Cyanide wanted to know how to ease the crunch

Replies

  • Spang
    286 posts Member
    TVF wrote: »
    I don't find stun cuffs to be any kind of bottleneck since they're constantly available for a decent rate in the guild store.

    Stun guns were manageable via the guild event store until Malak happened and via fleet until the g12 easing happened.

    Biotechs are a problem but availability via guild store lessens it slightly.

    I wouldn't touch stun cuffs. But I do think stun guns and biotech should have a little increased availability. More on the guns side I think. Maybe add them to guild store as well for the same price as raid gear.

    I agree. Although stun cuffs are also required for 3 purple and 1 gold gear, I think they're managable. Stun guns and biotech gear pieces (both prototype and salvage), on the other hand, are way too big bottlenecks besides G12, G12+ and G13 finishers.
    For example, I'm stuck at 2/4 of the Sith Master prestigious quest for many-many months now, coz I don't want to waste 3 biotechs, 2 stun guns, and 1 stun cuff on a really outdated character that I used maybe once or twice since the end of the Maul "meta".
  • TVF
    36518 posts Member
    I don't think a quest is a good argument for easing gear.
    I need a new message here. https://discord.gg/AmStGTH
  • leef
    13458 posts Member
    His response to that question was flippant and dripping with condescending undertones. No one should reasonably believe they want to do anything about the gear crunch. The devs truly do not care about community suggestions. That should be clear by now.

    Isn't the Q&A itself a community suggestion though? ;)
    Save water, drink champagne!
  • Spang
    286 posts Member
    TVF wrote: »
    I don't think a quest is a good argument for easing gear.

    You really have a knack for debating/contradicting even if somebody agrees with you. I wonder how could you have only 17907 posts on this forum.

    nekt9fmd0wx0.gif
  • Ultra
    11449 posts Moderator
    Spang wrote: »
    TVF wrote: »
    I don't think a quest is a good argument for easing gear.

    You really have a knack for debating/contradicting even if somebody agrees with you. I wonder how could you have only 17907 posts on this forum.

    nekt9fmd0wx0.gif
    A lot of contradictions in these parts
  • TVF
    36518 posts Member
    Spang wrote: »
    TVF wrote: »
    I don't think a quest is a good argument for easing gear.

    You really have a knack for debating/contradicting even if somebody agrees with you. I wonder how could you have only 17907 posts on this forum.

    I'm serious though.
    I need a new message here. https://discord.gg/AmStGTH
  • Adding a dedicated slot in the shard shop for guns or orbs would go a long way to easing the crunch, as you could just buy them whenever you have the shard currency. But I doubt they'd do that because you can refresh the store for crystals.
    xSWCr - Nov '15 shard - swgoh.gg kalidor-m
  • My take on it:
    I know there have been changes made to ease the gear crunch. For me, the kryotech on the dailies felt the best.
    Part of the challenge, is that players need to "feel" like the crunch has been helped, which is entirely subjective and will vary between each player. Reducing the cost of ship nodes doesn't help the feeling because of the daily RNG involved. Negative experiences stick in mind much longer than positive ones, so the day where I go 0 of 16 is remembered more than 6 of 16. Or that I only used to be able to do 14 attempts with that same amount of energy. (honestly, I forget the ship node changes ever happened until it gets mentioned. sorry)
    The other issue, is that we've had the same gear crunch for a very long time. Mk 5 Stun Guns have been a gear gate for...longer than I've been playing. And instead of getting better, the crunch gets worse (until you hit the magical place of all characters G12). New characters require more stun guns and carbantis than older characters (exceptions like General Carbanti do exist). For example, Enfys Nest to go from G11 to G12, 3 gold eyeballs, 3 stun guns, 1 stun cuff and some misc things. That is only 1 character for 1 gear level. That's insane.
    Contributing to this issue is power creep. When most players gear Phoenix, the general cut off is "as good as you need to unlock Thrawn." Why? Because they're not that good of a squad anymore, and you need to save as many Stun Guns/Carbs as possible. Hench why many players stop gearing them about Gear 8. However, we don't get that option anymore. There are hard number requirements for Epic encounters and both of the new Territory battles. You cannot even use a character until 17500 power. That means a G10 7 star character feels as useless to the player as 1 star level 1 character. So you have to slog through multiple levels of gear crunch that offer no direct benefit to the player. These are entire squads that I may or may not be remotely interested in, that I must give resources to if I want to hope to be competitive or to even experience the content.

