I find that limited time offers are a lot more palatable if they're clearly seen to be variants on what's already generally available.
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The first game I came across with preorder exclusives was Star Wars Galaxies. In that game you could play as a Tailor who could create outfits for other players to wear. I visited one such Tailor who was wearing a cool set of goggles. "Could you make me goggles like those?" I asked him, and his reply was no because they were a preorder exclusive and uncraftable.
He could make dozens of shirts, jackets or trousers in a myriad of different colours. He could make boots and shoes. He even had a small line of hats. Just not those cool goggles. In fact he couldn't make any kind of eyewear. In a game explicitly designed for player dependency, a functioning economy and the ability to craft and trade 99% of the items in the game, the
only eyewear ever made available in the game was exclusive and uncraftable.
It wouldn't have been so bad if the preorder exclusive had been, say, a jacket. He couldn't have made me
that jacket but he could have made me a similar one from the many templates available. The exclusive would have been a nice-to-have for him, making him stand out from the crowd, without making people like me jealous that they could not only never have that same item but could never have any similar item at all.
I'm afraid to say that I learned what is arguably the wrong lesson from that affair. Ever since I have thrown significant amounts of good money at bad games so that if I ended up liking the game
I would have the cool exclusives. Right up until this game, of course, when I bought Premium Beta instead of Alpha because I didn't realise the Alpha came with those cool decals and cheaper insurance.
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In Elite we have by way of example the Black Friday paintjob which was only available for a limited time. It's too late for new players to get that paintjob. However, for many ships they
can have the graphite paintjob. Some ships also have the chrome paintjob.
You can't have
that black paintjob but you can have
a black paintjob. As a result you're more likely to be philosophical and say "too bad I missed out on the Black Friday paintjob" than "this sucks I want a black ship and I can't have it."
For the last six months people probably wouldn't have minded so much about the Cobra Mk IV. It's slower than the Mk III and less capacious than, say, a Python. Now with the Engineers patch the Mk IV is starting to look almost attractive with enough slots for a fuel scoop, shield, collector limpet controller, vehicle bay, cargo racks
and scanners.
Building an entire ship is a lot of work for the developers to undertake for only a limited set of players to see. I'd rather they made the Cobra Mk IV available to everyone with we lucky players getting a rear spoiler or a specific paintjob. Something to make us stand out from the proles without limiting the whole ship to us.
