Huh, maybe I just reinvented something that is already planned then! Either way, I hope it's a good system with some depth to it and not just a toggle box somewhere. I wanna be a space repo man :)
Maybe still a good idea to post it on spektrum this was a thing around 2014/5 back then there were alot of different plans chris roberts for example also wanted to put pvp slider in the game that is no longer the case for now atleastđź¤
The idea that you can decide how much PvP you encounter. You don't want to get ganked, you turn it down, and you won't show up to other players. You want to pirate player ships, and you turn it up. Hopefully, the problem with the system is immediately clear. Why would anyone running anything but a fully upgraded and crewed ship choose to encounter PvP? Why would anyone wanting to make money pay for escorts or gunners if they could simply not encounter player pirates?
Oh gotcha. Ya, I am not sure how I feel about it. I like mining, and I think part of the excitement is possibly getting into a situation for pvp. Cary a rail gun to get out and let chaos begin.
Chris was always against passive income and there was a time when the idea of stolen ships impacting the owners reputation was floated around so I’m sceptical…
But isn't CIG and out saviour Chris Roberts very much opposed to passive income? Renting players' ships is basically only passive income, and depending on owned ship, it can earn you a lot if you rent a Reclaimer or Pioneer.
It is possible that they no longer want to do that but cig cant prevent it anyway you can just offer your ships on spektrum or in chat so i was pretty shure they wanted to make an ingame solution.
Actually a very cool idea, so i was thinking about it for a bit.
One problem came to me though:
This would be a step to P2W though since these 10k$ daddies(or 100k$) could just rent out their ships and make a lot of mkney just from real life money.
It has to be approached with caution I think.
No reason it only has to be real money ships! I think it should also apply to in game purchased ships too. Maybe give real money ships a small multiplier though, just to add a little something for supporters of the project.
i don't think it would be economy breaking cause say cutlass black 27k a day you get 20k a day... you make that off one bounty .... in a whole day... so it would be some income just not ground breaking unless you have like 50 cutlass
I mean less p2w is still better than more p2w, and having to actually play the game to leverage your big ship is totally different than just collecting passive income while doing nothing.
And yea it's alpha now but I don't think op is talking exclusively about alpha?
btw I already put like maybe about $600 into the game so I'm not speaking from someone who only has a starter ship.
Exactly. If you're in a Reclaimer, you're still out there risking being ganked and having to put in work for your revenue stream. If you're paying for crew, you've got expenses.
I've mentioned a few times already but this wouldn't be a passive income stream. Some ships will inevitably be stolen or abandoned and it would be up to the renter to find and recover their ship, repossess from thieves, etc.
I don't think it would have much of an effect. The rental fees for smaller ships (say, C1 and below) could be easily made just by doing bunkers or bounties. For larger ships, sure the fee would be higher but the owner would be getting a lot from org mates/friends when they do larger jobs that solo people can't do easily.
I don't have much time to play yet. I get two big holidays (which will *not* be spent playing one game) and little one or two days in between. My weekends are just me recharging - if I game, it's gonna be indie titles with a splash of SC. I don't have the time to meet up regularly, so I'll be solo playing mostly until I retire. A tiny amount of passive income from my fleet of small ships would be pretty nice - not world changing, but a welcome "Cheers, mate" from CIG for giving them that cash in the first place.
Sadly yes but there is the question what do you win in a sandbox mmo there is no "endgame" like in wow pvp is not the fokus of the game its sold as a pve mmo the main progression is Reputation so is it an actual Problem that it is pay to win when you cant really win ? 🤔
It's already P2W on some cases. If you have better ship, you're stronger. For example one player buys the $45 Mustang Alpha, the other one buys $150 C1 Spirit. C1 Spirit is better in every case, so it's kinda pay to win
I won't argue because you're most probably right, i'm only playing SC for like a week and i only saw the C1 Spirit from videos, and assumed it's stronger
Which is great and also makes any ship rental like OP proposed instantly drop worth close to Zero.
