Star wars galaxy of heroes: gear drop rate

There is a plethora of items where the drop rate is like 1 in 120 stamina, two if you're lucky. There have been times where it has been 0 for an entire stamina. It just seems really greedy of EA to not drop items where it says they should be. I understand drop rates of 1 in 5, but 1 in 20, or 0 in 20. This issue only compounds the issues where EA has a strangle-hold on their customer. When I first started playing, I loved the developers, it was a great game, I had fun... but the more I played, the more evil they became. There is a huge dark side to this game that I'm now beginning to understand. I trusted you! I had faith in you! I gave you over $1,000 because I loved your programming ability. But your "Disney Dark Side" became too much. My expenditures are now nothing, minimal at best. You had someone willing to continue to give you money and you spit in my face. Here are a few things, but by no means is it an exhaustive list:

1. Making the upgrades to gear now requiring a guild that plays level V or above (e.g. you can't up your own player's gear without Raid V or above... an intentional move to make it harder and take longer so EA doesn't have to present any additional levels or add new things to the game, just take the same game, make it harder and still make money).

2. Nerfing all characters with the previous update (taking the $1000 I've given you and washing it down the drain, with a "We needed to do it to save the game" response, when in reality, it needed to be done to get more money from the same characters that now had less power.

3. Endless non-drops of material/shards which is infuriating at times. Again, I understand 1 in 5, but if you present a picture of an item that drops, not dropping it is NOT an option. It's just sadistic.

4. Making Darth Vader almost impossible and rewarding his shards overwhelmingly by buying things instead of earning levels

5. Giving up almost NO coins to upgrade characters (you charge $1,000,000 to upgrade a character, and give me 240 in completing a level? Do you realize I would need to do that level 4,166 times, or spend 33,000 stamina to achieve it... you give around 150 per buy... needing 220 buys just to get there. It is like going to the only store in the city and finding out they are selling bread for $1,000 a loaf. Not $10 which would be insane, not $100 which would be ludicrous, but $1,0000!! Not because it is reasonable, but because they have you over a barrel and can do whatever they want to you.

6. If you buy two character shards from the shard shop, it costs you 300. When you "sell" it back at the shard shop, you give 30. 10 to 1? Seriously? The game has such potential... to be at constant odds with your customers seems completely insane! Why would try to steal 90% of your customers faith...just because you can? It is completely a Disney move. Charge the parents $8 for drink on a hot day... not because that is what it costs, but because you have a captive audience and you CAN take advantage of them, so you do. This is so wrong on so many levels.

So with many of the areas of the game just continuing to prove the developers complete and total disdain for their customers, sadistically FORCING them into unfair situations (some listed above), it's extremely hard to believe anything that comes out of their mouths. Greed and sadism it seems are the two highest regarded qualities at EA.

A HUGE Star Wars fan, a huge fan of the game, and a former fan of the developers. Word of advice... if you're going to fleece your customers, you shouldn't be so transparent. :-(

Very, very saddened and frustrated... I had such HIGH hopes.

So Nils... according to you if I spend enough energy/crystals/money to get any of the "random" drops the game provides, eventually I would have a whoop of stuff dropping by... right? So.. if you don't mind, would you give us a clue as where that turnover point is? Are we talking millions... trillions? Shall we put it on a parsec scale? If I where spending at a  lightspeed rate... how many lives would I need to seat through?

I just spend 188 energy (both cantina and battle) to get ONE shard for the Jedi consular. And that's supposedly one of the "common" characters...

my Imperial guard is still a two stars character because I just got fed up trying to upgrade...

....what about those gear pieces you need 20 of each to craft... and you need four of those to craft the part you need to fill the gear slot... and when you get at it, after 24 missions (I used my sim chips) (never mind if it where 6, 8, 10 or 12 energy) I got two.... TWO.....? So that means I'll need how many missions to get 18 more? For the one.... and then repeat three more times? 

And what about the data cards? I've making the daily 5k coins on rewards plus whatever else mission drops.. that's a minimum of 20 bronze cards a day.. I did notice that the more you get in one go, the more "generous" the system gets.. so I usually do it only every two or three days (tried the once a week thing.. that was like an hour of just taping the "buy card" button...) so... after all that "drop rate improvement" guess how many full characters I got out of that?.. you're right, just ONE. Ashoka. Which made me happy at the time, only till I actually tried to level her up and put it with the big dogs... an ewok with one less star and a gear tier has more power... and Ashoka has four levels more... so much for that..

what of those pieces of gear that I got 30+, 40+ (there's one I got 63 pieces).... what's that about? Is that what you mean by who's of stuff?

....and I know it's the wrong thread for this one.. but if you have the answer for any of the above you may as well know this one....

what about the "challenging" factor....??? How on earth I'm supposed to beat with an average party level 52, blue and purple gear, 3/4 stars.. a full on level 70 minimum 5stars all purple gear party...? My best party didn't even make it pass the first round of beating... nevermind the rest of the cannon fodder that will never make it pass 2stars (and not because I didn't tried)

So, Neil... or whoever is there.... any help?

or you're just there to make sure no one post dirty Ashoka pictures?

may the force be with you.