Buying ships/fleet etc with real world money?

[varonica]

Not true, actually. You can get the ships in game for in-game money.
They will however disappear after the server reset and only the ones you bought for actual $$$ will remain in your account. (I think they are working on changing that too, but that's a topic for another thread).

Ah ok, is that all ships or just a selection?

 

[rootsrat]

Ah ok, is that all ships or just a selection?

I believe all that are available as an in-game asset rather than a concept art

 

[Oddy-B]

I'm deadly serious here - for me grinding for fleet is clearly out of space. Instead of spending my time and life to do so - I willing to pay in real money for it.
And automatically - I believe that we should be able to but stuff - you can grind and is fine by me - but if someone wants to skip this part - frontier should give him this option
Let's also be real about amount here...

What you seem to miss here is the nature of the game. The whole idea is to start out with very little and gradually build up your own fleet over time and playing the game.

 

[Jmanis]

So here's the thing....

There's a successful market industry around "pay to hasten" games. I play a few myself. And there's a couple of principles behind them that, while unwritten, are generally the difference between the good ones and the bad ones. Two of them are:

• They're free to play. Here's a great example of what happens when you release a full-price retail game with "pay to skip the grind" features.
• The content you're paying to skip is empty and of no consequence, and you aren't missing anything by skipping it because you'll be encountering more of the same later. If the content you're paying to skip is worthwhile doing in it's own right, as a game dev you're actually developing yourself out of your own profit stream.

So here's the problem for FD:

• ED ain't free to play. It's a full price game.
• ED prides itself on it's procedural content and the stories you make during your journey. Providing a way to "paying to skip" that experience has some very significant implications.
  • That their point of pride is actually a failure, and the stories you generate along the way are of no consequence[1] and are ultimately meaningless to the player and can be ignored.
  • That there is nothing offered by the full price game; it's a book with blank pages.

Of course, some players will go "Oh, but some people just play to fiddle with ships to optimize them"... true, but that's as valid as me saying the game should be all about spreadsheets and BGS tracking. That still is not the intent of the game, whose headline is, for Odyssey:

Paying to skip that process goes against that tagline in every possible way. You can't "Leave your mark on the galaxy" if leaving your mark means paying money and ultimately not interacting with it.

But as I said in those first principles... paying to "skip through" the game is an acknowledgement that there's nothing there. For all the players still invested in the game because (of the hope that) there is something substantial there worth experiencing (and therefore, detracts from that income stream, which is a bad business model) would be a horrific black mark against the game.

[1] This does not mean they must have an impact on the galaxy, they simply must matter to the player in their experience within the galaxy.

 

[gorankar]

Not true, actually. You can get the ships in game for in-game money.
They will however disappear after the server reset and only the ones you bought for actual $$$ will remain in your account. (I think they are working on changing that too, but that's a topic for another thread).

Ships take months in SC, or even a year from the time they can be bought for real money, to when they can be bought with in game money.