If instead of Arx they offered the ships for 500B or 1T credits and made game credits purchasable for $$ would you feel entitled to get it for free in the same way?
That's a red herring.
If I play the game, I can get credits at virtually any rate... it's all down to how I play. I'm master of my own destiny in that regard. If I wanted to burn down my life and earn 1T credits right now, regardless of whether I did it via 1/2 billion/h via massacre stacking, or 1m/h farming Pod Tissue Samples playing non stop til i hit that mark.... or preserve my life and do it over the next year... regardless... it's in my control. So if it was a question only of credits, absolutely fine, no problem with that. I have full agency over how much or how little credits I want to earn.
I
cannot do that with Arx. I either purchase them with cash, or earn, what is it now, 400 a week? I have no agency over that, it's a hard cap that I can't get past just by playing the game. Now, I've seen plenty of other games (mostly mobile whale-hunting games) do this, and you know what they almost universally do? Offer a
season pass to get to the content for that update early rather than play through all the time-gated content to get there. You know what LEP holders bought? A
lifetime pass. That's why "lifetime" is the magic word here.
But to also turn your point on it's head... what if buying these ships was
only available with Arx (i.e not time gated at all), and Arx could
not be earned in-game, they could only be purchased. A pure cash-exchange. I would argue 100% that LEP holders should get access to that as part of the pass.
From there, if we consider
Freely available straight-up, no time gates, only credits == OK; and
Only available exclusively via Arx, and Arx are only purchasable == not OK;
Then the current situation sits somewhere between those two extremes, which goes back to my comments: This is just cash-grabbing and dealing in ambiguities through FD remaining silent on what the heck is going on with LEPs. If FD came out and said definitively "We aren't going to provide early access to the new ships to LEP holders because of X reason"... I'd be totally OK with that. And the reason FD hasn't done that is, bluntly, because they can't. There's no reason they can exclude LEP holders that wouldn't wind them in a hot spot. FD know this, so they
stay silent. Keeping it ambiguous makes it super-hard to demonstrate they have an explicit position that contravenes the expectations of the LEP.
I did actually seek advice from my local consumer affairs on this... the advice backs my position generally, but also can't compel a foreign company, so it's a moot point... by the time i try to leverage that advice in a meaningful way, the ships are probably available.
The easiest way out would just be to call it a day for the LEP officially. FD could absolutely do that. But they can't do that... you know why? It's because that implies the game is end-of-life.
So here we are. Stuck in limbo because things go on despite the LEP, but if we just stay
really really quiet, maybe nobody will notice...
It would certainly be within their right to do it if they chose to and it would not go against anything promised to LEP holders.
Obviously, they never promised to design their game and business models around LEP holders... only to give LEP holders all future content expansions.
The ships are not expansions
"It's not food, it's candy!"
EDIT: You know what? ARX and purchases like this are called microtransactions yeah? In which case, the ships are "Microexpansions". Yum, candy.
and seem to be ramping up after something of a rough patch. Possibly a statement from Frontier about this to clarify their position would good? Though given I'd only expect that to annoy people (on any side of this discussion), plus they probably like to have latitude to easily change their minds with less comment, I don't see there is much likelihood.
