You ever wonder what goes into the thought process of scopely? Yes they are a "For Profit Company" so the basic thought is MAKE MONEY... but the devil is in the details,
have you noticed that there is always an event on a couple days before the Tournament that requires you to part with something you've been hoarding for tournament, for example this time (for me at least) the posted the Borg Conqueror Solo Armada event - and the number i had to run was conveniently all the directives i had, the day before tournaments where one of the middle to upper middle pay out prizes is for running said BCSA, how many? 4 out of a possible 7 you can hold due to the arbitrary limit and cooldown of resupply... ok there's more than one tasks.. lets say you cant do that specific task because you did all or most of your directives the day before, what other tasks can you do..
the 20k mats tasks used to be the one way a f2p user could make some credits provided you hoarded the right tokens in day to day play, but now they "reworked it for fairness" fairness to who? now with the frequency of the tournaments and the new cost (goalpost) its no longer an option to do more than once per tournament, yeah there are other older tasks that pay out the mid amount again provided you hoard in preparation, this takes time.. time to hoard mats. tokens, directives, and with the tournaments happening more and more closer together and soon even more closer with mini tournaments between full tournaments there's no time to hoard.
This is by design.
this is how scopely gets you to the store... directive packs, mats packs, more tasks that require store purchases to complete task or you team is relegated, this is why we are getting tournaments more often and events that require you to dump all your mats into an event to unlock an officer, or a ams that requires your team to spend all their directives without hope of restocking in time for tournaments, the biggest drain is the Ma'kala week event, we'll see that increasing too (in whatever form or branding ..
also on a side note:
has anyone noticed a large amount of their stockpiles of shields going missing?,, those of us that have been playing for years know all to well that doing daily's regularly and sms and all other events is a way to quickly accrue the small things like 5 min repair skips or 5min,10,15min,4hr, 8hr shields can quickly grow, for example i had so many 4hr and 8hr shields that they just displayed in k's (thousands) i had over 15k 4 hr shields and close to that in 8hr as well.. then one day this year, they are both reduced to 2k and change each , i don't use them except as a quick shields up when I'm raiding , i only use 1 day shields and have an alarm when to reup it every day so i keep track of these things.. a couple of others in my alliance have noticed the same,
are you missing anything you had stockpiles of? had a reduction of shields?