[MEGA] State of the Galaxy: November 2021

It took a while, but GLs finally killed the game.

I mean, we all get that GLs are why they're doing this, right? Squad Arena still has people (including me) taking first place with JML. LV clearly didn't drive enough spending. The power-creep-in-Squad-Arena engine to drive spending is barely puttering along. But in conjunction with the nerfs to GL counters, Grand Arena can still drive whales to need to purchase every new big powerhouse, to stay competitive with each other.

As for killing the game? Well, changing the main crystal-producing activity from one with a daily tempo to one with a weekly/monthly tempo is going to cost far more players, in the long run, than the mass exodus this announcement is causing; people who miss the GAC join period will have little incentive to log in during that week of GAC, and once you've gone a week without logging in it's very easy to just stop logging in altogether. In other words: Squad Arena is habit-forming, and GAC is not. The long-term damage this change will do to the size of the playerbase is going to be tremendous.

Of course, that's another, subtler benefit (from CG's perspective) of the shift to GAC over squad arena - the more this game becomes a ghost town, the more the long-term active players are clustered at the top of their otherwise-dead Arena shards, getting too big a crystal payout, too easily. GAC divisions, however, are dynamic and constantly resetting; you'll always, always be up against active opponents (or at least, people who were active enough to click "join" in the GAC period), no matter how few other players there are. Someday, when it's down to the last few hundred active players, those players will still have to put in work and fight each other for those GAC rewards, whereas by then most of them would be alone in an arena shard, sitting atop a mountain of no-longer-actives. Make no mistake: this is partly CG preparing for the end.