AhnaldT101’s loss may be the Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes community’s gain. After one of his accounts got banned just a few days ago, AhnaldT101, arguably the most popular and influential YouTuber in the SWGoH community, took to YouTube to inform the community of what happened. While he defended his actions, despite being technically against the Terms of Service (TOS) for SWGoH, he also was quick to point out the hypocrisy of EA Capital Games and how they enforce their rules, negotiate with cheaters and turn a blind eye at far more serious situations. This is proving to be a major screwup by Capital Games as they picked the wrong guy to mess with.
Yesterday’s update on the topic discussed the importance of the coverage of this by other Star Wars YouTubers and AhnaldT101 himself, as well as many other whales (per the latest videos from CubsFanHan) have also pledged to stop spending on this game, something I, as the Director of Content of Gaming-fans.com, am fully on-board with. Given I am at 6.7 million GP, that should show that way too much of my own real money has been invested into this game.
While a spending freeze may very well spread across the community, let me be clear in the fact that nobody here wants to ruin Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes. The reason we as Content Creators are bringing light to this topic is WE WANT THIS GAME TO BE AWESOME. Let’s be real – SWGoH is anything but awesome right now, and that is a direct result of how it has been run, most notably the past 18 months. Fix your game Capital Games – your banning of Anhald may be insignificant in your company’s eyes, but this screwup on your part is bringing to light the many things you need to fix. Many of the key points of what we want for the community were listed in this SWGoH Reddit post:
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We need weekly communication.
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There needs to be a dedicated team of devs specifically allocated to bug fixes and QoL full-time until the queue is empty
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We need raids more often. Once every 2-3 years is not acceptable.
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2 Galactic legends and a few marquees are not acceptable “content” for 6 months of releases.
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Open up a line of communication between developers and the community. Q&A’s are infrequent and get cherry-picked for easy topics or bullshit like art and sound. The forums are censored beyond belief.
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Cheating needs to be punished appropriately and independent of spending.
Note that none of these items are Earth-shattering requests. Gaming-fans.com covers several other games including Transformers: Earth Wars, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite and Marvel Strike Force, all of which see multiple updates monthly from the development studio. Bug fixes are something that FoxNext, makers of the competing game Marvel Strike Force knows all about, and while they tend to have 3-4 bugs every time they update they are also quick to fix them and make up for their mistakes, something that is admirable. In addition, none of these other games have the rampant cheating going on to the scale of SWGoH, where CG allows it and only slaps offenders on the wrist. When comparing the studios, Capital Games is by far the lowest-rated across the 5 games and 4 gaming studios we deal with here at Gaming-fans.com (see our SWGoH rating), and even those within the walls of Electronic Arts have felt the dynamic with Capital Games had been strange over the year, noted by multiple YouTubers in recent videos.
So how do we make our voices heard to improve SWGoH? Continue to rise up and like the videos, share articles like this one on social media and make yourself heard on Reddit, the SWGoH forums, etc. All of us have invested countless hours and many of us have invested highly significant amounts of money into SWGoH only to see the developers ignore our requests and treat us poorly. Continually pressing this issue is likely the only way this game will last another 5 years as forcing the studio to act is likely the best scenario for both the community, and likely Capital Games (financially, if they act) in the long-term. The players of SWGoH want a good, healthy game that we can invest our time and money into, but CG first needs to give us a reason to have confidence in the future of the game.
