I've been playing the mobile game Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes by Capital Games (division of EA) for a pretty long time. I think I've been through two Christmas seasons playing the game. I think the time is better measured in years than months. I've also blown some money it in that time, but I'm restraining myself and spending less as I realize that the game is not set up to reward you. It's a machine to suck in people who get addicted and convince them to spend more money. I get that it's a business that has to make money, but it seems like their entire plan is to create a sort of gambling situation where you can keep spending more money to try to get the things you want, and you usually don't get it. It's like a slot machine. And the "game" is... well... dull. There's really not anything to do in the game that's fun. When I pick up my PS4 controller and play through the Resident Evil 2 Remake, I am having fun. I'm being told a story. I'm experiencing tension and anticipation. And I get to work my way through a GAME. Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes (SWGOH) is not really a game. You can't just play it. Everything you do in the game is in service of collecting stuff to power up your characters and ships with. And there are limits to how much you can do. And you have to be part of a guild for some of it. And the only way to break the limits and get to what you want more quickly than half a year is to pay more money.
I can describe Resident Evil 2 Remake as a survival horror game that includes solving puzzles and a decent story. SWGOH is a sort of collectible card game type of thing where you collect characters and ships; you power them up through ridiculous jumping of hurdles; and in the end the game is some PvP of your stuff versus other people's stuff. And you get rank. And based on your rank you get some rewards that are essentially more things for leveling up your character. It's mind numbing. It's pointless. It's not even fun. It feels like the responsibility of doing a job except you don't get paid. So, why do I play?
Why I play is probably a combination of a few things. First is that I love Star Wars. Second is that I enjoy collection. So, obtaining characters and ships appeals to me. The third (more depressing) reason is probably the "sunk cost fallacy". I spent a fair amount of money on this game to get a little bit more of whatever I needed at the time to get characters, power them up, and get more characters. I have that feeling that I should keep playing because I already spent money it, and somehow if I keep playing the expenditure won't have been a waste, but if I quit it will have been a waste.
The short version of this blog post is that if you enjoy PvP a lot; if you like Star Wars; and if you like collecting things, you might enjoy Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes. But for the most part, the game is bad and you should probably avoid it. The real reason for this blog post is so I an describe in detail what you do in the game...
When I wake up in the morning, it's usually before everyone else and it's a little bit of quiet time for me. I play my two main mobile games to make sure I can get through the daily quests to maximize my rewards in game each day. I start with SWGOH mostly to get through it and get it done. The first thing I do is open the Squad Arena section which is the basic PvP thing you can do. I pick an opponent and start it up, and I let it go on automatic so I don't have to pay attention while it's running. I pick the most powerful foe I can so it ends faster. I don't care about winning. I care about letting it do that because one of the daily quests is to fight two squad arena fights each day. And I would run two in a row to get them over with, but there's a 10 minute wait between fights. That's why I do one first, so that the time can go by while I do the other things. The next thing I do is open up the free Bronzium Data Card in the store. It's not usually anything impressive, but it's another daily quest to do that counts toward the total of having completed all the daily quests. After that I go into the Cantina Battles Section. It's a PvE (player vs environment) thing you can do. You have energy that recharges slowly and you spend that energy to play through a fight where you can earn stuff including character shards which is one way you can power up characters. So, you pick a fight that gives you shards for a character you're trying to power up. You can earn 1 or 2 shards with the energy you have at max. And it takes over 300 shards to max out a character on this axis of power improvement. So, in three and a half months you can probably earn enough shards to max out one character through the cantina battles. Yeah... so... whatever. They offer the ability to "sim" the battles once you're earned three stars in defeating the battle so you don't have to waste time playing through the fight anymore. But that makes it into nothing but a chore. Alright, new paragraph...
After Cantina Battles, I move on over to the Mod Challenges. It's the same basic thing as the Cantina Battles except what you're hoping to earn are called mods. They are another way you can power up your character, so you want to collect LOTS of these things. Each character has six slots for mods (each a different shape). Combinations of mods can have added effects. AND you can level up the modes themselves to make them more powerful. And you can bump up the rarity of the better mods to make them more powerful. Yeah... More of a chore. yay. I use up my energy gambling on mods, hoping to get good ones, or on the mod resources you can use to increase the rarity. It's another thing you can sim, so you don't have to waste time playing through nine or so fights. You just click and get your stuff.
After mod battle is Challenges. It's another PvE thing where if you get 3 stars in a fight, you can sim it. If you get 3 stars in the most difficult fights, they even give the convenience of being able to sim all the daily challenges together with one button instead of 2 to 6 buttons. You get in-game money, training materials, gear materials, and materials to help power up your characters in another way. Whatever.
Then you do the Light Side or Dark Side Battles. They are another PvE thing where you earn resources and character shards (like Cantina Battles), and they share one energy pool. So, you pick the character you want to work on and sim that fight hoping for a shard or if you're lucky: two shards. There are a very few characters that have multiple fights and fewer that have fights in both the Cantina Battles and the Light/Dark Side Battles, so don't get your hopes up that this will really help you power up any characters faster. Anyway, I do my 6+ fights by sim, and move on.
Next is the Galactic War section. You can earn some character shards and another type of in-game currency. It's kind of a PvP-lite sort of thing. You fight against another team some other player put together, and you fight through something like 30 fights to get to the end and complete the war. Each day to complete the daily quest, you just need to fight one fight. But if you want the in-game currency you could go through all the fights in one day if you want. This might be the most fun part of the game because you can fiddle with trying different teams of your own against whatever team comes up as the next fight. It might be the only place you can experiment and try out some of your other squads without risking your ranking. Anyway, on to ships...
