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Every meta shift, pvp and fleet, and new raid, there's people quitting. Lost a few shard and guild mates recently, mostly due to frustration and the perception that once their crystal income is decimated, they can no longer compete and might as well quit. This is largely because squad arena is the single most important source of free (relatively) crystals, and at the moment ranking outside of top 5 doesn't reward anything meaningful.

What if CG redistribute the crystal rewards, and spread it across squad & fleet arena, TW, TB, and raids? That way those who invest money aka whales will still rip the biggest benefits because they'll likely dominate all modes, and for the f2p players they won't feel suicidal if their pvp rank falls through the floor because they missed the malak bus. They'll still have a discounted yet significant portion of crystal income for them to work on squads, and that gives them hope, so they won't quit.

What do people think? Viable?

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almost 5 years ago - /u/EACarrie - Direct link

This is exactly, and I mean, exactly what I want to do. While we introduced modes like TW and GA to create a value for us to diversify the meta, the only way to make them matter is to move the crystals over. Squad Arena alone distributes $300,000 of crystals to players every single day.

The problem is, there’s no way to guarantee the same people who have their crystals on farm from SA would get them from other modes. And we’d have to make sure they could earn those crystals daily.

But I’d do it tomorrow if I thought that it wouldn’t massively disrupt one of the constants of the game for a ton of players.

almost 5 years ago - /u/EACarrie - Direct link

Originally posted by mountaineer30680

Well, you could easily start by just giving out some crystals, even a small amount for top-5, top-10, whatever, in those others. Gradually make the changes to level it out. If you communicate the change and ease folks into it, you'd still lose some players, but that's the case with a) any change, or b) staying the same.

You have to admit people are going to receive this claim from y'all dubiously. Especially since you rushed in a special buff to ensure spenders couldn't be beat by FTP, telling us JKA was WAI, then nerfing him, and all the rest. You have a rather large credibility problem right now saying this, because your most recent actions make it look like all you care about is those who will spend large amounts of cash, including the "tip of the spear" comment...

Oh there are crystals in other modes, but it's about where the majority of the source comes from.

The JKA thing is interesting to me, we described the change that we ultimately ended up rolling out in the second paragraph of that section of the post, but I've seen people say "oh I didn't think the part about GR meant a restriction" and I do understand why that's so - but that's just a misunderstanding, so we'll think about that when we write the next explanation, but we just can't always convey our meaning.

Just like "tip of the spear" is just an expression to describe the people who get there first, and when I use it, I'm including the nearly 1k people who got Malak without ever spending $1 in this game. There are a lot of people who pride themselves on being completely F2P and still at the frontlines, and they are very much included in that sentiment.

almost 5 years ago - /u/EACarrie - Direct link

Originally posted by Wu_Tang_Financial77

Two things:

Why is it a problem to not have a guarantee that the same players are able to farm the same amount of crystals from additional game modes? Someone that performs well in all game modes outside of SA essentially gets no additional crystals. That seems unbalanced to me.

Yes, large crystal rewards in top SA spots has been a constant in the game... but in general for a vast majority of players SA is nothing but a constant source of frustration. This has been exacerbated recently with the impenetrable nature of the last 3 meta squads.

Is utter and complete domination by one team something we should expect to continue? It seems like you’ve expressed a desire to change that but it has not come to fruition.

It's not a problem to have crystals from other sources, we add crystals all the time. The issue is the major inflow has been squad arena, and it's dependable. And it's not just one group of people, lots of people rely on it.

Singular team domination is absolutely not the intention, but it will take time. We need to message clearly and make changes incrementally. The game has been out for three and a half years, and when we make changes, they're not always well received, so messaging, describing our intent, and slowly moving that way is how we do it. I realize that in being slow, people think that means our intentions change, but sometimes it's easier to show on reflection (basically the introduction of TB/TW represents a year plus path for the gameplay involving social connections and guild play that has been very intentional, but would have sounded crazy/too slow if we tried to describe it up front).