And still no mention of addressing the dupe shard bug, and compensation for those of us who have lost out on untold numbers of shards?? I really enjoy this game and don't want to have to go to Google for a refund.
Re: SIM tickets being earned faster than they can be used...when I started this game I was surprised that the SIM tix also used the full energy cost of the level. Perhaps those tix would get consumed as fast or faster than they're earned if they consumed 50-75% of the normal energy cost. I know "energy cost should be cheaper" is always the chorus from players in this type game, but I do not jump on that bandwagon. I do however feel if you have to earn/buy those tix it should offset another cost elsewhere (ie the energy used with the ticket). Perhaps in addition to the reduced energy cost, SIM tix cost for "hard" stages should be 2 instead of 1.
Please introduce better sales. I don't mind spending if you guys have better sales. Take a look at another Disney property - Marvel Future Fight by Netmarble Games, if you guys want to get good ideas on how they run their sales.
Is the OP suggesting that Barriss could be improved in the next update? Or that her original stats were too high hence she got a nerf? Just trying to figure out if I should gear her up...just pulled her
Whilst I'm looking forward to new content, I think there are two higher priorities.
There are so many bugs with heroes abilities and battle mechanics that it is difficult to get a good indication of balance issues, for eg, would Leia still be OP if she did not give +100% crit or such frequent multi attack procs?
Adding more content and heroes onto a buggy platform will require more tuning the longer the many bugs raised in these forums are not addressed.
But above all, customer service should be the number 1 priority, and this is shocking for a game with such a wide audience. This department have been letting CG down heavily.
On behalf of the entire game development team here at Capital Games, I wanted to wish you all a Happy New Year! 2015 has come to a thrilling close for us and that is directly thanks to you and the millions of people who have played our game.
I also wanted to take a moment to reflect on the last few weeks since launch, and talk about what's ahead.
We launched the game worldwide just over five weeks ago. And while we always believed in our game, we have been humbled and awed by the huge outpouring of positive response. From the reviews, to the amount of time players spend in the game each day, to the feedback on these and other forums it's clear that the game is delivering what we'd hoped: a great Star Wars experience for mobile players across the world.
During the past five weeks the team has been busy fixing bugs, adding polish, and releasing new characters. We have addressed over 200 issues since launch -- a good portion of that based on your feedback.
That being said, we know not everything is perfect and there have been some mistakes, the Barriss tuning probably chief among them. Please know we take your feedback to heart and will work hard to avoid that situation in the future. Our team has a strong culture of both listening carefully to player feedback and constantly improving the game, so please keep all the positive and negative feedback coming. @EA_Jesse and @CG_AaronNemoyten have been the main ones posting on the forum, but many of us on the team read the forums actively.
Looking ahead, we have a lot of cool stuff planned. I can't get into many specifics because schedules and priorities can change and I don't want to promise anything that isn't certain. However I can say we will continue to round out our feature set, as well as add some wonderful innovations no other game is providing.
We will also keep bringing out additional characters to provide more strategic options as well as bring some frequently-requested Star Wars icons into the game. Our game is fundamentally designed to continue to grow as Star Wars grows. I hope by now you have all had a chance to see The Force Awakens. If so, I think you'll agree the future for Star Wars looks very bright indeed!
One thing I can announce -- and something we've been hearing increasingly requested in the forums -- is that we will be raising the Player Level cap from 60 to 70 in January. This will unlock new Light Side Battles, new Dark Side Battles, and new Cantina Battles. This will also open up new tiers of Gear and Ability upgrades for characters.
Beyond that we are currently wrapping up our next major update which will bring a brand new Events system (replacing the Key Card system) as well as bunch of improvements to the overall game experience. Again, many of these changes are in alignment with your feedback.
In closing, it’s a great time to be a Star Wars fan and we are so happy to have you enjoying this Star Wars experience with us.
Thank you all again for taking the time to play our game!
John Salera, Executive Producer
TL;DR: Happy New Year from the dev team! Thanks for playing the game and providing feedback. More cool stuff is on the way!
Happy new year.
I hope I can play my account by my Android and iOS devices both soon just like Simcity Build It or UFC made by EA.
