Yeah, that one. That's where I would have a problem. But I don't see a whole lot of people in this thread lining up to protect the poor consumer from abusive business practices. I mostly see a lot of people complaining that their imaginary line isn't going up as fast as it would if they shelled out a tenner.
My main problem with pay-to-win is internal consistency and the coherency of the setting. Ideally, out-of-game influences should be kept to a minimum. Some things are outside of Frontier's control--namely how much time players have, what gaming hardware they can afford, the kind of ISP they can get, etc--but wherever they have control I'd very much prefer they draw a line between the in-game setting and the real world. Balance and verisimilitude are secondary aspects of this. The pseudoeconomy is broken beyond repair, but if it wasn't (and I held out hope it would be fixed far longer than was rational), if we had anything resembling scarcity, the way they've implemented ships for Arx would be profoundly game breaking. As it is, it mostly annoys me in the same way Fighter Hangars violating the conservation of mass, large ships having densities on the order of 2kg/m^3, 40g of acceleration barely starting to cause blackout for the same CMDR that can't even walk on a 3g world, marginal NPC persistence, or CMDRs being able to vanish into the ether do. It's dumber than hell and takes considerable mental effort for me to ignore this perpetual slap in the face to even the fantasy logic that the setting is supposed to convey.
Protecting consumers from abusive business practices is nice, but, like any other tragedy of the commons, that can only really be addressed via policy changes.
Also, that line isn't just imaginary; the game tracks, and reacts to, several of them. My CMDR is disadvantaged in any contest of influence that could benefit from the tactics ships for Arx enable. The money itself is a complete non-issue. It doesn't really matter if the price is one penny or a thousand Dollars, though both extremes would be somehow more insulting than the seemingly cold calculus of the values FDev's bean counters have currently settled upon.
If it wasn't acquired in-game, by rules that make sense in a wholly in-setting context, it's going to bother me. Implementation counts as well; even if it was initially acquired in-game, by rules that originally made sense, being able to spawn one every sixty seconds or so ad infinitum begs the question of where they come from...handwavium is already stretched thinly enough explaining normal insurance coverage, let alone a version with no overhead of any kind and even fewer logistical constraints. Why does human society even pretend to use money, need frame shift drives, or have cargo CGs/missions, if unlimited quantities of matter can be conjured, in arbitrarily complex configurations (whole starships), from nothing, then instantly beamed anywhere in the galaxy?
Since I know some people's answer will be 'cause it's a game', I'll bring up my usual rebuttal now. Being a game doesn't automatically mean anything goes.
Silent Hunter II is a game, but my u-boat can't fly and it would annoy me if the default loadout had photon torpedoes or the HMS Fortune was able to use 21st century IR satellites to track me around the Atlantic. Likewise,
Elite: Dangerous sets up certain expectations and at least pretends to depict a certain setting...one that cannot work in the utter absence of scarcity and travel times. Constraints define games.
). The ARX purchase is small compared to the accumulated time savings. I was happy using my cutter, but I'm not going to handicap myself when a better solution becomes available. The PC II is absolutely advantageous to my activities.