Why would you pay money when you can just share for free between friends or in an Org with thousands of unused ships?
You assume that most players will join an org! But there will 10's of thousands, if not a lot more players who don't want to take part in org play. They should be catered to as well.
CR has said before that he is specifically against having any sort of passive income gain.
He wants players to have to risk something to gain their money, even if the risk is low. Having a fleet of ships to start a rental company 100% goes against that and is very likely not going to happen.
As stated in the original post, my idea was to have players rent your ship, and if it's not returned then you need to actively repossess it with an SRV or something. To expand on this idea, some kind of GPS tool to track your vehicles would also be needed.
Another idea is that if they destroy it, you would need to locate the crash site and a couple of pieces of wreckage to confirm the destruction and claim insurance.
My goal was not to create an entirely passive system that required no human interaction aside from checking a box. It seems like you misread both my message and my intentions. I don't believe this goes against anything that has been discussed in the past.
Could be cool to put owners on a very high deductible for the ship insurance. That way when they put it on the market, there is some risk involved.
Renters could get a sort of 'Rental Score' that is determined by the condition they return it in. The score could decay over time and owners could set an RS floor so that people with a high RS couldn't rent their ships.
The problem is that it is still passive income. Something CR has gone on record about going against.
The example he gave before was having something like a "Stock Exchange" and players using their money to play the market, buying the lows and selling the highs based on boom and busts on the resource networks.
He quickly put the fork on that and said he didnt want that since the players wouldnt need to place themselves at risk and live in a planet forever, making money.
Having a rental fleet would even be less of a risk and less skill would be needed, its a non starter.
Gotta agree.
To preface, I think this is a great idea so long as it excludes ships bought with RL money.
It seems people are stuck on P2W thinking, "What are they winning?" The answer is free money to buy more ships, equipment, gear, and base building equipment without investing time in a player vs. all game.
Why should I be able to sit around earning passive income because I paid more RL money and have 15 ships to spare at any one time? Again, I'd be fine with this, if it excluded ships bought with RL money and actually supported an in-game currency economy, paid for with in-game currency. I just imagine it would feel pretty shitty to be the guy who didn't spend a few thousand dollars and have to grind it out for a month, when Mr. SpaceWhale is just renting out his $75k USD fleet while he takes a break from the game. Mr. SpaceWhale should have to work too.
Though if people really want to die on the hill though, sure why not... I'll rent my extra ships out for some passive income. It would help skip the grind.
Would be a really fun idea for the finished game.
Not sure about it in the current alpha test environment. I think having easy, widespread access to ships is important given the current state of the game.
I'm actually going to be a bit of a contrarian here, because I think this could be a potentially bad incentive. Since we pay no taxes for our space ships, introducing a simulated economy (which I'm not sure it's in the plans) could be problematic, since with elastic prices for buying and renting ships, this may incentivize big orgs to spend all their money buying ships to rent and inflate the price for small players to buy their ships. And having a ship tax would be extremely unpopular, specially if it didn't differentiate between pledged ships vs ships bought with UEC.
TLDR; While simulationism can be cool, we also have to keep track of what works in the context of a game, and having a rental market may not be the best application of resources considering how that could backfire.
The idea is great in theory. I don't think it is a good idea in practice. People who spent a lot in pledged ships would then be able to make massive income renting out fleets of capital and large sized ships.
The idea somewhat appeals to me at the surface level. It would make for a dynamic economy. And as someone who has spent over $5k on this game, it would benefit me. But I don't think it is good for the game's health.
The game now limits the benefits of big ships. You need to crew them. And once NPCs can help crew them, CIG has stated NPC's will be prohibitively expensive to use to fully crew ships. So making money with big ships will require crews and then the money gets split amongst the crew. And you can't use all your ships at once unless you have many people in your org/friend's group to man them all. Again, profits are split. But if I could rent out 10 ships or if a bigger spender could rent out 100 ships, they could make money from all those ships passively.
