So, like many of you, I've been wondering if it's better to get zeta mats from fleet shipments or to upgrade my ships faster. Unlike many of you, I'm an obsessive math nerd, so here goes. (this line was meant as a joke, please don't take offense)THIS MATH IS CURRENTLY OUTDATED DUE TO INCORRECT ASSUMPTIONS, PLEASE SEE MY POST AT THE BOTTOM OF PAGE 2. I'm not interested in hiding my mistakes, so I'm going to leave this post to keep the flow of conversation in a state that makes sense.Currency Gains:GW: 1200 / day = 12 blueprints / dayFS: 1300 / day = 13 blueprints / dayOther Energy: 1 blueprint / day (I think this is optimistic considering my drop rate, but ymmv)~26 blueprints / dayWe need 8 5* ships to get zeta mats from challenges. That's 145 blueprints per ship, for 1160 blueprints total. I currently have 272 blueprints between my top 8 ships.(1160-272) / 26 ~= 34 days to get all the necessary blueprints, spending FS on blueprints.(1160-272) / 13 ~= 68 days to get all the necessary blueprints, not spending FS on blueprints.Therefore, spending FS on blueprints gets you 34 more days on the ability challenges.(34 / 7 ) * 3 * 2 ~= 29 attemptsThis means that if you're spending FS on blueprints, you get 29 more attempts at the zeta tier ability challenge.That may sound like a lot, but the method spending FS on zeta mats has had 34 days of spending zeta mats. In that time frame:(34 * 1300) / 2000 = 22.1 zeta mats.So, those of you whom are maxing ships first are essentially trading 29 attempts at zeta mats... for 22 zeta mats. Of course, this math changes if you have more blueprints than me. I only bought two ship packs (and would trade back both of them...). tl;dr: If you're F2P (or even a dolphin with similar blueprint count), and it makes more sense to just get the mats.

This is fallacious in that you won't be able to maintain your rank dumping currency into Zeta mats instead of upgrading your ships. So your 1300/day is likely to go down.

"Tannjam;780863" wrote:This is fallacious in that you won't be able to maintain your rank dumping currency into Zeta mats instead of upgrading your ships. So your 1300/day is likely to go down.I don't think you really thought this through, but let's run with it and see what happens. My math above assumes a rank of about 51-100 (I'm actually getting top 50, but I wanted to run my math conservative). Let's assume that my rank immediately plummets - I go from getting rank 51 every day to getting rank 500. This is only relevant about half the time because the rest of the time my ships will still be on par (you gain nothing until you actually get the * upgrade). This example is absurd, obviously, but let's see what happens.This drop my FS from 1300/day to 1050/day. I lose 250 FS/day * 34 days = 8500 points, or 4.5 zeta mats.So I'm still trading 17.6 zeta mats for 19 attempts. Unless the drop rate for zeta mats is at least 93% (lol), I'm still better off even in this absurd case.More realistically, I'm probably going to drop down a single bracket about half the time: where everyone else gets 4* ships and I'm still stuck on 3*, and again when everyone else has 5* ships and I'm still stuck on 4*. Remember, the rest of the time my ships are still on par. This loses me 50 FS/day, for a total of a measly 850 FS.

I drop 50 to 90 spots a day (while upgrading my ships) regularly. Maybe you're on a less competitive shard, I don't know. I think you're minimizing this. You also have to remember, that after the initial ship upgrade grind is complete, these people can then spend on Fleet shipment Zetas AND run the 2x weekly challenges. So after that first 68 days, they'll have the advantage over you. They'll be accumulating zetas faster AND they'll have a stronger fleet than you.

Also, it would be 34/7 * 3 times a week * 2 a day = almost 30But, you can also use the Ship Acquisition Tool here and it will do all the mathz for you :)

The problem with this is that, yes you are trading zetas for attempts, but after the initial investment into doing the challenges, you can farm zetas by purchasing them and doing challenges. I'd be curious how long it would take to recoup the initial investment costs with the crap drop rate. Probably by August.

Zeta Mats (Fleet Shipments vs Ability Challenges)

Tannjam
8 years ago
This is fallacious in that you won't be able to maintain your rank dumping currency into Zeta mats instead of upgrading your ships. So your 1300/day is likely to go down.
RicterDarkfog
8 years ago
"Tannjam;780863" wrote:
This is fallacious in that you won't be able to maintain your rank dumping currency into Zeta mats instead of upgrading your ships. So your 1300/day is likely to go down.

