Those with the wealth to afford high-end equipment, myself included, will always enjoy an advantage over the base game. VR+HOTAS affords me a considerable advantage over most aspects of the game compared to flat screen+KB/Mouse. The same goes for single-player cockpit games that support VR.
While I agree that there is out-of-game hardware that can improve in-game outcomes, I'm highly skeptical of claims that VR (and yes, I've played with VR before...I don't even think it really improves my situational awareness) is a good example of that, and the difference between types of controls is less profound than the difference within them.
Of course, that's all beside the point. Frontier has no realistic way to limit things like the hardware used, one's geographical location, one's ISP, or the amount of free time one has, and they already do their due diligence to mitigate the advantages these things may provide.
The control schemes and flight models have allowed there to be a decade of heated argument over who has an advantage where, with no real conclusion; a clear sign that things are about as balanced as they could hope to be, when it comes to input devices. The game has strong, almost absurdly so, latency compensation mechanisms to negate much of the advantage or disadvantage one's ping might otherwise give them, at the expense of being able to have a fully synchronous experience. Even play time is partially accounted for by limiting individual CMDR influence contributions with diminishing returns.
The
deliberate creation of ways to turn player assets into in-game CMDR advantage, rather than trying to hedge against these things, is an entirely different matter.
what exactly is everyone new & old "competing" for?
Influence over the persistent setting, which is a defining feature of this game. Barring a tiny minority of players who never have their CMDRs interact with the human civilization in-game, everyone contributes to what everyone else encounters. The reason my CMDR can't buy drugs at most stations called Freeport anymore, or gets a 15% discount at parts at LHS 20, or sees the goods prices he sees, is because of the actions other CMDRs. With the exception of Power Play, most of these results are largely undirected, unintentional, and may go unnoticed by those responsible for creating them, but they are there none the less. Even if one is unaware of it, ones gameplay is still shaped by it.
My aversion to pay-to-win (which is synonymous with pay-to-compete, or pay-to-anything that produces mechanical results of any kind in an in-game context) is that it creates an entirely avoidable inequality of opportunity when it comes to a player's ability to influence the game.
the fact that any player may purchase this item with in-game currency accumulated over, say, 18 months, of play appears to have been forgotten.
It hasn't been forgotten, but it is irrelevant. The existence of a disadvantageous route of acquisition that can be shortcut via monetization changes nothing, except perhaps to make Frontier's monetization scheme look more predatory.
If one could buy Engineering materials--something that can obviously be acquired without spending money--all the same people that think being able to buy access to the Python Mk II, and likely quite a few more, would call that pay-to-win.
there is zero advantage to any new player coming in with bought ships ... there is zero advantage to any established player buying the ship.
Disagree on both counts.
Yeah player retention should be improved, because it's very important for the survival of ED in the long run.
I'm fairly confident that Frontier's new avenues of monetization will increase the game's revenue. Not sure if it will increase player retention, but I'm much more doubtful of this.
Anyway, in the long run,
Elite: Dangerous is just a name for a product. The game wearing has changed profoundly over the years. I have zero interest in the survival of that name, or the franchise, at the expense of the incarnations of the game that I've enjoyed.
I still have a problem with non-functioning anti-aliasing giving me staircases and similar annoyances. This means that overall my Odyssey appearance isn't as good as Horizons was. Has this been fixed, do I need to tweak settings?
It hasn't been fixed and there isn't a whole lot you can do to fix it. Hardware permitting, you can brute force some of it away with enough supersampling, but pretty much every other solution has other trade-offs that can leave the game looking worse.
As stated in my post ... If you feel your gameplay experience is somehow cheapened by what others are doing in game ... that is on you and noone else. If you require external validation for your gameplay experience to mean something that's not Frontier's issue, that's yours.
That's Frontier's issue too. They created and marketed this as a massively multiplayer title where one care scarcely escape the impact of other players on their game. I'm not sure how you can go on about the lack of players being some kind of problem and then dismiss this impact.