One thing I can announce -- and something we've been hearing increasingly requested in the forums -- is that we will be raising the Player Level cap from 60 to 70 in January. This will unlock new Light Side Battles, new Dark Side Battles, and new Cantina Battles. This will also open up new tiers of Gear and Ability upgrades for characters.
Congratulations and thank you for this awesome game.
I get frustrated sometimes with the problems, ( please fix) but I still love playing every morning and then when I get home from work. Thanks for the game.
This was a much needed post thanks. Wish you would have delayed the level increase for another month or so but oh well glad to hear you are changing keycard events
I know I have posted some complaints, but I do in fact love the game. I play as often as my energy allows so keep it coming
I was hoping to get some more characters to 60 and geared up before the level cap changed, le sigh. Although it will be nice getting some characters to the next gear level
Any idea on a date for the update? General is fine (like mid or end of month)? Or perhaps you're gonna drop it tomorrow, lol. I am excited for these updates! Just trying to see if I can get a couple more folks geared up before leveling begins anew.
Any idea on a date for the update? General is fine (like mid or end of month)? Or perhaps you're gonna drop it tomorrow, lol. I am excited for these updates! Just trying to see if I can get a couple more folks geared up before leveling begins anew.
A date would be very helpful actually. Could you send a newsletter in game to alert all players not just those that post here?
Just catching up on the latest responses and questions. We really appreciate all the great questions and enthusiasm.
Below are some specific points I wanted to cover.
First, though, I want to make sure people are clear that we have the upcoming increase of the Player Level cap from 60 to 70 coming in January. We also have what I called our "next major update". We can't give a date for that yet, but we are working hard on wrapping that one up.
One thing I would like to see is a way to check on your allies so that you can see their progress as well. Also I think it should be easier to borrow heroes from them. Maybe as long as you are allies you should be able to pick which one of their heroes you want to borrow?
Any plans for revamping the ally system? It's still mysterious which characters we can borrow, and we can't even see their rosters or records. (Or heck, our own record for that matter.) Or chat with our allies.
The heroes you can borrow are filtered based on the rules of the game mode you're in. For example, Light Side Battles only show light-aligned heroes. The ally system in general is meant to be a lightweight way to connect with other people, a chance to experience other characters you may not yet have in your collection, and a fluid way to augment your core team for a given game mode. This specific system could certainly be built out to be much more robust, but that is not a near term priority right now.
Please do this more towards the middle or end of January. A lot of players like me who started playing only several days post-release and have logged on every day since are still having a tough time catching up, raising the level cap will only make the skill gap wider. My server only has about 5 players that have reached the max level and everyone else is in the 50-59 range, I myself am 54 and I've been completing all daily events every day since the end of November/beginning of December. I haven't really been pleased with what I got out of the Chromium bundles either but regardless please offer a little bit more time.
There won't be a perfect time for everyone to increase the player level cap to 70. Based on what we were seeing in the data and what we were hearing in the forums, we decided to move forward with the level increase. It was always planned as many here have mentioned -- it was just a question of when. I hope it doesn't negatively impact your play experience (it shouldn't).
Whatever this new mode is, I hope it is something people can do for a reasonable amount of time. A major issue with the game is that there simply isn't very much to do. Even if you buy a couple of refills, you end up simming because the fights are all the same and you've done them before -- they are boring. So after you've done GW and a couple of arena fights there's nothing to really do.
When the forums are more interesting than the game, that's a problem. Bored players lose interest and move on, so it's to everyone's benefit to give people more to do.
Says the person with 897 posts! Impressive... most impressive.
With the coming level cap increase, you'll have the option of playing through the new campaign battles (Light / Dark / Cantina), as well as pursuing new Gear and Skill upgrades.
But I'm guessing you're referring to the new Events system I mentioned. We have one major Event planned which should take most players quite a while to complete. But the system as a whole is very flexible and will let us bring out new types of battles.
The team is moving quickly, but we also want to spend time fixing bugs and ensuring that we don't introduce new ones. Hope that makes sense.
@CG_JohnSalera, I know implementing changed takes time. I understand there are a lot of variables to consider before taking action on any issue. My chief complaint with this game is the energy system and related costs. I feel a better monetization strategy is to either cut energy recharge rates by 50% or keep pricing static. I believe many more people would be willing to spend more money on the game if energy prices were static. Say 50 or 100 crystals per refill.