I don't think you really thought this through, but let's run with it and see what happens. My math above assumes a rank of about 51-100 (I'm actually getting top 50, but I wanted to run my math conservative). Let's assume that my rank immediately plummets - I go from getting rank 51 every day to getting rank 500. This is only relevant about half the time because the rest of the time my ships will still be on par (you gain nothing until you actually get the * upgrade). This example is absurd, obviously, but let's see what happens.

This drop my FS from 1300/day to 1050/day. I lose 250 FS/day * 34 days = 8500 points, or 4.5 zeta mats.

So I'm still trading 17.6 zeta mats for 19 attempts. Unless the drop rate for zeta mats is at least 93% (lol), I'm still better off even in this absurd case.

More realistically, I'm probably going to drop down a single bracket about half the time: where everyone else gets 4* ships and I'm still stuck on 3*, and again when everyone else has 5* ships and I'm still stuck on 4*. Remember, the rest of the time my ships are still on par. This loses me 50 FS/day, for a total of a measly 850 FS.
Tannjam
8 years ago
I drop 50 to 90 spots a day (while upgrading my ships) regularly. Maybe you're on a less competitive shard, I don't know. I think you're minimizing this.
You also have to remember, that after the initial ship upgrade grind is complete, these people can then spend on Fleet shipment Zetas AND run the 2x weekly challenges. So after that first 68 days, they'll have the advantage over you. They'll be accumulating zetas faster AND they'll have a stronger fleet than you.
Mageduckey
8 years ago
Also, it would be 34/7 * 3 times a week * 2 a day = almost 30

But, you can also use the Ship Acquisition Tool here and it will do all the mathz for you :)
glai1182
8 years ago
The problem with this is that, yes you are trading zetas for attempts, but after the initial investment into doing the challenges, you can farm zetas by purchasing them and doing challenges. I'd be curious how long it would take to recoup the initial investment costs with the crap drop rate. Probably by August.
Mef1428
8 years ago
To the OP, I think this is an interesting argument.

Have you factored in the loss of enhancement mats from losing rank? It may be marginal, but it will prevent your ships from leveling up at the same rate as others.

Have you factored in the loss of ability to do certain challenges faster? This should harm the ability to level up ships and level up their abilities. I don't believe it will hurt you on enhancement droids, although you will have less - I am FTP and don't run out of them.

I think you also may want to assume for calculation purposes that many F2P who are serious about ships will be farming Plo Koon's ship. That may modify your calculations somewhat, maybe in your favor.
RicterDarkfog
8 years ago
"Tannjam;780907" wrote:
I drop 50 to 90 spots a day (while upgrading my ships) regularly. Maybe you're on a less competitive shard, I don't know. I think you're minimizing this.

How many ship blueprints do you already have, and what rank are you getting regularly?

"Tannjam;780907" wrote:
You also have to remember, that after the initial ship upgrade grind is complete, these people can then spend on Fleet shipment Zetas AND run the 2x weekly challenges. So after that first 68 days, they'll have the advantage over you. They'll be accumulating zetas faster AND they'll have a stronger fleet than you.

This is fallacious. First of all, this makes the assumption that accumulating more zetas total is the most important goal. It's not. The entire point to this is to get zeta abilities quickly. Only a few characters have them, and fewer are relevant. Rushing zeta mats gets you a zeta upgrade on day 30 and then again on day 60. Rushing ships to 5* and then rushing zeta mats gets you a zeta upgrade on day 58. So you're a full upgrade behind for an entire month, and then have only a few days where you're even before you fall behind again.

It also implies that you can rest on your laurels at 5* and start spending FS on zetas. If they do that, you can flip your spending and catch up quickly to match their fleet and zeta acquisition rate. If you don't flip your spending, their advantage will be minor. Even with a bracket difference, they're netting an extra zeta mat every *20-40* days. When you need 20 of them to matter, you're looking at 400 days before you've gotten an extra upgrade.
RicterDarkfog
8 years ago
"TeamWarriors;780919" wrote:
The problem with this is that, yes you are trading zetas for attempts, but after the initial investment into doing the challenges, you can farm zetas by purchasing them and doing challenges. I'd be curious how long it would take to recoup the initial investment costs with the **** drop rate. Probably by August.

If your goal is zeta upgrades for arena purposes (mine is) and you rush ships, you're going to spend a month without one, and then about a month with 1 vs their 2. At that point, whatever advantage you may gain by having extra zeta mats in the long run is probably lost by being behind in arena for 2 months.

Edit:
"TeamWarriors;780919" wrote:
The problem with this is that, yes you are trading zetas for attempts, but after the initial investment into doing the challenges, you can farm zetas by purchasing them and doing challenges. I'd be curious how long it would take to recoup the initial investment costs with the **** drop rate. Probably by August.

Good catch. Fixed.

