Thanks, and I'm familiar with those numbers. You can see that there are spikes in spending (most likely the competitive whales) around releases of new content, which makes perfect sense, and is typical in the business. So the fact that numbers are down from a week ago, doesn't mean they're down from a month ago. Statistics should be used carefully when trying to make a point, because we can choose our sample and let too much of our agenda affect who we see it.
Yup. To be fair don't compare month to month and just a single week to another week. Entertainment spending is very seasonal and can very greatly month-to-month and definitely week-to-week. Some of the weekly trending can be insightful over time, so perhaps the 3rd week of August might shed some light on where the game is trending. The most telling sign will be the year-on-year improvement once the game has been out for a year. I'm fairly certain EA has annual earnings goals and this game will be expected to earn +x% compared to the same time last year. EA probably has a quarterly earnings call, that would be interesting to listen to as well. It's only July, they may not have had it yet because it takes time to close out the books on the prior quarter.
Maybe I should say this: I want more credits too, but I want to have to work for them. I further believe that what I want is not always what I need. However, it's not about me, it's about the game we love (or want to love). I still love it.
I think you are missing the point and summarizing incorrectly.
The limiting factor for any individual path of progression should be the unique resource to that path (shards, level, gear, mods). In some cases, this is fine.
Gear for instance appears to be properly controlled by how quickly you acquire the salvage to craft the gear (and credits are merely a secondary resource).
In other cases; however, this isn't the case. Leveling is a very good example. We accumulate way more training droids than we can use because credits are the limiting factor.
Character shards appear to have people on both sides of the fence. I don't have anyone waiting on credits to star up, but some people have several.
The time is takes to collect all the shards for the character is what should be tuned for that progression path. The time is takes to obtain the gear should limit that path. The time it takes to obtain training droids should be the limiting factor in leveling tunes. Not credits.
We're talking about "shoulds" again, which are an opinion/personal expectation. This game has always had credits. And the creative team that makes the game (not me), will make those decisions that effect speed of progression. Should they listen to player feedback, yes of course. Is every idea or 'need' something that she be implemented? That's where I get a little critical.
All I'm saying is, not EVERYONE is having the same credit crunch, therefore, a sweeping increase across the board wouldn't 'solve' 'the' issue' without swinging the pendulum another direction on another resource, similar to arguing about nerfing heroes out of the meta to bring more variety, which typically just forms a new meta, not more variety.
Thanks, and I'm familiar with those numbers. You can see that there are spikes in spending (most likely the competitive whales) around releases of new content, which makes perfect sense, and is typical in the business. So the fact that numbers are down from a week ago, doesn't mean they're down from a month ago. Statistics should be used carefully when trying to make a point, because we can choose our sample and let too much of our agenda affect who we see it.
There was a lot of noise on the forums the last week related to the mods, no doubt. But we need time to play out and see if things are truly as 'bad' as some proclaim. Can it improve, of course it can, but just throwing more credits at all of us isn't necessarily the best fix.
Specifically "All I'm saying is, not EVERYONE is having the same credit crunch,"
I've never once heard anyone say they have an overabundance of credits and a shortage of training droids. All I'm sayin.
(Side note: I specifically and intentionally didn't mention mods. New system. Still appears to be in flux.)
Maybe I should say this: I want more credits too, but I want to have to work for them. I further believe that what I want is not always what I need. However, it's not about me, it's about the game we love (or want to love). I still love it.
I don't necessarily care about more credits. I just want sufficient credits. Very important difference. I want the credits I make to be able to support the more rare resources I need to obtain (shards, droids, gear, mods).
And just for you I avoided using the word "should" since you appear to get distracted by semantics.
I think you're right. If the credit crunch was resolved, the pendulum would swing to other resources. I'd argue that result would be better for the players and the developer.
Imo, the ideal scenario is that when you reach a wall in one area of the game, you move on to a different area until you hit that wall, and so on.
How it is currently:
Ok I've finally farmed 330 Anakin shards, time to level him. Credit wall. Time to star him up. Credit wall. Time to mod him. Credit wall. Small mod wall(depending on how picky you are) Time to gear him. Small credit wall, gear wall. Time to get his abilities up. Small credit wall, ability mat wall.
The gear wall and ability wall are in good balance right now. The credit wall is just way out of balance.
If all aspects are balanced, people enjoy their experience and are more likely to spend, which is obviously the goal.
I want this game to be successful in the long run. The credit crunch is truly threatening that. If it isn't improved before level 90 hits, it'll be red alert time for sure.
@ShaolinPunk
Ok I've finally farmed 330 Anakin shards, time to level him. Credit wall. Time to star him up. Credit wall. Time to mod him. Credit wall. Small mod wall(depending on how picky you are) Time to gear him. Small credit wall, gear wall. Time to get his abilities up. Small credit wall, ability mat wall.
The gear wall and ability wall are in good balance right now. The credit wall is just way out of balance.
