Is F2P dying a slow death?

"BubbaFett;c-1634777" wrote:
I disagree.... You don't NEED all of these multiple marquis characters maxed out..... Some of them will be needed for legendary down the road, but they will be farmable by then..... Just accept that you won't be able.to get that legendary first pass and start farming for the next one .... It's really not that big of a deal......

We are in an era where anyone with a brain can be arena competitive, and it doesn't require money...... Be happy about that....

This, so much

Bastila is by far the best marquee character viable in arena immediately against the Sith meta. At first I questioned myself putting the zeta on her at such a low star level and since have not looked back nor regretted her. She’s perpetually stuck with low stars until she’s put onto a node, but what she brings to the table with GK, Zezra, GMZoda and ZzCLS is insane.

I'll wade into this whole conversation.

A previous poster listed a ftp roster that was pretty impressive. The thing I found interesting was the collection score. It was roughly 78. Mine is just a hair under 70, but he has me completely beat gear wise. Probably twice the G12 and G11 toons that I have. I am only missing Traya and IPD. He has eight more 7* toons than I do. I'm not sure how that collection score is calculated, but it appears that massive improvements to your roster won't move the score up too much.

As for who to farm, that is always the question. We haven't been getting as many hints as we have in the past. It is just mainly speculation based on what is being released. So let us look at what are probably the four biggest legendary/Hero's journey characters:

Jedi Knight Luke - he is the rumor king. With ROLO as the login character for September (TB compensation maybe?), this rumor is running full steam again. If he were released tomorrow, you would think it would require CLS, ROLO, Cap Han, R2 and Hoda. However, R2 was used before. There are also crazy rumors like needing Lobot and Lando. My gut tells me he still in the future. If we see an OT Chewie or C-3PO released, I think they would replace the R2 slot or may be needed in addition to R2. Bespin Han and Leia would fall in the same category. Whenever he comes out, he will be a must have toon, so I would prioritize farming his requirements.

Jango Fett - all the bounty hunter love leads to this rumor. Will he require bounty hunters or separatists? If it is bounty hunters, will any five do or do you need Bossk, Embo and/or Sing? Could it be a combo of toons a la Grevious, Zam, Dooku and two others? Of all the rumored toons, I see him as probably the least useful. At this point, as ftp, Bossk is the only thing you could farm (of the newer toons) for this one.

Beckett/Draden Vos - Here you may have a little wiggle room. I would guess you would need a Qira, Young Han, Young Lando, Vandor Chewie and L3. Again, how good is this toon going to be? That is unclear, but my guess is that it would need to be on a scoundrel team. As for farming, Young Han is easy. If you started when they put him in the store you should have him done by now. You have to split focus between Qira and L3. I got them both to 4* and am now focusing on Qira then L3 (134 and 248 shards to go). Vandor Chewie is going to take months without using refreshes (went 0 for 8 on him today). Same with Yound Lando (ditched the Sion node once Lando and Nest were added to ships). Remember, any toon on a single hard node is going to require 105 days to farm assuming 1/3 drop rate and the current 8 attempts per day. That goes up to 168 days at 5 attempts per day. Nest and Range Trooper are your outliers. If either would be needed, I would put money on Nest over Range Trooper. Again, I think either Beckett or Vos will have limited usefulness.

Revan - This will require Bastila, Bindo, Vao, Zaalbar and T3. HK being a requirement would be too much of a gift for a toon of this stature. None of these are farmable yet. When they are, they are going to be my priority. My bet would be that Revan game changing on the level of CLS. I think he would be a huge addition to the current Bastila lead arena teams, giving them a lot more punch. At this point, I think this is the most likely character to be released.

While JK Luke will come someday, I don't think we have all the required characters for him yet. Jango may be the easiest to get if he just requires any bounty hunter. Beckett/Vos seems a likely choice from what is farmable, but I'm not sure he will be worth the effort if you have to choose between him and Revan. Revan seems like a safe bet in the not too distant future and probably the one worth the most effort at this point.

