I'm not a huge fan of marquees. They're way better than before (Aurodium), however, all these marquee's have grown kinda stale.
Now, I'm not a fan of complaining about a problem unless I propose a viable solution to said problem, hence this post.
Thoughts? Maybe we'll come up with something the devs can use.
Personally, I was a fan of the way Wicket and Talzin were released, just not the 2 year 7* model.
#CloneHelmets4Life...VICTORY!!!!
"I don't like sand. It's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere." The more you tighten your grip, CG/EA, the more whales will slip through your fingers (and go F2P or quit).
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I also liked the Chopper roll out. He was the login character and had a daily event all month. Maybe add in the wrinkle that you can refresh his daily event at an escalating cost. That way you could have him at 3 stars for free and anywhere from 3 to 7 stars through Crystal refreshes of the event. Of course, it would have to cost as much to refresh to 7 stars as it would to buy packs to get the new character to 7 stars.
Another idea would be to just throw them onto nodes occasionally. No event. They're just farmable from day 1. Canderous Ordo might be a good candidate for this. A solid looking support character that doesn't seem meta breaking.
Another idea is to have event like the wicket or talzin events (as stated above) but just tweaked slightly. Maybe the events appear slightly more often, or aren’t so specific on requirements.
They could also add toons as TW rewards, adding a greater incentive to participate in and win the wars. They could even change them out every month or so, then put them in a cantina/hard node after. They could make it to where no matter what, you can unlock the character, but if you win, you’ll get more shards of them.
But it’s like I said, I don’t mind marquees so much, if only they weren’t so expensive (seriously when did 200$ become an acceptable amount of money for just 1 character) and if they gave out more shards. Or if the wait till farmable wasn’t so long.
It’s actually 2-3 months, usually 3. And then they get put on a hard node and added to my list of marquee hard node farms, which has a dozen or so characters on it right now.
MT / Wicket model was the worst and 10 shards a month and some months dev forgot to schedule the events is awful
Even if you made it bi monthly the devs will end up pushing the calendar and when you have a lot of toons there will be tons of complaints of having to log in every day of month to collect toon x then next day for y then z
While they rotate once or twice a month they aren’t in shipments or any other venue other than refresh 900 crystals for another 10 shards
Marquee farm requires patience. The pay to play option is to feed your impatience. The game has longetivity because there are characters to farm and having nothing to farm because the nodes are just gear would be stale and boring and the newer ways will be harder grinds
I don’t mind the release structure and it gives everyone equal time to collect the toons before all of them are needed.
It is a decent way to finish off activating Bobas contract bonus 500x
As far as the marquees in themselves, I agree with this sentiment. The problem arises when they do become farmable.
All but one of the Solo, BH and KOTOR marquee characters dropped on one, maybe two, nodes which makes it really difficult to a) get anyone to 7* quickly without crystal refreshes and b) farm more than two at a time. This was obviously intentional for KOTOR characters and Revan, which ****, but seems a bit pointless for others like bounty hunters (and actually the first wave of KOTOR now that the Revan event is finished). There need to be more options for farming these characters once they go f2p, such as scrapping the policy of not putting new characters in the GW, guild, ship or cantina stores.
Let me rephrase that: krennic, nihilus, and the rest were 3* characters. Marquees always grant you an extra star to your character (at least I remember with krennic they got him up to 4*...). Therefor, if you had a 3 or 4 Star marquee character (meaning they unlock at 3 or 4 stars, requiring 50 and 80 shards respectively) you could start off with them at 4 or 5 stars. This wouldn’t really do much initially, but you’d get to use them in later phases of TB (and get through platoon missions more easily) and it would take some time off of the farm once they’re out in a hard node. Lastly, stars, although they aren’t as important as gear, level, or mods, still factor into the stats of a character, meaning they would be more powerful than if they sat at 3*. I’m not saying they should do this for every character, maybe like 1 in 5 or 1 in 10, but for the significant, highly anticipated releases. Hope I cleared that up.
