I don’t get calling expansions p2w either. Some here called Horizons p2w, as had to buy it to get engineering, which is nonsense to me. All future game development can’t be restricted to ensure an even playing field for the vanilla product. I guess that’s part of the overall disagreement though, as monetization strategies change the terms that were used a decade ago when expansions were the norm gain different meanings to different people when applied to today’s practices.
I love E:D But really?
- Thread starter GraXXoR
- Start date
I think "the community" didn't have a big problem with early access and accepted it quite well. The issue is that Frontier kept extending the EA phase for every new ship without offering a single word of communication. That's not really how one should ideally treat a loyal playerbase either imho.
The P2W discussion feels pointless and irrelevant. OP didn't mention it either.
It has ever been thus
The issue (for me) is not so much about when or whether people have access to the new ships, but general balancing of the game in its entirety. I know "balance" is a bit of a meme at this point, but making existing content redundant seems like a shame to me, also because...
...what about new players who just bought the game? They'll just go straight to the Meta (which can now be obtained by simply buying ships for Arx, right after spawning in the noob system(s)) and skip most if not all the other ships in the game - which was already a problem with credit fountain inflation but this is a level up from that.
Maybe I'm overthinking this, but it seems very short-sighted and a poor game design choice, unless people treat Elite as a 100% sandbox, a little like MSFS et al, where you buy your planes and just fly them - but then why even have credits in the game still? It seems clear that Frontier no longer care about carefully balanced content and their priority is to milk it for Arx sales, perhaps understandable given where Elite is in its lifecycle, but it's a bit tragic that new players will never experience that same sense of progression and achievement of running and get to know the various ships in the game in a natural way. Again - perhaps it's no biggie and I'm just overthinking it and it's not something people still get pleasure from.
Just to pick up on that point...
In the current CG I've earned Cr180m (so far) in bounties, and that's put me in the top 25%, where I stand to gain a further Cr270m reward.
And the ship I've been using?
Coriolis EDCD Edition
A ship builder, outfitting and comparison tool for Elite Dangerous
s.orbis.zone
Course, there are people who say the CM5 is overpowered...
There are, I suppose, those who'd say it is P2W because early access gives me a "head start" over people who can't/don't pay for the new ship.
My PP faction can go out and do stuff faster/better than their opponents, I can explore places that others can't, and thus get my name on stuff and earn credits for exobiology... which, in turn, allows me to spend those credits on other things which others can't afford and thus extends my P2W advantage even further.
These are the same sort of people who did, indeed insist that Horizons and Odyssey were "P2W" as well.
They're the sort of people who insist that anything they don't enjoy doing is "unfair" because it gives others an advantage they don't have.
I've had illuminating discussions with people who suggest, for example, that it should be possible to buy mat's for credits because they don't like mining/exploring/prospecting and so they can't collect mat's as quickly as me and, thus, I have an unfair advantage.
People have suggested that simply being wealthy (in-game) is "unfair" because it gives players the opportunity to buy stuffz that peasants can't afford.
I guess it's just up to FDev to look at these complaints and decide how much merit they have.
I should say, though, that I do think it's a bit dodgy that FDev aren't committing to a general release date for Arx ships.
Obviously, there are people who'll just wait a known time-period for new stuff and get it for free and (presumably) FDev are trying to get them to open their wallets by dangling new ships on a stick but I think the honourable thing for a company to do (a company that used to insert new ships into the game with no cost) is accept that situation and be content with the level of profit they receive from eager players.
There is nothing to be 'thankful' for; how much of this nonsense I'm willing to tolerate is, and has always been, my choice.
Frontier already has my money and I haven't spent more on this game since late-2017 early-2018. Pay-to-win is far from the only area where it's gone astray, but the current incarnation of Elite: Dangerous does significantly exceeds my pay-to-win threshold.
I don't agree. I still find the term significant. This degree of pay to win significantly detracts from my enjoyment of this game.
When I look at titles that I have to pay to access, I will absolutely rule them out for what I consider to be pay-to-win elements that are less prominent than what Elite: Dangerous currently has, even if I think I'd really enjoy them otherwise.
Because it's still an advantage being sold for out-of-game money. That the thing being sold can be acquired via other means does nothing to detract from that; it doesn't need to be a permanent paid exclusive to materially skew things.
I maintain that early access is pay-to-win.
Absolutely.
