Board Thread:Game Updates/@comment-26091666-20160112013256/@comment-26486243-20160118185308

Your idea for retention by using capital ships as bait only works if players are hardcore enough. Casuals will simply opt out of farming them altogether if they have either insufficient resources or time to farm the capital ships.

Kadokawa and DMM make money off selling ship slots. Ship slots are only bought when players feel they want to keep more ships than they can keep with their current slot allotment - otherwise they'd just scrap the ships they don't want. If baited with more capital ships they're more likely to spend on slots rather than scrap ships. If you give them DDs they don't give a shit about, they'll just scrap them leaving DMM/KDKW nothing.

On the other hand whales who want to earn all the ships but run out of reso will spend money directly on resources to get the ships they want.

Only way to know what earns more (and/or retains the playerbase more, from server access stats) is to test, and the past two events have been tests. If it turns out whalebaiting is more effective they'll bait whales more in future with capital drops. If it turns out slotbaiting is more effective they'll bait casuals more in future with capital rewards. It's pretty much just as simple as that.