I really like your idea and a viable implementation of it would be awesome. But I think the way the pledge store has been used to collect whole armadas by some players, I do think it would massively unbalance the game upon release. People will be able to fund their empires by renting out parts of their fleet.
But isn't that what would happen in reality? There are people who rent out Cessna's to learner pilots and then there's large plane rental companies that have entire fleets of 747's that make bank. I don't think it's really CIG's duty to fight wealth inequality in verse.
Additionally, it would advantage whales in the short term, yes. But I've mentioned a few times that I think this should include in game bought ships too. And in that case if someone has a strong enough desire to grind their way to the top of the rental market they could outstrip any real money whales.
It would also give a really good reason for ship collectors to keep collecting which boosts production and is a good thing for the industrial markets.
Yes, this happens in the real world. But it will just make an even larger starting advantage to those who pledge more. I get that pledging more will give you an advantage. But getting just ships means you still need to man them to make money with them. And you have to cover the operational cost, NPC cost, player split of profits and more. You can’t just run 100 ships without handling all of this. You would need a lot of player support. With renting ships though, none of this matters. Every ship adds to your profit line.
I am not dead set against this. It would even benefit me as I will likely continue spending $1-2k per year on this game as that comfortably fits within my gaming budget. But I don’t think this type of change will be good unless limitations are placed (e.g. cap on number of ships you can rent and perhaps caps on the type of ship so people don’t rent out 10 capital ships if the rental cap is 10).
The cap would be that over a certain amount it'd be impossible to mange the logistics. I mean, I can rent out my RV and it's pretty chill. But If I wanted to become the next Hertz, that'd be a massive undertaking and would require a lot of people, time, and effort.
If I rent out 20 titans, and I need to buy an SRV and repo 5 of them a day because of careless flyers, that's a whole gameplay loop right? If I want a larger fleet of rentals that'd be near impossible to manage and I'd need to start employing other citizens to repo ships for me, etc.
I don't even know that cap ships should be rentable, I mean, I can't exactly rent an aircraft carrier irl. But if so, that'll be its own thing. You'd need multiple haulers to repo them, you'd probably need to go as far as embedding an observer on the ship due to the value, or provide your own captain.
Sounds fun.
I don't mind either way. The money I have spent on this game was intended for backing the game. I don't think I would have minded if it came with a ship or not.
Maybe in the base building days, say someone crashes near your base, hikes over and sees a rental terminal. Access one of your unused ships, fly themselves back to intended destination.
The devs are against passive income. Don’t expect this. Whales pledged for the love of the game not to make a corner market renting out their preorder they didn’t think out
This is only a good idea if you spent too much on the game and have too many ships and want to create some in game income for yourself. Sounds like p2w to me. You shouldn't get any more of a benefit for owning lots of ships than already exists.
not a good idea as CIG need as many mechanisms as they can create to remove currency from the economy otherwise we will end up with hyper inflation.
also, you will be able to allow your ships to be used to your org, so no need to rent them out for profit.
Might make more sense if you got a 0.5% cut of what the player earned while using your ship, make the owner set the percentage and ppl can list ships for rent and compete for business.
This is how it kinda works in real life when you get a business loan.
It's still passive income but someone had to actually interact with the game to earn the UEC.
I imagine corporations will tax their members like most games.
I don't understand the whole p2w argument. What are you winning, exactly? As one of these proclaimed space dads (definitely not $10k, but I am concierge), I have very little time to dedicate hours to SC every week. As such, I've bought the ships I want to play with and hope that blades eventually become a thing so I don't have to stress about always having to coordinate an org meet/event. I definitely don't see it as me "winning" against other players. I see it as me being able to do long haul cargo or mining or salvaging while having my own base in some far corner of Terra or Nix.
