Does FFG Do Enough?

A recent Discord discussion came about with the question “Does FFG do enough?” The two main areas where the question seemed most relevant were Communication and Organized Play.

Communication is the key to so many things in life. It’s how we interact with each other through spoken words, written content, body language and other non-verbal interactions. It is also how vendors interact with their customers. Vendor communication can be direct interaction with a single individual. More often than not it takes the form of broadcast messaging or advertising to get a piece of information out to a multitude of people.

There are of course the streams hosted by Xander Tabler that occur generally on Wednesdays, not every week but relatively often and with increasing frequency leading up to a new set’s release. Tyler Parrot answers questions on Twitter related to specific card interactions, rule decisions, and also relays small amounts of general information related to the card design process.

However, we are not fed much information from behind the scenes with the exception of spoiler season. The biggest portion of communicated content seems to come from the content creator community.

We know that Planetary Qualifier Season Zero has completed and that Season One should begin at some point with more scheduled events. That’s basically all we know about it.

We are aware of when and where the Galactic Championship will take place. Structure and prizing? Nobody has details about the event itself beyond it being a two day event with some byes for qualifier winners.

Store Showdowns for Twilight of the Republic? I’ve heard they are supposed to be in December, but that’s pretty much it so far.

Most of the information available related to Star Wars Unlimited comes from content creators. Maybe that is the model that FFG wants to use. Could be they are still trying to figure out the niche where their content should live without stepping on creators’ toes. Certainly some room for improvement related to communication and hopefully this is something FFG is aware of and working on behind the scenes.

The other aspect of “Does FFG do enough?” was related to prizing and support.

The Showdown prizing for Shadows of the Galaxy was obviously a stumble. Believe FFG more or less admitted this during one of their streams. Set 3 seems to be a bit more on track.

For future Showdowns, would be great to see only legendary characters of vehicles used for the top cut prizing and solid rare units for the participation. Even better would be a step beyond that. Push the envelope a little FFG. There could be hyperspace foil 30 point bases that are available nowhere else. More blacked out cards would certainly be enticing. Way outside the box would be metal, carved or etched leader “cards” that had the thickness of the hard cases that fit in the Gamegenic branded deck box slots.

Something that would potentially solve both aspects of the original question would be to fill in some of the organized play gaps. Announce now a schedule of events for 2025 that slot in between a Planetary Qualifier and the Galactic Championship. Make them two day events with large prizing. Thinking along the lines of a $10k or even $20k event series. Have Showdown winners qualify for the events and receive a bye for the first round or two. Release details and get the ELO ranking off the ground so that weekly events matter even for small amounts of points. Then have ranking help qualify people for large events like this $10k+ series and maybe the championship. Develop and share details of an invitational event for highly ranked people, and maybe content creators (admitted bias here). Get streaming done more officially on the main FFG channels and get some of the larger current live streamers to commentate and recap the events.

Clearly there is a ton of space available for FFG to expand. They of course went through some turmoil with the original organized play leader leaving the company. Things should settle and hopefully they will get better. The glass half empty folks will point to a bad track record with past card games from FFG. Hopefully, most of us are remaining cautiously optimistic even as we see other games with prize support equating to sometimes multiple hundreds of dollars for the winner of a showdown type event.

In the meantime though. What’s going on with the organized play packs? Mega drop off in the package branding for the third set. I guess room to improve here too.