Game Discussions Star Citizen Discussion Thread v12
- Thread starter Yaffle
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After all this time I am amazed we are still discussing this. Paying real money for game credits when credits in game can get you an advantage, of any type (in this case getting your ship faster than other non real money paying players), is pay to win. Period. There is no two ways about it. Other players expediting ships with credits achieved only in game will have those credits denied for other improvements etc.
It is of little importance for the pay to win to be such that some players may personally consider that particular advantage unimportant, or a one off. The advantage can be perfectly attractive depending on the scenario for other players. And one offs are only limited by the wallet of the buyer. For example when two players may be competing for a certain loot in an abandoned space wreck under a certain time limit for whatever reason with their preferred (and possibly expensive) ship for the task. If one of them just crashed its ship in an asteroid or got destroyed by the other player in a first round combat he may actually want to expedite ship readiness to come back quick enough to still contest the loot again etc.
This is just one hypothetical scenario but in an open sand box there will certainly be thousands of other viable scenarios where accelerating a specific ship recovery may be an advantage (battles, exploration discovery competitive areas etc). In fact in an mmo where player competitive advantages (better ships, better modules etc) are obtained essentially via time progress in the game, anything that can eliminate or accelerate that time is essentially pay to win.
Now, having said that what we can agree on is to discuss to what degree a specific event of pay to win impacts the game and other players. Some will more than others, no doubt. But all of them will still be pay to win.
After doing a single basic space postman mission you can buy an FPS gun, a set of armour and expedite your ship four times over, @Mole HD is right real money for aUEC is pointless.
I forgot to add, you only need to claim your ship if its stored in a different location to where you are, if you arrived there in your ship it will be parked there, so there is no timer.
Just like in ED. You would know that if you played it.
For now....
Will be interesting to see if on launch it will be like ED on release (credits are tight), ED now (credits rain from the sky), or somewhere in between.
We don't yet know how CIG will finance themselves after launch, i have no doubt there will be some form of pay to win, but getting your ship faster is not it, unless somehow you ended up somewhere different to where you arrived in your ship, or it was destroyed there is no timer on getting your ship, because its already there, the ship Drew rented was delivered to his home base, which it looks like is Orison on Crusader, he was in New Babbage on MicroTech so the ship needed to be moved from Orison.
So if you haven't made it to the ship and have seen it blown up before your eyes, you will ask FDEV to add in the game a teleport from the base directly to your seat to shorten the time ?
When you run out of time, being in or out of the ship is not a parameter.
Viajero
Volunteer Moderator
Oh sweet summer child...
A couple of remarks there:
- CIG seems to already consider what we have now out there as launched to most practical purposes, including handing dividends to the owners.
- If you really think UEC is not going to be competing at attractive real money prices with grind time (and/or actually continue selling ships in some form) then CIG may actually have a nice bridge to sell you.
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No, what I said i was thankful the teleport to cockpit was there so my ship didn't go boom.
ITS ALPHA! You don't polish things until near release you FUDster.
Also its the best game ever, and i personally never run into issues with missions failing. Have you installed the game on a SSD?
Let me rephrase what others said: ship claims are very short for smaller ships (like single seat fighters) and expediting the claim is often free too for these.
In a real situation (playing SC with all the bugs, crashes, fatal flaws that make you lose everything, etc.) expediting claims is:
1- Unfrequent. Most of the time you dont need to expedite, either because you've got another ship at the ready or you can pay for the expedited claim (since you can engage in those kind of activities - or it's a bit like trying to go PvP in Elite without a rebuy...).
2- Really cheap. Like i said it's less than the refuelling costs of the ship. (*)
3- Not needed for most cases as claiming first, then going to get your equipment back, will cover the claim timer usually.
4- Overall maybe about 0.001% at most of your budget. If that happens at all. If you define p2w in this game by buying credits, expedited claims is not what they are meant for. If people buy credits on ebay etc. it's to get A-grade equipments on their ships bypassing the grind, for example. Note that absolutely all online games with an economy (or even a "tier 0" buggered thing like SC) have that kind of parallel credit-selling/chinese farmer economy going on. EvE was notorious for that.
