As a concerned player who loves the game and doesn't want to quit, I'm writing you to ask you to change your behavior, before you lose too many customers. You may not know me, but I'm a light spender who has invested a lot of my personal time in improving the wiki for the game and helping a lot of players on Discord learn the game (many of whom have gone on to spend quite a bit of money). I am also uncomfortable recommending the game right now, or spending any money, because of recent changes that have led me to question whether I will continue playing if things don't change by December.

Many others feel the way I do, and I'm doing my best here to help you hear our needs in a clear way. We understand you need to make money to support the game, but there is a delicate balance between increasing revenue and driving away customers. Currently we believe you're getting this balance seriously wrong. Many people were attracted to this game precisely because you'd been doing a good job at this balance, and we're concerned that this is no longer the case.

We hoped to be excited this month about the anniversary, and instead we're depressed about the state of the game. The freebies announced for the anniversary are nice, but they are temporary, and we're more concerned about the long term.

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Here are some primary concerns that we would really like you to address:

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1) Arbitrary unit limits in EX content

This one is an extremely high priority for me- I will likely stop playing in December if this continues as it violates my primary principle of games (don't subvert playability of PvE content to force people to spend money, i.e. PvE should not be p2w). Arbitrary unit limits on EX content don't make the content more fun or add difficulty in a fun way- instead they force people to follow cookie cutter strategies and send a message to players that they must spend to have fun. You can claim it's about difficulty, but adding units like Roxy and Uzuma to the allowed list and including very few older farmable units makes it very obvious the reason reason is to push people to feel like they have to spend.

These unit limits need to be removed. If you want to add difficulty, do it via challenges that aren't so arbitrary, such as element or damage type (preferably on the missions, not the quest as a whole). Don't send "buy more gems" signals through the EX content.

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2) Loss of 3 step guarantee on free gem banners

This is a very concerning step for players of all kinds, but especially free and light spenders who make up quite a large part of your game community. These people may not spend as much, but without them the community would be much emptier and the whales would slowly drift away. As someone who buys pact regularly each month, I am not sure there's really any point in buying it without these 3 step guarantees. Even if they are present for non-limited units, but not for collaboration units, it defeats the point, as those are the ones people save their gems for.

It's unclear at this time if this missing 3 step guarantee is just for the Edward banner or will continue for future banners. The last time I remember us not getting one was for Siegfried, but we knew we'd have more chances at him in the future. But the lack of communication on this topic and other concerning trends of late has led us to suspect this might be the new normal, and if that's the case, it's more likely to drive light paying customers away than it is to bring in more whales for you. There's a video by one of our friendly whales describing the situation.

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3) Decreased value for paid gems on banners

This one affects me less personally as I have very few paid gems, although I have been saving them for a good banner, and so the direction this has gone has made me feel like there's less point in even having paid gems. Previously the paid gem banners were more expensive, but were primarily for guarantees. Now the price has been reduced, but the guarantees have been removed. The exception is the new 3 step guarantee paid banner for Edward/Toritoh, which apparently is supposed to be a replacement for the free gem guarantee but is far more expensive.

For people who are bigger spenders, they feel like their money has lost value in this game. It discourages the whales from spending, which presumably is the opposite of what you intended.

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4) Hard quest and soul coin shop release lag

The situation with hard quest releases is getting extremely concerning to players. I've been patient about the 3 hard quests a month thing, and even ok with some delays on popular units (like Shayna) because I figured that it was a temporary thing and that over time the hard quest releases would ramp up. Instead what we've seen is an even longer delay for Albea, skipping her over again to give us two completely uninteresting units to farm in the same month (Deneb and Margaret). We've also seen no increase in the hard quest release tempo as we get closer to the time when we might expect to see features like kaigan released. Even if Albea is released next month, that will be a 10 month delay from unit release to hard quest release. That's way too long, and it makes us worry about other important units like Mei Fang, Neica and Setsuna and how long we'll be waiting for them.

The soul coin shop in theory was there to allow veteran players to supplement the hard quests by buying units that aren't yet available. This used to work, but now almost all units in the soul coin shop are farmable. After 4 months of waiting for updates to the soul coin shop, we finally got 3 new units this week, but all 3 are farmable. This helps nothing. We need release of older non-farmable units in the shop, and ideally at least some of the older farmable units should be removed (I recommend just removing all 4 star units or giving them one dedicated slot).

The biggest issue here is lack of communication on the topic. Everyone is aware of how quickly Japan got to farm these units. This is not Japan so I don't expect the exact same design, but there should be a reasonable standard set of how quickly we can expect units to be in the soul coin shop and farmable. For example, I'd be fine with 2 months to soul coins, 4 months to hard quests if we at least knew that was how it worked.

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5) Poor handling/communication when something breaks

This is not a new issue, but it is one that repeatedly comes up and creates frustration. For example, when the gun and sword drops in The Rendezvous EX were mysteriously nerfed, we heard no communication at the time. We just got compensation for this issue today, but there are a lot of players who were extremely frustrated by the situation and had to put in a bunch of extra time farming to get the drops, since they had no way of knowing that the compensation was coming. There's also the situation with the twin storm blades in the Veda shop, which were priced incorrectly and were not fixed in this week's update. It's possible that you might compensate people for the extra coins spent, but they would have to have the extra coins to buy the item in the first place, and they can't be sure they'll even get that compensation, so of course they're afraid to buy it.

We also had the ticket distribution for the shard campaign delayed twice, with no compensation for that delay, and no announcement of the second delay, just the items didn't show up till a day after the promised date.

In general the communication to the player base of major changes needs improving as well, as evidenced by the issues I already raised.

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6) Skin costs

I'm not the best person to convey this issue because I personally don't have much interest in paying for skins, but a lot of the player base is particularly interested in skins. There have been a lot of concerns raised about the way skins are distributed and that it's significantly worse than how it was handled in Japan. The original skins that are being offered via banners are frustrating people because they're more expensive than people are willing to spend for them (especially relative to what JP pays), and because they can't even ensure they get the skin they want. They would rather have the option to buy the skins directly for a more reasonable cost.

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7) Cheaters

Another rampant issue that many have voiced is the amount of cheaters that plague the game in both PvP and in multiplayer. In terms of PvP, there have been a multitude of examples in both AI PvP and in live PvP where i.e. the enemy team has multiple attacks in one turn or multiple units beyond the restricted amount. This causes many heavy/light spenders to reconsider their spending amount if cheaters will just "out-do" them with illegal coding.

Furthermore, a few have had issues with cheaters in multiplayer. It has been voiced many times that individuals have been temporarily banned for partying unknowingly with cheaters. While these individuals have had their bans removed over quite some time, they have received little to no compensation for their missed in game time.