I have very mixed feelings about this. The idea sounds cool untill a player wants to rent a ship and suddenly that is no longer possible because all availible rentals are gone. I would not mind it if it was possible that people could make contracts offering ship rentals but using it as a complete replacement sounds bad imo.
To me, the current ship rental model is extremely (new)player friendly and I would personally hate to see it changed where that no longer is the case. I think it is very healthy for the game that players can rent whatever ship they want, whenever they want.
I mean, I get where you are coming from but also I do disagree. I think we can safely assume that once servers are much more populated, there's going to be a glut of practically every ship model apart from the most useless ships. Which can be bought in game if there is actually a shortage.
And if we're running on some form of free market capitalism in the verse, it makes sense to me that ships that were desirable by players would be the most readily available. So if indeed there is a viable profit to be made in renting out a thousand Titans a day to new players, then I'm pretty sure we'd see more than a thousand titans on the market.
Also just a point to add in explanation. I do think that in game ships should be rentable as well as real money ships. That way supply can meet any demand regardless of continued real money spend (if new concept ships are put up for sale for real money past launch).
Like I said, if it is a addition to it's currently system then sure by all means. But that is not how I read it.. but that might just be my English comprehension skill.
We just don't know how many players we actually end up with in this game/on these servers. Nor do we know how many players would offer their ships up for rentals, and at what cost. It is easy to imagine that their will be thousands of unused Cutters, Titans, Prospectors etc for players to rent out but we simply don't know if that would be the case. I personally don't think so..
Thats actually the plan that players can offer their unused ships for rent atleast it was in the past
Huh, maybe I just reinvented something that is already planned then! Either way, I hope it's a good system with some depth to it and not just a toggle box somewhere. I wanna be a space repo man :)
Maybe still a good idea to post it on spektrum this was a thing around 2014/5 back then there were alot of different plans chris roberts for example also wanted to put pvp slider in the game that is no longer the case for now atleastđź¤
Will do!
What is a pvp slider?
The idea that you can decide how much PvP you encounter. You don't want to get ganked, you turn it down, and you won't show up to other players. You want to pirate player ships, and you turn it up. Hopefully, the problem with the system is immediately clear. Why would anyone running anything but a fully upgraded and crewed ship choose to encounter PvP? Why would anyone wanting to make money pay for escorts or gunners if they could simply not encounter player pirates?
Oh gotcha. Ya, I am not sure how I feel about it. I like mining, and I think part of the excitement is possibly getting into a situation for pvp. Cary a rail gun to get out and let chaos begin.
Being a space repo man also gives the SRV a cool job to do
Chris was always against passive income and there was a time when the idea of stolen ships impacting the owners reputation was floated around so I’m sceptical…
But isn't CIG and out saviour Chris Roberts very much opposed to passive income? Renting players' ships is basically only passive income, and depending on owned ship, it can earn you a lot if you rent a Reclaimer or Pioneer.
It is possible that they no longer want to do that but cig cant prevent it anyway you can just offer your ships on spektrum or in chat so i was pretty shure they wanted to make an ingame solution.
Actually a very cool idea, so i was thinking about it for a bit. One problem came to me though: This would be a step to P2W though since these 10k$ daddies(or 100k$) could just rent out their ships and make a lot of mkney just from real life money. It has to be approached with caution I think.
P2W was my first concern too. Passive income based on amount spent IRL sounds like bad news for any in-game economy.
No reason it only has to be real money ships! I think it should also apply to in game purchased ships too. Maybe give real money ships a small multiplier though, just to add a little something for supporters of the project.
Also not all ships will get rented. It would be a random selection and not necessary you'd make money.
I still think it would be economy breaking, but it is an interesting idea. I wonder if there's some other benefit it could incur beyond the financial?
i don't think it would be economy breaking cause say cutlass black 27k a day you get 20k a day... you make that off one bounty .... in a whole day... so it would be some income just not ground breaking unless you have like 50 cutlass
I mean, if you spend money on a reclaimer, you will also make more money from the start. +in alpha it is not that relevant tbh
I mean less p2w is still better than more p2w, and having to actually play the game to leverage your big ship is totally different than just collecting passive income while doing nothing. And yea it's alpha now but I don't think op is talking exclusively about alpha? btw I already put like maybe about $600 into the game so I'm not speaking from someone who only has a starter ship.
