CALM DOWN FOLKS!
Sorry for shouting but this is already a non-starter. It's not going to happen, as I reported upthread
here. FD listened to their player community and ED is NOT going to go pay2win.
That link doesn't work for me. Just shows another post where you said it won't happen. No link to a dev post. There is a quote I saw was from the dev during the kickstarter though. But that said the opposite of what you're saying. Really, tbh FD is free to change their mind either way though.
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It's a business. And if they stop making money with new people buying the game, then I say, do whatever you need to do to make that money and keep the game going. I can't imagine a game that needs new players every day just to pay their staff and bills will last long. I mean, eventually new players stop showing up and you're left with those you already have who paid their buffet fee one time and expect you to feed them in perpetuity with no additional cost - sans an occasional cheap paint job that really people aren't going to all buy forever.
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That said, I don't think the micro-transactions will work either, but for a different reason than others have stated. I don't think it will be
enough money. People have this fear that everyone but themselves will just start shelling out 100s of dollars or something, but I believe that really it is a very small amount of people will who pay. This is why so many others in this thread who are pro no-transactions have argued that this model has not succeeded in the past in relation to a large game like this. Sure it works on Candy Crush or whatever low-cost-to-run phone game or cheapo computer game, but not on the scale of something like Elite, and not with their kinds of bills, and not with their kind of customers.
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For the long term survival of Elite, I believe that a subscription model would be best. I don't see how someone will pay the kind of overhead Elite must have with bobble-heads and paint jobs.
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I understand that they believe to be able to create new content for which people will pay, like being able to walk in ships or on planets but this is going to be years away. Unless it's really hurriedly and poorly done.
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No, I vote to find a way to fund the developers to the maximum, so they can pay the right people to do the right work. I think we may be seeing some of the effects in game already from the business model currently going - current state of missions, station variety, ship explosion bugs, prevalence of exploits and things that are worse than exploits, lack of NPC people in stations or any sort of dialogue at all with NPC, and goodness you all know the rest. All this is not because they're lazy or not good. I think they try very very hard, and they are skilled in the positions they were hired for, but I think we have people who were hired to do graphics or flight modeling also having to write for GalNet on the side, or write those missions, and they're simply overworked and not skilled in that specific area. More money would mean they could hire someone who could do Gal-Net, who could write meaningful missions - someone to fix the bugs, someone to create new station variety (more than 2) and maybe someone to look at the exploits. Heck, we all know they could use some more people to handle the tickets.
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Rather than complain about the current state of the game, we could help it by giving them the money they need to do what I imagine they hoped they could have done.