Epic event. You are assigned a team, comprised of event units. One of which is the new character. You must choose a team of characters from your roster to fight with this team. Winning nets you 10 shards, and eliminates every character you used from being used for the rest of the event. Characters you select must be gear 9+, and the star level requirement goes up as your new character Star level goes up.
Theoretically, this rewards both long term players and whales, while leaving newer players not able to achieve much more than 3* without waiting to farm or buying packs. Importantly, both whales and long term players will find it exceedingly difficult to 7* the character from the event, but it is theoretically possible.
http://swgoh.gg/u/Corrog/
http://swgoh.gg/u/Talshin/
Not one of the jkr characters. Mission and zaalbar can get 4 million phase 2 ( mcmole2) and jolee and bastilla are part of the jedi meta. T3 will be better with droid reworks or releases, he is the first droid healer.
the average shard rate (without refreshing) a single hard node is about 90 shards a month. this is what the events needed to payout based on the rewards and the run cycle and it didn't. I think player base would have been more receptive to it if it had been that way.
They need to retract their original comment about never adding anymore toon farms to these shops and just do it. L3, Qi'ra, Vandor Chewie or Range Trooper wouldnt have broke anything had they added them to shops. I get Nest and the Yando/LMF combo in the HNF is fine! But they could have put 3 of those toons in shops and been all the better for it. I get them not doing KOTOR cuz they wanted max $$. But adding 1-2 new toons in each shop, esp faction specific toons, each year, would be the best move CG could do.
~D
I have a huge stockpile of blue 5* health mods from marquees.
One thing would be take an element from Jangos event, the bonus rewards were nice as well as the bonus tiers giving daily rewards. A bonus giving a daily of just 100K credits(or ship mat if a ship) would do.
More events would be nice, like the BH events or wicket/MT or like Zombie/NS if there is a fear of too many Zetas.
When toons go to farmable having one in Cantina, Arena or GW would be nice. Another is upping the number of double shard nodes and how about reworking the gear on that node, some nodes like Big Z or young lando have nice gear on them, but Embos node is useless for gear sp you arent getting anything to go with toon shards.
Basically make it so every 20 energy node has one of Mk3 Carbanti, Hypo syringe, stun gun, stun cuffs, biotech implant prototype(never salvage), shield gen salvage, mk 4 keypad, other gold prototypes(not salvage)
Im hoping if Jango goes hard node he goes with Ghost, that node has some decent gear and i could use shard shop from Ghost.
Yo! That’s a great idea.
5 7* credit heists would be required for the next hero’s journey character.
which is kinda funny considering before marquee and release cadanece the time to 7* was crazy and before marquee it was unknown when they were going to be obtainable any where outside of chromium.
new characters are going to be in platoons immediately. they have not show any letting up on this. personally I don't care about platoons, think they are dumb any way, however they have are going to have pay walls somewhere and since every marquee is not game breaking arena worthy they have to look somewhere.
Oh yeah, marquees are way better than before, but years of them have left them...boring
I've been posting in the Jango/Marquee thread a bit about a lot of these thoughts, but realized it may be worth starting a new thread. This idea is something I started there, but wanted to flesh out a little bit. It's going to be a long post, and I encourage discussion on improvements, or other ideas that can work toward a similar goal. My intent is to mix my understanding of business, with my compassion as a player.
The Goal: To add to the Marquee character cadence in a way that relieves the time/burden of farming new characters, without negatively impacting the financial viability of Marquees for the developers
I know some might disagree with that goal, specifically the financial portion for CG - but this is their business, and ideas that suggest everything be free in one way or another will never work. I think it's time we start working with reasonable considerations, and maybe some progress can be made.
The Event:
A daily set of battles (5) that require a random specific faction, rewarding a single shard per battle for a randomly selected character. "Earn Embo Shards by Fighting With Your Resistance Team"
The Character Shard Pool:
The 15 most recently released Marquee characters, rotating out as new ones are introduced.
