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| My large son, he is not so bright but he makes up for it in anger |
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So let’s talk about how I got decent at this damn game.
Notice I didn’t
say “good,” I said “decent.”
There is a great
deal of humility in learning how to do something not well, but decently, and
being aware at all times of just how large the gap remains between decent and
well. Perhaps I aspire one day to reach beyond mere mediocrity – but you’ve got
to pay your dues before you can pay the rent.
Something about
video games that I never appreciated before is that they present a windows into
worlds where actions have consequences. Things make sense because players have
to be able to depend on some degree of consistency. Even given the element of
randomness inherent in the game system for something like Galaxy of Heroes, the randomness is predictable. You can set your
watch by it. I know that every different kind of item to be farmed is meted out
according to odds that range from “parsimonious” to “grim.” And it sucks,
sometimes, to do something like drop 200 Cantina Energy in one fell swoop –
which buys 12 shots at node 8-F at the Cantina Battles table, at 16 points a
pop, with half of one left over – and get one measly Veteran Smuggler Chewbacca
shard for my trouble. But I know the next time I have just enough for three
shards – 48 points – I could just as easily get all three shards from all three
chances.
It’s consistent
enough that I can make reasonable common-sense estimates regarding how long
certain things are going to take. In the case of Veteran Smuggler Chewbacca –
well, I didn’t pick just any random character. Right now as of this writing the
biggest question mark on my horizon is whether or not I am going to be able to
get the aforementioned Veteran Snuggler up to the requisite seven stars by the
next time the event comes around for Jedi Training Rey, currently one of the
most powerful characters in the game. He’s one of the five characters you need
to finish the mission to unlock her . . . and he’s the last one I need,
incidentally.
(I should point
out that I literally just now picked up the game, saw that I had 21 Cantina
Points, and bought one go at 8-F – and got one snuggly shard for my trouble. So
it’s just luck. And algorithms.)
Perhaps I should
back up a bit here . . . it’s easy to get lost in the weeds because long-term
plans for this game tend to metastasize, as they generally follow the story
logic of the “swallowed the spider to catch the fly” type. The important thing
to remember is that the most powerful character in the game is currently Darth
Traya.
Yeah, her.
So powerful is
she that the all but two of the top twenty Arena teams in my node have Traya,
and some of them don’t even have her all the way up to seven stars yet. If you
recall, there’s only one way to get Traya, and that’s the Heroic level of the
Sith Temple Raid. And it so happens that the absolute best character for
getting past the most punishingly difficult level of the temple – that’s right,
our boy Captain Tryhard himself, Darth
Nihilus – the character who does it best is none other than Jedi Training Rey.
Please don’t ask
me how. The reason why Nihilus is so
damn annoying in the first place is that he has
some kind of weird protection
regeneration ability that deflects the vast majority of damage – unless, that is, you know how to slide
your damage under the protection, and the character who can do that the
absolute best is Rey with a dedicated Resistance team. The most common team I
see when I look is usually Rey (“JTR”), with the game’s other Rey (“Scavenger”),
BB-8, R2-D2, and the powerful generic Resistance Trooper.
(An aside about
generics: faceless characters like Resistance Trooper, Resistance Pilot, Hoth
Rebel Scout, and Hoth Rebel Soldier are actually important, even though it
really hurts to have to allocate
resources to get my Resistance Trooper up to Gear Level XII when other, cooler
characters who are also significantly less important languish. I’m looking at you, seven-star General Grievous.
Perhaps the most useless rare character in the game, but I love him perhaps not
despite but because of his
uselessness. He tries his best. I’m proud I got my angry son up to seven stars
even though there was literally no reason
to do so except my vague suspicion that he will one day be a Fleet
Commander in the Ships minigame, same as Holdo. Presumably either Hux or Snoke
will one day also be a Fleet Commander for the First Order, since they already have
a lot of ships but still no carrier. Neither Snoke nor Hux are playable yet,
and one must assume the developers are aware of the absences.)
