Dear CG: An Eras Discussion
We're about halfway through this experiment in Eras hitting a year old and I think it's time to discuss the good, bad, and ugly.
The Good: Predictability. Players understand what is coming in an Era for releases. No more guessing. Spenders can look to invest in a multi-month model instead of week-to-week.
Synergy between releases. Teams are typically formed by eras or lift old teams. While the investment cost is higher, it's nice to have a shiny new team come online at once rather than waiting for intermittent parts throughout the year.
The Bad: Hit or Miss feel. The Sad Batch era was an opening meh. Episode 3 content was an uptick. Pirates are a downtick. We're getting background characters from the Sequel trilogy instead of characters like Prince Xizor with a Black Sun Pirates faction. Here's a list of factions/teams I would buy before Pirates: Naboo, Kotor 2, Eternal Empire, Eternal Alliance, Alternate Clone Wars Battalions, Delta Squad, Maul's Syndicate, Pyke Syndicate, Cloud City Security, Coruscant Security, Dark Council, Shadow Council. KotOR/SWToR should be getting content before side characters in the Sequel Trilogy. At the very least, give us Clone Wars and Prequel stuff we're missing. A certain dubious politician comes to mind.
Smaller critique, they're too long. This is mainly felt with bad Eras, which you're batting .333 as of now. I would prefer 6 weeks of content and a 2 week breath. Give me the characters, the event, and then pause to see how it impacts the game for post-release balance updates/tuning.
The Ugly: Delivery on promises. Bad Batch didn't get a Legendary drop. It's make good was to put them in a raid that they do not cleanly fit into. Crosshair is a slow start character. The raid is about gas pedal from the start. Additionally, Conquest characters are being shackled to supplement Eras when we were told they "might" sometimes be aligned. Conquest should be lifting up old teams and making them relevant. The same way omicrons were supposed to make old team relevant, and you stopped, Conquest is being used to push Era spending not to enhance the health of the game. Lastly, you changed the order of events to prevent shards from being given out too early. We were under the impression that the Era Battles would be included alongside the units involved.
