"Amos;c-2310281" wrote:
I know that even a FtP account can generate crystal income as a reward for consistently engaging with the game, so technically they can just spend that. I'm saying we shouldn't have to in an effort to overcome physically impossible time constraints. Crystals aren't required to fully participate in Territory Wars, Territory Battles, Galactic War, Grand Arena, legendary events, Assault Battles, Galactic Challenges, Raids, or even the PvP arenas. Crystals aren't even required to get the max rewards from any of those things; all you need is a good enough roster, a guild to call home, and intelligent play.
Conquest requires spending crystals, no matter how good your roster is, or how much you've already spent on the game. It goes against how the rest of the entire game is modeled, and it especially punishes FtP now with a non-crystal accessible battle pass.
I think you're making a great point here - conquest requires crystal investment to maximize payout where no other game mode explicitly does. There are some nuances that I think you might be glossing over though. All those other game modes you mentioned, while they may not explicitly state that some kind of spending is going to be required, certainly do benefit from investment of real world currency or crystals to maximize rewards.
Most people that do a daily arena climb to maximize their rewards will do a refresh to get there, and that costs crystals. Also, people often buy core gear with crystals or real world currency to become more competitive and maximize rewards in all of the game modes that you mentioned. With CG adding more core gear to the economy there will be fewer resources spent on those bread and butter items so in order to keep the financial metrics healthy, they have to make up the difference somewhere.
All they've done is moved the expenditure from one place to another. I don't get why so many people don't understand this. Increasing the availability of core gear has the effect of eliminating a large source of revenue - why on earth would they do that if they couldn't make it up somewhere else? They're in a no-win situation here - as long as they're asking people to pay for something, some players are going to be mad about it. If they stop asking people to pay for things, the corporate types are going to be mad.
As an aside, getting a day 1 unlock of a character through conquest - even if you have to spend money to get it is still far and away cheaper than getting a day one 7* marquee character. At least the f2p and low spenders get a chance at it in conquest where-as there's no way around spending hundreds of dollars for the marquee if you want 7* on day one.
Honestly, I really wish they'd have left conquest alone. They created a fun game mode and then ramped up the frustration mechanics in order to monetize it. Nearly every change that they've made since the end of C6 has been frustrating and I still haven't seen a single mention of the duplicate data disks problem that's probably a 5 minute code fix - serious bang for the buck on that one and it honestly baffles me that they can't make time to do it.
But lazy coding/bugs aside, if monetized conquest is the trade-off for the gear being more accessible (gear that helps us in ALL game modes) - then maybe it's actually a fair trade. I just dropped a stun gun on Gamorrean Guard to try to get ready for the conquest feats. I never EVER would have done that if I didn't have some faith that I could replace that stun gun in a reasonable amount of time.