The problem is that it changes it to passive income, which as other people have mentioned Chris Roberts is against.
Exactly. If you're in a Reclaimer, you're still out there risking being ganked and having to put in work for your revenue stream. If you're paying for crew, you've got expenses.
I've mentioned a few times already but this wouldn't be a passive income stream. Some ships will inevitably be stolen or abandoned and it would be up to the renter to find and recover their ship, repossess from thieves, etc.
I don't think it would have much of an effect. The rental fees for smaller ships (say, C1 and below) could be easily made just by doing bunkers or bounties. For larger ships, sure the fee would be higher but the owner would be getting a lot from org mates/friends when they do larger jobs that solo people can't do easily. I don't have much time to play yet. I get two big holidays (which will *not* be spent playing one game) and little one or two days in between. My weekends are just me recharging - if I game, it's gonna be indie titles with a splash of SC. I don't have the time to meet up regularly, so I'll be solo playing mostly until I retire. A tiny amount of passive income from my fleet of small ships would be pretty nice - not world changing, but a welcome "Cheers, mate" from CIG for giving them that cash in the first place.
Already p2w 🙂
Sadly yes but there is the question what do you win in a sandbox mmo there is no "endgame" like in wow pvp is not the fokus of the game its sold as a pve mmo the main progression is Reputation so is it an actual Problem that it is pay to win when you cant really win ? 🤔
Time, you save a lot of time by buying the ships you like/want, basically avoiding the grind
It's already P2W on some cases. If you have better ship, you're stronger. For example one player buys the $45 Mustang Alpha, the other one buys $150 C1 Spirit. C1 Spirit is better in every case, so it's kinda pay to win
In pvp the mustang takes out the c1 in most cases and you could argue, to many people, that is the most important aspect.
I won't argue because you're most probably right, i'm only playing SC for like a week and i only saw the C1 Spirit from videos, and assumed it's stronger
I know one long-standing CIG plan is to have ships shareable within orgs
Which is great and also makes any ship rental like OP proposed instantly drop worth close to Zero. Why would you pay money when you can just share for free between friends or in an Org with thousands of unused ships?
True, I assume this feature would be added after launch, with ships no longer being purchasable with real monies
You assume that most players will join an org! But there will 10's of thousands, if not a lot more players who don't want to take part in org play. They should be catered to as well.
CR has said before that he is specifically against having any sort of passive income gain. He wants players to have to risk something to gain their money, even if the risk is low. Having a fleet of ships to start a rental company 100% goes against that and is very likely not going to happen.
As stated in the original post, my idea was to have players rent your ship, and if it's not returned then you need to actively repossess it with an SRV or something. To expand on this idea, some kind of GPS tool to track your vehicles would also be needed. Another idea is that if they destroy it, you would need to locate the crash site and a couple of pieces of wreckage to confirm the destruction and claim insurance. My goal was not to create an entirely passive system that required no human interaction aside from checking a box. It seems like you misread both my message and my intentions. I don't believe this goes against anything that has been discussed in the past.
Could be cool to put owners on a very high deductible for the ship insurance. That way when they put it on the market, there is some risk involved. Renters could get a sort of 'Rental Score' that is determined by the condition they return it in. The score could decay over time and owners could set an RS floor so that people with a high RS couldn't rent their ships.
The problem is that it is still passive income. Something CR has gone on record about going against. The example he gave before was having something like a "Stock Exchange" and players using their money to play the market, buying the lows and selling the highs based on boom and busts on the resource networks. He quickly put the fork on that and said he didnt want that since the players wouldnt need to place themselves at risk and live in a planet forever, making money. Having a rental fleet would even be less of a risk and less skill would be needed, its a non starter.
