1 shard a day

While true you can farm multiple characters at once. I am merely pointing out the rediculous amount of time it takes to farm in this game. Neither are unjustified nor pumped up and a fair amount of heros there is only a single hard node to farm. Limited characters have multiple nodes but I appreciate the input. At a single shard a day which is roughly a 5x20 for ls/ds hard node 20% drop rate it would take you 330 days. The math is hardly flawed for a single run through. Your assumptions are that rng will be favorable to reduce that time by getting more shards in 5 attempts. I however in my experience take a more pessimistic approach since the devs leave the drop rate so low anyway and like to limit the pace of the game. As a side note you feel that 200 days by your own calculations is equitable or reasonable time for a single character? This IMO takes away from the experience of the game and game play. Especially considering all of the various factions that are possible and needed to attain any goals in the game?

"trooper521;c-1859374" wrote:
Are you sure about that? Is it documented somewhere by the devs or are you just saying that.

It's documented by many many players who have actually tracked drop rates over significant periods of time/attempts and under varying circumstances.

"trooper521;c-1859383" wrote:
So again single player data not indicative of the actual programmed drop rate. Hardly a large enough sample size to verify your statement.

Uh... you have no idea what the sample size is. This was a group effort among a very large number of players to track the drop rate. It's far more verified than the nonsense assumptions in your OP.

@EventineElessedil I think many of us agree that those farms are too long, which is why we refresh attempts and spend crystals daily to shorten them. Most new character releases come with 50 free shards, so at 15 attempts per day (75 crystals) you're looking at ~36 days to six star a character (180 shards averaging five per day) and an additional 20 days to seven star it. So, about two months of dedicated farming. I think it's up to the individual user as to whether or not that's a quality experience.

As for @trooper521 - I didn't defend anything, I just pointed out that your math was off and gave you the actuals. If you feel that the experience is crap, then you're under no obligation to play a free game. I just wanted to make sure you understood the truth of hard node farming and could plan accordingly. And yes, full disclosure, I think seven months is ridiculous which is why I refresh attempts if I'm actually hard node farming a targeted character - because 75 crystals for 10 chances at a shard is less than the 80 crystals that shard would cost me in shipments.

If you don't believe the quoted drop rate:
https://forums.galaxy-of-heroes.starwars.ea.com/discussion/196365/new-old-republic-characters-drop-rates-day-28-completed/p1

and

https://www.reddit.com/r/SWGalaxyOfHeroes/comments/b3ak6v/darth_revan_toon_drop_rates/

There's no reason to farm them one at a time though. And there are other farming locations besides hard nodes.

How do you intend to present an argument when you keep backing it up with miscalculations and unjustifiably pumped up numbers?
With 5 node attempts a day, you will get a toon from 0 to 330 shards in roughly 200 days. That is an obvious increase from the average 125 for 8 attempts (no refreshes calculated), but far from a whole year, as you present it.
As Liath pointed out, you are by no means limited to farm a single toon at a time, unless you purposely waste your daily free energy by not going below 144 energy points. You don't even have to refresh energy for crystals to be able to use more than 100 a day, which is the price of the most expensive hard node muptiplied by the 5 attempts.

It's flawed because the drop rate is 33%, not 20%.

Are you sure about that? Is it documented somewhere by the devs or are you just saying that.

So again single player data not indicative of the actual programmed drop rate. Hardly a large enough sample size to verify your statement.

"Liath;c-1859354" wrote:
It's flawed because the drop rate is 33%, not 20%.

This. It feels like one per day because that's all you remember. You get 375 free energy per day from the timer and the three free standard refreshes (morning, payout, evening). Assuming you're farming nothing but 20 energy characters, that's 18 attempts per day. Assuming you're not refreshing attempts and you're dedicating your farms that means you're making 5 attempts on 3 different nodes and 3 attempts on a 4th node per day. Assuming you're starting from 0 shards and doing a little rounding cuz math is hard, you need 1000 attempts to get your 330 shards (we can argue drop rate but there are any number of posts you can search to see that it's really really really close to 33%).

1000 attempts / 5 attempts per day = 200 days with no crystal spend at all. But since you're farming 3.6 characters at once what you'll actually have at the end of those 200 days is...

330 shards of first hard node farm.
330 shards of second hard node farm.
330 shards of third hard node farm.
200 shards of fourth hard node farm.

So in a little under seven months, you will have 2/3 of a squad, just from hard nodes. Fortunately there isn't a single squad that is exclusively hard node farms so in reality, in that seven months you've also been able to farm toons from Fleet hard nodes (same math as above, only for a single toon), and Cantina (far more generous as there's no attempt limit) and you have yourself a team. For free. Without paying anything. And hoarding every crystal you've earned through that entire time. (Which, even if you're just finishing top 1000 in squad arena and top 50 in fleet would be 20,000 crystals!)