Guys, they’re the finishers.
Carrie, is the GA/TW mod glitch being fixed in the upcoming title update as previously stated?
I've seen many times and have recorded instances where the speeds of toons are not working correctly and I believe it to be different than the glitch/exploit that's been previously brought up.
Yup, we have had this fix done for a couple months, TMoney from Operation Metaverse brought it to us so we could address it without it being out in the public, and for that I'm super grateful. Glad the fix is going live soon though. People will have to l2p. :)
Mostly software/game development talk:
Internal build: The version of the game they are currently testing and debugging.
Live build: The version we play.
"crossing the t's and dotting the i's": Just an idiom meaning you need to check everything carefully
0-2: currently between 0 and 2 zetas drop (not sure what the other thing she referred to
shop tabs: She talked about reordering the shop tabs so the ones you go to more often are together
TU16 polish: I think TU16 means the 16th major release of the game (where you need to install an update). Polish meaning the last few bits before submitting the new version to the app store
reduce friction: stuff that makes the game slower and more obnoxious to play for no good reason (here scrolling between shop tabs all the time)
hope that helps
Perfectly described. Apologies for not making it more user friendly! TU16 is the (very) soon update.
Let’s make this the most upvoted post to balance the hate CG crumb caught for his “compensation” post. This is much better news, and also feels much more genuine and not as much a last minute back peddle.
Ugh, I did not do that on purpose. Crumb was delivering the news that was the reality of how things are that you didn't like, but were 100% my fault, and then I get to come in here after we've discussed everyone's concerns and talk about all my hopes and dreams and change things willy nilly. He's constantly advocating for the community in meetings, so feel free to direct your hate at me still.
Perfectly described. Apologies for not making it more user friendly! TU16 is the (very) soon update.
With the way things are setup. It doesn't surprise me that the way Devs and player see data and drop rates is different.
Dev sees it from a total player pool perspective. They see 33% of the player base receiving zeta drops from a player base in the millions.
What they don't see is you, you who sees yourself as the individual player (being that 66%) that miss out, again, again, Again, AGain, AGAin, AGAIn, and AGAIN!!!!
This is a really good description of the tendencies we fall into in development. In many cases we walk through the player experience, either in mockup/wireframe or build where we sit there and simulate what it looks like, and this is where employees playing the game really helps (and the fact that we have many different player types - John Salera would not rest about the Ewoks until we beefed them up, because he's completely F2P and that's his main squad).
That's also why my brain shortcircuited in the meeting because you go "I definitely saw that somewhere, I remember we changed that, where did that change".
And also sometimes when we're rushed we skip the player perception step and rely on the math. And that's where we get our "Luck is probability taking personally" problems. We need to do better about touch and feel and experience... and yes, in some cases, drop rates too.
Read moreThanks for posting this, because I was looking for an in to talk about it. In the third hour of rambling my head off, I said two things that were too close to "not necessarily true" for my comfort that I want to clarify. I usually try to give myself an out, like "I don't recall if that's live, but it should be" but I would totally understand why it seems that way. It's because I spend as much time playing internal builds and having discussions as I do playing the live build. Usually when I'm posting here, I run around and get clarity, but I didn't do that because we recorded over the weekend, and I should have fact checked the following day and asked for an edit but forgot.
So we started investigating where that ended up, we DID end up taking 0-2 off things that you never saw, so that doesn't get me any brownie points. And so I sincerely apologize for not being clear when I should have checked or at least followed up and requested we edit out my babbling nonsense. The reality is, I a...
Read moreSo you’ve never heard of this patent but your bosses have asked you about implementing the exact patent regularly? Hard to believe...
This is one of the most deceptive practices you could implement in a business model that already relies on withholding key info from players.
You’re too honest Carrie which is a good thing for consumers at least.
I want nothing to do with anything remotely like this.
I know nothing about patents. The CONCEPT is very common in video games. I’ve been asked if we would offer dynamic purchases, etc., and we said no and that’s the end of it. But I left the door open that there are many people more powerful than me so I can’t say “never ever” (I made this mistake once talking about Real ID to Eurogamer and had to write profuse apologies to the BioWare doctors, so I’d like to avoid if possible).
If we do it, we will communicate it.
We are removing this immediately and will be patching it into the build this evening. My sincerest apologies that this is in the game, I have no earthly idea why it happened, but we will be looking into it.
“Does that mean we’ll never do it? I can’t say that...”
The fact that I gave myself the out should be proof positive that I’m telling the truth. If I were lying why bother with the caveat? I gave myself that out because I have a lot of bosses and this is something we have been asked for regularly. Many F2P mobile games do it (I can’t speak to which ones, it’s just considered industry standard); and the team does not want to do it.
And as I said in other posts, because we’ve talked about changing drop rates in the player’s favor (Monte Carlo system), that would be a dynamic pricing change. So there are always chance we will use it in a positive way.
If we ever make this change we will announce it in advance so people know.
Read moreThe Monte Carlo system would be a welcome QoL change some day. Dota 2 uses a similar mechanic for bashes with a % chance. I believe they call it "pseudo-random" chance
I agree. Mostly so I can stop talking about probability and randomness with people. :) Randomness isn’t a perfect spread across variables. It’s random. And it isn’t “fair”. I’d like to nudge towards fairness if we can.
I’ve never seen that patent before so I can’t speak to it, but let me clarify - we do no difficulty tuning or targeted offers at all. All drops are a fixed rate.
We have talked about a Monte Carlo system which actually increases your odds if you don’t get a drop after a few rolls. But that isn’t in the game because we don’t have the tech.
The only targeting we do is that we have some “lifecycle packs” that get offered to people as they’re leveling up, but they can only be bought once and they get offered to all players.
Thanks for posting. The last error occurred over 30 minutes ago, so you should be safe again. Message here: https://forums.galaxy-of-heroes.starwars.ea.com/discussion/203908/territory-wars-errors/p1?new=1
Two things:
Why is it a problem to not have a guarantee that the same players are able to farm the same amount of crystals from additional game modes? Someone that performs well in all game modes outside of SA essentially gets no additional crystals. That seems unbalanced to me.
Yes, large crystal rewards in top SA spots has been a constant in the game... but in general for a vast majority of players SA is nothing but a constant source of frustration. This has been exacerbated recently with the impenetrable nature of the last 3 meta squads.
Is utter and complete domination by one team something we should expect to continue? It seems like you’ve expressed a desire to change that but it has not come to fruition.
It's not a problem to have crystals from other sources, we add crystals all the time. The issue is the major inflow has been squad arena, and it's dependable. And it's not just one group of people, lots of people rely on it.
Singular team domination is absolutely not the intention, but it will take time. We need to message clearly and make changes incrementally. The game has been out for three and a half years, and when we make changes, they're not always well received, so messaging, describing our intent, and slowly moving that way is how we do it. I realize that in being slow, people think that means our intentions change, but sometimes it's easier to show on reflection (basically the introduction of TB/TW represents a year plus path for the gameplay involving social connections and guild play that has been very intentional, but would have sounded crazy/too slow if we tried to describe it up front).
Read moreWell, 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.
Read moreThis 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.
Read moreYeah, 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. :)
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...
Read moreI 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.
... Read moreI 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?