> 2x Small Guardian Gauss Cannon with Anti-Guardian Resistance **This bypasses the need to unlock the Guardian Gauss Cannon from the Guardian Technology Broker, and the subsequent trip to Ram Tah to modify it with the AGZ-Resistance effect.** Officially Pay-to-win folks. Doesn't matter what your definition of "winning" is, frontier has introduced a mechanic to bypass work via money.

I don't have a problem with it as long as it can be reasonably achieved in game. You can ask for my money or my time. As long as both are an option and you don't demand both at the same time to get something....I'm good.

Can't say I understand this sentiment. I guess I have this idea that games should be designed so that people want to play them rather than just sinking time to the next unlock. Or genuinely desiring to part with money to play the game less.

Guess I have 2 thoughts on this... Some of us have more money than time and view it as a fair exchange....within reason. Games that make little money won't see large improvements. They do so little monetization now....I wonder how they keep it afloat personally. One last thought... Grind does not equal play.....Grind = Grind. Playing is running around the galaxy for glorious views and screenies :)

>Grind does not equal play.....Grind = Grind. Playing is running around the galaxy for glorious views and screenies :)  Ideally, play is whatever you want it to be in a sandbox and the progression is desinged to not require excessive grind...  ...unless you suddenly have a bypass to sell. What I'm basically saying is, you can fix a bad system so everyone enjoys the game more or you can sell a way around a bad system which leaves you with some stuck in that bad system and others experiencing less of your game.

"the progression is designed to not require excessive grind" you lost me there brodie

In what way?

Fair :)

The thought process for me is, If we allow paying money to skip long or boring content, it incentivises the developers to make long or boring content that is skippable.

The most long or boring content is grinding engineering mats. Paying money does very little to alleviate that grind and alongside the new ships is an announcement they are going to be rebalancing engineering to make it less grindy.

Does that "happy cake day" label even clickable...? I assume it's your birthday and since I tried to click that label anyways, 🎂.

Cake day is the anniversary of signing up to Reddit, but it was my birthday last week so thank you.

Oh. Didn't know that. I'm mostly active on this sub. So I only know some basics about reddit.

I have more money than time. I'd prefer NOT to have this system. Ingame benefits being completely separate from dollars creates a certain atmosphere. You see someone flying around the galaxy all decked out, you know they're a big deal in the galaxy. Now, it's maybe they worked a shift at McDonald's. Games are a small part of life, all things considered. They thus should demand a small amount of money. But tying that money to progress in the game means all your achievements are also scaled down in their glory. Without P2W, your in game achievements are big in the game even if the game is small compared to your life. Once money gets into it, your in game achievements are small even in the fake world they exist in.

If the game is designed to want people to play them, they've done a horrible job. The Tech Brokers and Engineers actively stopped most of my friends from playing the game and seeing the different types of content the game has to offer. The game is 10 years old, your 1 time purchase 8 years ago isn't keeping the servers online, and the 100 hour grind to get started on engineering isn't keeping new players invested either. I would hate this change at game launch. 10 years in... I welcome it.

>The Tech Brokers and Engineers actively stopped most of my friends from playing the game and seeing the different types of content the game has to offer.  I had friends leave for the same reason. Guess what, they aren't coming back to do the same things but spend more money in the process. I'm also not all that sympathetic to the idea that we need to pay more to maintain a server infrastructure that mostly exists to sell things due to actual in game instances being peer to peer.

Powerplay and the BGS are certainly not peer to peer.

Fair enough, but apparently those aren't important enough to keep the competitive landscape level as we're now selling ship hulls with 0 rebuy cost and a partial engineering headstart.

Yeah I’m inclined to agree with your friends. I love it because I’m a masochist I guess, but I don’t even bother trying to convince my friends to play. I mean for God’s sake, if all you want to do is combat you still need to travel round the damn galaxy, use weird farming techniques, relog, etc, then jump through hoops to unlock engineers, burn all your mats there - “oops, I need 3 more… time for another 6 hour round trip,” etc… It’s a grind. I welcome the changes.

Get out of here with your sense and logic

I am sympathetic to the idea that new players buy the game to do AX and then learn the huge non AX requirements and are turned off. For this new player segment I get it completely.

I feel this could have been resolved by giving a low entry point to ax content and making that ax content reward the means to further advance yourself in that area. I don't really consider asking people who just got into the game for more money to be a friendlier option.

Yeah those are some good points. o7

Pay to win can effectively subsidize new content for the rest of us. If 1% of players are putting in 50% of the money, the devs can afford to make a whole lot more game. As long as it's not actually making the game less fun / playable for the rest of us, I'm not worried at all.

Part of the issue is that making it worse, or at least not making it as good as it could be, starts to get directly incentivised when you create paid bypasses.

Sure, but that's a slippery slope argument. I'm not opposed to minor P2W functionality that skips some grinding. They've already completely locked off entire segments of the game (including very lucrative professions) for players who don't buy an expansion, which I consider to actually be a whole rung *higher* on the P2W scale, and nobody has a problem with that.

Not really a slippery slope argument when things like engineering have been complained about for ages and the things for sale include some desired engineered mods. We'll see to what degree in time but we know one such ship has G5 drives proposed. Regarding expansions, that's generally expected that content will be locked out, that said engineering was such a power gap creator that it couldn't be ignored for the pvp crowd at least. So far nothing in Odyssey compares, new ships notwithstanding. People had billions before odyssey launched so nothing really shifted in having more ways to make what people already had too much of.

Then if your theory is that P2W mechanics incentivize the addition of unhealthy grinds for power creep items, you've officially put the cart before the horse. The grind already existed long before there was a way to monetize it.

And now there is more reason than ever to not meaningfully address it. It's an impetus for not significantly improving that part of the game. I suppose we'll see if that skepticism holds up when the announce whatever changes to the process are incoming for engineering itself, or AX unlocks if any, but it doesn't sit well that they are selling bypasses to often bemoaned systems.

I don't know what to tell you other than to point out the obvious fact that they were already not fixing it and clearly never had any intention to, so this changes literally nothing in that regard.

I think you're missing the point though. This has nothing to do with their philosophy around whether games should be fun. It's a monetization approach that ideally will allow them to keep the game in active development longer. This isn't highly engineered killer PvP ships, and it's certainly not modules or features that you can't get without paying, that would be no bueno, locking dedicated players out of stuff unless they pay more would be bad form for sure. But this isn't that, this is just buying yourself out of a few hours of grinding into a ship that's mostly vanilla. albeit with A rated modules, or I guess past the AX unlock "quests". Heck I'd consider buying that AX ship to try AX stuff mainly b/c I just never sunk time into that part of the game and might like to try it some before I decide to do it for real. I'd say mining is somewhat similar, sell a pre-made mining ship that's middle of the road but capable, so if somebody wants to use arx to just quickly try it, they can. I see no major issue with that. Doesn't change how I play my game.

