252/258 Gearing System not viable for Casual/PvP players

[Ghost_Spectre]

I doubt there are even 50000 subs still in the game.

 

Actually, they've held a solid 500k with fluctuations above and below that. IIRC that was mentioned in each of their yearly fiscal reports. Subs are still the backbone of this game even with the CM. 50,000 subs could not fiscally support the game if that were the case. 500,000 subs generate 7.495 million dollars a month (at 14.99 as standard sub rate). 50,000 only generate 749,500 per month. That's barely enough to keep things running.

 

In February 2013 they reported nearly 2.5 million subs; however, after 1.2 dropped they lost 1.5 million subs in a blink of an eye. Calculate the monetary loss from that. Then you'll see why they went F2P within 2 months. Poor business decisions and business models produce these types of results. Yet, no one in BioWare nor EA pay attention to it. It's like they are following Coca Cola's way of doing business with the Niki motto, "Just Do It!"

Edited November 10, 2018 by Ghost_Spectre

[Andryah]

I dont think that’s necessarily true. Expertise gear was exceptionally easy to get. The only people I can see getting upset about it are people who pvp to get gear for pve.

 

You are of course assuming that gear being PvP specific again means you will get the extremely fast gearing that was the case as some points years ago. There is no evidence of this being the case to come.... though they did at least acknowledge that there is an issue to resolved there. You are assuming they will make expertise gear fall from low hanging branches on trees once again. That is an assumption... not a known fact at this point.

 

I do agree that they have trouble finding a balance point with gear in general, not just PvP gear, in terms of effort/resources to acquire..... vacillating over the years from easy, to hard, to easy, to random, to very hard... rinse and repeat. Maybe someday they will get the entire process reasonably balanced.... but likely never to your level of satisfaction though.

Edited November 10, 2018 by Andryah

[Batwer]

I doubt there are even 50000 subs still in the game. Last Primetime I checked on SS only had 3682 people on the whole server.

With only 3 active servers and 2 dead servers, there is probably about 12000 people online for the whole day and not all of those are subs.

Interesting. At the same time you were everywhere on the server. : eek: In each WZ, FP, planet, etc. Incredible. I want that too.

 

The bolt is raised to 252. The scream was successful. It should not be more. Otherwise, I want to do the same for PVE, even with the MOPs. Same rights for all. Only that would make the equipment unusable.

[Jdast]

The grind will be easy and fast for people like Dasty who have lots of UCs and lots of Alts

Personally I’m not going to take exception to Dasty and others in his position. If they have the time and UCs to by pass a lot of the grind it’s because they’ve played a lot of PVP. Thousands of hours of it to get those stock piles,

 

To provide some perspective based on my experience -- let's use one year / 52 weeks as an example...

 

When 5.10 rolls out in December, as I stated earlier, I will have roughly 55,000 Unassembled Components. The period that I have been accumulating UCs is actually longer than a year, but for the sake of simplicity...

 

With 52 weeks in a year, I am averaging 1,057 Unassembled Components per week.

 

That was through a combination of PvE and PvP but took absolutely nowhere near "thousands of hours."

 

Sure, it helps that I'm my own boss and (largely) set my own schedule. But that was very doable in 12 hours / week, which I know is high for some. Regardless, 12 x 52 = 624 hours over the course of the year -- a far cry from "thousands" by a very large margin.

 

Playing alts helped, in that I would focus on completing dailies / weeklies on different characters, which I enjoy largely because it makes me a better player to know and understand the different classes. Not suffering from Best-in-Slot-itis helped too. Having 4 characters at BiS was just fine, which allowed me to stockpile.

 

A lot of people PvP more than I do because I do a lot of PvE (including leveling through complete story arc 10 or so characters this past year). If I had done more PvP, my UC accumulation rate would have been much, much higher. But 1,057 UCs / week is not a high number if you focus on doing the actual quests surrounding PvP (dailies / weeklies) and PvE (dailies and weeklies) to get crates, which as of a year ago allow you to disintegrate items for even more UCs. Did I game the system? Sure. But I enjoy playing alts.

 

Note too, I have said in several posts on this subject that I understand and am not supportive of how 5.10 screws over people who play one character. And while I think they should adjust the costs to some extent, the problem isn't UC acquisition per se -- it's the MWS throttling system.

 

Dasty

Edited November 11, 2018 by Jdast

[Totemdancer]

Interesting. At the same time you were everywhere on the server. : eek: In each WZ, FP, planet, etc. Incredible. I want that too.

 

The bolt is raised to 252. The scream was successful. It should not be more. Otherwise, I want to do the same for PVE, even with the MOPs. Same rights for all. Only that would make the equipment unusable.

 

You don’t have to go everywhere, you can use the “who” search to see how many people are online and where they are.

Edited November 10, 2018 by Totemdancer