Anything that detracts from the internal consistency and continuity of the setting is a negative impact on my experience. There is no contextual reason for different payer monetary expenditures to result in CMDRs with different insurance premiums, or Cobra Mk IV's, or different access to surface settlements, for example, nor for player money to be able to buy greater in-character agency. There are always unavoidable factors that bias or handicap players, but I firmly believe that a multiplayer title should take all reasonable steps to ensure equality of opportunity between it's participants. Refraining from monetizing anything that could provide any kind of advantage is what I'd call a reasonable step.
Offering players a head start or preferential terms for their CMDR is tantamount to me taking bribes in a tabletop game I'm GMing to allow better rolling methods or more build points; it both changes the course of the story that gameplay tells and really rubs me the wrong way. I'm bothered by these pay-to-win elements in much the same way that I'm bothered by the lack of credible economic or demographic simulations, compounded by the fact that the pay-to-win elements are entirely avoidable.
And the fact that you describe your opinions as facts does not make them so. Get over yourself and go enjoy the game the way you want to play it.
Not sure you're understanding the difference between fact and opinion.
Small ships are for new, intermediate and advanced players. Fact.
Some small ships excel at certain tasks compared to medium or large ships. Fact.
Vulture is the best ship in Elite Dangerous. Opinion.
Water is wet. Fact.
Ginger beer is the best fizzy drink. Opinion.
Fly safe o7
I'm early into a 3.5 PHB only game, and you've given me an idea. I'll tell everyone I've ordered Races of Stone and for a fee to cover my costs of introducing it to the game anyone who pays me in a currency I will invent and make purchasable with real money, should they not be content with the small trickle they will receive in game in an immersion breaking fashion, will be able to use new races and prestige classes from the book for an undisclosed amount of time before I make it available to all.
Your analogy has somehow made me dislike pay or delay even more.
You're wrong. "Pay 2 Win" no longer has any coherent meaning in gaming circles really. It's something people just say whenever anything is offered for money. When it used to mean things you could ONLY get for real-life money that gave you a significant advantage over other players.
There's no way this "significantly" detracts from your enjoyment of the game. If you stand by that claim then I'll need some actual examples of how that's so.
Can you elaborate on this please? When you say "negative impact on my experience" -- what "impact" are you referring to? How does it hinder your experience?
The interesting thing is that under that definition, Horizons when offered separately would be very obviously pay-to-win, while whether the new ships count is a lot more debatable [1].
A lot of the definitions of that type also have an implicit or explicit "things branded as DLC can't be P2W" clause so that DLC power creep is both allowed and encouragable, which does give the interesting hypothetical questions of "would Frontier have avoided basically all the controversy by branding it as 'Ship Pack 2024 DLC'?" and "given that the controversy is clearly a minor forum sport only, would that have affected their actual income from it and if so, which way?"
[1] Though still not clearly a "no", even under that definition, if you don't include the "DLC can't be P2W" clause:
- you either have to buy Odyssey, which is only available for real-life money
- or you have to buy them for 16520 ARX each, which you could earn in-game, but as things currently stand, not quickly enough to buy all of them that way (you could get about 1 in 4 of them, if you didn't spend it on anything else)
So it probably comes down to whether the collection of ships available that way counts as giving a "significant" advantage.
(And that of course leads to the fairly arbitrary scenario that it's not P2W today, but will be in another N years time when there are more ships under that grouping, because that would cross the "significant" threshold)
He didn't cite any in-game impact. He basically is saying this affects how he 'feels' about the game now, which is impacting his experience negatively.
Personally that doesn't cut it in my opinion. I don't think he has an argument balance wise or community-impact wide. He used a lot of words and colorful language to basically say "I don't like a thing". Which I suppose is valid but it doesn't seem to meet the bar for "Pay 2 win" impacting game play as he originally claimed.
I'm trying to play an immersive CMDR simulator. This is what the game was marketed as during it's initial development. This is what I backed. When players can spend money to skew things in their CMDR's favor, that's an explicitly out-of-character influence on an implicitly in-character, in-game, experience. I accepted some degree of this as the price for funding the continued existence of the game. I was also ignorant of some of the implications of these pay-to-win elements, or how their biases would be expanded upon, rather than just diluted and depreciated.
I'm not sure what further elaboration is needed. It seems completely self-evident to me that even small biases lead to different journeys and different outcomes than if they were absent.
If you really can't imagine anything more specific, here are a few examples, from my own CMDR's journey:
- My CMDR has always had a Shinrarta permit. Even using this as a last resort meant that my CMDR had a huge leg up during the early game. Being able to put exactly what I wanted on a ship, rather than spending days scouring stations for the parts I needed (outfitting was much more sparse and there were no third party tools for this in early 2015), meant my CMDR had more and earlier experience with that hardware, which multiplied his effect on the BGS and skewed combat (PvE and PvP) outcomes in his favor.
