5 minutes ago, Jeff Wilder said:

You're still sticking with this silliness? You know you're wrong about this.

If FFG had made every upgrade an actual upgrade, people could have bought, sold, and traded individual ship upgrades, to match their collections or to recoup losses. Or both.

FFG f#$%ed up the Conversion Kits, and it really hurt the player-base. I think the game -- which is a much better game -- is recovering, but it didn't have to take the massive hit it took.

Evidence, please?

Just now, JJ48 said:

Evidence, please?

Of what, exactly? Of the basics of buying, selling, and trading among gamers? Really?

Of the game taking a hit? The numbers do vary from region to region, but they've been way down overall. Like I said, they're recovering, but they didn't need to drop as much as they did. I personally know a dozen players or more who quit -- and haven't returned -- because of the way FFG did the Conversion Kits.

1 hour ago, Embir82 said:

1) I think it is quite contrary. Majority of former players in my local playgroup hate the concept of Hyperspace format. It is miniatures game, not MtG clone with fake demand introduced by forced rotation. Also I can't imagine how anyone would want to play Empire where Vader or Soontir get rotated out.

2) Whole selling point of X-Wing 2.0 was its app and possibility of easier fixing balance on the fly. As it stands FFG introduced app but instantly tries to shove down new, terrible format down my throat. I wouldn't mind this if this abomination didn't influence another format and X-Wing community but as it stands Hyperspace is forced on bread'n'butter types of events in X-Wing, namely Regionals.

1) It's getting old, having to explain this over and over again but a game that constantly expands inevitably has power creep issues. It's unavoidable. I consider rotation mutually beneficial to players and FFG because it keeps the format manageable and it's a sustainable business model so they keep producing the game. I know I'm in the minority with this position but I couldn't care less if Vader or Soontir or anyone else was in the game as long as the game was balanced and fun. Again, I know I'm in the minority but I couldn't give two ***** about lore.

2) That's only partially true. They made it clear that they wanted to fix mechanics and add formats. Maybe to you, that's all 2.0 is. That's hardly true for everybody. The premier event format is Extended. Extended is still the primary format. I do sympathize with your complaint that all Hyperspace trials are Hyperspace format. They should have left the event names what they were and the format for regionals could rotate.

I will wholeheartedly agree that FFGs transition to 2.0 has been poorly communicated and executed but I don't think Hyperspace format is one of their bad decisions. I think it's essential to the longevity of any expanding game.

11 minutes ago, Jeff Wilder said:

Of what, exactly? Of the basics of buying, selling, and trading among gamers? Really?

Of the game taking a hit? The numbers do vary from region to region, but they've been way down overall. Like I said, they're recovering, but they didn't need to drop as much as they did. I personally know a dozen players or more who quit -- and haven't returned -- because of the way FFG did the Conversion Kits.

Explain please.

The conversion kits are glorious and each gamer around here was amazed how much material was inside for their price.

Only downside i saw was splitting factions at the same time so some people had to get like 5 different conversion kits

11 minutes ago, Jeff Wilder said:

Of what, exactly? Of the basics of buying, selling, and trading among gamers? Really?

Of the game taking a hit? The numbers do vary from region to region, but they've been way down overall. Like I said, they're recovering, but they didn't need to drop as much as they did. I personally know a dozen players or more who quit -- and haven't returned -- because of the way FFG did the Conversion Kits.

If FFG had broken out the kits individually or increased the amount of cardboard in them, it would have increased the cost. If the cost went up, the price would have gone up, most people would have still bought in, but some would have left. This is basic economics.

With what actually occurred, you had some people leave because they were tired of the game, some leave because they weren't going to buy into the new game regardless of how it was handled, and some who would have bought in if the kits were done differently. Only this third group is really relevant to the kit discussion.

What I'm asking, then, is for evidence that doing the kits differently would have been better as far as player numbers are concerned. That is, evidence that the number of players who would have stayed in had the kits been done differently is greater than the number of players who would have quit over a higher pricetag.

