Shard Economy Changes [MEGA]

Replies

  • Gouj4 wrote: »
    Ravens1113 wrote: »
    Gifafi wrote: »
    seeing a lot of salt. 2 points:

    1. if you are worried about a newer player "catching up" to you bc of some farming changes for older toons, my advice is to git gud.

    2. if you are angry bc new players will be able to get things easier than you did. then my advice is to walk everywhere like your forefathers did. Not fair you get to ride in a car. I might allow one of those bicycles with the giant wheel in the front if you post proof your great gpaw rode one. In other words, git gud

    I haven’t seen anyone complain about either of those. Pretty sure people are positive about this change for new players.

    The issue, which of course you miss, is that they are not doing anything to ease the gear crunch at all! In fact, they’re making it worse by doubling the shard shop currency, all while keeping bronzonium rates the same, effectively making the crunch worse. So again, CG has failed to help its veteran players and have made things worse actually. Although I must say, the more they do things like this and ignore their veteran players, the easier it is to give my money to MSF over SWGOH 🤷🏻‍♂️

    Go back one page and the first comment is someone complaining about how it’s not fair new players won’t have the same grind he had

    He's literally the only one in the thread so far to say that. Although to be fair, yes, "not seeing *anyone* complain about that" is technically false.

    Yeah I know I meant it more sarcastically than anything. Ravens was right (almost), I would say I think they’ve left the door open for changes to the gear crunch down the line and I’m gonna remain optimistic for all you veterans that they’re able to fix the technical issue sooner rather than later. Wouldn’t like an update to help myself whilst negatively affecting anyone else permanently
  • Just adding some suggestions... Know I'm stretching it... Would we get an update to GET 1? Like are we increasing Get 1 for all TBs?

    So that new toons are released via Get 2
  • Ultra
    11423 posts Moderator
    edited November 2020
    Scuba's suggestion to double the ally points we get is the best solution to bronzium problem imo

    Either that or half the cost of bronzium to 125 ally points

    Sounds like it can be done easily and faster than figuring out the bronzium situation

  • Because in the process of passively farming, you'll get characters in half the time now as a new player. Thus you get twice as many characters, unless you're suggesting that they should just not farm once they have a team of five, which no new player will do.

    I don't even know what to do with that. If you already have an account, you're not competing with a new player. They're not going to be hopping onto your arena shard. That's now how that works. And you don't get twice as many characters. You get characters twice as fast. You do realize that credit heist unlocks at lvl 30, right?



    Spoiler alert: there's no "getting phoenix, Jedi, Seps early". They're the first toons you can easily and cheaply farm and anyone new who joins the game just has to do a google search to find out that phoenix and bugs are 2 of the best squads early on to get.

    You had a lot there to unpack so I'm taking this one slowly.

    I never said it was gonna be a problem with shard-hopping newbs breaking the game with bloated rosters. I said they'd be able to farm twice as many characters as before with no changes to the other economies in game.

    To your objection saying they don't get twice as many characters, they just get them twice as fast: What happens when you finish a farm and have more useful toons to get? You farm the next one....twice as fast. Meaning in the same time period, they get twice as many characters.

    As for the credit heist statement. At level 45, let's say you're working on the opening teams. You have five seps in the works, as well as phoenix and rebels and jedi. You still only have the first tier of credit heist open, which only comes around about once every two weeks (but with no official cadence so don't take that for granted). At the first level, you also have to have reasonably geared scoundrels which takes resources, but you only get MAX of 1 mil per round. Doing it twice with perfect drops nets you 2 mil. Now, assuming the rest of your credit income at this point in the game is going into gear in the daily shop, leveling characters up, and leveling abilities (because let's face it, beginners have inefficient credit use and there's no good income source guaranteed), you only get enough to 7* a character every two weeks from credit heist at perfect drops, and only if you've geared and leveled up enough scoundrels to beat it.