- My CMDR has an advantageous rebuy cost. Since I'm playing a CMDR who doesn't take his survival for granted, I have very few insurance claims, but that lesser penalty for ship loss has still subtly influenced my gameplay, making me and by extension my CMDR, less risk adverse than otherwise.
- I've had access to every beta build of the game since mid-2014. I have more hours in betas than most players will ever have in the game, full stop. I have thirty times as many rebuys in betas than I have in the live game. Hundreds of hours of consequence free build and combat experiences, due to my LEP, experiences that would require a lot of grind and/or multiple accounts otherwise. This should have obvious implications to my ability to advance my CMDR's goals in the live game.
- I've had access to Horizons and Odyssey from the moment they've been available. With that I've had new, occasionally more efficient, ways to manipulate the BGS. Horizons access is required for Engineering and my CMDR was well ahead of the curve when it came to acquiring, and leveraging, Engineered vessels.
Early access ships and pre-configured ships are newer incarnations of this trend. The degree to which they skew things is debatable, but that they do should not be doubted. There is no way to sell meaningful gameplay to a subset of the player base without introducing further biases to that gameplay.
From my perspective, the setting is the game. Avoidable out-of-character influence on the setting damages the setting and my enjoyment of it, perforce. This is as real an effect as any other addition or omission of content, as any balance change. The game is specifically marketed to players who enjoy playing characters with agency in the setting. Pay-to-win (or whatever label you want to use) elements skew that agency in a manner that is devoid of in-game context. That context is hugely important for me. Verisimilitude is what I'm after and being able to buy out-of-character influence is about the single fastest way to undermine verisimilitude of a multiplayer setting that I can think of.
This is like trying to articulate why it's better to get what one wants than not while there are people telling me that my overriding reason for playing games shouldn't matter to my enjoyment of these games.
And don't listen to Starshot_Jigawatts when it comes to my posts. His interpretations of my statements are so often completely off the mark that I wonder if we're speaking the same language, and he's on my ignore list because he all but insists he knows my thoughts better than I.
My particular objection to the early access ships is that I’ve already paid for them via the Odyssey DLC, now apparently I’m expected to pay for them again or to wait for an unspecified amount of time. As a customer, I can’t see the benefit.
Yeh, said it elsewhere that I think it's a reasonable discussion to have to question when these ships go live for credits. That's about it though.
The rest isn't nearly as important to me as the health of the game's development. And, for that, they need money. And for that, we need reason to part with it.
I saw no mention of ships being included in the DLC... can you provide a source for this statement?
Small ships aren't for new players? What ship did you start in?
It's bad etiquette to argue using half of someone's statement. The other part was "for giggles" as in, more of a focus on fun. You're not using one for building a new station in any significant way anyway.
As for what ship this beats, given the internal, weapons (including convergence) and the agility and speed of the ship, if I bought a Cobra mkV I would see no need for an Asp Scout (obvs), Asp Explorer, Keelback, T-6, FDS, FAS and Krait Phantom (aside from as an exploration ship) in my fleet. It would do everything I would want of those others.
Thank you. This is a perspective I haven't considered before.
Usually the grievances are from the POV of a player who is not paying for bonuses. I never considered the case where you, the person paying, are being forced to skip experiences you otherwise might enjoy. The Shinrarta and rebuy examples are good ones. If you didn't have the Alpha/Beta privileges then your early game experience would have been more interesting. I bought the game in May 2015 so I remember that outfitting was a bit trickier. EDDB released module search around October 2015.
The case you provided is a bit odd because it isn't opt-in like pre-configured ships. When I bought the Cobra MK V, I intentionally bought the standard version, sold all of the built-in modules, and re-built the ship myself from the ground up. I did it this way because I enjoy engineering ships and didn't want to skip that part of the game.
If there was some sort of progression requirement (eg: rank) to buying a Cobra MK V then I wouldn't have bought it in the store at all. I wouldn't want to skip that progression. But the in-game value of the ship is 1-2 million credits and I have billions. So I wasn't skipping anything by purchasing it in the store so that wasn't a problem.
Anyway what I'm saying is that (like you) I do value my gameplay progression and I avoid skipping it where I can. That's why I simply don't purchase anything that would undermine my progression.
On the other hand, some players might want to skip that progression because they don't enjoy it. There are new players who bought the Type-8 and are very happy with their purchase. Everyone has a different appetite for these things.
What makes the Alpha/Beta privileges different is that you're not necessarily opting in to them.