mountaineer30680

Well, you could easily start by just giving out some crystals, even a small amount for top-5, top-10, whatever, in those others. Gradually make the changes to level it out. If you communicate the change and ease folks into it, you'd still lose some players, but that's the case with a) any change, or b) staying the same.

You have to admit people are going to receive this claim from y'all dubiously. Especially since you rushed in a special buff to ensure spenders couldn't be beat by FTP, telling us JKA was WAI, then nerfing him, and all the rest. You have a rather large credibility problem right now saying this, because your most recent actions make it look like all you care about is those who will spend large amounts of cash, including the "tip of the spear" comment...

Oh there are crystals in other modes, but it's about where the majority of the source comes from.

The JKA thing is interesting to me, we described the change that we ultimately ended up rolling out in the second paragraph of that section of the post, but I've seen people say "oh I didn't think the part about GR meant a restriction" and I do understand why that's so - but that's just a misunderstanding, so we'll think about that when we write the next explanation, but we just can't always convey our meaning.

Just like "tip of the spear" is just an expression to describe the people who get there first, and when I use it, I'm including the nearly 1k people who got Malak without ever spending $1 in this game. There are a lot of people who pride themselves on being completely F2P and still at the frontlines, and they are very much included in that sentiment.

This is exactly, and I mean, exactly what I want to do. While we introduced modes like TW and GA to create a value for us to diversify the meta, the only way to make them matter is to move the crystals over. Squad Arena alone distributes $300,000 of crystals to players every single day.

The problem is, there’s no way to guarantee the same people who have their crystals on farm from SA would get them from other modes. And we’d have to make sure they could earn those crystals daily.

But I’d do it tomorrow if I thought that it wouldn’t massively disrupt one of the constants of the game for a ton of players.

DemonOfWrath

Yeah, I don't think it has to be trying to respond to every PM or question in the world either.

What I think of when I think of this are some of the blog posts done by some of the Riot teams about things that are inconsequential to the patching process or the direction of the game. Like, one of the coolest bits of communication I read was one where they literally just talked about how they dealt with modernising their code-base and all their tech debt.

I know not everyone will think of it the same way I do, but yeah my own vision is like the forum posts for game updates you guys already do (highly visible, standalone, you get to choose the topic), but just shorter, more informal/bloggish, and about just cool random little things here and there.

Yeah. I love this. It feels a little bit like we can’t get our head above water to do it though.

Here’s what I will do, I will not make the commitment to do this and if it happens to start happening at any point, hopefully it will be a pleasant surprise. :)

DemonOfWrath

So the thing here is stuff like patch notes and the like don't feel like communication, and in fact what I feel could help doesn't have to be anything like that. I'm aware that it's probably not as easy to get things approved as we'd like, but that's also why my suggestions at the top were more along the lines of "here's some cool stats about the last event", or "the arena/GA has had some interesting turns, this is actually kind of cool (or, we don't like it too much)".

I actually liked the stats on the Malak release for instance. Little things that just elaborate on things in the game and how stuff is going, without needing to make promises or give info on potential future stuff.

Basically the issue is that we hear nothing from you guys unless it's either a patch note, an announcement about something new in the game, or when things are going really really bad.

At this stage I reckon you're going to have to just accept the criticism and anger and push through it and keep talking. To be blunt, we really don't have much faith in you guys anymore when it comes to maintaining communication, and that's only going to change through sheer persistence and showing us otherwise.

If a post comes only once a month or so, then all the frustration in that month will get directed at whatever part of it is vulnerable. If there's a post every 3-4 days (even if most of them are about inconsequential stuff, or just neat datapoints) then the same post will probably get far less negativity. I think. Maybe.

Great points. I think we don’t do ourselves any favors by diffusing communications. I have 300 unanswered PMs on our official forums. That’s just me, I know between a handful of other devs we get hundreds a week. Different people sit in different channels of testers and Game Changers etc and each outlet: individual person, group, forum - has a reasonable expectation of response. There’s just no way to keep up.

But because this team is made of people who care, we try to hit those individual touchpoints. It’s why I respond to people on Twitter sometimes, but then it highlights we aren’t saying enough. And that it’s been scattered.

Also, when we talk about intention, I think things can be misconstrued. It’s much easier to be either completely black/white or informal/low-key. Therein lies what I think the community issue is with us.

And you’re right. We just have to talk through it. But it’s challenging to face that head on. Two years ago I didn’t post ever. I don’t think I even had...

StarSon_

I did a quick search and found 4 threads and a mega thread. Even though your forums are hard to navigate, there were so many posts about it, I can't believe you didn't see them.

And, the first thread about it was on April 10th. Leviathan didn't post until just before 10:00 AM Pacific the next day. If the Community Manager can't be around for whatever reason (Celebration, vacation, whatever), how do you not have someone else to watch the forums? I believe there was an Answers post as well.

