Episode 1 Track and Reward Breakdown

I saw the usual spontent creators gushing over the new reward system so I wanted to do an actual breakdown with real numbers. 

Let's start with what we know about the reward track:

• It has 50 milestones and each milestone requires 5,000 episode points (EP), which means you need 250,000 EP to max it.
• You get EP from daily quests, episode quests, character quests, and galactic challenges.
  • Daily quests appear to give 3,600 EP per day (300 per quest with seven quests and 1500 for finishing all seven). Over 28 days this is 100,800 EP. 
  • Episode quests appear to give 22,000 EP per week (2000 per quest with seven quests and 8000 for finishing all seven). Over 28 days, this is 88,000 EP. 
    • Note that this assumes everything is doable. Even one feat locked behind the newest Conquest or journey guide character will cost you 10,000 EP. 
  • Character quests do not appear completely by f2p players. The first shown quest requires 70 Huyang shards and we currently get 65 free shards from the new marquee system. The wording's a little unclear but it appears that each character will have 28 quests worth 500 EP each, which would be 28,000 (28 x 500 x 2) over 28 days but a big question is how many are doable without buying packs. 
  • We don't know how many points Galactic Challenges (GC) give but we do know that the "complete the battle" feat is going to be paywalled behind the $20 pass. This is currently 1/3 of available GC points. 
• So, assuming the numbers don't change, if you do complete all dailies and episode quests, you'll have 188,800 EP leaving 61,200 to get from character quests and GC which sounds daunting to me. If all GC feats are worth 100,000 over an episode, a f2p player would be able to get 66,000 for example (assuming current point ratios remain)--not a lot of wiggle room, there. 

Now let's break down the store and I'm going to make two assumptions. The first is that you can actually max the track as a f2p player. The second is that we're not going to use the 4 Gold / 4 Red comparison and instead compare it to 8 Red Crates because that's what dedicated players can currently do. We need to compare maximum rewards under the old and new systems for apples to apples. Otherwise, you might as well say that the new system gives 100 times the rewards of a tier 1 GC crate and pat yourself on the back. 

From eight Red Crates you get: 

• 880,000 credits
• 600,000 ship building materials
• 8 Blue Mods
• 8 Purple Mods
• 8 Gold Mods
• 240 character shards* (less if you get ship blueprints or the characters are unaccelerated but none of those are shown in the new shop so we're using this number)
• 8 Omega Ability Materials 
• 20 Mk 7 Kyrotech Shock Prod Prototype Salvage
• 20 Mk 9 Kyrotech Battle Computer Prototype Salvage
• 13.3 Injector Cell Salvage
• 13.3 Injector Handle Salvage
• 13.3 Injector Head Salvage
• 16 Yellow Gear Salvage Mystery Boxes* (you get eight each of two different flavors but Meathead didn't differentiate so I'm assuming he means the same thing)
• 32 Purple Gear Salvage Mystery Boxes* (same as Yellow, 16 each of two different kinds)
•  48 Mk 1 Amplifiers
• 160 Mk 1 Capacitors
• 80 Mk 2 Pulse Modulators
• 160 Mk 2 Circuit Breaker Modules
• 256 Mk 2 Thermal Exchange Units
• 120 Mk 2 Variable Resistors
• 48 Mk 2 Micro Processors
• 16 Omicron Ability Materials

From the maxed free episode track, you'll get:

• 41,000 Episode Currency (EC)
• 0 Credits or Ship Building Materials
• 0 Mods
• 0 Character Shards
• 0 Omega Ability Materials
• 12 of each Kyrotech Salvage
• 20 of each Injector Salvage
• Same Yellow and Purple Gear Boxes
• 40 Blue Gear Boxes
• 10 Mk 12 Armatek Multi-Tool Prototype Salvage (these also come from one of the yellow boxes and you'll average 5 per 28 days from there as well)
• Same Slicing Mats
• 4 Omicron Ability Materials

If you try to break even using the Episode Currency, you'll fall short:

• 8 of each Kyrotech Salvage costs 2,800
• 8 Blue Mods cost 600
• 8 Purple Mods cost 1,600
• 8 Gold Mods cost 3,200
• 8 Omega Ability Materials cost 4,800
• 12 Omicron Ability Materials cost 19,200
• and 240 Character Shards cost a whopping 30,000* (characters available in other stores are cheaper but no one's buying those here)
  • Even taking into account the extra 4800 EC worth of Injector Salvage, you're in the hole 880,000 credits, 600,000 ship building materials, and 21,200 EC (less whatever the 10 Armatek salvage is worth). But hey, 40 blue gear chests. 

Moving into opinion and the finish:

On first glance, I don't like the point numbers. Remember that we currently get rewards for doing dailies and biweekly GCs. CG wants us to do dailies, GCs, and more quests on top of that for comparable* rewards while removing 1/3 of the GC points. If f2p cannot max the reward track or there's zero wiggle room, things get bad quick.

The quantity limits in the EC shop stink. Maybe you don't need any of the characters or omegas and pick and choose your mods so you break even on kyrotechs and omicrons and have 19,000 EC left over... what are you even spending it on? My only real bottlenecks currently are signal data and--to a lesser extent--high end relic mats and kyros but none of those are in this store. 

tl;dr it looks like we're doing more work and having to manually purchase rewards while ending up with less than what we currently get. I'm staying optimistic and hoping for the best when it launches next Tuesday but we'll see. 

Thanks for reading!