Cool, My thread got necro'd.
I have yet to play a MMO game that didnt have "pay to win" even if only through the chinese farmers. Lets see SWG, lotro (pre F2P - Beryl shards were big business for the farmers), Age of Conan, WoW (right from the early days). Eve (officially supported), Vanguard, Everquest. All of them you could find other players who had paid real money for in game currency to enhance their game play.
This game has already had plenty of people who have got a big leg up from real life transactions, including Patrick here. I certainly fully intend to use my cobra with a long range drive right from the early days. I dont doubt at some point I will go back and try out the sidewinder, but I will be using both my kickstarter credits and ships and equipment. The chances of me buying further credits in game is low though. I enjoy figuring out how to make money in games way too much. If I do manage to squeeze in sufficent game play time I expect to be in the top 1% of "in game wealthy" players.
Now Im not saying Frontier will get it right. But I am saying I see it as completely possible to get it right. That cash for credits can both work for those who like that style of gameplay without ruining the game for those who prefer to progress the traditional way. In all the games above I never once found the fact that other people had paid for currency to detract from my own gaming experience.
As weve seen the cash for credits could mean £7000 for a panther clipper, a ship which will no doubt have astronomical insurance premiums. I "get" the idea that someone may spend £500 to tool up if they risk nothing in death. I dont see more than a tiny percentage of people paying £7000+ to tool up and risking huge amounts of credits for insurance if and when they get blown up.
I would hope that Frontier avoid the tacky "instore shop everywhere" pitfalls, I would seriously hope they dont offer "magic unavailable elsewhere potions" etc. A cash for credits rather than cash for items is probably the least game breaking way to go about things. Regardless of your play style there will be people with more credits than you, with more play time than you who will be "ahead of you" regardless.
Elite is unique amongst all the mmo's mention for being completely about twitch real life skills. We are already seeing in Alpha that some people find the game hard others of us are finding it easy. We all have the same ship and equipment. No one has paid to win, yet there are vast differences in our game play experience.
People talk about how slow and hard it was to make money and progress in the original elite. But that was not a shared experience. I personally found across all versions that I could have an iron ass in a day. I believe in PC elite I could make "Elite" in a day or two of playing as well... In Frontier you could have a panther clipper within a day no problem at all...
With the prices I mentioned at the beginning of the thread, there may be a few players tooling up on day one, of those you may have 1 or 2 who have both kit and skills, but within a month they will be out numbered 40-1 by hardcore time rich people who have both insane skills and kit earnt legitimately in game.
I remember JTL in Star wars galaxies. PvP there was twitch based, and the differences in equipment available for those with time or money was vast (the sums of money involved for top end parts was vast) Yet the Great PvPers were capable of winning with the cheapest of setups. To give some idea of equipment prices you could buy a top end crafted engine for maybe 100,000 credits. or if you wanted a reverse engineered top spec engine you would be looking at buying 8 engines at around 500,000,000 each (the game had a hard coded credit cap at 1,000,000,000 cash and the same in the bank) so you could look at a 100,000 credit engine or a 4,000,000,000 credit engine and the top PvPers would hand you your ass with either. Because when it comes to twitch flight skills its the pilot that matters most.
In SWG you COULD buy a kit advantage for real money, you could illegally buy your credits from farmers and spend those credits to buy allsorts of absolutely amazing kit (the value of space components would make that a VERY expensive thing to do - by the end of the game you could have looked at £2000 for a top class engine. BUT if you put that kit in the hands of a new pilot it was worthless. And a great pilot made even the most basic of kit work well.
