Not sure how many freemium games you guys have played but swgoh is VERY f2p friendly.
Go play World of Warships Blitz... Wonderfully designed ftp model. Anyway, I quit the game about 3 weeks ago; not because of a widening ftp-whale gap but mostly because of boredom. I was an April 2016 shard and a dolphin btw...
While it was fun a year ago, it's now like Taco-Bell; rearrange the same five ingredients and call it ”new". CGs model here is like a jigsaw puzzle except with no borders... They just expand the same things in ways which makes it difficult to keep up but it's the same thing over.
The thing that worries me is how EA has skillfully targeted and exploited people's psychologically addictive tendencies in a borderline unethical manner.
We live in a free society, and people are able to do what they wish, providing it is legal.... EA is not forcing people to do anything...... Is it the casino's fault that Joe is a gambling addict, the liquid stores fault that Jane is an alcoholic or the corner store's fault that Jack has stage four lung cancer because he was a lifetime smoker?..... My point is, everyone has to make choices and people who are unable to live within their means or unable to enjoy things in moderation will always find a vehicle to drive them to self destruction......
I completely agree with you... Except I'm not talking about Joe or Jack... I'm talking about EA. Opiods were marketed as "a great thing"... Doctors prescribed them. Doesn't excuse the patient who just kept taking them thinking everything was fine, yet the drug companies and doctors enabled the addiction.
I personally love the "it's your choice" argument... Of course you have a choice! But we seem to always disregard the things that influence it...
Well, I dont want to stray too far from the OT, so to use your own analogy and tie it to the topic at hand, there is a very big difference between a medical professional prescribing prescription drugs to someone with a medical condition to help them cure or deal with their illness and someone that voluntarily downloads and plays a mobile game.
My kids are fortnight addicts.... They are constantly asking me to get them v-bucks to upgrade their characters.... When I spent some time watching them play and realized that the money in that game doesn't actually improve your gameplay or characters, it's simply used to buy skins that make you look cooler..... In essence, fortnite's business model is to use online poker pressure amongst kids and young adults to get money for the latest and greatest look...... Now THAT is greasy.....
Yeah, perhaps the opiate analogy wasn't the best, but the idea is the same... As a recent example, how many players just HAD to have their mods back to gold after the mod-slice update? For the rational minded it might not be a bid deal but to some green/blue mods are just unacceptable... I'm sure quite a bit of money was spent satisfying this OCD need. I've also seen quite a few g.XII Gamorean Guards... Why? Doesn't seem logical to me.
Another poster used the analogy of gambling, saying "Is it the casino's fault that Joe has a gambling addiction?" Well, if Joe was informed of the potential addictive nature of gambling, then no... but that's the key... Gambling addiction is well known, casinos have age restrictions, and a gambler is informed of the odds of winning. To this point, EA has had the same attitude as many have posted on this forum... "You have a choice!" Except EA has done nothing to provide an INFORMED choice... they wouldn't even tell you your odds on those 5-330 packs (I guess that is changing now? Even so, it's only by political pressure, not by any moral compass)
So I don't blame EA for people's choices... but I DO blame them for not informing the player base of what they're potentially getting into.
And back to original post... FTP might be on a small upswing for newer players but I think veterans like me (and I was a dolphin until about 5 months ago) will start leaving more and more due to a widening gap. It's not so much "FTP" as it is the fact that it is becoming exceedingly difficult to be a casual gamer here.
I was the "other poster"..... EA just recently posted the drop rates on all packs and it confirmed what we all knew..... It only took me buying one 5-330 pack and getting 7 to understand the odds..... Never bought another again......
Please don't take this as argumentative..... I enjoy topical debate with someone with your experience in the game, but you bring up age restriction...... Again, I am a firm believer in personal responsibility..... If underagers are spending large dollars on this game, then those dollars are not coming from them.... they are coming from their parents who are enabling them.... Something I, as a parent, would never do.....
Big corporate will always be big corporate......
