ChipPatton

Sadly, from my understanding DAC is to be modeled almost exactly to PLEX, at least that is what Novaquark sent to me in the KS page.

I'm not a part of the swarm. As you might bee able to tell, though, they are the BIGGEST organization in this game. Imagine the buzz of DAC right now within their inner circles.

Yes, I would love to see that there are a lot of others who start encouraging the developers to change that. I'd love to actually be able to support the game without changing my ethos while in doing so.

No, their allies were no match, even Severance sent out an advisory to stay out because they saw the market flood with Plex. Honestly, the only recourse was someone in Corporation A to have the necessary IRL funds to compete with the flood of Plex Corporation B dumped on the market. This is a historical encounter in EVE Online where one of the most experienced corporations was defeated while many of their allies knew there was nothing that could be done without one of their own members sinking a lot of money into the game. This is why these corporations quit the game -- they did not fight back or just chalk it up to "we were defeated". They saw it as a battle they couldn't win because there were no Wall Street bankers in their corporation.

I would say DAC undermined the KS for itself. There are countless people withholding pledges because of DAC and the relationship to PLEX. Oh, we did that by canceling our very long-held subscriptions.

You must have been in IWI, you want that line of argument which is prima facie to the pay-to-win scheme of PLEX to die pretty quick it seems. Hopefully your pal with deep pockets will be joining you here and not fighting against you, for your own sake.

No, I don't think you saw the indicator there that I know how IWI won which they'll never admit to publically, but I have the spreadsheets on it.

My definition is the most literal and I walk back to EVE to explain: Corporation A and Corporation B fight over territory in nullsec. Corporation A (the defenders) are winning and have the home field advantage. Corporation B (aggressors) are all but spent. Then suddenly one of the members buys $50,000 in plex. Corporation B smokes Corporation A and makes them go extinct. Corporation B quits the game in a swarm. This is a true story. Corporation B, quite literally, "PAID" IRL money to "WIN" in the game. You can't possibly find a more literal definition. Being as DAC will follow a very precise path of PLEX in this game, it will be pay to win in the most literal sense.

It becomes pretty tough to carry on a reasonable debate when you're purposely using ambiguities. The point you were trying to make is that no games can survive without P2W, you are wrong, and history proves you are wrong. There is nothing to make my mind up on as EVE was NOT pay to win before PLEX was introduced. Yet ESO lost big-time when they were caught siding with cheaters -- overnight they lost nearly 80% of their PVP population. I bet they thought their methods were foolproof as well. They were wrong and they had to go free-to-play because of it. I'll quote their Community Manager as Beth/Zenimax's excuse, "exploiting is a gray area in the TOS". Sorry, but you are misinformed. An anaconda in ED can pretty much do everything, fighting (very well), trading (very well), and exploration (very well). It is the end-all-be-all ship. That is why you have referees, you trust them to ensure that both teams play fair and by the rules. Currently, there are no rules that say you can pay for yards. Thanks for the wishes of good fortune and luck finding that game. As for Nyzaltar, I did not engage because it seemed canned and exact to the message he sent another one of our members on the KS page when he directly questioned him on DAC. When you are dealing with canned replies in which my member says after he explained our community's experience, there was never any reply, there isn't a great chance that I will get any civil discourse here that is based in honesty rather undertones of greed and justifications for those undertones. I would love nothing more than to sit down and explain to him why DAC isn't cool, but this is obviously already in stone so there is no conversation that can actually help here because Nyzaltar is already convinced that DAC is some whiteknight tool to use against farmers when it is anything but. I hated finalizing the officer's vote in my community to abandon this project because I was honestly in love with the concept of a Space Engineers/EVE MMO, but the DAC system just threw up everything about EVE we all hated and the reason we abandoned EVE a little after PLEX came out and we realized just how pay-to-win it was when abused by certain players. It is not just me who has decided to not support this game, it is an entire community who has strongly backed a few other games before including Elite Dangerous that is saying "no" to this solely because of the DAC system, and when we brought that up as an issue on the KS, we were told "you are wrong and morons if you think it is pay to win". The only moronic thing there was someone who thinks first-hand accounts is moronic. Obviously, the KS page was non-caring, Nyzaltar was non-caring, so what is the point to argue it? Honestly, what is the point of me continuing beyond here as these forums minus some 22 people here liking the post? I don't think there is one and think the game is a lost cause, which is tear-jerkingly sad. When the fancamp is in the forums before the game is released making excuses for the developers for making decisions that are blindly obvious show-stoppers in other games that already had the reputation and playerbase to absorb the fallout, I'm sorry but the game doesn't even have a snowball's chance in hell. Experience has taught my community one thing when a company goes pay-to-win they never go back, they double down on it, in fact. Look at EverQuest (Mercenaries then outright levels for money) and other Daybreak/SOE games, and look at Ark: Survival Evolved -- I mean they put their big toe in pay to win with Scorched Earth and now they're going "all in" from what I hear in their Discord by getting ready to release a DLC that allows you to build a character who can cast spells for the price of $49.95. Meh, maybe just fundimentalists like me are a dinosour in gaming now and have no place any more.

