I care. I care about the game and its future. I've been a fan of the franchise since Elite released on the BBC and I've been a supporter of ED since it entered beta. On many occasions I've been accused of being a white knight for FD or a paid shill. So, perhaps, when someone like me expresses a concern, maybe, just maybe, there is an issue that is worth considering and not outright dismissing?
Latest CG, the clearest example of P2W in ED to date?
- Thread starter Agony_Aunt
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I care. I care about the game and its future. I've been a fan of the franchise since Elite released on the BBC and I've been a supporter of ED since it entered beta. On many occasions I've been accused of being a white knight for FD or a paid shill. So, perhaps, when someone like me expresses a concern, maybe, just maybe, there is an issue that is worth considering and not outright dismissing?
That's a very good question and one that has largely been made moot now by FD rolling it into the base game. But at the time, most definitely a huge P2W point, especially due to its impact on PvP, and its PvP where P2W becomes the most apparent and least defensible. In such situations defenders of the practice can't event say "But what are you winning?" like some sort of trump card, because in PvP you can point directly to PvP encounters and say "There, there is the win!"
Answer me plz
Did you buy teh panther clipper?
What has valuing my time got to do with it? The amount of credits I get for an activity has nothing to do with valuing my time. I value my time in enjoyment, not credits gained.
You don't need a big ship to get those exclusive rewards. You can get them in a sidewinder. The only thing you get with a bigger ship is more credits.
since there is no ' i've completed' elite, all you do by reducing grind loops temporarily by purchasing a ship is move your goal posts to higher values. You still end up grinding just as much. You now, just have an even higher, beyond necessary amount, of credits or whatever you were grinding. That's all you can do. So either you are spending the same or more amount of time playing as before or you are playing less.
The value of your time was decided when you chose to play a game that has one level of gameplay and one means of controlling progression. Nobody is getting more value for their time buying a ship unless they decided having the ship was the goal and they stop playing.
if the value of your time is important enough that you're questioning if it has value if someone is edging you out of a grind loop by a couple hundred tons of some pointless commodity per trip, then you are measuring your time's value against some imagined value other players have of their time. Measure based on your own interaction. It should not change based on what someone else can do.
This feels like some demand that if playing sucks for you, then it should be just as sucky for everyone or it devalues the experience for you. That's not how good games work. Blame the actual game mechanics if that's the case. The game should be fun, and someone skipping ahead to get something they would have had to play more to achieve should be something you feel sorry about them missing out on. Either way it shouldn't impact the value you got from your experience.
It really sounds like people against buying ships or even this cg while the ship is exclusive are really just not happy with the game mechanics the game has. And they ought to be unhappy with them. But the problem isn't the paid ship program. It's why you think the paid ship has such an advantage when you know the activity of any other players in the game really doesn't matter.
Universal access to one, but not the other, is a difference.
Yes I can, because one is the topic of this thread and the other has been expounded upon elsewhere. One can easily look up my posts on that topic and reply to them where appropriate. I think you'd probably find little to argue with, but the devil is in the details.
The level of balance, fairness, continuity, consistency, coherency, contextuality and pay-to-winness are not binary either-or things.
I don't think this game has or ever will be especially fair. However, I absolutely do think it has been more fair in the past and that it can get much worse.
I does both, rather overtly, as far as I am concerned.
It doesn't need to enable something that was impossible before to skew things against those who have not paid. I don't want more grinding for everyone who doesn't pay. I want less grinding for everyone, irrespective of what they've paid. I want a universal common denominator, even if I have to personally sacrifice advantages I have already paid for.
As for the faceless aspect, that's your own projection and is neither here nor there. I am tolerant of abstract gameplay, as long as everyone is playing by the same set of rules. I don't need to encounter my foes face to face. I'd like to and I'm infinitely tolerant of direct opposition--indeed it tends to give my CMDR a significant edge--but the game exists without it. Stuff that occurs in a different mode, or when my CMDR isn't there, still occurs and still has a profound impact upon my gameplay.
That's a strange thing to conflate with being upset that Frontier is selling a different, better, set of rules while incentivizing purchases by continuing to undermine the base game.
I applaud those who accomplish the same or more work, with equal or lesser effort, than my CMDR can. Knowledge of how these mechanisms interact and organizational efficiency are the overriding skills that actively manipulating the BGS tests. My problem is with the non-contextual interjection of resources and time savers that skew this contest. Infinite, instantaneous, ships for Arx don't come from contextual gameplay or have any contextual explanation. They reduce verisimilitude. They are clearly advantageous in some fairly common scenarios. They might be the deciding factor in close contests. They don't need to be significant weights to tip the scales and they're wholly out of place in any case.
It does matter. I want those cargo racks and people with the new paid ship are going to edge me out because I'm still using a cutter
Yea, they totally make space trucking something to somewhere for some reason nobody will remember or care about totally the deciding factor. Might as well just give up if you dont have them.
Indeed.
That's why Frontier, knowing fully well that Elite is, in it's core, a single player off-line game, provided us with Solo and Groups.
So this "everybody is everyone else's content" goes only for Open.
It seems to me that this applies to you and this topic too..
To me it's a game and I don't care if other use a shortcut to make their gameplay easier...with the caveat that this is also a multiplayer only game and everyone should be on the same set of rules. Contextless shortcuts for some, even for me and not others, make my experience worse.
I don't want the fact that I can afford to spend half of my modest gross income on entertainment to allow me an advantage over Agony Aunt's PMF if we fight over control of a system of historical importance to my CMDR, but I shouldn't have to handicap myself either. The only way for this to be reconciled would be for Frontier to find a less crappy monetization route.
The game doesn't even work offline.