4 minutes ago, Rangor said:

Explain please.

Explain what?

Quote

The conversion kits are glorious and each gamer around here was amazed how much material was inside for their price.

Yeah? And how much cardboard was thrown away because it was useless, and could neither be traded nor sold?

Be clear: I'm not making a comment on the existence of Conversion Kits (they were absolutely necessary to avoid the death of the game), nor on the amount of content. What I'm talking about is the way FFG chose to present that content ... in a way that made it extremely likely that most players with existing collections either had (a) way too much cardboard, or (b) nowhere near enough cardboard ... without any way to meaningfully sell or trade to match their collections and recoup costs.

If each ship "conversion" were an actual conversion, there would have been almost zero waste of Conversion Kit contents, and far, far more people would have ended up with product to match their existing collections.

3 minutes ago, Jeff Wilder said:

If each ship "conversion" were an actual conversion, there would have been almost zero waste of Conversion Kit contents, and far, far more people would have ended up with product to match their existing collections.

For some folks, sure. Personally, I would have just ended up with even more wasted cardboard that would have either been thrown away or collected dust.

2 minutes ago, JJ48 said:

If FFG had broken out the kits individually or increased the amount of cardboard in them, it would have increased the cost. If the cost went up, the price would have gone up, most people would have still bought in, but some would have left. This is basic economics.

The price would have gone up, yeah, but -- and I'm now aware you're ignoring this deliberately at this point, which is incredibly dishonest -- but people could have bought, sold, and traded to match their collection. The overall cost per player would have likely been less.

Instead, people bought Conversion kits, used what they could, found it very difficult to buy, sell, or trade the remainder, and the remainder has gone to waste. (I had a huge collection, did not go crazy with Conversion Kits, and I have an entire shoebox of cardboard that nobody is willing to buy or trade for, because very little of it actually converts an existing ship. Net result, FFG sells more kits, costing players more money, and players are unhappy (and many left the game).

Just now, JJ48 said:

For some folks, sure. Personally, I would have just ended up with even more wasted cardboard that would have either been thrown away or collected dust.

Why? Because you wouldn't want to put in the effort to trade or sell it?

At least that would have been your choice and shortcoming.

14 hours ago, Kehl_Aecea said:

While our group is small and we've picked up more people, I know of two players that quit for different reasons. One sold his stuff due to hitting hard times and the other lost his **** mind when 2E was announced and tossed out all his ships and cards swearing off on buying anything FFG again. We'd only see him when X-Wing and Magic game nights overlapped and he's since been banned from the store for ripping up some kid's card after he lost a game. (dude is pushing middle aged... one of the saddest things I've ever witnessed)

13 hours ago, JJ48 said:

If what you say is accurate, it sounds like the second case wasn't that big a loss for your group as a whole.

Agreed. A guy of ANY age that does that stupidity, is IMO a welcome "LOSS" to your group..

Days since release of second edition: 206

Days the forums have gone without someone complaining about the conversion kits: 0

1 hour ago, Jeff Wilder said:

The price would have gone up, yeah, but -- and I'm now aware you're ignoring this deliberately at this point, which is incredibly dishonest -- but people could have bought, sold, and traded to match their collection. The overall cost per player would have likely been less.

I hear this argument the first time. I cant believe anyone would think even more but smaller conversation packages would make it any cheaper, while for everyone with basic knowledge of economics, its obvious its gonna be much more expensive for 99% of the players.

In a simplified model, the price is split between design (cardboard design, package design, optimized production process design) , production (people, machines, material), transport (again, people, machines, material) and sales (FFG, Stores, Customers).

In your assumption it should become cheaper, lets have a look out of these 12 factors, which one is getting cheaper with diversatile conversion kits.

Just one would become lower effort in total, equalizing lower prize, and thats production material.

All 11 other factors go up in effort. For example, its much more complicated to design a production process around 30 products then 5. So you have more downtimes, quality teams need need to check more carefully ...)

