Capital Games Team
I was one of the most "eloquent" critics of the proposed change to the assault battle cadence, so I wanted to make sure that I responded here.
While it is disappointing that I'm excited about this decision (since I'd rather be excited about new content and cool characters), I suppose that shows how much I enjoy the game.
I probably still won't be buying crystals, but I might be able to convince myself to buy some other packs if they're really good. Can't spend on both accounts, but I do think I can lighten my restrictions a bit in light of some good news.
I'm very happy that you (CG as a whole) reverted the worst decision you'd made in ages, and it's great to see that you are actually listening to player feedback (thanks meathead!). There's still some game balance that I find questionable, but you've addressed most of the problems I've had with the game in the last couple months.
Basically all I'm waiting on is squad arena currency to be back in dailies (meathead says it's a bug that it's not, so I'm giving y'all a pass on that for now), and and *maybe* a road ahead or something about the next raid, since we're getting antsy and a little excited to see what the next one is gonna be.
Props to the community management being done, and here's hoping for continued good news as we go through the holidays!
Wanted to continue elaborating on this, since I think it's important.
IF it turns out that for reward totals, CG can't run 10 assault battles at once, I think it is VERY important to make sure that the older assault battles (The ones with challenge tiers) are still available in some form.
It would obviously be much nicer to have all the assault battles be additive rewards for players to build towards, especially since they're kind of foundational to the current gameplay cadence.
The most commonly suggested/requested compromise is to have some sort of option to pair the old and new assault battles, and you get to pick one to earn rewards for. This is fine, but I'd like to argue for why we should get all of the assault battles moving forward.
Item 1: Relic 9 is still not very common, the average player isn't super likely to have more than 1-2 R9's in their roster, and if CG wants that to change, removing relic mats/gear rewards is not the way to do that.
Item 2: Engaging in the new assault battles should be an incentive, but not a necessity. While the new characters are cool, and typically better than the old ones, there's a lot to be said for letting players still be rewarded for going after the most iconic characters (who were in the game first, since they're iconic). For example, going for Jedi Knight Luke Skywalker is awesome right now, since you get to unlock a really awesome character, but you also get rewarded with a small boost to your gear economy in the Ground War and Military Might assault battles
Item 3: At some point (right now it'd probably be 19 assault battles), you'd start making players choose between 3 events. Maybe 19 is a far-fetched number, but that's like 2.5 years away if the cadence is 4/year (1 per era), and 3.5 years away if it's 3/year. It feels like a band-aid solution to say "yea you can just choose one".
Item 4: Increasing rewards is a good thing, since the average new player has WAY more characters to farm than a new player would have if they'd started 4 or 5 years ago. And that's going to get worse.
My suggestion is, instead of lowering the floor, raise the ceiling. Introduce something that's hard for players to achieve, even with these increasing rewards, and keep players progressing through the older content (like Relic 0-7) at increasing speed, so they get to chase the new content, and collect the characters they're interested in.
