It's not cheating if the devs sanction it. What makes you selfish and childish is refusing to accept such a condition.

^^

Why would that be cheating? Some players would prefer to invest their own time (especially since this will create more skill in the long run) and spend their money more carefully, and others prefer to invest their money and spend their time more carefully. Welcome to Living :P Seems kinda arbitrary to declare one of these cheating, especially in the case of a skill based MMO where the 'cheaters' will have less practice and be at an inherent disadvantage

Would you go to a chess tournament and accept the option for people to bribe the host to promote pawns to queens if they find it too tedious to walk the pawn across the board? The things you ask for are less severe than that example, but they are still wrong. Somebody who does not have the levels to buy a ship should not have the option of bribing the devs to get the ship anyway, nor should they have the option of bribing the devs to get the levels without putting in the work.

You keep bringing up this concept of skill, as though that somehow makes everything okay. Well, of course I could still kill the idiots, but so what? It's still a violation of integrity. Going back to the chess example, I might be completely confident in my ability to win against some new player even if they are permitted to make one bribe-promotion per game, but I still would be disgusted by that action. Bribing people for an advantage, however minor, is inappropriate. Real-world wealth has no business influencing events inside the game, period.

I would not go to a chess tournament.

pizza, if you really need the chess analogy, I think the real one is would you go to a tournament where the person playing Carlsen bought his way into the finals instead of grinding his way through the lesser tournaments to painstakingly increase his ELO rating until he could challenge?

In either case he would probably get his butt kicked :)

Excellent analogy vanatteveldt.

Not that chess holds up in any way since it's such a traditional game that is mainly defined by its established, near-timeless ruleset.

VO is not a historical game

VO does not have any ruleset besides what the devs implement

I get what you're saying I suppose: It violates the ingame-laws if people can fly ships without the proper licenses (or work their way up to the proper licenses), and the involvement of actual money always makes things seem less legit. But since there is literally no negative gameplay impact (aside from butthurt pirates who want to cash in on grinding noobs), I cannot envision a reason why this would be bad.

So far your two reasons why it would be detrimental are:

1. It deprives other players of play experience, which again has been refuted

2. It would be "cheating"/"bribing"/"other-negative-connotation-words-that-don't-really-apply" which entirely comes down to personal opinion in this case. Tell me Pizzas, are you the kind of guy who gets really salty when he sees other people succeed? Not trying to be insulting, I just cannot understand how something with literally 0 gameplay ramifications for you (except for the long term benefits the devs implement with some extra cash) invokes such a hateful and baseless response. Especially since you are usually pretty logical about this kind of thing

Pizza, can you please address the point I made earlier about how this is any inherently, immorally, worse than someone trading their time for ingame success? Please consider:

Player A spends $0.99 on the game, 8 hours grinding, now they can get a valk
Player B spends $0.99 on the game, and $4.99, and now he can get a valk

Now, explain to me how Player B, who gives the devs more revenue (thus benefiting the whole playerbase), shortchanging only themselves through the deprivation of experience and flytime, is somehow breaking a fundamental law of gaming? Because it sounds to me like the exact choice every one of us makes 10000 times throughout the day for every little decision. You can pickup lunch or make your own. You can clean your own house or pay someone to do it for you. You can take a highpaying incredibly busy job, or you can take a part time job that leaves you with a lot of freedom. The decision of time or money is inherent to life.

(Two conditions for your response:

You can't say "cheating" or "bribing" or any other such implied-illegality words, since in this hypothetical the game and devs allow it.

And please remember that "deprives other players" doesn't hold up)

Oh and skill is hugely fundamentally critical to this discussion. If skill were irrelevant in VO, then the IAP we're discussing would be pure pay-to-win. No one in this thread supports that.