I also appreciate a civilized discussion... point/counter-point is always good communication
Everyone keeps talking about the new shard as if arena is the only thing that matters. Any new players who remain F2P will never partake in any new raid content in this game. Most guilds right now can’t even bed or attempt heroic sith. Those are guilds made up of players with 1.5+ years of play time as well. No one starts a game and says hey once I’ve spent some decent time grinding in this game I’ll be fine never being able to do the neeedt raid content. That’s just ****. Sith raid has been out for a fair amount of time now and there are still so many guilds who are unable to reach traya shards. With the current path this game is on it will certain loose many F2P people. If any of you out there think loosing the F2P means less then loosing the whales you are wrong. If a huge player base is not kept in a game like this then it will certainly die off. Whales do not make up enough of the population to keep this game going for years to come. The easiest way to fix everything is to increase shard drops on all nodes.( space, cantina and hard nodes) if each time you run 1 sim you have the chance to get 2 or maybe 3 shards this would close in the gap of farming squads. That gap closing is all that is needed. Shard increase per sim is the way to go. It doesn’t cost CG any money from the whales and it keeps the F2P clients in game.
Wouldn’t solve anything because character shards are absolutely not the problem. You earn shards so much faster than credit, gear and ability materials it’s like the last thing you actually need. I have dozens of characters needed for raids teams or other events that are 7* but useless because going from g8 to g12 is so long, i have around zero omega, zero zeta and even zero purple mat cause you need so much. The gap has never been and never will be character shards. It’s 100% ability mat and gear, and to a lesser extent credit.
@BubbaFett Just a quick thing regarding your talk about responsability. You should check some articles and stuff on the internet about marketing, com and neuroscience (friendly reminder that the people spending the most money in the world on neuroscience are google, amazon and the like).
Won’t go too far cause a you said it’s not the place, but a lot, and i mean a lot of what you would think to be « your choices » are actually anything but.
Everyone keeps talking about the new shard as if arena is the only thing that matters. Any new players who remain F2P will never partake in any new raid content in this game. Most guilds right now can’t even bed or attempt heroic sith. Those are guilds made up of players with 1.5+ years of play time as well. No one starts a game and says hey once I’ve spent some decent time grinding in this game I’ll be fine never being able to do the neeedt raid content. That’s just ****. Sith raid has been out for a fair amount of time now and there are still so many guilds who are unable to reach traya shards. With the current path this game is on it will certain loose many F2P people. If any of you out there think loosing the F2P means less then loosing the whales you are wrong. If a huge player base is not kept in a game like this then it will certainly die off. Whales do not make up enough of the population to keep this game going for years to come. The easiest way to fix everything is to increase shard drops on all nodes.( space, cantina and hard nodes) if each time you run 1 sim you have the chance to get 2 or maybe 3 shards this would close in the gap of farming squads. That gap closing is all that is needed. Shard increase per sim is the way to go. It doesn’t cost CG any money from the whales and it keeps the F2P clients in game.
Wouldn’t solve anything because character shards are absolutely not the problem. You earn shards so much faster than credit, gear and ability materials it’s like the last thing you actually need. I have dozens of characters needed for raids teams or other events that are 7* but useless because going from g8 to g12 is so long, i have around zero omega, zero zeta and even zero purple mat cause you need so much. The gap has never been and never will be character shards. It’s 100% ability mat and gear, and to a lesser extent credit.
@BubbaFett Just a quick thing regarding your talk about responsability. You should check some articles and stuff on the internet about marketing, com and neuroscience (friendly reminder that the people spending the most money in the world on neuroscience are google, amazon and the like).
Won’t go too far cause a you said it’s not the place, but a lot, and i mean a lot of what you would think to be « your choices » are actually anything but.
I will respectfully never agree to that...... And believe me, I am farming the vets right now.... It's nonwk see Chewie and bigfoot look similar.... The sightings are just about as rare.....
I just think responsible people draw a line in the sand and stick to that line.....
Everyone keeps talking about the new shard as if arena is the only thing that matters. Any new players who remain F2P will never partake in any new raid content in this game. Most guilds right now can’t even bed or attempt heroic sith. Those are guilds made up of players with 1.5+ years of play time as well. No one starts a game and says hey once I’ve spent some decent time grinding in this game I’ll be fine never being able to do the neeedt raid content. That’s just ****. Sith raid has been out for a fair amount of time now and there are still so many guilds who are unable to reach traya shards. With the current path this game is on it will certain loose many F2P people. If any of you out there think loosing the F2P means less then loosing the whales you are wrong. If a huge player base is not kept in a game like this then it will certainly die off. Whales do not make up enough of the population to keep this game going for years to come. The easiest way to fix everything is to increase shard drops on all nodes.( space, cantina and hard nodes) if each time you run 1 sim you have the chance to get 2 or maybe 3 shards this would close in the gap of farming squads. That gap closing is all that is needed. Shard increase per sim is the way to go. It doesn’t cost CG any money from the whales and it keeps the F2P clients in game.