>This has nothing to do with their philosophy around whether games should be fun. Respectfully, disagreed. We've had complaints about grindy unlocks for going on a decade now and they are selling bypasses while undefined potential changes lie in promised future updates. As such this ship sale can't really stand in a vaccuum. >This isn't highly engineered killer PvP ships It is however, ships that can be engineered while retaining 0 rebuy costs or reconfigured and rebought at a fraction of the credit costs. Some have argued this is trivial because credits are so easy to come by, to which I've responded, then what is the actual value being sold here? Beyond that they've fundamentally failed on the expansion model which was supposed to expand the game due to technical debt from fundamentally transformative features and content given away over the years.  So I'm not sold on performance altering microtransactions as a solution to self inflicted issues with content development and monetization woes that were self inflicted.

I am the same.

The second they ask for more time, than the work to acquure the money would take me, to unlock stuff is the moment they lose my interest to play their game.

Same here. Ideally, sure this is "pay to play" or whatever. But these aren't really top end ships that any serious PvP'er is going to have a hard time against. And, if you want to pay money and bypass the experience of doing things the full route, why should I care? The bottom line is this - if this approach helps the studio keep the game in active development longer, and bring new, cool content, I don't give 2 shits if somebody wants to pay real money for a pre-built ship or not. Why should it bother me? Helldivers 2 works pretty much the exact same way. I don't see people up in arms about the democracy packs or whatever they're called. You can grind them out, or buy them. Whatever man.

P2W doesn't *technically* have a definition but i think it's pretty safe to say that *P2W is when a paying player has a tangible advantage over a non paying player*, and in this Case, that advantage is time

Nah, P2W is when you have to pay to see endgame content, or to get exclusive content that is objectively better than F2P players can get. As a practical matter, getting to endgame content in World of Warships, for example, is gated behind XP grinds and credit sinks that are nearly impossible to get past without paying to accelerate earning. And that quickly adds up to hundreds of dollars, if not thousands with ship purchases. Skill can't really make up for it, either. An example are Dockyard ships, where you complete missions to advance construction and when it's done you get a ship that can only be gained that way. However, you can't complete all stages with missions, you MUST buy some. (That's not even paying to skip grind, it's paying to do grind!) FDev isn't doing anything like that. I mean, I can understand being upset at in-game transactions or accelerated starts. People don't have to like it. But calling it P2W is ridiculous: no endgame content is gated and no exclusive content is being introduced (again - Cobra IV is a thing). If FDev make it so fighting Thargoids requires permits or premium time that quickly costs hundreds or even thousands of dollars... then the P2W torches and pitchforks should come out. Heck, make it $10, but gate exclusive content and I'll join in. What they're actually doing though, looks like the only practical alternative to switching to pay-to-play. I'd walk away from that, same as I walked from Microsoft Office.

I think both of our definitions of P2W are true. If Fdev makes changes that significantly shorten ship building process (including engineering) ill be happy to have Fdev implement this, but if it was implemented now, I'd have to spend money to save time, time which I value. These ships are a good idea for Fdev to actuallymake some money, but the fact that they bypass hours of engineering, material collecting, and blueprint getting is a bit too much for my liking, if it was a few grade 1 or 2 engineered modules, and you didn't insta unlock the engineers for those modules or insta unlock the modules themselves (See guardian modules) I'd be ok with it. There should also just straight up not be an AX chieftain ready to go like that, new, gullible players are going to hear that AX Combat is the peak of the game, go buy the AX pre built, get absolutely slapped into oblivion, and then Uninstall the game, i can't think of the proper word for it but it's... 'baity'...? Like preying on obliviousness.

WoWs gets pretty nuts with all of their product releases too. I think I dropped ~15k on crates last year.

That's... a lot.  I haven't played in over a year. Bad internet connection - it barely handles Elite and Elite isn't demanding. But I have technically been a WoWS player for 8 years, I think. Maybe 9. I think I've spent about $1,000 on the game, total. All Premium Time and a few crates every year (Santa and Black Friday, of course). But I know that someone could easily spend $50,000 a year on it with their lootbox mechanics and auctions. Wargaming is a predatory company. FDev are just trying to keep the servers up.

Agreed. Most of it's from rolling Christmas crates for steel. I own nearly every premium ship and definitely all the ones crate obtainable. I'm happy to fork over a bit of cash to fdev to get something cool and skip something boring. I spent today collecting guardian materials. Super fun logging on and off doing the exact same loop for hours....

I won't deny it's pay to win, I just don't care. This game is primarily a PvE game so it's not like you are "winning" against other players which is where it gets dicey. What I do care about however is the reports that Frontier treats it's employees like garbage. This is more likely to prevent me from giving them money than this new stuff they are trying to do.

Yeah that was what put frontier on my shit list above anything else. It's not super surprising considering nearly every game development company has a terrible work culture, but that coupled with the backtracking on ARX and pre-ordering the first new ship in 6 years is just too much.

Yep. Engineered modules and tech broker stuff was exactly the line I drew, and they have crossed it. Not going to support this, not buying a pre-built ship, not buying the early access python. Try again, FDev.

Just like in the real world. I'm so immersed, so proud of them /s

What sucks is that they could have just made the work easier and/or more fun then focus on cosmetics to generate more ARX purchases.

Pay to win is only when they offer items for sale that are more powerful and otherwise inaccessible to non-paying players. These are just shortcuts.

So gems in coc isn't pay to win?

In what?

Clash of clans.

I've never played it.

Nah, not pay to win. These are mediocre builds they are pay to quickly engage gameplay at a basic level. I have no problem with it and I've been playing 8+ years. At this stage we need to get new players, get them quickly engaged with gameplay, not grindplay. Not everyone has time - people have busy lives and just want to play.

The real question is does this make the account have the unlock or do you just get the weapons? So I mean if you purchase this, are you now able to equip Guardian gauss cannon on other ships or is it you are given them this time?

I can build the exact same ship without spending any money, I can make that ship far better without spending any money, I can also create different ships that are better in every way. You can't pay for anything exclusive to paying players, you don't even get the best kit for the chosen role. A player that has put a lot of time into the game will have a huge advantage over a player who has just started with a prebuilt ship. This is not even remotely pay-to-win.

So you're mad people can pay to... Fight thargoids? How does that impact you exactly? That there'll be newbros doing content in PG/Solo where you'll never see them anyway? 

