I'm probably in the minority here, but I think EA actually has taken our feedback into consideration. I'm going to play devil's advocate for a moment knowing full well I'm going to be torched.
I've noticed that TB's game design is intended to allow everyone to reach a reasonable number of stars fairly easily, and then at phase 5 ratchet up the difficulty to separate guilds with high GP / team efforts, while still attempting to make these later phases relatively enjoyable for everyone. Why do I think this?
- the first time you encountered Rose and Holdo was at 5*... not at 4*... you probably had a reasonable time filling a lot of platoons and are just NOW failing to fill more than 2
- which brings me to my next point; I've noticed they took feedback and kept at least 2 platoons void of what we consider "pay to play" toons. This means, given an aggressive farming strategy, guilds with a lot of players and somewhat mature rosters should be able to achieve level 1 in platoons (this is an improvement over previous iterations of TB)
- You don't need to fill all platoons to get 45*, free to play can still achieve this. It's GP dependent, not character dependent.
- this actually makes these later stages more challenging for EVERYONE because even my guild (115 GP) won't have all the necessary toons to complete every platoon, which means we strategize on "how many do we actually fill" or "do we fill additional platoons to get the bonus or do we try to clear all of the battles at 5/6 and 6/6"
I think the community frustration probably stems from being able to easily fill platoons in the first 4 phases and then WHAM hit a platoon wall.
It's tough to figure out a sensible solution to this gripe by the community because my impression is that they are trying to make the gameplay more challenging by preventing almost all guilds from completing all platoons (without paying a pretty penny). I don't fault them for this strategy because they're telling the community if you want the ultimate advantage, it's going to cost, otherwise everyone participates on a level playing field.
I don't know that there's a simple answer to this, but maybe game designers should consider delaying newly released characters 1 full TB cycle before introduction to platoons. Given the release cadence, I suspect it would not materially alter how many players actually collect those characters because they're still not farmable in-game. On the flip side of that, would it actually change player resentment since they're still not non-datacard farmable?