The Battles:
Required faction is randomly selected per day
Character shards are the same across all 5 battles, and are randomly selected per day
Battle requirement/rewards can be both be re-rolled together for 50 Crystals each time. "Earn Embo Shards by Fighting With Your Resistance Team" could roll into "Earn Bastilla Shards by Fighting With Your First Order Team"
Free battles can be completed once per day
Battles can be refreshed once per day, at a cost of 100 crystals per battle
Battles simply rehashed from the original Marquee battles
Faction requirements go up in stars required per battle, from 3-7*
The Math:
The biggest issue right now is there is a large gap in the cost/time between Marquee release, and farm-able. This presents an awkward situation where you are either a Whale, or essentially F2P, with not much room for the Dolphin/Guppie/Other Fish sort of inclusion.
7*ing a Marquee Character day one runs somewhere between $300-450, depending on RNG of packs. Very Expensive/Immediate/$1-$1.50 per Shard.
Once that time is over, you have to wait a few months until shipments, where they cost around $150 but you also need to pay for or wait for shop refreshes and hope that those characters show up. Expensive/Long/$.50 per Shard.
The F2P option, a few months after that, is to wait for them to go to a hard node or two, and you have to hope RNG works in your favor + balance limited energy to spread among all character farms. Free/Forever/$0 per Shard.
With this added event, there becomes a middle option between shops and the Marquee packs. With perfect RNG landing the character you want each day, which would never happen, you could get a 7* character in 28 days by refreshing your battles, for $90 worth of crystals. The flip side is that if you have to refresh it each day 15x to get the right character or faction if you don't have the roster depth, you're spending an additional 750 crystals/day on refreshes, and you're getting that character to 7* for $220. Moderate/Moderate/$.32-$.78 per Shard
Why This Works:
We all understand that the balance is always time and money. Wanting something soon, it will cost more, wanting it cheaper it will take longer.
The players who want a character immediately will not be willing to wait 30+ days to get the character they want, so the Marquee packs will still sell to the audience they are currently selling to.
Those who do not wish to spend any crystals at all, will get a little relief on their farms once they become farmable, as they'll have been getting 5 shards per day for random characters, provided they have the teams in place to beat them. Much nicer starting off at 25/30 or 5/65 instead of 0/30, when you're working with a single hard node farm. Free shards, more content to play (or auto) each day.
This then provides something to do and a middle ground for the players who don't necessarily want or can't afford a character immediately, but wouldn't mind dropping $150 on them to get them sooner than others.
Thanks for reading. I hope this can begin conversation about what realistic ideas we can come up with to help bridge the gap in these character releases. I'd love feedback from anyone, CG and Players, about how something like this would be received and any improvements that could be made on it!
My issue stems from where they are placed after the event. I was not pleased when they said they will no longer add the stores asides from shipments, because they wanted them all to be shard shop currency. The hard node and high energy cantina nodes are not a best fit for all characters. I feel it worked for the better characters that were released like Nihilus and Nest for example. It does not work for characters like Mission Vao and Range Trooper I feel the time investment for those characters (alone, not including use towards Revan) is not worth the effort because they have a very limited niche in the game.
I think that an individual raid would be fun. It could have multiple tiers of difficult that rewards more shards the more difficult the tier. Think if they would have done that for Revan? Four phases that follows the the KOTRO storyline could have been a nice raid.
TWs have become tedious because of Bastila and Revan and others. TBs have become a grind. Omega battles are a joke. Quests were poorly executed and pretty much pointless. The list goes on and on. Something new and creative (and fun!!!) that doesn't rely on the guild for rewards as a way to earn shards for new characters would be great.
Release Marquee. In exactly 6 weeks (with an in-game countdown timer) the character becomes farmable. If the character is in a hard node, guarantee 100% drop rate.
The real question should be - is there any other way to release a freemium toon and make it possible for f2p to get it to 7* faster than it is now?
Not likely to happen since it doesnt earn them anything. The current model is fine imo. Would i be happier if i could get a 7* toon for free at a faster rate? Sure, but i highly doubt it will happen. Maybe let the 30 shard pack be purchase-able twice or something - gives dolphins a better chance at a faster 7* and earns ea some revenue.