Wouldn’t solve anything because character shards are absolutely not the problem. You earn shards so much faster than credit, gear and ability materials it’s like the last thing you actually need. I have dozens of characters needed for raids teams or other events that are 7* but useless because going from g8 to g12 is so long, i have around zero omega, zero zeta and even zero purple mat cause you need so much. The gap has never been and never will be character shards. It’s 100% ability mat and gear, and to a lesser extent credit.
@BubbaFett Just a quick thing regarding your talk about responsability. You should check some articles and stuff on the internet about marketing, com and neuroscience (friendly reminder that the people spending the most money in the world on neuroscience are google, amazon and the like).
Won’t go too far cause a you said it’s not the place, but a lot, and i mean a lot of what you would think to be « your choices » are actually anything but.
I don't know how long you have been playing, but credit crunch has been a lesser problem for many long termers. Gear on the other hand is always is. To give you an idea I'm a day 1 f2p, I have all the characters/ships fully leveled and at least g7 and have 40M credits on top of that even though I've been also buying store mods. Some of the other top notch f2p that began playing later have been slowly catching me in terms of leveling most of their roster. So....main bottleneck for me is always shards of the newest marquee toons since I can force grind gear whenever a new character needs to be geared.
Everyone keeps talking about the new shard as if arena is the only thing that matters. Any new players who remain F2P will never partake in any new raid content in this game. Most guilds right now can’t even bed or attempt heroic sith. Those are guilds made up of players with 1.5+ years of play time as well. No one starts a game and says hey once I’ve spent some decent time grinding in this game I’ll be fine never being able to do the neeedt raid content. That’s just ****. Sith raid has been out for a fair amount of time now and there are still so many guilds who are unable to reach traya shards. With the current path this game is on it will certain loose many F2P people. If any of you out there think loosing the F2P means less then loosing the whales you are wrong. If a huge player base is not kept in a game like this then it will certainly die off. Whales do not make up enough of the population to keep this game going for years to come. The easiest way to fix everything is to increase shard drops on all nodes.( space, cantina and hard nodes) if each time you run 1 sim you have the chance to get 2 or maybe 3 shards this would close in the gap of farming squads. That gap closing is all that is needed. Shard increase per sim is the way to go. It doesn’t cost CG any money from the whales and it keeps the F2P clients in game.
Wouldn’t solve anything because character shards are absolutely not the problem. You earn shards so much faster than credit, gear and ability materials it’s like the last thing you actually need. I have dozens of characters needed for raids teams or other events that are 7* but useless because going from g8 to g12 is so long, i have around zero omega, zero zeta and even zero purple mat cause you need so much. The gap has never been and never will be character shards. It’s 100% ability mat and gear, and to a lesser extent credit.
@BubbaFett Just a quick thing regarding your talk about responsability. You should check some articles and stuff on the internet about marketing, com and neuroscience (friendly reminder that the people spending the most money in the world on neuroscience are google, amazon and the like).
Won’t go too far cause a you said it’s not the place, but a lot, and i mean a lot of what you would think to be « your choices » are actually anything but.
I don't know how long you have been playing, but credit crunch has been a lesser problem for many long termers. Gear on the other hand is always is. To give you an idea I'm a day 1 f2p, I have all the characters/ships fully leveled and at least g7 and have 40M credits on top of that even though I've been also buying store mods. Some of the other top notch f2p that began playing later have been slowly catching me in terms of leveling most of their roster. So....main bottleneck for me is always shards of the newest marquee toons since I can force grind gear whenever a new character needs to be geared.
I get what you are saying...... I guess what I am saying is players need to recognize this and make their choices......
We all know carbanti and stun guns are a crunch..... we all.complain about it, and maybe rightfully so....
But when I put together the SWGOH happy meal (guns and carbanti), it's very satisfying.....
