Zeta Event that may not happen:
Look, nothing is official until it's official, but in the datamines there's information that if you have at least ONE (1) JKCK toon at 7 stars, then you will be eligible for bonus zeta drops. Actual wording under spoiler since it's obviously subject to change/cancellation:
There are two reasons I bring this up. The first is that if this happens, it might be useful for folks short on Zetas to have a couple extra days to finish up JKCK toons so that they can access the event.
But the second is about CG. Not terribly long ago I put up a thread called "CG, Could you look at your Zeta economy?" The idea was that as someone who listens to a lot of other people, I'd been hearing about zeta shortages. And when I looked at my own zetas, I had about the same as a year before, but was on the verge of Leia and dropping a bunch. So I wasn't growing in zeta cache, and depending on the timing of the comparison, it was possible that I was falling behind a little. I wasn't worried for myself long term, but the fact that an end game player wasn't able to increase her stash lended credence to the idea that mid and earlier players might be falling farther behind. Combine all that with the fact that Omicrons have superseded zetas, and I thought the economy was worth a look.
That thread went up 2 months ago tomorrow, and we're now hearing that it's very possible (very likely?) that we going to get a temporary zeta boost.
What does that tell me? A couple of things.
First, I probably wasn't wrong that the economy was marginal. There are always bottlenecks and there always should be, but as the game grows we don't expect that things we grew past needing to worry about will suddenly become things we have to actively manage again. The indications were that the economy was marginal and based on this ... it probably was.
Second it tells me that CG probably agrees that Omicrons should be the new bottleneck for Ability upgrades. We don't have infinite Omega materials, but it's been a hugely long time since I have had to think about them at all. The idea of not applying an Omega because I'm low on mats is silly for someone at my stage of the game. While we're not there with zetas, it looks like Omicrons will be moving zetas more towards the level of importance and management concern that Omegas now occupy. ("Towards" doesn't mean that it will reach that level soon, just that it's moving in that direction.)
Third, I just want to point out to people who think that CG never reads the forums and doesn't care about player experience that this is one situation in which we asked for something and we're quickly finding out what CG thinks and, if this event turns out to happen the way the datamine suggests it will, we're getting a positive response with relatively rapid action.
I don't know how many zetas will drop for me on those 3 days, and I don't know if any future zeta bonuses will happen, but I think this is a great step. It doesn't require them to make permanent decisions about what the zeta economy will eventually become. A different release cadence or number of zetas per character over the next year is always possible, and permanent changes to the economy risk being inappropriate to that release rate. I think a temporary boost to Zetas while they monitor the economy over the longer term is a great step that rewards people who bought Lightspeed Bundles as well as the people who have invested in the game over the long term.
Thanks, CG, for reading the forums and acting when we have good arguments and reasonable requests. I hope that people remember this the next time pessimism sets in and someone starts saying you don't care about your players.
And for the rest of you -- snag that first JKCK character if you don't have one already and get ready to swim through your zeta mat vault like Scrooge McDuck.
INBOX_BONUS_DROP_ZETA_MESSAGE
For a limited time, Zeta Ability Materials have been added to Cantina Battle nodes as bonus drops for all Players who have one or more of the following units:
- 7-star Cal Kestis
- 7-star Cere Junda
- 7-star Merrin
- 7-star Tarfful
- 7-star Saw Gerrera
During this event, the drop rate on each node has been scaled to Cantina Energy. Cantina Battles are rewarding bonus drops from 12/12/2023 through 12/14/2023.
For a limited time, Zeta Ability Materials have been added to Cantina Battle nodes as bonus drops for all Players who have one or more of the following units:
- 7-star Cal Kestis
- 7-star Cere Junda
- 7-star Merrin
- 7-star Tarfful
- 7-star Saw Gerrera
During this event, the drop rate on each node has been scaled to Cantina Energy. Cantina Battles are rewarding bonus drops from 12/12/2023 through 12/14/2023.
There are two reasons I bring this up. The first is that if this happens, it might be useful for folks short on Zetas to have a couple extra days to finish up JKCK toons so that they can access the event.
