Profit Mining / Training Droid Hunt - probably even worse than you think
February 11, 2016 1:39AM
edited February 2016
Like many of you I am surprised at how little these pay out. So I did a bit of math to see just how bad they are.
Credits
Most people, even F2P, use 200 crystals per day for 2 standard and 1 Cantina refresh. The regular energy usually goes to simming hard missions for shards and regular ones for gear. We are always short on energy, though the extra 135 per day is a nice bonus now.
Let's say you are the typical person and you do the 50/50/100 split. And say you need credits. So you spend 200 crystals to do this event 10 times. The base payout is 8.4k. Let's say you get the 3x 10% of the time. That comes to just about exactly 100k credits.
Now consider instead that you could use those 200 crystals for an extra Cantina refresh. If you do this using a level 6 node, you will get:
- 50k credits.
- 210 orange balls, worth a little over 2.5 shards in the best shipment area.
- On average, about 3 shards from the missions themselves.
- A chance at Tier 3 ability mats.
- 120 XP if you are below cap.
- 8,400 points worth of training droids.
Who wouldn't pay 50k credits for 5.5 character shards alone? By the way the training droids are worth 3.5 tries at the training droid event all by themselves.
Okay well, let's say you've done the 200 crystal Cantina refresh and you really need credits. You can spend 200 crystals to get 100k credits from the event, or 170 crystals to get 130k from the store.
So who actually can make use of this? Only someone who needs credits but has no shards or gear they are farming from missions. Does anyone fall into this category?
Droids
Basic reward is one 2*, one 3*, one 4*. That's 2400 XP total. Again let's assume you get 3x 10% of the time. If you do this 10 times then, you get 28,800 XP. That will cost you 240 energy. Which, unless you have nothing else to do with it, costs a minimum of 100 crystals. More likely 200 since most people use the 50 refreshes already, and this would be on top of that.
At 100 crystals for 2 refreshes, this is 288 XP per crystal. At 200 crystals, it is 144 XP per crystal. But you can just buy 7 5* droids for 60 crystals, which is 21,000 XP and works out to 350 XP per crystal. And you can do that 4x per day with no increasing cost like energy refreshes.
So once again, this is of no use to anyone unless they have no need to use their free energy on anything else.
Credits
Most people, even F2P, use 200 crystals per day for 2 standard and 1 Cantina refresh. The regular energy usually goes to simming hard missions for shards and regular ones for gear. We are always short on energy, though the extra 135 per day is a nice bonus now.
Let's say you are the typical person and you do the 50/50/100 split. And say you need credits. So you spend 200 crystals to do this event 10 times. The base payout is 8.4k. Let's say you get the 3x 10% of the time. That comes to just about exactly 100k credits.
Now consider instead that you could use those 200 crystals for an extra Cantina refresh. If you do this using a level 6 node, you will get:
- 50k credits.
- 210 orange balls, worth a little over 2.5 shards in the best shipment area.
- On average, about 3 shards from the missions themselves.
- A chance at Tier 3 ability mats.
- 120 XP if you are below cap.
- 8,400 points worth of training droids.
Who wouldn't pay 50k credits for 5.5 character shards alone? By the way the training droids are worth 3.5 tries at the training droid event all by themselves.
Okay well, let's say you've done the 200 crystal Cantina refresh and you really need credits. You can spend 200 crystals to get 100k credits from the event, or 170 crystals to get 130k from the store.
So who actually can make use of this? Only someone who needs credits but has no shards or gear they are farming from missions. Does anyone fall into this category?
Droids
Basic reward is one 2*, one 3*, one 4*. That's 2400 XP total. Again let's assume you get 3x 10% of the time. If you do this 10 times then, you get 28,800 XP. That will cost you 240 energy. Which, unless you have nothing else to do with it, costs a minimum of 100 crystals. More likely 200 since most people use the 50 refreshes already, and this would be on top of that.
At 100 crystals for 2 refreshes, this is 288 XP per crystal. At 200 crystals, it is 144 XP per crystal. But you can just buy 7 5* droids for 60 crystals, which is 21,000 XP and works out to 350 XP per crystal. And you can do that 4x per day with no increasing cost like energy refreshes.
