Pay2Win made it to Elite

Have you flown the Civ...?

Yes.

For a while it was one of the best ships to harvest and transport corrosive cargo. Today it's one of the best local mission runners in systems with long SC distances because it can hold tons of fuel and armor for a small ship (which are faster in SCO)...I don't even have to bother capping my frame rate to 24 (which is profoundly annoying) to get around with it. It's never been one of my CMDR's goto ships, it's flatly bad in a lot of ways, but it has enough unique features to give it a niche that cannot be precisely duplicated.

Personally, I am still at a loss as to what makes a pre-built ship a microtransaction. I would love to be enlightened. Cosmetics sure but, a pre built ship is another story.

Any expenditure of real-world money on a game, beyond that required for basic access to the game (subscription fees or expansions), is a microtransaction. One could argue that a one-off expenditure like a ship unlock is more akin to an expansion, but if it becomes the norm to acquire such access piecemeal, I'd consider those microtransactions. A repeatable purchase like a pre-built ship is every bit as much a microtransaction as cosmetics, if not more so. Cosmetics after all, are infinitely reusable and can be duplicated (put on more than one suit/vehicle) without needing to be bought again. A pre-built ship is a discrete asset that must be purchased again to have another copy of it.

Anybody who has a Cobra MKIV is already participating in pay to win more than anyone paying for the early accesss is. At least we will all eventually have access to the Python MkII...

My first indulgence with pay-to-win in this game was called Tactical Graphite.


Those videos are all gone as I deleted the account they were associated with years ago, but for an example of how it can be difficult to distinguish dark colored ships that were capable of silent running for the full duration of an engagement, this should suffice:
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qq9TDEvg-tU


That's with just two opponents. Fighting five or six ships that all looked identical, all blended in to the background, that couldn't be targeted could be frustrating.

Anyway, I've spent more on cosmetics than most people have spent on the game and the only reason I ever bought cosmetics before Arx was for a tangible gameplay advantage (camouflage). This is something I've repeatedly complained about in the past (I recall suggesting that every ship be given a free low visibility paint job precisely because cosmetics shouldn't be so P2W) and that Frontier seemed to have grudgingly acknowledge as they started giving away Midnight Black paint jobs that year (2015). 2.0's global changes to heat, 2.1's introduction of Engineering (and emissive), then the later addition of night vision rendered it almost totally moot, but for a good year paint was overtly P2W.

As for the apparent hypocrisy here, I play the game I have, even if the game I have isn't exactly what I want. I've been complaining about Engineering since the 2.1 beta, and would remove all traces of it from the game if I had the power, but my CMDR still has 5k+ G5 rolls, because, despite me wishing it otherwise, Engineering exists and matters.
 
I think there's been a lot of misunderstanding here. As I understand the FD announcement, you pay ARX to unlock the Python II early, and then you still have to buy it with credits in the game. I guess that will apply to other pre-engineered ships in future too. No-one is going to be skipping gameplay.
That doesn't really flow with the announcement as stated, but admittedly they haven't said there isn't a credit cost. I will say though that for prefitted ships that logic makes no sense as in that case the Arx do literally nothing, and for the python to be different they'd need to have 2 systems selking ships in different ways, 1 just giving the ships and the other selling early access to otherwise normally obtained goods.

Given the idea is coming at all I'm not inclined to extend benefit of the doubt and moreso I can't see them selling access to something you can be locked out of claiming even after forking over the cash.
 
What, a couple of dozen vociferous forumites crying in their cornflakes? Which is what it appears to be...

Loving the lively debate over FD's actions to improve the game for everyone, for a price, naturally!

For all of the years I've been on this forum there have been many, many, topics on engineering, grind, how disadvantaged new players are compared to anyone playing for a week or more... Nowt but complaints that the game (although dead, apparently, many times!) is too hard, takes too much time to get anywhere, usual stuff from gamers. So FD go the path of "give us money to save your time" and that is wrong too.

Give up Frontier, pull the plug on the game and let the unhappy folk here go play Star Citizen instead...

I wonder how many of the rage quitters here will be playing in a few days time?
The kind of person who thanks a thief when they offer to sell them their stuff back right here.

Like the only way to address complaints was to charge players more money. And for the privilege of not playing parts of the game while all the content that draw complaints remains. Genius.

I'll never understand people who act like pay to progress is a good way to deal with complaints about progression. I hope they nail whatever reworks they have planned or we'll have more like this to effectively come tell us we're too poor to get a decent progression experience.
 
When I've seen this pop up in Suggestions it's been the Core Dynamics and Gutamaya ships.
Following this logic the pay to buy modules are likely to be the Power Play ones.
So if they allowed you to purchase a Cutter with Prismatic Shields and Imperial Hammers, how would we feel about it?
 
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Some example pre built ships..



While i am glad that the builds are not to overpowered, a positive response to this kind of practice will open doors to more malicious forms of monetization.
For now FDEV is dipping their toes into the Actiblizz Practice but i fear that a positive response to Real Money Ship sales will result in more and more balance breaking packages in the future.
 
While i am glad that the builds are not to overpowered, a positive response to this kind of practice will open doors to more malicious forms of monetization.
For now FDEV is dipping their toes into the Actiblizz Practice but i fear that a positive response to Real Money Ship sales will result in more and more balance breaking packages in the future.
It's still noob bait as currently presented, raising the potential financial threshold of getting into the game and for that matter still a significant upgrade from what you otherwise start with.

Also the reported lack of rebuy is interesting as well.
 
Also the reported lack of rebuy is interesting as well.
I bet they initially forgot to consider this factor. My guess is that there will be a disclaimer in the Store saying: Ships lost during Gameplay will not be restored.
Though i fear there will not be a disclaimer and 10000 Tickets will flood the poor Guys over at costumer Support. (Cheers to the CS Team Btw, you guys are still the Best Frontier has to offer.)
 
so no insurance costs......... and pre engineered.

but not P2W type shenanigans at all then? ..

When Star Citizen introduced life time insurance people accused them of being P2W because it offered something you could not buy in the game..... but in Elite its fine apparently.
oh well!.
 
My first indulgence with pay-to-win in this game was called Tactical Graphite.
Another example was the 'engine color white' on Chieftains in biweave type 1v1s.
(The Chieftain has a fast c6 biweave shield but they also had a notoriously fragile canopy neatly lining up with the power distributor, so it was a viable tactic to spam rails at their distributors in hope of breaking the canopy, which used to lead to losing the reticle in legacy Horizons. To counter this, Chieftain pilots were using the 'engine color white' livery item, because it made the boost effect so bright, even while the Chieftain was facing you, that the module target rectangle was nearly completely invisible). :)
 
I bet they initially forgot to consider this factor. My guess is that there will be a disclaimer in the Store saying: Ships lost during Gameplay will not be restored.
Though i fear there will not be a disclaimer and 10000 Tickets will flood the poor Guys over at costumer Support. (Cheers to the CS Team Btw, you guys are still the Best Frontier has to offer.)
That's honestly playing with fire IMO. Buy a ship then get stuck in a mail slot somehow or some other mishap? Bye bye cash. The more I learn about this the worse an idea it seems.
 
so no insurance costs......... and pre engineered.

but not P2W type shenanigans at all then? ..

When Star Citizen introduced life time insurance people accused them of being P2W because it offered something you could not buy in the game..... but in Elite its fine apparently.
oh well!.
Ok, needing clarification as I read that as no rebuy meaning "cannot be rebought" not "can rebuy at 0 cost" and want to eliminate any ambiguity.
 
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