But the second is about CG. Not terribly long ago I put up a thread called "CG, Could you look at your Zeta economy?" The idea was that as someone who listens to a lot of other people, I'd been hearing about zeta shortages. And when I looked at my own zetas, I had about the same as a year before, but was on the verge of Leia and dropping a bunch. So I wasn't growing in zeta cache, and depending on the timing of the comparison, it was possible that I was falling behind a little. I wasn't worried for myself long term, but the fact that an end game player wasn't able to increase her stash lended credence to the idea that mid and earlier players might be falling farther behind. Combine all that with the fact that Omicrons have superseded zetas, and I thought the economy was worth a look.
That thread went up 2 months ago tomorrow, and we're now hearing that it's very possible (very likely?) that we going to get a temporary zeta boost.
What does that tell me? A couple of things.
First, I probably wasn't wrong that the economy was marginal. There are always bottlenecks and there always should be, but as the game grows we don't expect that things we grew past needing to worry about will suddenly become things we have to actively manage again. The indications were that the economy was marginal and based on this ... it probably was.
Second it tells me that CG probably agrees that Omicrons should be the new bottleneck for Ability upgrades. We don't have infinite Omega materials, but it's been a hugely long time since I have had to think about them at all. The idea of not applying an Omega because I'm low on mats is silly for someone at my stage of the game. While we're not there with zetas, it looks like Omicrons will be moving zetas more towards the level of importance and management concern that Omegas now occupy. ("Towards" doesn't mean that it will reach that level soon, just that it's moving in that direction.)
Third, I just want to point out to people who think that CG never reads the forums and doesn't care about player experience that this is one situation in which we asked for something and we're quickly finding out what CG thinks and, if this event turns out to happen the way the datamine suggests it will, we're getting a positive response with relatively rapid action.
I don't know how many zetas will drop for me on those 3 days, and I don't know if any future zeta bonuses will happen, but I think this is a great step. It doesn't require them to make permanent decisions about what the zeta economy will eventually become. A different release cadence or number of zetas per character over the next year is always possible, and permanent changes to the economy risk being inappropriate to that release rate. I think a temporary boost to Zetas while they monitor the economy over the longer term is a great step that rewards people who bought Lightspeed Bundles as well as the people who have invested in the game over the long term.
Thanks, CG, for reading the forums and acting when we have good arguments and reasonable requests. I hope that people remember this the next time pessimism sets in and someone starts saying you don't care about your players.
And for the rest of you -- snag that first JKCK character if you don't have one already and get ready to swim through your zeta mat vault like Scrooge McDuck.
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Replies
100% this - plus as a cherry on top a BH tag for Ventress so it has synergy with both separatist and Executor fleets.
I am very happy about this zeta event. Hopefully we will be swimming in Zetas as you say!
Realistically, if I can get three full zetas out of this event, I will be happy. Don't know if it's too optimistic, but let's see what the actual drop rates are.
The event isn't even confirmed yet, after all.
In the past when they've done bonus drops for zetas it was tracked at close to 1% by DeXxy over on the events discord. At least, if I was following the conversation correctly, that's the number he arrived at through crowd-sourced data. I hope he'll correct me if I'm wrong, but you can ping him over there to verify. So if it follows previous rates, that's about where it should land.
I'm not sure that was all you. Regardless, that was a real bummer for a lot of people - mostly people in smaller to mid sized guilds. Not sure why you'd want to take credit for that, but ok.
CG has a track record for considering player sentiment though, and more so since Meathead came along - contrary to the lamentations of some very vocal people that insist otherwise.
Thanks. I did not remember that. Then we should be expecting 5-8 per day (if you're doing 3x refresh on Cantina Energy), one third of what I was saying. 18-20 mats should be about average.
Cal is on an 8 energy cantina node - it doesn't really get more 'new player friendly' than that. You only need one of the characters at 7* to get the Zetas.
I think the issue is the characters required are new and there isn't really enough time to get them to 7* unless you were already working on them. That sort of gates this event behind a barrier that is very difficult to overcome in a very short time frame.
