns to the guild store. That would be a huge help.

    Sounds like a plan. I wouldn't mind g11+ gear to be a bit more accessible either to be honest. If you don't rank high in raids it's a flippin slow process. The whole top10 / the rest in terms of HSR rewards isn't exactly ideal imo.
    I always wondered why stun guns weren't in the guild store in the first..
    Save water, drink champagne!
  • 1. No more raid only gear. Every piece should be farmable (using energy not currency). Buying is not farming.
    2. Put bottleneck gear in more places. I know you don't want to update the old stores like Fleet and GW but it is time. You could add bottleneck gear in 1 slot. Rotate the salvage in that 1 slot.
    3. Better raid rewards for HAAT. The rewards for the tank raid are absolute garbage. This is a spot where you could really help players feel the easing of the gear crunch without opening the flood gates. There is a limit to how many times a week any guild can run a tank raid. (Side note, it is time for a sim button.)
    4. I like the daily challenge idea.
    5. I would love to see some of the g12.5 and g13 salvage added to the LS/DS nodes (not just finishers). Right now it is almost all ship energy for farming.

    These are just a few ideas. I do not hope for all of them but any of them would help. There are a dozen other ways the devs could help but I tried to think of the most visable changes that would make us as player FEEL the gear crunch easing.

    The fact that this post is even in the forums and getting positive feedback from the community gives me hope. Please CG don't smash that hope. Read what we are saying and take it to your drawing board.
  • I'm absolutely with you as i already posted above, BUT unfortunately this is not the first Post about the topic with similar solutions proposed, but you know what, no one did care @ CG, and i think this will be the only thing we can expect, that they still do not care ;-)
    Swiss Garde Officer, drop me a message if you're interested joining
  • leef wrote: »
    JacenRoe wrote: »
    leef wrote: »
    I much prefer if they made gear easier accessable instead of just handing out bottleneck gear in challenges.
    I haven't really felt the stun cuff crunch in a while now and adding golden balls to the challenges will just result in me running out of the salvages.
    It's not like i couldn't use more of that gear, but i rather have the option to chose what gear i want. increasing the droprate for example, or increasing the store currency income.

    How about increasing gear drops to 40-50% for old stuff like cuffs/carbs/guns? Keep it 20% for Kyros, but double old purples and golds that are used at g11 or below. Maybe add stun guns to the guild store. That would be a huge help.

    Sounds like a plan. I wouldn't mind g11+ gear to be a bit more accessible either to be honest. If you don't rank high in raids it's a flippin slow process. The whole top10 / the rest in terms of HSR rewards isn't exactly ideal imo.
    I always wondered why stun guns weren't in the guild store in the first..

    Agreed. I’m not a fan of overly top heavy rewards for guild cooperative content. But I don’t want to get greedy. It’s not like they will do any of this anyhow. I wouldn’t mind new content in the near future that awards G12/12+. Also not taking 68,400 GET 1 per player out of the economy every time an Epic Cheapskate event comes around would help with that.
  • BB1180
    12 posts Member
    edited December 2019
    The reason that people aren't 'feeling' any easing of the gear crunch is because they have largely addressed the wrong issue. That's not to say that the G12+ improvements aren't welcome, because they are, but the real issue lies in the G8-G11 range. The average character needs about 1000 mid-tier, purple gears in that range, and about half of those are composed of only four or five things, like Mk5 Stun Guns, Mk 3 Carbantis, Mk3 Stun Cuffs and a couple more. I'm preparing for JKR and I think he needs 300 Mk3 Carbantis just to get to G11. Never mind everything else I'll need. At a time when new content is being tuned for a full G13 R7 squad, that we still have a huge gear wall beginning at G8 just doesn't make a lot of sense to me.



  • JacenRoe
    3016 posts Member
    edited December 2019
    Austin9370 wrote: »
    Ravens1113 wrote: »
    A: CG_Cyanides - No, I haven't forgot and we are planning more. We added Kyros to Daily Activities completion and TW rewards, reduced the crystal and shard shop cost of G12 and added G12+ to shard shop, reduced the energy cost of Ship Energy, increased the refresh rate of Ship energy, and added G12+ to Ship nodes. Actually, my question back is define "easing"? I hear easing a lot, but it is very subjective. Mathematically, we have eased the gear grind, but that doesn't mean that players actually "feel" the easing. This isn't being snarky, I am just genuinely interested in what everyone's definition of easing is to see if I can some how help that feeling.

    Firstly this isn’t a call out post, this is a response to a dev asking how we can feel the gear crunch easing so I’d like to answer his question.

    The players would feel the gear crunch ease if we had access to more gear pieces of mk3 carbantis, mk5 stun guns, Mk3 stun cuffs and mk8 gold eye balls. We need to have this old gear crunch alleviated to where we don’t feel an accomplishment from getting 1/2 fully crafted stun guns a month.

    Currently the only places we can get mk5 stun guns on a regular are the tables, farming. That’s it. We can’t afford to get them in the GET store because we need to horde 10’s of thousands to finish epic characters. Just shy of 70,000 GET. So that’s out. They rarely pop up in the shard shop store and that’s totally random.

    How can we ease this crunch? Simple.

    Add a new tier to all the challenges. Make guns, cuffs, and the golden eye balls prizes in the last tiers. It’s as easy as that. At the current rates of gear in challenges, if you do that you won’t overload the economy and can actually help your players feel like they aren’t suffocating under a gear crunch.
    You get each challenge 3 times. For example, add the mk5 guns to a new mace challenge tier. Make the range 3-5 on how many you can get. On average you get 4. So that’s 20 salvage a Day. 3 times a week gives you 60 salvage pieces. 4 weeks gives you 240 salvage. Just short if enough stun gun salvage for 5 Full pieces a month.

