They just need to stop with easy modes. Make everything hard to complete. Get some more separation between casual players.
This is a _mobile_ game. Everyone is a casual player. Even the whales have serious hobbies that don't revolve around playing a game while they take a dump.
First off @CG_JohnSalera please understand my post is not meant to slam anyone or come across as me being a ****. I apologize up front if it is. Just asking questions and stating things from myself and guild mates about our experiences.
That being said, being sneaky about it is just plane wrong. Everyone noticed a big change. Folks were posting about the difficulty increase right away and thought it was a bug that rolled out when Teebo was reworked.
Then @BentWookiee was commenting on people's posts about it asking if there was a bug and if it needed to be fixed or not. Why was he not even informed of this change taking place?
I don't understand how the goal with the June 15th update was to make GW take less of our time... Just to rework it 2 weeks later, (with what's seeming to be an under the table job), and make it take longer? All of that and now for many (including half my guild) are unable to even finish GW due to the massive increase in squads we face?
Pre June 15th, GW would take myself along with many in my guild around 1 1/2 hours to complete. We all hated how long and boring it was. Some of us ran into time issues. Due to how long it took, we just couldn't complete them every day.
The June 15th update was amazing. All of us could play it out and take around 15-20 minutes. This was especially good since GW happens to be a guild challenge as well. So having to put in only 45-60 minutes vs up to 3-4 1/2 hours for some in my guild to try and complete 36 nodes was so much better.
Post June 29ths sneaky tweak, half my guild cannot even finish the new tweaked mode. While some are getting a very easy node 12 after 3-4 crazy tough battles, some of us are getting 4-5 crazy hard battles with some moderately hard battles mixed in. The time frame is right back up to about an hour+ to complete for most of my guild as they have stated in our guild chat and offline chat. Which means when GW guild challenge comes back around... We all dread it again. I mean, if you're going to keep it THIS hard, at least give us the rewards that make completing it worth while. Bc right now, the rewards are not worth the headache this has become once again.
Final thoughts, this is now just one more thing that is killing the game and the guild I'm in. With how incredibly long it take to farm anything, getting gear, improving toons and now the chore of GW again, the guild is becoming stagnant with almost no growth to our squads.
That's the end of my discussion about GW. Keeping it on point, I'll go to other threads to discuss my thoughts on other topics (lightly touched in the previous paragraph)
Thank you folks for taking the time to read my book. I hope you found it as good feedback to the daily struggle my T6 raid guild is having with the June 29th GW "tweak"
I wanted to give an update on Galactic War tuning.
Before I get into it, I want to reiterate that the goals of this feature continue to be:
Provide a real challenge to players. In other words: it’s meant to be hard!
Provide a place in the game where your entire collection can be brought to bear. Potentially every character can help you succeed.
Provide a “war of attrition” where health is persisted as you progressed in battles.
Provide a place where there’s an ever-evolving set of challenges in terms of which characters / parties / builds can be most effective. (As more characters are released, and as more types of builds are discovered and developed by the players, this will become increasingly true.)
Well the way I see it the fundamental issue here is that there's a striking design contradiction between the first and second points here. I can understand if these are intended design pillars, but they're fighting each other and the end result of that is always going to be a muddled execution - a feature that no one, probably including the design team at CG, is entirely sure how it's supposed to feel.
Providing a real challenge is well and good, but in a game like GoH, the GW system can't actually achieve that. First because it relies on the player having sufficiently built characters up enough to complete the battles and to complete them repeatedly. Since the system has to hinge the strength of the opponent teams to some kind of data, this means that pragmatically, the player can only win these fights with the characters they've most built up. The GW nodes are either hard enough to damage the player's top team or they are not. If so, any characters that fall below that threshhold will just get torn to pieces.
As for point two, the player just can't bring his entire collection to bear. Why would the player ever use any characters other than his top line up? Especially since most people don't want to spend 5 minutes or longer per fight, in twelve consecutive battles. The impetus here is clear - win the early nodes as effortlessly as possible. Once you've played long enough, you'll have a reserve line-up, but if the GW node team is strong enough to pose a risk to your top tier team, the reserve characters won't be able to pick up that slack. At the moment you begin to suffer actual losses, you've hit the wall and won't beat the GW series as a result. More strikingly, since the GW uses arena teams as the targets, you see the same series of characters constantly. It's just Sidious, Phasma, Luminara, etc. - over and over. There's such a heavily restrained variety of what you face. If "bringing your entire collection to bear" is a design mandate of GW, then CG has really really missed that mark -- missing the mark on design goal 2, means you inherently miss the mark on design goal 4. The challenges don't evolve, because you're fighting the same types of line-ups on every single node. The only noticeable difference is how strong the team selected is, and that tends to manifest in a "knife's edge" fashion. Either the enemy team will destroy you, or you will destroy them. There's no variety equation to solve here - field your strongest team because you will constantly face the teams built on the meta-in-favor. What teams to run in Arena is an efficiency equation being solved by thousands of players in unison. They'll inexorably arrive at the solution, and do so very very quickly. If the meta changes, the arena teams will change, but the variety problem won't change a bit.
