There has been a few suggestions as to why it wouldn't be viable to sell cards separately.

Please address those before asserting that there is "zero reason" for not doing it

You say that they're losing money out through eBay, but they're really not. Those eBay sellers had to buy the expansion packs in the first place in order to get the cards. That means FFG is getting their money from someone. They're just not getting it directly from you.

That assumes that everyone that WANTS the card is willing to pay eBay prices for it. But there's lots of people that simple do without the card rather than do that. People that would be willing to buy the card from the company at a more reasonable price. Those are people FFG is currently not getting money from at all.

I know people don't like to assume that people who just won't play the game if it's prohibitive to do so exist because there probably aren't any on this board, but they absolutely do.

-There is zero reason they can't sell upgrade cards in a pack at a marked up price. Everyone knows how high margins are for card packs. It would be a smart business move. But they use upgrade cards as leverage to sell ships that are obviously not enticing enough to be worth the purchase alone.

This is blatantly false. A very basic understanding of business and/or manufacturing can easily see this. Now, whether you agree with those reasons or not, that's another matter. And, ultimately pointless. As FFG has said that card packs are not in the cards, because of their analysis has shown them to not be a viable product.

There has been a few suggestions as to why it wouldn't be viable to sell cards separately.

Please address those before asserting that there is "zero reason" for not doing it

To be fair, all the suggestions as to why it wouldn't be viable can be summarised as:

OH NO! X WING WOULD BE GONE AND THERE WOULD BE MUCH WAILING AND GNASHING OF TEETH!

To which the appropriate response is:

When I saw the thread.

...

When I read the thread,

Oh so your the guy who threatens to gun down tournament players if they don't let you take that forgotten action.

In the wake of yet another school shooting, I must say I'm more than a little bothered by that jest...edited my post; hope you do as well.

...

You got to be kidding me

No. I am not kidding you. *Que the music.*

I think they should refresh the product line, as is we have some pilots are seriously underplayed.

I demand better value for my money, as in everything should have reasonably correct point cost so it can all be viable.

Looks at:

Winged Gundark

Major Rhymer

Lt. Lorrir

All the Defenders

Avenger Squadron Pilot

Fel's Wrath

Lt. Lorrir

Kir Kanos

Tetran Cowall

Captain Yorr

Colonel Jendon

+ scores of upgrade cards

What did they playtest these with, a potato?

There has been a few suggestions as to why it wouldn't be viable to sell cards separately.

Please address those before asserting that there is "zero reason" for not doing it

To be fair, all the suggestions as to why it wouldn't be viable can be summarised as:

OH NO! X WING WOULD BE GONE AND THERE WOULD BE MUCH WAILING AND GNASHING OF TEETH!

To which the appropriate response is:

Having followed the license between 3 different companies over 20 years, you begin to appreciate how suddenly the license can disapear. SWCCG, a rival to Magic, was cut at close to the height of it's popularity. Though, recent revelations have shown that the likely reason for the license leaving Decipher was really sad. There may hae been some genuine displeasure with how Decipher was using the license (they only had the card game license, and was sort of stretching it with three different card games). And Wizards is just Wizards. It's become clear they only want to focus on Magic and D&D (only the RPG though).

And like it or not, the expectations for this game has changed. X-wing has been soo much bigger than they ever dreamed about. Why would they want to mess with a winning formula?

Why would they want to mess with a winning formula?

They wouldn't. But that doesn't people who still think they can do better should stop asking.

Whoops.....didn't realize this was that argument again. Would the last one out please turn off the light. Thanks.

All in all, this thread was for providing feedback to FFG, about what some customers would like to see published in the future: second editions of classic packs with some fixes included. They don't even need to wait for removing the first editions from the stocks or cause a "ship drought". It's, as someone said above, a 1 ship aces pack with perhaps different paint scheme, different pilots, different upgrades (albeith enough to fix 2 ships). In that way, both the first edition and the second edition would be marketable, because of course everyone wants Darth Vader that only comes in the first edition. But maybe they could get the creat Juno Eclipse that comes in the second edition along with two X1 titles and two Advanced Targetting Computers.

Okay, it's too late for the T/A, the T/I and even the T-65 X-W, the A-W or the B-W. But most agree that most other ships types are in dire need of new or updated pilots. The T/B, the T/D, the E-W, you name it.

It is easier for a customer that wants that nice ship he loves to buy two pack that feature the same ship in different paint schemes and with different, complementary, pilots and upgrades; than to have to buy a totally different ship, perhaps from a totally unrelated faction.