    If you're working on lets say 16 toons (3 scoundrels for the event, 5 seps, 5 phoenix, and three more jedi with Kanan and Ezra), and you have a bunch of them starring up throughout this period, you can only seven star one of them every two weeks (assuming the cadence of Credit Heist remains constant). If you're saying Credit Heist is enough to alleviate that crunch entirely, you're ignoring that with accelerated farming of shards, people will be sitting on 7* capable toons for about 32 weeks at the beginning of the game. And that's just the beginner characters. Even if we account for them leveling up enough to access tier 2 of credit heist, they'd need more scoundrels and near perfect drops every time to remotely ease the credit crunch.


    Basically, this only accelerates farming superficially and on the surface. It'll still take most new players over half a year to level up, star, and gear relevant early game toons to a usable degree. Not including the fact that it takes 6.2 mil credits to level someone to 85. So once they hit max level with just those 16 toons, they'll have spent almost 100 mil credits on levels alone. The crunch has always been there, but by having more characters to farm up faster, they will have more things the credits can go towards.


    From the rest of your post, it sounds like you can't speak for the average player anyway, especially any newb that can "use one google search" to find relevant teams. You got BB8 and EP and Thrawn, arguably some of the most useful legendaries in the game, without farming up their teams at all, having no support for them, and then mocking us because you have 154 mil credits? That alone will only level 85 and 7* about 19 characters for you, which is enough to form a resistance squad and an empire/sith squad to go with your legendaries, and more rebels to support uses for R2.

    You only have those credits cuz you haven't used them wisely, someone chasing good teams who has made any "google searches" to support their farming would have actual teams involved, and even with the same credit hoard and income as you, they would experience a crunch as soon as they leveled the toons relevant to your roster.

  • Cool, so we'll be able to more quickly have 7* toons to not be able to gear up.
  • Ultra wrote: »
    Scuba's suggestion to double the ally points we get is the best solution to bronzium problem imo

    Either that or half the cost of bronzium to 125 ally points

    Sounds like it can be done easily and faster than figuring out the bronzium situation
    Nope...unable to accommodate as it helps in providing more gear and scavenge material to players...god forbid we help in those areas.
  • scuba
    14016 posts Member
    Ultra wrote: »
    Scuba's suggestion to double the ally points we get is the best solution to bronzium problem imo

    Either that or half the cost of bronzium to 125 ally points

    Sounds like it can be done easily and faster than figuring out the bronzium situation

    That works to, if you can't double the output half the input
  • scuba wrote: »
    Ultra wrote: »
    Scuba's suggestion to double the ally points we get is the best solution to bronzium problem imo

    Either that or half the cost of bronzium to 125 ally points

    Sounds like it can be done easily and faster than figuring out the bronzium situation

    That works to, if you can't double the output half the input

    "Oh no, that would let players that already have millions of the smallest relic piece get a few more per day than usual, that would ruin the in-game economy of relics, the most fair and balanced economy there is!" - someone probably
  • ndwilson
    89 posts Member
    edited November 2020
    While I agree with everyone here about not being happy about the bronzium pack issue, I do think this is a very positive change for the game. I only counted 6 characters currently on nodes that aren't included in this change right now so it will drastically help my farming for FO for SLKR since I went Rey first. These are positives to this change. I only wish ship blueprints were also included with this change.
  • Double shards will ease the gear crunch for those farming the appropriate characters. Twice the shards means you'll be able to farm normal nodes instead of hard nodes twice as fast, getting twice as much gear in the process.
  • Ultra
    11423 posts Moderator
    Starslayer wrote: »
    Double shards will ease the gear crunch for those farming the appropriate characters. Twice the shards means you'll be able to farm normal nodes instead of hard nodes twice as fast, getting twice as much gear in the process.

    Uhhhh not really no, your gear inflow doesn't double even if the time to farm gear is quicker (which is also misleading)

    it only applies to accelerated characters, once you are done with accelerated ones, you have to work on original characters which is acquired at the current pace
  • Well, I guess it'll help me finish Hux, Sith Trooper, Urrurururru, and Embo a little bit faster.Otherwise I've got all the Accelerated characters done!

