Shard Economy Changes [MEGA]

Great for new players.
Bad for older players until they fix bronziums. And I'm not convinced they will.

While I concur with this assessment in the very limited sense of how much gear an older player is able to purchase each week, I think that this is actually of long term benefit to the older players as well. ("Old" meaning, I hope obviously, players who have been playing the game longer, not players less recently born.)

When new players find fewer barriers to entry, they come in greater numbers, they find the game less frustrating and therefore stay longer, and they ultimately contribute more to the community. You may be in a guild or guild network with them. You may chat with them on the forums. Some of them will spend money on the game, and that certainly benefits all of us.

For a couple years now I have been encouraging CG to make entering the game more attractive to people who haven't yet begun to play. We want more new players and so we should want the entrance requirements to the coolest content to be less daunting.

I strongly support this change.

This doesn't mean I'm unconcerned about how the loss of some Bronzium income changes my purchasing power in the Shard Shop, but over all, I think my purchasing power there (and the Shard Shop purchasing power of older players more generally) is less important than ensuring a healthy influx of new players.

Please fix Bronziums when possible, CG, but even if that never becomes possible, I'll still support this change.

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All that said, the purchasing power problem can be fixed in other ways that ARE technically possible.

First, cut the cost in Ally Points of that one gear Weekly Shipment in half.
Second, add one weekly Clone Wars Chewie bucket of shards in the Weekly Shipment for a price that equals a reasonable number of ally points per shard. If the number of shards in the bucket is appropriate, then effectively we get back a bunch of the Bronzium shards we could have gotten by spending ally points on Bronzium pulls and turn it into currency without tinkering with Bronziums at all.

If the shards are only ever CWC shards, then you can't use the weekly shipments to increase farms of other toons that should be gated. The only downside here is that since the shards are always the same character, new players will be able to gain Shard Shop currency earlier. (Under the old system they would get approximately as many shards, but they'd be spread widely across many characters so most wouldn't generate ShSh currency nearly as early in a player's career.)

...HOWEVER... getting a small amount of ShSh currency every week earlier on in the game would do little enough that the game economy isn't thrown out of whack, while the longer-term economy is not affected at all. In other words, that change also would be a benefit to new players, albeit a much smaller one than doubling shard drops for older toons, and so would continue to promote the entry of new players without harming the game long term.