It's just that, feedback. FFG's people will find it valuable, at least to know, and they will study its financial viability, put it on a table during a meeting, and consider it or discard it. And if they know their job and what is best for the long term profitability for the product line, they will do what is right.

Nobody is telling here that "FFG, do this or you are sh*t!". Nor that a suggestion necessarily has to be marketed as suggested.

Please, spare the condescending responses in the style "And you know better than then how to run a company or to market a game?". No, I don't and no, I don't need to know in order to give feedback. If I go to my usual café and I want to have a nice croissant but the café only serves croissants if you also order a whole 100€ "breakfasts of the world feast combo", I would expect to be considered reasonable that I ask the guy behind the bar if I can have just the croissant, without being assaulted by a bunch of hostile locals yelling "Shut up! You don't know what you are talking about! In the GW café if you want a croissant you need to buy it in bulk in pallets of 500, you spoiled brat.", "Go to another café if you don't like it here!", "How do you know what is best if you don't run your own café", or "You want to destroy our beloved café, you monster!".

That is why I don't understand: the hostility with which most feedback is welcome in here. And not from FFG, precisely, but from other fellow customers.

And it is not like FFG has said that they ignore community feedback. I have seen Alex Davy saying that they aren't promoting any other game modes with X-Wing because they are waiting for feedback from the community before doing so. They are waiting for people to get bored of the 100 points tournament matches before promoting anything else.

That leads me to the epic ships being packed with small ships' fixes. You know? I think fewer people would have something against that if epic ships were actually valuable. At their current state, an epic ship is useless in the standard format, and a liability in the epic format. Any combination of points spent on a huge ship plus upgrades will always be much much worse than spending that same amount of points on small ships.

So the epic ships have no value other than for casual epic matches, for fluff or for fun. If you are a competitive person and play epic, you would never field an epic ship because they aren'r remotely efficient.

At the same time, if you are casual player and only play for fun or for fluff, you don't need the small fix "fixes" bundled with these ships, since you can proxy them.

Then, who are the epic ships with fixes marketed at? Not the competitive ones that need the fixes but despise the poorly balanced epic ships, but not the causal ones that don't need the fixes either.

If you cannot see that something is wrong here and could use some help, then I guess I cannot make myself better understood.

That is why I don't understand: the hostility with which most feedback is welcome in here. And not from FFG, precisely, but from other fellow customers.

This topic, and the ideas contained within, are not new. Not at all. The exact same thread with the exact same ideas pops up at least once a month (we've had two in as many days, for heaven's sake), and having to explain why the ideas are unrealistic each and every time gets a little bit annoying. And that's before you take into account the outright hate you get dealt each time for daring to suggest that the OP's Master Plan for Saving X-wing won't work out.

They are waiting for people to get bored of the 100 points tournament matches before promoting anything else.

In all reality if they did reprint expansions with corrected point cost pilots and improved upgrade cards it would be great. There would be spare tie bombers on eBay for miles along with tie interceptors and defenders I think that the old stock would still sell, after all, the model remains unchanged. Painting and converting galore

And that's before you take into account the outright hate you get dealt each time for daring to suggest that the OP's Master Plan for Saving X-wing won't work out.

• It's not the same idea about selling card-only packs. This is about selling miniatures.
• It's not really anyone's new fancy idea. It's the same as FFG has been doing with Aces Packs, only limited to one ship.
• If tomorrow FFG comes with an announcement of this very idea, most of the people that are here now bashing it will be saying how clever it is and how great FFG is compared to GW. And Joe Boss will make a post saying how happy he will be with his new alternate paint scheme ships, and make new icons for those ships.

Realistically, FFG is running out of ships. The Force Awakens and Rogue One movies and Rebels aren't providing so many new ships to sustain a couple more waves. Of all the alternatives, I think republishing old ships with extra pilots and upgrades and paint schemes is something that benefits both the collectors, the casuals, the competitive, and FFG themselves.

You say FFG is running out of ships, but people have been saying that since Wave 3 when all the OT ships were made available. And yet here we are 5 Waves more. FFG has even gone so far as to work with LF to create a ship to fill their needs. So honestly the idea that FFG is running out of ship's isn't well grounded. We have no clue from where FFG is going to be willing to pull ships from, the only thing we do know is that they were confident enough to secure the license for "years to come". Given that X-wing is thier largest and most profitable usage of that license, I don't expect that FFG feels as if they are running out of ship's just yet.

I have two issues really, in what is otherwise the best game I've ever played.

