TOPIC: Grand Arena Championships
Q: Are there any plans for Grand Arena players to see/review the team that defeated their team? This would help players to improve for future matches
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Tophat - Absolutely. In our most recent
State of the Galaxy we talked about this specifically. Building out the system entirely is a bit of a lift (to do quickly), so as an intermediate step we're in the process of seeing what it would take for us to host the information on SWGOH.GG. We've gotten some feedback about players being worried about their counters being exposed, so we're trying to figure out when do we surface the info, do we link it to swgoh.gg accounts, etc? This conversation is in its VERY VERY EARLY STAGES. We don't have any firm idea of what all this looks like other than what we talked about in the State of the Galaxy. Our hope is that we have something more tactical/real that we can share in the next State of the Galaxy.
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Q: What are you doing about cheating in Grand Arena?
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Tophat - We just tackled this broad issue in our latest State of the Galaxy (link above). We are still working on it and trying to make it easier for us to detect it and for you to detect it as well.
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Q: When will you bring back 3v3? It was the single best mode in the game for theorycrafting. It was a tremendous way to use the roster and something that is sorely missed in the game. Since we have been brought back to 5v5, we just see the same stale 5v5 teams. I understand that the initial design of the teams was to have 5 person synergy. But with the lack of content, 3v3 would at least give a fresh perspective on some of the newer character updates. Thanks
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Tophat - We're currently working on it right now. We were discussing about deploying it for the next championship, but we still have some investigations ongoing to make sure it's stable. We don't want to relive the initial release of GAC, so we're taking our time in testing it and making sure it works right. One of the current sequencing ideas we're kicking around is 3v3, 5v5, 3v3 w ships, 5v5 with ships. Our thinking is that order scales to test the collection more broadly while injecting different strategic contexts to react to. Still pretty preliminary in our thinking around it, but feedback is appreciated.
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Q: Can we get an auto-fill when someone only sets one team in Grand Arena please? I cannot complete feats when there are no teams to beat.?
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Tophat - We've talked about it. We're still looking at the auto-fill tech/intent and what all we want it to do. We have some ideas that we need to incentivize setting defenses more or change scoring around the behavior before expanding autofill more. It's definitely a topic of discussion, but lower than conversations around feats, overall scoring, and new types of GAC (3v3, sips, etc).
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Q: Last Q&A (if my memory is correct) it was mentioned that GAC / TW / TB are considered as events so there isn’t a lack of events as the players think it is ie. Assault battlesor omega battles for example
Q: Shouldn’t there be replacement events scheduled when GAC is cancelled or delayed due to unforeseen circumstances to make up for it? Because according to the calendar there should be events running during this timeframe?
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Tophat - That's a reasonable request that is difficult to execute on (sorta). Often times when we run into a GAC, TW, or TB needing to be pulled down we're in "firefighting mode" meaning we need to rapidly do a release to change the calendar because something is bad wrong. That means we're trying to do the release as cleany as possible without introducing any new variables (like new event content). That said, if we use our established events that should be relatively safe... I'm taking the note, it may not be the next one but we'll see if that's something we can layer in. No promises, but hope we can deliver.
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Q: Is there anything on the roadmap that would put more emphasis on the defensive side of GAC? Something like awarding points for an initial hold, adding quests for defensive achievements, additional GAC progression for defensive achievements, etc.?
Q: Thanks for all you do to produce this game!! I love seeing new ways to progress, greatly improved communication, and the chance to interact with you. If you can, join a few more of the popular podcasts when possible. Thanks!!
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Tophat - All I can say is that it's on the list. It's a thing we want to target, but balancing it and making sure we don't over correct on the scoring around defense is a little tricky. It's very much in the "sooner, rather than later" column
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Q: Aside from the new Geo TBs LS and DS (which are challenging, but not really "new content"); will we be getting sometime soon, NEW CONTENT?
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Tophat - I'd love to tell you, but I can't. But we're always working on something...
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Q: When are TW bonuses coming back!?!
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Tophat - Not any time soon. They were expensive to make and balance, divided the community, and had no impact on how much engaged with TW. If we saw in the data that people went crazy for them, then we would do more - but that doesn't seem to be the case.
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Q: Now that u are talking about changing the gear crunch little bit (because of relics), will u bring back Mk 8 BioTech Implant Salvage as HAAT reward?
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Cyanides - Once Relics are released and we have more information on how players are interacting with them/earning them, we will determine if we want to change inflow sources/quantities for existing gear. We recently increased the quantity earned from completing Daily Activities as part of the preperation for gear economy changes.
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Q: You said in the last Q&A that the GAC was supposed to replace arena as the main source of crystal income. When is this going to happen?
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Tophat - Great question. The answer is we don't know. Until we resolve issues that affect fairness (cheating being the primary one) and stability, we won't make the change until then.
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Q: What are the chances of facing the same opponent twice or more in GAC? I fought an opponent in the GAC exhibition and then fought them again in the current GAC?
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Tophat - Our data indicates it's virtually zero, but there are a few players that fall into weird places where this happens to them more often (so often they think we are trolling them). It does occur, but it's a fringe behavior. We are going to review again in the next couple months to make sure it's not happening more.
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Q: When are you going to adjust matchmaking? I sometimes face rosters with way more G13 characters and way better speed mods.
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Tophat - We've gotten a lot of questions around this idea of "making matchmaking better". What we can offer is that we'll be opening up the investigation again soon., but our current set of analyses indicate that the current matchmaking has led to more "pitched" battles (meaning more players are experiencing a 50% win rate) - which for us is the definition of what we're hoping for. We believe that combat experiences that result in regular victories and losses is more exciting, more engaging, and, hopefully, less one sided. We're going to be running another analysis after the current change to matchmaking (where players can't be surfaced matches that are outside their division) has had its first run. We'll also do some analysis around the impact relics have on matchmaking. A number of players have reached out to us about the "mis-weighting" of zetas relative to G13, which we'll review as well. We've said it a number of places, but we are taking match making very seriously and continue to re-evaluate. We'll let you know if there are any changes we think need to occur.
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Q: Matchmaking on the top 80 characters of a roster consisting of 170+ leads to many wild mismatches. Will this be changed to something more reasonable such as 120?
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Tophat - We received a lot of variations on this question. Ultimately, expanding our cutoff point, we just get closer to collection GP which we think is not as good at discriminating matchups (see above for deeper dive around "making matchmaking better". We will continue to monitor the performance of the matchmaking algorithm to ensure a fun and fair experience, but overall are pleased with the switch to effective GP and do not plan to switch back. Whether we do more fine-grained tuning is a different question.
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Q: Why can't we have a meaningful and fair tie-breaker for GAC ties instead of one kind of GP figure or another? For instance award the win to the player with the most 64 Banner wins (then 63/62/etc) if still a draw award to the most 1St time undersized squad wins, and only then use gp if still a tie but aware to the lower gp player (and only playable gp, i.e. not ship gp in a chars only GAC)?
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Tophat - It's been discussed. Right now, we don't see a tremendous number of tie-breakers in general, so from a cost benefit perspective, it's a non-trivial amount of work that affects only a few people. We are likely not going to pick up this work any time soon, as there are a lot of other competing priorities that are higher impact.
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