I dont think the lower material price of paper and plastics used for the FFG products would have made it in the same amount cheaper to produce the more complicated production processes made it more expensive if you only went up from 5 to 30 products. Let alone 5 to 100... And thats just one out of 11 simplified factors going more expensive.

No, i cant imangine more then 1% of the people getting a cheaper way to converse with a higher diversity of conversion kits.

So i still cannot follow your argument.

Most players will use between 30 and 60% of the conversion kit they bought.

If you split conversion packeges in a way that you get a theoretical 5th, so 20% of the actual kit, meaning the complexity of design, production, transport and sales goes up by factor 5, you would pay around 80% of an actual conversion kit for it.

So that normal players pay between 160% and 240% of what they paid for the actual conversion kits.

You cannot get these 60% to 140% back with private sales, not talking about the personal effort you had to put into selling...

1 hour ago, Jeff Wilder said:

Of the game taking a hit? The numbers do vary from region to region, but they've been way down overall. Like I said, they're recovering, but they didn't need to drop as much as they did.

An alternative or additional explanation for the numbers dropping could be that 2.0 was announced too far in advance.

Many gamers are creatures of habit. If anything breaks their routine, they look for an alternative to fill the freed spot. There was a lot wild, false and offputting speculation before 2.0 dropped. And then 2.0 also took a bit time to take off, especially with the two formats.

I'm not saying that the conversion kits were no factor. But I would bet that it contributed less than the early announcement, lack of continuous play during the Summer (May to September!) and the usual, bad communication by FFG.

edit: and PS, don't get too dragged down by the new CommanderKaine copy...

39 minutes ago, GreenDragoon said:

An alternative or additional explanation for the numbers dropping could be that 2.0 was announced too far in advance.

I actually tracked who was signed up for a trading co-op, who wanted to sign up (but didn't, once it became obvious trading wouldn't work), and who quit, mostly because of that.

It was significant.

I know Jeff is tired of explaining the same deficiency of the conversion kits again and again, so he's abbreviating his explanation, but some of you are misunderstanding his point.

As far as I can remember, it goes like this:

Tie Interceptors: you got 3 dials and 3 base tokens (Soontir+Sabre; Turr+Alpha; Alpha+Sabre), but only 2 pilot cards for each of the generics. If you own 2 Interceptors you have a spare dial and nothing else you can trade away. If you own 3 Interceptors, you need another copy of each of the generic pilot cards plus an extra Alpha+Sabre base token. If you own 1 Interceptor, you can trade away 1 of your 2 spare dials, the 3rd base token, and one of each generic pilot card - but the only person who would want this kit would be someone with 3 or more Interceptors who had already bought a conversion kit. Someone without a kit, who merely wanted to buy the bits for their single Interceptor couldn't use these spares usefully.

Why was there a 3rd dial in the first place?

Meanwhile, there were other imbalances all over the kits. 4 dials for Tie Fighter, 4 pilot cards for each generic, 4 sides of base tokens for each generic: this was good, if you owned 4 Tie Fighters. Meanwhile, the Z95s (both versions) got 4 dials but only 3 pilot cards and 3 base token sides for each generic. Why? Meanwhile, the M3A for Scum got 4 dials and 4 Tansarii Veteran Pilot cards, but only 2 base tokens for those 4 cards!

FFG sells single ships with: 1 dial, 2 base tokens, 1 of each pilot card. They have done this since the game came out, it's what everyone expects to see in an expansion. If they had followed this pattern within the conversion kits, every dial would convert one ship. It would have been easy to trade a set of bits for each ship. Eg suppose the kits have the right amount of bits to convert 2 A-Wings. Player A has 5 A-Wings, Player B has 1. Each player B can sell a complete spare set to Player A. 2 dials for K-Wings could have meant a player with only one K-Wing could sell the spares to a player with 3 and both would be happy.

No wastage, no excess bits. The total amount of 'stuff' in each kit could remain the same - just in the correct proportions. Instead, there are too many dials for most ships compared to base tokens and pilot cards.

The Resistance and FO kits were far better designed - they have pretty much the correct amount of each component for most ships.

