This post is a guest post from John Lynch.

I downloaded SW: Galaxy of Heroes mid-December, about a month after it launched. Perusing the list of Star Wars apps, I saw that it was fairly new and decided to try it out. I quite enjoyed it for a while, playing for many hours a day (my battery usage by app was embarrassingly skewed). The further I progressed in the game, the more time I invested. Then, at the end of July, I quit.

Before I explain why, I’ll talk about the basics of the app first.

Its gameplay is quite simple. You unlock characters by collecting shards, enough shards gets you to a certain star level (1 through 7), with a higher star causing a boost in stats. You could further upgrade characters with gear, which you had a chance to get by completing certain missions on the holotable. A higher gear level makes your stats get better, or in some cases add new stats altogether. A nice mechanic was that it didn’t matter what order you starred or geared up a character. The end stats were the same for individual characters. Your Qui-gon had the same stats as my Qui-gon as long as they were the same star amount, character level, and gear level. *Hang on to this part, we’ll revisit it later*

Initially, this was a big part of the game. There were a few other parts, like cantina missions where you could get character shards or daily challenges where you could get valuable materials to level up your abilities or character. Another big aspect is a PvP component called the arena, which went through some minor changes, but generally stayed the same. Unlike other mobile games, your arena pool may be different from someone else’s, making it quite feasible that you and a friend could be number one at the same time, just on a different arena set. This made it extremely free-to-play (F2P) friendly, as it gave out very generous rewards that otherwise had to be purchased using real money.

Note: Personally, I only ever spent $10, excluding Google Rewards survey money, on the game. There were people I interacted with on the forums, Reddit, and my guild however that had spent hundreds or even thousands per month.

Any battle you fight, whether that be PvP or PvE, consists of five Star Wars characters per team (from any part of the Star Wars universe), each going in a turn-based combat order. If you eliminated the opposing team, you win. In some cases, you get better rewards based on how many of your team survived. One character would act as the leader, giving buffs to characters. For example, my most recent team consisted of Phasma as the leader, with Rey, Qui-gon, Royal Guard, and Leia as the other four characters.

There are a few other things I’m leaving out (including Galactic War, which had/has its own benefits and problems, but won’t get into here), but this is a pretty good sample of its framework.

As with other games, it gets addictive, especially since much of the rewards are RNG (random number generation) based. At its core, it was very simple. Along with the gambling factor of getting gear or character shards, many of us were in it due to the collection of Star Wars characters. Some characters you had to pay for (which wasn’t a good deal because you weren’t guaranteed the character you wanted), but the majority were accessible by F2P players.

The first big problem that faced the game is one faced by many that have characters with stats: some are better than others, which leads to a meta being in place (my team sample is an example of the meta at the time I quit). The problem with metas is that they highlight a small sample of characters (say, 7-10) that are useful for competing. Popular characters like Boba Fett, Darth Maul, or Luke Skywalker were rendered useless because they were not part of the meta. However, as annoying as metas are, this is something not uncommon to video games. For a particularly egregious example, check out the SW Galaxy of Heroes subreddit and type in “Poe meta” to the search bar. It was bad. As in, I hate it more than Jar Jar, bad.

A largely avoidable mistake came that was called “pre-crafting”. Basically, certain people were able to gain an advantage over other players because they happened to be on the forums at the right time. Capital Games’s (the dev for EA for this game) solution to the problem was to charge money (around $16 each) for the gear that a small number of people had made in this small window. Again, take a look at Reddit for some of the bigger details.

That brings us to raids, which overall were a great new addition to the game. But, the issue with gear extended into raid rewards. As they had promised, the previously unobtainable gear pieces were available as raid rewards…. maybe. If you got top 5 out of 50 (or something like that), and even then it might be a crappy amount. At the current rate, it would takes months for all but the top players to upgrade their rosters. But to their credit, the developers heard our criticisms and changed the structure. If you completed the top three raid tiers, no matter if you placed 1/50 or 50/50, you’d get some amount of raid gear, with the guaranteed minimum amount going up the better you did.