For what its worth I love this even though I can't benefit. Its nice to see the players that grinded these characters the hard way get something for their effort.
Yeah and TBH it is a little crunched but Merrin has been out quite some time and is very useful. You should have her 7* by now. If you don’t Cal you can rush since he isn’t a hard node. Plus we have a bit of advanced warning via the data mine.
There have been crunches in this game. The omega crunch was the worst. The credit crunch was complained about for a long time. I remember 1 month they came out with 6 months worth of max omega farms. That would be like dropping 30 full zeta in a month under the current economy. Just because you don’t have something doesn’t mean it’s a crunch. The math is well established that even not spending crystals at the current pace you will eventually have every zeta in the game and have extra. You can also spend crystals to accelerate through this backlog.
Yep. 165 free energy per day = 20.6 attempts.
3x 120 energy per day = 45 attempts
65.6 attempts/day = 20 shards/day
I gave you 6 days notice so that's +120 shards for the people who read here, +80 for people who get their news through the guild grapevine. It's not a ton. It's not even half a character. But that's a very substantial hunk of the total shards needed. more than 1/4. So there's some opportunity here.
Also, I just want to respond to this from @Rius :
I'm not either. But I'm also pretty certain that this isn't the single cure for "any zeta economy issues".
Obviously there must be enough zeta mats in the game that midgame players get them faster than new zeta requirements are added. You want to **make progress** which means that even if you're not backfilling quickly, there's still enough to do the currently released requirements PLUS do a little bit of work placing zetas on old toons, so that over time you're catching up more than you're falling further behind. You don't have to be catching up quickly, but you do need to be headed in the right direction.
I have no idea if this is happening. Or rather, I have an idea, which is why I started the first thread, but it's merely an idea, based on self-reported anecdotes. CG has the data. So while this is obviously not a fix for the problem we **think** we have, no one has proved that problem exists, and if it does, no one has quantified it.
This seems like a first step to me. It's not a permanent change to the economy, so they can implement it without worry that they're throwing things seriously out of whack.
To me it seems like the kind of thing you do while you're working on a long term solution. Therefore I'm not going to judge their efforts on the entire zeta economy based on this one event (even assuming the event actually goes forward as datamined info suggests).
In all these zetas discussions I’ve still not heard a realistic expectation on what an early to mid game player should be getting in terms of zetas. Nor an expectation of just how high they should be expected to climb in fleet arena, number of abs they should have ct1 on farm to help achieve that minimum. What gear tier they should expect to gear a character to count as a character who needs a zeta.
I mean the original thread called for 20 zeta mats a week from non fleet arena sources or abs or the calendar which was essentially pushing the zeta economy to 80-90 a year for those getting first in arena with all abs at ct1. A 60-80 percent increase in the zeta economy is unrealistic and not needed.
I think an early game player should be getting very few zetas from Fleet Arena. It's hard to get certain important units without spending in Fleet Store on those. One of the indicators of reaching midgame ought to be moving to full time Zeta spending.
But for early game Fleet Arena rank, I would say that #199 is probably the minimum expectation, which gives a player 1200 Fleet Tokens per day. I'd expect that such a player will reach midgame anywhere from 1 month to 6 months after reaching level 85. (Part of the uncertainty is me not knowing exactly what constitutes "mid game" but part is also not knowing exactly how long it takes these days and then finally there's the uncertainty of how serious a player is and how good they are at managing their early resources.) Though different people might define things differently, reaching rank #50 at payout for your 3rd or 4th time combined with finishing up non-zeta purchases in the Fleet Store (and finishing ALL purchases in the GW Store so you can move to ShardShop currency focus there) are pretty good indicators that you're just reaching or have reached mid-game.
So, early midgame you should be averaging 1280 Fleet Tokens/day. That's 233 mats/year or 19/month just from your purchases. At the very end of the midgame you should probably be taking top 5 in fleet. That's 273 mats/year. There's not a huge variation in between. Call the midgame expectation about 13 full zetas per year from the fleet store.