^but... how long does it take to farm 330 Anakin shards? And how many other toon shards are you farming at the very same time, in parallel? It's not like it should be "330 shards. Anakin done. Next!", if you're farming Anakin shards with all your cantina energy and a refill.
OTOH, if you farm fewer shards, then you will not have as bad a credit shortage. Just saying there's another way to do it, and no one ever claimed that you should spend 1 cantina refill and 2 energy refills forever. You don't have to do it that way. You can slow the shard farm. You can have raid geared toons at 6 stars, even. You might profit greater that way.
Maybe I should say this: I want more credits too, but I want to have to work for them. I further believe that what I want is not always what I need. However, it's not about me, it's about the game we love (or want to love). I still love it.
I'm all about having to work for them, I'm not a Democrat / Socialist. LOL. I just want that opportunity TO work for the credits and that opportunity doesn't exist right now. As hard as GW is, I feel we're underpaid. LOL!
^but... how long does it take to farm 330 Anakin shards? And how many other toon shards are you farming at the very same time, in parallel? It's not like it should be "330 shards. Anakin done. Next!"
I'm not saying that. Nowhere in my post did I say all upgrades should be free. I'm saying the different walls (gear, abilities, levels, stars, mods) should be the same height. So you always have something to work toward instead of just waiting for credits.
Cool. And I'm saying you can rebalance your daily grind so things even out. So the walls are the same height. It is possible. I'm not saying you are doing it wrong. Just saying your different height walls are based on the way you are grinding. Game gives you options on how to progress. You are doing it one possible way, which ends up short on credits. Why get those shards so fast, if you know you can't afford to use them by the time you get them?
Want more credits = want to progress faster. I suppose we all want faster.
But credits are unbalanced, only because of the way you choose to grind.
I hear you loud and clear. But you go out of your way to not understand me.
If you think faster progression is good for the game in the long run, then just say that.
there's no need to justify it with arguments that have holes.
What you're basically telling me to do is live within my means. Obviously I'm doing that currently, as are we all.
Yes, but we all aren't doing it the same way. If you have multiple toons sitting around with 330 shards and can't even do anything with them, then you might be losing ground to a better strategy. One where less stuff sits around, wasted. When you repeatedly face credit shortage and waiting for more credits, you might be failing to think longterm.
This game moves slow. Course corrections take time. It is hard to completely avoid that iceberg when you aren't paying attention. But the farther ahead you plan, the better your course. If you repeatedly end up short on credits, maybe you should stop doing the same thing over and over.
I think you are missing the point and summarizing incorrectly.
The limiting factor for any individual path of progression should be the unique resource to that path (shards, level, gear, mods). In some cases, this is fine.
Gear for instance appears to be properly controlled by how quickly you acquire the salvage to craft the gear (and credits are merely a secondary resource).
In other cases; however, this isn't the case. Leveling is a very good example. We accumulate way more training droids than we can use because credits are the limiting factor.
Character shards appear to have people on both sides of the fence. I don't have anyone waiting on credits to star up, but some people have several.
The time is takes to collect all the shards for the character is what should be tuned for that progression path. The time is takes to obtain the gear should limit that path. The time it takes to obtain training droids should be the limiting factor in leveling tunes. Not credits.
We're talking about "shoulds" again, which are an opinion/personal expectation. This game has always had credits. And the creative team that makes the game (not me), will make those decisions that effect speed of progression. Should they listen to player feedback, yes of course. Is every idea or 'need' something that she be implemented? That's where I get a little critical.
All I'm saying is, not EVERYONE is having the same credit crunch, therefore, a sweeping increase across the board wouldn't 'solve' 'the' issue' without swinging the pendulum another direction on another resource, similar to arguing about nerfing heroes out of the meta to bring more variety, which typically just forms a new meta, not more variety.
Thanks, and I'm familiar with those numbers. You can see that there are spikes in spending (most likely the competitive whales) around releases of new content, which makes perfect sense, and is typical in the business. So the fact that numbers are down from a week ago, doesn't mean they're down from a month ago. Statistics should be used carefully when trying to make a point, because we can choose our sample and let too much of our agenda affect who we see it.
There was a lot of noise on the forums the last week related to the mods, no doubt. But we need time to play out and see if things are truly as 'bad' as some proclaim. Can it improve, of course it can, but just throwing more credits at all of us isn't necessarily the best fix.
I wasn't saying those numbers were the end all be all man. I was just pointing out that there are objective numbers showing a decline. The amount of positive reviews was obviously fake btw. Do you really think that many people rereviewed the game to give it 5 stars? People are waaay more likely to do that to reduce numbers (angry people are simply more motivated) and it was obviously paid for reviews. They are down from a month ago. You can look up the stats yourself if you want instead of speculating what they might be to prove your point that everything is peachy.
The number of downloads and daily active players is waaay down and the purchasing spike doesn't change that. You saying they should wait and see makes no sense when there are so many plainly evident reasons for them to lighten the credit gate.