Hopping in here - while you can be frustrated with issues in the game, I do want to remind folks that we aren't here to talk about issues like substance abuse, the opioid crisis, etc. These topics aren't appropriate for the forums.
I’m still saying —> Stun Guns!
If a new player can more easily get Finn Resistance, Phoenix etc to G10+ then they will compete far better than having dozens of undergeared characters.
Taking myself as an example I need more than a dozen stun guns on core characters & I’ve been farming them nonstop! Anyone even slightly less “focused” would be needing 25+ easily.
F2P is already dead in the fleet arena. Squad arena is very f2p fiendly as you can get by with some 3* g11 characters (even if they are trying to make it worse now that you can't equip 6* mods on non-g12 toons) and every team has a hard counter.
But fleet arena is a disaster with the new ships. They are useless at 3* (worse you also need a newish toon like Bossk geared and stared) and it's impossible to beat them with anything that's not a mirror team.
You go into a new ship arena too...and it’s smaller than the main arena, so more closely matched to your level and ships.
Im running a Rebel Team - it’s tricky to get any higher than about 35th. But the payout difference between say 10th and 49th isn’t that big (1400 and 200 crystals vs 1300 and 50)
Arguably Fleet is ok if you can hold top 50.
the only think that makes F2P Bore dying is their riduculously low drop rate ..... always farming the same gears which drops less often then the Loto numbers. Farming shard that drop once every 10 tries. 330 Shard = 3300 Tries ....
Next legendary will be C3PO since it is in every movies and comics Grievous will be required and will have it'**** rework.
Does the ability of a 95M Guild able to only fill 1 single Ships Platoon for Phases 4, 5, and 6 combined tell you something?
Yes, I'm talking about the current Empire TB running at the moment.
Nop, it tells me nothing. All but whale collectives are experiencing the same thing regardless of GP (155M here, only 1 whale in the guild). Platoons help a lot, but they are not a must for stars. You brute force your way into more stars as the guild gp rises.
Hopping in here - while you can be frustrated with issues in the game, I do want to remind folks that we aren't here to talk about issues like substance abuse, the opioid crisis, etc. These topics aren't appropriate for the forums.
They are, however, comparable to gambling and gaming addictions, which was the point.
Everyone keeps talking about the new shard as if arena is the only thing that matters. Any new players who remain F2P will never partake in any new raid content in this game. Most guilds right now can’t even bed or attempt heroic sith. Those are guilds made up of players with 1.5+ years of play time as well. No one starts a game and says hey once I’ve spent some decent time grinding in this game I’ll be fine never being able to do the neeedt raid content. That’s just ****. Sith raid has been out for a fair amount of time now and there are still so many guilds who are unable to reach traya shards. With the current path this game is on it will certain loose many F2P people. If any of you out there think loosing the F2P means less then loosing the whales you are wrong. If a huge player base is not kept in a game like this then it will certainly die off. Whales do not make up enough of the population to keep this game going for years to come. The easiest way to fix everything is to increase shard drops on all nodes.( space, cantina and hard nodes) if each time you run 1 sim you have the chance to get 2 or maybe 3 shards this would close in the gap of farming squads. That gap closing is all that is needed. Shard increase per sim is the way to go. It doesn’t cost CG any money from the whales and it keeps the F2P clients in game.
Wouldn’t solve anything because character shards are absolutely not the problem. You earn shards so much faster than credit, gear and ability materials it’s like the last thing you actually need. I have dozens of characters needed for raids teams or other events that are 7* but useless because going from g8 to g12 is so long, i have around zero omega, zero zeta and even zero purple mat cause you need so much. The gap has never been and never will be character shards. It’s 100% ability mat and gear, and to a lesser extent credit.
@BubbaFett Just a quick thing regarding your talk about responsability. You should check some articles and stuff on the internet about marketing, com and neuroscience (friendly reminder that the people spending the most money in the world on neuroscience are google, amazon and the like).
Won’t go too far cause a you said it’s not the place, but a lot, and i mean a lot of what you would think to be « your choices » are actually anything but.
I don't know how long you have been playing, but credit crunch has been a lesser problem for many long termers. Gear on the other hand is always is. To give you an idea I'm a day 1 f2p, I have all the characters/ships fully leveled and at least g7 and have 40M credits on top of that even though I've been also buying store mods. Some of the other top notch f2p that began playing later have been slowly catching me in terms of leveling most of their roster. So....main bottleneck for me is always shards of the newest marquee toons since I can force grind gear whenever a new character needs to be geared.
