Stores and old characters
October 13, 2020 2:15AM
edited October 2020
Hi guys, first of all, I didn't find anything related in the tracker, so sorry if I'm repeating a topic. As a F2P player with more than 3 years in the game, I totally understand the need for monetizing the new content and characters and I'm not against that.
But I think there is a way of helping both new and old F2P players in a way in which the monetization will not be affected and at the same time, improves the overall experience for F2P players.
Nowadays in store we have:
- Shipments: To buy gear with credits. 98% useless.
- Weekly Shipments: Here every week you can buy toons and gear with credits, useful, but once a week.
- Cantina store: After a couple of years you farm all the characters and is useless.
- Guild Store: The only interesting store to buy gear.
- Arena Squadron Store: Same as cantina, useless after a couple of years.
- Galactic War Store: Same. Useless.
- Fleet Store: Place to buy Zetas, after a while all the rest is useless.
- The rest of the stores are ok.
So, can we agree that we have 11 stores, from which half is totally useless after a couple of years?
At the same time, the game is doing something great with the journey guide. By placing the characters there you can play whenever you reach the prerequisites, without waiting months, if the character is more than 1 year old.
Why we can't do the same for characters older than 2 years? The devs can just add those characters as rotations to the currently useless stores, so we can focus our energy in the gear crunch and the new characters that are the new hype, and not spending 3 months F2P farming a character that came to the game 3 years ago.
Stupid example: URoRRuR'R'R'
Useless character. Is not a requisite for anything in the game, and no one will ever farm it. Why not include him in a store to be collected?
Another example: Imperial Supercommand
Another example: Baze Malbus. Only one hard node farming for a non-relevant character.
The same happens with a lot of old characters, not useful in the actual meta, hard to farm, and where the game is not getting any monetization.
Once the character has 7stars you still need to:
- Farm for gear until level 13, (carbantis, stun guns, cuffs, gear 13 pieces)
- Get good mods
- Farm the new mods
- Farm the relic materials
I mean, is not that the character is usable at 7stars, you still need to invest in order to use him.
What do you think?
But I think there is a way of helping both new and old F2P players in a way in which the monetization will not be affected and at the same time, improves the overall experience for F2P players.
Nowadays in store we have:
- Shipments: To buy gear with credits. 98% useless.
- Weekly Shipments: Here every week you can buy toons and gear with credits, useful, but once a week.
- Cantina store: After a couple of years you farm all the characters and is useless.
- Guild Store: The only interesting store to buy gear.
- Arena Squadron Store: Same as cantina, useless after a couple of years.
- Galactic War Store: Same. Useless.
- Fleet Store: Place to buy Zetas, after a while all the rest is useless.
- The rest of the stores are ok.
So, can we agree that we have 11 stores, from which half is totally useless after a couple of years?
At the same time, the game is doing something great with the journey guide. By placing the characters there you can play whenever you reach the prerequisites, without waiting months, if the character is more than 1 year old.
Why we can't do the same for characters older than 2 years? The devs can just add those characters as rotations to the currently useless stores, so we can focus our energy in the gear crunch and the new characters that are the new hype, and not spending 3 months F2P farming a character that came to the game 3 years ago.
Stupid example: URoRRuR'R'R'
Useless character. Is not a requisite for anything in the game, and no one will ever farm it. Why not include him in a store to be collected?
Another example: Imperial Supercommand
Another example: Baze Malbus. Only one hard node farming for a non-relevant character.
The same happens with a lot of old characters, not useful in the actual meta, hard to farm, and where the game is not getting any monetization.
Once the character has 7stars you still need to:
- Farm for gear until level 13, (carbantis, stun guns, cuffs, gear 13 pieces)
- Get good mods
- Farm the new mods
- Farm the relic materials
I mean, is not that the character is usable at 7stars, you still need to invest in order to use him.
What do you think?
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Replies
As for the 2yo or older characters, 2 things:
You are either farming them for a purpose.... they are not likely to make that easier, since they likely chose that character to give the pace they wanted for the end goal you have.
Or you are farming that to "be ready for anything", in which case the length of time to farm them is semi irrelevant.
Characters vs gear is part of the always present resource management part of the game. Time/energy vs gear/characters is always a balance players need to make work.
