[MEGA] Road Ahead: October 2021

"Amos;c-2310265" wrote:
For those people saying Conquest is still a totally viable game mode FtP:

I've been FtP since I joined the game January 2018. I've been in a guild for about 90% of that time, and changed guilds twice to make sure I wasn't the most dedicated player there. I've logged in for at least an hour every day since I joined; there are <30 total days that I didn't get all my dailies done.

My current roster has every legendary character except JKL, and no GL's. 5 million total power. Any GL would take me at least two years of dedicated grinding to unlock, and I've had other priorities.

For Conquests 7-9, I calculated that you would need to generate 1591 energy to get through every battle, fight each miniboss 3 times and each end boss twice, and swap out 5 data disks. At 12 minutes per energy, that takes 19,092 minutes, or 13.26 days, out of a 14 day event.

That's assuming you win every battle without ever losing a unit, and play diligently enough that the energy never caps out which resets the 12 minute timer. Even in that case, you would only have 4 extra battles of energy generated before the event ended.

I assumed that with a decently built roster that matched the recommended power for Hard mode (5 million), I would reasonably be able to achieve the top 3 crates like I did in Conquests 1-6. Instead the difficulty, energy costs, and feats were tuned so high I counted myself lucky for getting the second worst crate. It simply isn't possible for me to do better without spending premium currency (crystals) on energy and stamina refreshes.
Even with a top tier roster that doesn't flinch at the difficulty of tuned-up relic 8 enemies, there wasn't physically enough time to generate enough energy to get the best rewards without spending crystals because of having to repeat so many battles in pursuit of feats. And a roster top-heavy enough to do that isn't possible to have FtP, even if you started grinding right at launch. I know that because if it were possible, then I would be about 4 years away from a maxed out roster, accounting for new character releases, and I'm not. I'm laughably far from it, and the gap only gets bigger with every new character, relic tier, mod tier, and gear type.

Requiring the use of premium currency, even if it is sometimes given to a player as an in-game reward, is not FtP game design.

It is literally impossible to do remotely well in Conquest as FtP anymore. Either you're spending on refreshes, or you've already spent on a roster good enough to do well without refreshes. Adding this battle pass system only makes that more true.

I've accepted that I'm never catching up. In a competitive game that has a business model based on microtransactions, there's always going to be a difference in the power curves of FtP and PtP. It's always going to be true that PtP will perform better and get better rewards; that's the point of competing. I don't even mind the PtW aspect of those power curves because CG has done a decent job of separating players into tiers.

Never mind that Conquest is PvE, and therefore not a competitive game mode in the first place.

But it bothers me how much more predatory and exploitative CG keep getting. Let's not lose perspective here! An annual subscription to a big MMO's is ~80$ a year, with additional in-game fees that are often cosmetic. CG has a tiny fraction of the content and staff that those games do. Even if we're generous about those in-game fees for the sake of this comparison, imagine ONLY spending 200$ on SWGOH a year to stay current! Instead of choosing to balance their in-game economy so that a single G12 finisher, of which you need a dozen to have even one GL, is worth 50$ US.

If you've played ftp long enough, conquest is easily beatable. It are also won't take 2 years to get a GL if you grind. I'm 100% ftp. I have played since November 2016 with an 8 mo break around the time of the malak fiasco. So I missed Rey and slkr. I started up again about the time they announced see and jml. In that time (about a year but a tad bit more), I've finished gas, got jkl, see, jml, executor, and jmk. All without spending a penny. So it doesn't take a year to grind a GL.

Conquest is also possible ftp. Though I use crystals to refresh to make it more manageable. It's up to you whether the added rewards are worth a few refreshes a day or not. To me they are. But even if refreshes are required, you get enough crystals from dailies to do that if needed. If you choose not to that's up to you. But to say that it's impossible is simply not true.