I answered to someone talking about new ftp players and their problems. But yeah i don’t doubt that when you already have 50 g12 chars, have every char in the game 7* lvl 85 and have been doing credit hesit for the past 3 years, and are able to complete the last tier of every event, every mission, every raid, and the last thing left for you to do is to farm the recently availables marquees, you don’t have the same problems as someone starting today.
And to be honest, even in that case, i really doubt that you would need a 200% increase in shard droprate, since farming those is the only thing you need to do, you should be able to invest all your ressources into it and get them fast enough, should you need them for anything.
That’s all i was saying.
Truth is this a new player/veterans thing, not a f2p/p2p thing, as many have demonstrated here that even f2p can do all this, as long as they’ve been playing for years.
I don’t know if f2p’s situation is really different now from what it was at the beginning. I’ve been playing only 11 months (to answer your question^^) so i don’t know how it was back then. And truthfully i don’t know how it’s like right now either, with the quests and everything.
Everyone keeps talking about the new shard as if arena is the only thing that matters. Any new players who remain F2P will never partake in any new raid content in this game. Most guilds right now can’t even bed or attempt heroic sith. Those are guilds made up of players with 1.5+ years of play time as well. No one starts a game and says hey once I’ve spent some decent time grinding in this game I’ll be fine never being able to do the neeedt raid content. That’s just ****. Sith raid has been out for a fair amount of time now and there are still so many guilds who are unable to reach traya shards. With the current path this game is on it will certain loose many F2P people. If any of you out there think loosing the F2P means less then loosing the whales you are wrong. If a huge player base is not kept in a game like this then it will certainly die off. Whales do not make up enough of the population to keep this game going for years to come. The easiest way to fix everything is to increase shard drops on all nodes.( space, cantina and hard nodes) if each time you run 1 sim you have the chance to get 2 or maybe 3 shards this would close in the gap of farming squads. That gap closing is all that is needed. Shard increase per sim is the way to go. It doesn’t cost CG any money from the whales and it keeps the F2P clients in game.
Wouldn’t solve anything because character shards are absolutely not the problem. You earn shards so much faster than credit, gear and ability materials it’s like the last thing you actually need. I have dozens of characters needed for raids teams or other events that are 7* but useless because going from g8 to g12 is so long, i have around zero omega, zero zeta and even zero purple mat cause you need so much. The gap has never been and never will be character shards. It’s 100% ability mat and gear, and to a lesser extent credit.
@BubbaFett Just a quick thing regarding your talk about responsability. You should check some articles and stuff on the internet about marketing, com and neuroscience (friendly reminder that the people spending the most money in the world on neuroscience are google, amazon and the like).
Won’t go too far cause a you said it’s not the place, but a lot, and i mean a lot of what you would think to be « your choices » are actually anything but.
I don't know how long you have been playing, but credit crunch has been a lesser problem for many long termers. Gear on the other hand is always is. To give you an idea I'm a day 1 f2p, I have all the characters/ships fully leveled and at least g7 and have 40M credits on top of that even though I've been also buying store mods. Some of the other top notch f2p that began playing later have been slowly catching me in terms of leveling most of their roster. So....main bottleneck for me is always shards of the newest marquee toons since I can force grind gear whenever a new character needs to be geared.
I answered to someone talking about new ftp players and their problems. But yeah i don’t doubt that when you already have 50 g12 chars, have every char in the game 7* lvl 85 and have been doing credit hesit for the past 3 years, and are able to complete the last tier of every event, every mission, every raid, and the last thing left for you to do is to farm the recently availables marquees, you don’t have the same problems as someone starting today.
And to be honest, even in that case, i really doubt that you would need a 200% increase in shard droprate, since farming those is the only thing you need to do, you should be able to invest all your ressources into it and get them fast enough, should you need them for anything.
That’s all i was saying.
Truth is this a new player/veterans thing, not a f2p/p2p thing, as many have demonstrated here that even f2p can do all this, as long as they’ve been playing for years.
I don’t know if f2p’s situation is really different now from what it was at the beginning. I’ve been playing only 11 months (to answer your question^^) so i don’t know how it was back then. And truthfully i don’t know how it’s like right now either, with the quests and everything.