To be honest, they shouldn't have to wait and see anyways because this was a problem before mods and they made mods initially very cheap in response to this existing problem. Then they nerfed mods and made them insanely more expensive BUT DID NOTHING to supplement credits. What exactly do they need to wait and see? The problem is plain as day and it is awful game design.
What you're basically telling me to do is live within my means. Obviously I'm doing that currently, as are we all.
I'm trying to present ideas that might actually improve this game in the long run, not just give out Zen advice.
Right? This is a game after-all, should be entertaining and not frustrating. Now if you came on and said you bought Cody and Geo Spy and can't pay your bills now; I'd say you need to live within your means. LOL
Apparently you dramatically edited your previous post after I responded to it.
If there was a way to farm credits without farming shards I'd agree with you, but there isn't. They took away the credit mining for the scoundrel event(let's not open that can of worms). I guess I could farm cantina nodes that don't give shards, but that just makes no sense.
Credit mining was really bad value, but at this point I'd be doing it everyday. I was doing it months ago when gw was really broken the first time.
I am a little bit tired already about people defending the status of the game as if there was no credit crunch, so all I want to say is:
Previously to the mod update, a lot of people were complaining about the credit crunch for months. Although I could always understand these people, I never felt that way myself. Since I knew that after I reached level 80 it was only a matter of time until I will finally overcome the credit crunch. Prior to the mod update it would have maybe taken me 2-3 more months. I expected that after that time there will surely come another lvl increase, so the whole credit thing would start over again. But that would have been fine, since the target had always been within reach. I know that these kind of games are designed around "chasing the carrot".
Then came the mod update and the credit needs quadrupled. If you want to take part in the whole mod thing then your WHOLE progression with other characters has to stop for months. This is the perfect example of putting the carrot too far! This game looses a lot of its fun for many people if they cannot achieve any new characters anymore. There are a lot of other gates in this game which prevent you from maxing out, e.g. raidgear, normal purple gear, omega materials and also having the best mods, if they only were affordable. This game definetly doesnt need a credit crunch which is this severly.
After all it should be in the best interest of EA. If they want to make money then they should at least try to cater a little bit to their customers.
Cool. And I'm saying you can rebalance your daily grind so things even out. So the walls are the same height. It is possible. I'm not saying you are doing it wrong. Just saying your different height walls are based on the way you are grinding. Game gives you options on how to progress. You are doing it one possible way, which ends up short on credits. Why get those shards so fast, if you know you can't afford to use them by the time you get them?
Want more credits = want to progress faster. I suppose we all want faster.
But credits are unbalanced, only because of the way you choose to grind.
Amazing solution to the credit crunch man--just stop playing. Wow that is awesome advice. What exactly can you do in this game that doesn't give you shards and/or training droids? This is some serious Stockholm Syndrome stuff here. Just about every activity in this game gives you things you need to spend credits on (remember GW and Arena give you shards too).
What "progress" is not tied to credits praytell? If you are saying to spend 100k a day on training, 100k a day on abilities, 100k a day on shards, and 100k a day on mods to keep the wall level, then that wall isn't really ever going to get much higher is it? You are still getting other currencies/"gates" way faster than credits
If there was a way to farm credits without farming shards I'd agree with you, but there isn't. They took away the credit mining for the scoundrel event(let's not open that can of worms). I guess I could farm cantina nodes that don't give shards, but that just makes no sense.
Amazing solution to the credit crunch man--just stop playing. Wow that is awesome advice. What exactly can you do in this game that doesn't give you shards and/or training droids?
Ok, at the risk of being captain obvious:
1. Cantina. Stop refreshing it. Crystals saved = 100 per day. Credit conversion = + ~100,000 credits per day.
2. Hard nodes. Stop doing them. 5 rolls, daily completed, done. Rest on gear. If you are not bottlenecked on gear, you can NOT refresh energy, and save another 50 to 100 crystals a day.
3. Guild coins: balance number of shards you get with the raid gear you buy
4. GW shards... shard shop for vader and GG.
How is this "not playing?" It still takes > an hour a day to do GW and Arena, and only 3 seconds less of hitting "refresh energy" and pressing multisim. It takes 4 or 6 times longer to farm shards for your new toon... and? If you are having enough credits, then go back and start buying cantina refresh? If ur not OCD about the shards, your toon will be more useable at 5 star with gear and levels, than it will be at 7 star and waiting on credits.
I have an excess of training droids. Right now. That does not bother me?
If there was a way to farm credits without farming shards I'd agree with you, but there isn't. They took away the credit mining for the scoundrel event(let's not open that can of worms). I guess I could farm cantina nodes that don't give shards, but that just makes no sense.
Amazing solution to the credit crunch man--just stop playing. Wow that is awesome advice. What exactly can you do in this game that doesn't give you shards and/or training droids?