So once again, this is of no use to anyone unless they have no need to use their free energy on anything else.
Quit 7/14/16. Best of luck to all of you.
Post edited by Qeltar on
0
Replies
Even the chance at triple totaling 25,200 is horrible! This game is like a bad slot machine... C'mon man...
Greed will kill this game.
I was progressing fine even now into the 60s but now that the credits have been reduced to crud its gonna slow my progress waaaaaay down. Makes it even harder for us f2p players.
Before, these were poor unless you were at the cap and had lesser demand for gear and shards. Now they are just completely useless. You would have to burn a whole days energy to level up 1 character by 1 level
I agree the amount its at is laughable, but I don't think many used it in the first place.
24 energy for 8,300 credits is 346 credits per energy
So 15% of the previous award or an 85% decrease
This constant reduction in playable benefits is getting really old.
I would love to see the minutes of the meetings where this garbage is hashed out. . .
I used to spend crystals (paid for with $$$) to raise energy and farm keycard credits. . . That will never happen again now.
Unacceptable.
That being said, if I knew they were gonna do this, I would've sold everything I had before they took it away, I'm broke from a game perspective and will not spend energy on this. It's a waste of energy and therefore exp. Even if I was at max level I wouldn't use them.
Most people who used it, would not use the entire hour. I would wait until my energy replenished over time then add 2x50 crystals (and sometimes expend another 100) then mine credits and/or droids as needed until I dropped below 50 energy. Using Auto, it took 15-20 minutes tops.
So much for that.
Please fix this ASAP to award players with the credits you have advertised.
If we could spread the word and no one used it at all, they may realize that that it was a crap change and alter the numbers.
Still, I am hoping that someone just forgot to add a 0 to the available reward and they adjust it like they did the non-issuing credits on the Jedi pack.
AMEN! I guess the F2Pers who figured out how to use the old system to level up their players at a decent rate were **** them off. Gotta slow those non-payers down! Yeah.... slow them down to not playing.
I used them all the time. With 1 50 crystal refresh, you can run the challenges 4x and get 400,000 credits. On the next day, I would do the same with the training droid. Those two combined with the GW rewards and I was able to level up 4-5 players every few days. A decent return when you have 20 characters you need to level up.
Now? It will take me 4-5 days to level up 1 single character. Unlocking new characters is almost pointless now as to go from level one to level 60 or higher requires a million credits. Not to mention all the gear and mats that need to be farmed.
That being said, for those who want to run the events, they are garbage.
When I saw what happened yesterday with the credit/training events I was really angry at EA for a while and then later I got angrier at myself for not seeing it coming. I actually knew exactly what was going to happen subconsciously on Feb 3rd when they introduced this cheap insulting red data card event but I was still finishing getting to 70 at this point and we all know to focus on xp rather than spend 50 energy or more on 100k credits which gives zero xp and no droids or materials. So then a day or two later after I do get 70, I say "great now I'm going to start spamming key card and build up a ton of credits" until I saw the February release notes which totally derailed this process and I essentially only got 1-2 days of building up credits until I saw two things.
1. They are going to release yoda which made me immediately switch to farming Jedi and I spent all my energy gearing these guys up instead of farming credits and
2. The way I interpreted was Jesse wrote about credit events I actually thought that it would increase the amount of credits.
Part of me thought that sure, they'll probably decrease credits by 10-20% but this will be offset by free energy and constantly being open so I can spend something like 8 energy for 15k. Well stupid me I guess but more accurately shady Jesse and developers which I'll get to in a second. But let me say first that these boards are toxic/whiny/annoying to read overall and very negative. I don't like to read all these posts but if I didn't I wouldn't know important things about the game (how speed works, latest stealth nerf on Poe) and I actually thought that maybe EA did this nerf on credits which if you look at the math is a massive 50-85% decrease in credits which is going to be a major impact on the game, as a way to spite us players and get back at us for how toxic the boards are. That's not the case however. Here's what you need to know about the developers and why they changed the credits:
First of all, look at the math. The players could spend the energy they wake up with, two 50 crystal refreshes, several 100 refreshes, and free energy they receive and make at least 1.6M credits for less than 600 crystals which they would have to spend in the shop to get guaranteed 500k up to the 1.5M if they got lucky.