Elite: Dangerous is, at it's core, a persistent world MMO. So, it goes for every mode where we can interact, which is all of them, because most of the interactions in this game are indirect and abstract via the BGS, pseudoeconomy, PP, and even the galaxy map.
There are systems that are the way they are because my CMDR flipped them, or screwed something up and caused someone else to take notice and fortify them against his sloppy machinations. There are also probably hundreds of systems in the southern half of the galaxy that have nothing scanned in them, except the water worlds, which also have my CMDR's name plastered on them. Anyone who passes through any of these systems, or even pays close enough attention to the map, is the beneficiary of my content. Likewise, simply going where other CMDRs have ever been generally imposes some of their content upon me.
Let's not assume that P2W = P2A, nor it is equals to P2SST (SaveSomeTime). Personally, I'm even perfectly fine with me participating in pure P2W, as long as other people not gluing to me wrong motives for that participation.
Yes, it is. You are paying for tastier bread, comfy car(s), better food and more involving entertainment, why to consider anything wrong / dishonest when same done by "devs".
Some people trying as hard as possible to explain that reasoning and motives are different, but in the end is it, perhaps, better to spend that time in ED then for unnecessary explanation. If I win anything, would you please explain from who exactly I won that anything and what you exactly loosed to so "winning" me??
Basically: I've purchased PCII Stellar, at the moment enjoying flying it and do not feel any guilt nor shame for doing so. And even less care how it is called by people boycotting ARX ships.
Please enjoy your boycotting while I'm enjoying flying PCII. Did I paid to win my enjoyment? No!!! Did I paid to have my enjoyment? Yes, most likely, yes. Can you feel the difference? Doesn't matter really... it's a very cute ship to fly. Auto launch.
Pay to win in a nutshell
Does the elite 3rd party api access provide universal access to all and do we all have our own platforms to gather make use of it and develop programs that can easily give us advantages that players of the game dont have? No it is not universally accessible. Yes it does provide a subset of players the potential to take advantage. It has no in-game reason for existing yet it does. Has it added to some cumulative unfairness ? No. Because it doesn't change the experience for the supposed victims any more than modes already introduced.
Is buying exclusive ships unfair, yes. But it doesn't add to the existing unfairness.
Is it pay to win? No. You can't win in elite. It's an endless cycle of doing the same things...what anyone else does doesn't change what you can do. Your imagined game roleplaying not withstanding.
No it hasn't been more fair. As mentioned previously buying your way to content early has been a thing since horizons, which was around a year after release. The addition of new content to buy early changes nothing.
Then what advantage does this give against you? How can you differentiate opposition based soley on someone's purchase of a ship from any number of other available options to provide advantages to your opposition? You cant. You can only assume. Since your gameplay that's being disadvantaged is in your head, you are free to perceive them however you want. But i see no difference between someone doing something in the game with a purchased ship, or with more time than me or with better external tools than me or with more friends than me or with a cheat engine...all behind the black box of modes and p2p networking that makes them all equally unverifiable. So equally unfair and equally pointless to be upset about.
Nobody in this game has ever been playing by the same set of rules. You choose your rules, whether that's open only or not or role playing or no thind party tools, only playing certain days of the week so missing timed events, etc.. You have the same choice to buy a pc early as anyone else. The same choice players had with horizons and early access to other ships and paid updates.
This is a game where people drop hundreds of usd on hotas and vr setups and new gpu's to brute force the engine into not stuttering. They're not charging obscene amounts for some exclusive cap ship. 20 bucks is pretty universally accessible to someone playing this game, and if you dont think it's worth it, you're only out a couple hundred tons of the exciting and fun role of space trucker for a couple months.
It's not a contest. There is no winning in elite. There's no finish line. There's nothing someone else can do with some temporarily exclusive ship that you can't do...no gameplay you are excluded from. You cannot win no matter how much you pay...and nothing anyone else does can impact your gameplay unless you choose to want it to.
So this paid ship is a non-issue. On the list of things it makes unbalanced or unfair, the fact that it's temporarily exclusive doesn't rank. I'd be much more concerned with how its existance will lead to the further perceived unbalancing of anything involving hauling. Which will get combat pilots to demand increased payouts and so on. Not that one concern negates the other, but that one is legitimate and would impact everyone (as it has happened before). Exclusive paid content is almost as old as the game is. Then, so is income inflation..,which is why i dont think anything related to the pc release matters.
Pay 20 bucks. Get it. Or dont. It doesn't matter either way. That's been the elite way from the start.
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Once again, no, they are not. The floor for getting that second set of cargo racks is currently 2,186 tons. Are you telling me you can't deliver that much in a Cutter? Honestly, even if does manage to run for the full month, I don't think the 75% mark will get above 10K. And even if it reaches twice that, it'll still be totally achievable without paying real money for a higher capacity ship.
You don't have to pay a monthly subscription to play the game. They have to make money on this somehow to keep it running and to develop new content. It isn't run on unicorn giggles and kitten squeeches. My apologies if that comes off snarky, but personally I'm not sure that people who whinge ever on and on about "pay to win" in a game that is free to play ever stop to consider that it doesn't run on magic. Please stop to consider this. Maybe look at it this way: the people who are willing to fork over actual money to get early access to a ship in a game that you apparently enjoy are helping to fuel further development of that game so that you can continue to enjoy it.
Incidentally, "Pay to Win" is actually a PvP term where some strictly PvP games do charge exorbitant prices for items that can only be purchased with actual money that give players a decidedly lopsided advantage against players who cannot afford it or who refuse to pay absurd prices for the gear. It does not apply to games like ED where you pay a reasonable amount for early access to a ship that gives no actual advantage over other players.