    So what can be done?
    Many people suggest a new tier of dailies. This would help, providing an average of 45 more carbanti shards a week, because there is a new tier, and because its a noticeable change, it will feel much better to players. (all my opinion)(assuming the current average is 4 per daily attempt, and the new average would be 7.5 on a range of 5 to 10)
    Another suggestion I've seen and think will help, is reducing the number of shards required to craft a full piece. IE, 20 carbanti shards to craft a full carbanit. change Mk 5 Stun Guns to be 30 carbanit shards and 30 Stun Gun shards. This kind of change can feel huge. (I understand the need to make money off crystal->gear sales, but even changing the carbanti/stun cuff/stun gun tier to 40 shards per piece would help the gear grind immensely.
    A different suggestion that would help in the long term but won't be as felt, would be to change gear around character design. Lets say you have a new faction of 7 characters. Maybe the 3rd or 4th best character gets designed differently so that it value agility very hightly. This character only has 1 stun gun in its gear cycle, and very few carbanti. Maybe the character is designed around critical strikes and avoidance. This helps the grind because its a new character that is used (key points) that doesn't effect that stun gun tier of gear. Unfortunately, I don't think this will help all that much for the feeling of the gear crunch, but it would help.
    New events, or new character introductions, could be used to introduce more in the stun gun tier of gear. Again, it would ease the gear crunch but I'm not sure it would be "felt" by the player base.
    Maybe with the new Legendary event structure, allow players to replay it once a week for bonus gear.
    Overall, I suggest doing something that the players can earn and then benefit from in the long run. It needs to be either a large numbers change, or something new for the players to experience.
    Just my thoughts. Good Luck.
  • He didn't ask "how to ease" the gear crunch...he asked what are people's expectations about the term "ease", meaning how much do people think the gear crunch should be "eased" up. It's clear that a lot of people had a vastly different expectation than what CG intended and thought the phrase "easing" the gear crunch meant we were suddenly going to be swimming in stun guns and G12+ pieces.
  • JacenRoe
    3016 posts Member
    edited December 2019
    He didn't ask "how to ease" the gear crunch...he asked what are people's expectations about the term "ease", meaning how much do people think the gear crunch should be "eased" up. It's clear that a lot of people had a vastly different expectation than what CG intended and thought the phrase "easing" the gear crunch meant we were suddenly going to be swimming in stun guns and G12+ pieces.

    That’s a misleading oversimplification.

    In the old days it was REALLY easy to complete g8 and get to g9. Then there were a variety of hard to grind pieces that caused you to hit a wall. You had to slowly grind away to complete g9-11.

    Having added G12, G13 (including Kyros), and 7 relic levels that require signal data and more hard to get G12+ pieces being scrapped... that’s a drastically harder grind than the old G9-11 days. However, a grind is necessary, and we all want CG to make a metric $*** ton of money. So that’s fine... however, struggling against that AND still struggling with gear before that is too much.

    It’s not without precedent. I remember when a stun cuff was a seemingly insurmountable goal. At the same time I couldn’t actually focus on farming them because I constantly had to spend days farming blue junk like MK 3 Droid Callers. Then they added those blue droid callers to challenges, and I’ve never farmed one since. So yeah, previous walls should be obsolete. They should not continue to gate progress significantly. Stun guns need to become the new MK 3 Droid Caller because Kyrotechs have become the new stun gun. Those there is a very good argument for “swimming” in.

    G12 plus should still be a gate, but that one they could lighten up a little only at the bottom of the guild. Top ten Sith Raid rewards are solid. 11-50 are junk, and unfair to the 80% of the guild who contributed tickets, and (in my guild at least) are 95% as good at the raid as the top 10 players, and all have the same gear needs. So keep 1-10 the same. SLIGHTLY bump up 11-50, or let us earn a little more G12+ with some new content we are actually capable of completing.

    That is a far cry from saying we just want to swim in free stuff.
  • @CG_Cyanides to add on to OP.

    This game is far more advanced compared to what the current challenges give. CG really needs to look at the daily challenges. There are 5 days of challenges, and the only useful thing you get is Carbs. Im at 4.2m GP and I think that others will agree, literally all the other gear you get just stockpiles
  • TVF
    36518 posts Member
    Eyeballs.
    I need a new message here. https://discord.gg/AmStGTH
  • What about a weekly login calendar? So instead of just a monthly calendar with crystals and whatnot, there is a weekly calendar with this gear in it that resets after 7 days, or resets if you miss a day?
  • jonnysiniwal
    675 posts Member
    edited December 2019
    This company is bringing in millions of dollars. We shouldn't have to advocate for their bottom line. It is disgusting that the customer has been tricked into looking after CGs profits. Let me tell you are a secret... They are fine. They can afford to ease the early bottleneck. They can afford to remove it completely. Any claim to the contrary is a lie and you are being played if you believe it.
  • What are peoples thoughts on adding a calendar to help with the gear crunch? So in addition to the monthly calendar, we could have a weekly calendar that gives specific gear over 7 days. It resets every 7 days or if you miss a login. It could feature specific gear like stun guns and eye balls and as the week goes on, you could get more gear like day one gets 4 stun guns, but day 6 gets 6-7 stun guns. I like this personally as it's a passive way to help with gear collecting so that I could get the gear I need over time while focusing on other aspects of the game.
  • ZAP wrote: »
    Several comments from this cyanide person lately proves he really doesn’t understand several aspects of this game.