    All things considered, sure. Sounds good. It'll help new players get started more quickly, so good for them.
    Ceterum censeo Patientia esse meliat.
  • Ultra wrote: »
    Starslayer wrote: »
    Double shards will ease the gear crunch for those farming the appropriate characters. Twice the shards means you'll be able to farm normal nodes instead of hard nodes twice as fast, getting twice as much gear in the process.

    Uhhhh not really no, your gear inflow doesn't double even if the time to farm gear is quicker (which is also misleading)

    it only applies to accelerated characters, once you are done with accelerated ones, you have to work on original characters which is acquired at the current pace

    I wasn't clear. Agree it's only for accelerated characters though (i called them 'appropriate characters', it was misleading).
    Let's say you need 1000 sims so 20,000 energy to farm a character. Now you can do this with only 500 sims so10,000 energy. So you can use those unused 10,000 energy on normal nodes instead, for 1000 sims instead of 500.
    So with the same amount of energy dedicated to farm a character:
    - Before: 1000 battles (all hard)
    - Now: 1500 battles (500 hard+1000 normal), so about 100 gear parts considering 20% drop rate
  • Ultra
    11423 posts Moderator
    Starslayer wrote: »
    Ultra wrote: »
    Starslayer wrote: »
    Double shards will ease the gear crunch for those farming the appropriate characters. Twice the shards means you'll be able to farm normal nodes instead of hard nodes twice as fast, getting twice as much gear in the process.

    Uhhhh not really no, your gear inflow doesn't double even if the time to farm gear is quicker (which is also misleading)

    it only applies to accelerated characters, once you are done with accelerated ones, you have to work on original characters which is acquired at the current pace

    I wasn't clear. Agree it's only for accelerated characters though (i called them 'appropriate characters', it was misleading).
    Let's say you need 1000 sims so 20,000 energy to farm a character. Now you can do this with only 500 sims so10,000 energy. So you can use those unused 10,000 energy on normal nodes instead, for 1000 sims instead of 500.
    So with the same amount of energy dedicated to farm a character:
    - Before: 1000 battles (all hard)
    - Now: 1500 battles (500 hard+1000 normal), so about 100 gear parts considering 20% drop rate
    Ok but for most endgame players who have accelerated characters, how is this doubling the gear we are getting?

    Sure, we can start farming gear sooner, but it doesn't double our gear. We are still getting the same amount of gear, but the grind starts a few days earlier

    As far as the gear economy goes, this doesn't really move the needle in any significant manner, other than the bronzium change which lowers the gear progress players are making daily
  • Starslayer wrote: »
    Ultra wrote: »
    Starslayer wrote: »
    Double shards will ease the gear crunch for those farming the appropriate characters. Twice the shards means you'll be able to farm normal nodes instead of hard nodes twice as fast, getting twice as much gear in the process.

    Uhhhh not really no, your gear inflow doesn't double even if the time to farm gear is quicker (which is also misleading)

    it only applies to accelerated characters, once you are done with accelerated ones, you have to work on original characters which is acquired at the current pace

    I wasn't clear. Agree it's only for accelerated characters though (i called them 'appropriate characters', it was misleading).
    Let's say you need 1000 sims so 20,000 energy to farm a character. Now you can do this with only 500 sims so10,000 energy. So you can use those unused 10,000 energy on normal nodes instead, for 1000 sims instead of 500.
    So with the same amount of energy dedicated to farm a character:
    - Before: 1000 battles (all hard)
    - Now: 1500 battles (500 hard+1000 normal), so about 100 gear parts considering 20% drop rate

    Yes, if your assumption that CG will never release any new characters to farm in energy nodes you are spot on.
  • Great for new players.
    Bad for older players until they fix bronziums. And I'm not convinced they will.

    While I concur with this assessment in the very limited sense of how much gear an older player is able to purchase each week, I think that this is actually of long term benefit to the older players as well. ("Old" meaning, I hope obviously, players who have been playing the game longer, not players less recently born.)