Communication was then lacking - until the first kits were actually opened, no-one knew that those '3 dials' actually only convert 2 ships. Hence a lot of the belly-aching and (some of the) rage-quitting.

tl;dr: there was a much better way to make the kits and far more people could have been happy about it.

Sorry if I am rehashing old ground. I feel like the kits mainly benefited more casual players and those who routinely flew Aces. If you were a Swarm player, or had a lot of stuff for another reason, then you might need to buy multiple kits, which is not cool. I speak as what I feel is the target audience.

8 minutes ago, Gilarius said:

I know Jeff is tired of explaining the same deficiency of the conversion kits again and again, so he's abbreviating his explanation, but some of you are misunderstanding his point.

As far as I can remeber..... The total amount of 'stuff' in each kit could remain the same - just in the correct proportions. Instead, there are too many dials for most ships compared to base tokens and pilot cards.

The Resistance and FO kits were far better designed - they have pretty much the correct amount of each component for most ships.

Communication was then lacking - until the first kits were actually opened, no-one knew that those '3 dials' actually only convert 2 ships. Hence a lot of the belly-aching and (some of the) rage-quitting.

tl;dr: there was a much better way to make the kits and far more people could have been happy about it.

Good summary.

But also stupid stuff like double Ghost and double Decimator in the kits. I personally never seen anybody flying such a list. Of course someone somewhere wants to fly this, the ones actually interested in flying could have easily traded in for the second Deci if the kits had had only one. Now could you not meaningful trade away any Ghost or Deci stuff when not posessing and wanting the ship yourself, as everyone had already stuff for fielding 2. Wasted space, which better would have been filled with snubfighters which are much more likely to be fielded in triplets than large ship fielded in dublettes. Esp. as large bases are weak in 2.0 (what I like), but don't try tell me FFG did not know that when defining conversion kit content.

And now the Deci is already coming again as rerelease. I used all its cardboard for modding ships, as I do not possess a Deci. The cards were just going straight to recycling paper, what a waste.

In our local club we have kids playing. We adults with more hobby money had a plan for exchanging our expected excess stuff to keep the financial blow as small as possible for them. Of course, the way the kits were organised almost no trades did work, one kid almost quit, as it was a steep investment to convert. Only some of us helping out prevented that.

9 minutes ago, Nohwear said:

Sorry if I am rehashing old ground. I feel like the kits mainly benefited more casual players and those who routinely flew Aces. If you were a Swarm player, or had a lot of stuff for another reason, then you might need to buy multiple kits, which is not cool. I speak as what I feel is the target audience.

The conversion kits didn’t cater to anyone.

Casual players with smaller, scattered selections of ships ended up paying the full price of the conversion kits to cover some of their ships while also making them pay for useless cardboard for ships they didn’t have. Also, if they had some special affection for a specific ship, it was unlikely they had that ship covered with a single purchase.

The more dedicated players who had full or near full collections needed to buy multiple conversion kits to cover their collection, and also ended up with dead cardboard after all of the purchases.

Now I understand there was a need to give SOME type of kit, but making it a mishmash that would cover only some imaginary, perfectly in between the two extremes collection, it served no one perfectly.

hmm, some interesting reasons for players quitting, many linked to the way FFG handled the conversion kits. For me the kits were hit and miss. good and bad. i have a decent collection of rebels, imperials and scum and only opted to convert scum initially but then went halves in a rebel conversion kit as my backup faction and my hand was kinda forced as it was the only way to get the Hawk-290 title. Overall though I count myself pretty lucky there was enough there to work with between those 1.5 kits.

its a guessing game as ti what FFG has planned for further 'patches' with the upcoming upgrade kits. Card board, Pilots and dials. How they package those pilots will be vital. New pilots and more generics as a minimum requirement for me.

For me personally my interest in the game has lessoned a bit. Im hungry for some new scum content. The recent points adjustment has shuffled some options but im feeling like im in a holding pattern with scum (still list building but not as excited as i was 2 months ago).

