2018-04-05
Electronic Arts

Hello Holotable Heroes,

It's been a busy start to 2018 here at Capital working on the Sith Triumvirate Raid and Quality of Life update. In the context of both of those releases, we have identified some additional items we want to clarify both on the communication and quality of life front, as well as our mapping of the Road Ahead for what's to come.

Communication Moving Forward

One of the widest communications that we put out (outside of the in-game newsletters) is the Road Ahead blog (like this one), which will almost always fall in the first couple of weeks of a quarter and will be posted to both our website and forums. We will add additional Road Aheads as needed, but the idea is that they map out the next few months in Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes.

We are also going to be hosting a Live Q&A in our forums on Friday, April 6th 12PM PDT. After our previous Q&A, we answered over 60 questions from the community, and have posted those responses in our forums.

We are also partnering with our Game Changer and Beta groups to ensure we are maximizing those programs. If you are interested in joining either program, we will be providing information on how to do that in our forums. 

Quality of Life Ongoing Changes

Every client update (major updates that require a new update from your respective mobile app store), we set aside a certain portion of time to devote to quality of life updates and bug fixes. This past February, we released our Quality of Life client update, but it represents a slightly larger spike in an ongoing approach we have to Quality of Life. Specifically, in response to recent community sentiment, we have made changes to the upper limit of Territory War requirements, a change to refreshing arena opponents, and added some additional features to our upcoming TU12 client update, intended to launch inside of this quarter.

Upcoming Content

In anticipation of the upcoming movie, Solo: A Star Wars Story, we are revisiting the Bounty Hunter faction this month inside the game. The Bounty Hunters are getting a new mechanic called "Contracts" and the interplay between the different Contracts and different makeup of the Bounty Hunter squads are going to revitalize their gameplay inside of Galaxy of Heroes. Alongside the rework of some of the existing characters, we will also be introducing the Trandoshan Bossk. One of the most featured Bounty Hunters in the galaxy, Bossk uses his natural Trandoshan hunting instincts to hunt down and capture his targets.

After the Bounty Hunters, we are going to be in full on "Solo" mode. We will start by releasing... you guessed it, another Han Solo (we've seen the memes), and pairing him with the movie's Chewbacca - as the first of a number of characters from the upcoming movie. 

Upcoming Features

One of the biggest areas for improvement in Galaxy of Heroes is our social mechanics. From the literal social features to actual social interplay between players, we acknowledge that there's room to grow. Our upcoming TU12 update plans to attack some of these head on. And while not all of the features are aimed at the elder playerbase, we believe that the value provided by having some of them in game will prove to open up new opportunities for recruiting and competition in a way that you haven't seen before.

One of the biggest features is the improvement to the in-game chat functionality.

Chat, at the moment, operates like a bulletin board inside of a single guild. While it was our intention to make every member of the guild valuable with the addition of Territory Battles and Territory Wars, there's a downside to that value, which is that new friends and new accounts, until they're Territory-ready, can exist alone isolated from the rest of the game. It also makes it hard to find the person or conversation that you most want to have without resorting to a third-party service.

Our additions to chat will enable creating sub-rooms inside of your guild chat to split out the people talking about specific strategies or having officer-only chats inside the game. They will also allow direct messaging between two players, so people who want to be considered for a top guild can provide more information about why they should be included, and officers can communicate positions on the waiting list. Additionally, we will be adding a chat channel that extends to 500 players that exist either in the guild or the ally list of anyone invited. The idea is that while you may spend a lot of time strategizing with your guild, there are people in partner guilds or friends lists that would benefit from the availability of rooms like these.

And with new things to do, come new rewards. Inside of the chat system, we will be introducing the first player vanity item, which will be player set titles. Titles will be visible inside of chat and other social spaces where your guild is usually shown, and you can choose to keep your guild affiliation or choose from a number of unlockable titles to show off inside the game.

And Ships...

We have been working for some time now to revitalize ship content (i.e. introducing a PVE table) and to make some significant changes to the way that ship combat works. Our aim is to speed up that gameplay, make it a lot more dynamic, and get you more bang for your buck with ships. Much more to come on that!

As always, we'll see you on the holotables,

-Carrie Gouskos

Senior Producer