Ok, at the risk of being captain obvious:
1. Cantina. Stop refreshing it. Crystals saved = 100 per day. Credit conversion = + ~100,000 credits per day.
2. Hard nodes. Stop doing them. 5 rolls, daily completed, done. Rest on gear. If you are not bottlenecked on gear, you can NOT refresh energy, and save another 50 to 100 crystals a day.
3. Guild coins: balance number of shards you get with the raid gear you buy
4. GW shards... shard shop for vader and GG.
How is this "not playing?" It still takes > an hour a day to do GW and Arena, and only 3 seconds less of hitting "refresh energy" and pressing multisim. It takes 4 or 6 times longer to farm shards for your new toon... and? If you are having enough credits, then go back and start buying cantina refresh? If ur not OCD about the shards, your toon will be more useable at 5 star with gear and levels, than it will be at 7 star and waiting on credits.
I have an excess of training droids. Right now. That does not bother me?
RE 1: What if you're farming a character in Cantina?
RE 2: What if you need to farm a character that can't be farmed in Cantina? FOST, FOTP which are needed for Offense Mod challenge
Doing what you suggest is playing by your standards and what makes you happy in this game.
RE 1: What if you're farming a character in Cantina?
If you don't have credits to use the shards BY THE TIME you've got em, which is what you are saying. Then what does it matter if your shard farm is slower? You still progress in shards with your totally free cantina energy. And if you have enough credits, then go ahead and buy some refreshes. Preferably on Sundays.
RE 2: What if you need to farm a character that can't be farmed in Cantina? FOST, FOTP which are needed for Offense Mod challenge
If you want to hit every hard node for these toons at the same time, to the point where your shards outpace your gear/credit? Well, you will wait on credits when you are done. That's your choice.
These things are not lip service. I do them all. Stopped doing cantina refresh for a full month BEFORE the mod "crisis." The GW token dump to Shard Shop was the hardest to start doing, for me, personally. But if credits are not enough, value of shards is low. Don't need 'em.
1.You get 56k credits for doing a refresh of cantina. Plus purple mats and shards. If you bought credits for ~ 100000, you only gain an extra 44k.
It would take 104 days of that amount of saving to level one character from 1-80.
2. I already do minimum hard nodes. I still farm gear because the gear wall is still high (just appropriately high imo). If I quit refreshing regular energy I could level a character 1-80 in 46 days with the extra credits.
3. Raid gear from the guild shop is the single worst value item in the game. I would do the math for you, but suffice it to say, it will take you forever to get one piece that way.
4. This solution says "get characters you don't want because they are so hard to farm you won't be able to spend credits fast enough."
Please don't tell me my arguments are full of holes.
1.You get 56k credits for doing a refresh of cantina. Plus purple mats and shards. If you bought credits for ~ 100000, you only gain an extra 44k.
True. Good point. I buy raid gear with my crystals. And I personally have hundreds of purple mats unused. I hate getting purples from the Mod Challenge... I want to rage.
3. Raid gear from the guild shop is the single worst value item in the game. I would do the math for you, but suffice it to say, it will take you forever to get one piece that way.
This why I said "balance" the shards and gear. If you can't use your toons for lack of credits, then you could buy more raid gear.. I mean, unless you don't need raid gear. And a lot of people are in a place in the game to disagree with you on this. There are plenty of players at the point where raid gear is very important.
This solution says "get characters you don't want because they are so hard to farm you won't be able to spend credits fast enough."
It is more like get the parts of the toons you want. All the parts. If you race to finish one part, of course you will be waiting on the rest, before you can do anything with that toon!
If there was a way to farm credits without farming shards I'd agree with you, but there isn't. They took away the credit mining for the scoundrel event(let's not open that can of worms). I guess I could farm cantina nodes that don't give shards, but that just makes no sense.
Amazing solution to the credit crunch man--just stop playing. Wow that is awesome advice. What exactly can you do in this game that doesn't give you shards and/or training droids?
Ok, at the risk of being captain obvious:
1. Cantina. Stop refreshing it. Crystals saved = 100 per day. Credit conversion = + ~100,000 credits per day.
2. Hard nodes. Stop doing them. 5 rolls, daily completed, done. Rest on gear. If you are not bottlenecked on gear, you can NOT refresh energy, and save another 50 to 100 crystals a day.
3. Guild coins: balance number of shards you get with the raid gear you buy
4. GW shards... shard shop for vader and GG.
How is this "not playing?" It still takes > an hour a day to do GW and Arena, and only 3 seconds less of hitting "refresh energy" and pressing multisim. It takes 4 or 6 times longer to farm shards for your new toon... and? If you are having enough credits, then go back and start buying cantina refresh? If ur not OCD about the shards, your toon will be more useable at 5 star with gear and levels, than it will be at 7 star and waiting on credits.
I have an excess of training droids. Right now. That does not bother me?