    Incorrect. He doesn't care. They have no interest in changing the fact that old content is gated in a way that is annoying to even veteran players who should be beyond it. If they were going to do anything about this g12 finishers would not require stun cuffs/guns/collars. Stop listening to their mealy mouthed statements and start looking at their actions.
  • Some suggestions on how to ease the gear crunch. (For now & for the future)


    1. Put gear in more locations.
    The double blue energy was great but when you removed the critical gear from those locations you killed farming for all the newer folks.
    Maybe if I had hundreds of G11/12 characters the G12 gear would be nice but as an 8 month player the loss of blue for Guns/Carbantis really hurt.
    Ditto the GET store. I myself use it still but I can see why SOO many folks don't who are leveling the 4 characters in that store.

    Probably the easiest thing to do would be to give the critical items their own slot in the Shard Store & take them out of the "rotation" slots much how Col. Stark & Young Solo were given in the Guild Store.
    That way we are not getting the stuff "free", and, we are no longer waiting on the RNG gods to bless us with Guns more than once every few days.

    **************************


    2. Yes, create a new challenge level & upgrade it with items that are in demand instead of all the crud that are in the current challenges that you had to create an entire new aspect of the game just to use them.
    Seriously, has anyone looked at why those pieces were ever included in challenges to begin with?

    But no it doesn't need to be 5 full stun guns a month. Fix it at 2 Shards. 10/Day = 30/Week. 120/Month.

    While your at it, can you remove the RNG from the other items? Carbantis are 3-7, but no one ever sees that full spectrum. Lock it at 5/sim & its a slight boost over the average & avoids the complaints of 3 being too common & 7 never being seen.

    Basically give all the RNG the "Zeta" treatment. That was a HUGE change IMHO for both total #s but also in the annoyance factor of streaks of never seeing one.

    ***************************


    3. Stop using the same piece over & over again when you design a character.

    Every time I see a pair of MkIII Carbantis in the same level, or 1 of them AND a Stun Gun 5 which includes the Mk3 in it, I think.

    "Would it have killed them to use the MK1 Carbanti here for even more stats & I have some in the bank?"

    There are plenty of lower tier gear items with stats similar to the really hard farms.
    All I'm saying is use one of those every time you start double tapping us w/ multiple slow farm items in a single gear tier.

    Or use a Mk2 Nubian or Mk4 Power Cell instead of the 2nd/3rd Mk4 Keypad used for every level.

    Just saying a little variety in item choices would go a long way in future character design & the eternal crunch.

    *************************

    4. Stop using the same piece Inside upper level pieces. (Hint Hint - Stun Gun 5 Inside the Stun Gun 6)

    ***************************

    5. Stop using items that are insanely hard to farm & yet give stats that aren't appropriate to the character's role.

    Why am I wasting a Support/Healer (Tactics) item for my Old Ben at G11 ??? All that does is take away from my farming of Palpatine, Jolee, Bastila, etc etc.
    Give him a STR/HP based item (That isn't another Stun Gun) to improve the character or if you don't want stats for him for "game balance" issues then make it a throw away item that I have 1000+ of.

    Seriously has anyone looked at all the wasted items we use up by giving multiple Agility Syringes to Healers ??

    *************************


    Obviously some of these are fixes for right now while others are more for future character creation but to me little is more demoralizing than upgrading a gear level & when I open up the new level there is ZERO slots that will be easy to fill because I see multiple Cuffs, Carbantis, Fusion Cores, Droid Callers, & Stun Guns just laid out in multiples for that level.
  • This is something that would be greatly appreciated by the players and easily achievable by the devs, so it'll never see the light of day
  • This company is bringing in millions of dollars. We shouldn't have to advocate for their bottom line. It is disgusting that the customer has been tricked into looking after CGs profits. Let me tell you are a secret... They are fine. They can afford to ease the early bottleneck. They can afford to remove it completely. Any claim to the contrary is a lie and you are being played if you believe it.