In the case of ship transfers (which is what started this discussion), It's worth noting that the timer there is kinda legitimate (and very short actually compared to actually moving the ship).
You guys are barking the wrong tree here.
(*) so much in some cases that I used to claim ships instead of paying for repair/refuel. I'm certain that I was not alone doing this
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Viajero
Volunteer Moderator
Not really, no. Pretty sure it is the right one:
Now, having said that what we can agree on is to discuss to what degree a specific event of pay to win impacts the game and other players. Some will more than others
Once you have in game cash for real world cash, then every aspect of the game no matter how trivial, if its linked to credits, then its pay to win.
Nope. Buying credits is p2w, that's the issue, not claiming ships. And there's no preventing it for an online game really - CCP has thrown the towel for example and officially sold p2w skill bypass packages to undermine the grey market.
Pretty sure he means cash for pixel money. It's kinda what most people mean with p2w. Sometimes you get to buy assets directly with cash, but mostly it's having to acquire virtual cash first before you make the win purchasing.
We can take an example from ED.
When Horizons was launched some people said it was pay to win. Initially i argued against that, its just a DLC, games release DLCs at the time with improvements and ability to get better stuff. But over time I came to understand what some people were saying. You're not directly paying cash to get better stuff directly, but the addition of engineering meant you had an advantage or ability over other players. In some ways, no different to WoW selling an expansion that increases the level cap with new areas with new phat loot, but at the same time there was the possibility to encounter players with engineering when you didn't have because you didn't buy Horizons. The "mistake" there was allowing Horizons and non-Horizons owners to play in the same instances. That's what created the pay to win element, and it especially affected PvP, but also affected PvE. FD increased the hit points on combat zone ships to counter the massive increase in damage output thanks to Horizons... meaning people who didn't have Horizons were disadvantaged through no fault of their own.
Pay to win (or whatever we want to call it, pay to progress, pay to skip) comes in many forms, some worse than others, but once you have direct cash for currency, the whole game becomes pay to win.
When Horizons was launched some people said it was pay to win. Initially i argued against that, its just a DLC, games release DLCs at the time with improvements and ability to get better stuff. But over time I came to understand what some people were saying. You're not directly paying cash to get better stuff directly, but the addition of engineering meant you had an advantage or ability over other players. In some ways, no different to WoW selling an expansion that increases the level cap with new areas with new phat loot, but at the same time there was the possibility to encounter players with engineering when you didn't have because you didn't buy Horizons. The "mistake" there was allowing Horizons and non-Horizons owners to play in the same instances. That's what created the pay to win element, and it especially affected PvP, but also affected PvE. FD increased the hit points on combat zone ships to counter the massive increase in damage output thanks to Horizons... meaning people who didn't have Horizons were disadvantaged through no fault of their own.
Pay to win (or whatever we want to call it, pay to progress, pay to skip) comes in many forms, some worse than others, but once you have direct cash for currency, the whole game becomes pay to win.
Lol
Source: https://twitter.com/cracked/status/1466221778284470277
Source: https://youtu.be/y1GWkMmcqLU
With bonus move into the past tense in the comments
Source: https://twitter.com/cracked/status/1466221778284470277
With bonus move into the past tense in the comments
True, but people made a mountain of "expedited claims" which makes absolutely no sense in any context for anyone who has tried to play SC. We are at 3+ pages debating a topic that should not even exist.
The whole game is completely p2w for many reasons (the most prominent one being able to buy "better" ships with real money) but expediting claims is really nothing compared to the mountain of problems that this project is facing, which are much more worth debating.
AND a player to player economy, which ED doesnt have (to my knowledge, maybe i missed the ship carrier thing, never was interested in those). Otherwise you can bet there would be tons of ebay "ED cash" floating around. Any MMO with a player economy is plagued with this kind of issue, that's as old as World of Warcraft. I'm not throwing the stone at CiG for that really, and the "we'll buy UEC for cash at release" is moot as release may or may not happen in our lifetime.