This is a concept I've been going over in my head with lots of the features in the game. With each thing that comes along that the players interact with... I wonder... did the designers create this to work this way? Is this what they INTENDED? or is this just what was a poor DESIGN?
Marquee events are catching a lot of flack lately!
My understanding of the INTENTION of these events is to show off a new character. Build excitement in some aspect of the game. Get the player base excited over the new possibility in their game to use this fun new toy. Finally, the intention is to build excitement to the point that players feel rewarded for playing each day, and that if they are excited enough they open their wallets.
My view of the DESIGN of these events causes a result of the following. The new character is only exciteing based off what a game changer tells us the character can do, and if they change the game substantially then we feel inclined to spend cash (Nest, Hounds Tooth for example). We know the character cannot be used in a majority of the events until they are 7* so we forget about the characters ability when we finally get the character to 7* months later. The players look past the rewards they get (mods and other rewards for playing) and just grumble about the character not being full power. Players generally AUTO the battles ignoring the ability to test new features.
Some suggestions:
1) Make the full team (intended use) available for the event. If Aurra Singh is meant to fight a raid boss.... let use use this Marquee event to fight a raid boss with a team built around her. You could even turn these events "competitive" to see who can get the best score. Recently players had the opportunity to use PRELOADED TEAMS in quests... Some players could not overcome the hardest levels because they did not understand the skillset of the characters they were using. This forced them to LEARN & OVERCOME (a Game Basic principle)
2) Make the event run again for each player when they finally achieve 7*'s on the character... in fact the event should run for new players just starting out to educate them on the character they just unlocked. (I know this is Design intensive, but this would be a major QOL update that ive not seen). A new player gets the 10 shards needed to unlock Qi'Ra TODAY, should get the event loaded and rewarded with a 2 or 3 star Qi'Ra... it would then advice them on if they should keep going for her or not.
3) Turn off the ability to Auto Battle in these events. People may hate me for this one... but I stand by my belief
4) Hire a media team, even if its 1 or 2 of your Game Changers. The game-changer system is GREAT and a huge Advantage for EA. But it is also a crutch. These guys and ladies dont sell me on a character...
I really wonder what our vibrant community thinks about this. CG has done some great things over the life of this game, and some missteps, they will continue to push for delivering the best content... so i think the best way is to continue to give constructive feedback that comes with suggestions on what we want. They cant make everyone happy, but they keep trying.
@CG_Carrie Thanks for all you do, I know its not easy.
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I also love marquees but yeah there were too many in too short a time period. I think they have learned their lesson from this. A few a month are nice though and I hope they keep up the constant stream of new content.
As they keep releasing more and more marquee toons a huge back log builds up because there is no relief. Before they made the poor decision to remove toons from squad, fleet, cantina, and gw shops you could farm an entire team of new marquee toons at the same time. Not any more and it is causing many players to get frustrated because they do not feel like they are progressing when they haven't finished farming 1 set of toons and CG has released 3 more sets of toons on top of there current farm schedule.
They really need to either rethink the shop decision, hold off on marquees for a while, add more events that reward large amounts of character shards, significantly increase the shard drop rates across the board, significantly decrease the price it takes to 7* a new toon so more people would be willing to spend money. (more people spending less money can = more profit over all anyways if its priced correctly.) Decrease the cost of refreshes on energy (they already halfed the refresh on nodes. 👏) or increase the energy regen speeds and or the amount you get when buying a refresh.
All of those ideas would make grinding out 25+ new marquee toons seem way less daunting and buy back some good will. Which knowing how CG has operated over the past year will not happen...
They have killed all my faith at this point.