If you review these forums and the online reviews for this game, you will see this is a key aggravation for your customers.
Part of the reason we went with the scaling refill costs is to keep the initial refills cheaper so more people could do them. If we went with an average cost, that would likely exclude folks from the refills.
Now how about more Vader shards being available through gameplay?
Vader shards can most effectively be earned by completing Achievements. Which means, by playing the game you can Activate and then Promote him.
Vader is clearly an important character and we thought by linking him to game progress he'd be available to everybody and also woven throughout the experience.
Excellent job so far guys. Appreciate this game. One suggestion would be to consider making some heroes have a few more locations to farm their shards. An example would be resistance trooper. After bug fix he was weakened some but he has amazing synergy with Poe. No one on my entire pvp grouping uses this combo mainly thinking due to the time it takes to farm the shards. He could be a really strong team member at 7 star. I'm still running him at 3 star and hit rank 1 yesterday completely free to play. There are other characters that might be used more often in pvp if for instance they are given a cantina spot for farming or 1-2 more spots on ls ds missions. It could be just a slight increase in ability to farm so there opens up more possibility and unit comps that are more commonly used in pvp. It gets kinda boring fighting the same grouping of heroes in pvp 8 out of 10 battles. I will say highly impressed that you have created a game that you can be competitive in without spending any money.
With the level cap increase there will be additional shard drop locations in the unlocked stages of each of the main campaign tables.
Also, just wanted to give you props for swimming against the tide and trying your own party builds. There's more to explore in the meta than is commonly seen right now.
@CG_JohnSalera can you make Poe available for purchase by Android players and Captain Phasma available for Apple players for a token fee? They were given out for free last week but limited to Poe for Apple and Phasma for Android but some players want the other.
I need to discuss this with the team this week. Stay tuned.
@CG_JohnSalera hey my only one question is about a name change. I didn't know that we couldn't change our name when i first started. I,
Like a lot of people are now stuck with the name of Mol Eliza and wanted it changed. Anything about adding this feature or the option for a one time change?
We do have this feature in our plans, but it's not a top priority right now compared to some of the other things we're working on for the next release.
@CG_JohnSalera Any plans on giving us an easier way to make credits? Leveling a character to 60 and starring them already costs quite a bit of credits. Will cost even more now going to 70.
We know this is a concern, and are discussing options internally.
And still no mention of addressing the dupe shard bug, and compensation for those of us who have lost out on untold numbers of shards?? I really enjoy this game and don't want to have to go to Google for a refund.
We are looking into this one. It's still not clear (to me at least) if this is just a visual bug, or if the actual shards awarded are incorrect. @EA_Jesse will follow-up once we've determined the nature of the bug.
Please introduce better sales. I don't mind spending if you guys have better sales.
If you're referring to putting the Crystals on sale for a discount, we aren't currently planning on doing that. We would prefer to keep the economy stable, and sales lead to wild swings (positive and negative) in game economies. Let me know if I misunderstood.
Is the OP suggesting that Barriss could be improved in the next update? Or that her original stats were too high hence she got a nerf? Just trying to figure out if I should gear her up...just pulled her
No. I'm not implying any forthcoming change to Barriss.
Whilst I'm looking forward to new content, I think there are two higher priorities.
There are so many bugs with heroes abilities and battle mechanics that it is difficult to get a good indication of balance issues, for eg, would Leia still be OP if she did not give +100% crit or such frequent multi attack procs?
Adding more content and heroes onto a buggy platform will require more tuning the longer the many bugs raised in these forums are not addressed.
But above all, customer service should be the number 1 priority, and this is shocking for a game with such a wide audience. This department have been letting CG down heavily.
Agreed that bugs need to continue to get squashed. We have been fixing bugs in updates since launch (and before). We also have a robust QA group who help us track things down. But it goes without saying that as much as we test before release, when millions of people get their hands on the game they will find new things. Given that, we will (continue to) review the Bugs and Issues section regularly to see what the community has reported.
Regarding the customer support, we have heard the concerns and we have been speaking with that team. We will continue to keep a close eye on this situation and reaching out to you guys to let us know if things have gotten better (or not).
