Yeah that would be fine except multiple people upthread explained why the ARX ships are not a competitive advantage.Pay to win doesn't mean a literal winner screen pops upit means buying in game advantages to competitive gameplay.
It's great to be back but I have a big concern
- Thread starter Refreshing Truth
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Or for even less effort - provided you have friends:
- your friends get a bunch of 50 million wing missions to completion but not yet handed in
- when you log in for the first time, they share them with you
- you now have 300 million credits without even leaving the station
Regarding the exo biology to make money fast, it's not realistic for a new player to discover that early on, perhaps like you say if they're specifically interested about exploration and read about it in the codex they might discover it, otherwise the game has essentially hidden it from all the other missions and playstyles presented to the player first which 'feel' more important due to menus and missions, exo bio appears where? as a desk in some on foot stations where the npc just says hand stuff in here? If they watch a YouTube guide or whatever then they might learn its more profitable vs other stuff but otherwise yeah it's mostly meta gaming that gets you too it when people tell you its super profitableSeriously, have you ever done exobiology? If you buy an artemis suit with your starter cash, FSS scan the Odyssey starting system and land your sidey on the moon with 7 bio signals, you can be at 20 million credits in a couple of hours (no need for a surface scanner, the place is covered with bios, buy one after cashing in your first haul).
Is it meta-gaming to do this? Only if you think not playing completely blind is meta-gaming. Learning FSS scanning and exobio early is entirely reasonable if 1) you're interested in exploration game loops or 2) you want money and have researched enough to know that exobiology is an excellent way of getting it.
Depends just what we mean by impressive, and who's being impressed. To me, big ships are nice, but much more impressive when fully engineered, and that is always going to be hard work. A fleet carrier is hard work. Good combat skills are extra hard work. Your own Orbis is ... a lot of work
The struggle for the first few million credits that characterised the game a decade ago is gone now, just a fact, and I can sympathise with regret for its passing. Maybe the epic scale of the colonisation game loop can go some way to replace it
ARX ships like the A class T9 are a pay to win competitive advantage as they allow you to be far more effective in:
PowerPlay
Colonisation
Background Sim manipulation/faction wars
It's undeniably pay to win
Is this how you play games
by exploiting past the entire game loop, that sounds miserable, I think this would ruin the game for 99% of new players, just to instantly have everything gives it no value.So no-one will use exo because it's hard to discover, but the T-9 is the meta because it lets you "win" at the even harder to discover BGS?
In PowerPlay you can have more influence in less time invested than someone in a starter ship.
In colonisation you can buy more colonies and build more stations/buildings faster with your increased hauling capacity vs a new player.
In faction warfare you can impact the faction influence faster with larger trade runs etc, quicker completion of missions etc than someone in a starter ship.
It's all very pay to win.
I have no idea what your point is sorry.
How? Its not faster between systems?
A standard T9 still has the same capacity as a Arx one?
Again rubbish
No its not
My Mrs started playing at Chrimbo, i gave her advice but no help, in two weeks she had reasonably engineered ships (easily on par with ARX ships), guardian modules unlocked and within a month Fed and Imp ranks completed.
The Arx ships give you a head start, nothing else and the standard ships are available for credits after a while.
O7
Anything that works in this game is "hard to discover" without getting advice from a seasoned player.
If your friend isn't playing completely blind, wants credits, but is still working on a second million Cr after 30 hours, then either they don't have earning credits as a goal (and that is very ok!) or they are meta-gaming (by your standards), but just doing it badly through bad advice or not following good advice.
You may disagree, but the wider point is still: credits now fall like rain in Scotland, the challenges and work have moved elsewhere, but they are still very much in the game.
For me engineering is the impressive part. I'd rather not waste time on upgrading a "worthless" ship i don't want, because i know i'll have to do it again when i get the ships i want. Might as well get the base quickly and work on improving it after and feeling the improvements from the upgrades.
I think that's the great thing about this, it pays for future development of the game and it gives us newcomers a shortcut to get into what we want.
And Elite can make it work because you're paying for a hull with some A rated components you can get in-game rather quickly. It's not like Star Citizen where if you own an F7A mk2 (Which i do) you can wipe most players in PvP without being the best.
