Welcome to the first edition of Fine Tuning SWGoH.

Each week I am going to pick a section or aspect of the Cantina and go through it, what it does, how it works, and how it can be improved – even whether or not it needs to be improved. Some weeks I will cover heavy topics like the arena, other weeks it will be lighter fare. Where possible I will always try to suggest improvements, and quite often these will be drastic overhauls. Please note, I know that not everyone playing is level 85, but I will be writing these articles from the perspective of a level 85 player. If you stick with the game and these articles it really won’t take too long before you are viewing it from the same perspective.

I suppose I should also tell you a little more about me so you can better understand my perspective. People in-game know me as Sparrow, my SWGOH.GG profile is located here, and by the way, awesome work those folks do over there, top notch site. I have been playing the game since December 2015. I consider myself 100% Free to Play, though I gain a little Google play credit from Google Opinion Rewards, and I have used that credit to buy one crystal subscription, one pouch of crystals, and one box of crystals. So judge how you will. I was one of the founding members of Let the Wookie Win, and in December of 2016 myself and a group of 7 others left to become part of the then forming Bounty Hunters Guild Black Sun Division. I am currently an officer with BHG Black Sun (Top Guild in June 2017).

For the first outing I am going to tackle a subject I have been hearing a ton of complaining about this week so this one is for you @[BHG]PresidentSkroob.

Sim Tickets – we all get them we all need them and we all use them, but why are they there and should they even be there?

To start off you need to first understand at the beginning the content of this game was much smaller. It used to be you could not sim daily challenges, and the very idea of multi-sim was just a pipe dream. The most expensive Light Side and Dark Side nodes cost 16 energy, and Cantina went as high as 12 energy. Back in the beginning there were no ships and overall the content was much smaller. We had no raids, we had no guilds, no one to talk to and just not much to do. So every day we would log in play Galactic War, do 5 arena matches and burn 40 minutes in between doing our daily challenges on either auto or manual. (Yeah really that was the big goal I had for a while getting enough good tanks to auto the tank challenge).

But the thing is for any mobile game one of their key metrics is average daily play time. Hence the reason for sim tickets. Sim tickets will reduce your play time by allowing you to quickly repeat battles you have done before, but limiting sim tickets means you have to use them sparingly, hence keeping your playtime somewhat elevated as you auto battles here and there.

In the game we have now though, playtime is already high (averaging around 3 hours per day – 168 minutes – from the last stat I heard). So do we still need sim tickets? In a word no, with nearly daily raids, squad arena, fleet arena Galactic War, and general fooling around with mods and equipment the average player spends a ton of time playing the game already. We don’t need an artificial barrier making us auto easy battles and challenges just because we ran out of tickets.

Now I have just told you that we don’t need sim tickets and they should go away. But really they are not that big a deal either. Personally I have over 5,100 sim tickets stockpiled and that pile is growing. Many others are in the same boat as me so this one falls very low on my list of improvements for CG/EA to make.

Below you will find a chart of sim tickets by the numbers (please note I am rounding all numbers down as you just can’t spend tickets on a 10 energy node if you only have 9 energy).

Assumptions:
Those who refresh energy will refresh normal energy first;
You will receive approximately 1 sim ticket for every ten battles you fight as a random reward.
For Normal Energy use I will assume you spend entirely on 10 energy nodes, as an average I believe this is a fair assumption.

Energy Refreshes	0+0	1+0	1+1	2+1	2+2	3+0	3+2	3+3
Total Normal Energy	375	495	495	615	615	725	725	725
Total Cantina Energy	165	165	285	285	405	165	405	525
Tickets from Refresh & Activities	35	55	65	85	95	95	115	125
Tickets used on Normal	-37	-49	-49	-61	-61	-72	-72	-72
Tickets used on Cantina (8)	-20	-20	-35	-35	-50	-20	-50	-65
Tickets used on Cantina (10)	-16	-16	-28	-28	-40	-16	-40	-52
Tickets used on Cantina (12)	-13	-13	-23	-23	-33	-13	-33	-43
Tickets used on Cantina (16)	-10	-10	-17	-17	-25	-10	-25	-32
Tickets for challenges per day	-13	-13	-13	-13	-13	-13	-13	-13
Min Tickets Gained from battles	4	5	7	7	8	9	9	10
Max Tickets Gained from battles	5	6	9	9	11	12	12	13
Max Tickets Gained per day	-21	-12	-7	1	4	9	14	18
Max Tickets Lost per day	-17	-8	-10	-2	-5	15	5	1

 

Feel free to go through the numbers above, but the basic conclusion is simple, if you are running out of tickets, do 3 normal energy refreshes per day, and spend your cantina energy on the expensive nodes.

Leaving sim tickets as part of the game actually gives some incentive to be strategic with what nodes you farm. Spend some energy on hard nodes, go after the 10 energy farm when you are also low on tickets. Farm some mods or the new cantina toons like Sith Assassin or Gar Saxon.

So yes, they should remove sim tickets entirely, but if you spend your resources wisely it will never be a problem for you anyway.

 

By Sparrow
BHG Black Sun Guild Officer
Gaming-fans.com Staff Writer