What are these limits?
Edit: you mean the total amount of credits you'll be able to purchase with real money (over any period of time) will amount to no more than the in-game cost of a 300i?
The store iself currently says it is "limited to ¤25,000 UEC per day and to a maximum of ¤150,000 UEC per account".
Right now, ships are cheap. They are believed to triple in price once the game launches.
$20 = 20,000UECs.
A basic Aurora is curently $25, which would be 25,000UEC in-game. After launch, this would therefore be 75,000UECs.
So, that means three days of buying in-game credits and you could buy a maximum of two Auroras (Aurorae?) with the maximum amount of bought credits you could ever hold.
A 300i is $55 or 55,000UEC. After launch, that would be 165,000. So in fact you couldn't even get one of those just through purchased credits alone!
I assume you could empty that account and then buy more credits, but that's the most you can buy up to at any one time. Anything over that will have to be earned.
What about comparing a skilled player to a skilled player?
Ah - Skilled at *what*, though?
There are so many different ways to play and not just fighting.
You could be the most skilled pilot, able to pull off immensely complicated maneuvres... but I am more skilled at tactical planning and anticipation, so while you're playing Top Gun in your Hornet, I sit still, wait for the opportune moment and then catch you out by bunging a well-timed missile up your afterburner. BANG... hope you're insured!
Or perhaps I'm armoured to hell and back, so simply stand there to draw you in, letting your minor fire slowly wear my shields down before springing my trap and unloading a DEMON of a plasma cannon in your face, obliterating you in one shot...
Perhaps you are king of fire positioning and speccing up a gunship... but that may count for naught if you can't dodge the asteroids like nippy little me can!!
I've gone up against many highly skilled pilots in their fighters before and lost horribly... But put those same pilots in charge of a big, slow Capital ship and I whip their butts every time. Capships move and fight very slow, so the skill there is in planning your positioning sometimes minutes ahead of time in order to gain superior firing position.
You then have ships that are faster, ships that punch harder, ships that are nippier and so on. People are thinking about 1 on 1 combat, but if half of you lot come at me I'm escaping and evading instead. Catch me if you can.
Your combat maneuvres may make you a heavy-hitting fighter, but how are you at catching someone skilled at running for their lives?
Haha sponging is not paying lots of real money for in-game currency and ships - nice one. Is it not enough people buy the game anymore?
A) I do believe he was being somewhat sarcastic.
B) No, it is not enough that people buy the game. There are ongoing running and maintenance costs, tweaks and corrections, patches, potentially re-balancing, etc. Plus the more money this makes, the more likely additional cool stuff we'll see. Sequels perhaps, additional singleplayer missions, Smartphone companion apps, spin-off games, etc.
The world has gotten kinda expensive these days, after all.
Here's a novel idea, how about everyone just pays a fixed amount for the game and plays it as much or as little as they want. Too radical?
Great for single player games. Not so much for online ones that require ongoing support. Even private servers cost money and require upkeep. The private Freelancer one I play on costs £150 a year to keep online, with teh support and maintenance being done free as a hobby by the owner. We sometimes have as many as TWELVE players online all at once, you know!!