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Star Citizen 3.7 Ship Showdown | Renting & Buying Ships

 Welcome to some more Star Citizen, today I wanted to talk about the Ship Showdown, Ships available for sale, CIG’s Monetization Model with ships, do you need to buy ships outside of the game? And how ship rentals and persistence is going to really help the game.

Ship Showdown – From now until October 10 there is a community event pitting the “Top” 16 flyable ships against each other. These top 16 ships were based on the SC community posting creations, screenshots, artwork, videos and more with the #SCShipShowdown Hashtag.

Every day there will be 2 ships facing off in a popularity contest that backers can vote on via the Website. This premiered with the Cutlass Black vs the 300i. The Cutlass Black is currently on top 5.7k votes to 2k.

On the 10th of October a “Champion” will be crowned.

The Top 4 ships though have something special planned for them.

As part of the Ship Showdown there are loads of ships available in the Pledge Store that are not normally available with the suffix 2949 SHOWDOWN EDITION as well as corresponding CCUs for most of them too. So what are the top 16 ships and what are available to purchase?

There were a few 890 Jump Hulls that instantly sold out on the first day BUT there should be a few available every day until the 10th of October. 

Ships that are on sale & available beyond the normal ones are the Dragonfly, MIS Freelancer, Vanguard Warden, Retaliator Bomber, Caterpillar, Valkyrie, Reclaimer, 600i & Hammerhead.

The other ships that are part of the 16 (but are always available are) the 300i, Avenger Titan, Connie Aquila, Freelancer MAX & Gladius.

I suspect that the 4 top ships will have either some loadout variants made like the Masters of Flight Series (Avenger Renegade, Sabre Comet, Hornet Wildfire & Gladius Valiant), maybe they might be free to fly for a while, or maybe they will get added to the ship customization page on the RSI Website and/or exclusive skins. The 10th of October which is Star Citizen’s Anniversary of sort of it’s announcement, seems like a good time to have a freeflight.

Now this is a marketing campaign for sure AND I DO NOT advise people purchase ships beyond a starter package unless they have lots of disposable income, love a particular ship and want to support development more… 

You are not getting a massive advantage by purchasing these ships imo.

Alpha 3.7 brings Ship Rentals so that you can rent ships for unto 30 days at a time at a % of their full cost, thus enabling you to leverage the power of a particular ship to hopefully make more aUEC in game & to try out mechanics in an affordable way WITHOUT spending any more real money.

Not all ships are going to be rentable, we don’t know for sure what ones are there for 3.7 either until we actual have the LIVE build for the update BUT expect most flyable ships to be there.

Again Ships are purchasable in game as well BUT rentals are a lot more sensible to do currently as we know that aUEC & aUEC Purchases are reset every major patch and some minor ones currently. The problem that many had with ship purchases were that some of the ships were effectively unobtainable in a 3 month patch cycle at their price like a Reclaimer or Hammerhead. However rentals really help overcome that!

There is something quite exciting that was recently mentioned by CIG as well and that was the ability for them to potentially have aUEC and aUEC purchases saved between patches and updates in the near future, this obviously does not preclude them from resetting every so often or when the change to UEC from aUEC BUT it does mean that we will be able to have actually progression and more reasons to play & make money in game & less reasons to buy ships outside of the game… at least for some people.

CIG making most/all of their ships available in game is an interesting talking point.

Some say that they don’t want to do it as it damages their monetization model.

Where as I believe that it might actually help it, though it is a bit of a gamble for CIG THEY kinda HAVE TO START DOING IT as the game is becoming more fleshed out.

I think players are more likely to understand what mechanics and ships they like if they are able to rent them and it makes it more likely for them to buy a ship outside of the game, even if it’s a goldielocks purchase like a Avenger Titan or Cutlass Black, a ship that’s not too expensive but allows you a bit of a kickstart.

I think it’s very likely that we will have ships like the RSI Mantis which is the latest ship to be revealed by CIG and is going to be straight to flyable in Alpha 3.7……… we know it’s going on sale around that time too (again all suggested to be around the 10th of October, though it could certainly go on sale before that) BUT will it be available to purchase in game or rent straight away? I don’t actually know. It might be & hope it is BUT marketing wise it could make sense for CIG to wait a month or quarter before putting that ship in the in game shops. 

This also works extremely well for CIG and Concept Sales in my Opinion (not straight to flyable ones) where they can then offer the ship at the earliest possible stage to backers the pledge for one. Kind of like the way Warframe was monetized… at least when I used to play it ages ago.

Currently CIG seems to put on a concept or straight to flyable vehicle every 6-8 weeks and this is where the majority of the game’s continued funding comes from, it’s not really an exercise in greed, it’s just the model that the games funding is based on, that is a brute fact and is unlikely to change at least in the mid term at least until Squadron 42 Episode 1 is out.

I would be interested to know what CIGs monetization plans are now for the future, I mean, I know they are going to be a bit dynamic and change / evolve them based on what they believe is sensible. Originally when the game was finished they said they didn’t want to sell ships beyond starter game packages… and other monetization would be the sale of UEC the in game currency & merch.

However I think it’s highly likely they will continue to have concept sales and sell more exclusive skins/flair items even after a launch.

It is also worth mentioning that CIG have said they want to move towards getting more ships and vehicles in game straight to flyable like with the Mantis, Arrow, Ballista and Valkyrie yet again that does not preclude Concepts too.

There was a VAT Issue with Store Credit when buying ships from the RSI Website that has since been resolved BUT it had VAT being charged even after applying store credit which was unintentional, store credit used is assumed to have already had VAT charged on it.

FreeSpace 2 one of my favorite games of all time is free on GOG currently.

It literally built a huge portion of my love for the idea of Space Combat Games & Star Citizen.

It’s from 1999 but I believe there is a mod you can get for it to modernise it significantly.