The zeta crunch...

"Gaidal_Cain;c-1203794" wrote:

The point isn't how many Zeta's anyone has, it is the length of time it takes to farm a zeta.

This is exactly why zetas take so long to farm.

There are bottlenecks to every part of the game. Some of the bottlenecks, like gear and sometimes shards, can be bypassed by real life money. Others, like zeta mats, cannot. The zeta and omega bottleneck is one of the things that keeps people that have maxed out toons still playing.

Let's back this up for a second and imagine if everyone was able to get everything instantly, including zetas, just by spending enough cash. And of course, people will complain that it's too expensive, so we also lower the cost to something reasonable so that in a couple months you can have all of the toons maxed out, abilities, shards and gear.

What would you do then? Most likely stop playing, or at least stop playing every day. The game becomes even more stale than the whales are already complaining it is.

The only way to make a collection-based game like this even halfway interesting is introduce a time component where you are interested in continuing to play because you need time to collect that next more powerful thing. It wouldn't matter if it took two or three months to collect a zeta, as long as their perceived bonus warranted that kind of commitment. This is end game collection material that we're going after.

What does matter is the up and coming players having a chance at all in "catching up". Which the devs have done for us. (1) Any one team can only field 5 characters, so that's approximately 5 zeta abilities that a newer player might need for arena (as opposed to the 17 that the OP already has; newer players don't have to "catch up" to that 17 abilities to be able to compete) (2) Characters have multiple utility (the same character can be an arean toon, a pilot, and be useful in Rancor and/or Tank raid) (3) Whenever a new max is released, they increase the rate at which you can achieve the past maxes, such as omega abilities, which we now have omega event weekends, omegas drop in GW and zeta challenge, as well as the regular mats challenge.

It's an ecosystem where the long-playing players have more utility in depth of roster. They have more options, can switch to different arena teams quicker/easier, can field more high-powered tank teams. But the newer players have the possibility of at least somewhat "catching up" and being competitive, such as being able to omega all the abilities of their arena team more quickly than it used to take you a year ago.