Edit: And this is just one example. It happens more and more lately. So many details slipping through the cracks. I understand that it happens (I am a developer, I get it), but after it happens, we feel we are ignored. At the top end of this game, we spend so much time and energy that when we feel like you don't care, we stop caring. But in the meantime, it is so very frustrating.

I always try very hard to keep it civil when I complain, but damn if you guys haven't made that difficult this calendar year.

IIRC, it was in the Malak build which we made the somewhat late call to give ourselves another day to work through some beta feedback. For a good portion of the 10th though, we still thought we would have it out on time. When we moved the build, we should have put the MF up anyway but it takes some work to create a separate build and QA it and we’ve been making decisions to de-risk where we can because we’ve had some build issues of late.

But it’s a fair point, the second we made the call to move the build out, we should have posted that the MF would be delayed a day as well.

One of the things we did fairly recently is put a DD over community (not sure what kind of Dev you are or if Development Director has the same meaning that it does at EA), but he’s basically building out better organization and structure for that group. Workflows, etc. I agree it’s been especially sloppy this year, and it’s not for a lack of effort. So we are now coming in with a big process machine over top.

StarSon_

I take issue with you guys calling Crumb a "Community Manager," when his last reply to a thread was over a week ago. He doesn't "manage" anything, he just posts blurbs. Perhaps you need him to be an actual community manager?

The issue is largely that you'll go hours and hours without saying anything, like a few weeks ago when the Falcon event didn't show up. Your Twitter feed was the first mention of it, about a day after we noticed, and it was at least 6 hours after that before it got posted officially on the forums. When that stuff happens, it feels like no one is even reading the forums.

That’s a great example for us to compare notes. Crumb was at Celebration that week (along with a few other people) and running the booth at a convention is a LOT of work. So Leviathan was handling the day in and day out that week. Here’s where the note was posted. Is it because the forums are too hard to navigate?

https://forums.galaxy-of-heroes.starwars.ea.com/discussion/200259/flight-of-the-falcon-starting-april-12th#latest

-WDW-

I have similar feeling and will always maintain that their lack of ability to communicate will be there undoing. There are other EA Star Wars games where they have a strong community manager in place dealing with, interacting with and generally sorting out little niggles.

If I had any advice to Carrie it would be to put in a really clear and obvious structure for communication.

So my advice:

1) A monthly dev post, this could be from any of the team that gives us some stats on what’s happened the previous month and a bit of a heads up on anything coming in the month ahead. 2) A proper PVE calendar and PVP calendar of events, not this outlook calendar nonsense a proper professional post, similar to the battlefront ones so people can see what’s happening. 3) An on going list of known bugs and where they are in terms of fixing them, updated weekly. 4) Monthly or BiMonthly community polls asking for people’s views on some things they are looking at and gathering opinion from more people than just the small circle of players they are currently using. 5) Quarterly Q&A session when the road map lands.
6) Significantly better interaction on the forums and reddit etc, it’s obvious they read this stuff but very rarely interact.

There’s a lot to say here but I agree with a good amount of the sentiment of this thread but I’m responding to this part because it’s basically identical to a calendar we are working up.

For a year we have been staffing to and making the case for why communication like this is needed. I usually make the MMO analogy. But we now have dedicated staff to handle cheating complaints, a community manager, a video artist, a 2D artist, a couple others working on the communications team. But the strategy is a ton of different vectors from Star Wars.com articles to talking to beta players to in-game messaging to the forum posts to a lot of single touchpoint complaints and concerns. Reddit and Twitter are supplementary, not strategy, and most of us do it to try to help but not in an official capacity. (Also it’s a little weird for me to think of it in terms of a quota.)

But it’s also been harder and harder to be on these platforms because the discussion is getting more volatile. I worry about ...

[deleted]

[deleted]

We are aware and will correct this. See the official announcement here: https://forums.galaxy-of-heroes.starwars.ea.com/discussion/203251/issues-with-sith-assassin-rollback

Yepp, we are aware of it.

We already flagged this as a bug with the studio.

StripperMario

Hey I'm having trouble loading the page you linked (i am logged in). I applied some gear to my assassin and havent received the refund just yet.

My ally code is 432-832-698

Thank you

Hi there and thank you for your message. The "sticky" Bot message on top of the thread is cutting the link to the correct page. If you scroll down to my original message you should be able to click the correct link there.

We've flagged this as a bug. See: https://answers.ea.com/t5/Bug-Reports/Event-empire-base-training-phase-4/m-p/7845167#M26034

We've already flagged this as a bug. See: https://answers.ea.com/t5/Bug-Reports/Rebels-Basic-Training-bug/td-p/7841672

Get your friend to get in touch with our Customer Support: https://help.ea.com/en-us/help/star-wars/star-wars-galaxy-heroes/how-to-contact-support-for-star-wars-galaxy-of-heroes/

/u/intheorydp, send me your ticket number and we’ll look into this when we’re back in the office.

We just rolled Sith Assassin back but not GG. Submit a ticket at help.ea.com and DM me your ticket number and we’ll look into it first thing when we’re back in the office.