    I’m not advocating for them. That’s absurd. I am recognizing a reality. They won’t make content unless they rake in absurd amounts of money. There will always be gear paywalls. They will never take them down entirely. That being the case, what is a reasonable argument for removing some old ones even though it won’t happen.
  • JacenRoe wrote: »
    This company is bringing in millions of dollars. We shouldn't have to advocate for their bottom line. It is disgusting that the customer has been tricked into looking after CGs profits. Let me tell you are a secret... They are fine. They can afford to ease the early bottleneck. They can afford to remove it completely. Any claim to the contrary is a lie and you are being played if you believe it.

    I’m not advocating for them. That’s absurd. I am recognizing a reality. They won’t make content unless they rake in absurd amounts of money. There will always be gear paywalls. They will never take them down entirely. That being the case, what is a reasonable argument for removing some old ones even though it won’t happen.

    There are a lot of great suggestions, but that isn't my point. My point is that we all need to stop operating under the notion that they can't address this. They absolutely can. They simply refuse to do anything but make it worse. Their is no advantage to being delusional about why they are doing the exact opposite of easing the crunch.

    Does anyone honestly believe this million dollar revenue stream would collapse if stun guns were a little more available? Because that is how they talk and it gets repeated by a lot of players. It needs to stop.
  • While this is an interesting idea, and I like it, I feel like its just a different form of the give us a new tier of challenges event.

    I feel like both this idea AND the idea for a new tier of challenges are good but also both require the Devs to work on a project that isn't a "quick fix".

    To me the easiest option is to take the existing challenges rewards list & just tweak what is in there.

    That way they aren't creating entirely new content.

    Today's Tier-V rewards for the Tarkin/STR event list for example.

    Mk8 Eyeball Implant Salvage (Max 4)
    Mk3 Carbanti Salvage (Max 7, Avg 4?)
    Mk4 DroidCaller Salvage (Max 5)
    Mk4 Keypad Salvage (Max 5, Avg 4?)
    Mk4 Armor Mod Salvage (Max 9)
    Credits - 800


    Now tweak this exact mission rewards

    Mk8 Eyeball COMPONENT Salvage (Fixed at 2)
    Mk3 Carbanti Salvage (Fixed at 5)
    Mk5 DroidCaller Salvage (Fixed at 2)
    Mk4 Keypad Salvage (Fixed at 5)
    Mk1 Armor Mod (Fixed at 2)
    Credits - 2000


    Minor changes from unused items to over used items that are blocks.

    Reduces the max to a lower fixed amount so they don't give away the farm.


    This was done to keep the # of icons the same but you could just as easily fix the #s and then add in the 3 rare items too if # of icons on the screen isn't a major coding issue.

  • Don't get your hopes up. CG has no interested in fixing the gear bottlenecks.
  • Austin9370 wrote: »
    JacenRoe wrote: »
    This company is bringing in millions of dollars. We shouldn't have to advocate for their bottom line. It is disgusting that the customer has been tricked into looking after CGs profits. Let me tell you are a secret... They are fine. They can afford to ease the early bottleneck. They can afford to remove it completely. Any claim to the contrary is a lie and you are being played if you believe it.

    I’m not advocating for them. That’s absurd. I am recognizing a reality. They won’t make content unless they rake in absurd amounts of money. There will always be gear paywalls. They will never take them down entirely. That being the case, what is a reasonable argument for removing some old ones even though it won’t happen.

    There are a lot of great suggestions, but that isn't my point. My point is that we all need to stop operating under the notion that they can't address this. They absolutely can. They simply refuse to do anything but make it worse. Their is no advantage to being delusional about why they are doing the exact opposite of easing the crunch.

    Does anyone honestly believe this million dollar revenue stream would collapse if stun guns were a little more available? Because that is how they talk and it gets repeated by a lot of players. It needs to stop.

    I will tell you that they have a financial model indicating that if X stun guns are added monthly, Y will be the $$$ impact.

    Whatever those numbers are, they aren't ready to give up.


    That is my point. The ever worsening crunch and why they won't deal with it becomes really easy to understand in those terms. They have done that math, and the equation told them to make it worse which is what they did. So they added all the crunch gear to g12 finishers right on top of the kyros that they claimed would ease the grind. This is exactly what I mean when I say to stop listening to their words and look at their actions. Most of these Q&A sessions are propaganda and double talk.
  • KKatarn wrote: »
    Don't get your hopes up. CG has no interested in fixing the gear bottlenecks.

    But we could all think of creative ideas and solutions and pose them to the game devs OR we could all just complain so that they don't see the ideas under all the complaining.
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