How exactly do you do due diligence on purchasable assets when:
1. 'Purchasable' does not always mean 'playable now'.
2. CIG change ship stats and other factors on a whim, often enough to completely change certain ships' roles.
3. There is no actual game to accurately test quality/value of assets in.
4. It's all subject to change.
The only real sensible option is to not bother buying anything really, that's as much due diligence as people are afforded..
All of this can be summed up by reading what you can at the time of purchase. If you don't like that things will change...don't back. If you cannot handle the minor bugs that pop up....don't back. Noticing a theme?
#3 is interesting but it's solely dependent upon the person backing and how they assess things than anything CIG can control. Many here don't like the flight model but I know quite a few (including me) that have little to no issue with it. Many here don't like that it's taken 4-5 years, depending upon who you ask, to arrive where they are now, and yet I can point to a majority of people who take little issue about that.
So yes if you want to majorly "invest" into the project, it's on you to do your due diligence to understand the risk that is involved. Before you even try, yes CIG could make a better effort to clear up the message and emphasize the risk, however, it's not like that info isn't out there. This is why I have very little sympathy for people who back for what I perceive as the wrong reasons.
Sure it does.
Before its release, NMS was a massively hyped game that failed to live up to its expectations, especially among the people who had hyped it up and who had very aggressively harassed anyone who suggested that maybe, just maybe, it was ever so slightly overhyped. Something very similar is going on with SC, and based on what they've released, the one consistent aspect is that it's not really living up to the hype. It's not much of a stretch to imagine that it, too, will not meet its hype target on release.
Should that realisation reach the ardent, very aggressive, core fanbase, there is nothing to suggest that they will not have the same reaction as the NMS fans have had.
Gonna need a citation to backup the claim that the majority of the Star Citizen community WILL display the same vitriol that the NMS community did upon release.
If you can buy ships or in game cash with RL money then it's pay2win, there's no middle-ground. Games do it or they don't gamers like it or they don't it's a blocker for a lot of people. AFAIK CiG have said in the past they wouldn't do it post release, but that's big pinch of salt obviously.
The balance is impossible one side or the other will lose their minds, probably both to some degree.
Look at the drama with NMS people went nuts (proper death threat nuts) because a shallow cartoony space exploration minecraft/spore crossover was a bit delayed then wasn't the second coming of space simulation. The game's exactly as I expected it to be from watching game-play video's a space mans version of borderlands (I don't mean that in a bad way both games are daft mindless fun). There's a lot of people applying wishful thinking/online theory-crafting to games in development, then they are very disappointed when reality hits. Over-hyped marketing doesn't help.
The wishful thinking, theory-crafting and over-promising in relation to SC is much, much worse than NMS ever was. The fallout on release/cancellation/MVP will probably be equally magnified (and there's people much more heavily spending on it).
There is always a balance; there is always a way to make the MAJORITY happy. Not everyone is going to approve, it would be silly to assume otherwise and CIG DOESN'T have to cater to them.
The problem with NMS was that too little was showed which allowed potential gamers imaginations to conjure up theories of what it was GOING to be and not enough correcting from Sony or Hello Games. Sony could have easily gone out and temper the expectations of this game but they didn't because they were more motivated by their bottom line than being honest with their customers. Sean Murray did at least try but it was like trying to talk to a crowd w/o a microphone (crowd being the hype). This is not the same as Star Citizen, you are seeing how the game is developed and can play the current iteration (something that you could not do in NMS). CIG does inform their backers, admittingly at the last minute or after the fact, that things will be delayed; they also give a reason, perhaps not in super detail, why it was delayed. The only time this didn't occur was for Star Marine but when we did get an explanation, it made sense at least to me.
As an aside, it helps to know what version of pay-to-win you're evoking because there really isn't a solid definition of what it is (
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pay-to-win)