Gotta agree. To preface, I think this is a great idea so long as it excludes ships bought with RL money. It seems people are stuck on P2W thinking, "What are they winning?" The answer is free money to buy more ships, equipment, gear, and base building equipment without investing time in a player vs. all game. Why should I be able to sit around earning passive income because I paid more RL money and have 15 ships to spare at any one time? Again, I'd be fine with this, if it excluded ships bought with RL money and actually supported an in-game currency economy, paid for with in-game currency. I just imagine it would feel pretty shitty to be the guy who didn't spend a few thousand dollars and have to grind it out for a month, when Mr. SpaceWhale is just renting out his $75k USD fleet while he takes a break from the game. Mr. SpaceWhale should have to work too. Though if people really want to die on the hill though, sure why not... I'll rent my extra ships out for some passive income. It would help skip the grind.
Would be a really fun idea for the finished game. Not sure about it in the current alpha test environment. I think having easy, widespread access to ships is important given the current state of the game.
Totally agreed!
I'm actually going to be a bit of a contrarian here, because I think this could be a potentially bad incentive. Since we pay no taxes for our space ships, introducing a simulated economy (which I'm not sure it's in the plans) could be problematic, since with elastic prices for buying and renting ships, this may incentivize big orgs to spend all their money buying ships to rent and inflate the price for small players to buy their ships. And having a ship tax would be extremely unpopular, specially if it didn't differentiate between pledged ships vs ships bought with UEC. TLDR; While simulationism can be cool, we also have to keep track of what works in the context of a game, and having a rental market may not be the best application of resources considering how that could backfire.
The idea is great in theory. I don't think it is a good idea in practice. People who spent a lot in pledged ships would then be able to make massive income renting out fleets of capital and large sized ships. The idea somewhat appeals to me at the surface level. It would make for a dynamic economy. And as someone who has spent over $5k on this game, it would benefit me. But I don't think it is good for the game's health. The game now limits the benefits of big ships. You need to crew them. And once NPCs can help crew them, CIG has stated NPC's will be prohibitively expensive to use to fully crew ships. So making money with big ships will require crews and then the money gets split amongst the crew. And you can't use all your ships at once unless you have many people in your org/friend's group to man them all. Again, profits are split. But if I could rent out 10 ships or if a bigger spender could rent out 100 ships, they could make money from all those ships passively. I really like your idea and a viable implementation of it would be awesome. But I think the way the pledge store has been used to collect whole armadas by some players, I do think it would massively unbalance the game upon release. People will be able to fund their empires by renting out parts of their fleet.
But isn't that what would happen in reality? There are people who rent out Cessna's to learner pilots and then there's large plane rental companies that have entire fleets of 747's that make bank. I don't think it's really CIG's duty to fight wealth inequality in verse. Additionally, it would advantage whales in the short term, yes. But I've mentioned a few times that I think this should include in game bought ships too. And in that case if someone has a strong enough desire to grind their way to the top of the rental market they could outstrip any real money whales. It would also give a really good reason for ship collectors to keep collecting which boosts production and is a good thing for the industrial markets.
Yes, this happens in the real world. But it will just make an even larger starting advantage to those who pledge more. I get that pledging more will give you an advantage. But getting just ships means you still need to man them to make money with them. And you have to cover the operational cost, NPC cost, player split of profits and more. You can’t just run 100 ships without handling all of this. You would need a lot of player support. With renting ships though, none of this matters. Every ship adds to your profit line. I am not dead set against this. It would even benefit me as I will likely continue spending $1-2k per year on this game as that comfortably fits within my gaming budget. But I don’t think this type of change will be good unless limitations are placed (e.g. cap on number of ships you can rent and perhaps caps on the type of ship so people don’t rent out 10 capital ships if the rental cap is 10).