You are missing an important metric, that is 6 days to raise €62,000.00 (in my defense, there is still about $70k to go which converts to about €62k)

I thought it was obvious, EVE before Plex. You also have Elite Dangerous which is by far zero pay to win and NO re-occurring payment model either. Both games actively (or did in EVE's case) seek out farmers and had zero-tolerance policies for them. You missed the point as it wasn't targeted to pre-PLEX but post-PLEX. Even after PLEX was introduced it is still a problem and farmers still sell plex at much lower prices than CCP does. This can't happen unless farming is still a MAJOR problem meaning PLEX negated nothing, however, it does legitimize the trade of IRL money for in-game currency. IMO if there were any improvement at all in the farming, it is not worth the submissive reckless abandonment of decades of ethos in the "can't beat'em, join'em" mantra. And if caught the game would lose its reputation and likely fold within a few weeks once players tell news outlets like RPS and Polygon about it. I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but this is an entirely self-correcting issue. How has Elite Dangerous pulled this off then? I realize all ED provides is match making but still they have infrastructure to maintain. How did EVE pull it off for so many years? Moreover, how does my son's football team pull off playing without paying the refs for a first down, or extra yards?

Being as this DAC system seems to be modeled after EVE by the CR's quasi-admission I'll reply to that and be a little more specific. PLEX in EVE ran many corporations away. It did not take long for many corporations to realize there were wealthier corporations IRL out there. Before PLEX, if a corporation was obviously enlisting the services of illicit farmers, you could report that to CCP and the corporation could be shut down. There were real consequences for inflating the markets including losing your time and money investments into your own character which was a great deterrent to know that CCP, before PLEX, would not tolerate the exchange of IRL money for ISK. Until PLEX, and for the most part, wars were very fair and balanced. No corporation really wanted to wage wars and if they did they were highly efficient where the loser would bow out to prevent a total loss while the winner would allow this bowing out because they were generally also taking losses either by pay for info schemes or their mercenary and office bills. Once PLEX was introduced, the waters were muddied; those who are clearly losing a war now can just keep injecting PLEX for ISK into the market and can even turn the tide of a war by hiring their own mercenaries even after losing ALL their assets. To say this is not a literal pay-to-win scheme is diminishing the definition to suit one's own agenda here, dishonesty at best. To call this a deterrent to farming is a very desperate "hail marry" to say the least. Looking just at CCP's EVE Online, the farming did not go away. It did not even slow down, in fact, it only shifted focus. There are MORE adverts in the game now selling PLEX for much lower prices than what you can even buy them from CCP. If CCP's PLEX taught us anything, it is the farming gets worse when you give legitimacy to the use of IRL Money to purchase in-game items and makes it harder for the players to understand that the behavior is unacceptable. My community has a very simple defining method: Place two hypothetical players in the game, one with a $100.00 budget and one with a $100,000 -- if the player with a $100,000 budget has broader access to the game, stats, money, etc because of his budget, it is pay to win. I do have a disposable income as a disabled veteran and small business owner but I'm more than certain there are many, many more people here that has a much higher disposable income. But let's just be honest here, in no video game should my disposable income EVER be a factor. Again, let's be honest here, PLEX and DAC are simply another pay to win scheme that has been glossed over and shrouded by claims of "equal access" when the only group of folks that these systems have ever benefited is those with high disposable incomes (or those fiscally reckless). I understand the developers need a payment model to fund the longevity of the game, but IMO if you have a subscription service, DAC is unnecessary and only seeks to undermine the awesome idea of this game, especially when the game already has a funding method: KS and