Reading this thread, it certainly seems that recent update may have knocked something in the balancing algorithm out of whack. That seems to be an entirely fixable issue, but the less fixable issue is that pulling arena teams is going to generate exactly the kind of tedious monotony that's described by nearly ever poster in thread. I, for one, would sure like to stop seeing Luminara in 90% of the GW teams I fight. I'd like to see a whole lot less of Vader, Sidious, QGJ, Jedi Consular, etc. There are dozens of characters I might well have never seen in a GW team.
If you ask me (and sure, nobody did, but I'll gamble that CG reads these threads)
--Stop pulling arena teams as the GW squads. This will almost certainly never generate anything but monotonous line ups. Develop an algorithm to compose auto-generated enemy teams by automatically leveling and gearing randomly selected characters to a target difficulty.
--Actually give the player the capacity to field variety within in their own squad without compromising the ability to complete nodes. I'd suggest something alone these lines -- turn the ally leader slot in the squad into a "power up slot". The player can stick any character he owns in this slot and it will be powered up automatically (but only for that particular fight) to be at parity with the GW node team. These would create numerous benefits, not the least of which is letting the player actually use any character he owns, and letting him see what that character will play like once he has powered it up. The strongest delivery on the fielding the whole team notion would be power fixing the player's entire squad here, but that's a compromise I'd be very surprised to see.
--Speed this whole ordeal up by reducing the number of GW nodes and redistributing the rewards.
I don't normally read long posts and I just wanted to say enjoyed yours.
My patience with the incompetence of EA is at an end. The 12th node had all 7 stars and fully geared to the tilt. I didn't even know the protection bar could be divided so much. I'm happy some are finding GW easy, but most are not. Your attacks on others posting their frustration is truly childish, just disagree. I could beat GW before the change and easily after it, and the time required was fitting for a mobile game, not like it is now. Guess the money I did spent in this game is a reward for the fun My son and I had playing up to now, so I'm just cutting loses and leaving this wreak of a game alone for sometime or just deleting it and gain time in our day back. My son and I can easily find another game to enjoy together.
The reasons for the increased difficulty is glaringly obvious. If your teams cannot beat them then you must build them up. Most do not have the time. So they must spend more cash. Or quit. If they are F2P walking away is easy. If they have already spent money, EA/CG is hoping you'll spend more to remain competitive. The changes were made to increase revenues. The ball is in your court now. Will you invest more time and money, or...?
So it's harder....get a grip people. Rise to the challenge. Get stronger. Iron Sharpens Iron!!!!
For many it isn't hard. It's completely impossible. And without being able to beat it to get the rewards, they won't get stronger. Iron may sharpen iron, but it crushes flesh to a bloody pulp.
Just adding in one more voice to this, my best arena team is barely 30K power, I only have three 7* characters and one g10 character, the rest are either 8 or 9. My level is 78 so I only have toons level 76/77. So my last node has 5 level 80 characters, three at g10 and the other two at g9. And of course they have RG and st han, plus two droids and GS just to top it off. I tried twice and I already know that there's no hope of ever winning this fight. I can get rank 70 on my best days in the arena, you expect me to fight teams that belong in the top 5? I can throw my entire roster of toons at this team and I'll never win. I tried my B squad, they never even got off a single hit before they were leveled. If this is how it will be, I'm never going to finish GW again. I've got 81 GW completes, guess I'll never hit that 150. Not for two months when I might have several level 80 squads that I can throw at this. Thanks?
Time to ignore GW again until they fix their mistake. Ridiculously long and difficult. I don't mind a challenge but the current balancing isn't worth the effort.
I take away my original praise (and thanks) for the developers, or whom ever was in charge of making the decision for the first roll-back/ change to GW. It was a MUCH needed change to a section of the game that is BEYOND REDICULIOUS! You made a intelligent decision to fix this last month... And then quickly went and screwed it all up,again.
You listen to the sheep too much, you will never please them on this forum, nor anywhere else...there will always be whining / crying/ people who have nothing better to do then complain about anything and everything. Some advice that maybe you've never heard before... "you cannot please everyone". Stop trying to make the game something everyone can enjoy or be happy with, it WILL NEVER HAPPEN.