Any idea on a date for the update? General is fine (like mid or end of month)? Or perhaps you're gonna drop it tomorrow, lol. I am excited for these updates! Just trying to see if I can get a couple more folks geared up before leveling begins anew.
A date would be very helpful actually. Could you send a newsletter in game to alert all players not just those that post here?
The two updates I referenced in my original post will have different release dates. For the level cap increase, that will come in January. For the next major update, I can't give a date yet. We normally need to keep future releases under wraps until they're very close. This is for various reasons. However, given some of the questions we were seeing in the forums, we wanted to push the envelope and give players a bit more of a preview as to what is coming.
When these two updates come, we will be detailing out the contents both here and as a newsletter in the game.
@CG_JohnSalera , any comment on the happy new years day notification some players were sent saying they had free phasma and trooper? im getting to a point where if i buy a round of phasma shards and this is suddenly awarded like it said, I will be beyond the 100 shards I need and wasting some.
I believe that notification was a reminder at the end of the promotional period. It should have only gone out to players who hadn't logged in since the start of the promotion.
Sounds like there was a problem with that filtering.
Let me start by saying that SWGOH is by far the best mobile game I've played. However, since I began playing in early December, I've realized that there are couple areas that really should be addressed to make the experience vastly better for everyone. I have too much to say to include on this post so I'll just talk about what I think will make the biggest difference.
The Problem
The biggest problem is character availability. When I first starting really getting into the game, I had so much fun thinking about different possible squad synergies and what characters I needed to unlock in order to build them. Unfortunately, as I became more aware of how characters progress into the "late game" I realized that the characters I obtained from the forty dollars I spent on packs would ultimately be useless to me because of the fact that I cannot promote them. My 4* grand moff tarkin will always only be 4*(of course unless I spend more money for a 1/71 chance at some shards which won't even be enough for a promotion). After realizing this I stopped buying crystals altogether. I knew that if I want a squad that will be viable for me in the long run, it needs to consist of FTP characters. The reason why everyone's pvp team looks the same is because everyone who doesn't spend tons of money is essentially forced to choose between the 2 or 3 good choices from each shipment if they want to compete with 5*+ teams anytime soon.
the solution----
Rather than restricting many of the characters to purchase-only, why not create energy-expensive or crystal priced missions to have a chance at their shards? In style, these missions could be like additional hard-mode missions or they could be completely new like 5v1 boss fights(imagine fighting a rancor or something epic like that with your squad). The bottom line is, if there's a certain character I want, I'm much more likely to purchase crystals if I know where my money is going. Implantation like either of the above will open up all characters to everyone, while maintaining and arguably increasing crystal purchases.
----side rant about chromium packs---
The random aspect of the packs is fun and all but I'm a bit disappointed that I've gotten better characters from Bronzium packs(mace windu,baris, old daka all 4*) than I have from spending 40 bucks on chromium packs(grand moff 4*,cad bane 3*, leia 2*, a few ewoks and many unusable shards distributed amongst unobtainable characters). Of course me being me I thought of my own ideas of what I think should be done about this and I'll consider posting more if people happen to care what I have to say.
@Kaylik
I agree with most of your post, except for the character availability. Let's just wait and see what new toons we can get after level cap has been increased to 70. Im sure additional characters are added in the newest levels. Also because many people play since start of december, too less time has passed to really call this an issue. I already see many variations ingame through GW and Arena Squad.
The more characters we will get, the more likely we will see variation. Also remember that unlocking "new" characters is mega slow at start but i.e. I already have 40 daka shards, also 40 ren shards and 40 poggle shards. At this rate I will unlock all 3 of them at once (at least in the same week). In other words, there will be a time where you are bound to use the same roster for maybe a month time. After that you have more toons that unlock around the same time to have some variety.
439-259-888 I have a bad habit of editing my typo's after posting
And still no mention of addressing the dupe shard bug, and compensation for those of us who have lost out on untold numbers of shards?? I really enjoy this game and don't want to have to go to Google for a refund.
We are looking into this one. It's still not clear (to me at least) if this is just a visual bug, or if the actual shards awarded are incorrect. @EA_Jesse will follow-up once we've determined the nature of the bug.