For the most part, I bought at least one of everything, and the conversion kits all covered what I had plus extra. So I think it was pretty good for what they did.

6 hours ago, Jeff Wilder said:

-- and I'm now aware you're ignoring this deliberately at this point, which is incredibly dishonest --

So because you don't understand someone's point, you assume they're being dishonest?

4 hours ago, Jeff Wilder said:

I actually tracked who was signed up for a trading co-op, who wanted to sign up (but didn't, once it became obvious trading wouldn't work), and who quit, mostly because of that.

It was significant.

Did you actually figure out if it could have worked with fewer kits than people ended up buying, or did you just track interest? No one's saying people weren't interested; I'm just saying I doubt it would have ended up being any cheaper on the whole.

Also, how do you define "significant"? Like, a sizable portion of the X-Wing playerbase, or just more than a couple people?

4 hours ago, Gilarius said:

I know Jeff is tired of explaining the same deficiency of the conversion kits again and again, so he's abbreviating his explanation, but some of you are misunderstanding his point.

As far as I can remember, it goes like this:

Tie Interceptors: you got 3 dials and 3 base tokens (Soontir+Sabre; Turr+Alpha; Alpha+Sabre), but only 2 pilot cards for each of the generics. If you own 2 Interceptors you have a spare dial and nothing else you can trade away. If you own 3 Interceptors, you need another copy of each of the generic pilot cards plus an extra Alpha+Sabre base token. If you own 1 Interceptor, you can trade away 1 of your 2 spare dials, the 3rd base token, and one of each generic pilot card - but the only person who would want this kit would be someone with 3 or more Interceptors who had already bought a conversion kit. Someone without a kit, who merely wanted to buy the bits for their single Interceptor couldn't use these spares usefully.

Why was there a 3rd dial in the first place?

Meanwhile, there were other imbalances all over the kits. 4 dials for Tie Fighter, 4 pilot cards for each generic, 4 sides of base tokens for each generic: this was good, if you owned 4 Tie Fighters. Meanwhile, the Z95s (both versions) got 4 dials but only 3 pilot cards and 3 base token sides for each generic. Why? Meanwhile, the M3A for Scum got 4 dials and 4 Tansarii Veteran Pilot cards, but only 2 base tokens for those 4 cards!

FFG sells single ships with: 1 dial, 2 base tokens, 1 of each pilot card. They have done this since the game came out, it's what everyone expects to see in an expansion. If they had followed this pattern within the conversion kits, every dial would convert one ship. It would have been easy to trade a set of bits for each ship. Eg suppose the kits have the right amount of bits to convert 2 A-Wings. Player A has 5 A-Wings, Player B has 1. Each player B can sell a complete spare set to Player A. 2 dials for K-Wings could have meant a player with only one K-Wing could sell the spares to a player with 3 and both would be happy.

No wastage, no excess bits. The total amount of 'stuff' in each kit could remain the same - just in the correct proportions. Instead, there are too many dials for most ships compared to base tokens and pilot cards.

The Resistance and FO kits were far better designed - they have pretty much the correct amount of each component for most ships.

Communication was then lacking - until the first kits were actually opened, no-one knew that those '3 dials' actually only convert 2 ships. Hence a lot of the belly-aching and (some of the) rage-quitting.

tl;dr: there was a much better way to make the kits and far more people could have been happy about it.

There are some cases where it works out, but there are also cases where I'm not as convinced. My guess is that there will be many ships that are in high demand, and many ships that are in high supply, and very little overlap between the two. If many Imp players want to be able to do a full TIE swarm, they'll need two kits. But they won't really be able to share with other Imps, unless those Imps don't want any extra TIE Fighters themselves. And even if they could split a third kit so that each got, say, 6 TIEs, what about the extra pieces neither of them want? Sure, there may be a small demand for extra Decimators, but enough to buy up all the extra components people would have? I doubt it.

In theory, many people would support trading and selling components. In practice, I think the people who want oddball stuff would be vastly outnumbered by the people who want something closer to the meta, and you'd have less popular ships still being thrown out while people bought enough kits to cover the more popular ships.

