I feel lik this has to be said again.
As far as the players were concerned, and let’s face it, ours is the only opinion that matters, Premium ships were a way to progress more quickly.
Take Tier 3 prior to the 0.9.0 patch. If you bought a Rank 7 ship and fly it, you’d earn less money than if you’d stayed in Tier 2 and flew your Rank 6. This was pretty much guaranteed for the majority of players because Rank 7, especially the Phobos, were and still are terrible ships. Eventually, you get to Rank 8 and your income and xp rate improved, and then eventually you’d hit Rank 9 and you’d be earning good amounts of cash and xp.
Or, you could go Premium. This would immediately give you Rank 9 cash and xp income, plus a little bonus income because you had no repair costs. You earned money faster, you got xp faster, and you progressed faster. You could skip the crap ships nobody wants to fly and shouldn’t be in the game at all because they serve no purpose, and get the ships that people actually want to fly.
If you bought DLC, your progression was even faster! The Desert Eagle, Dragonfly or Bear let you storm through Tier 3 because the reward rate was astronomical compared to Rank 7.
This was a system that pretty much everyone was happy with; fly for free and grind, pay to skip some of the grind, pay a bit more to skip even more grind. We were happy, you were happy, everyone was happy.
Now, it’s “pay to grind more”. What. The. xxxx? Seriously? You think that is a valid monetisation plan? “You can fly crap ships for free and suffer through gameplay that would make a normal player quit, or you can buy a Premium and have to fly 5x as many games as the free to play people in order to get to the same content!”
That is the kind of thinking I would expect from someone who drinks paint thinner before coming into work. It is not the action of a company that actually gives a damn about its players.
Whoa, slow down, nobody ever said you should spend that much on a Beta.
I was just saying it’s a shame when people complain about a F2P game, when they haven’t even spent a dime to support its developers.
Many of us did. We paid money because we liked the direction the game was going, and then the Dev team said “xxxx you!” and changed direction. Now they’ve taken away the stuff we paid for and won’t give it back, nor will they refund us. In essence, the Dev team stole from us.
Why should we be thankful of supportive of thieves?