The Road Ahead (MEGA)

EA has been pushing hard to get players to spend more time on this game lately.

Territory Battles are quite time consuming. The Flash Events were designed to get players to check into the game more often. Territory Wars will happen on the days TB doesn't to try and keep us engaged at the same amount of time all the time I'm certain.

It's my belief that they want this as a stat they can show their shareholders or potential investors to encourage them to do so, as well as an underlying belief that they look at the time vs. money issue differently than is healthy for the game. Ergo, they think that increasing the time it takes to get something increases the money people will spend to get it. While they aren't exactly wrong, the real reason that time vs. money aspect needs to be kept in perspective is so that you don't make the time frame too unreasonable.

If it's skewed too much towards the money side, then the people who aren't paying quit, and once they do the game becomes boring due to lack of competition and the whales quit as well. Now the answer to this isn't to make the price ridiculous to match the ridiculous time commitment, the answer is to keep the time commitment reasonable.

This is a mobile game. 3-4 hours a day is right at the limit of what seems reasonable. As others have pointed out, Arena is 1-2 hours a day. Fleet is another hour. TB starts without anyone's control so in order to maximize output I have to spend on that 7 hours apart from when I do my pvp. Then Galactic War has gotten ridiculously hard lately, that's another half hour to hour on that. And I haven't even talked about raiding, energy, events, or challenges yet. Now all of those together take up at least another hour more like 2. Then there's the time to spend gearing and leveling toons, mods, ships, and abilities.

So we're looking at a time commitment of 5-7 hours a day as things stand right now when TB is active if you are competitive in all areas of the game. Those 3 days where it isn't up are nice because it brings the game back to where the reasonable range of 3-4 hours a day is attainable (it is at least possible to get it all done in 4 hours then).

Please do not push the envelope any more when it comes to time commitment and instead look at lowering the time commitment to some other aspects of the game if you want to add in more content.