The whales spending thousands of dollars on this game are kind of like whales that buy land plots or castles in more traditional MMO type games. Really the bigger ships are only useful for certain activities and you can only use one at a time. This current "sale" for $2500 includes a lot of ships, and one big ship (Idris) - it's like buying a lot of different mounts and a castle. Guys buying the $400 dollar science ship are buying a house + farm. All this shit can be earned in game, and all this shit can be destroyed/taken in game. Sure, the whales will have insurance, but they'll have to wait for the replacement, longer in the case of big expensive ships, and they'll have to deal with the knowledge that some noobs just blew their shit up.
Lot's of whales will have their PVP slider way toward PVE and they'll never leave protected space. They're just gonna play house in their big ship with some of their org mates. None of this should be game breaking for other players. Did you read about how fucking big the zones are? The SC 2.0 Alpha build will have a test zone that is 2 million square kilometers. That's one zone. Have you looked at how big the star map is? There will be tons of NPC ships around planets and you'll only occasionally have to deal with the whales and their big toys.
2 million square km is a meaningless number precisely because it's a space game. How fast do ships travel? is there FTL travel? I assume there has to be FTL travel otherwise enjoy spending 9 months IRL holding down 'W' to get anywhere.
Then again 2mil square km is only 1400ish km across. And that's hoping you didn't mean 2mil cubed km (since we're talking space, you can fly in 3 dimensions right?), in which case it would only be a ~126 km box. Which is a comically small sized "zone" and completely unrealistic, unless every zone is just a small area of space above a planet, like a space station or something, and this game has tons of zones, like 1000 zones to cover a single area of a planet or something. shit grids in eve (grid is basically everything you see on your screen/overview) are larger than that.
I guess the only similar large-space type multi player games that are currently playable would be Elite Dangerous and Eve, right? I've never played either of those - are their zones millions of kilometers in size? (without load screens)
Zones in Eve range from 30 AU to 130+ AU (think the largest system is like 147 AU). an AU of course is an astronomical unit, equivalent to the distance from the Sun to the Earth, or ~150mil km, so yeah a 130 AU zone is over 19.5 billion km from one end to the other, or 380 quintillion km squared.
Though technically zone's do not end in eve, you can keep flying in 1 direction as far as you care to, there are no zone 'edges', only stargates used to travel from one star system to another.
That's a single zone with no loading screens and no instancing. and there's over 7000 zones in eve.
And none of that matters until you supply context. Which for a space game trying to brag about how large your zones are, you need to know how fast ships travel.
In eve ships travel from ~60-80 m/s (that's battleships without propulsion mods and capital sized ships) to upwards of 10 km/s using sublight engines (fast frigates with micro warp drives), and 0.5 AU/s to as much as 18 au/s while using warp drives to travel between 2 points in a zone. So yeah freighters (huge cargo ships) take like 2-5 minutes to FTL warp across each zone. and sublight engines? forget it. That same freighter trying to fly from 1 side of the zone to the other without using it's warp drive is still flying because the game has only been out for 12 years.
which means sub-light travel is used during combat to move around, position, close range, disengage etc while FTL travel is used to travel across zones as well as from the zone entrance to wherever the combat is occurring.