Edit:
"l2edLeader;780928" wrote:
This assumes also that there will be no new nodes open to farm in the next 30-40 days. Also assumes that there will be no new activities that will involve ships that you might want to participate in (guilds or tourneys). It will take me about 41 days to get to the Zeta challenges. In that time I could have my first 20 Zeta but I'm going with the slow farm for ships thinking that will pay off more in the long run.

That's a fair point. But remember, for a significant portion of the time, the zeta rusher won't be behind - you have no advantage until you actually get that * upgrade - 64/65 is the same as being 0/65. You absolutely will be behind the zeta rusher for about 2 months in terms of zeta upgrades.

Edit:
"Mef1428;780929" wrote:
To the OP, I think this is an interesting argument.

Have you factored in the loss of enhancement mats from losing rank? It may be marginal, but it will prevent your ships from leveling up at the same rate as others.

Have you factored in the loss of ability to do certain challenges faster? This should harm the ability to level up ships and level up their abilities. I don't believe it will hurt you on enhancement droids, although you will have less - I am FTP and don't run out of them.

I think you also may want to assume for calculation purposes that many F2P who are serious about ships will be farming Plo Koon's ship. That may modify your calculations somewhat, maybe in your favor.

No, not in the OP. Even assuming I drop a tier half the time, I lose about 1200 shipment points. Even rounding that against zeta rushing, it's not even close. Even in an absurd case where I drop from r51 to r500, I'm only losing 4.5 zeta mats. Still well worth it.

Plo Koon's ship is a great point. I don't have Plo Koon and have much better things to do with cantina energy than spend it on a ship and a niche character and I'm assuming that anyone that cares significantly about zeta mats is in a similar ship.

This post assumes that arena is priority, and that you want zeta upgrades as soon as possible. In that case cantina energy is far too valuable to spend on a ship, as you're likely spending it on all the great characters in the cantina and on mods.
Acrofales
8 years ago
Doesn't work like that. For the ability mats you need to clear 5* Executrix challenge, so you need 5 DS ships. And the only Dark Side blueprints you can get from GW are:

Geo Spy Ship
Geo Soldier Ship
Sun Fac Ship
Imp Tie Fighter
FO Tie Fighter

While that is your 5 ships there, you'd have to get incredibly lucky to get these to 5* in the minimum time you give. Moreover, there's both Geo Spy and Sun Fac there, which F2P players won't have. So you will, at a bare minimum need to buy Sun Fac with credits (then again, you have to do that as well on both routes), and farm Geo Spy (which, granted, might still be faster than praying for Slave 1 shards from the Fleet Shipments).

Either way, both timelines are significantly slower than you put there, while other people who farm faster are overtaking you, and causing you to get less FS credit.

Moreover, the challenges are reported to be quite hard, so on both routes you're going to have to spend resources gearing and levelling all those characters, and that might set you back too (on either route).
scuba75
New Rookie
8 years ago
"Ricter;79558" wrote:
So, like many of you, I've been wondering if it's better to get zeta mats from fleet shipments or to upgrade my ships faster. Unlike many of you, I'm an obsessive math nerd, so here goes.

Currency Gains:
GW: 1200 / day = 12 blueprints / day
FS: 1300 / day = 13 blueprints / day
Other Energy: 1 blueprint / day (I think this is optimistic considering my drop rate, but ymmv)
~26 blueprints / day

We need 8 5* ships to get zeta mats from challenges. That's 145 blueprints per ship, for 1160 blueprints total. I currently have 272 blueprints between my top 8 ships.

(1160-272) / 26 ~= 34 days to get all the necessary blueprints, spending FS on blueprints.
(1160-272) / 13 ~= 68 days to get all the necessary blueprints, not spending FS on blueprints.
Therefore, spending FS on blueprints gets you 34 more days on the ability challenges.

(34 / 7 ) * 3 * 2 ~= 29 attempts
This means that if you're spending FS on blueprints, you get 29 more attempts at the zeta tier ability challenge.

That may sound like a lot, but the method spending FS on zeta mats has had 34 days of spending zeta mats. In that time frame:

(34 * 1300) / 2000 = 22.1 zeta mats.

So, those of you whom are maxing ships first are essentially trading 29 attempts at zeta mats... for 22 zeta mats. Of course, this math changes if you have more blueprints than me. I only bought two ship packs (and would trade back both of them...).

tl;dr: If you're F2P (or even a dolphin with similar blueprint count), and it makes more sense to just get the mats.

You do realize the challenge has a chance of dropping 2 mats per attempt, which I have seen it do enough already.

So it is not 29 attempts in 34 days but is 58 attempts.