After this, the devs did a good job of listening to community feedback and adding good quality of life changes. There were still some issues, but most people could look past them.

But everything changed when mods hit.

Prior to rolling them out, I and many others defended the change that was coming. Most changes that happened before were dreaded before they were implemented, but were generally well-received afterward. Some, like raids, needed some tweaks, but were overall good changes. Why should mods be any different?

But mods changed the game completely. Remember when I said that as long as one character was the same level as that same character on someone else’s team they’d be the exact same? Mods threw all that out the window. You could customize characters. This, in theory, sounds like a great idea. But there was (unfortunately) a problem.

A character that used to have 15,000 health plus 10,000 protection (basically a shield stat that acted like another layer of health) could suddenly have 48,000 health and 60,000 protection, more than quadrupling the effective hp. My Royal Guard, a tank character, went from 40k effective hp to nearly 160k. That is not a minor change. Other stats, like critical damage or attack could be affected on a similar scale. Plus, when you upgraded mods, you would get random stats as it got better. So again, RNG could love you or hate you.

What’s more, the energy used to complete mod missions was the same one used to get character shards (though I think this has changed in a recent update), which would hamper people’s ability to collect and upgrade their teams. But mods did have this going for them: you were guaranteed a mod every time you completed a mission.

The devs heard our outcry again (this time within the day). Except this time their response was to announce a change to make mods a random drop, just like everything else. So what did people do? They spent money to make sure they could have as many mods as possible before the change happened.

Moreover, it was stated that the next day mods would cost more to upgrade, which again people spent lots of real world money to make sure they had credits to have the best possible.

The next day, they said that they would tweak the stats of mods in the next day’s update.

By tweak, they meant obliterate.

My character that had 40k effective hp only increased to about 50k, with other stats following suit. If this had been the original effect, we all would have mostly liked it. But now, people had spent lots and lots of money to get something that now meant a lot less.

To recap:

Day 1: Mods introduced, give up to 400% boost of initial stats (and making months of hard-earned gear irrelevant), people spend lots of money because changes to drop rates are coming.

Day 2: Mods will cost more to upgrade. People spend even more money.

Day 3: Mod stats are drastically reduced. People who spent lots of money now have a whole lot of something that only has a very little impact.

This was the straw that broke the camel’s back (and there’s even more mod-related crap I don’t have space to get into).

The game dipped from a consistent top 5 money-making app to somewhere in the 40s overnight. Many long-time players quit. I only stayed because of loyalty to my guild and that an announcement came that EA/CG would be making a statement about the future of mods and their goals for them. I was skeptical, but they had come through before, convincing me I could go on.

What came after was utter bullshit. They called it “Mods Appreciation” where they had a period of a few days where, temporarily, mods would cost less to upgrade and nothing to replace (all this in the in-game money, not real world money). Additionally, they offered gear and mods for money as a way to say “sorry”.

Here’s how I view it. They sold us a product, but then beat us up and took it back without refund. Then they sold it to us again, this time at a 10% discount. Plus, they offered us the product’s accessories at a 25% markup.

I couldn’t take it anymore. I was very forgiving in the past, but this time they messed up way too much.

In retrospect, it’s too bad. Despite being quite simple, it was entertaining for me and many others. It was generous with giving out premium currency to F2P players. In my months of playing, despite only spending $10 on the game, I regularly got top 5 in PvP and top 2 in raids.

I think the game’s problems can be reduced to one aspect: the game’s version, as of this writing, is 0.5.149973. This technically means that everything is still in alpha or beta status. Those of us playing the game are/were the playtesters, many of whom spent tens to hundreds to thousands of dollars a month. I know games like this are released to make money, but this seems unethical (or at least brazen), even for EA.

In the end, I feel lucky that I made it out only having spent $10.

I quit three days ago. I don’t regret it.

*Disclaimer* Due to the changing nature of the game I did my best to make sure my memories were accurate by checking reddit and the official forums, but there may be some small errors with dates or some minor details. Overall this post should reflect the general reality of the game. If you want more in-depth analyses of the game and its history, be sure to visit its subreddit /r/SWGalaxyOfHeroes