Explain ships to a new player

"Tintguy;c-1871257" wrote:
If it can't be interpreted as a way to measure success/failure, what's the point of it being there?

GP was introduced into the game when Territory Battles got introduced and you needed the GP from your characters/ships to get enough territory points and collect stars on the map for better rewards at the end. Outside of TB the whole GP thing is pretty flawed with 2 main problems:
1) GP is not a really good inidcator of a squads strength (simple example: a squad full of characters where each one has 4 or 5 abilities (= high GP) can be easily beaten by a squad that doesn't have a lot of abilities (= lower GP) but has some good synergy).
2) GP "fluff" is still a problem. Old players that upgraded all their crappy/useless chars to a certain lvl (g7 lvl 53 with 5 dot mods was the way to go) in order to get enough territory points in TB for higher rewards now have a lot of "fluff" in their roster that they can't get rid off which might be a problem for GA matchups that are just taking the total GP into account. Newer players are not upgrading most of their chars to avoid building up that "fluff", they can just go for the useful chars and build them up to have a stronger roster and have an advantage in GA.