"Wycross;c-1572144" wrote:
If part of the goal is to have varied fleets, then the ability to change up a fleet must be facilitated.
From my perspective, the limiting factors to changing up my fleet is the need to farm, level, and gear an entirely new set of pilots.
To be fair, I had most every ship at 7 stars and level 85. The exceptions are Episode 7 Millenium Falcon, and Kylo Ren's Command Shuttle. They've been joined by Lando's Millenium Falcon.
But pilots are so much more difficult to level and gear. If you want to encourage us to try out new pilots, we will need more ways to gear them up than are available. Getting stuck for multiple weeks farming one salvage because drop rates are bad and the shard shop refuses to have it means that advancement toward that goal is glacial.
And, from where I sit, the solution shouldn't be to spend money/crystals. We have several stagnant shops. We have resource piling up that aren't useful for this goal. Give us a way to tap into those resources to get these new pilots geared. As it stands, I don't use anyone who wasn't in my fleet before simply because gearing is so difficult.
Do it better.
I don't believe that pilots are any more difficult to gear than any other character.
The difference is, you need to basically gear, level, skill increase, and mod pilots in addition to leveling a ship and increasing its skills.
I agree with you on gear is too slow (as are credits really unless you're maxed out.) And I agree with you the solution isn't more crystal spend.
Another method would be to remove pilots out of the equation completely and have just "ships". Increase the number of ships available, etc. (A-wing, B-wing, etc from every era.)
I'm sure others have suggested this in the past.
But, some of those pilots are only geared and used because they are pilots, not because they're useful. As long as the quantity of ships to level/skill up replaces the pilots it shouldn't be a revenue loss.
Progression cadence is slow for revenue reasons, but I think the balance is off. Quite honestly, the cadence should be that any player can max out all characters available (excluding specialty farms /raid only/legendary) in 2 years. That could viable increase player base (not that it's probably hurting too bad.) As I've mentioned before, if I wasn't a star wars fan the slowness would've turned me off and deleted the game long ago.
Whales who want to short cut that, they're going to spend the money. They already have blocks in place to prevent free to play from gaining a character too quickly. For example, right now, it's 4-6ish weeks before farmable. They could change that to 12 weeks so there's still benefit for whales.
EA Staff (Retired)
Capital Games Team