Agreed, trying to catch up from point zero looks impossible. Have to set other goals for new players. Though upping shard drop rates globally will never happen. The middle class of the game (guppy, dolphin etc.) feeds cg mainly by refills instead of maxing toons outright which only whales do.
I like the idea of new player oriented surprise re-marques (i.e. throughout their first year in the game). Or even pick your marquee out of some options (that would help create variety amongst beginner rosters from getgo).
This won't hurt their newbie chromium sales even a bit, because 160*330 shards is such an enormous number.
Hopping in here - while you can be frustrated with issues in the game, I do want to remind folks that we aren't here to talk about issues like substance abuse, the opioid crisis, etc. These topics aren't appropriate for the forums.
They are, however, comparable to gambling and gaming addictions, which was the point.
Again, discussion of the opioid crisis isn't appropriate for the forums. Relevant to the discussion or not. If you want to have these discussions and bring up its relation to the subject at hand, you can do that elsewhere but we don't permit drug/substance related discussion here, sorry.
Hopping in here - while you can be frustrated with issues in the game, I do want to remind folks that we aren't here to talk about issues like substance abuse, the opioid crisis, etc. These topics aren't appropriate for the forums.
They are, however, comparable to gambling and gaming addictions, which was the point.
Again, discussion of the opioid crisis isn't appropriate for the forums. Relevant to the discussion or not. If you want to have these discussions and bring up its relation to the subject at hand, you can do that elsewhere but we don't permit drug/substance related discussion here, sorry.
Nobody was "discussing" the opiate crisis... It was mentioned to promote understanding as a relavant parallel to potential gaming addiction... You'd have a point if somebody said "this stuff I got high on last night was awesome..." That is inappropriate of-course. Can gambling/gaming addiction be discussed in this forum? I'm seriously asking because I don't want somebody to be kicked because of EAs discretion in censorship...
If they really wanted to help out F2P they would 1 time gift everybody 400 purple mats, 200 omega, and 6 6e mod slicing kits. these items are crunched and F2P can't do anything about it.
If they really wanted to help out F2P they would 1 time gift everybody 400 purple mats, 200 omega, and 6 6e mod slicing kits. these items are crunched and F2P can't do anything about it.
Since we are making a gift bundle, put in some zetas too please.
If they really wanted to help out F2P they would 1 time gift everybody 400 purple mats, 200 omega, and 6 6e mod slicing kits. these items are crunched and F2P can't do anything about it.
Since we are making a gift bundle, put in some zetas too please.
Zeta Mats aren't nearly as rare as omega mats at high end f2p.
I think looking at FTP has to be looked at in 2 separate ways. I continue to read the FTP players who have been here for a long time and understand that if planned right can compete with those that spend. My experience with games over the years and more common nowadays is those who pick the P2P model never really learn how to play the game strategically more times than not but the F2P player has to learn and maximize all resources. And yes before someone bashes me and defends their position as a whale I did not say every whale. To me though with the F2P vets that have been around my question is what keeps you in the game and if I am developer how can we continue to provide that because without their population the game would die in my opinion.
I mean I have all the resources to be a whale but really do not see the reason to do so. I enjoy the lore of SW and enjoy participating in most of the events. The ship arena to me is probably the worse design I have ever seen in a game in my opinion. The PvP arena is very boring for two reasons I find. Like I said the whales buy their toons with little strategy due large part to how stale the meta is or lack of options may be a better way to state it. The game determines the meta not the players by the release cadence and so no creativity in team makeup. Second and which was a huge disappointment to me from past PvP experiences was you play against AI not real people. As someone that has been around for a little over a year, even though my son played first before he got bored and then I took a break over the summer, I am just not sure I will stick around that much longer. So I do wonder why some of the FTP vets stick it out.