    When new players find fewer barriers to entry, they come in greater numbers, they find the game less frustrating and therefore stay longer, and they ultimately contribute more to the community. You may be in a guild or guild network with them. You may chat with them on the forums. Some of them will spend money on the game, and that certainly benefits all of us.

    For a couple years now I have been encouraging CG to make entering the game more attractive to people who haven't yet begun to play. We want more new players and so we should want the entrance requirements to the coolest content to be less daunting.

    I strongly support this change.

    This doesn't mean I'm unconcerned about how the loss of some Bronzium income changes my purchasing power in the Shard Shop, but over all, I think my purchasing power there (and the Shard Shop purchasing power of older players more generally) is less important than ensuring a healthy influx of new players.

    Please fix Bronziums when possible, CG, but even if that never becomes possible, I'll still support this change.

    ==========================================================================

    All that said, the purchasing power problem can be fixed in other ways that ARE technically possible.

    First, cut the cost in Ally Points of that one gear Weekly Shipment in half.
    Second, add one weekly Clone Wars Chewie bucket of shards in the Weekly Shipment for a price that equals a reasonable number of ally points per shard. If the number of shards in the bucket is appropriate, then effectively we get back a bunch of the Bronzium shards we could have gotten by spending ally points on Bronzium pulls and turn it into currency without tinkering with Bronziums at all.

    If the shards are only ever CWC shards, then you can't use the weekly shipments to increase farms of other toons that should be gated. The only downside here is that since the shards are always the same character, new players will be able to gain Shard Shop currency earlier. (Under the old system they would get approximately as many shards, but they'd be spread widely across many characters so most wouldn't generate ShSh currency nearly as early in a player's career.)

    ...HOWEVER... getting a small amount of ShSh currency every week earlier on in the game would do little enough that the game economy isn't thrown out of whack, while the longer-term economy is not affected at all. In other words, that change also would be a benefit to new players, albeit a much smaller one than doubling shard drops for older toons, and so would continue to promote the entry of new players without harming the game long term.


  • crzydroid
    7233 posts Moderator
    Ultra wrote: »
    Scuba's suggestion to double the ally points we get is the best solution to bronzium problem imo

    Either that or half the cost of bronzium to 125 ally points

    Sounds like it can be done easily and faster than figuring out the bronzium situation

    Or adding ally points back to challenges.

  • If you're working on lets say 16 toons (3 scoundrels for the event, 5 seps, 5 phoenix, and three more jedi with Kanan and Ezra), and you have a bunch of them starring up throughout this period, you can only seven star one of them every two weeks (assuming the cadence of Credit Heist remains constant). If you're saying Credit Heist is enough to alleviate that crunch entirely, you're ignoring that with accelerated farming of shards, people will be sitting on 7* capable toons for about 32 weeks at the beginning of the game. And that's just the beginner characters. Even if we account for them leveling up enough to access tier 2 of credit heist, they'd need more scoundrels and near perfect drops every time to remotely ease the credit crunch.

    the truly fastest way to get any toon up is to go 1 toon at a time. Phoenix can be spread out, true enough. Zeb is in GW, Hera and Ezra in Cantina. Chopper is cantina tokens. The method you describe though (which is funny since you mock me for doing it) is actually very inefficient. And obviously credit heist isn't enough to completely alleviate it but you seemed to be implying credit heist was inaccessible until lvl 80 for players. That's not true. When you only have 5-12 characters or so, the amount of currency given also isn't horrible.

    From the rest of your post, it sounds like you can't speak for the average player anyway, especially any newb that can "use one google search" to find relevant teams. You got BB8 and EP and Thrawn, arguably some of the most useful legendaries in the game, without farming up their teams at all, having no support for them, and then mocking us because you have 154 mil credits? That alone will only level 85 and 7* about 19 characters for you, which is enough to form a resistance squad and an empire/sith squad to go with your legendaries, and more rebels to support uses for R2.

    You only have those credits cuz you haven't used them wisely, someone chasing good teams who has made any "google searches" to support their farming would have actual teams involved, and even with the same credit hoard and income as you, they would experience a crunch as soon as they leveled the toons relevant to your roster.

