Copying a thread of mine from September for relevance.
I've been posting in the Jango/Marquee thread a bit about a lot of these thoughts, but realized it may be worth starting a new thread. This idea is something I started there, but wanted to flesh out a little bit. It's going to be a long post, and I encourage discussion on improvements, or other ideas that can work toward a similar goal. My intent is to mix my understanding of business, with my compassion as a player.
The Goal: To add to the Marquee character cadence in a way that relieves the time/burden of farming new characters, without negatively impacting the financial viability of Marquees for the developers
I know some might disagree with that goal, specifically the financial portion for CG - but this is their business, and ideas that suggest everything be free in one way or another will never work. I think it's time we start working with reasonable considerations, and maybe some progress can be made.
The Event:
A daily set of battles (5) that require a random specific faction, rewarding a single shard per battle for a randomly selected character. "Earn Embo Shards by Fighting With Your Resistance Team"
The Character Shard Pool:
The 15 most recently released Marquee characters, rotating out as new ones are introduced.
The Battles:
Required faction is randomly selected per day
Character shards are the same across all 5 battles, and are randomly selected per day
Battle requirement/rewards can be both be re-rolled together for 50 Crystals each time. "Earn Embo Shards by Fighting With Your Resistance Team" could roll into "Earn Bastilla Shards by Fighting With Your First Order Team"
Free battles can be completed once per day
Battles can be refreshed once per day, at a cost of 100 crystals per battle
Battles simply rehashed from the original Marquee battles
Faction requirements go up in stars required per battle, from 3-7*
The Math:
The biggest issue right now is there is a large gap in the cost/time between Marquee release, and farm-able. This presents an awkward situation where you are either a Whale, or essentially F2P, with not much room for the Dolphin/Guppie/Other Fish sort of inclusion.
7*ing a Marquee Character day one runs somewhere between $300-450, depending on RNG of packs. Very Expensive/Immediate/$1-$1.50 per Shard.
Once that time is over, you have to wait a few months until shipments, where they cost around $150 but you also need to pay for or wait for shop refreshes and hope that those characters show up. Expensive/Long/$.50 per Shard.
The F2P option, a few months after that, is to wait for them to go to a hard node or two, and you have to hope RNG works in your favor + balance limited energy to spread among all character farms. Free/Forever/$0 per Shard.
With this added event, there becomes a middle option between shops and the Marquee packs. With perfect RNG landing the character you want each day, which would never happen, you could get a 7* character in 28 days by refreshing your battles, for $90 worth of crystals. The flip side is that if you have to refresh it each day 15x to get the right character or faction if you don't have the roster depth, you're spending an additional 750 crystals/day on refreshes, and you're getting that character to 7* for $220. Moderate/Moderate/$.32-$.78 per Shard
Why This Works:
We all understand that the balance is always time and money. Wanting something soon, it will cost more, wanting it cheaper it will take longer.
The players who want a character immediately will not be willing to wait 30+ days to get the character they want, so the Marquee packs will still sell to the audience they are currently selling to.
Those who do not wish to spend any crystals at all, will get a little relief on their farms once they become farmable, as they'll have been getting 5 shards per day for random characters, provided they have the teams in place to beat them. Much nicer starting off at 25/30 or 5/65 instead of 0/30, when you're working with a single hard node farm. Free shards, more content to play (or auto) each day.
This then provides something to do and a middle ground for the players who don't necessarily want or can't afford a character immediately, but wouldn't mind dropping $150 on them to get them sooner than others.
Thanks for reading. I hope this can begin conversation about what realistic ideas we can come up with to help bridge the gap in these character releases. I'd love feedback from anyone, CG and Players, about how something like this would be received and any improvements that could be made on it!