I am here to assure you this is not a purely visual bug. On many occasions I have experienced this bug. For example character shard drop #1 gives 12 shards bringing my total for that character to 32/30, the dupe shard drop later in the 8-pack shows another 12 shards but the count remains at 32/30. After completing the reveal of the rest of the 8-pack I go for the character to promote it, where it still shows 32/30, pay the promotion credit cost, and I then have the character with 2 shards toward the next promotion. This does not happen only when a character exceeds the required shards for its next promotion, but it the most clearly understandable (i hope) example that this is a real bug, based on my real experience.
I certainly hope to hear some real information about this moving toward a resolution soon. I am loving playing this game, and don't want to see its future endangered by this current issue (which has been identified elsewhere as a "known issue"). What this ultimately comes down to is a failure to deliver paid merchandise, which I doubt the community will support for long. This is currently the only game I spend real money in, and I would like to keep it that way for a long time. I am continuing to spend some real money on the game, but now only on energy refills or the occasional shipment purchase, no more 8-pack (or any level chromium packs) until this issue is confirmed fixed. I'm sure my spending would be more if chasing those hard to get characters was a viable option, but it isn't with the broken dupe shard issue.
I believe that notification was a reminder at the end of the promotional period. It should have only gone out to players who hadn't logged in since the start of the promotion.
Sounds like there was a problem with that filtering.
Apologies for the confusion.
then why did it specifically say happy new year in the notification and mention nothing about any previous promotions? It very much sounded like a whole new gift for new years day
@CG_JohnSalera can you make Poe available for purchase by Android players and Captain Phasma available for Apple players for a token fee? They were given out for free last week but limited to Poe for Apple and Phasma for Android but some players want the other.
Perhaps a better solution would be to make Poe also available in the Galactic War Shipments rather than in the Cantina Shipments?
An "average" player can possibly farm up to 15 Phasma shards per day when completing GW whereas Poe can only be farmed for 5 shards a day - and that's with one Cantina energy refill (the cost for the second refill is probably too much for many players). Given such, Apple players got a relative advantage since they can get Phasma a lot easier (in 4 days with no additional cost) than Android players getting Poe (need 20 days or 10 days + 1,000 crystals for the energy refills).
Granted, some will argue that you have the option to expedite farming with energy refills in the Cantina Shipments (whereas GW Shipments is capped at 15 shards per day), but I doubt few "average" players have the resources/are willing to spend that much crystal. Besides, levelling up Poe after acquisition would be even more time-consuming and expensive.
Yeah, I know... even when giving out free stuffs, people complain.
Replies
Re: SIM tickets being earned faster than they can be used...when I started this game I was surprised that the SIM tix also used the full energy cost of the level. Perhaps those tix would get consumed as fast or faster than they're earned if they consumed 50-75% of the normal energy cost. I know "energy cost should be cheaper" is always the chorus from players in this type game, but I do not jump on that bandwagon. I do however feel if you have to earn/buy those tix it should offset another cost elsewhere (ie the energy used with the ticket). Perhaps in addition to the reduced energy cost, SIM tix cost for "hard" stages should be 2 instead of 1.
I look forward to more feedback from you.
Whilst I'm looking forward to new content, I think there are two higher priorities.
There are so many bugs with heroes abilities and battle mechanics that it is difficult to get a good indication of balance issues, for eg, would Leia still be OP if she did not give +100% crit or such frequent multi attack procs?
Adding more content and heroes onto a buggy platform will require more tuning the longer the many bugs raised in these forums are not addressed.
But above all, customer service should be the number 1 priority, and this is shocking for a game with such a wide audience. This department have been letting CG down heavily.
Guild: Fear The Boot
Happy new year.
I hope I can play my account by my Android and iOS devices both soon just like Simcity Build It or UFC made by EA.
I was hoping to get some more characters to 60 and geared up before the level cap changed, le sigh. Although it will be nice getting some characters to the next gear level
Guild: Fear The Boot
Just catching up on the latest responses and questions. We really appreciate all the great questions and enthusiasm.
Below are some specific points I wanted to cover.
First, though, I want to make sure people are clear that we have the upcoming increase of the Player Level cap from 60 to 70 coming in January. We also have what I called our "next major update". We can't give a date for that yet, but we are working hard on wrapping that one up.