    :joy::joy::joy: that's hilarious. I lvled them up intending to make teams for them, FYI. But guess what? Other things become priority or happen to change the initial plan. Happens to everyone. If presenting an example is mocking someone I'd suggest calming down and remembering it's just a game and these are just words on a screen. My point is I don't conserve my characters in my alt. And despite that, I still have lots of cash. Relics are the worst to overcome for new players. There are significant gear issues, so credits as any sort of problem vanish when you consider everything else a new player must contend with. You wanna know who sucks at g8-9? Vader. Not only does he hit like a wet noodle even with his new zeta, he dies stupidly easy. The advent of relics have made the game much harder for new players, especially in arena.

    I don't even see the point in this argument. more shards for old characters = good. New players can get a 7* toon sooner, cheaper, and find a guild to join to get heroic rewards to earn more gear, credits, etc. JKR, DRevs, Gen Sky are easier to farm = good. Even Rey and SLK are easier to farm. Gear crunch remains (obviously; it's not ever going away). Gear crunch sucks. Currency will not impact anyone more than the gear will and more shards aren't making it worse.
  • Ok, this is a lot to comb through. I've asked for a summation of key points raised by the comments in this thread, and will work on getting feedback to address some of those recurring points.

    Might take a few days, as tomorrow is a holiday. But, I know the goal here was to make it easier for newer players to unlock and level up units, while also trying as much as possible to minimally effect other parts of the economy for elder players.

    Will keep y'all updated when I have more.
  • So if anyone has toons they haven't activated yet, and have more than 330 shards, they really need to activate them before the change over, or those shards will be halved in value, right?

    If you have it sitting as SSC, it'll get doubled, but if you have it sitting as shards it won't.
  • Monel
    2776 posts Member
    Not really impressed as a vet, but it definitely is good to try and help keep newer players around.
  • Over half my guild consists of newer players (on average about 2.4 gp) and the complaints are always centered around gear not shards. It is a shame that such a easy solution of NOT doubling the cost in the shard shop to help with the gear crunch...is not part of the economy discussion is unbelievable. Wouldn’t you want to do something that benefits all players whether it is shards or gear? With relics the gear crunch is insane and the recent release of galactic challenges hasn’t helped. Those two kyros I receive once a week isn’t helping.
  • @CG_Doja_Fett

    The important thing is that simply doubling Ally Points effectively cures the inability to double the drop rates of Bronziums.

    There's still the matter of not doubling the 10 free Bronzium pulls per day, but now that's exactly the same for all characters. Making people do 20 pulls per day is going to annoy a bunch of people, but since you're not dealing with differential spending earning different players different numbers of pulls through ally points (since that's taken care of by doubling ally points), you just do the math on exactly how many shards, on average, each player would get per week from that extra 70 pulls. You have the drop rates of shards & full toons, so that calculation should be easy.

    Now round off that number of shards as appropriate & add that number of shards to the Weekly Shipments. Make sure it's the same character every week so that new players don't get an advantage over their peers if what they're farming happens to be the toon of the week. Choose just one basic toon - I recommend Clone Wars Chewie, but CUP or Jedi Consular or Talia or StormTrooper are all candidates - and all the extra shards are of that toon. Now give it a low cost, perhaps 100k credits or 10 crystals or anything other than ally points. Boom. You've replaced the extra 70 free pulls you would have had to add. You don't give out the gear you didn't want to give out from those extra 70 free pulls. But you do replace the ShSh income.

    So double Ally Points + a few shards/week available relatively cheaply for an alternate currency will precisely double shard rewards that you would have gotten from Bronziums.

    Actually, there's that other important thing, though, too, about how we're thanking you for lowering the barriers to new & returning players, which helps keep the game at a healthy number of players for all of us.

    This is a good change, even if the Bronzium bug is going to create some temporary weirdness.
  • Maybe I'll finally farm Bodhi Rook.
  • RoBane1738
    267 posts Member
    edited November 2020
    I don’t see it helping new players much, at current shard drop rates a newer player can’t keep up with the credit cost of leveling and promoting toons to 7*. What good is it to have the shards twice as fast if you can’t do anything with them. Then they have that many more toons to gear and mod.