Assuming 100 energy per refill = 200k. 200k for initial, 400k for two 50 crystal refreshes, free energy 100k, 600k for three 100 refreshes, and since we get 20 energy more per refill that's another 200k which in total is about 1.5-1.6M credits and maybe more for less than 600 crystals. In what universe would any player spend crystals for credits when you get guaranteed more credits for less crystals? And what business, realizing the math of this, would ever let it continue? Which brings me to my next point.
Here are EA's priorities whether you like them or not:
1. Make money
2. Do what's in the best long term interests of the game in terms of character balancing, economy, lvl, pvp ect.
3. Listen to players and feedback. And adjust to make them happy.
As you can see, everyone in the forums and myself we fall into number 3 on this list and the credit adjustment is on number 2. EA's will not go back and they will tell you they're listening and they care and maybe they do but they're looking at the long term picture of the game and as it stands, everyone has raced to 70 and almost everyone in my server in the top 100 is already 70 and everyone else is probably at least in their 60s and will be 70 soon enough. EA needs to buy itself more time. I'm betting that in another month or so, it will raise the cap to 80, and instead of people getting there in two weeks, it will take 1-2 months given how much the credits will cost. Many people will say that the credit chance was just a money grab but I don't think that was the primary motivation for EA. This change was about longevity and quite frankly they do not care what you say. Even if they lose 1/5 of the players over this, they need to make this game viable long term and if you could farm up 10-20M credits in a couple weeks then when they raise the cap to 80 then the top players would get there too fast again.
Finally, here is why I'm truly angry at EA. I'm angry that EA, once again, did not let us know that this was coming and the reason they didn't let us know is because if they had, then every single player would have spent tons of crystals and farmed up 5-10M credits over the last week and that's the last thing they wanted us to do. Instead they decided to lull us into a false sense of security by giving us between 500-1M credits with these red cards and distract us with the yoda event so all us players at 70 would focus on getting out Jedi up and not to mention making it sound as if we'd be getting more credits in this new event that would be open 24/7. There is a real honesty problem going on between developers and players. From the developers perspective, they had to launch this game before it was ready (anyone remember barrissgate? Imo this is much worse), had to work hard to play catch up and make the game playable, and had to change the credits so that they could look out for three best interest of the game because no money/no longevity = no game for players to even complain about. From the players perspective, the game didn't seem complete/buggy/lack of content, some moves feel like a money grab, and we play everyday which can feel like a grind and just as I was lvl 70 with a fair amount of 7 stars and about to amass credits and feel like I was getting some breathing room, you take it away acting as if was a minor change while everyone is distracted by yoda.
I look at a company like apple that bends over backwards to make customers happy in every way but my experience with this game has been far from that. I've spent $200-$250 in total and while I complain that I feel screwed over, I know any f2p are going to hurt much more. My only options are to 1. Quit 2. Spend money and get more crystals to stay ahead or 3. Go completely f2p. I've decided to go fully f2p. I'm sure the amount of money that I've spent is above EA's projected average amount per player so they don't care if I quit or not but with this upcoming event I was planning on spending $20 up to another $200 over the course of the next year. I won't spend any more money now. Also, I think this change actually does help the longevity of the game and this morning I'm more optimistic that this game will become the premium game that we hoped it all would be months ago. I think every player should be extremely upset by how the key cards were replaced (which is ironic considering everyone hated these events and EA promised it would replace it with something much better and I can already hear some threads about "bring back the old key cards system.") And my only bit of advice is that at least when these decisions are made they either help all of us or hurt all of us more or less equally and if you're really upset I wouldn't blame you for quitting or going fully f2p so what I'm going to do is remember that it's just a game, it's here for our amusement, and try to have as much fun with it as possible despite all the negativity and nonsense.
They made the game so much slower now because we'll always be short money or training droids.
At least it frees up my budget for other games now. I won't spend another dime on this game until the corporate greed is toned down or at least disguised a little better.