1. I would say Snake 2 pretty much nailed how silly this list is, but where are you getting the 100k a day from not doing refreshes in Cantina? it is 85 crystals for 65k with a chance to get a higher amount. That is not ~100 a day. As he noted, you are also sacrificing the only non-GW and credit challenge source of credits by doing this, so it DEFINITELY isn't 100k a day.
2. The only hard mode I do is Ewok Scout...
3. guild coins-buy atrociously priced guild gear once or twice a month and put them on characters that aren't high level enough to equip them due to credit crunch? Seems like I get mega-screwed twice there...
4. GW, ARena, Cantina shards for Vader and GG? I rarely ever see Vader, but I definitely buy him when I do. This is once again a terrible solution though. I would have way more shard shop coins than I needed for the rare Vaders and I could not care less about Grievous. What kind of solution is it to accept an awful exchange rate for existing currency to buy someone that isn't even worth it? This is a ridiculous solution to a terrible game design that somehow manages to make the game even less fun. I could stop gaining shards and training droids completely right now and I would still be months away from having spare credits (this was before mods btw)
What kind of solution is it to accept an awful exchange rate for existing currency to buy someone that isn't even worth it?
If you can't use the shards, then they aren't of value. As long as shards fall from the sky in GW, and credits don't, the shards are very low in value, once you have decent GW and arena teams...
guild coins-buy atrociously priced guild gear once or twice a month and put them on characters that aren't high level enough to equip them due to credit crunch?
So your solution is to farm more shards with this currency? I don't get it. Doesn't that create more low level toons that you can't afford to level? I wish I had the problem of too much raid gear that I can't equip. I know I'm not alone.
You guys are thinking
"I need some more worthless credits. So I can use these valuable shards."
You need to value your credits more, and shards less.
Sometimes I forget to do my challenges. Sometimes I forget to do my arena battles. Sometimes I forget to collect and spend my energy. I never fail to do my GW.
RE 1: What if you're farming a character in Cantina?
If you don't have credits to use the shards BY THE TIME you've got em, which is what you are saying. Then what does it matter if your shard farm is slower? You still progress in shards with your totally free cantina energy. And if you have enough credits, then go ahead and buy some refreshes. Preferably on Sundays.
RE 2: What if you need to farm a character that can't be farmed in Cantina? FOST, FOTP which are needed for Offense Mod challenge
If you want to hit every hard node for these toons at the same time, to the point where your shards outpace your gear/credit? Well, you will wait on credits when you are done. That's your choice.
These things are not lip service. I do them all. Stopped doing cantina refresh for a full month BEFORE the mod "crisis." The GW token dump to Shard Shop was the hardest to start doing, for me, personally. But if credits are not enough, value of shards is low. Don't need 'em.
RE 1 & 2: This game changes frequently and different characters are needed for different things. You can't sit back and wait for the change to occur and then start farming a new character. Characters like RG are very important, there was an EA post a while back that alluded to AOE becoming important, so having Lando and / or JKA will be important. For all but the HP Mod challenge, you need unique teams. What about people that still need Scoundrels for the Scoundrel challenge? People that need Jedi for Yoda? Should we just not enjoy that content then?
This game offers a fair amount of content most of which have unique requirements. As it stands today, it is nearly impossible to prep for much of the content if one is not already prepared for it. If you're fine with that then fine, but don't try and tell people that how they're playing the game is wrong or they're mismanaging their resources. Some people want to enjoy and be competitive in all aspects and all content within the game and the in-game resources does not support that. Effectively one has to miss quite a bit of the content if they don't already have the characters.
And hell... what about the next raid? We have no idea what we're going to need. Once we find out, it's an all new character farm and possibly even a specific Mod farm? Maybe part of the raid will require high-tenacity Mods to resist a key debuff in a certain phase. Something like that means farming and leveling 30 mods, which is how many million credits? It also means having a specific squad. Does the player even have that specific squad? If not, they have to farm. It's definitely possible. Not sure if you've raided in games like WoW but different phases of a boss encounter definitely have such demands, wouldn't be unlikely to have something weird like that.
Bottom line, the current state of the game does not allow for even moderate expansion to enjoy all of the content if you are not already prepared for it. The game should not be so unbalanced with excess credits that everybody finished everything, gets bored and quits. Neither should the game be so unbalanced with a lack of credits that a moderate % of players are frustrated, gets bored, and quit; that's the current reality of this game. The game should be somewhere closer to the bell of the curve.
I don't think of it as making the best of a bad situation. I feel like it is making the best of THE situation. It is simply maximizing resource utilization for my current point in the game.
If that situation changes, and devs increase the credits, my relative evaluation of shard value will change.
A lot of us have a skewed perception. Early in the game credits are more than we need. And shards are very valuable. Things change over the course of the game. Like a frog in a slow boil, we might not notice until it's very late in the game.
You guys are thinking
"I need some more worthless credits. So I can use these valuable shards."
You need to value your credits more, and shards less.