Not to mention that this really only works in a sizable community with good communication. Players in smaller groups (such as three people who each focus on a different faction) who aren't active in the online community would end up paying for the extra cardboard and packaging without having any real way to get something useful for it. Are there ways to make it work? Sure. But the current way works too. What I'm not convinced of is that the gains over the current system would be significant enough to justify the much, much higher complexity involved.

3 hours ago, Managarmr said:

Good summary.

But also stupid stuff like double Ghost and double Decimator in the kits. I personally never seen anybody flying such a list.

I've seen double Decimators a couple times. Looks like a decent list, though I still prefer my Lambdas.

3 hours ago, Kdubb said:

The conversion kits didn’t cater to anyone.

Casual players with smaller, scattered selections of ships ended up paying the full price of the conversion kits to cover some of their ships while also making them pay for useless cardboard for ships they didn’t have. Also, if they had some special affection for a specific ship, it was unlikely they had that ship covered with a single purchase.

The more dedicated players who had full or near full collections needed to buy multiple conversion kits to cover their collection, and also ended up with dead cardboard after all of the purchases.

Now I understand there was a need to give SOME type of kit, but making it a mishmash that would cover only some imaginary, perfectly in between the two extremes collection, it served no one perfectly.

Really? I had one of every product except the Raider Corvette, and the kits covered my collection quite nicely. Maybe a couple extras pieces of cardboard here and there, but all in all, pretty good coverage.

The game is significantly smaller in my area than it was at the height of X-wing, but that's a lot less to do with 2nd edition, which has brought people back. The conversion kits were never the sole reason a person quit, but gave most an out that they were really already looking for.

I think the only way to make everyone happy with conversion kits would have been to give blank cardboard bases with blanks for people to fill in whatever ships they wanted. They were more successful with the later ones, not because they had learned anything but because they were only dealing with a only handful of ships for each of those factions. For those saying it was a mistake to include two of the big ship, I can imagine there would have been a huge uproar if they only included one since a lot of people own more than one and there were a lot of double big ship lists in 1e. 2e hasn't seen that, but not sure they could know for sure.

I've purchased one of each kit and have never felt like I lacked anything to build any of the lists I want, even though it didn't convert my entire collection. I also haven't ever really played a swarm since 1st edition crack swarm (and even then I may have only been bringing 4+shuttle -- or was it 5?). I built but didn't fly a list with 4 interceptors, I guess, but I had people ready to lend me stuff. My point is, I guess it might be different depending on the lists you like to fly, but the interceptor list was the first time I came close to not having what I wanted from just one kit.

11 hours ago, Kdubb said:

I’ve been thinking about buying back in and trying to get a new group of friends into the game with me, but similar to my brother and brother in law, I’m finding the new introduced mechanics since I left to be intimidating, and it’s likely I’ll just be a casual lurker from here on out.

You should at least try things out on Vassal if you haven't yet.

6 hours ago, GreenDragoon said:

An alternative or additional explanation for the numbers dropping could be that 2.0 was announced too far in advance.

This was the issue here. It cost us probably 1/3 of our regular players. We've gained maybe one new player since 2.0 came out.

Our 1.0 numbers averaged 16 at tournaments with upto 20 on a casual night. Right now we get 18+ per tournament depending on the venue. Casual nights 14-18 average for the night I go (3 nights in the city)

BUT.... Everyone did convert locally. But by January we had lost 2 and February a couple more. Long time players. Don't know why the long time, a core member of the community, left... But haven't heard from him since. Another hasn't been out in over a month, but he was so dice mad he raged quit a few others are active on the local Facebook group, but lives changed and they haven't been able to make it out.

But for every 2 that have left 4 more come in. We got so many new players and good solid players that pretty much every game is solid competition. The biggest problem tho is that we are incrediby competitive and every tournament is just a blood bath that a few of us, myself included, are more down on casual night jank lists and no going to tournaments for the foreseeable future.