When they changed the hard node farm from 5 to 8 originally, they did say that it wasn't gonna last forever. Not the biggest deal. It's literally just back to the way it was before the change. Chill out people.
When they changed the hard node farm from 5 to 8 originally, they did say that it wasn't gonna last forever. Not the biggest deal. It's literally just back to the way it was before the change. Chill out people.
...like back in the day when characters were available in 3 different locations and not in ONE 20 energy hard node? Sign me in, please.
This is a huge slap in the face to your players considering in the same time frame you have been releasing new characters almost exclusively to single hard node farms. Though somehow I'm not at all surprised coming from these devs...
So with the fallacy, "this change is bad for new players" I completely disagree. This change slows focused farming across the board and specifically to just released characters aka everyone equally.
Additionally, if you're trying to acquire many characters as a new player, just farm more simultaneously. The rate will even out and perhaps be faster depending how many hard mode characters you're targeting.
That is all, back to the regularly scheduled program...
So absolutely incorrect, jeez dude, common sense. Newer players have to farm more hard node characters, legendary or not smh, reducing the # of attempts absolutely hurts newer players more than older players. Its basic math dude.
Perhaps your actual thoughts got lost in your response dude. Slightly more than basic math...when you are farming more characters simultaneously (as new players will) the real bottleneck is energy.
Obviously more of anything is optimal, but it's not as bad as people are reacting for new players.
Adding on, once this change takes effect, rather than focusing on two characters or ships, I'm going to add another two to my farm. Problem solved.
Newer players, such as myself, want to earn characters locked by events. After all, in this game the characters are pretty much the content. Those events come around periodically but I would say 80 to 90 days is a reasonable, ball park estimation.
Assuming a 33% drop rate you can get a character to 5* in just over 60 days with 8 attempts a day. That gives newbies a bit of wiggle room as they figure things out at the start. Reducing the attempt number to 5 increases that 5* farm to 97 days. That really leaves no margin for error and they will be at the mercy of the release cadence. Missing that cadence means that character is unavailable for about another 3 months. Sure they can get it at 7* second time around... maybe, but is it reasonable to make new players wait that length of time for content. And I don't mean the Revans. I mean the stuff that's been in the game for years.
Your point about going wide is correct and well made. It is certainly what I'll be doing. I usually farm 5 nodes; now I'll farm 8. But please understand that this does hurt the ability of newer players to access old content. It is a retrograde decision.
Wow! The overwhelming feeling I get from this, after dredging through the anger and frustration that immediately rise to the surface, is discouragement. This is very discouraging. It makes me want to play the game less. The time-suck that this game already is, is off the charts compared to any game I've ever stuck with over my decades of gaming. This change only makes the game a greater time-suck, while at the same time requiring more financial output to keep the same rate of growth. It's a bad move CG.
I recently had a good friend I recruited to the game quit because of the time commitment required in this game. With moves like this, it's definitely something to consider.
When they changed the hard node farm from 5 to 8 originally, they did say that it wasn't gonna last forever. Not the biggest deal. It's literally just back to the way it was before the change. Chill out people.
...like back in the day when characters were available in 3 different locations and not in ONE 20 energy hard node? Sign me in, please.
There have been single hard node farms since the game began. I remember farms taking a full year back when it was 3 per day. I had multiple characters I was farming like that just because I had no idea if/when I would ever need them and there was no way to panic farm them if such time were to come.
When they changed the hard node farm from 5 to 8 originally, they did say that it wasn't gonna last forever. Not the biggest deal. It's literally just back to the way it was before the change. Chill out people.
This is a perfect example of how difficult it is to change something back once it’s been given, even if stated from the beginning that it’s temporary. It’s like trying to undo government assistance programs or tax cuts (have to find an example from both sides!). People freak out.
When they changed the hard node farm from 5 to 8 originally, they did say that it wasn't gonna last forever. Not the biggest deal. It's literally just back to the way it was before the change. Chill out people.