Subscriptions. Other funding methods could be employed that my community would have no objections to; Fluff, IRL Merchandise, etc. Anything that doesn't affect or leverage a PVP fight within the game is fair game as far as we're concerned and we've never complained about the notion that a company employs these methods, no matter how cheesy they're said to be by other players. I do regret that my community pulled out of this kickstarter, it was quite sad watching the game fall from ~$440,000 pledged to ~$412,000 in just a few hours. I really did have great expectations for this game and hoped it would be a pleasant relief to the genre after the NMS debacle. While I understand my community's support was just a small drop in the bucket you must understand if this KS fails, it will likely be directly due to the poor choice of funding, as I'm more than certain we could contribute in the realm of $30,000 to this game. But we're simply not going to fund another pay-to-win game, we've been burned way too many times on this front. Sorry. The DAC system, like the PLEX system, also serves those who do not play and have very large wallets. Sure, I can use a gun to hunt and defend myself, but I can also use it for nefarious purposes as well just as the DAC system will be used and unregulated because the capital gains from the nefarious uses will far outweigh any moral compass any employee at Dual has, I'm sure of that. Imagine this: While you're paying for your access to the game by farming in-game currency, the guy that's getting ready to sell you plex/dac spent 0 time and is likely poising himself to buy a better ship than you currently have to grief a group of players that have been playing for months and have months or even years worth of structures that are about to be obliterated. So yes, while you are using this as a pay to play or work to play scheme, it only takes ONE person that is using it for Pay to Win (which it will be used as) to completely ruin your experience. That is the bitter truth, how that is silly is beyond me, not unless you're one of those guys with big wallets ready to sell all the DAC you can for an end-game ship on day one. I imagine if that is the case, then DAC is very critical to your experience. Even if you are that guy, what you don't understand is there is always more to buy, more upgrades, etc after every update which means you are on an endless treadmill of forking over exorbitant sums of cash to the developers just to stay ahead of the curb. Some people will be completely fine with that because they would pay anything to massage their own egos and feel better in virtual reality. I'm not, and there is nothing that can be said or otherwise told that would make me ok with that. It's not because I can't participate, I could; I'm just not that intellectually challenged to participate.

My guild has withdrawn its support of the Kickstarter because of the pay-to-win the DAC adds in which we were told very specifically on the KS page that DAC was "set in stone" by the project creator. Some, understandably, will argue that DAC is nowhere near pay-to-win, but our scope for defining a pay to win game is quite specific: According to this very specific doctrine written by our community officers years ago, this game fits well within the realm of pay-to-win. Our guild has had a lot of bad experiences with pay to win and models exactly like this, most notably from EVE where we engaged in Alliance v Alliance wars in nullsec. After the Plex was added to the game we found the wars came down to wallet sizes as ISK (which could be gained by dumping thousands of Plex on the market) meant everything in a war, from hiring allies, to replacing ships and implants. Our members are fiscally responsible adults ranging from lawyers, executives, and politicians to labor workers, consultants, and unemployed. We are a diverse group and we enjoy having equal footing in any game we play. EVE became a cesspool of wallet wars that our unemployed couldn't participate in, and our more privileged demographics wouldn't participate in. Our community's officers asked us yesterday to withdraw all of our pledges from Dual Universe's Kickstarter with the following message: And that, sadly, is how we feel and confirmed 19 withdrawals ranging from top-tier to gold pledges (we all wanted access to the alpha and had many of our members donated pledges to other members for that access). If this ever changes we will reconsider our pledges or subbing for the game if a pledge is too late.