[Star Citizen free-fly from May 22-June 2] - See what almost $300mil in dev funding gets you

I just looked at the game packages page, and the ships you can get have wildly different prices (the most expensive one is north of US$1k o_O).

Are the relative abilities also wildly different, or are they just cosmetic differences?

(My concern here is that I despise marrying RL income to in-game success, and not just because "pay2win is bad, blah blah blah." More than that, it ruins the immersion--and, in any economy-driven game, the ENTIRE game--for me.)

They claim ships have been designed with roles in mind. The idea being you would work your way up to larger ships that have specialized loadouts to make your profession easier/more profitable.

In combat, they tried to scale things by class, i.e. light fighter, medium fighter, bomber, heavy fighter, capital ships, etc. As it stands right now, a bigger ship will always win against a smaller ship simply because it'll have bigger guns, better shields, more armour etc. Ships of the same class in theory should be fairly competitive with each other, the edge going to the better strategist/pilot or better equipped ship.

The larger ships are multicrew, which means they aren't designed to allow for single pilot control for maximum effectiveness, though they talked about allowing players to recruit NPC crew. Of course, if you can round up a crew to fly with you, it can make all the difference. A lot of fun in the game in it's current state is when someone in your server instance has a large ship and is willing to bring tagalongs for a cruise around the system. Makes for some fun experiences.

In a manner of speaking, yeah, people that have purchased the larger ships are definitely farther ahead/better off than someone with only a starter package. RSI gets around the whole P2W by claiming every ship available for purchase can also be earned/purchased with in game creds.

Lastly, there's a large grey market for limited ships and ships with something called Lifetime Insurance... That's a whole other scheme that's worth a post of it's own...

Because their whole funding model involves selling concept ships, selling them again when they are released, and selling them again during events where they throw in premiums like longer term insurance or limited edition skins or loadouts, there's no getting around the fact that effective day one, there will be people so far ahead of the consumer race that those that measure themselves relative to other players will not have a good time.

Thanks for the in-depth response! The game's probably not for me.

The reason I asked is that the reddit poster you linked to mentioned a "predatory monetization model." He does go on to contextualize that a bit.

By the way, I don't object to linking in-game currency to RL currency because I "measure [myself] relative to other players" (I think that's a common misconception about people who object to pay2win). Rather, it's because of what I said above about immersion and, on a closely related note, because it muddies the river separating a real-life job and an in-game one.

It also frequently has the side effect of the game's relative difficulty or (as in PoE's case) QoL being balanced around a calculated average possession of certain paid MTXs, which has a very real impact even on those who avoid MP 100%. The necessity for this is almost impossible for a developer to avoid, especially in an MTX-driven game.

And I don't want to derail your thread, so I'll leave it at that. Thanks again. :)