Orborogon

Really? So you want me to put in hours of my time to mine the resources you need for building, then you want to be able to deprive me of my well-earned cash at the end of it? I'm sorry but an economy where you can so blindly rob another person will not last long! I personally like to harvest resources, but hate to script and/or build (or I suck at building more to the point, so I'll buy buildings/plans), I love that thrill of finding a vein of some rare resource I can harvest or filling up on something I know is going to sell well. So it will be people like me who help you build that fleet but in return I expect a fair trade for the work I have put in, else I am using them to build my own fleet

I actually like the subscription model. As Saffi said it will help to keep the quality of player higher (the last thing we need is tens of thousands of trolls who come in briefly, mess with everything you have done, get bored then move to the next free to play game etc) and more importantly it gives the developers funds. I assume this game will have massive ongoing costs for all of the servers etc, and the ongoing development and maintenance that will be inherent to the model, so I for one am more than happy to pay continually for the game. If a game has a campaign and once you complete that then you're done, then yes I expect to pay once and complete the game and move on, for a massive, evolving universe with near infinite replayability then I expect to pay for each month I play.

I was part of the paid alpha for Everquest Landmark (another voxel-based building game) and they had that exact problem. The people who were paying for access had no intention of actively helping to find bugs or providing feedback, and didn't appreciate the game was in an alpha state without most of the features. They just wanted to 'play the game early' and then whined about bugs, bashed the game on the forums, it basically (in my opinion) turned into a huge mess in the end which is a shame as the game showed some real promise (when they fixed the ability to actually claim any land!). I don't know how much that experience contributed to the collapse of the game, or if the developers just had their funding pulled for other reasons, but it is a hard line to walk when you need lots of testers due to the scale of the game, yet you want genuine testers with patience and not angry kids demanding fixes and bashing the alpha because of a lack of features. If the KS goes ahead I will be one of the first to sign up though and I understand what you're saying about the mystery, but to me it's all about permanence, so the magic of the game is still there because on day 1 of the final release the universe will have been wiped so only at that point will what I create and do have any permanence, making it all exciting again