But because nothing unlockable in this game compares to a bit of skill and experience, any IAP-derived benefits are going to be a lot closer to 'cosmetic' than to 'gamebreaking' (or even 'game-affecting')

And your Chess example for why skill is irrelevant again fails due to the fundamental differences between VO and Chess. If VO had been around for thousands of years with billions of people learning one ruleset, and then all of a sudden a certain server allowed players to pay money and change the rules, you'd have a good point.

Your chess example is so egrigious, and "obviously bad," for two reasons, and I don't think the worst is that money was introduced, but because a special ruleset-changing-rule is introduced. To a game whose value derives from its unchanged ruleset.

To put it in more clear terms: take your chess example, and switch the money-cost for a time-cost. If you went to a tournament with a special rule that said anyone who spent 10 hours ref-ing (or whatever chess tourns have) was allowed one extra pawn move, this would still be seen as illegal and game-breaking and bad.

Finally, yes it is "bribing" in chess because the action is directly illegal under the establishes rules of chess. In this thread we're discussing changing the rules to a game that is a LOT more ever-evolving than chess.

If this was just some FPS game with unlockable content, I wouldn't care about letting people skip the grind. But it isn't. It's supposed to be a persistent world space RPG that happens to have twitch-based FPS-style combat. That is an entirely different beast, and demands a higher level of immersion and consistency. An option to pay the devs so that you can play under a different set of rules than everybody else is inappropriate.

Anything you can buy with IAP should automatically be bundled into the premium subscription. If it doesn't make sense to be automatically applied to all premium subscribers, then it doesn't make sense period and should not happen.

I agree, but I would make the exception for eye-candy. I'm willing to bet that purchasable paint and content that does not significantly impact game play would sell immediately. A newbie who fancies himself a pirate would happily slap down cash for a Jolly Roger paint scheme, etc..

It seems that the vast majority of responders to this thread have been in support of the IAPs idea. What those IAPs should be is an entirely different discussion. I think the obvious introductory or trial IAPs would be purely cosmetic. Whistlers Jolly Roger paint scheme would be a hit, or any type of skull and crossbones. In other games I've played guild members had an option to create a guild banner, flag, cloak, etc.. that represented their guild. Offering an IAP that allowed guilds to put a customized guild banner on their ships would work. Perhaps custom weapon effects such as changing the beams colors or sound effects. Entire new ship skins. I could go on, but you get the idea of how cosmetic IAPs would not change gameplay, but bring in new income for the devs.

Isn't there some kind of IAP currently for mobile devices?

Crystals and upgrading to lite or premium subscriptions are currently being offered.

I find this discussion very funny. However I'd like to point out some serious issues that Pizzasgood has been trying to show you:

- Not only newbies can benefit from the IAPs if I have understood it right up to now. I could just get my tablet, plug a keyboard and an USB mouse into it, run VO, buy me an exp. Multiplier, launch my BHM2 and mine myself to mining level 20 in a matter of a few hours.
- Even if you limited the duration of time that Multiplier lasts to only 1 hour, let it be know that I have these 5 bucks.
- The pay-to-win feeling. The idea may be really cool, but if I knew some kid can just grind himself to insane levels that the guy who played 10 years for and put work into... that just makes me feel uncomfortable.
- The skill excuse doesn't always work. A paid newbie will always have an Advantage over a non-paid newbie.

Don't get me wrong. I am ALL for filling the devs pockets, giving them cash for their hard work etc. This is just the wrong approach. Newbies have to be given the Option to pay for things that us full subscribers have access to anyway. I have recently posted a suggestion which solves this quite well, but it was drowned under an irrelevant RP discussion...

I don't mind custom ship skins (within reason). I do have to draw a line at custom weapon effects/sounds, since that directly impacts gameplay (weapon identification, distractions, etc.).

