horizons is expansion ...if was like p2w thingie same goes for all the expansions on every game...
Horizons is textbook definition 'pay to win'. Pay extra money to get access to outright upgrades to your ship that greatly enhance your combat abilities, which are utterly unavailable without paying that extra money. In doing so, gain advantages over other players that significantly unbalance PvP between Horizons and non-Horizons players.
Like I edited in just before you quoted, I'm not particularly
fussed about this about Horizons... but then again, I a) bought it, and b) don't play PvP. If someone pops in here who can't afford Horizons and
does play PvP, they might have a very valid gripe about it.
But you seem pretty relaxed about this too, so my question is: why would the below really offend you?
1. FDev introduce a player market, allowing deals that can include anything: credits, commodities, materials, modules and ships.
2. Some rich suburban US kid
would put in 1000 hours getting a heavily engineered Federal Corvette, but instead he goes behind FDev's back and pays a poor kid in Bangalore to get it for him.
3. The rich kid then goes around with a ship that many others who didn't 'pay to win' have, without the requisite skill to use it, and (maybe) goes to muck around in PvP where he's at
best at the minimal level to compete in PvP, and more likely has an expensive ship he doesn't know how to use and might as well have just set fire to the cash.
4. The poor kid puts the money aside for college.
If a very tiny minority of players in the game pull a stunt like this, what does it actually do to your gaming experience?
Horizons is far from a "pay-to-win" thing, you are not buying the upgrades you are buying a game feature set. It is no more a pay-to-win thing than any other expansion in any other game.
Perhaps most game expansions are, to some degree, 'pay to win'. Many game designers doing it doesn't make it any less true. I think for the term to hold though, you need to see the following:
1. Clear power creep in the expansions. Power creep usually happens
accidentally: often new material is balanced by itself, but adding more and more stuff means more versatility and more combinations. This is esp. true of stuff like D&D expansions [1], the card game Dominion, etc. But in Elite's Horizons, the power creep is
explicit. Engineered ships are better than non-engineered ships.
2. The game has to actually have such a thing a 'winning'.
3. And that 'winning' has to affect other players, or at the very least the power creep has to apply to the existing challenges. (You get stronger in Diablo 3's expansion, but the challenges are harder: it's not 'pay to win', but if you paid to start the normal game at a higher level and have a higher level cap, it would be.)
For Elite's PvP players, Horizons ticks all three boxes.
Edit: but yes, you do actually have to do some in-game work to get access to the stronger ships. This makes it a little less on the nose, sure, but it doesn't change the overall dynamic: buying Horizons will let you fly stronger ships than players that don't.
[1] D&D 3rd Edition had the best example ever. About half a dozen different expansions, all intrinsically reasonably balanced, together gave access to an utterly omnipotent character by 5th level. Of course, D&D isn't really about 'winning' either, so...
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