The heroes you can borrow are filtered based on the rules of the game mode you're in. For example, Light Side Battles only show light-aligned heroes. The ally system in general is meant to be a lightweight way to connect with other people, a chance to experience other characters you may not yet have in your collection, and a fluid way to augment your core team for a given game mode. This specific system could certainly be built out to be much more robust, but that is not a near term priority right now.
There won't be a perfect time for everyone to increase the player level cap to 70. Based on what we were seeing in the data and what we were hearing in the forums, we decided to move forward with the level increase. It was always planned as many here have mentioned -- it was just a question of when. I hope it doesn't negatively impact your play experience (it shouldn't).
Says the person with 897 posts! Impressive... most impressive.
With the coming level cap increase, you'll have the option of playing through the new campaign battles (Light / Dark / Cantina), as well as pursuing new Gear and Skill upgrades.
But I'm guessing you're referring to the new Events system I mentioned. We have one major Event planned which should take most players quite a while to complete. But the system as a whole is very flexible and will let us bring out new types of battles.
The team is moving quickly, but we also want to spend time fixing bugs and ensuring that we don't introduce new ones. Hope that makes sense.
I know energy is a common topic in FTP games. There have been several threads about it, and the desire for change and more energy is somewhat mixed. (For example in this thread: https://forums.galaxy-of-heroes.starwars.ea.com/discussion/3709/does-it-take-too-long-for-f2p-players-to-continue-playing/p1
Part of the reason we went with the scaling refill costs is to keep the initial refills cheaper so more people could do them. If we went with an average cost, that would likely exclude folks from the refills.
Yes, this will be addressed in our next major update.
Awwww, you guys. You bring a spark of life to my cold, dead corporate heart.
Vader shards can most effectively be earned by completing Achievements. Which means, by playing the game you can Activate and then Promote him.
Vader is clearly an important character and we thought by linking him to game progress he'd be available to everybody and also woven throughout the experience.
With the level cap increase there will be additional shard drop locations in the unlocked stages of each of the main campaign tables.
Also, just wanted to give you props for swimming against the tide and trying your own party builds. There's more to explore in the meta than is commonly seen right now.
I need to discuss this with the team this week. Stay tuned.
We do have this feature in our plans, but it's not a top priority right now compared to some of the other things we're working on for the next release.
We know this is a concern, and are discussing options internally.
We are looking into this one. It's still not clear (to me at least) if this is just a visual bug, or if the actual shards awarded are incorrect. @EA_Jesse will follow-up once we've determined the nature of the bug.
If you're referring to putting the Crystals on sale for a discount, we aren't currently planning on doing that. We would prefer to keep the economy stable, and sales lead to wild swings (positive and negative) in game economies. Let me know if I misunderstood.
No. I'm not implying any forthcoming change to Barriss.
Agreed that bugs need to continue to get squashed. We have been fixing bugs in updates since launch (and before). We also have a robust QA group who help us track things down. But it goes without saying that as much as we test before release, when millions of people get their hands on the game they will find new things. Given that, we will (continue to) review the Bugs and Issues section regularly to see what the community has reported.
Regarding the customer support, we have heard the concerns and we have been speaking with that team. We will continue to keep a close eye on this situation and reaching out to you guys to let us know if things have gotten better (or not).
Enabling cross-device play for the same player account is on our backlog, but currently not a high priority.
The two updates I referenced in my original post will have different release dates. For the level cap increase, that will come in January. For the next major update, I can't give a date yet. We normally need to keep future releases under wraps until they're very close. This is for various reasons. However, given some of the questions we were seeing in the forums, we wanted to push the envelope and give players a bit more of a preview as to what is coming.
When these two updates come, we will be detailing out the contents both here and as a newsletter in the game.
Hope that helps!
Thanks again, everyone.
Odd...I didn't get a notification. Maybe it was just delayed from when you got them a few weeks ago.
Sounds like there was a problem with that filtering.
Apologies for the confusion.
