Sidrat

I wish you could designate an area and assign a control feature to it, Mass will increase the performance/stats. e.g a nicely shaped curved bump on the top of the hull could be assigned with the Radar mechanic and voila you have a radar, with an NQ assigned texture applied, so you know it's been assigned as a Radar Three groups of 3x3 on the rear of the hull assigned to the Engine trait will be your engines along with the Engine Texture. Models are great but they provide no flexibility in the shape and functionality of the hulls that can be designed as the 3D models determine the overall shape, or at least the minimum size. Cargo container sizes for statics is adequate, the same dimensions on a ship is bizarre.

I'll convince a handful or ten of my fellow Eve coalition mates to test and form and join and learn. You see it all depends on the extent of the meta allowed. A game not having NPC influx of in game cash via PvE makes the market and piracy tricky.

The ultimate advantage in buying Plex in Eve from someone who sells it for ingame currency is the chance to avoid grinding several billion isk for pvp and skill books. This is in a game with more than a decade of content and history. Dac in a brand new environment with limited player base, content and mined resources offers a much smaller potential to avoid grinding so isn't worth as much, especially if the stocks of what you need is too far away or non existent in general. People and the devs need to ensure they don't get too carried away with the market opportunity as having finite resources is going to be strange as the habited zones get turned into barren wastelands and people live further away from everyone else to have some sort of buffer zone, or the quantities are so large that finite doesn't much.

When it comes to trust unless you know them from other games then there really shouldn't be a lot to begin with and even then not much. Really depends on the level of freedom and protection the game offers and if scamming through meta gaming is going to be allowed at the same level as EvE (everyone versus everyone).

I hope all of your test subjects had fun, in T1 or T2. small ship pvp in small groups or solo is a lot of fun and a nice change from large tidi fleets where I'm usually logo and cursing the ecm frigates that are a fraction of the value of my ship. Small combat drones can be useful, if there's no smart bombs around. Pay to win needs to be defined and avoided.

I believe the true definition of pay to win is when the developers create items from thin air in exchange for a direct payment, bypassing normal player production or farming methods. The downside to creating a Plex-like item in a brand new game is that there may not be the players to acquire the resources or items you may want to buy with your currency, the main issue however will be the limited supply in the beginning. It took CCP nearly ten years to remove the npc buy orders to maintain the markets and that was with a lot of faucets available to players.

This is a brilliant and lively discussion that probably didn't happen when Eve was in early alpha, simply because people didn't know how or if it would work. What we do know now is that very early on a sandbox environment is going to need a lot of sand and some sink holes to create further demand. This analogy is getting dark. CCP did at the very beginning of Eve, which is when we should be looking at not 2010, but around the 2003/4 years. They needed to do it as player capacity and module limits made resource mining a lot slower than it is today, with fewer items to build too. They don't need to do it in the same way as they have the player activity. PLEX trading isn't an Isk injection or faucet at source, it's relocating existing Isk supply from one place to another. It may lead to people working that little extra to get their own plex but most chose overtime and pay for their account sub, cheaper and faster in most cases. Ultimately the game will need AI NPC's to serve as faucets for the player base, be it mission content in the form of blow me up for currency or move this stuff to my mate for money. This will mean they don't have to have a closed market money supply which will need hand holding forever.