The reality here is that this is a game... Most importantly remember that, after all, this just a mobile game at that. It SHOULD NOT be meant to cause hours and hours of game play. That is not what mobile gaming is about; hence the term "mobile gaming". Someone who wants to spend hours and hours upon days and days playing a game should invest in a PlayStation or Xbox console that is what they were intended for... But I have already wasted too much of my life and time trying to explain to you what you (CG) should ready know, but I digress. I'm talking out of endless frustration towards endless stupidity and realize I'm just wasting my time and energy again...
What I'm trying to say is; you fixed it and now you --- again... Way to go, good job! (that is sarcasm, in case you did not catch it).
It's not like they made it pretty much impossible to beat right? Crap....
Well it's not like it's inconsistent now right? Oh wait some players get Gear lvl 3 teams on the final node and some don't... Crap
Well at least you're fighting teams at or near your level right? Oh dang, you guys increased the power level on the hard nodes by 15%.... Triple Crap
The only saving grace is that, with the credit crunch, you guys increased the total rewards for doing GW considering you ramped up the difficulty and time it takes to complete it. Oh ******* hell... Crap.
TL;DR GW is crap now.
I have beaten GW flawlessly every single time since I was level 40. Today was my first loss in 6 months since that time. G10 Toons and plenty of 9 and 8 ones. Finish top 50 every day at least, etc.
Fix this CRAP.
Keep in mind. John S. said it needed to be more challenging, so they adjusted it, and it stll doesn 't seem challenging enough. If I understand that right, it means GW will get even harder?
While I personally prefer a full rework of the GW system, here's another idea.
Front load all of the current Galactic War rewards into the first 6 nodes, and make the second half "challenge" nodes for random shard rewards and maybe random gear but no other payout. That way basically everyone can get the full credit and GW token bounty, and players that enjoy GW can continue on for bonus non-progression essential rewards.
The point of GW in the first place was to have a really good roster, not to be to use one team to run through it in 20 minutes or less. However it doesn't matter if you go up against Evasion lead/double taunt/rey teams every single time. Not to mention they are always heavily geared. I wouldn't mind losing to a team that is unique. But this is really ridiculous. Am I alone?
So let me see if I have this straight. Everyone complained that GW took too long and was just a pain. So they made it easier, even though it took just as long. Then they snuck in a tuning to make it harder, so not only does it take longer, but it is almost unfinishable. In fact with a strong roster of 27 7* over gear 7 toons I couldn't finish it.
Time to take a break from GW again. Just not worth the time and effort after the latest tweak. Add these bad updates to the flood of bug exploiters with maxed gear that were able to walk away with their spoils and this game gets less and less addictive by the day.
Keep in mind. John S. said it needed to be more challenging, so they adjusted it, and it stll doesn 't seem challenging enough. If I understand that right, it means GW will get even harder?
And they say I'm crazy..
The way it is at the moment it doesn't matter if your lvl 50 like my wife is or lvl 80 w/38k squad power like I am, Galatic Wars is a challenge. I made sure to upgrade Baris's gear today cause it looks like I'm gonna need it.
While I personally prefer a full rework of the GW system, here's another idea.
Front load all of the current Galactic War rewards into the first 6 nodes, and make the second half "challenge" nodes for random shard rewards and maybe random gear but no other payout. That way basically everyone can get the full credit and GW token bounty, and players that enjoy GW can continue on for bonus non-progression essential rewards.
Yeah I agree, it's not worth the time. True success only comes from trial and error in learning the npcs moves and planning accordingly the second or third attempt at a node . How is that fun ??
I don't think this would work in practice. Nobody has to play GW but we feel compelled because we don't want to miss out on the rewards and fall behind all the other players. If there was an easy mode with lower rewards we would still feel we have to grind through the hard mode to get the same rewards as everyone else. It would just be another way of opting out, which nobody would want to do. And we already have a partial reward system in GW because you can just do, say, six nodes instead of twelve.
I get the idea but I don't think it actually adds anything.
Replies
This is a _mobile_ game. Everyone is a casual player. Even the whales have serious hobbies that don't revolve around playing a game while they take a dump.
That being said, being sneaky about it is just plane wrong. Everyone noticed a big change. Folks were posting about the difficulty increase right away and thought it was a bug that rolled out when Teebo was reworked.
Then @BentWookiee was commenting on people's posts about it asking if there was a bug and if it needed to be fixed or not. Why was he not even informed of this change taking place?