I find it easiest to track stuff on an excel sheet. I try to farm two light side and two dark side hard nodes at a time (zero refreshes). With the cap back to 8, that is going to put a dent in my gear farming. I am farming the Solo characters since it is mainly cantina and ship nodes with just Chewie on a hard node. However, if they sprang a legendary on use in say October, there is no way to be ready as ftp.

We are just lucky that most whales and pay to win players actually spend because they wouldn't be able to win otherwise. And we also have to be thankful that a lot of whales are still bad players because money can't buy brains. Otherwise the game would die a slow and sad death.

I'm f2p, I've always been and God knows if I will always be. I would give money to Stalin to build gulags rather than giving it to EA.

During my gaming experience (almost 2 years), I found that just a few whales can actually take advantage from the money they spend. Most of the times, whales are just spoiled kids which don't know how to waste money or people who are not patient enought to wait until a toon is completed with regular farming. It's actually rare to see a whale which knows what he/she is doing. This gives the game a lot of balance in a pay to win perspective, because actually very few people manage to win by paying. A lot of them just pay and remain exactly where they were before. You can spot some of them because they usually complain about the worthiness of their spending because they couldn't make paid things work as they thought they would have worked. In a Shepherd-shepherd dog-herd situation they would be the herd. Very mild-tempered little sheeps which let the guys up there confuse them and therefore easily shut their mouths with vague statements and justifications. Luckily, these are the major source of income for the game and the majority of the spenders, because they spend without thinking and trust me, they spend A LOT. They're not much of a problem, because they don't actually alter the meta so much. Yes, you'll find some g12 bastila, some enfys nest, things you can overcome absolutely for free. And they're my favourite opponents in TWs, they usually can't make it past the second territory even if they use the low participation trick to face weaker guilds.

The ones which are actually killing the game are those very few guilds which are groupings of very whealthy people which happen to also have at least a chunk of brain. You recognize them by the fact that they put spending x money every month as a requirement to join their guilds. They count a lot as well, because they basically are walking salaries for the game's staff and a good chunk of the game's health bar, even if they're very few compared to the first ones. In a shepherd-shepherd dog-herd situation they would be the owner of the farm to which the herd, the dog and the shepherd belong. You don't even take them into account, because the owner is not listed in the shepherd-dog-herd situation and you don't see his influence on them. If they complain about something, you can swear that the whole staff will run like hares to fix the problem or modify the thing they don't like. They are the cause of the birth of the sith raid and the cause of all this attention to the heroic tier of the raid rather than tiers 1-6, because you can be sure that these "players" (I don't know, I don't think that this could be classified as "playing") never touched the other tiers of the raid. And what a coincidence, the devs totally don't care about other tiers. They managed to give us a vague talk about some reward changes in tiers 1-6 but that's it, no more things to come besides of nerfs for f2ps which managed to find a good team for the raid without paying. On the other hand, g12+, untouchable Traya (they will never nerf her, they'd nerf whole teams before nerfing her because she's their favourite toy atm), continuous reward updates and fixes and so on.

To the op; in short f2p is not dying. The stature of f2p have been undulating since the game started. Sometime ago we didn't have access to tons of toons like rex and chase. I managed to ride arena top spots through thick and thin. Starting from JTR f2p went into a territory where legendary unlock became hard to impossible the first time around (without a huge pile of crystals for emergencies). This trend will continue. Minority of f2p will still be unlocking legs first or 2nd time around. Each time a new leg churned out a team that dominates the arena, there were at least some counters to it. If there's a time in the future a single team fully dominates the arena which is not f2p unlockable at any state then it will be time to revise my opinion.

The new mod system is also capped between a few sources. You just can't buy your way through instantly capping your mods once again. There will be advantage for early rising slicers, where many will catch up given 6 months. On paper this advantage doesn't look to me it'll be unsurpasable since I've been battling whales with +120-130 speed siets wth my meager +90-110 sets forever.

Admittedly top arena competiting f2p have to a minority in the population. But if you are not trying to cling to arena top 20s your crystal income is low and stable anyway, you are not losing too much ground due to high end competetive changes.

