Poll Pay-to-Win? (114 votes)
Hello duders!
Thanks to Vinny i got reminded that this game still is getting made, but some of the details he mentioned did sound quite.. odd.
Selling ships for hundreds of dollars, additional million dollar stretch goals and so on. So i decided to check it out again, i haven't done that since they started their Kickstarter.
And this game suddenly went from "must-have asap!" to "i don't really know anymore.." for me.
I imagined this to be kinda like a "next gen" Wing Commander Privateer/Freelancer with added FPS combat and an MMO like multiplayer, basically the "perfect game" I've always dreamed about and always wanted.
But the details about all this are giving me a sour taste. In the MMO portion of the game you can simply buy in-game currency for real money, giving anybody with enough spare cash an unbeatable advantage. They are selling an "Idris Corvette" (some really powerful ship) for real money that's supposed to be limited in quantity, can't buy any of those on the website so i guess they are already sold out. In essence: The game ain't even out yet and there are tons of people who have a hangar full with nearly a dozens ship, each of them best suited for certain tasks.
While Joe-average-gamer with his $35 pledge starts out with the most crappy ship there is and he is gonna need dozens of hours just upgrading that one ship and possibly hundreds of hours to buy another one (ships are specialized for certain tasks). What makes this whole situation worse: There is perma-death, your ship gets destroyed is gone.
Now the game ain't out yet, but tbh knowing all this i can already see this happening: You spent 100+ hours working your way up to the next "better" ship from the $35 starting ship, that's a lot of hours. Along comes some guy who just bought the game and dropped down additional $100 on the "Awesome Frigate", the next thing he's gonna do, is blow you out of space and thus you lose your shiny new ship, that you spent 100+ hours on getting in the first place.
That sounds horrible, it does not sound fun at all and it certainly does not sound like the Privateer/Freelancer games i know and love.
The whole point of these games has always been to work your way up to the really awesome stuff, the joy comes from how you work your way there.
But what's the whole point in all of that, when you can just dump down the $ bills and get all the awesome stuff from the very beginning? Even worse: Spending that money allows you to outclass any non-paying player, giving you an advantage and thus allowing you to ruin their day, preventing them form every getting anywhere.
On the official forums there is already a really big thread regarding this (with more details as to why it's bad) plus some of Chris Roberts quotes on this issue and i don't know what to say about them. He considers LoL a pay-to-win game, his sole definition of pay-to-win boils down to "it's pay-to-win when there are things in the game you can only buy with real money", that's idiotic and flawed to the core.
So what are your guys opinions on this? Do you think pay-to-win is okay in such a game? Does it matter to you?
tdlr version: This game makes the worst possible choices you can do in terms of microtransactions, no matter how much time you gonna spent on it, somebody who spends money is always gonna come out on top of you. People spending a lot of time and money gonna be unbeatable.
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