I don't understand how the goal with the June 15th update was to make GW take less of our time... Just to rework it 2 weeks later, (with what's seeming to be an under the table job), and make it take longer? All of that and now for many (including half my guild) are unable to even finish GW due to the massive increase in squads we face?
Pre June 15th, GW would take myself along with many in my guild around 1 1/2 hours to complete. We all hated how long and boring it was. Some of us ran into time issues. Due to how long it took, we just couldn't complete them every day.
The June 15th update was amazing. All of us could play it out and take around 15-20 minutes. This was especially good since GW happens to be a guild challenge as well. So having to put in only 45-60 minutes vs up to 3-4 1/2 hours for some in my guild to try and complete 36 nodes was so much better.
Post June 29ths sneaky tweak, half my guild cannot even finish the new tweaked mode. While some are getting a very easy node 12 after 3-4 crazy tough battles, some of us are getting 4-5 crazy hard battles with some moderately hard battles mixed in. The time frame is right back up to about an hour+ to complete for most of my guild as they have stated in our guild chat and offline chat. Which means when GW guild challenge comes back around... We all dread it again. I mean, if you're going to keep it THIS hard, at least give us the rewards that make completing it worth while. Bc right now, the rewards are not worth the headache this has become once again.
Final thoughts, this is now just one more thing that is killing the game and the guild I'm in. With how incredibly long it take to farm anything, getting gear, improving toons and now the chore of GW again, the guild is becoming stagnant with almost no growth to our squads.
That's the end of my discussion about GW. Keeping it on point, I'll go to other threads to discuss my thoughts on other topics (lightly touched in the previous paragraph)
Thank you folks for taking the time to read my book. I hope you found it as good feedback to the daily struggle my T6 raid guild is having with the June 29th GW "tweak"
I don't normally read long posts and I just wanted to say enjoyed yours.
LMAO
warmonkey
I take away my original praise (and thanks) for the developers, or whom ever was in charge of making the decision for the first roll-back/ change to GW. It was a MUCH needed change to a section of the game that is BEYOND REDICULIOUS! You made a intelligent decision to fix this last month... And then quickly went and screwed it all up,again.
You listen to the sheep too much, you will never please them on this forum, nor anywhere else...there will always be whining / crying/ people who have nothing better to do then complain about anything and everything. Some advice that maybe you've never heard before... "you cannot please everyone". Stop trying to make the game something everyone can enjoy or be happy with, it WILL NEVER HAPPEN.
The reality here is that this is a game... Most importantly remember that, after all, this just a mobile game at that. It SHOULD NOT be meant to cause hours and hours of game play. That is not what mobile gaming is about; hence the term "mobile gaming". Someone who wants to spend hours and hours upon days and days playing a game should invest in a PlayStation or Xbox console that is what they were intended for... But I have already wasted too much of my life and time trying to explain to you what you (CG) should ready know, but I digress. I'm talking out of endless frustration towards endless stupidity and realize I'm just wasting my time and energy again...
What I'm trying to say is; you fixed it and now you --- again... Way to go, good job! (that is sarcasm, in case you did not catch it).
Edit: removed language
Well it's not like it's inconsistent now right? Oh wait some players get Gear lvl 3 teams on the final node and some don't... Crap
Well at least you're fighting teams at or near your level right? Oh dang, you guys increased the power level on the hard nodes by 15%.... Triple Crap
The only saving grace is that, with the credit crunch, you guys increased the total rewards for doing GW considering you ramped up the difficulty and time it takes to complete it. Oh ******* hell... Crap.
TL;DR GW is crap now.
I have beaten GW flawlessly every single time since I was level 40. Today was my first loss in 6 months since that time. G10 Toons and plenty of 9 and 8 ones. Finish top 50 every day at least, etc.
Fix this CRAP.
And they say I'm crazy..
Front load all of the current Galactic War rewards into the first 6 nodes, and make the second half "challenge" nodes for random shard rewards and maybe random gear but no other payout. That way basically everyone can get the full credit and GW token bounty, and players that enjoy GW can continue on for bonus non-progression essential rewards.
Today I'm on node 8 and have had 6 maxed dodge meta arena teams in a row.
What is going on here @CG_JohnSalera ????????????
Guess I'm done with this game mode again until it's fixed properly.
My time is valuable and this is a waste of it, when a game wastes my time I spend less time caring and playing.
The way it is at the moment it doesn't matter if your lvl 50 like my wife is or lvl 80 w/38k squad power like I am, Galatic Wars is a challenge. I made sure to upgrade Baris's gear today cause it looks like I'm gonna need it.
+1 logical, reasonable, sensible. I like it.
I get the idea but I don't think it actually adds anything.