Sometimes I forget to do my challenges. Sometimes I forget to do my arena battles. Sometimes I forget to collect and spend my energy. I never fail to do my GW.
Are you on drugs? Your "solution" to getting a ton of character shards we can't use (but which objectively "could" be useful if we had any credits with which to use them--like for mod challenges, events, next raid) is to literally throw them away to get a crap character that takes forever to get. This "solution" is a ridiculously circuitous attempt to somehow live in the current state of hyperinflation in the game. This takes all fun out of the game and makes the snail's pace of "progress" even worse. You seem to pretend that shards are the only thing credits are used on too. This is a fraction of what represents the cost of raising a character. It is just super obvious to see how little you have when you notice how many are waiting to get upgraded.
The fact that you even think this solution is reasonable and (perversely) the only responsible way to spend resources should signal that something is very very wrong
This game absolutely will die if something doesn't change, and your "solution" hampers anyone who sticks around long enough for that change to happen.
throw them away to get a **** character that takes forever to get.
same as I would throw away used toilet paper, yes. If/when credit supply increases, I can farm 15 GW shards a day, and whadya know. I have shards, again.
Replies
Yup. To be fair don't compare month to month and just a single week to another week. Entertainment spending is very seasonal and can very greatly month-to-month and definitely week-to-week. Some of the weekly trending can be insightful over time, so perhaps the 3rd week of August might shed some light on where the game is trending. The most telling sign will be the year-on-year improvement once the game has been out for a year. I'm fairly certain EA has annual earnings goals and this game will be expected to earn +x% compared to the same time last year. EA probably has a quarterly earnings call, that would be interesting to listen to as well. It's only July, they may not have had it yet because it takes time to close out the books on the prior quarter.
Specifically "All I'm saying is, not EVERYONE is having the same credit crunch,"
I've never once heard anyone say they have an overabundance of credits and a shortage of training droids. All I'm sayin.
(Side note: I specifically and intentionally didn't mention mods. New system. Still appears to be in flux.)
I don't necessarily care about more credits. I just want sufficient credits. Very important difference. I want the credits I make to be able to support the more rare resources I need to obtain (shards, droids, gear, mods).
And just for you I avoided using the word "should" since you appear to get distracted by semantics.
I think you're right. If the credit crunch was resolved, the pendulum would swing to other resources. I'd argue that result would be better for the players and the developer.
Imo, the ideal scenario is that when you reach a wall in one area of the game, you move on to a different area until you hit that wall, and so on.
How it is currently:
Ok I've finally farmed 330 Anakin shards, time to level him. Credit wall. Time to star him up. Credit wall. Time to mod him. Credit wall. Small mod wall(depending on how picky you are) Time to gear him. Small credit wall, gear wall. Time to get his abilities up. Small credit wall, ability mat wall.
The gear wall and ability wall are in good balance right now. The credit wall is just way out of balance.
If all aspects are balanced, people enjoy their experience and are more likely to spend, which is obviously the goal.
I want this game to be successful in the long run. The credit crunch is truly threatening that. If it isn't improved before level 90 hits, it'll be red alert time for sure.
Well said.
OTOH, if you farm fewer shards, then you will not have as bad a credit shortage. Just saying there's another way to do it, and no one ever claimed that you should spend 1 cantina refill and 2 energy refills forever. You don't have to do it that way. You can slow the shard farm. You can have raid geared toons at 6 stars, even. You might profit greater that way.
I'm all about having to work for them, I'm not a Democrat / Socialist. LOL. I just want that opportunity TO work for the credits and that opportunity doesn't exist right now. As hard as GW is, I feel we're underpaid. LOL!
WILL WORK FOR CREDITS!
@ShaolinPunk
I'm not saying that. Nowhere in my post did I say all upgrades should be free. I'm saying the different walls (gear, abilities, levels, stars, mods) should be the same height. So you always have something to work toward instead of just waiting for credits.
Want more credits = want to progress faster. I suppose we all want faster.
But credits are unbalanced, only because of the way you choose to grind.
I'm trying to present ideas that might actually improve this game in the long run, not just give out Zen advice.
(Actual response to his edited post is in my next post.)
If you think faster progression is good for the game in the long run, then just say that.
there's no need to justify it with arguments that have holes.
Yes, but we all aren't doing it the same way. If you have multiple toons sitting around with 330 shards and can't even do anything with them, then you might be losing ground to a better strategy. One where less stuff sits around, wasted. When you repeatedly face credit shortage and waiting for more credits, you might be failing to think longterm.
This game moves slow. Course corrections take time. It is hard to completely avoid that iceberg when you aren't paying attention. But the farther ahead you plan, the better your course. If you repeatedly end up short on credits, maybe you should stop doing the same thing over and over.
