Is the P2W state of the game healthy for the future?
In the last few weeks, a few changes seem to have really compounded the effects of spending money:
(1) essential gear only farmable in raids dominated by expensive rosters,
(2) purchasable gear in shipments,
(3) arena dominance of Leia teams (and to a lesser extent Rex), and
(4) the majority of players locked into gear 8.
I pay money, what I consider an absurd amount for this game, but I'm not a "whale." My concern is that arena ranks and guild ranks, upon inspection, seem to nearly be simply a ranking of how much money people have spent. I'm simply wondering if others feel that the correlation between ranks and money has become unhealthy for the game. I'm also wondering if people anticipate the extreme P2W state of the game to be temporary, or if the game has been forever altered in that way.
Obviously the game should be highly profitable, and purchases should be an advantage. But the competitive impact from money, dedication, and/or strategy seems to have gotten overwhelmingly skewed toward money.
(1) essential gear only farmable in raids dominated by expensive rosters,
(2) purchasable gear in shipments,
(3) arena dominance of Leia teams (and to a lesser extent Rex), and
(4) the majority of players locked into gear 8.
I pay money, what I consider an absurd amount for this game, but I'm not a "whale." My concern is that arena ranks and guild ranks, upon inspection, seem to nearly be simply a ranking of how much money people have spent. I'm simply wondering if others feel that the correlation between ranks and money has become unhealthy for the game. I'm also wondering if people anticipate the extreme P2W state of the game to be temporary, or if the game has been forever altered in that way.
Obviously the game should be highly profitable, and purchases should be an advantage. But the competitive impact from money, dedication, and/or strategy seems to have gotten overwhelmingly skewed toward money.
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hitting the lvl cap will decrease the advantage p2p has
Exactly.
I'm a porpoise and my issue ISNT gear or having Leia ( though yes I've been lucky as HELL with her) my issue is 80% of my roster is sub 72 and I can't even REMOTELY afford to promote them nor to promote my toons from 6 to 7stars. Just to clean up my top 15 slots and advance them all would probably run me near 35million and I am NOT buying 70 credit packs at nearly 600 a whack. 42000 ish crystals?!? Yeah, go pound sand.
And the Ftp will catch up quick enough because the credit war is fairly equal unless you are willing to spend stupid cash on credits and a lesser amount, Droids.
Filters may be a WEEEEE bit overboard..
And ftr my shard is filled with pre crafters and dolphins/whales with 3-5k more power than me yet I still manage to compete.
You probably also pay way more attention then they do and use your noodle rather then walking into bad match ups and try to overpower things. We have like 4 who are that way who are perpetually at the top on my shard as well. 28-29k FTP toons and they just keep on trucking.
Good on you man.
I thought they were balancing the game but i was way wrong. It's broken now unless you precrafted or refreshed shipments to buy furnaces. I used to get to #1 nearly every day. Now I'm struggling to get into the top 10.
The recent decisions have caused me to close my wallet on this game. Soon I will fall further behind and dump the game. This is the big thanks I get for spending thousands supporting this game. The sad part is, they don't care.
So to answer your question. The great devide was created by precrafting and selling furnaces in shipments. It doesn't matter how much money you have now because you can't buy most of the gear.
Myself, I know that 1K wont get me much in this game, maybe not even 5K.
Curios idea. I thought a whale was anyone who paid more than an initial intro deal. What do you consider yourself then? An Orca? A Dolphin? What figure do you have to pass to be a whale?
On any fee structure based on micro payments 'dolphins' prob contribute more overall.
I spent about 5 weeks at the top of arena, paying out #1 everyday and for the most part I still can, BUT... after double dollar days that we just had coupled with all my toons being gear locked by unobtainable gear (and I'm not talking about furnaces, those are obtainable even though they're expensive) so all my toons do now is just sit and wait for others to catch up to the same gear locked state.
Couple all this with the mentality that everyone should be able to beat everyone and it's created a situation where it really isn't that fun anymore because there's nothing to do; nothing to work towards. It also seems like they've lowered the drop rates on purple pieces abysmally lower than the abysmal levels they were before further encouraging the purchase of crafted purple items from the shipments. I do want my raid squads geared up but being that most of the fully crafted gear is appearing randomly dispersed throughout all layers of the rewards there isn't much of a need to try and deliver "that" much higher damage in raids. So I can slow farm my raid squad and play extra arena matches against all the teams with 4-6k less power than me that can beat my squad.
Spending money in this game definitely produces the need to spend "more" money in this game.