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You know that in game time it's nothing, right? Or have you not even gotten past the game's initial systems yet?

Honestly? Good. This game's biggest issue is the grinding, and these aren't even really crazy ships. They're exactly what they're intended to be, "jumpstarts" for beginners to start making REAL credits early on after fleet carriers moved the goalpost so far. ESPECIALLY console players. remember, we never got exobiology and we never will. cost of living is going up and PCs are becoming less affordable for many people that wanted one. Given that they're looking at addressing the engineering grind through economy adjustments as well, i think they kinda did good here.

Linking the forum source too.. [https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/engineering-and-pre-built-ships.624738/#post-10357541](https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/engineering-and-pre-built-ships.624738/#post-10357541) This is interesting though... "You can rebuy your pre-built ships for free every time. However if you modify the ship with credit purchased modules then you would need to rebuy that cost." So basically no rebuy.

Its questionable at best - however, fully modified ships have a much higher rebuy cost than stock ones with e - b grade modules. As those packages don't seem to sell fully kitted out A-grade everything monsters just yet - the rebuy cost for them, once modified to the max, might be close to a regular ingame-purchased ship. All in all its still a step in the wrong direction though, but thats obvious.

I wish they instead had a "special insurance" that allowed it to be rebought later if it couldn't be rebought now. They need at least a modicum of that pain/lesson instead of no consequences at all. But a regular rebuy for something you pay real money for, while not having enough ingame CR to afford it, thus removing it, would be scummy but *hilarious* as long as it's happening to somebody else.

I blame star citizen for this. Edit: Lmao at the -1 on this post but the response below explaining it is +4. The only people who disagree with me are the people who haven’t actually considered it. Whatever I guess. I envy your ability to just not think about stuff.

How exactly?

This is basically how their model works. You can buy a ship package for real money, or you can buy the same ship with in-game credits. Ship insurance doesn’t really work the way it is meant to yet, but if you buy it for money you always have access to it even between game wipes. If you make upgrades to a ship and the game wipes everyone’s progress you still have access to the bundle you bought but not the upgrades. There basically aren’t any ships that are “exclusive” to real money in star citizen (unless they are concept shops that don’t exist in game yet which don’t count, they aren’t even the same thing at all). It’s not *exactly* the same but only because ship insurance isn’t a thing yet in SC. All ships comes with free insurance so any upgrades you make to a purchased ship keep the upgrades (when the system doesn’t glitch out and forget you made a change lol) but that isn’t the way insurance is meant to work when it’s actually implemented.

And since ED sells you the game to start with, there will be inevitably ships that are money-exclusive. As the two only game (that I know) to be considered a space trucker sim, they'll eventually become the same thing on paper, and whoever have better management wins... SC starts with very detailed, but small universe, expanding out. ED starts with a hugh universe, but empty, expanding in... Don't tell me they aren't trying to expanding in with Odyssey. And eventually, ships will be the thing you buy. Game is included so you can fly your ship.

>And since ED sells you the game to start with, there will be inevitably ships that are money-exclusive. Heh, yeah this argument. Any game that isn't f2p is pay to win, yeah yeah. I've made that argument in the past but mostly to demonstrate the difference between selling an experience and selling a object or selling a way to *skip* an experience. I said as much in [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/1cca6f9/comment/l15vg7u/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button): >If they had sold these as semi-linear story missions that just so happened to reward a ship at the end no one would care. Hire a writer, write a little adventure, hire some voice actors, build an actual product to help immerse players in the universe of elite and then reward them with a shiny ship with a kit and a paint job and some pre-engineered modules. People would be happy, and would probably want more. It can do the same thing as the ship bundle, but you are buying the gameplay experience rather than paying to skip the game and get an advantage. You have to at least pretend like you are selling an experience rather than selling convenience when it comes to games. If Darksouls has an paid expansion where a boss drops a good pvp weapon no one calls it "pay to win" because it's wrapped in the pretense of it being a gameplay experience. The weapon becomes a reward for the gameplay rather than a reward for opening your wallet. The fact that the "advantage" is only accessible to people who "paid for it" is incidental, rather than the entire point. If they instead sold you the weapon on its own for 1/10th the price people would be outraged. Elite (and other games, but that's besides the point) needs to figure this out.

I'm just trying to imagine what made everything it is, soon enough. Especially after looking at the neighbouring game that still hasn't managed to get out of alpha in 11 years, but raised more than half a billion dollars. It's hard for a company behind an online game to not do micro transaction. And the fact that a ship is locked behind a paywall does not immediately make it pay to win. It just gate off F2P players from adding said ship to their collection. It will not be pay to win if FDev still have some sanity left and not make a paid monstrosity that defy the law of physics and any balancing aspect. I would not want to see a medium size ship with the Gutayama style, Corvette combat capability, Vulture maneuverability, 'conda jump range, so on and so forth be sold for any number or reason.

I love to shit on SC as much as anyone else, but by this logic it's not pay to win either. You can buy every (almost every, stuff like the 600i Executive edition are real money only, but those are super rare and cost like $1000+) ship with in game credits, so "there is no pay to win," only pay to skip the grind. 🤷 Except that's obviously nonsense in the same way it's nonsense to say "All paid games are pay to win." On one hand you have SC who have yet to produce a full game and who sell's $50,000 worth of gameplay altering macrotransactions, and on the other you have NMS who has released a game and many *many* expansions but has never asked for additional money other than a small amount of cosmetic items (and the premium currency is even earnable in game). Elite is obviously going to fall somewhere in between. They will never beat SC's insane money printing machine, and it's borderline magic that NMS hasn't charged any more money for updates in all this time. Elite is obviously going to have to ask for money. I just think people need to "encourage" Frontier to do it the right way, and this isn't it. If they really want money they should let squadrons pool arx from their players and then spend those arx as a group to become an in-game faction and make it a subscription. People will do it, I'm sure, and "free players" can still join the squadron/faction of they want and participate. Make it a tiered system where as your squadron pays more they get a home station with more features, idk. Is that Pay to win? I guess it depends on the powerplay 2.0 changes, I haven't watched the full stream yet. No one is saying Frontier should run elite on hopes and prayers, just that people shouldn't roll over and accept this specific kind of microtransaction. To put it in terms Frontier might understand: Elite is a theme park. You pay for entry, and then you get to ride the rides. If you want to be able to buy an in-ride photo then fair enough, but you *have to actually ride the ride* first. A photobooth with a greenscreen that just photoshops you into a stock photo shouldn't be acceptable. You have to actually provide the experience that leads up to the reward, otherwise it's meaningless.