I am 100% confident that we will be pleasantly surprised
The Problem
The biggest problem is character availability. When I first starting really getting into the game, I had so much fun thinking about different possible squad synergies and what characters I needed to unlock in order to build them. Unfortunately, as I became more aware of how characters progress into the "late game" I realized that the characters I obtained from the forty dollars I spent on packs would ultimately be useless to me because of the fact that I cannot promote them. My 4* grand moff tarkin will always only be 4*(of course unless I spend more money for a 1/71 chance at some shards which won't even be enough for a promotion). After realizing this I stopped buying crystals altogether. I knew that if I want a squad that will be viable for me in the long run, it needs to consist of FTP characters. The reason why everyone's pvp team looks the same is because everyone who doesn't spend tons of money is essentially forced to choose between the 2 or 3 good choices from each shipment if they want to compete with 5*+ teams anytime soon.
the solution----
Rather than restricting many of the characters to purchase-only, why not create energy-expensive or crystal priced missions to have a chance at their shards? In style, these missions could be like additional hard-mode missions or they could be completely new like 5v1 boss fights(imagine fighting a rancor or something epic like that with your squad). The bottom line is, if there's a certain character I want, I'm much more likely to purchase crystals if I know where my money is going. Implantation like either of the above will open up all characters to everyone, while maintaining and arguably increasing crystal purchases.
----side rant about chromium packs---
The random aspect of the packs is fun and all but I'm a bit disappointed that I've gotten better characters from Bronzium packs(mace windu,baris, old daka all 4*) than I have from spending 40 bucks on chromium packs(grand moff 4*,cad bane 3*, leia 2*, a few ewoks and many unusable shards distributed amongst unobtainable characters). Of course me being me I thought of my own ideas of what I think should be done about this and I'll consider posting more if people happen to care what I have to say.
I agree with most of your post, except for the character availability. Let's just wait and see what new toons we can get after level cap has been increased to 70. Im sure additional characters are added in the newest levels. Also because many people play since start of december, too less time has passed to really call this an issue. I already see many variations ingame through GW and Arena Squad.
The more characters we will get, the more likely we will see variation. Also remember that unlocking "new" characters is mega slow at start but i.e. I already have 40 daka shards, also 40 ren shards and 40 poggle shards. At this rate I will unlock all 3 of them at once (at least in the same week). In other words, there will be a time where you are bound to use the same roster for maybe a month time. After that you have more toons that unlock around the same time to have some variety.
@EA_Jesse
I am here to assure you this is not a purely visual bug. On many occasions I have experienced this bug. For example character shard drop #1 gives 12 shards bringing my total for that character to 32/30, the dupe shard drop later in the 8-pack shows another 12 shards but the count remains at 32/30. After completing the reveal of the rest of the 8-pack I go for the character to promote it, where it still shows 32/30, pay the promotion credit cost, and I then have the character with 2 shards toward the next promotion. This does not happen only when a character exceeds the required shards for its next promotion, but it the most clearly understandable (i hope) example that this is a real bug, based on my real experience.
I certainly hope to hear some real information about this moving toward a resolution soon. I am loving playing this game, and don't want to see its future endangered by this current issue (which has been identified elsewhere as a "known issue"). What this ultimately comes down to is a failure to deliver paid merchandise, which I doubt the community will support for long. This is currently the only game I spend real money in, and I would like to keep it that way for a long time. I am continuing to spend some real money on the game, but now only on energy refills or the occasional shipment purchase, no more 8-pack (or any level chromium packs) until this issue is confirmed fixed. I'm sure my spending would be more if chasing those hard to get characters was a viable option, but it isn't with the broken dupe shard issue.
then why did it specifically say happy new year in the notification and mention nothing about any previous promotions? It very much sounded like a whole new gift for new years day
Perhaps a better solution would be to make Poe also available in the Galactic War Shipments rather than in the Cantina Shipments?
An "average" player can possibly farm up to 15 Phasma shards per day when completing GW whereas Poe can only be farmed for 5 shards a day - and that's with one Cantina energy refill (the cost for the second refill is probably too much for many players). Given such, Apple players got a relative advantage since they can get Phasma a lot easier (in 4 days with no additional cost) than Android players getting Poe (need 20 days or 10 days + 1,000 crystals for the energy refills).
Granted, some will argue that you have the option to expedite farming with energy refills in the Cantina Shipments (whereas GW Shipments is capped at 15 shards per day), but I doubt few "average" players have the resources/are willing to spend that much crystal. Besides, levelling up Poe after acquisition would be even more time-consuming and expensive.
Yeah, I know... even when giving out free stuffs, people complain.