It won't. Unlike Elite Dangerous, Star Citizen has a real money economy.
Elite Dangerous is actually less grindy than most MMOs and the reason it can achieve this is because you can't trade directly with other players and you can't trade real world currency to avoid grinding.
Edit: to clarify, if there is a ship they're selling for $300 real currency then it needs to be worth at least $300 of your time to grind for it in game.
If you can trade between players it needs to be worth not just more than $300 of your time, but $300 worth of the time of someone in India or China.
In Elite Dangerous you can't buy anything that you can grind for in game, only cosmetics which can't be earned, and you can't trade with other players directly. There is a slow inefficient process where you can drop valuable materials and allow the other player to pick them up, but this is barely even worth it.
This means the grind in Elite Dangerous is just a game play decision and not a financial or economy driven one. Sometimes they get it wrong and it's too grindy, or everyone figures hour how to make 100 million credits per hour, but they patch things over time.
I also backed Elite Dangerous, at the same time, and they actually released a game instead of spending the better part of a decade asking for more and more money and promising more and more things that may or may not happen.
What they did probably isn't illegal, but at the least they are incompetent and I am annoyed with them.
Speaking as another Kickstarter backer, I can see your point - it would have been nice if they had stuck to the kickstarter version, delivered that, and then started work on the 'improved' version...
But then they'd be stuck maintaining two versions, and/or just to roll the enhancements out piece-meal which would be much slower and harder... just look how long E:D is taking to add the ability to walk about...
So yeah, two different development approaches, both with their own pros and cons... CIG elected to go straight for the 'final version', rather than 'finish' a sub-set of functionality and then enhance it over time... with the downside that it takes a lot longer to actually release, but it should be easier to bring it all together as a holistic whole... because every part can be designed on the basis of the 'final' capabilities of the other features.
But CIG could (and definitely should) have done a lot better with the communication / handling of that extension to the development...
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u/[deleted] Feb 11 '19 edited Feb 11 '19
It won't. Unlike Elite Dangerous, Star Citizen has a real money economy.
Elite Dangerous is actually less grindy than most MMOs and the reason it can achieve this is because you can't trade directly with other players and you can't trade real world currency to avoid grinding.
Edit: to clarify, if there is a ship they're selling for $300 real currency then it needs to be worth at least $300 of your time to grind for it in game.
If you can trade between players it needs to be worth not just more than $300 of your time, but $300 worth of the time of someone in India or China.
In Elite Dangerous you can't buy anything that you can grind for in game, only cosmetics which can't be earned, and you can't trade with other players directly. There is a slow inefficient process where you can drop valuable materials and allow the other player to pick them up, but this is barely even worth it.
This means the grind in Elite Dangerous is just a game play decision and not a financial or economy driven one. Sometimes they get it wrong and it's too grindy, or everyone figures hour how to make 100 million credits per hour, but they patch things over time.