1) VO's level grind does not take ten years. I've raised 4 alts up to sufficient levels to buy what I need (around 8/8/8/x/x) and standing with home, corvus, axia etc. This takes a couple evenings of gameplay, maybe a couple weeks, but certainly not longer

2) The connection between grind and player experience is only fun for the first alt. Starting a new character and re-grinding is *not* fun at all, serves no discernible purpose, and I would gladly pay a couple bucks to skip it (and it would not feel like cheating, but rather like being cheated out of said bucks)

3) A android 'newb' who spends 30$ buying license or ship access in the first 3 months has not paid to win, he has simply paid like it used to be for everyone. And even if the devs decree that android players can pay less because of competition, product quality, or whatever, that's their choice, not mine.

4) For me, the line against buying is if paying more gets you something that you wouldn't otherwise get. A neut4 that is only available for crystals/$$ would piss me off. Giving f2p players access to a neut2: fine with me.

VO's level grind does not take ten years.

I think you haven't quite gotten my point. I know how easy it is to raise an alt to basic levels that allow you access to most ships... I've been talking about the prestige levels other players grinded to as a personal goal (Trade 25, Combat 21 etc. etc.) THAT does take long. And I think it's a slap into those people's face if some kid takes some of daddy's bucks and just buys his way to Level 30s for fun and bragging.

Anyway. Maybe just cap the abilities to buy more levels to 10s or something if you're doing it.

I have to agree with the people who are against enhanced experience/rep/etc for real currency.

I would love to spend $10 and get double XP for combat or trade, but this does pose a real problem for the following scenarios:

1. Pirate tanks his faction standing, buys an xp bonus or trade bonus and regains respected/admired status twice as fast as another player who does not buy the bonus.

2. Player begins leveling an alt, buys a bonus to build xp, rep, etc faster. Gets access to high-tier ships much faster than a player who has to work for it and avoids much of the risk of nationalists, pirates, and even traders trying to shoot them while traveling. A player who can jump into a UDV, Atlas-X, Greyhound, Valk, or even an SVG very quickly is able to eliminate 90% of the travel risk because they are uncatchable in anything but a faster ship. In a greyhound, there is no faster ship.

As a mitigation to the above, there could be a purchase limit for any IAP within a monthly timeframe, and monthly subscribers could redeem these purchases for free to offset any benefit the IAP users get over a monthly subscriber.

If it's going to work, the IAP system needs to be an alternative method of paying for whatever a monthly subscriber would also have access to.

Just because someone worked long and hard (twss) for something in VO shouldn't prohibit the devs from making meaningful and beneficial changes to the game. Case in point: 13 PoS.

While I agree making IAPS that obliterate any otherwise meaningful achievements in game for $$ is ridiculous, it's also kinda ridiculous to assume the devs would do something like that in the first place. OBVIOUSLY there would need to be balancing considerations and not just simply open the IAP floodgate and let people buy their way to the top of everything. Giving someone a speedy path to access available content is acceptable. Giving someone a speedy path to XP levels that have no affect on game content (i.e. above level 10) is not acceptable.

Furthermore, it's completely ridiculous to be having this discussion as though somehow we have any fucking say whatsoever in how it goes down. This isn't like gameplay suggestions where the devs rely on the experience of players as a factor in improvements. IAP decisions rely heavily on analysis of information we are not privy to.

In the mobile screen, the box that displays ones wealth also displays the number of crystals you have. If you tap on it it opens a purchase dialog where one can buy crystal, lite, or premium sub. If the devs wanted to expand IAPs they could easily do it through that interface. I imagine it would not be too hard to implement on PC as well. As far as possible IAP items, xp doublers (or some other fraction greater than 1), ships that one could not otherwise purchase, weapons that one could not otherwise purchase, ship skins, paint schemes, etc.

For the xp boosters I suggest that they be only for a specific license.
Ships could come in lots of three.
Weapons in lots of 7 or 8.
Skins to be aplied character wide at the discretion of the pilot upon purchase of a new ship. I.e. once you have it you can apply it if you want to any ship of that type you own.
Paint schemes could be a one time purchase, one ship only.

All of this could be implemented on the website to reduce in-game work for the devs. Changes could take effect on the next client boot.