This is a perfect example of how difficult it is to change something back once it’s been given, even if stated from the beginning that it’s temporary. It’s like trying to undo government assistance programs or tax cuts (have to find an example from both sides!). People freak out.
Add to the fact that its been 8months, which is long enough that many many people currently playing, the people who started playing, the people who make up for all the people quitting the game which would cause this game to be gone forever when enough quit..
Only experience is with 8 hits on hard nodes. They will still have so many, so so many single hard node/fleet node farms to do, especially as they have missed every marque. Imagine every single one of your characters that have one hard node farm available at 20 nrg, suddenly had 0 shards.
It already takes years and years and years to max out what we already have. That's a long time to hold player retention. And CG's response to these new players is:
"we don't care about you, everyone else had enough time to farm, who cares about you".
Yes the change was supposed to be temporary but 8 months ain't temporary. Quite a few longtime players from my guild are thinking about quitting the game and I can't blame them. To be really competitive in this game you need a wide roster and that takes time which most of us obviously don't mind putting in but screwing with us to make the game unnecesarily harder is just bad. I know you will ignore all the comments here but one of these days you will go too far and the player base will start ignoring you.
Well, we used to get up half an hour before we went to bed, eat an handful of hot gravel and lick the road clean with our tongues...and we only had 3 battles.
Just because some state of affairs was the norm in the past doesn't mean that it's necessarily a good idea to return to old ways.
Cg you probably will not read this but I feel that changing the hard node farms to 5 will not only push a lot of your fan base away but will cause more loss of money than gain of it. Doing this makes the game feel like even more of a grind than it already is which will push away a lot of newer players. It will also cause any mid game players to give up due to the change in how longer it will take to get to the end game. I feel that this is a very bad marketing strategy that will intern lose you more money than it will gain you
Cg you probably will not read this but I feel that changing the hard node farms to 5 will not only push a lot of your fan base away but will cause more loss of money than gain of it. Doing this makes the game feel like even more of a grind than it already is which will push away a lot of newer players. It will also cause any mid game players to give up due to the change in how longer it will take to get to the end game. I feel that this is a very bad marketing strategy that will intern lose you more money than it will gain you
Keep fighting my friend, but don't expect too much. They are throttling progress and it's calculated. They have their own metrics and no matter what anyone thinks this is a money based decision. They never really cared about the f2p player and that's no surprise, we've known this for years now. I give it a 0.1% chance of staying at 8
If they move back to 5 nodes per day thats fair. It was a temporarily fix and allows to farm more in the wide range. It will also reduce the gear grind as characters are more slow reach 7s to be able to gear to 12. I don't see a real problem in this step.
I would like to see new content on another hand - i.e. raids, tb, tw...;)
It’s an EA game. You knew it would be bad before you started playing.
So true it hurts. This is the only EA game I've played in the last 6 ish(?) years or so. The SW MMO was the last one prior to this, mostly because I really like SW. Screw EA though. If I hadn't invested so heavily into this game, I'd probably already be done by this point. As I have with some other titles similar to this one. The big difference there was I've only invested a few hundred dollars in those titles and stopped caring, as opposed to way to much in this one (along with the 3 years), which makes it a bit harder to leave. However I feel like the developers of the game don't care and are pushing people away with their poor decision making the last year or so. If it's not one thing it's another. Perhaps it is time to leave for greener pastures.
What if CG did a massive Hard Node reshuffle and then gave different numbers of attempts to different Nodes?
So put the characters like the Jawas, Geonosians, Clones, OG Jedi, OG Rebels, etc, on the lower numbered shards and keep them on 8 attempts per refresh - or maybe even increased some of them to 10. And then the newer stuff that they were still trying to get people to pay for, they put on the higher numbered Hard Nodes with a lower number of attempts per refresh; 5.
That way, the old content could still be acquired relatively easily but the newer more powerful content that a player needed to keep up with "the meta" would still be harder to access without paying.
I'm not saying this is a perfect solution but it might be a workable compromise.