    At its base, I think it’s a great idea and could be very helpful to new players, but other things would have to change at or around the same time for it to actually have good effect.
  • RoBane1738 wrote: »
    I don’t see it helping new players much, at current shard drop rates a newer player can’t keep up with the credit cost of leveling and promoting toons to 7*. What good is it to have the shards twice as fast if you can’t do anything with them. Then they have that many more toons to gear and mod.

    At its base, I think it’s a great idea and could be very helpful to new players, but other things would have to change at or around the same time for it to actually have good effect.

    Exactly, as long as the gear requirements are the same and it still takes 8.2 million credits to take a toon to level 85 and 7*, more shards faster just means the economy gets crunched even further. Especially for newer players who now have dozens of easily accessible toons begging to be geared up and leveled, but no one has the resources.
  • You might have to introduce some new-player-only quests to fill in some material gaps while leaving us vets untouched.

    I love this idea of accelerating most characters after a year's release onto a node, or whatever.

    Even vets benefit, and get a chance to fill in gaps in their rosters a bit more easily.

    Sure, it'll cost more gear etc, but we'll have more gear from the shards costing less energy.

    Well done coming up with a good solution for getting new players going at a more reasonable pace!
  • scuba
    14016 posts Member
    RoBane1738 wrote: »
    I don’t see it helping new players much, at current shard drop rates a newer player can’t keep up with the credit cost of leveling and promoting toons to 7*. What good is it to have the shards twice as fast if you can’t do anything with them. Then they have that many more toons to gear and mod.

    At its base, I think it’s a great idea and could be very helpful to new players, but other things would have to change at or around the same time for it to actually have good effect.

    Exactly, as long as the gear requirements are the same and it still takes 8.2 million credits to take a toon to level 85 and 7*, more shards faster just means the economy gets crunched even further. Especially for newer players who now have dozens of easily accessible toons begging to be geared up and leveled, but no one has the resources.

    This whole thing is to reduce the acquisition of a single resource (shards of old units).
    Yes there is more that goes into building a unit up than just shards, however it is a start at something.

    To alleviate any resource crunch they have to agree that the aquistion rate is lower than what they want it to be.
    Players and Dev will never agree on what is or isn't in a crunch.

    If new players can aquire 330 shards of units faster they will get to the pain point the rest of the player base complains about sooner, and than maybe just maybe They will do something about it.

    There are so many ways They could allviate the gear crunch the players see, yet they don't and haven't since the release of the game, They just keep adding to it. That tells me they see gear flow where They want it to be, regardless of what the players think.
  • Here's an idea:

    For the legacy toons who are having their drop rates doubled, require 1/2 the credits to level up. The credits necessary for a star promotion can remain the same or be halved as well. (Alternatively, only the promotion costs can be halved.)

    This would mean that instead of 8+ million credits, older toons would cost 7 million + a bit (promotion cost halved), 5 million+ (if having level up cost), or 4 million + (if halving both).

    Since it only affects older toons, and only those toons affected by shard doubling (thus not Legendaries, etc.), it still fits the theme of bringing up a wide-ranging roster quickly so that people can meaningfully participate in both Hoth TBs, but it doesn't affect the end game economy at all.

    Since we're doubling most shard progress for new players, reducing the costs by 12% - 50% shouldn't ever give you more wealth at any stage of roster development than original players had. It just means that new players pass through those stages of roster development more quickly.
  • @Rebmes
    Even vets benefit, and get a chance to fill in gaps in their rosters a bit more easily.

    Well, most do. I don't have anything to farm except new toons, so it won't matter to me unless I take a break from the game or unless they release so many toons at once that I literally can't finish some of them before a year goes by.

    When did they release Cara? I guess she might qualify at some point, though I kinda doubt it. I'm pretty sure I'll finish 3PAC, Piett & MonMothma with plenty of time to take Cara to 7 stars before she's a year old.
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