Capital Games TeamAppreciate the communication and transparency but few things stand out to me.
"We've heard from the community that players don't think R9 is worth investing outside of requirements, GLs, and the occasional tank." The vast majority of players don't have access to resources at a fast enough pace. So they hoard them until they need them instead of using them on enjoyable things. If the gear/relic grind was reduced first it would allow people to invest in what they want and you'd see a greater investment in end game levels.
"Players invest in unlock/entry requirements for content they want to engage, but the higher the relic level, the scarcer its materials and the less likely players are to invest those resources". People don't want to have to relic up something just to play content. A high difficulty is fine but locking the content behind an upgrade wall is frustrating when the content you then unlock isn't do able or is immensely difficult at the unlock level. If content was available to more people at a lower level but scaled in difficulty through mutliple tiers then people would be able to unlock it, enjoy it and work through it. I just unlocked the new Mace Windu. It wasn't an engaing event, for me the "content" was 10 minutes doing 4 battles. After spending months grinding for shards and materials and waiting so long for the event to come back my characters were over levelled for it anyway.
Many people remember the days of minimun requirements, the Thrawn event for example, when events were hard but could be accessed with lower level gear ( before relics), and were possible to complete using good modding and strategy. People enjoyed the challenge then, it allowed more people to engage with new content. Even if it couldn't necessarily be completed by everyone.
Furthermore pigeonholing so many character to the point of being unuseable outside their prescribed team kills most of the desire to invest in a new character that comes out, and usually results in resources being stretched thin across multiple new characters instead of fully investing in a 1 or 2 of them up to a high relic level.
"we will be changing how players get and invest in new characters. More details to come on that later".
These details need to come sooner rather than later as they will have a huge impact on how people interact with the game. At the moment the sentiment is very much "CG are making our characters useless and forcing us to spend loads just to be able to use them". If there is to be a gear grind adjustment it would help alliviet peoples frustrations to know that they will be able to bring their characters up to a competitive level ASAP.
"new Signal Data, which will not be farmed with energy (so it doesn’t disrupt your current Signal Data farming). Instead, the new Signal Data will be available in both the Scavenger and other game modes." The drop rate of these materials will be incredibly important. Personally i'd rather farm multiple types fo signal data that i can get plenty of with a multiple refereshes over a few days than the literal hundreds of gear 12 and 13 gear pieces needed for higher relic levels and take significantly longer to farm. Even when buying gear or relic mats from the various stores. The advent of relics on low star characters, while positive on the whole, has put an even greater strain on resources. Relic delta also makes this change feel somewhat pointless as a low relic and low star charcter is already at a disadvantage, stats wise, and relic delta will make this noticably worse. Making any investment in character not 7 stars potentially pointless.
The final point I have at this time is timed content, i.e. content with an expiration date, negatively impacts the disire to invest in a character. Raids, and era battles are the main culprits of this at the moment. Why put hard to acquire resources into character that don't have a function outside of that content. If the model were to change and raids were put on a cycle to keep them relavent then it would incentivise investing in them. But the majority of players hedge their bets and invest as little as possible were raid characters are concerned. Some raid teams are good in other modes, Hutt Cartel from Krayt raid, Leia from Endor, QA and Gungans from Naboo. But investment in other characters is limited to the bare minimum to achieve whatever score they can. Why keep devaluing developers invested time and resource by removing the relevance of that content and players invested time and resources. Rotating raids means any investment has a return long term reward and keeps things fresh by not repeating the same thing over and over for a year.
Era battles are another particularly egregious example. They're designed to reward early investment, fair enough, but the deminishing returns for people who can't invest early makes it feel like why bother content? By the time most characters are farmable the era is over and the era battles is so rarely seen. If the rotation were kept up more frequently it would reward that investment for all players eventually. And those who adopted early would see the biggest payouts overall, rewarding that early investment