"No_Try;c-1635154" wrote:
To the op; in short f2p is not dying. The stature of f2p in the have been undulating since the game started. Sometime ago we didn't have access to tons of toons like rex and chase. I managed to ride arena top spots through thick and thin. Starting from JTR f2p went into a territory where legendary unlock became hard to impossible the first time around (without a huge pile of crystals for emergencies). This trend will continue. Minority of f2p will still be unlocking legs first or 2nd time around. Each time a new leg churned out a team that dominates the arena, there were at least some counters to it. If there's a time in the future a single team fully dominates the arena which is not f2p unlockable at any state then it will be time to revise my opinion.

The new mod system is also capped between a few sources. You just can't buy your way through instantly capping your mods once again. There will be advantage for early rising slicers, where many will catch up given 6 months. On paper this advantage doesn't look to me it'll be unsurpasable since I've been battling whales with +120-130 speed siets wth my meager +90-110 sets forever.

Admittedly top arena competiting f2p have to a minority in the population. But if you are not trying to cling there your crystal income is low and stable anyway, you are not losing too much ground due to high end competetive changes.

"No_Try;c-1635154" wrote:
To the op; in short f2p is not dying. The stature of f2p in the have been undulating since the game started. Sometime ago we didn't have access to tons of toons like rex and chase. I managed to ride arena top spots through thick and thin. Starting from JTR f2p went into a territory where legendary unlock became hard to impossible the first time around (without a huge pile of crystals for emergencies). This trend will continue. Minority of f2p will still be unlocking legs first or 2nd time around. Each time a new leg churned out a team that dominates the arena, there were at least some counters to it. If there's a time in the future a single team fully dominates the arena which is not f2p unlockable at any state then it will be time to revise my opinion.

The new mod system is also capped between a few sources. You just can't buy your way through instantly capping your mods once again. There will be advantage for early rising slicers, where many will catch up given 6 months. On paper this advantage doesn't look to me it'll be unsurpasable since I've been battling whales with +120-130 speed siets wth my meager +90-110 sets forever.

Admittedly top arena competiting f2p have to a minority in the population. But if you are not trying to cling there your crystal income is low and stable anyway, you are not losing too much ground due to high end competetive changes.

That's exactly what I meant with my comment. There are countless whales out there but the ones which can actually take advantage from their spending are not so much. And the spending system of the game is mostly gambling, so if you're unlucky (and you are, because it's not so much a matter of luck) you could end up with just a bunch of nothing in your hands, even if you know what you're doing.Paradoxically, the gambling thing is saving the game balance. Because it forces whales to invest A TON of money if they want sure results, hence boosting the game's health. And most of them either can't make the things they buy work properly or spend on the wrong things, like the bunch of clever people who just threw dozens of bucks in the new modding system without thinking or planning just to understand too late that it wasn't worth the money. We have to be thankful that these people exist, because they make the game survive without altering its balance.

"Vice_torn;c-1635184" wrote:
can't say much more under TOS rules

I love when they warn you in those worried ways and hurry to delete your post/comment, while they usually never answer you as long as you behave like a cute mild-tempered sheep. When it happens you'll know that you unveiled truths they don't like.

The game has never been more FTP friendly. The game has also never been more intimidating. With the growth of events, activities, and characters, existing players get a huge advantage. New and early game players are going to struggle to figure it all out. I hope they do, this game is fun.

"Zanads;c-1635200" wrote:
You can't make smart choices unless you know what they lead to.

I think this is the definition of "gambling". Isn't it?

I am not saying that they shouldn't charge for in game items. My complaint is that it feels excessive. Mod packs previously cost crystals. They pulled them because they are not optimal for mods 2.0. Then bring them back at a cost of $15. Wait till they bring the gear packs back, bet it will cost more $$$. The constant marquee toons at cost. It wouldn't hurt to release say 3 or 4 pay toons and one free toon on a hard node. I just wish they would add something into the game that didn't cost players $$$.