I will microtransaction myself to death for interesting/cool shit when it's reasonable but the whole 'oh man only $350!' pricing scale has me utterly disinterested still, I have my $50 or whatever buy-in because I loved freelancer but I can't see dropping thousands and thousands on this. Guess they're in a lucky niche of catering to people with way the fuck too much money, surplus Saitek flight yokes and a killer yearning for MMO Freelancer.
I mean, we don't even know how hard it will be to get/keep some of these ships, lol.
It won't be cheap to maintain ships. The ships, including personal gear like armor and small arms, degrades with use even if you never get shot. It won't be just a visual thing unless they changed their mind about that. That's the minor upkeep part of maintenance and it will occur over a long period of time/use.
As far as ship costs in game they keep saying we are getting a significant discount on them by pre-buying. I would never pre-buy a ship just for the sake of pre-buying it. I did what I did to give my org a leg up at the start and a ton of options to do whatever the hell we want right away.
They also say that the real cost of ships will come from ship parts. You will be able to buy parts for a ship that cost as much as the ship itself. They won't necessarily be just better than the last lot as giving you significantly more customization and specialization. For example placing an extremely sensitive passive SWACS unit, but only average in active scanning, into a Super Hornet.
Hull insurance will always be cheap but insuring the mods in the ship is where it will get expensive. Again that's what they say now. Who the fuck knows by the time the game launches once they are done balancing. We haven't even seen the system yet. This is all theory but the long and short of it is that obtaining ships will be relatively trivial, even when they will likely cost you a few dozen hours at least to obtain, compared to obtaining and insuring the high tech mods you add later to them.
Keep in mind that we do know, and this is not likely to change, that obtaining unique weapons/mods and personal equipment will be restricted to specific vendors on far flung worlds. I'm sure some enterprising merchants will buy in bulk and sell them in major hubs for a nice profit but otherwise you will spend a significant amount of time hunting them down yourself. Again that risk/reward won't necessarily come cheap as some vendors may be behind enemy lines and you may have to break a blockade to get to them or travel to unknown regions. This is exactly how Privateer did it and Chris is trying to emulate that so I doubt he would change it to make it easier.
So when you see mods and personal gear up for sale and get pissed off about the pricing just try and keep in mind that you will probably need to put some serious effort later on to obtain that shit. This is both a good and bad thing. Good that you can get a leg up and bad that people are going to be geared up right from the start.
