Training Droid Smuggling

I believe anyone that can unlock it doesn't have the need for either of those.

Yep. It's like a potion of healing in the horde of a Lich. The rewards aren't related at all to what a character at that level might still need. Worse, by that level training droids themselves are irrelevant: you're simming away at cantina nodes, etc., that provide more than enough.

If they wanted to keep the same structure, swapping out the gear for Clone Wars Chewie and CUP shards is probably the easiest way to make it relevant to players looking to master that tier without providing unbalancing benefits to end-game stage players who get to keep simming the TDS event forever.

They don't need to change this, obviously, but I think the highest tier's rewards didn't work from the original concept, and it probably would have been better to have something like CWC/CUP shards than what it actually puts out.

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As a separate thing: The credit crunch is real and serves a purpose in the game. I wouldn't want to have Training Droid Smuggling spit out more credits (I mean, I would, but only for me. Say 100M per attempt?). But the real credit crunch is probably Mods - all that leveling just to find out which ones have the right secondaries (almost always speed), then a big 100+k tax to take them to level 15 on top. I don't sort through my mods that often, but when I do I burn through 10M in no time. On the other hand, if I go a long time without sorting through my mods, I find I have more than enough cash to handle character leveling and character promotions.

Eliminating the effects of mods on your cash flow would be unbalancing and would change the game. We wouldn't want that, but there are players who are over level 80 but below the stable character-growth point (say, 2M gp + ) where you're still constantly needing another million for another promotion and wondering where you're going to get it.

Since that's the same stage of the game when you're first unlocking the final tier of of Droid Smuggling, and since at that stage you're way past any droid shortage you ever had but right in the middle of that awkward time when you're finally reaching the point where you're needing to promote a wave of toons to 6 and 7 stars without the money to do it, it would be really cool if we could provide a benefit relevant to that stage of the game that doesn't unbalance later stages.

Is that possible? I believe it is. The trick is not making droid smuggling just another source of cash which will continue to be available to end game players, and here the nature of Training Droids provides us with the perfect opportunity.

What if the top end tier of Training Droid Smuggling dropped bots that didn't grant more XP. Instead, they granted the same Toon XP as the droids dropped the tier below, BUT they were special bots that didn't require credits to provide the XP benefit to your toons.

If you could only get those droids in the Smuggling event, then it would be a tiny bit of ease up on the credit crunch at a frustrating stage of the game without ever providing more credits to your general pool. If you're not leveling up toons, it doesn't help you. you can't use it for mods or rarity promotions. It's just a training droid that doesn't require cash. This creates a real incentive to win the Training Droid event. When I first mastered it, it wasn't because I cared about droids. I mastered it because I was improving my scoundrels for the Credit Heist, and mastering droid smuggling was almost accidental. Special no-credits-required training droids would have made me actually interested in the TDS event itself, something that never happened in the game as it existed when I had yet to master TDS's final tier. (or since)

Make this change and you have a relevant Smuggling Droid event without unbalancing the rest of the game. As it is, I get more than enough training droids just from simming all the cantina nodes I need for my farming. This would finally be different, and would actually have a real impact on players who are just unlocking that final tier. When you're level 80 - 84, the cash crunch is hugely real, and not limited to just mods. At that point just getting a single level to one of your top toons once ever 2 weeks would still be appreciated. No-Credit-Required training droids wouldn't really alter the experience of end game players, but it would never be entirely irrelevant either. A couple hundred thousand credits useful only for leveling toons would doubtless sit around forgotten most of the time, then get used automatically when boosting your new legendary toon right to level 85.

This is exactly what you want: a reward that is highly valued by those pursuing it, but not completely useless to those who end up with it despite no longer pursuing it. I think this is really the best change that could be made to the TDS event, even if swapping gear for CSC or CUP shards is probably a much easier change to implement.