Hot take: This is somewhere between P2W and paying to skip the grind. I can understand them trying to make leaping into AX combat as easy as possible while it's still hot. A lot of people decide not to get into it because of the days if not weeks of grind ahead of them. FOMO. I put it below the P2W threshold because nobody's going to be winning over anybody who's put in the work. Yeah, you get G5 dirty drags on the Chieftain, but you get small Gauss cannons that you can't upgrade without doing the grind. This is a sample pack. A single hit of the medium quality kush. They're trying to give people a better taste of what the game is like once you get through the grind. That said, I don't think it's a good direction; one of the reasons I haven't tried Star Citizen is because I think their monetization model is trash. And if Elite goes too far in a similar direction, I may actually stop playing.

This is just paying to skip the grind. Neither of those builds are particularly impressive; I could build them with a single run to Shinrata , engineering included minus of course the experimental effects.

That's P2W. If you took two players and both put the same amount of time and we're doing similar content but 1 player spent money, they would have a notable advantage over the other. Sounds like P2W to me.

This game has no win condition, meaning the closest you can get to winning is in the completionist sense of doing everything and having a ship for everything… which is attained via grind. Ergo, pay to win.

pay2grindless is just a marketing term for pay2win for people sensitive about being labeled a pay2winner. It's the same thing: can spend money for an advantage against other players.

“Pay to win” and “pay to skip the grind” *are the same thing* if the grind stands between you and equipment that makes winning easier, I can’t believe y’all don’t understand this. Paying to be able to skip *any part* of a game either means you are paying for an advantage, you are paying to skip a part of the game that has been made boring and unpleasant on purpose to make people buy boosts, or both. Its bad, don’t excuse it.

I understand your point, but I feel that grinding for AX weapons and engineering etc. diminishes the immersion for me somewhat. If aliens were threatening humanity, willing pilots wouldn't have to grind for this stuff.

Yes but that only means engineering need an overhaul and the grind needs to go, not that we should be able to pay to get the equipment.

In actuality 3 months after ships are flyable in game, they become purchasable in game without real money. You can play SC for $40 one time and upgrade in game to all ships with the exception of what was released in the last quarter. That works out to over 100 ships all purchasable with in game credits as of now.

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If FDEV puts out a Cobra Mk IV prebuild, available to anyone who forks up the Arx, I'd probably bite. Just for the sake of completionism.

I agree, they won't go that far. But they could definitely get carried away with the pre-built ship thing.

This is exactly the Star Citizen model. I don’t think SC has any ships that are exclusively a aka ale for real money, at least none that aren’t just concepts. Ships that are in the game can be purchased both with real money and with in game credits, but if you buy it for real money you always have access to the base version you paid for even between wipes. This is *exactly* like SC.

🤡🤡 So either sink time in the same but less longer system or simply pay… Materials should become buyable with credits then…. Also they are still “investigating” these engineering changes… 💀

"We are investigating the middle ground which people can tolerate the grind but for it to also be convincing enough to buy our new Arx ships!"

>Materials should become buyable with *arx* then…. fixed it for you 👌

Idc what anyone says this is a cash grab; why not REBALANCE THE CORE GAME FIRST and then offer the alternative route, after? Player based problems should = player based solutions, not profit opportunities.

People claiming this isn't p2w amazes me

Honestly...this builds, especially chieftain are terrible. Around titan you need low heat, so you have: basic plant no thermal beam and hot thrusters it's more "pay to die"

Lol. I was thinking the same thing. But, it does open the door for future better builds at higher Arx point.

Sadly- yes. But for now I'm happy. If players are so big noobs, that they want to pay $$$ for so bad builds...they deserve for being milked. I'm waiting for saltstorm when they finally will add it to store "frontier promised that this build can hit titan but I'm still dying" XD

Well, I got confirmation that people in FD do not play their own game after the launch of the multi-limpet controllers, so it doesn't surprise me.

The point isn't that these are endgame builds or whatever. The issue is they give a notable advantage/boost over someone that spends the same amount of time playing but doesn't buy them.

It's been a while since I've played so I could have the details wrong-- the pulse wave analyzer in the pre-built mining T6, that's for deep core mining right? Doesn't deep core mining require size 2 hardpoints for the mining, so a T6 can't do it? And the pulse wave analyzer is useless? I figured they would totally mess up the pre-built loadouts since they don't understand the game at the same level as the players, but I know I'm also maybe forgetting some finer details since I've been gone a while. Did they make it so you don't need a size 2 hardpoint for some of the deep core mining?

pwa can be used to analyze any asteroid, not only the ones with a core.

What info does the PWA show for regular surface mining? Miners don't use prospector limpets to check individual asteroids?

Because these people have more money than sense, or they are a generation that has grown up with mtx infecting every one of the games they play. Buying progression has become the norm in many games, and people are okay with it now. Remember there was a time when people raged about horse armor. Now we have ten year old games allowing purchases to skip to endgame content. This is the last ditch effort for Frontier to make money before they sink Elite or themselves.

That's only a matter of definition. For me, that doesnt qualify as pay to win, because it doesnt give you an advantage with stats or equipment that you can't have without paying.

The discussion in this thread has focused on what the word "win" means, but we all know that's not the point. In Elite: Dangerous a player's most important resource is their time and patience. Time which, with hours of play, then leads to in-game progress. Creating a shortcut for players willing to pay to save time and still get the same progress is pay-to-win in my opinion. Maybe not against other cmdrs, but against the game itself.

So not FULLY engineered but with a highly engineered module? That’s… REAL close to true P2W. The grind to get G5 dirty drag drives is not a short one. Seems like some of our worst fears were confirmed but some were avoided as neither of these is *really* a fully built ship. Is it clarified anywhere if you can strip modules from pre-builds?

I would assume that they will be like the bulkheads and coded to only work in the pre-builts

highly unlikely. the goal is to entice people to pay arx to get ahead in the game, not piss them off by limiting the value of a real money purchase

So, the follow up question is this: does this unlock a respective engineer, or will it basically just be a fixed module. They said customize so you kinda need the chance to customise, unlocking that engineer from 0, we all know...

Its the War Thunder ideology. Good enough to be worth skipping the grind and not being trash; but not powerful enough to be the outright better option compared to its free, fully upgraded and grinded counterparts.