    I don't think this is what he said despite the likes. Everyone obviously just wants more and that is the problem!

    He was looking more of a definition of easing the gear crunch looks like. You provided a "solution" of how to input more into the game. There are numerous ways to do this and I think they are fully aware of how to.

    I believe a more direct answer would be the alleviation of high need gear in early tiers. For example, having characters need many cuffs, stun guns, and carbanitis in early gear tiers where they aren't all that usable is problematic. You feel like you're doing a lot of grinding for minimal return. Therefore, the grind would only really be felt at later tiers, but there would be benefits to it.

    Another idea would be, what players think the grind isn't too bad and use that as a starting point. The players who rank high in arena and have ~900 crystals a day are who I'm looking at as they can afford all the initial price tier of energy refreshes. While I don't propose providing this to everyone, figuring out a solution to provide energy refreshes more easily to the lower ranked players (who spend minimally anyway) could be reviewed. This puts the player more in control of what to farm and improves their experience.

    Of course with any change that inputs more resources into the economy, there is less need to buy. You just need to find the right balance that increased inflow of resources creates increased player retention and commitment of players to want to "invest" in the game as they feel you want everyone to have a great experience and aren't purely using gambling and psychological tactics to part "users" from their money.

    My definition is very simply not struggling to get gear that was a wall in 2015-17. I WANT a slow grind on signal data, Kyros, G12, and G12+. I would like to see gear below that become as common as blue/green gear used to be when our main grind was getting to g9-11.

    If you can get to g12 fairly easily without having to spend crazy amounts then you can spend to get to g13 or to advance relic levels. You are right that adding things to the economy means less things we need to buy. However they have added new things to buy that are harder to get and more expensive without making old things easy enough to get to keep the grind at a similar level. I’ve played since nearly launch and the net effect is that they have made it worse. They are adding pay gates and not removing old ones, so that’s why it feels like garbage to us despite their list of “charity.”

    That and not rewarding full 7* characters on Epic confrontation events is why gear grinding sucks. It takes a MASSIVE outlay of resources to prepare for Malak and G$. Then you are rewarded with the privilege of grinding which has ruined the experience of unlocking those characters. It felt like ZERO reward. And the effect on the gear grind. All that work, and all that expense and you still need to pay 136,800 GET 1 to PROPERLY use those characters you already should have earned. Do the math on how much gear you can get with that much GET 1, and it’s not hard to see why the gear grind feels so miserable.
  • I know you (CG) have said in the past that you don't want both the Hoth TBs and Geo TBs running at the same time. My proposal below, IMO, I think is a good compromise.

    Every three to six months, during a week that GeoTB is not running, give guilds of a certain power level (to be determined) a **CHOICE** to run a bonus LS Hoth TB (and three to six months later a bonus DS Hoth TBs) for either full or half rewards.

    You (CG) have said/implied in the past that:
    • We don't want to use up too much time of the players.
    • We want to make getting players to G11/G12 easier.
    • We don't want to upset the game economy with too many rewards.

    I say:
    • If the guild thinks the optional bonus Hoth TB is not worth their time, they won't do it.
    • Having extra bonus rewards will help players reach G11/G12
    • If members of the guild are doing Hoth based quests or achievements, they can progress.
    • The game is not flooded with tonnes of extra rewards as the Hoth bonus "event" would only happen two to four times a year.
    • Some players complain about not having enough things to do. Doing a week long event is something to do.
    • Some players are interested in acquiring Rebel Officer Leia Organa and Imperial Probe Droid shards without having to spend GET2 currency.
    • Because Hermit Yoda, Wampa, Malak and General Skywalker all need GET1 currency, there is an ever greater need to play Hoth TBs as they provide much more GET1 currency.

    If you don't think this is a good compromise, can you please explain why?
  • The solution to this gear crunch was putting some of this gear in the GA Championship store. ...Although i don't trust them not to put something critical in that store, so I'm not spending that currency. Crystals are more efficient for gear than GAC.

    https://forums.galaxy-of-heroes.starwars.ea.com/discussion/206309/changes-to-g12-inflow
  • There’s a lot of good proposals here, and I don’t think any of them are being proposed for the first time. The reason we don’t feel the easing of the gear crunch is because demand for gear has raised faster than supply. In addition, stun guns used to be more accessible (being on ship nodes), and now we have to split our regular energy among stun guns, kyros, and g12 finishers.
  • TheRHOMBUS wrote: »
    Tweaking Raid rewards, especially Haat, would help immensely. Remove some of the garbage and add a higher drop % for the G8+ items; guns cuffs carbs.

    Rancor > Haat. And that should be reversed at this stage. And Once Haat is simmable (cough cough) it would act/feel more like another challenge tier for those key gear pieces.

    I wouldn't remove garbage gear. Remember what happened with gold balls. Just add stun guns/cuffs/etc.
  • cannonfodder_iv
    992 posts Member
    edited December 2019
    To turn the question back at the devs, what's a reasonable amount of calendar time to take to bring a character from G11 to G12, assuming that the common bottleneck gear is depleted?

    Specifically, I'm working on getting Ahsoka to G12 to put into a Padme team and prep for GS. She needed two golden eye balls at G10, so I'm out of both components and she needs three. She also needs two stun guns, a cuff, and MK IV Bacta (throw in a MK VI Thermal to round it out).

    Say I finish Top 5 in raids and average 500 crystals per day. How long should this take me?

    Edit: typo
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