Now the other group though is the new FTP players. I do feel this group is the least likely to stay. Even over the last year it seems the entry to fully enjoy the game has gotten harder and with the company wanting to appease the P2P as the game ages and to retain them, has created a even larger gap for the newer players. I completely understand and fully support that because they are a business and their sole mission is to make money. No whales mean no game as well and less revenue coming in means less to spend in development and to provide a product. But new F2p players I see come and go as they feel they start to far behind where the model should be make enough accessible so that they get hooked and want to spend. But the release cadence of new toons and requirements for events(new toons that have no other value) make it more and more less appealing to those checking out the game to stay long term. Why bother that every time you acquire something or reach a goal the said toon is outdated and something else is required. I have played way to many MMOs that died with one of the main reasons being grind to just grind. Players do not mind grinding if they can enjoy their result but now in this game you grind to only finish to start grinding again. Make so a F2P has to grind a little longer then a P2P so those that decide to spend(everyone has this choice) will gain some advantage but let the F2P also enjoy the meta or current events for a while so that they enjoy after the long grind. Slow the cadence down of new toons, events, and requirements. Also as others mentioned maybe provide more opportunities to grind out to help reduce the time and up the % of farming a bit. I am not sure why a whale would care if a F2P can speed up the grind. It only would help out guilds and provide a more competitive arena.
Sorry for the long rant and for the record I started playing with UO from the beginning and my first beta testing was with SWG. Played a lot of MMOs and seen a lot die. With F2P finding the balance is even harder nowadays in my opinion.
Replies
I also appreciate a civilized discussion... point/counter-point is always good communication
Wouldn’t solve anything because character shards are absolutely not the problem. You earn shards so much faster than credit, gear and ability materials it’s like the last thing you actually need. I have dozens of characters needed for raids teams or other events that are 7* but useless because going from g8 to g12 is so long, i have around zero omega, zero zeta and even zero purple mat cause you need so much. The gap has never been and never will be character shards. It’s 100% ability mat and gear, and to a lesser extent credit.
@BubbaFett Just a quick thing regarding your talk about responsability. You should check some articles and stuff on the internet about marketing, com and neuroscience (friendly reminder that the people spending the most money in the world on neuroscience are google, amazon and the like).
Won’t go too far cause a you said it’s not the place, but a lot, and i mean a lot of what you would think to be « your choices » are actually anything but.
I will respectfully never agree to that...... And believe me, I am farming the vets right now.... It's nonwk see Chewie and bigfoot look similar.... The sightings are just about as rare.....
I just think responsible people draw a line in the sand and stick to that line.....
I don't know how long you have been playing, but credit crunch has been a lesser problem for many long termers. Gear on the other hand is always is. To give you an idea I'm a day 1 f2p, I have all the characters/ships fully leveled and at least g7 and have 40M credits on top of that even though I've been also buying store mods. Some of the other top notch f2p that began playing later have been slowly catching me in terms of leveling most of their roster. So....main bottleneck for me is always shards of the newest marquee toons since I can force grind gear whenever a new character needs to be geared.
I get what you are saying...... I guess what I am saying is players need to recognize this and make their choices......
We all know carbanti and stun guns are a crunch..... we all.complain about it, and maybe rightfully so....
But when I put together the SWGOH happy meal (guns and carbanti), it's very satisfying.....
If a new player can more easily get Finn Resistance, Phoenix etc to G10+ then they will compete far better than having dozens of undergeared characters.
Taking myself as an example I need more than a dozen stun guns on core characters & I’ve been farming them nonstop! Anyone even slightly less “focused” would be needing 25+ easily.
But fleet arena is a disaster with the new ships. They are useless at 3* (worse you also need a newish toon like Bossk geared and stared) and it's impossible to beat them with anything that's not a mirror team.
Im running a Rebel Team - it’s tricky to get any higher than about 35th. But the payout difference between say 10th and 49th isn’t that big (1400 and 200 crystals vs 1300 and 50)
Arguably Fleet is ok if you can hold top 50.
Next legendary will be C3PO since it is in every movies and comics
It's faster and easier to pay but it is possible as F2P... you juste need time and focus on what you want... and to be in a good guild.
Yes, I'm talking about the current Empire TB running at the moment.
Started mid-FEB 2017, and not trying to reach the top.
Nop, it tells me nothing. All but whale collectives are experiencing the same thing regardless of GP (155M here, only 1 whale in the guild). Platoons help a lot, but they are not a must for stars. You brute force your way into more stars as the guild gp rises.
They are, however, comparable to gambling and gaming addictions, which was the point.