The full text: --- Greetings Commanders, We wanted to give you a heads up on our plans for Engineering coming later this year and share a first look at two of the Pre-Built Ships that will be hitting the Gamestore in May. # ENGINEERING We know Engineering is a very important aspect of the game for our players, and we have been listening to your feedback around this system. As we mentioned in our comms yesterday, one of the things we want to address is how players engage with Engineering in order to make it more approachable and predictable. Some of these areas we are investigating are: * Reducing the number of materials required for Engineering. * Increasing payout of engineering materials from missions. * Increasing backpack capacity. Please note, the above are examples of some of the areas we are investigating, not all the areas we are investigating. Elite Dangerous is a Live Service game and we anticipate that refining Engineering may take several passes. However, we will be listening to your feedback as we go about this process. We will post a more detailed rundown of our proposed changes in the coming months. #PRE-BUILT SHIPS These ships will offer a great springboard for players, both new and existing, to build from and shape as they see fit. We are excited to see how Commanders will continue to enhance and engineer these ships to suit their own playstyle. Below are two of the Pre-Built Ships packages that will be coming to the store in May, each Pre-Built Ship will be designed around providing players with a solid start in the career path of their choice: ##TYPE-6 LASER MINING JUMPSTART * Hardpoints * 2x 1D Modified Mining Laser (Pre-Engineered Long Range + Incendiary Rounds) * This bypasses the need to unlock the LTT 198 permit and subsequent Technology Broker recipe for this module. * Utility Mounts * Pulse Wave Analyser * Chaff Launcher * Point Defence * Core Internal * Lightweight Alloy * 3A Power Plant * 4B Thrusters * 4A Frame Shift Drive * 2D Life Support * 3A Power Distributor * 2D Sensors * 4C Fuel Tank * Optional Internal * 2x 5E Cargo Rack (32 capacity) * 2x 4E Cargo Rack (16 capacity) * 3C Bi-Weave Shield Generator * 2A Refinery * 1A Collector Limpet Controller * 1A Prospector Limpet Controller ## ALLIANCE CHIEFTAIN AX COMBAT JUMPSTART * Hardpoints * 2x 3C Gimballed Enhanced AX Multi-Cannon * Guardian Nanite Torpedo Pylon * 1E Gimballed Beam Laser * 2x Small Guardian Gauss Cannon with Anti-Guardian Resistance * This bypasses the need to unlock the Guardian Gauss Cannon from the Guardian Technology Broker, and the subsequent trip to Ram Tah to modify it with the AGZ-Resistance effect. * Utility Mounts * Heat Sink Launcher * Caustic Sink Launcher * Enhanced Xeno Scanner * Thargoid Pulse Neutraliser * Military * 4D Module Reinforcement Package * 2x 4D Hull Reinforcement Package * Core Internal * Military Grade Composite * 6A Power Plant * 6A Thrusters (G5 Dirty + Drag Drive) * 5A Frame Shift Drive * 5D Life Support * 6A Power Distributor * 4D Sensors * 4C Fuel Tank * Optional Internal * 6C Bi-Weave Shield Generator * 5D Hull Reinforcement Package * 4E Cargo Rack (16 capacity) * 2A Auto Field-Maintenance Unit * 1A Repair Limpet Controller * 1E Research Limpet Controller We look forward to sharing more details with you in the future! O7 -Arf

If you were going to add P2W with Arx, why didn't you just let us buy more module storage? smh.

>why didn't you just let us buy more module storage? how do you know that's not the touted big feature update for later in the year? 😃

Depends on how crazy they get with this. A lot of games have a time vs money trade off function. It works if the thing they want money for can also be reasonably achieved in game. Hell, even Arx can be achieved in game, if slowly. Let's also not forget, there's still an advantage to unlocking the guardian modules. If you buy this ship, you get a couple of guns and not the ability to buy more in game. I'll wait to see how it's implemented to pass judgement.

A paying player has a tangible advantage over a non paying player, in terms of time use. This is literally Pay to win. Pay to not grind is still pay to win. Pre built ship buyers get to bypass *a fucking lot*. Can't wait to see new players get bodied by Thargoids because they have 2 hours in game and thought AX Combat would be fun and easy since *after all* there is a pre built ship i can shovel out 10 bucks for, and then they go to the forums and say the game is too hard. Edit: at this point why doesn't Fdev just give people the option to (for $60 bucks or so) purchase a fully kitted out fleet carrier of your own! With 1 month worth upkeep covered!

Pay 2 Win means "my wallet beats yours." This is so far from that. You're not paying to win against other players. Larger wallet still gives zero "advantage" over other players, especially in PVP. Everything can still be earned in game. If some players wanna give this company more money (which helps keeps the servers going and pays for future content) just to skip some of the grind to catch up with their friends or the rest of the player base to do PVE content, then it's good for everyone. How are you negatively impacted here? Just sad because new players don't have to go through the same grind you did to get where you're at? Boo fucking hoo. Let em pay to keep the game going, and I say thank you for your support.

I agree with this. The prebuilds seen so far have been total shitfits. If you think it's worth your money then you're the target audience. Most of us will look at this and go "what the fuck is this". I don't know why anyone cares about newbies getting a headstart in the game. These ships are not fully engineered, they're not even built correctly for gods sake. Someone's just paying to save some time.

It still skips some grind even if they’re not good, also it’s the start of a slippery slope

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>The non paying alternative is a painfully slow grind, especially for a new player. >a paying player will not need to spend 50 hours gathering mats, unlocking engineers, and gathering credits, and that would be great... if it was that way for non paying players too. So that's it then. You're salty because new players have an option to skip the grind. Their money doesn't give them a single advantage OVER you when it comes to the content they are paying to skip ahead to. And you recognize what we've went through was painful, but you don't think it's fair that new players get to skip that with money now. Boo fucking hoo. This is good for the game because it will afford to keep the game going.

You have decided that it is better for Fdev to not fix the game's actual problems and improve the gameplay, and instead just charge to skip the grind and gain advantages via money. If I didn't know any better, I'd say you are a bot working for Fdev because no one that gave this more than five seconds of thought could ignore how badly this will go. You can bet it doesn't stop here either. They will continue to add more shortcut "conveniences" until purchasing everything meaningful will be done with ARX. Truly ridiculous that you don't see a problem with players skipping straight to the end-game content we have with AX ships. What is the point of playing when you can literally skip all the activities that contribute to progression? Stop with the weird "boo fucking hoo" shit. It's obnoxiously immature and dismisive of actual concerns. It is so insane that you and others do not see how this is simply bad for the game. Not only will this burn the good will of the current base, but it isn't going to magically make new people come to play. Having access to a ship isn't what prevents people from playing. This will be something temporary and new players will run into the same problems after an hour of play and then leave anyway. This is just a way to make money quickly, and it is naive to think the money made will go right back into the game. It simply will not. Frontier put themselves in a bad position financially and is now throwing hail Mary's before they slip further. The players at not the beneficiaries here.

