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| RAAAARGGRRRRRRGGRRRR |
Hey! Before you dig in, did you know that subscribers to my Patreon can now read Galaxy of Zeroes every week-ish (cough) in the virtual pages of The Hurting Gazette?
The double-sized premiere issue, featuring “The First Star Wars Essay,” is still free here.
Thank you for reading!
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So lets talk about Ships.
Everyone hates
the Ships minigame. Everyone has also been pretty vocal about that since they
introduced it. Let’s talk about why.
A normal Arena match
is played with five characters against five other characters (unless you’re
playing something like a raid and therefore attacking the computer). Ships
started out that way as well, with five ships against five ships, with a
carrier for each side. Every fleet needs a carrier – currently the most
powerful and popular carrier, without question, is Thrawn. You do see Admiral
Ackbar and Tarkin as well, but very rarely Mace Windu.
Poor Mace.
Between Clones and Jedi, the Galactic Republic faction actually has a strong
fleet – just not Thrawn strong.
Anyway. When
Ships started, the max time for any game was 7:30, up from the 5:00 of timed
Arena combat. Between the carriers and reinforcements (something unavailable in
any other part of the game), ships games naturally run longer. At the
beginning, they ran so long that they had to nerf half the ships’ defensive
capabilities and reduce the opening number of ships from five to three. They
lowered the max time down to 5:00 at some point in there, and it plays better
now but games still run a lot longer than Arena contests.
If I had to
describe the experience, I’d say if the regular game was baseball, the ships
minigame is baseball for people who really
like sabermetrics. It’s the same game, roughly.
Galaxy of Heroes is a wonky game in a
lot of ways – by which I mean it encourages a wonkish mindset. It’s OK for
things to be kind of boring or even kind of elaborately
boring to an asinine degree, because what they’re trying to do is entice
players to spend money. Much of the game, for me, and I imagine for the
developers as well, consists of testing the patience of even the most committed
free-to-play users, such as myself.
Ships takes the
regular game and adds another layer of fiddly shit in order to scramble
expectations. The presence of static carriers and the use of reinforcements
does give combat its own distinctive feel, but it also makes for longer games.
That’s only a bad thing if people aren’t having fun, but the fact is that the
earliest incarnations of Ships were terrible. It was a slow game seemingly for
no other reason that defenses relative to offensive capabilities were poorly
balanced. People avoid Ships still because, frankly, it just wasn’t very fun
for a very long time.
But something
important regarding Ships, which I believe I’ve mentioned before: the Fleet
Arena is the only source for Fleet Arena tokens, and those are the only tokens
you can use to buy Zeta materials. And as I know I’ve mentioned Zeta abilities
represent the most significant upgrade in the game.
So if you’re
following along so far, let’s now talk about the game’s single biggest Achilles
heel.
The developers
manage a pretty tight grip on the metagame, and they do this primarily through making
powerful new characters that lead the game precisely in the direction they want
to go. Sith were dominant in the meta for a long time – and still are, as of
this writing – but they’ve been putting a lot of effort into rebuilding Jedi
the past few months. They’re not completely competitive yet. Twenty-two out of
the top twenty-five teams on my Arena node are currently led by Darth Traya,
with two led by Bastila Shan and one lonely team led by good ol’ Emperor
Palpatine.
Jedi have been on
the receiving end of a concerted effort to reboot the faction for a few months,
after being completely unplayable for most of the game’s existence. General
Kenobi has always been good, but General Kenobi was also the only playable Jedi
for long stretches of the game’s history. They started with goosing Grand
Master Yoda’s stats to make both of his Zeta abilities more effective. His
Leader ability still isn’t anyone’s favorite, but otherwise they succeeded in
making him a lot more formidable. Actually kind of a tiny green cyclone of
pain, which is probably what Yoda looks like to you if Yoda wants to beat your
ass.
Beat your ass I will, but enjoy the
exercise of violence I will not . . . much.
But, everyone
already has Grand Master Yoda, and a lot of people even already had his Zeta
abilities, so that one upgrade wasn’t going to push anyone to spend a lot of
money. Which is why they introduced Bastila Shan right after, telegraphing her
significance before putting her on sale for a month.
And that makes sense. They want me to
drop either crystals (which cost money) or, preferably, human money. There’s no way to get enough crystals to be able to
afford to buy the latest character packs when they appear – and I will point
out, the character packs in the store often do not include set amounts of
shards. Right now the going rate is 1,299 crystals for anywhere from 5-330
character shards. And I probably don’t have to tell you the payoff for those
isn’t always the best.
Or you can pay
$19.99 American dollars for 30 shards, guaranteed, which is about the going
rate. It varies a bit depending on how hot the character is. After the first
month or so they start selling premium characters in the Shipments store for a
slightly better freight – right now you can get 4 Bastila shards for 320
crystals, so you can do the math on that.
The only way to
get that many crystals, the amount you would need to ever be able to justify
actually buying new character shards in the store, is by winning in the Arena.
First place in the Arena – which goes out every night at 7:00 PM – gets 500
crystals and 900 Squad Arena Tokens. (Squad Arena Tokens aren’t that valuable
except for the fact that the Squad Arena Store is the only Store that sells the
Prestige ability materials which you need to upgrade your Carriers for Ships –
there was an old lady who swallowed the fly.)
By contrast,
coming in First in Ships gets you only 400 crystals, along with 1,800 Fleet
Arena tokens. (Remember, Zeta mats cost 2,000 Fleet Arena tokens and every Zeta
ability requires twenty Zeta mats. See what I mean about the math starting to
stack up?)
If you’re
thinking, wait a minute, 400 really isn’t a lot
less than 500, well . . . that’s a very good point. Because the thing with the
Ships minigame, it’s simply a much smaller game. Ships didn’t start until the
game had already been going for a while, and there just aren’t as many ships in
the game as characters. Even once they started releasing ships at a steady pace
alongside characters, there are just fewer ships in the Star Wars universe than
characters. Around the time of the release of Rogue One they added nine Rebel characters to the game, but only
two Rebel ships, to give you the idea. Now, you needed many of those characters
to fly their ships, but fewer than nine.
*
Galaxy of Zeroes
If This Goes On - II
The Bad News Bears Go To Dantooine
1
2
3
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1 comment :
Thanks great bblog
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