Poll on New Updates

I was referring to the SWGoH Events discord - I'm sure that there's an link on swgohevents.com or somewhere thereabouts, but sifting through the dumpster fire of posts on that server from yesterday is a fate I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. There were several people trying to lay out how the math shows that the FTP rewards path would result in people getting roughly equal value to what they were getting before. Sometimes maybe more, sometimes maybe less, but generally equal value. There's tons of posts on reddit about this if you look for them and several content creators have done videos explaining it. In particular look for a post from Fatal on Reddit where he lays it out plainly and simply - it's really difficult to make it more simple than he did. 

I keep saying 'roughly equal' because this update has introduced a degree of player agency in choosing rewards that was not present in the old system and it's hard to put a value on that (this was a wildly popular shift when they revamped raid rewards similarly) - so in some scenarios people may see less overall and in other cases people would see more - we're all just ignoring that everyone's roster is different and the requirements of any given GC is going to impact different players differently. That being the case it's very hard to say, "everything is the same" - because it won't be - but the expected VALUE of what you end up getting is going to be better, in particular for people that weren't getting 4 or more red boxes per month in GCs (for example, all the smaller F2P accounts that weren't doing that well in GCs to start with are going to come out way ahead here). 

There's also a pervasive assumption that the GCs are the primary source of these rewards when that's no longer the case. The fact is you'll get most of your episode points (and as a result, most of your rewards that used to come from GCs) from doing dailies and other activities outside of GCs. So again - people that were not able to complete higher levels of the old GCs are going to end up coming out ahead here. It's actually much less impactful now to run up on a GC that your roster isn't equipped for - but that doesn't play well with the current narrative that CG is just doing a big cash grab and the sky is falling. 

I'm not always a fan of the choices CG makes - as I made clear in my initial reply - but I really do feel like with a few tweaks, this update could be one of the best updates to the game in years. The knee **bleep** reactions aren't unexpected, but have come with such ferocity this time around that even as an 8 year veteran of the game, I'm a bit surprised.

I'm also a bit sad that the community is rejecting the transparency that comes with a flat out ask for spending as opposed to the historical norm of making the player guess where their money would be best spent. When CG adds significant value for our in-game dollar, we should be encouraging that instead of excoriating them for having the audacity to market their paid product to those that are engaging for free. At the end of the day, they should be paid for their work and I don't think they're out of line to make it known that that's their goal. As a paying customer (and former free to play player), I'm 100% fine with this and I hope they make a boat load of money from the new pass - not just because I like the game and want it to remain healthy, but because it's a GENUINELY good value when compared to 95% of their other offers in the game and I'd like to see even more of that in the future - but instead we're going to scream at CG about how it makes us feel to see that we can't complete some feats if we don't actually pay them to play the game.

To be clear, I think that constructive criticism is a very good thing and suggesting tweaks to improve the player experience is something that the community SHOULD do - but what's happening on these forums is far beyond that. And if you made it this far, thanks for reading, and thanks for your effort to corral all this feedback in a somewhat organized format.