I wasn't saying those numbers were the end all be all man. I was just pointing out that there are objective numbers showing a decline. The amount of positive reviews was obviously fake btw. Do you really think that many people rereviewed the game to give it 5 stars? People are waaay more likely to do that to reduce numbers (angry people are simply more motivated) and it was obviously paid for reviews. They are down from a month ago. You can look up the stats yourself if you want instead of speculating what they might be to prove your point that everything is peachy.
The number of downloads and daily active players is waaay down and the purchasing spike doesn't change that. You saying they should wait and see makes no sense when there are so many plainly evident reasons for them to lighten the credit gate.
To be honest, they shouldn't have to wait and see anyways because this was a problem before mods and they made mods initially very cheap in response to this existing problem. Then they nerfed mods and made them insanely more expensive BUT DID NOTHING to supplement credits. What exactly do they need to wait and see? The problem is plain as day and it is awful game design.
Right? This is a game after-all, should be entertaining and not frustrating. Now if you came on and said you bought Cody and Geo Spy and can't pay your bills now; I'd say you need to live within your means. LOL
If there was a way to farm credits without farming shards I'd agree with you, but there isn't. They took away the credit mining for the scoundrel event(let's not open that can of worms). I guess I could farm cantina nodes that don't give shards, but that just makes no sense.
Credit mining was really bad value, but at this point I'd be doing it everyday. I was doing it months ago when gw was really broken the first time.
Previously to the mod update, a lot of people were complaining about the credit crunch for months. Although I could always understand these people, I never felt that way myself. Since I knew that after I reached level 80 it was only a matter of time until I will finally overcome the credit crunch. Prior to the mod update it would have maybe taken me 2-3 more months. I expected that after that time there will surely come another lvl increase, so the whole credit thing would start over again. But that would have been fine, since the target had always been within reach. I know that these kind of games are designed around "chasing the carrot".
Then came the mod update and the credit needs quadrupled. If you want to take part in the whole mod thing then your WHOLE progression with other characters has to stop for months. This is the perfect example of putting the carrot too far! This game looses a lot of its fun for many people if they cannot achieve any new characters anymore. There are a lot of other gates in this game which prevent you from maxing out, e.g. raidgear, normal purple gear, omega materials and also having the best mods, if they only were affordable. This game definetly doesnt need a credit crunch which is this severly.
After all it should be in the best interest of EA. If they want to make money then they should at least try to cater a little bit to their customers.
Amazing solution to the credit crunch man--just stop playing. Wow that is awesome advice. What exactly can you do in this game that doesn't give you shards and/or training droids? This is some serious Stockholm Syndrome stuff here. Just about every activity in this game gives you things you need to spend credits on (remember GW and Arena give you shards too).
What "progress" is not tied to credits praytell? If you are saying to spend 100k a day on training, 100k a day on abilities, 100k a day on shards, and 100k a day on mods to keep the wall level, then that wall isn't really ever going to get much higher is it? You are still getting other currencies/"gates" way faster than credits
Ok, at the risk of being captain obvious:
1. Cantina. Stop refreshing it. Crystals saved = 100 per day. Credit conversion = + ~100,000 credits per day.
2. Hard nodes. Stop doing them. 5 rolls, daily completed, done. Rest on gear. If you are not bottlenecked on gear, you can NOT refresh energy, and save another 50 to 100 crystals a day.
3. Guild coins: balance number of shards you get with the raid gear you buy
4. GW shards... shard shop for vader and GG.
How is this "not playing?" It still takes > an hour a day to do GW and Arena, and only 3 seconds less of hitting "refresh energy" and pressing multisim. It takes 4 or 6 times longer to farm shards for your new toon... and? If you are having enough credits, then go back and start buying cantina refresh? If ur not OCD about the shards, your toon will be more useable at 5 star with gear and levels, than it will be at 7 star and waiting on credits.
I have an excess of training droids. Right now. That does not bother me?
RE 1: What if you're farming a character in Cantina?
RE 2: What if you need to farm a character that can't be farmed in Cantina? FOST, FOTP which are needed for Offense Mod challenge
Doing what you suggest is playing by your standards and what makes you happy in this game.
If you want to hit every hard node for these toons at the same time, to the point where your shards outpace your gear/credit? Well, you will wait on credits when you are done. That's your choice.
These things are not lip service. I do them all. Stopped doing cantina refresh for a full month BEFORE the mod "crisis." The GW token dump to Shard Shop was the hardest to start doing, for me, personally. But if credits are not enough, value of shards is low. Don't need 'em.
It would take 104 days of that amount of saving to level one character from 1-80.
2. I already do minimum hard nodes. I still farm gear because the gear wall is still high (just appropriately high imo). If I quit refreshing regular energy I could level a character 1-80 in 46 days with the extra credits.
3. Raid gear from the guild shop is the single worst value item in the game. I would do the math for you, but suffice it to say, it will take you forever to get one piece that way.
4. This solution says "get characters you don't want because they are so hard to farm you won't be able to spend credits fast enough."
Please don't tell me my arguments are full of holes.
