The highly successful mobile game Star Wars: Commander has just been given a few rule changes much to the chagrin of some highly ranked players.  The game has basically been modified to not reward those players who sit and wait to defend their base.  According to Disney Interactive VP of Studio Operations Nate Etter they wanted to modify how players gain medals better balance it out for everyone.

Check out the letter Nate released on the Star Wars: Commander forums below.

Commanders,

As many of you have noticed, today we implemented some changes to medal counts in the game. I wanted to take a few moments to describe the changes, and how they may have affected your own medal counts.

First, some of you may be asking “Why are you changing the way medal counts work in the first place?”

To understand this, we need to go back to the early days of the game. When we first launched, we had a few problems with the way we were calculating player-vs-player matches, and medals. One of them led to players who had very few attacks, but thousands of successful defenses, getting a massive number of medals. (If you’ve looked at the top player leaderboards recently, you’ve probably seen them there.)

Then, a couple weeks ago, we made a few matchmaking changes that resulted in all of these medals being distributed throughout a large number of players that were roughly at Headquarters level 3 – 5. This wasn’t intended, and resulted in very significant medal inflation throughout the community for those players – an unfair and unintended advantage for the people in this group over everyone else.

This is why we needed to act, and make changes to the medal counts for these affected players.

So, what did we change?

The changes made today were about deflating many of the effects of the aforementioned problems, and aligning rewards and incentives in the game toward actively attacking players, instead of “turtling” and just trying to win easy defenses.

We did this by implementing 3 rules, or “caps,” to how medals work. These rules will govern how medals are awarded going forward, and we also re-calculated everyone’s medal counts using these rules.

The rules are as follows:

  1. You cannot have a medal count higher than than 5x your base score. Once you have reached this limit, any additional medals won will not be credited to your account. (To earn more medals, you can upgrade your base to get a higher base score.)
  2. You cannot have a medal count higher than 20x your number of successful attacks. Note that defenses are not counted in this calculation, and this is intentional! As in #1 above, once you have reached this limit, any additional medals won will not be credited to your account.
  3. Your total medal contribution from successful defenses cannot exceed your medal contribution from successful attacks. However, additional medals that exceed this cap are not lost unless they exceeded one of the other two caps. Instead, they are “banked” and will be added to your total medal score as you win attacks in the future.

These changes took effect around 6:00pm PST tonight (Wednesday October 15th, 2014.)

We are confident that these changes will result in much more balanced, and more equitable, leaderboards in the game – something we take very seriously (and we know you do too!)

I want to thank all of you for your patience as we worked through these changes. I know that this update caught some of you by surprise, particularly with the size and scope of the impact, and we could have done a better job communicating it in advance. We’re listening, and will work to be more transparent with upcoming changes in the future.

Thank you for playing!


Nate Etter
Vice President, Studio Operations
Disney Interactive

Charge into battle and lead your troops to victory in Star Wars: Commander, an action-packed, combat strategy mobile game! Build your base, recruit and train an unstoppable force, and challenge players across the Star Wars universe! In the midst of the Galactic Civil War, competing forces need allies for their cause. The Rebellion rallies for justice and freedom, while the Empire seeks control of the galaxy. As an unaligned mercenary returning to Tatooine, a pivotal decision must be made: will you side with the Empire’s strength and technological might, or the Rebellion’s heroism and resourcefulness? The choice is yours as you rise through the ranks as a powerful battlefield commander in this exciting game of strategy and competitive galactic combat!

Available On: Android™, iPad®, iPhone®, iPod touch®, Windows® Phone, Windows Devices