The ships section is where you switch focus to your fleet instead of your characters. It has a Challenges section for the same kind of resources you can get for the characters but for the ships. It has a Fleet Battles secion which is like the Light/Dark Side battles section. And it has a Fleet Arena section which is like the Squad Arena section, but again for the ships instead of the characters. I do all the challenges by clicking on the sim button over and over. I use up my fleet energy in the Fleet Battles hoping to earn ship shards. And I play one PvP fight in the Fleet Arena because that's what you have to do to earn all the daily quest rewards. It's the same as Squad arena. I pick the toughest foe I can so it goes quickly. I don't care about winning. Just the daily quest.
I go back to the main page and look at the Shipments section. It's where you can the ELEVEN types of in-game currency to buy things like character shards and gear upgrade resources. One of the daily quests is to get at least three things from the Shipments section. I go through each sub-section and buy what I want that I have the currency for.
By now the timer should be done in the squad arena, so I get my second PvP match in. Set it to auto and pay attention to something else for a couple minutes while it goes. Once it's done, I go the objectives section and collect all the rewards for completing the daily quests. I check the mail because you get some of your rewards that way from other things. I should mention that there's a PvP thing called Grand Arena that seems to happen a lot. I tried it once, and hated it. What a stupid thing that was. You get rewards, but it requires too much effort to be worth it. It's awful. I won't play Grand Arena again.
Anyway, I check out the events because sometimes they're the only way to get certain things, but mostly because you can get good amounts of resources and character shards. I play through what I can using sim as much as possible. Finally, I check out the Guild section. If the guild has a raid going I'll participate. I'll check the exchange to see if I have a lot of something that other people need and donate it to them. And if there's a guild event going on I'll participate in that too. If you want the original trilogy straight up Han Solo character (you can get other versions of Han like when he's in Stormtrooper armor, when he's young, when he's old...), you pretty much have to get those shards through one of the guild raids. If you want Princess Leia shards for her Hoth version, you have to participate in the guild event that offers those shards. These are just like all the other things you can do in this game. They are not fun things to do. They are chores that get you what you need to gather more characters and make them more powerful.
Now that I've done all that to collect things to make characters more powerful, how do you make characters more powerful? Imagine your job is to shift all the sand from a beach onto another beach, and the only tool you're allowed to use or touch the sand with is a paper clip. How long would that take you? You'd finish moving the sand before you can make your characters powerful enough to compete with the high ranked players. I've been playing for what I think is two years and I haven't managed to get even one character to a powerful enough upgrade that I can use something called relics. I remember when they introduced relics. They sounded happy to introduce them. But I haven't used that feature at all. Ever. It's stupid. And that's something to keep in mind. The game is designed to make the whales happy. And of course by whales, I mean the people willing to spend big money. Early on, I spent probably $100 a month... way too much. But because I didn't start playing at the beginning, I was too far behind to catch up. And, the game is designed for the big whales. That's it. They don't care about you. They don't seem to care about new players or retaining them. They only seem to care about those people who played from the start and are spending huge money. Let me tell you what it takes to power up a character.
Once you (the player) are level 85, you can level up your characters to that level. Hooray. There's a fair amount of time and work that goes into getting yourself to that point. Enjoy that crawl. Anyway, characters have 5 axes that get powered up...
- Level: This is the basic level 1 through 85. You have to be max level for other things and makes the character a tiny bit more powerful.
- Stars: This is what you collect character shards for. The lowest a character can be is 1 star, and the highest is 7 stars. This has a decent bearing on how powerful the character is, but also controls what events they can participate in. They have to be high enough in stars to work for certain guild events for example.
- Skills: Characters come with different numbers of skills and each one represents something they can use in combat. It'll be things like buffing your team, attacking enemies, applying debuffs to enemies, healing, and so on. Each skill can be level 1 to level 8 (max). Each skill requires certain resources (earned through some of those daily quests) to level them up. This process is super slow.
- Mods: These are the six things you assign to your character to give them some upgrades. You choose the trait you want to focus on and pick mods that match that trait. Oh and each mod is from level 1 to 15, so you have to spend more credits to level those up.
- Gear: Your character has a gear level. My most powerful characters are at gear level 12. I spent a fair amount of money to make that happen. But this seems to be the most important thing for how powerful your character really is. Gear level 13 is when you can start working on the relic for the character. So, I don't know what that's like yet. The materials you need for increasing gear levels come from those things you do for daily quests, but also from guild activities. Importantly, it's the higher gear level resources that come from the guild stuff. You can buy some of it with real money (buying crystals and then just purchasing it), but that's the rabbit hole they want everyone to go down. It takes so many resources to get one character up by one gear level that it's ridiculous. After my two years or so of playing I have ONE team that is decently powerful, but not powerful enough to use all the features of the game.
I think I hate this game. Collecting enough shards to get a character to 7 stars can be months of patience. One character. Literal months of playing every day hoping you get shards for that character. And then the gear level... it gives me a headache thinking about it. Yup, I hate the game. It's not even a game. It's a chore with decoration I like and I've spent money so I don't want to give up.
I just did a search to see how many players they have, and I found out they have something between 70 and 80 million players, and made something like 900 million so far. I guess they're doing something right. That's a lot of players and a lot of money. I was going to write a few ideas for them to change things here, but I can't think of any reason for them to care what I think.
My recommendation...
- You love PvP, Star Wars, and don't mind spending too much money: Play the game. I also recommend the $100 starter bundle. It gets you pretty far into the process.
- You love Star Wars and enjoy collection style games: The game will be frustrating. I'd avoid it. But if you're good at NOT spending money and have boundless patience, give it a shot.
- Anything else: Skip it.
