That settles it. As I thought, it is not pay2win. It would be pay to win, if you could by better equipment, which are not available for purchase for ingame money. By buying a ship with real money, you get a short term adventage in PVP after release, but that's it.
Pay2Win is when specific players gain an advantage over everyone else by paying money, I do believe buying stronger ships very much qualifies.
Assuming it is possible to unlock them or “buy” them in game, albeit some of the strongest and most expensive ships seemed to be “Backer Exclusive” on the higher tiers, there will be an excruciating grind equal to the amount of money people have paid tied to it and “backers” will still have the insurance situation thing which puts us back on Pay2Win.
A simple fact for now is that nobody will exactly know how it will work till the game releases, saying “It’s not Pay2Win” without even playing it first in light/despite of the most obvious and large amount of evidence pointing towards that (Being able to pay anything from $25 to $250+ dollars for “virtual ships”).
There’s already talk about ships with different weapons systems, dozens of player crew and NPCs and whatnot, just see your very own brainwashed
Blaine talking about them further above and you are trying to tell me that a game with this type of a payment structure won’t be “Pay2Win”? Which games with a similar payment plan did you see that didn’t end up being such so far?
Most good F2P games use only cosmetics and let everything else be fair play e.g. see League of Legends, Awesomenauts, even to the largest extent Hat Fortress 2.
The less awesome games are the ones where you can gain the same things you can buy through gameplay but the gains are largely just alternative weapons or play styles but don't offer hard noticeable gameplay advantages/disadvantages (like in say Tribes: Ascend) and it does only circumvent a few (dozen) hours of gameplay.
The even less awesome variant or nearing exploitative ones are those where you have to grind for months for something and stuff you buy for real money gives you an obvious advantage over the other players e.g. Bonus damage, better items/equipment etc. like Planetside 2 or APB
It gets ever more ridiculous the more it builds on that and when free players can’t even use certain items and have many restrictions in regards to paying ones like say Star Wars: ToR, Age of Empires Online, Battlefield Heroes, World of Tanks and all those Social Gaming games and cow clickers.
Star Citizen is resting somewhere at the lower end of that spectrum with the cow clickers.
Seeing as the ships seem to have more features and are better the higher priced they are I don’t see how you can even start arguing this won’t be the case in the first place. One of two things will happen, either it is indeed a “fair playing field” and/or they will easily be acquirable within the game at which point the people putting out hundreds and thousands of dollars will ask themselves what they put out the money for in the first place or it isn’t and they will have an advantage over everybody else and for everyone else it will be an insufferable month- or year long grind to even be able to try and gain on those people.
Everything else is just justifying it to yourself how you’ve spent hundreds of dollars for virtual currency and items that don't even exist yet. At this point someone like
Blaine is so far invested in the game that he wouldn’t say something bad about it even if it would stare (or hit) him right in the face.
All I’m seeing is a bunch of people and raging fanatics using that justification because “they want to believe”.
It’s making it all the more fucking ridiculous how everyone put out all this money into virtual ships before the fucking game is even finished and they ACTUALLY KNOW how the game systems will work, if it ends up being any fun or how exploitative it’ll end up being instead of defending it on the basis of “developer said it won’t be Pay2Win”, just lol
If you want to invest thousands of dollars into a cow clicker or a card game I'll think you are retarded all the same and in some cases I'm hoping for government intervention:
http://www.serkantoto.com/2012/05/18/gacha-regulation-official/ but at least you'll know the results of what you are doing and what you're getting.
As far as I can tell, this is the most blatantly Pay2Win and exploitative set-up for a game that I’ve ever seen so far (maybe short of Molyneux’s Curiosity, but almost nobody fell for that) and it doesn’t even use Microtransactions, more like Macrotransactions.
I was very excited about the game at first too and might have even pledged a bunch after seeing a few of the videos due to blind faith if their site didn’t go down in the first few days, but fortunately my critical thinking faculties set in at some point after that saying “Wait a moment, this asshole has based his entire game on a Pre-Purchase cash shop and is trying to trick a large amount of gullible people into buying the most expensive and awesome-est looking virtual ships before the game is even out, they know how they work and it'll work and I’m supposed to trust this guy? This is the type of shit even EA hasn't managed or thought of pulling yet. They've Pre-sold the games, they've pre-sold what they call "DLC" months before a games release but they haven't had the ingenious idea of starting to sell cash shop items years before a specific game was even out.”
Starting from that premise his "assurances" at the moment mean fuck all.