Best Of

What's better is 'downtime.' Like having to pray for salvation, or wait for your ship to be built, or just not be able to PVP for a bit that increases each time you die consecutively.

I don't know how much you've played other IRE games @Rothare, but I think you overestimate the value of credits, particularly in terms of the difference they're capable of making to the enjoyment of anyone other than the person who purchases them.

Don't get me wrong, there's a difference in IRE games between the haves and have-nots, as there is in every other walk of life, but only to a point. There was a study a few years back that determined the closer you are from $0 to earning $75,000 a year, the happier you'll be, but that past that magic number average happiness plateaus, and more money won't statistically make you happier. I don't have a study handy on IRE customer satisfaction, but I feel like it'd follow a similar trend in terms of how happy owning a bunch of credits can make you.

Speaking for myself, I definitely find it significantly more enjoyable to play an IRE character who's omnitrans, or at least tri-trans. Though there are exceptions, transcending at least your two main class skillsets (the third often being more utility/trade focused) is often seen as a bare minimum entry-bar for PvP, and I always feel like I'm not really getting to experience all that my class has to offer when I join an IRE game as a newbie and haven't yet purchased enough credits/lessons to tri-trans.

But once you've done that and hit a few milestones like sewer access in survival, obtained a craft permit you enjoy etc., I think you start to see significantly diminishing returns from credit purchases. While there is a marked difference between a combatant who's tri-trans vs. one who's omnitrans vs. one who hasn't even transed a single skillset, there really isn't a huge difference between a combatant who's omnitrans vs. one who's not only omnitrans, but is also sitting on a mountain of credit-funded artifacts.

People love to slander artiwhores (jealousy IMO), but the reality is that all the money in the world won't buy you skill and competence in an IRE game. You can be loaded to the gills, above L100 and still get beaten by a mid-level combatant who isn't even tri-trans but has a better system. Of course if you compare an amazing combatant without a bunch of useful artifacts against an amazing combatant who also has a bunch of useful artifacts, the latter's more likely to win most fights assuming that all else is equal. But what I'm trying to say is that having a fuckton of credits isn't the end-all be-all of player competition, and past a certain point, it certainly won't make you a happier or better player, nor will it allow you to get more out of the game.

Past the benchmarks for entry-level PvP, an overabundance of credits will mostly provide some minor cosmetic benefits, like having a really fancy IG house (in Starmourn I'm assuming this'll be a spaceship with artifact upgrades) or a premium pegasus mount or a pet that greets your friends, etc. These little things will make you happy but they really aren't game-breaking things capable of nullifying all the investment that other players have made towards trying to be 'better' in various ways. Like really the worst that's gonna happen is you'll be jealous that they have a talking pegasus while you settle for riding around on a donkey.

So I don't think your fears about retirement credits skewing the playing field are founded. If you can afford to buy enough credits/lessons to max out your class skillsets, you'll be fine, and likely derive as much enjoyment out of the game as everyone else, just without some added cosmetic frills. And if you can't afford to do that, then regrettably, speaking as someone who's played these games literally since childhood — before I obtained access to my own funds to throw around in sometimes irresponsible ways — you'll have to accept that you're going to be at the bottom of the totem-pole regardless of whether people are sitting on mountains of 2000+ credits or molehills of 100+. You'll still be surrounded by people who have full access to their class while you don't.

Additionally, as an adult who's now slightly wiser with her funds, and has some regrets about prior spending habits, I would be highly unlikely to roll even another penny IRE's way if I didn't feel at least somewhat vindicated in seeing some return on my prior investments. Knowing that I can still make some use of the money I spent years ago on the now defunct MKO makes me feel more valued as a long-term customer, and safer to buy up some credits on Starmourn too. It's also the reason I felt comfortable spending some money on Aetolia when I tried it out for a bit after MKO died. I didn't end up liking Aetolia, but at least trying it out wasn't a total waste of my money/time because I can just forward that expenditure on to Starmourn, and maybe the next IRE somewhere down the line if it turns out I don't like Starmourn either.

Owing to the fact that all weapons and armor face the ravages of time, base item customization isn't something we'll be offering at the start. If/when we were to do it, we'd very likely have a system of saved customisation templates that you could apply to any item of that type. So you had a customization for "a dagger with a blue-enamelled handle", you could apply that to your current weapon, and when that decays, you could apply it to your replacement.