Commander Caractacus_Potts via email (info@laveradio.com)TLDR Is Horizon’s not pay to win too Shan? Guardian and Engineering require Horizons, which is paid for DLC.I sure do love your show, keep up the great work. You have such a great mix of people, with fascinating guests, and I enjoy every episode. Ok, enough fluff, on to the meat of things.I have really been surprised that in your discussions of open only Powerplay that a comparison to Horizons has never come up.
Statements were made that open only would introduce a pay to win element to the game, as those on consoles would have to pay to participate in Powerplay. If a console person wanted the weapons and such that are available only thru pledging to a power, it would cost.
But does not the same hold true with Guardian technology? To get any of that, you have to land on a planet, and that requires Horizons, which costs money. When Frontier released Horizons, did they break the pledges that Shan had researched, or at the later date when the Guardian tech dropped in the game? Or did they sidestep it by doing it in two phases? I don’t recall hearing of a similar upset about that. Since it sounds like Guardian tech is almost a prerequisite for serious Thargoid hunting, and if open only Powerplay is pay to win, then needing Horizons to get Guardian tech certainly makes all the Beyond chapters pay to win as well.
But I don’t consider any of that “pay to win”. There is no win or lose in this game, just participation and progression. If you want to engage in certain aspects of the game, these are the modes of play and costs associated. No big deal. If I want to do any missions that require landing on a planet, I need Horizons. I want to do that, so I pay. Seems reasonable to me, and I don’t see any fundamental principles broken.
Personally, open only is what will settle my decision to engage in Powerplay. I don’t PvP, but all 200 hours or so of my time has been in the open. It is the fact that I am in the galaxy with other commanders that makes Elite so appealing. Listening to your Battle for Lave podcasts really opened my eyes to the intricacies of it, which I find fascinating, but it is the ability to team up with other commanders to accomplish shared goals that really hooks me. But not if I am playing against people that I can’t counter. I understand that instancing and other technical issues won’t make this a perfect system, there will likely always be some sort of exploit, but in my eyes, the idea of engaging with other commanders is fundamental principle of Powerplay, and that necessitates open only. If Frontier chooses to keep solo as an option, then I won’t participate. It is not a big deal, I have plenty of other things to do in this galaxy. But it seems to me that with solo players and bots making the efforts of commanders playing in open seem so futile, that the number of commanders willing to fight that hard for nothing will dwindle, and the bots will end up running the galaxy. I, for one, welcome our new Borg overlords!!!
All the best, Commanders.
Commander Caractacus_Potts
O7
NASA invited Elite Dangerous Streamers 