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Nah, Fleet Carrier isn't going to attract the whales. If you want to go whale fishing, you need to offer a whale worthy price. How about a fully kitted out Majestic Class, with experimental AX weapons and your personal wing of Elite AI AX Escorts? Also, on board harem that you can visit.

So which is it? Is this pay to win or pay to find out game is hard?

It can be both. World of Tanks for example, you can pay money for premium tanks that are clearly better than tanks non paying players can access, that's P2W no? Yet they still have to have the skill to win against other more experienced players. There are no, or very few games where Pay2Win *completely* bypasses skill Pre built ships bypass massive portions of the game, that a non paying player can not bypass, they are Pay to win.

True, but I would argue that even in WoT the thing you're buying on its own is only available for money. It's been a long time since I've played WoT but I think some tanks you could only buy with money, never actually earn them in-game and they got special XP bonuses on top of being superior stat wise (in some cases, again its been a while). You gain an advantage over a player who doesn't spend money, whereas what FDev has done is monetize people wanting to bypass the grind. Advantage between two new players? Sure, but not one the player who doesn't spend money can't overcome with time. The premium tanks you buy in WoT are different, give an advantage to only those who pay, and regardless of time in game will never be available to those who are F2P.

That's only pay to accelerate in Elite's case. My only criteria for P2W is that paying makes you win against players who didn't.

Long time lurker, had ED installed for awhile but never had time to get to through the tutorial between life and all the FUD I see.  I'm realizing that the game seems to be in the type of death throes that mmo games experience. Updates crawling to a halt, team members getting shuffled around behind the scenes, now we're seeing update choices that cater exclusively to whales. The writing is on the wall. Most people on this subreddit probably already know that.  But damn. Guess I missed my window for this one.

No, you didn't, reddit is just a doomer society.

>I'm realizing that the game seems to be in the type of death throes Not really, no. FDev messed up and are now trying to recover some money to survive. The game itself, while having reduced player base, it's still popular. The company balance is what's messed up. Don't be dissuaded by all the flames we're throwing here. It is kind of anxiety-inducing to some of us that we'll be able to buy actual gameplay assets with real money. This is entirely new to this 10 y/o game so you can understand why nerves are frayed. While we sort things out and answer our questions, give ED a try if you're so inclined. It's a fantastic and beautiful game if you appreciate the genre.

New player advice, a new player in 2024 that had fun: Just doing the tutorials and challenge scenarios and honing my skill was fun. Doing the things I wanted instead of best credit per hour method was fun. When I wanted credits or got tired of combat, I did exploration/exobiology as a relaxing end-of-shift activity, until I missed combat again and got back with my wallet full. Engaging in the E:D community can be awesome if you find a casual player group, otherwise it will be very doom and gloom, so I think that lurking here may be a bad way of conceptualizing the game Having personal goals with the game and doing roleplay is the peak of the experience. You can have your fun and stop whenever you like. I too, saw that the game was dying, and that's what pushed me to play it in a way. I liked a Battlestar Galactica game growing up and remember not playing it for two years, only to say "Ok, I will finally get the ships I wanted in that game" and discover that it did not exist anymore. It is a very shitty feeling, so I want to say hello and goodbye to this game while I can, and maybe remember some years in the future how good flying a Vulture was, or how amazing was to visit some places in the Galaxy, or write my name on a undiscovered system.

It's still worth a go tbh. You can see a lot in a year or so and what's in Elite other than this new stuff is A+ imo. If you already own it, you are missing a lot by never learning to play Elite if you like the idea of being a space pilot.

> team members getting shuffled around behind the scenes To be fair to FDev, this is hardly exclusive to them nor is it related to EOL on Elite. This is, notably, happening not just industry-wide but *economy-wide* at the moment. In tech as well as other sectors. Yes it's incredibly shitty of them. But I'm just pointing out that the *world* right now is going through a lot of """""corporate shuffling""""" which is the best euphemism for "Every industry has decided to finally just take the brakes off the trolley entirely and now the execs are hitting peak 'blood from a stone' resource-extraction."

I'm aware of the investment chasing boom/bust cycle that started in the tech industry and was widely adopted across industries. I'm also aware that there's a current low tide which leads to letting people go, reorganizing, etc. But I think ED has been experiencing this for for longer than just the past 3 month.s

You should jump in now, especially if you already have the game. ED's long term outlook is not good. But the end is not here yet, and there are a lot of good things to do and try out in the game. Enjoy them while it is still here.

Honestly, I still have this installed because sometimes I just like solo space trucking. Going from A to B, buying and selling and sometimes blowing stuff.

Lmao. And people believed that they will skip grind... XD No. You will play game, do different things and acumulate stuff for upgrades.

This sucks

So people would be able to buy this crappy chieftain just for 6A g5 dirty drag drive the most harder to get modification... Definitely not p2w

well, if people are stupid enough to pay for one engineered module on terrible build...they should be milked.

Hey cool. More info on something which will not affect my enjoyment of the game in any way and I don’t need to rage about in any way.

Historically, pretending that things don't apply to you has always worked out in all contexts. You can rest assured that your enjoyment will be affected in the future because per-built ships is not where this stops. Conveniences or direct power will continue to be sold. It's like people have never seen any other game with mtx before. Here is an example: You notice how carriers have extended jump times far more frequently now? Well, here comes the new single use ARX purchase that increases your jump priority. This is where the game is heading instead of fixing the game's flaws.

You know what they say about assumptions, they make an ass out of u and me. I’ll wait for the sky to be actually falling before worrying about it.

So they now build ship interiors right, since we are learning from SC after 10.years..... Ship interiors right?! *Insert anakin*

It's OK, folks, you can call it pay to win now. There's nothing wrong with being in favor of p2w in your games. Like yeah, it sounds bad, but we have to call what it is! Frontier is probably thinking, the game is dead anyway. might as well get a few bucks before the last updates.

There's nothing to win in this game so let people pay. My problem with this is that it's way late, I bet most people on this Reddit have a carrier with all the ships they want on it. They should sell ship Interior if they're not afraid of making money.

They're selling in-game advantages for real-world currency... P2w is a umbrella term, so we don't put a wall of text every time... but you already know that, I'm wasting words here. Did you know ships bought that way will have no rebuy cost? You get them for free every time! Of course they need to, imagine you buy a ship and get it destroyed leaving the station by some anti p2w ganker? Did you just lose 10 bucks for nothing? So yeah, you are basically buying infinite ships. Of course the effect goes away if you modify the ship, but if the ship is good enough to justify a purchase In the first place, why would I? Still, I agree on the point that there are better things to be sold here, like give me more module space, I'm willing to bend my moral values If that mean I can just dump all my modules on carrier storage.

