Thanks for the responses guys. I must warn you that this is long, but I realized, after reading your responses, that I didn't articulate my thoughts on a solution very well. Allow me to rectify -
First off, I am aware that this game is
funded by whales; they pay so we can play and I accept that. The cost of that is that it shuts those who don't pay out of the top tier.
As for the meta, I didn't mean I don't have the teams, I just wish that I didn't have to use them because it gets old. I don't find much entertainment from fighting a clone team. I could easily switch to one of, (no Jedi Rey, but I can field the rest. Right now, I just don't see much value in pursuing arena because I have all the characters. I guess what I'm trying to convey is that it's stale. I'm running a painstakingly grinder sith team (zaul zader zEmp Zavagr and SA), that places me in 100-200, but no higher despite the absurd stats.
I also realized I didn't make clear exactly what I wanted. I don't expect mods to change, (though I wish they had more strategic value than they appear), and I just wish they would adjust a few values here and there on the characters to bring them to better parity. The new ones keep getting better and the old are slowly relegated to fossils.
As for what I think would help things along for the f2p is to have them appear in a node sooner after launch. That's what I meant. It would be nice if we could close the gap between the free and pay a bit so that f2p can actually get a character to 7 g12 before it's already been outclassed by another. They did this with unmasked kylo and that was awesome.
I have most of the characters to 7 that you can farm, due to missing like 2 days since launch :-) That of course includes night sisters but their gear level is hilariously low. I am hoping that my first order team will be able to eclipse the sith team soon.
Perhaps it's just my shard, but it's got 80% Jedi Rey, 5-10% CLS, and 10% others (emp, nightsisters, etc). Outside of the top 100 almost every team is CLS lead, rHan, R2 etc...
Honestly, it's just something that's been going around the guild. We love the cooperative part of the game and simply wish for an Arena mode that was challenging, but fair. I think the best way to do this is to repeat what they did with unmasked kylo.
That said, my chief complaint is that fleet is starting to turn into arena. Where there were once 3 viable fleet commanders, there is now one. As with Arena, I can field the meta, I just choose that wasny the only option. I still use Akbar :-).
The meta part of my post was more general assessment of how monotonous things are getting and a desire to make the game more interesting in pvp.
The characters part is purely F2P. The first year of this game f2p could work their way to the top with patience and grinding, but that went out the window with the inslaught of super powered toons we have no way of acquiring without money.
It's really frustrating to grind for half a year on a team just to have it steamrolled a month later by the advent of a new character with a move set you need 2+ older characters to match or counter.
I love this game I just wish they would balance these new characters or make them farmable sooner. For starters, there should always be at least two individual characters capable of independently hard countering any given character. Concordantly, it should never require you to field 2+ characters to counter a singular opponent. If they ensured this was the case, viable Arena teams would increase exponentially.
While I doubt serious balancing in Arena is a realistic expectation at this point, they could easily adjust thrawns kit to make him more in line with the other 3 commanders and this save it from the same fate. There is real strategy in fleet, but that's being threatened by the thrawn epidemic. He's just too powerful right now, which severely undermines what makes this mode so fun.