Who knows what will change in the future, but this kind of "random" rotation into stores is not likely, as many toons are given new life as either a new member of a new team or a requirement for a new toon. This is all part of the draw and the "catch them all" that is driven on one side, while also introducing/keeping a pace that can be accelerated by spending.
I partially agree with you. I understand this is a resource management game, and when I started playing I was deciding how much energy use for gearing and how much energy use for farming characters.
But that was almost 3 years ago. Currently, we have:
- A new gear level (13, farmable with energy)
- Relics materials (farmable with cantina energy)
- A lot of new characters
- Higher conditions to play the new content, (relic needed or 7 stars needed)
And a new layer. I remember not long ago, to have toons at level 10 or 6 stars that were useful for PVE and PVP content. Nowadays all the PVE content is relic required and in the PVP those toons are irrelevant with relics. The difference between a toon at gear 10 and 12 was important, but the difference between a toon gear 10 and another one relic 3 is non-playable. (And relic 3 is very F2P)
So, even if I agree with you that is a resource management game, the game has many more things to do with almost the same amount of resources. (Galactic challenges were supposed to solve that, but now the main reason to do the event is not the gear, but the materials to farm mods, a new progression system)
So, let's be real. There is no point in farming to 7 stars an irrelevant old toon, that can't be used until gearing it up for level 13 and relics in almost any PVP and PVE content.
Keep monetizing the relics, mods, and new characters. If you want the fancy shiny thing, pay for it. Totally agree, but when adding new layers of progression, it shouldn't be so painful to go through the old, non-relevant progression system of 3 years ago.
I thought the store, most of them non-relevant for old players, could be a place, but the galactic war, (useless), the daily challenges (useless except for carbantis) are also good places to explode.
It will still be a resource management system, is not free, you need to use your guild currency, or whatever, to buy the fragments, but nowadays we have tons of useless resources and struggling with the few ones that are useful and more needed every month after each progression layer.
(I have more than 1Million allied currency, what I'm supposed to do with that?? open a bronzium data card?)
You probably don't want to hear this but for ally points bronziums are by far the best deal. For what you pay in the weekly store, you get enough shard shop currency to buy 4 times or more of the gear they sell.
I suggest an auto clicker to save your thumbs though.
But they really do need to ease the shard crunch for regular energy and cantina for early game players. For late game players, it isn't too big of an issue. They have most of the hard node and cantina node farms done so it isn't a problem. You may have to pause signal data farming for a few weeks here and there but not very often.
But newer players still have a ton of shards to farm from there and to actually play the newer content need to farm signal data too.
Here are some suggestions
1. Make a marque guide. This could allow anyone who missed a marque event to replay it at any time to get a 3 star character. It would only reward once so it is effectively a catchup mechanic for newer players. A 3 star character may not seem like much but it is a few weeks of hard farming per character. That would be a major help.
2. Have some events that reward a large amount of shards for some older characters. You can still monetize the newer characters but it wouldn't hurt to give some shards out for older less useful hard or cantina farms. Maybe 25 shards at a time rather than 5. Or even a full 5 or 7 star character on special occasions (like may 4th or the anniversary or the game). It would show some good will.
3. Put newer characters in the bronizum packs after a time. We all have ally points that we get and have to use. Throwing a chance to get 50 shards of a semi relevant character other than the ones that were in the game 5 years ago would be a big help. The requirements for the Revans would be a good start. They aren't meta anymore but are a good early journey. Getting 10, 25, or 50 shards every now and then would help make the farm more bearable.
4. Increase the payout for the older store currencies or increase the amount of shards you get for the 400 store currency. This would make these farms go faster for newer players and let them start getting shard shop currency faster, which would ease the gear crunch for them slightly.
Going to have to disagree on some aspects of this...
1) Farm everything. Any time you elect to leave a toon unfarmed- especially one that’s available in the stores you’re discussing - you are left vulnerable to the classic CG switcheroo that sees you need that toon for an event or as a requirement for another new toon.
2) as someone else described, by far the best use of ally points is bronziums. That million ally points is likely to net you 20-25K shard shop currency. Maybe slightly less for you if you haven’t taken all the available toons to 7*.
A regular feature of these requests (which do come up frequently) is the claim that it would benefit newer players. But almost always the poster is really looking for a shortcut to farming some of the toons available on hard nodes that they haven’t farmed yet.