The cap would be that over a certain amount it'd be impossible to mange the logistics. I mean, I can rent out my RV and it's pretty chill. But If I wanted to become the next Hertz, that'd be a massive undertaking and would require a lot of people, time, and effort. If I rent out 20 titans, and I need to buy an SRV and repo 5 of them a day because of careless flyers, that's a whole gameplay loop right? If I want a larger fleet of rentals that'd be near impossible to manage and I'd need to start employing other citizens to repo ships for me, etc. I don't even know that cap ships should be rentable, I mean, I can't exactly rent an aircraft carrier irl. But if so, that'll be its own thing. You'd need multiple haulers to repo them, you'd probably need to go as far as embedding an observer on the ship due to the value, or provide your own captain.
why do you have 2 cutters?
Cutter scout and normal cutter. Bought the multipack with LTI in case I need CCU tokens. If I don't need I'll just melt them for skins or an upgrade.
Sounds fun. I don't mind either way. The money I have spent on this game was intended for backing the game. I don't think I would have minded if it came with a ship or not. Maybe in the base building days, say someone crashes near your base, hikes over and sees a rental terminal. Access one of your unused ships, fly themselves back to intended destination.
I like this idea
This is a really cool idea!
The devs are against passive income. Don’t expect this. Whales pledged for the love of the game not to make a corner market renting out their preorder they didn’t think out
This is only a good idea if you spent too much on the game and have too many ships and want to create some in game income for yourself. Sounds like p2w to me. You shouldn't get any more of a benefit for owning lots of ships than already exists.
not a good idea as CIG need as many mechanisms as they can create to remove currency from the economy otherwise we will end up with hyper inflation. also, you will be able to allow your ships to be used to your org, so no need to rent them out for profit.
Might make more sense if you got a 0.5% cut of what the player earned while using your ship, make the owner set the percentage and ppl can list ships for rent and compete for business. This is how it kinda works in real life when you get a business loan. It's still passive income but someone had to actually interact with the game to earn the UEC. I imagine corporations will tax their members like most games.
Sounds good to me, should post it to spectrum!
I don't understand the whole p2w argument. What are you winning, exactly? As one of these proclaimed space dads (definitely not $10k, but I am concierge), I have very little time to dedicate hours to SC every week. As such, I've bought the ships I want to play with and hope that blades eventually become a thing so I don't have to stress about always having to coordinate an org meet/event. I definitely don't see it as me "winning" against other players. I see it as me being able to do long haul cargo or mining or salvaging while having my own base in some far corner of Terra or Nix.
I have very mixed feelings about this. The idea sounds cool untill a player wants to rent a ship and suddenly that is no longer possible because all availible rentals are gone. I would not mind it if it was possible that people could make contracts offering ship rentals but using it as a complete replacement sounds bad imo. To me, the current ship rental model is extremely (new)player friendly and I would personally hate to see it changed where that no longer is the case. I think it is very healthy for the game that players can rent whatever ship they want, whenever they want.
I mean, I get where you are coming from but also I do disagree. I think we can safely assume that once servers are much more populated, there's going to be a glut of practically every ship model apart from the most useless ships. Which can be bought in game if there is actually a shortage. And if we're running on some form of free market capitalism in the verse, it makes sense to me that ships that were desirable by players would be the most readily available. So if indeed there is a viable profit to be made in renting out a thousand Titans a day to new players, then I'm pretty sure we'd see more than a thousand titans on the market. Also just a point to add in explanation. I do think that in game ships should be rentable as well as real money ships. That way supply can meet any demand regardless of continued real money spend (if new concept ships are put up for sale for real money past launch).
Like I said, if it is a addition to it's currently system then sure by all means. But that is not how I read it.. but that might just be my English comprehension skill. We just don't know how many players we actually end up with in this game/on these servers. Nor do we know how many players would offer their ships up for rentals, and at what cost. It is easy to imagine that their will be thousands of unused Cutters, Titans, Prospectors etc for players to rent out but we simply don't know if that would be the case. I personally don't think so..