(“Holy shit,” the developer gasps, “you
realize we could do . . . Snoke! He’s in that movie too, we could make him a
playable character!”
“Let me see if I understand you
correctly,” the other developer answers, “Snoke . . . from that movie we saw?”
“Yeah! I was just reading – did you know
that was a Star Wars movie?"
“I suspected as much,” the second
developer mused. “Call it a hunch. But this – this changes everything.”)
So anyway. JTR does something really
quite clever but very complicated and leads her team to a considerable amount
of damage against that punk Nihilus.
This is an
example of everything I hate about the game, by the way. They designed an
essential challenge such that there is really only one viable option, meaning that you’re stuck playing the game at
their pace. Which, I mean, fair enough, it is their game. But I hate being
siloed into a very specific set of actions, especially
when it’s a multi-step process that forces me to build my entire medium-term
plan around accomplishing just this one
thing.
There’s not a lot of creativity in
that kind of game play. In fact, there’s quite a bit of white-knuckle grim determination.
Here we see a big
difference between the game play in Galaxy
of Heroes and the kind of game you’d buy (hopefully as much as possible) all
at once and play in its completed form at home on your TV. My game playing
experience is free, yes. Never paid a single dime. But the game is obviously not designed to help players
like me in ways that discourage us from spending money. There are always
opportunities to get ahead if you’re willing to part with actual hard-earned
currency.
So it’s not as if
long stretches of boring languor are going to get me to rage-quit the game. I
mean, they might in theory. But whereas another type of game might put a
premium on never consciously trying
to frustrate players through sheer tedium, Galaxy
of Heroes has such tedium structured as part of the experience. They always
play fair with free-to-play players – by which I mean, everything is available if
you have the patience. They’re counting on people not having that much
patience.
But over the long
term? As of this writing they have just introduced a maddeningly fiddly new
system for mod enhancements, one that introduces yet another currency into the game economy. Doesn’t look as if they
have any plans to stop expanding the game anytime soon. There’s just a lot to
keep up with. In lieu of being an oil tycoon the only way to stay competitive
in the long term is just to show up and
do the damn farming.
With that said,
there’s really no way for me to be competitive in the Arena anytime soon. I’m
stuck around one hundred on any given day – on a good day I can maybe beat a team
in the seventies, and on a day I don’t pay any attention my team on auto will
tend to settle somewhere around the one-teens. Pretty consistently.
So they’re not a good team. Not even close.
Every character in it is good, but
ultimately they’re a team of utility players without much direction – Emperor
Palpatine on lead, with Vader, Thrawn, Tarkin, and right now, the generic TIE Fighter
pilot in the fifth slot. Even if my team is maxed-out there’s still only so
much that set of characters can do in Arena. Not compared to the wall of Trayas
at the top, or the Jedi and Resistance teams scattered among the Sith for most
of the rest of the Top 50 on any given day.
It’s a
placeholder, basically, because I know
I’m not competitive in that realm. The problem is that the game doesn’t sit
still. Traya is on the top now, but as sure as the sun rises, in a few months
it’ll be someone else. Traya will undoubtedly still be important but will in
her turn recede into precisely the kind of utility player represented by the
likes of . . . Emperor Palpatine, Vader, Thrawn, and Tarkin.
Because, I mean,
I finally got my General Kenobi up to seven stars. Remember him? It’s been an
eventful summer. He’s still very playable,
especially since they’re slowly building Jedi into a competitive faction – all
the Jedi teams in the Top 50 are led by Bastila Shan, another Old Republic
character, about whom I know only that she whomps ass.
It took a couple
years for me to get that General Kenobi. They introduced him, and the original
Tank Raid, when I was just fresh out of my nervous breakdown rushing like a
freight train towards the climactic end of 2016. A different world ago. I was
patient.
The long and the
short of it is that I don’t anticipate being competitive in Arena anytime soon.
I am, however, quite competitive in Ships. And that
might be almost as good.
*
Galaxy of Zeroes
If This Goes On - II
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