"I assure you, Lord Vader..."

CG_Erik
30 posts EA Administrator
edited April 2019
With over 170 characters and 40 ships, Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes has an incredible breadth of character interactions. While that makes for an interesting game, and despite thousands of man-hours of testing per release, it also presents a very difficult challenge in terms of not introducing interactions that create unintended (and potentially game-breaking) consequences - especially as new characters interact with characters that were built over 3 years ago.

It’s not news that after the characters are in the wild and players have had a chance to plug and play with them, that we’ve seen issues in their interactions, increasingly so over the past few releases. That’s not something that we’re proud of - and it’s not a sustainable pattern.

The reality is, as we had the opportunity to discuss with many of you at Celebration, that within the first hour of a character going live the community has eclipsed the total number of hours that we’ve been able to test - and many times over.

None of this is an excuse, it’s our job, and we will continue to work as hard as possible to ensure we minimize these issues as much as possible. There are a number of changes we’re considering making to the testing process - see: Carrie’s recent overtures about our intention to potentially expand our balancing process to something akin to a Public Test Server that you see in complicated games like MMOs. We also need to respond as quickly, and thoughtfully, as we can whenever damaging interactions appear.

Our goal whenever possible is to creatively design around game-breaking bugs, and while we’d prefer to never nerf characters if possible, interactions will occur that are damaging to the long-term health of the game and we are forced to respond. When this happens, we will do whatever we can to rectify the situation as fairly as possible.

Galaxy of Heroes is a game about skillful resource management. And, so while unintended interactions will occur, if that change is counter to information we published which influenced players to make specific investment choices, we will always endeavor to make the situation right - which may look different depending on the situation.

So, that leads us to the current discussion around Sith Assassin. With the release of Darth Revan’s kit, we communicated that Darth Revan synergizes with Sith Assassin. This character remains very competitive in a squad which includes Darth Revan - but does not include Darth Malak.
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Following the release of Darth Malak, some players chose to invest in Sith Assassin expecting Darth Malak’s Gnawing Terror ability to positively work with those characters.

Following the announcement that we were making the adjustment to Malak’s kit, we heard the dissatisfaction from players who made an investment in Sith Assassin, who felt like that change nullified their investment.

We’re looking into returning any gear to your inbox which was applied to Sith Assassin following the announcement of Darth Revan’s synergies on 3/20. Because this sort of wide-scale adjustment of player’s gear isn’t something we’ve had to do before, and because we want to do this right (and not ram out an incomplete solution), we’re not going to commit to a date for this update, but we will continue to communicate updates as we make progress.

Conditions:
  • You must have Darth Revan.
  • You applied any gear pieces to Sith Assassin following the announcement of Darth Revan on 3/20
Note: Please refrain from adding further gear to Sith Assassin until we complete the refund. If you do, those changes may not show up in our data, and you may not be credited.
Additionally, we’ve been monitoring the forums and Reddit and noticed the performance of Jedi Knight Anakin relative to some Darth Malak teams. We have only a limited number of cases to evaluate, but we are actively reviewing data as it comes in. Our intention is that Jedi Knight Anakin should not outperform Darth Malak. We’ll evaluate the cases we are seeing for differentials in mods, levels, abilities, etc. to potentially explain any discrepancies. If this would inform any decisions to gear or level him up, we would ask that you refrain from doing so until we give the all clear on his kit.
Please stay tuned and we’ll give an update as soon as we are able - both on our near-term plans with the Sith Assassin refund and possibly with Jedi Knight Anakin - as well as any potential long-term changes to our testing regime to ensure the quality of these releases are within an acceptable standard.
Thanks for your patience and understanding - and as always, we’ll see you on the Holotables!


-Erik

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