I need help

1. what do you mean “missed out on Star Wars day”
2. yes

i did not get the may 4th rewards

May the 4th rewards are like a little Christmas bonus.  It's not your salary.  

To progress, you need to work hard.  If you're nowhere yet, you may want to purchase a hyperdrive bundle.  It's only 9.99 now.  If you're already somewhere, might not be worth it.

Being competitive in ship arena is very important.  So, work on a meta fleet.  

Pick farms that give you something very potent and stick to it.  

Try to do the best you can in GAC.   Even if you're going to lose, you'll pick up credits for won battles.  The better you are in GAC, the more you'll understand and get better and you'll get better rewards too.

Mods and modding is vital.  You need to do work on them every day.  If you get a good ship with a good ship arena payout everyday, that'll help pay for your mod farming.

what is GAC

GAC is a game mode where u play against another person. Typically ur paired against someone who has way better stuff than you. 

back to ur first question, that’s really complicated and I’m not sure what you have, but u didn’t know what GAC was so I’m assuming ur relatively new and don’t have much 

- make sure ur in an active guild. If ur not  get discord and ask around. 
- get the webstore. Just look up webstore Swgoh 

first two squads 

phoenix (captain Rex, Hera, chopper, kannan, zeb) get them to g12 

empire (Mara jade (only 3 stars g8) palpatine, Vader, thrawn, tarkin

these two squads are really easy to build up and work well at the early game. 

next get iden versio, snow trooper, range trooper, stark, storm trooper. Only iden has to be at high gear 

build a empire fleet with ( iden’s ship, vaders ship, tie bomber, and tie fighter pilot. Have tarkin be your fleet commander. 

get both darth revan and jedi knight revan. They both take some time, but are very good in the beginning. 

long term ur probably going to need to go after executor, but this is a good start. If u want me to provide more accurate info plz list ur ally code 

ok my ally code is :468-479-668 also am on pc so p2w is not an option

You’re pretty new I would just focus on Phoenix (Hera, Rex, Kannan, Ezra) and with that team u can get palpatine and Vader. 
basically u want to create a phoenix team to complete the light side battles and a dark side team to compete the dark side battles. 
you should mainly just upgrade these two teams until u reach lv85 (should be in 2-3 weeks. 

u can lv up quickly by following the journey quests 

After that things can get kinda complicated, but for now just focus on those things 

if i'm necroposting i'm sorry it's an accedent but how am i supost to get the charater shards for those charators + should i save my shards or can those be easily farmed later

(edit: also which phoenix members do i use i can't tell if i am supost to use ezra or not becuase a previous post gave a team that left them out)

Those characters are?

There's definitely an argument for farming double shard drop characters (After a period of time when a character becomes old enough you get 2 shards instead of 1 shard when farming).

I think, you need to sit down and think about what you need.

1. What is your guild doing?  What would allow you to do best in raids and Territory Battles.
2. You want to plan for big unlocks that'll lead to the next big unlock.  This being Legendary characters, meta ships and Galactic Legends.  Don't be afraid of taking on a meta command ship or Galactic Legend early.  It'll put you ahead of your piers.
3. PvP is extremely important.  However, trying to make yourself effective in the early game, may mean you get left behind in the middle-early late game.  An example would be Geonosians.  An extremely effective low level team,  3 great ships which work well together.  However, in the middle-late game both the ships and team become more and more redundant.  

I'm sure there is 'a perfect path'.  Obviously, it depends on what you have and where you want to go as to what that path will be.  So, you need to sit down and plan it out.  All I can say is, don't be afraid of taking on a large task (like a GL), but make sure you plan it out and where to go next.