I answered to someone talking about new ftp players and their problems. But yeah i don’t doubt that when you already have 50 g12 chars, have every char in the game 7* lvl 85 and have been doing credit hesit for the past 3 years, and are able to complete the last tier of every event, every mission, every raid, and the last thing left for you to do is to farm the recently availables marquees, you don’t have the same problems as someone starting today.
And to be honest, even in that case, i really doubt that you would need a 200% increase in shard droprate, since farming those is the only thing you need to do, you should be able to invest all your ressources into it and get them fast enough, should you need them for anything.
That’s all i was saying.
Truth is this a new player/veterans thing, not a f2p/p2p thing, as many have demonstrated here that even f2p can do all this, as long as they’ve been playing for years.
I don’t know if f2p’s situation is really different now from what it was at the beginning. I’ve been playing only 11 months (to answer your question^^) so i don’t know how it was back then. And truthfully i don’t know how it’s like right now either, with the quests and everything.
Agreed, trying to catch up from point zero looks impossible. Have to set other goals for new players. Though upping shard drop rates globally will never happen. The middle class of the game (guppy, dolphin etc.) feeds cg mainly by refills instead of maxing toons outright which only whales do.
I like the idea of new player oriented surprise re-marques (i.e. throughout their first year in the game). Or even pick your marquee out of some options (that would help create variety amongst beginner rosters from getgo).
This won't hurt their newbie chromium sales even a bit, because 160*330 shards is such an enormous number.
Again, discussion of the opioid crisis isn't appropriate for the forums. Relevant to the discussion or not. If you want to have these discussions and bring up its relation to the subject at hand, you can do that elsewhere but we don't permit drug/substance related discussion here, sorry.
Nobody was "discussing" the opiate crisis... It was mentioned to promote understanding as a relavant parallel to potential gaming addiction... You'd have a point if somebody said "this stuff I got high on last night was awesome..." That is inappropriate of-course. Can gambling/gaming addiction be discussed in this forum? I'm seriously asking because I don't want somebody to be kicked because of EAs discretion in censorship...
Since we are making a gift bundle, put in some zetas too please.
Zeta Mats aren't nearly as rare as omega mats at high end f2p.
I mean I have all the resources to be a whale but really do not see the reason to do so. I enjoy the lore of SW and enjoy participating in most of the events. The ship arena to me is probably the worse design I have ever seen in a game in my opinion. The PvP arena is very boring for two reasons I find. Like I said the whales buy their toons with little strategy due large part to how stale the meta is or lack of options may be a better way to state it. The game determines the meta not the players by the release cadence and so no creativity in team makeup. Second and which was a huge disappointment to me from past PvP experiences was you play against AI not real people. As someone that has been around for a little over a year, even though my son played first before he got bored and then I took a break over the summer, I am just not sure I will stick around that much longer. So I do wonder why some of the FTP vets stick it out.
Now the other group though is the new FTP players. I do feel this group is the least likely to stay. Even over the last year it seems the entry to fully enjoy the game has gotten harder and with the company wanting to appease the P2P as the game ages and to retain them, has created a even larger gap for the newer players. I completely understand and fully support that because they are a business and their sole mission is to make money. No whales mean no game as well and less revenue coming in means less to spend in development and to provide a product. But new F2p players I see come and go as they feel they start to far behind where the model should be make enough accessible so that they get hooked and want to spend. But the release cadence of new toons and requirements for events(new toons that have no other value) make it more and more less appealing to those checking out the game to stay long term. Why bother that every time you acquire something or reach a goal the said toon is outdated and something else is required. I have played way to many MMOs that died with one of the main reasons being grind to just grind. Players do not mind grinding if they can enjoy their result but now in this game you grind to only finish to start grinding again. Make so a F2P has to grind a little longer then a P2P so those that decide to spend(everyone has this choice) will gain some advantage but let the F2P also enjoy the meta or current events for a while so that they enjoy after the long grind. Slow the cadence down of new toons, events, and requirements. Also as others mentioned maybe provide more opportunities to grind out to help reduce the time and up the % of farming a bit. I am not sure why a whale would care if a F2P can speed up the grind. It only would help out guilds and provide a more competitive arena.
Sorry for the long rant and for the record I started playing with UO from the beginning and my first beta testing was with SWG. Played a lot of MMOs and seen a lot die. With F2P finding the balance is even harder nowadays in my opinion.