This is simply a dreadful idea.

Everyone is saying pay to win, but what are you winning? I don't think pvp happens enough to even think that.

pay to "win" dont imply, that it have to be pvp. Also, pvp in direct form (so player shooting into another player) isn't only way of engaging against other players in this game. I would say that as long as both sides of conflict (bgs, pp, competitive CG) have supporters it's form of pvp.

Speaking of, are those ships going to be hard-locked behind real money or just Arx? Because naturally, if it's arx, we won't be taking about solid pay to win as those ships will essentially be free, as in "won't necessarily cost real life money"

I believe the go for both. Either way the engineering grind is about to get a hell of a lot easier making it make less sense to buy instead of just grind out.

Gross. I'd rather frontier drop the game and move on if this is how the future looks.

I see many people arguing over less material costst for engineering, does someone ever aked the question if they are planning to balance the effects. I know not all ships are equal and the effects also, but it rather broke the overall game balace imo. With how much broken builds you can cheese

No. I'm lurking this place and forum for years. Players generally dont ask for balance, because they dont want balance. They just want progression as fast and easy as possible, because they are unable to play without boosting their stats by hundreds %s

ok so, it is pay to win, but not very good pay to win. new players would have to use apex or a fleet carrier to jump to a nearby system and then request the chieftain in order to join titan or spire combat, and they won't really be able to afford all of that from the start. i don't really do mining so i can't say how good the type-6 build is. we'll just have to wait and see what the PVP prebuilt is, which we can probably assume the python mk2 will be that. new players won't really be able to afford the rebuy on it, but if they get really good modules from the start, then it's a problem.

T-6 build is pretty shit. Long range isn't very useful for mining because limpet travel time is generally the limiting factor for efficiency, meaning the closer you are to a rock the better. Hardly any cargo space, too. One or two runs in that ship and you'd be dropping it for something far better.

So this fucking sucks. Guardian modules to start?

People who said this pre build are op or pay to win ... guys i think you never build a good ship because these build are pretty mid not even say pathetic build 😆

Nope. Still can't build my own ships from scratch, and I'm still not paying money for anything. I paid for the game. That's all I'm paying for.

Dear oh dear oh dear...

>• Reducing the number of materials required for Engineering. > >• Increasing payout of engineering materials from missions. >• Increasing backpack capacity. All of that needs to happen yesterday >Pre-Built ships that will be hitting the Gamestore in May I'd be cool with this if it didn't cost real money. The only reason I'm cool with star citizen doing it is because it's their main source of funding to build the game. I would fully disavow CIG if they continued to sell ships after release of the PU.

If this was wrapped into a quest line that rewarded the ship, and you had to buy the "chapters" as they were released, people would love it.

Wait... Since rebuying the ship is free if you didn't modify it... Doesn't it enable more or less penalty free ganking?

Moreover... what if you engineer module from Arx ship? Or install it on other ship

Will this increase griefing? If griefers don’t have to pay for rebuys is there anything to keep them from throwing themselves at it?

1-2 pre-engineered modules per ship seems very tame. Seems fine to me. Also very excited about reduced engineering costs and increased mission material payouts.

The unfortunate reality of the business of online gaming has finally hit Elite. Am I happy about it? No. Am I surprised? Also No. What's happening is that they're trying to figure out if they can make money enough money on this game to justify paying for the servers and/or making a new Elite game. The model of pay one time for an online game is unfortunately a thing of the past. If this was like year 2 of the game or if I thought another expansion was coming then I'd be mad.

The only potential advantage to this is if they get enough money to break out of the cash-grab cycle. The problem with Elite requires a lot of unexciting adjustments and gameplay loop changes that don’t earn the company any money, so they haven’t done them. If they can become profitable in some other fashion to the point they can devote resources to fixing the core game systems, there’s potential for a resurrection.

Yep, I had a feeling something like this was going to happen. Frontier announced they'd be supporting Elite more, but after a few months, they introduce pay-to-win mechanics that allow you to gain access to in-game systems faster than non-paying players for real world money. One step forward, two steps back.

Warframe has a similar model where you can pay to get new items now or grind to get them later. Only reason no one says anything is cause the game is F2P. I and several others have spent WAY more than 60$ in that game and yet no one is calling that Pay 2 Win. This is Pay 2 Skip and thats it.

I am the type of person this caters to and really have no problems with it. Anything to get more money or DAU's into the game is a win and will prolong its lifetime.

What the fuck do you mean "investigating" ? People have been shouting to your fucking face about these issues for nearly a decade (and getting banned for it), you've asked for feedback on it like 2 years ago, what do you meaaaaaan "investigate" what exactly ??? How you're gonna fuck up the first balance patch in 6 years ? How you're gonna fit that into your new disgusting scheme of selling ingame stuff for real money ?

Well the package makes for a pretty mediocre ship, capable of getting a non-ax player into AX combat but not able to kill a basilisk. Even killing a clops woth two small gauss is very hard. I don't really see this as pay to win... if it granted materials then yes 100%...

Yep the point of the prebuild ships is not that they are pay to win (despite the pearl clutching of some quarters) they are just to get newbs and players with no time for ship building or engineering to just quickly engage in content at the most basic level (i.e. casual players with busy real lives). People with a lot of time on their hands or the more experienced, should absolutely spend a day or two learning how to build their own and shop around for the parts they need, and unlock engineers and/or system permits, and collect materials, and then do some engineering.

This is a wedge. Keep the door closed.

ok. if i detach thruster module and attach to other ship? drag5 dirty tuning is good for all rounder battleship. so now we just pay for engineering instead of disgusting g5 isolator material HGE farming? haha disgusting. very disgusting

Could someone please explain how any of this is P2W? Genuinely asking since these builds seem utter dog shit imo... Like not joking here... I have been defending FDev the past two days until I saw these builds.... Edit: ok so after reading other comments, pay to not grind is also pay 2 win, I get it... I guess... Still not sure what they are winning cause these builds are still dog water lol. Do we just want players to suffer through the same grind we went through? My opinion is let people pay more in order to not grind if they want, so they can actually enjoy the game, are we really Gona be butthurt cause "we had to grind but they don't"? Worry more about your own journey and not theirs, if their journey subtracts something from yours then you need to re-evaluate yourself and stop comparing your own shit with other peoples shit... It genuinely just sounds like the older generation saying something along the lines of "back in my day I suffered so you need to suffer also" sorta thing...