Everyone mentions exbio for quick cash, but i don't want to get into that just yet, maybe in the future. But if i was forced to do that for quick cash, rather than hauling in my T9. I'd just have given up out of boredom. The more options the game can provide for starting players the better, some might stick around and even buy more stuff to pay for the continued development and upkeep, because in the end money is required.
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You say on one topic (exo) that no-one will use to a hard-to-discover hard-to-leverage system.
And then you say the T-9 is p2w because it helps leverage a hard-to-discover hard-to-leverage system (BGS). Which you also claim people won't use because...
Can't both be true?
1. Starting players cannot pledge right away.
2. A new player is not going to have the resources to finance colonisation.
3. Oh dear, this just reveals that what we have is another "unfair to bgs players" - add it to the solo vs open argument.
Seriously, the whole objection is rather minor. I am a new(ish) player and I thought I'd experiment with this "unbalancing" that pre-built ships might produce. So I cleared save and started again, making sure I was in the newbie paddling pool - I bought the Cobra MkV pre-built and went out totally wiping all the NPC missions etc (there were NO commanders in the starter zone to ask if they felt like experimenting with combat). The ship was OK for these pirates but in the CZs the ship was useless - feeble small pulse lasers.
Maybe the Python II or the Vulture (which has some engineering) would have been more "unbalancing" but I wasn't going to fork out for more ARXes to find out.
Suffice to say my pre-built MkV is benched.
It is not pay-to-win - it is "pay to regret the extra 16,480 ARX".
I'm just saying that worrying about "what if players paid to skip the early game" is a bit pointless when any existing player can give a new player an equal or significantly greater step up using entirely in-game tools, if they're getting one of their friends into the game and their friend isn't a "learn by trying and failing" sort.Is this how you play games
This isn't a game built around a fine balance of earnings, progression, levelling up, etc. - this is a game where all activities have essentially arbitrary payouts already and there isn't really anything to balance. And to the extent that there are competitive activities in game where ship build matters ... well, everyone in a squadron has a clear incentive to help the new member out by giving them some extra credits, maybe some Odyssey materials, etc. so that they can be effective faster, rather than watching them haul 4t a time in their Freewinder and get more Reinforcement merits for the system from the ship scans along the way than the actual cargo carried.
Do I personally play the game like that? No - I can never be bothered to min-max anything, I have a poor tolerance for either giving or receiving orders so organised group play rarely appeals, and besides I've been playing long enough that I already had more credits than I had any use for by the time Frontier introduced wing missions. But I am aware of what's possible in the game even if I'd never do it myself, and - perhaps because I have more credits than I have any use for - I don't have any particular concern for how anyone else gets theirs, so long as they're having fun and not outright cheating.
The game has pay to win mechanics as if you spend real money you can be a lot more effective in the pvp gameplay like PowerPlay territory control for example, I read through all your replies but I didn't find any of them to be reasonable counters for why a paying player doesn't have an advantage over a non paying one in many areas of the competitive game.
The late game A class engineered T9 is absolutely a pay to win ship that gives many big advantages in all the competitive areas of the game, I'm worried about what they'll add next, both the integrity of the competitiveness and the single player progression have been compromised by this.
Come now - we all know the Vulture is the best ship in the game
But it's horses for courses...
A Vulture will never be able to haul as much as a T-9 or Cutter...
Or jump as far as far as a DBX or Manalay...
Or deal as much damage as a Python mk2 or FDL...
It's still by far my favourite ship though
But more or less compromised than by
- Horizons giving those who purchased it access to engineering (tripling or more the power of their ships at almost everything)
- Odyssey purchasers having access to a whole set of BGS, Powerplay and other activities that are sometimes highly effective and not available to anyone else
- players being able to give or share resources with newer players
- players being able to look up large amounts of both walkthroughs and information on 3rd-party sites that they wouldn't normally have in-game access to
- existing competitive exploits being considered an ultra-low priority for bug fixing (the "wake scan" Powerplay exploit, for example)
If you're after a game that has strong single player progression and balanced inter-player competition then Elite Dangerous hasn't been that at any point in the last decade and isn't going to start now.