LS PACK UTTER STUPIDLY , no strategy or direction

Of course they have a strategy, they will have data that will guide that. If the 50 percent they please spend money then they have achieved their objective.

Not quite sure why you are so angry about packs that you can simply ignore.

The packs aren't the big problem. The thing is, it takes away the essence of the game of grinding, strategy, achieving an objective etc. I don't really mind the packs, but it kinda has become a pay 2 win situation, with players with zero knowledge of the game at 8 million GP in a couple weeks. GAC has definitely changed due to this. 

The effort is to bring new people into the game after pissing off players who have been here for years.  What do you expect?

Then we can easily destroy the players in GAC who have no idea what they are doing. 
Sounds good to me. 

I disagree it remains as always pay to accelerate. In these packs it is clear, acceleration of gear and relic grinding. Which creates new zeta and mod bottlenecks to maintain the grind we oh so love and keep coming back for. 

Any roster which is inflated entirely on HBD or LSB will struggle until they get to grips with the game. We have all seen the odd account in recruiting which buys everything yet still is not performing in raid, with nothing to support in TB or TW, so they will not advance to guilds with higher rewards until they figure out how to contribute to team success. LSB will not make you win against a superior roster with well crafted mods and all the appropriate zetas/ omicrons and the journey guide characters fully unlocked. 

But they do advance players towards particular squads, GL’s and journey guides so they can catch up somewhat on a game with years of content. Otherwise it would be overwhelming with no means to backfill some of the older squads whilst chasing the new content.

And from my perspective it’s a good strategy from CG, I am a 10M roster and spent considerably more in the last year of play than any so far due to back filling characters I have missed with the LSB. 

Even those who seem to have been extremely pissed off for years keep playing and spending, so even that seems to be working. 

It hardly takes away the grind of the game. What it does is allow players to grind on new stuff vs having to continuously grind out old stuff at the expense of any new stuff. Most players weren't with the game in the early days and therefore do not have the luxury of their rosters keeping pace with all the new releases. Most people find themselves choosing between old and new farms. Most new players face the choice of either build rosters full of new toons or old toons but not both. LSB allows for a player to acquire both old toons and new toons which prior to LSB's was really only the domain of really mature accounts that had been around since the beginning. 

Exactly. I've been GRRRMAD quite a number of times, but I'm still here. Now I certainly wouldn't still be here if not for the social aspect of the game, but so far I've never been mad enough to actually walk out on my guild mates, and the same is true for many other high-GP accts. 

People are always joining and retiring, but I've never seen any data that shows that you get large numbers of high-GP accts retiring b/c of LightSpeed packs or anything similar.  

The game has always been pay to win, the LSB packs just bring this into the more affordable range of many. After all those of us who are f2p (or mostly in my case in that I'm not a whale) need people spending money to keep the game going.

More than happy to play players with zero knowledge- that's free crystals.

Hardly, most of these packs are characters we've had for years while we get to play with the new shiny stuff.

Certainly not gonna lose sleep because newer players suddenly have SEE etc in their line-ups. And love it that our guild gets a bump up as our newer members not only add GP but can join in more in TW and TB.