They Lost Me

 For the past two years or so, I've been playing a mobile game called Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes. While it had its annoyances (heavily pushing in-app purchases, making the free-to-play [F2P] a long slog, requiring you to unlock characters after weeks or months of effort, then more weeks and months to level them up, etc.), it scratched an itch I've had since I was a kid. 

Growing up just barely on the good side of the poverty line, I never had many Star Wars action figures. The few that I did have were like gold to me. I loved Star Wars. Still do. And looking at the back of those figure cards, or through the Sears Holiday Catalogue (remember those?) made me wish that I had so many more. 

Well, this game definitely scratches the itch of the would-be figure collector I was as a kid. And yeah, I could be spending money on the actual figures now. But I'm too old to play with them (maybe?). And neither of my boys ever got into playing with action figures. They have a lot of my (and my brothers') old figures, but never played with them much. So I didn't have that excuse. And my wife wouldn't be too happy if I was filling up our apartment with unused toys, making it look like every cringe "nerd" channel on YouTube. 

So I found this game to be a pretty good substitute to that. I was happily going about part of my day grinding for characters, or gear, or completing challenges in the game. Building up my Mando squad. My Rebel squad. My Empire squad. Slowly, little by little, putting some effort into improving the Jedi squad. Pretty much ignoring the sequel trilogy characters as much as possible. 

But this week, the game went through a big update. Before, there was one game mode that had a F2P and P2P (pay-to-play) track. It wasn't the main part of the game. F2P was slow, but you could still make progress without handing over tons of money to EA every month. The new update makes the main game a distinction between F2P and P2P. And that looks like it will slow down that slow grind even more. It will be hard to gather the ridiculously varied types of resources and in-game currencies that are needed to unlock and improve characters. 

So, today I uninstalled the game. 

Am I going to miss it? Maybe for a while. I had quit the game last year after playing for a few months. Then I downloaded it again and was really enjoying having it back. But I think this time, I'm done for good. 

Subscription-based gaming is not something I think I'll ever be interested in.