Some alternatives/different ideas.
Challenges: Change this to the more away team style of SW:tor, Where you can assign characters to it and they collect gear/credits/mats/etc over time. Though this is a much bigger change than mcmole's suggestion, it would allow people to inattentively direct grind.
Mods: instead of dropping useless mods that we then need to sell, have a setting that would allow a minimum accepted mod, ex. 5pip purple, if that doestn't come up in the rng reward just give extra credits/cantina credits/mats.
Zetas: I actually don't mind the zeta crunch, I think these "Ultimate Abilities" should be few and far between. I would like to see more purple drops though, as I am running out of these all the time trying to power up for TB.
Gear: As McMole said, there is no point to having thousands of one piece of purple gear and next to none of another. I suggest a way to sell/trade gear in for desired gear. Maybe, a gear store similar to the shard shop, where you can sell gear for credits for the store.
Stores: Speaking of stores, is there really a need for nine stores? How bout one store for each thing, Gear Store, Character Shard Store, Ship Shard Store, Mod Store, Mat Store?(Do we really need a training droid store?)
Organization: This is huge, TB was released to be an inclusive guild participation event that required a lot of guild coordination and communication. Absolutely no tools were given to this end. In game chat is garbage, character roster information non-existant, etc. CG is relying on the good people at swgoh.gg to hack their game to give anyone any information at all instead of providing it to the community in an accessible manner. I wrote scripts to help with platoon assignments, let alone the 20 minutes of data entry to type the 270 characters for each day, so my guild doesn't waste characters on platoons that won't get filled because they require 7* lobots and Paywoks. Now they are talking about guild v guild and DS TB when we don't have good tools to accomplish the original release. I like TB, I like that it could make guilds coordinate better. But, please make it a bit easier for the open source community to organize around the game. Even a paid "guild account" to give access to an api, would be acceptable so I can pull platoons down instead of typing them out, or write image recognition software to parse 18 screenshots...
Pricing: As someone who has spent some money on the game, your pricing is ridiculous. I have spent far more money on Mechwarrior online, because their pricing models are sane. I do not mind spending money on a game to support developers. But, I really don't want to support games that obviously phish for people to spend money ignorantly. MWO and LoL have superior business models and neither use gachapon style reward systems, neither have any RNG for that matter.
I do realize that some of my ideas are not easy changes, from a coding perspective, but I love Star Wars and I love the idea of this game. I want you to make it better. Let players invest their "grind" into assured rewards and not E. Skinner style suspicions off of rng. I know it takes effort to make a good game, but I hope you put forth that effort. Listen to some game designers when they talk about input/output randomness, what grinding is good for, information horizons, gachapon reward structures. My two biggest issues with the game are the randomized rewards(gachapon) and lack of organizational tools. I do hope you listen to your player base on this.
Helpful links:
input/output randomnessgachaponThanks,
Damanar