The first is a lack of availability of certain powerful upgrade cards. Auto-thrusters is one such card that has already been used as an example in this thread. It is only available in one ship, so if you don't want that ship but do want Auto-thrusters, you have limited options:

1) Buy a ship you don't want just to get a couple of cards. Many of us do this and I'm sure there are a lot of StarVipers sitting gathering dust. Personally, I buy the ship, remove the cards I want and then re-sell at a modest loss. It is annoying though, for any customer, to buy something that they don't really want. Yes, no one is "forcing" them to buy it, but that doesn't make it any less aggravating.

2) Proxy the cards. Acceptable for casual play but not tournament play and some players simply don't like using proxies. It's possible to play X-Wing whilst making no purchases at all from FFG. But who would want to do this? Everyone prefers to use the official, proper models and cards.

3) Suck it up and go without. Fine for a lot of upgrades, but certain upgrades are so powerful, or are "fixes" for previous errors, that they become almost essential if you want to remain competitive. Note that just because someone is a casual player, doesn't mean they don't care about whether the lists they run are strong or not.

Simply spreading upgrade cards around into more expansions would largely eliminate this. Take the key cards that, as game designers, you know are going to be THE upgrades of that Wave, and include them in more than one ship. Provided that second ship isn't more than one Wave removed then I believe the complaints would largely disappear. FFG do appear to be moving towards this, with things like Engine Upgrade finally appearing in a second expansion, but it is taking too long. If Auto-thrusters had been announced in the T-70 or TIE Adv Prototype would anyone still be complaining about them? I would suggest not. The downside of this is less different upgrade cards overall, but with the number already available, that doesn't seem like too bad an idea.

My second issue is the bundling of small base ships with huge ships. Not everyone plays epic. In fact, if my experience is typical then a large proportion of X-Wing players don't play epic. But most of those players will still want the small base ship that comes bundled with the huge one. This creates a similar annoyance to the customer as with the cards, whereby they want something but it is only available with something they do not in any way want to buy. However, the much larger price point of the huge ships multiplies that annoyance. Again, I make the purchase and resell at a modest loss, but the more people who do this, the more the secondary market is flooded with unwanted huge ships... good for epic players who want to pick up a second dirt cheap, but bad for customers in general as they end up paying a large amount for the small base ship.

There is a very easy solution though. Just don't bundle the small base ships. Sell them separately as an Aces pack. The repaint TIE Advanced from the Raider and repaint TIE Fighter from the Gozanti could easily have been sold as Imperial Aces II and I'd have definitely bought it. Twice. If the huge ship sales are not financially viable to survive in their own right without the small ship bundling tactic, then let them die. Don't artificially prop up sales and cause the sort of aggravation that causes threads like this to pop up every month.

Someone above mentioned that it is tiresome that these threads are created over and over and over. Yes it is. So perhaps FFG should do something to address the cause?

Someone above mentioned that it is tiresome that these threads are created over and over and over. Yes it is. So perhaps FFG should do something to address the cause?

They ARE doing something about this. The posters bleating endlessly on about these perceived "issues" are simply to impatient to care.

• Push the Limit was originally only available in the A-Wing expansion; now you can get it in Imperial Aces.
• Predator was originally only available in the TIE Defender Expansion, now you can get it with the Kihraxz.
• Lone Wolf and Stay On Target were originally both only available in the YT-2400, now you can get it in the Hound's Tooth.

Autothrusters only came out earlier this year; chances are it will be available with a different ship before long as well.

But of course, you still get the inevitable bleating from people who wants (nay! NEED) Predator but don't want to buy a Defender OR the Kihraxz. To which I say: get over your sense of self-entitlement.

1) There really hasn't been a place to reprint autothrusters. Wave 7 has no good place for it, while it would take up a space the Wave 8 small ships with boost need for fix-cards. I expect to see it in Wave 9 or an aces pack. Predator wasn't reprinted until wave 7, so this doesn't seem to be that out of place.

2) FFG clearly wants epic ships to contain cards relevant to the standard game. I suspect they're trying to encourage people to try epic by packaging card relevant to the base game into epic expansions. I feel the Tie Fighter in the Gozanti is less arduous simply because the Tie doesn't need much help, though. So, maybe the lesson is they should try to use ships that are already reasonably competitive, but suffer from lack of competitive options, instead? Of course, then we'd have gotten a phantom in the Raider, and like I said a page or two back, the phantom's on a razor-thin line with regards to balance.

3) The forum is a vocal minority. We represent a tiny fraction of FFG's playerbase. FFG is not going to change a fundamental market strategy unless it begins to affect sales. So, I mean, you can still complain. It just isn't going to do much, especially since any major changes to the line need to go through Disney (See all the red tape the raider went through).

Oh so your the guy who threatens to gun down tournament players if they don't let you take that forgotten action.

