Zeta crunch, does it get easier?

It takes a pretty long time to get there, but it becomes a bit easier. However, with the rate they add 2 or 3 zeta toons, that can make it difficult. I try to keep a stash of 200. Just blew through 120 recently with Jabba so I'm trying to build back up again. I'm looking at Cere, Cal, and Trench so that would be another seven zetas. After that, I'm kind of hitting the bottom of barrel. If my count is right, I would have 55 zetas left to apply after the above seven.

As others in this thread have said, it's just a time thing. Unless you are a big spender, you will always accumulate zetas faster than you gear up characters (and faster than CG releases new toons) so eventually you will catch up and there will be no things left to zeta. Depending on how far you are in the game that might be very far away from you, but you will get there eventually. I'm a F2P launch player so I usually farm characters slower than spenders, which naturally gives zetas enough time to accumulate. Plus being in the game since before zeta release made sure I was farming zetas from day 1 they were available. That resulted in me having 600 zeta mats today, with nothing important left to zeta. My G13 characters all have all their zetas, with very few exceptions (like GMY lead, Captain Han etc.), and the only zetas I'm missing are low gear characters that I pretty much never use, and obviously toons/teams that I haven't built up yet. But by the time these missing teams are built, I will have accumulated even more zetas, so I will effectively never run out of them, unless something super drastic happens within the game's economy. You will likely get there too at some point. So for now just work on one toon and one team at a time, and you will notice that the zeta crunch isn't as bad as it seems.

I recently dropped to 360, the lowest I've been in a long time. I'm back above 400 now and will likely earn more than I place for a while. It was an unusual set of circumstances relating to the new TB making a bunch of previously irrelevant characters more relevant and also throwing zetas on the new tuskens. But it does happen that I go through periods of using more than I'm accruing.

Generally I don't drop zetas on a character until g12, though there are exceptions. The Tuskens are a classic example of this b/c their use in Galactic challenges made it much more important to drop a couple zetas on them now, at sub-7* and sub-g12, to meet my GC goals. Or at least to meet them with minimum stress.

Any policy should have some flexibility built into it, but if you don't zeta toons before they hit g12, that will make things much easier for you. It will automatically weed out some toons as "not ready" and thus slow down the excited zeta dropping that can happen when several characters are released close to each other.

As others have said, it's also useful to limit your resources to a single toon or faction that you're developing. This would include zetas -- but even if it didn't, it would include them by accident if you apply my previous suggested policy b/c if you're only spending gear on a particular toon or squad, then you would only have a few toons at a time reaching g12 and thus being considered worthy of a zeta.

I doubt that things will be the same for you as for me. I've been swimming in a couple hundred zetas or more for years now, but if you started the game later than me then you have more previously-released toons to catch up with. And though I've used my g12 test for a long time, with gear acceleration that's more like how a g10 test might have functioned 3 years ago.

But even if things are different and even if I'm not able to tell you exactly when thing will get easier, I can assure you that they do. In fact, with the release of Omicrons, I'm convinced that they're going to allow even more zetas into the economy at some point before the end-of-year, possibly when they release the new Krayt Dragon raid, or possibly in conjunction with some as yet unknown changes to the game.

Be hopeful! The zetas will get easier and then you'll only have to worry about gates on Omicrons, Kyros, Signal Data, and relic mats!