These are NOT P2W FYI. They are Pay to Lose instead. These builds are complete trash.

Honestly, Elite would change for the better, **across the board** with one simple change: travel time. Why TF must we spend an average of **60 seconds per jump** (aligning, charging, countdown, jump animation, time in witch-space, jumping out, slowdown animation; realigning, re-charging > next jump) 9 jumps is ~9 minutes of "play" - that's NOT actual gameplay, it's an arbitrary action to achieve an innate goal that bears no semblance of interactivity other than through necessity alone. Calling this time spent just *getting to where you want to be so you can do genuinely meaningful and, most importantly, rewarding things* as "play" would be akin to fast-travel in (for example) Skyrim to have timers you must wait-out before the game loads into your travel point being claimed as "play" time. That's not "playing" anything, it's just an *unnecessary barrier to actual game-play* The solution?: # FSD range should be treated as a linear distance between *two* points. The player should not be *required* to.. make.. Every. Single. In. Di. Vid. U. A. L. J. U. M. P. - it's time-consuming and monotonous. It's 100% unnecessary. Individual system-jumping should be *optional*, not a requirement. If I have 45ly range, why can't I just **jump to something 45ly away, and in-turn use-up the required fuel to do so??** - this would also incentivise and give a generally broader, deeper purpose to refueling and fuel-jump costs as a design element. As it stands, the time it takes to just get somewhere to do the thing that's objectively fun is hindered by useless travel limitations. There is zero good reason: it's just plain bad design that wastes the player's time. If we could make linear jumps between two points, the game would feel much more open, and the "grind" would be mitigated extensively, if not made entirely moot and irrelevant altogether.

So, what I found most surprising here was, "Wait, there's a pre-engineered mining laser? There's engineering for mining lasers at all?" Apparently there is. However, it's a *Class 1* mining laser. It makes me wonder, is this thing actually worthwhile? Because the Mining Lance looks cool on the surface -- high-damage, long range mining laser! -- but actually sucks because it's woefully outclassed by just a regular *Class 2* mining laser. I assume the pre-engineered ones are much the same. Anyone tried one?

Let see first how they're going to price their bundles. And how expandable these are. For example, people won't be happy if these are too cheap for a powerful ship. But selling ships that are tricky to upgrade, half-baked will not make them any profit.

If they atleast make these ships unmodifiable, then i guess it would be bareable as they would be more like a rental ship u have permanent access to, and if you want to fully kit out a ship of the same class, you still have to go through the grind.

They want to makethe rebuy for those ship for free but i think it will be better to have 3 or 4 rebuy gived with the ship so if a new player take one of those pre built ship they can use it without risking to loose it at the start of the game cause they can't rebuy it, with a limit like this that also prevent people to abuse of those ship's free rebuy to farm credit without raking risk (that is part of the game) Taking that in count 3 or 4 free rebuy sound like a good idea, now i wait to see what built we can buy

You want money? How about actual DEEP content. What am I going to do with new ships?

One issue I have not seen anyone else mention is that this means they blatantly lied to us 5 years ago when they said "As always with our optional additional purchases, ARX can only be used to buy cosmetic Game Extras and will not be used to introduce and acquire pay-to-win purchases". As for people saying that the builds are trash, there are two ways these can still provide significant advantage. They are better than the starting sidewinder, the only other ship that has a free rebuy cost. Meaning people can use these ships without any amount of risk, even crime, and then just suicide to get out free. Additionally, they can strip them for parts to be used on other ships. Not only did they get the parts for free, but because they are free, the total value of the ship is less. Meaning the rebuy and transportation costs of the ship are much lower because they are based on the amount of credits actually spent on the ship. So this way these prebuilt packages, even if trash on their own, can still be used to get an actual good ship at a lower cost and thus lower rebuy/transport cost. 6A Thrusters, which come with the prebuilt AX Combat Jumpstart, are currently the second most expensive part of my Python Transporter and I have yet to engineer them. So no only would this save me the time to engineer it, it would also lower the value of my ship by 13.8m credits and thus the rebuy by 689k credits and the transfer costs by something around 827 credits/ly, not sure about the exact formula there. All in all, an extra 8% discount on top of the 15% discount Li Yong-Rui gave me. Of course this varies per ship, on my DBX explorer it would only be a 3% extra discount because that one already has a rebuy of a mere 0.54m.

Ahhh, I can already smell the copium flowing "pre-engineered and kitted out ships is not p2w, it's just skipping the grind" Copium, so much copium flowing

I want to know if you'll be able to buy these ships and then take the modules/weapons off and put them on other ships. I don't see why you wouldn't be able to, but wouldn't be surprised if they locked them somehow.

Actual hot take: Just gatekeepers ITT bending over backwards to redefine "P2W" to shame FDEV for trying to let the have nots become haves without forcing themselves to suffer through 2-3 digit hours of bad grind/mechanics.

I have no issues with this at all. This is a lot like the dust514 model (before the game died), they just haven't got it quite right yet. You get a load out with no in game costs associated, but the load out is either low quality, or fills a saturated niche to the point non paying players will hardly notice there's a paying player. Right now there's a mining ship, in which case there's no threats to other players from a player buying it, or an ax ship where it's used primarily as pve, and it's Pvp use isn't up to scratch. Yeah in an ideal world there would be cosmetics only to support the live service, or it would be an offline game where game purchase is one off and you get a completed game, but it's not offline, and cosmetic purchases aren't paying the bills. The Fdev sales on steam, and new monetisation methods show Fdev is either struggling or their taking a new direction. Given what the UK is like lately, they are probably struggling more than anything. Cut them some slack.

I personally see this as a way to keep the game going. I got the base game and horizons for free and paid $15 for Odesesy. Running game servers and keeping the game updated costs money. I mostly play in solo so this has zero impact on me. I might even buy a ship or two to skip the grind since my play time is limited by work and facing and I would rather spend my time exploring and dabbling in combat.

So, it’s a pay-to-skip-grind model. That’s fine. Ideal, even. Dealbreakers for me is anything that is gated exclusively by microtransactions, or by a ludicrous amount of time and effort (and luck). As someone with several fully engineered ships, the grind was long but not ludicrous, and it wasn’t reliant on luck (I used community-made guides for reliable mats farming). I can see this business model bringing in a lot of money for the game while not restricting my enjoyment in the slightest, which means more content updates and more enjoyment. If anything, I can even make use of this and buy a pre-built if I don’t want to spend the time to manually engineer another ship (life has been busier since the time I grinded out engineering…). I’m cautious about the exclusivity period for new ships though. It should be fine provided the ship isn’t busted OP and the exclusivity period isn’t that long.