In the wake of yet another school shooting, I must say I'm more than a little bothered by that jest...edited my post; hope you do as well.

No I won't it had nothing to do with the incident you mentioned and I won't bow down in the face of emotional black mail.

We Arnt all American on this board we come from all over the planet, not everything revolves around the USA and the events good or bad that occur within.

I notice there's no outrage when people talk about bombing things, Syria is getting reduced to rubble daily but no one gets shamed for discussing ways to drop an cluster mine and nor should they.

This isn't tumblr we are here to talk about x-wing not your feelings.

Oh so your the guy who threatens to gun down tournament players if they don't let you take that forgotten action.

In the wake of yet another school shooting, I must say I'm more than a little bothered by that jest...edited my post; hope you do as well.

No I won't it had nothing to do with the incident you mentioned and I won't bow down in the face of emotional black mail.

We Arnt all American on this board we come from all over the planet, not everything revolves around the USA and the events good or bad that occur within.

I notice there's no outrage when people talk about bombing things, Syria is getting reduced to rubble daily but no one gets shamed for discussing ways to drop an cluster mine and nor should they.

This isn't tumblr we are here to talk about x-wing not your feelings.

You have a point in that the sentiment is rather American-centric. Still, your comparison isn't exactly fair; Talking about an in-game mechanic is very different from making a joke someone finds tasteless. If anything, your argument would seem to suggest we just shouldn't make jokes about shootings and bombings in general, regardless of when the last one near us was.

Of course, that kind of ignores the cathartic element of humor, doesn't it. Which is a pretty big part of why humor exists. So, tricky issue. End of the day, just do the best you can not to hurt/offend people, apologize when that isn't enough, and try to do better afterwords, in my opinion.

Guy uses gun to kill innocent joke made, then joke maker cries emotional blackmail, then does the "one up", and then dismisses others feelings after just making multiple emotional appeals.

So you know exactly where I'm coming from and how this relates to Xwing: I am an American, I happen to be an Oregonian, I happen to be a teacher, I stay after school to play Xwing and other board games with students; last time we did so we talked about the last time someone brought a gun to our school. Those first two facts about me are pretty irrelevant big picture, but they happen to matter a lot right now. Context matters, to me at least, you can take it or leave it.

So are you outraged that I don't find the killing of humans humorous and asked that you not go that route, especially right now? That I'm an American? That your situation is worse? Or that I brought a little reality into your miniatures game discussion after you also weren't talking Xwing?

I'm glad to take responses as PMs or start a thread in off topic if you or any other human (or alien, or cyborg, or droid for that matter) wants to discuss that. Regardless of where on the web you post, or where you're from, you will likely encounter people (or ewoks, or wookies, or astromechs) who think that making jokes about the killing others is pretty unacceptable. You can still do it but don't be upset when someone calls you on it.

The posters bleating endlessly on about these perceived "issues" are simply to impatient to care.

This is a really dishonest way to describe the thread. The vast majority of posters in this thread come across as quite reasonable. You certainly may disagree with their points, but to call it "bleating" is more than a misrepresentation.

But of course, you still get the inevitable bleating from people who wants (nay! NEED) Predator but don't want to buy a Defender OR the Kihraxz. To which I say: get over your sense of self-entitlement.

Beating up strawmen is easy, and granted on this forum it will get you surrounded with a tender loving circle jerk of likes. The posters in this thread are not asking for something for free. In fact the original post which you probably skipped just so you could jump into telling everyone what's what said they'd like repaints repackaged. It should be implied that they are willing to pay for those, which is kind of the opposite of self-entitlement. What is so offensive about telling FFG what you as a consumer want? I don't see how this negatively impacts your play, or really why you even care. How would the OP's dream becoming reality hurt you as a player?

Coming from a competitive Magic the Gathering background, this game doesn't feel all that expensive to me. I can buy every rebel ship for the price it would take me to acquire a competitive tier 1 modern sideboard (15 cards). But if this is your first game you've ever competitively played, I can certainly understand how it feels a bit pricey.

I'm curious where all these people are getting their insider information regarding Fantasy Flight's profit margin.

I'd like to know, specifically, where you're finding the information they would be in the red by offering a few extra cards in every expansion or offering a upgrade expansion.

Or is it possible that while playing a game like Star Wars: X-Wing some are finding it difficult to separate reality from fiction from personal beliefs from pure supposition.

[Edit] specifically as in where exactly is it publicly shown that an authorized spokesperson for Fantasy Flight Games made the announcement that ....

1) There really hasn't been a place to reprint autothrusters.

The TIE Advanced Prototype would have been a perfect place for it. Given that it has a native Boost action.