As much as I loved this sale, it is the worst thing to ever happen to T5. Allowing people to get T5 premiums for 2015 GS is great, provided that the pilots have the skill required to play in T5. Not just anyone can hop into T5 and do well, it takes thousands of battles of practice in the lower tiers to become good enough to be a succesful T5 pilot.
Too many pilots of exploited this sale as a means to get to T5 as quickly as possible, allowing them to bypass hundreds, if not thousands of necessary battles they would have otherwise needed to do to get there, for just a few dollars. I had the misfortune of having a game where on my team of 5, 3 pilots had a T5 premium and the rest of their ships were T3 or lower. This is unacceptable. Allowing pilots to completely skip out on necessary battle time to become skilled enough to be able to compete in T5 is one of the worst things you can do to this game. This only reinforces my strong belief in two changes that need to be made to T5 PvP.
- Players cannot take ships lower than R10 into T5 games. It should work like PvE, they are blacked out and unable to be used in that battle.
- A minimum ship requirement needs to be implemented into all tiers. Implement a rule that at least 60% (roughly) of the ships in the previous tier have to be bought and have the synergy maxed with to unlock the next tier. T1 and T2 pilots (or T3 or T4 for that matter) should not be able to get a free “skip the grind, necessary skill training, the dedication, and gametime and go straight to T5” card. Pilots need to spend the time in the lower tiers (and middle tiers) to develop their skills and learn what it takes to become a good pilot that is competitive in T5.
A key thing I should point out with this is that premium ships won’t count toward the ships needed to unlock the next tier, but premiums of the next tier won’t be unlocked until the respective tier is unlocked. This way pilots will have to grind up some of the standard ships (they can still buy premiums) in order to progress in the tiers, thus forcing them to learn the game mechanics implemented in each tier (as each tier adds new modules, gamemodes, or possible gameplay styles).