Replies
Yeah it's their short term memory alright... This message was sent only by in-game message 8 short months ago...
...like back in the day when characters were available in 3 different locations and not in ONE 20 energy hard node? Sign me in, please.
Newer players, such as myself, want to earn characters locked by events. After all, in this game the characters are pretty much the content. Those events come around periodically but I would say 80 to 90 days is a reasonable, ball park estimation.
Assuming a 33% drop rate you can get a character to 5* in just over 60 days with 8 attempts a day. That gives newbies a bit of wiggle room as they figure things out at the start. Reducing the attempt number to 5 increases that 5* farm to 97 days. That really leaves no margin for error and they will be at the mercy of the release cadence. Missing that cadence means that character is unavailable for about another 3 months. Sure they can get it at 7* second time around... maybe, but is it reasonable to make new players wait that length of time for content. And I don't mean the Revans. I mean the stuff that's been in the game for years.
Your point about going wide is correct and well made. It is certainly what I'll be doing. I usually farm 5 nodes; now I'll farm 8. But please understand that this does hurt the ability of newer players to access old content. It is a retrograde decision.
Sorry for the wall of text.
Bye
There have been single hard node farms since the game began. I remember farms taking a full year back when it was 3 per day. I had multiple characters I was farming like that just because I had no idea if/when I would ever need them and there was no way to panic farm them if such time were to come.
This is a perfect example of how difficult it is to change something back once it’s been given, even if stated from the beginning that it’s temporary. It’s like trying to undo government assistance programs or tax cuts (have to find an example from both sides!). People freak out.
Add to the fact that its been 8months, which is long enough that many many people currently playing, the people who started playing, the people who make up for all the people quitting the game which would cause this game to be gone forever when enough quit..
Only experience is with 8 hits on hard nodes. They will still have so many, so so many single hard node/fleet node farms to do, especially as they have missed every marque. Imagine every single one of your characters that have one hard node farm available at 20 nrg, suddenly had 0 shards.
It already takes years and years and years to max out what we already have. That's a long time to hold player retention. And CG's response to these new players is:
"we don't care about you, everyone else had enough time to farm, who cares about you".
Just because some state of affairs was the norm in the past doesn't mean that it's necessarily a good idea to return to old ways.
Only because an fun and playful improvement...
Keep fighting my friend, but don't expect too much. They are throttling progress and it's calculated. They have their own metrics and no matter what anyone thinks this is a money based decision. They never really cared about the f2p player and that's no surprise, we've known this for years now. I give it a 0.1% chance of staying at 8
And I 7* my lobot at the 3/day time...
Lol Savage
I would like to see new content on another hand - i.e. raids, tb, tw...;)
I spend 150 crystals a day on refreshes of energy and I will continue to do that. I’ll just farm more widely instead.
This is annoying though as it means hard node characters are even more of a grind.
My issue is less with the number of times I can hit a node and more with the dismal drop rates.
So true it hurts. This is the only EA game I've played in the last 6 ish(?) years or so. The SW MMO was the last one prior to this, mostly because I really like SW. Screw EA though. If I hadn't invested so heavily into this game, I'd probably already be done by this point. As I have with some other titles similar to this one. The big difference there was I've only invested a few hundred dollars in those titles and stopped caring, as opposed to way to much in this one (along with the 3 years), which makes it a bit harder to leave. However I feel like the developers of the game don't care and are pushing people away with their poor decision making the last year or so. If it's not one thing it's another. Perhaps it is time to leave for greener pastures.
So put the characters like the Jawas, Geonosians, Clones, OG Jedi, OG Rebels, etc, on the lower numbered shards and keep them on 8 attempts per refresh - or maybe even increased some of them to 10. And then the newer stuff that they were still trying to get people to pay for, they put on the higher numbered Hard Nodes with a lower number of attempts per refresh; 5.
That way, the old content could still be acquired relatively easily but the newer more powerful content that a player needed to keep up with "the meta" would still be harder to access without paying.
I'm not saying this is a perfect solution but it might be a workable compromise.