This why I said "balance" the shards and gear. If you can't use your toons for lack of credits, then you could buy more raid gear.. I mean, unless you don't need raid gear. And a lot of people are in a place in the game to disagree with you on this. There are plenty of players at the point where raid gear is very important.
It is more like get the parts of the toons you want. All the parts. If you race to finish one part, of course you will be waiting on the rest, before you can do anything with that toon!
1. I would say Snake 2 pretty much nailed how silly this list is, but where are you getting the 100k a day from not doing refreshes in Cantina? it is 85 crystals for 65k with a chance to get a higher amount. That is not ~100 a day. As he noted, you are also sacrificing the only non-GW and credit challenge source of credits by doing this, so it DEFINITELY isn't 100k a day.
2. The only hard mode I do is Ewok Scout...
3. guild coins-buy atrociously priced guild gear once or twice a month and put them on characters that aren't high level enough to equip them due to credit crunch? Seems like I get mega-screwed twice there...
4. GW, ARena, Cantina shards for Vader and GG? I rarely ever see Vader, but I definitely buy him when I do. This is once again a terrible solution though. I would have way more shard shop coins than I needed for the rare Vaders and I could not care less about Grievous. What kind of solution is it to accept an awful exchange rate for existing currency to buy someone that isn't even worth it? This is a ridiculous solution to a terrible game design that somehow manages to make the game even less fun. I could stop gaining shards and training droids completely right now and I would still be months away from having spare credits (this was before mods btw)
So your solution is to farm more shards with this currency? I don't get it. Doesn't that create more low level toons that you can't afford to level? I wish I had the problem of too much raid gear that I can't equip. I know I'm not alone.
"I need some more worthless credits. So I can use these valuable shards."
You need to value your credits more, and shards less.
Sometimes I forget to do my challenges. Sometimes I forget to do my arena battles. Sometimes I forget to collect and spend my energy. I never fail to do my GW.
RE 1 & 2: This game changes frequently and different characters are needed for different things. You can't sit back and wait for the change to occur and then start farming a new character. Characters like RG are very important, there was an EA post a while back that alluded to AOE becoming important, so having Lando and / or JKA will be important. For all but the HP Mod challenge, you need unique teams. What about people that still need Scoundrels for the Scoundrel challenge? People that need Jedi for Yoda? Should we just not enjoy that content then?
This game offers a fair amount of content most of which have unique requirements. As it stands today, it is nearly impossible to prep for much of the content if one is not already prepared for it. If you're fine with that then fine, but don't try and tell people that how they're playing the game is wrong or they're mismanaging their resources. Some people want to enjoy and be competitive in all aspects and all content within the game and the in-game resources does not support that. Effectively one has to miss quite a bit of the content if they don't already have the characters.
And hell... what about the next raid? We have no idea what we're going to need. Once we find out, it's an all new character farm and possibly even a specific Mod farm? Maybe part of the raid will require high-tenacity Mods to resist a key debuff in a certain phase. Something like that means farming and leveling 30 mods, which is how many million credits? It also means having a specific squad. Does the player even have that specific squad? If not, they have to farm. It's definitely possible. Not sure if you've raided in games like WoW but different phases of a boss encounter definitely have such demands, wouldn't be unlikely to have something weird like that.
Bottom line, the current state of the game does not allow for even moderate expansion to enjoy all of the content if you are not already prepared for it. The game should not be so unbalanced with excess credits that everybody finished everything, gets bored and quits. Neither should the game be so unbalanced with a lack of credits that a moderate % of players are frustrated, gets bored, and quit; that's the current reality of this game. The game should be somewhere closer to the bell of the curve.
Which enforces my previous point. You're saying live within your means. What you're saying may be a way to make the best out of a bad situation.
I'm trying to make suggestions to improve the entire situation.
You're not going to convince this entire forum that the credit crunch doesn't exist.
Maybe a dev will read my post and be persuaded to make changes.
If that situation changes, and devs increase the credits, my relative evaluation of shard value will change.
A lot of us have a skewed perception. Early in the game credits are more than we need. And shards are very valuable. Things change over the course of the game. Like a frog in a slow boil, we might not notice until it's very late in the game.
Are you on drugs? Your "solution" to getting a ton of character shards we can't use (but which objectively "could" be useful if we had any credits with which to use them--like for mod challenges, events, next raid) is to literally throw them away to get a crap character that takes forever to get. This "solution" is a ridiculously circuitous attempt to somehow live in the current state of hyperinflation in the game. This takes all fun out of the game and makes the snail's pace of "progress" even worse. You seem to pretend that shards are the only thing credits are used on too. This is a fraction of what represents the cost of raising a character. It is just super obvious to see how little you have when you notice how many are waiting to get upgraded.
The fact that you even think this solution is reasonable and (perversely) the only responsible way to spend resources should signal that something is very very wrong
This game absolutely will die if something doesn't change, and your "solution" hampers anyone who sticks around long enough for that change to happen.