I'm at ~$400. I'd say "small dolphin." Part of why I posed this question is that I just put in another $100 and felt like it barely made a dent. Upon looking closely at everyone else's inventory and ranks after that, I noticed that the ranks lined up nearly exactly by apparent money spent. And it only seems to be getting more spread out in that order. Maybe my arena server is not normal in this regard.
how do you see "apparent money spent" ?
and now i am not sure what you are actually asking. You think you get a too little competative advantage with 400 dollars spend? Or that others who spend 10k on the game have a too much advantage ?
in all fairness, i have no clue what it costs to be noticably more competative, im f2p. I am just happy that ppl are willing to spend money, and they should be rewarded with some advantage. If anything, i think the advantage is too little. The chance of having more than 50 whales on a server is pretty small, meantaining top50 is good enought for f2p (at least for me).
how do you know they all spend atleast 1k ?
are all the f2p finishing #1 horsepoop ? or are you just unlucky with your server>
i finish top20 everyday and i am full f2p (mid februari ios server, not alot of precrafters)
I used to compete for top 5 in arena daily. Now my gear 8 team can barely scratch the gear 9s, so I'm lucky tofinish top 20 now. So that's 200 or so crystals a day I can no longer count on. Guess who is getting more crystals to buy more gear in the store? The gear 9 teams.
The gap between the 8s and 9s is significant and it's getting more so each day.
I disagree, I don't see P2W even being a problem once you get caught up in levels and have a full 7* team
That's absolutely fascinating.
It is tough but you can still compete.
I am FTP and at level 77 I'm part of a good guild who raid often and tend to finish middle of the pack. I am saving up guild coins atm with 2200 banked. 25 pieces of the 50 needed for a mark 5 furnace costs about 8000 guild coins so I'm a 1/4 of the way there. Note I've been banking them for approx 4 days (since they came out I switched from Gam Guard to gear). It will take a couple of weeks but I'll get the furnace mk 5 I need or RGs / QGJs droid caller!
Separate to this I have kept my top 8 toons for arena fully geared and leveled at all times my main 5 has a team power of 31k in my server some of the whales go to 36k but I still compete and always finish top 10. In my top 20 there are 5 teams I can't beat so I hop around them. These last 2 days I have keep myself in the top 20 at all times then I focused 80 mins before my pay out using 1 refresh to climb up and landed rank 1 on pay out 2 days in a row. That's gave me 1000 crystals that I have put aside to buy a furnace mark 5 once I get the approx 1600 needed. I work full time so I can only really do this 3-4 times a week and on the other days top 10 will do.
Even with this I balance and manage my credits as best I can. I always finish GW and challenges every and collect all energy refreshes. I also refresh the energy via crystals 50,50,100 and 100 and do at least the 100 cantina refresh.
Whilst going from level 73 - 77 I have unlocked both STHan and Dooku taking then to 6*, both gear 8 and abilities all at level 7. STHan is lvl 72 and Dooku lvl 77 both have 50 of the 100 shards needed to 7 star them. At the same time I've took IG86 from 4* to 6* nearly ready for 7* and unlocked and leveled upto 40 quite a few more toons.
Cheers Jay
#3 in my server:
Biggest whale in my guild (always #1 in activities and raids, 38k arena power):
The main reason is that you have to come at this game with a long term perspective to get any sense of progress/accomplishment out of it. At the same time, they could nerf that toon at any moment. It is becoming harder and harder to be flexible with your roster because it takes a larger investment for a toon to be viable.
I really enjoy the idea of gear being this crucial aspect to crafting a top tier character. I don't mind that people pay for it either. The problem comes when that character you've been working on for months gets nerfed.
This has been an issue before but will become a bigger issue as the investment required to max out a toon increases. I'm afraid people will start abandoning the game out of frustration when this happens.
how do you check what char other people have?
This is one of the most f2p friendly COMPETITIVE mobile game I have ever seen, and I have played many. Most mobile games like this you need to spend atleast a grand a month to even be in top 500 and stay there. This game you can actually bid your time and move up as f2p.
Most games the only way to get any kind of decent toon is by packs, which is only real money as they don't have a way for you to make the money in game. A lot of the best toons in this game can be got for free while these others no chance at all at getting a middle toon, let a lone a high end one.
FYI- I have spent about $500 on the game in 6-7 months. For me the game is about collecting and leveling. I keep myself in the top 100 of the arena for rewards but don't care about the top spot. To me dropping $20 on the game is the same as going to the movies. If I'll spend $10 for 2 hours of entertainment what's the problem with spending $50 (or so...) a month on a game I play everyday?
Everyone's experience with the game is different. If people think things are unfair they could quit playing, or new players could be discouraged. Before writing off every complaint as sour grapes (ok, sometimes it's exactly that) observe the patterns.