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To sub or not to sub?

Moderator: JC Denton

To sub or not to sub?

Unread postby icycalm » 15 Dec 2022 22:06

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You can read all about the sub program here: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/pledge/subscriptions

And you can check out as an example this December's promotions:

December 2022 Subscriber Promotions
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm ... Promotions

I almost subbed today, at the highest, Imperator level even for about $20/month, but then I changed my mind. I'll explain why.

At the end of the day, with the sub you're giving them $240/year (or $120/year if you're subbing at the Centurion level), and you have to ask yourself what you're getting in return, or what else you could be getting for the same amount.

For $240 per year I could be getting the equivalent of 2 fighters per year. Or close to 5 cheap LTI vehicles for upgrades. Or one pretty large mid-size ship. Per year. You can build out an entire fleet in a few years with the amount of money the sub costs.

And what does the sub give you in return? It does give you one vehicle per month to try out, but this vehicle you neither choose, nor can you upgrade it. It's just a random vehicle out of the 100+ that they have (not quite random, it's supposed to be a recent release), so what are the chances it'll be the right vehicle for the job when you need it? You can't count on it, so you can't depend on it, so it's almost as if you don't have it. And if you do get one you really like, well, the next month you'll need to buy it anyway if you want to keep it. So why not just buy it outright from the start with the money you'll be saving by not subbing?

So you see, I am not advocating for not giving money to CIG. I advocate for giving as much money as you can afford to give them. But since you're giving them the money, and since there's almost no ceiling to how much money you can spend in this game (even if you buy everything for yourself with tens of thousands of dollars, your friends won't, so you could spend hundreds of thousands of dollars gifting everything to your friends too, if you wanted, and in the process strengthening your org), you might as well spend the little money you will spend as efficiently as possible. And, after crunching the numbers, the sub just doesn't make sense.

And that's before you realize that the flair items—the sub's other main attraction—will enter the loot tables three months after release. From the second page linked above:

CIG wrote:Earnable In-Game
As we've mentioned in the past, our goal is to make most offerings available to be earned in-game. For this reason, we're excited to share that many of the Subscriber flair items have been added to the in-game loot table as a rare drop, starting in Alpha 3.17. More specifically, most pre-2022 items (those that can be player carried) have been added, with future flair being added after a 3-month exclusivity window.

Note: Some digital items that are exclusive to events, such as items from a CitizenCon Goodies Pack, etc., will not be making their way into the in-game discoverable loot system.


There are more perks to the subs, and none of them are crap, they all have their uses. The rental credits can certainly come in handy, and I would also be interested in the 10%/20% discount you get off store items after a year of subbing. But can this discount be applied to anything? Can I get 20% off a $3,000 Javelin by spending $240 on a sub for a year? That doesn't sound right, so it probably doesn't work this way, but I haven't been able to locate the fine print yet.

But overall, to me, the vehicles purchased outright offer more value than all the perks contained in the sub combined, so I will stick to just buying vehicles for now, until the sub starts to make sense. Who knows, perhaps they'll adjust the perks at some point, we'll see. But for now, I just don't see the value.

There are some exceptions, however. For example, I wouldn't mind those Zeus suits they gave out a couple months ago. I saw in a pic that they go very well with all three Cutter paints [ > ], and since I have all paints, I would also like all the suits. However, I can't even see how much they cost, because they won't even let you look in the subscriber store if you aren't subscribed! The link is here, but I can't see shit: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/pled ... duct_id=65

I mean the store is there, but I can't see the items. They even state that part of the benefits of subbing is so you can gift your friends stuff they themselves can't buy:

CIG wrote:If you would like to receive these legendary bounty hunter weapons as part of a subscription, you can subscribe on or before December 13th, 2022, 2000 UTC.

If you subscribe after December 13th, 2022, you can pick up these and previous months' flair (going back to 2014) in the Subscriber-Exclusive Store. You can fill in any gaps in your collection and pick up extras to gift to non-Subscribers.


So to get these suits I just send some money to Chev or Archonus, who are subbed, and they get them for me. But first I have to find out how much they cost.

Come to think of it, if I was subbed when the suits came out, I would have had them now, and perhaps cheaper than what they'll now cost me. So I suppose it all depends on how many of these items you want per year. Past a certain threshold, the sub starts to make sense.

Fuck it I am subbing, forget all the above lol. I've seen enough cool items in the past three months to know it's worth it. Moreover, you can sell unwanted items in the grey market! So in the end, if you go that route, the sub might even cost you nothing! (I probably won't bother doing this, I am just sayin' the option is there. Hell you could take out a number of subs and sell everything and make some money. But it'd be too much hassle for me; ymmv.)

Some comments on the subs by knowledgeable players on Reddit. Read them, and then I'll say something more below.

https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/co ... &context=3

haryesidur wrote:I don't really think it matters that much if the current balance remains. Just visiting outposts for an hour gets a full suit of armour and a medgun and tractor beam utility, starter cash will get you an arclight plus ammo.

Using that or even without the armour step, you can begin running bunkers or crash sites, in which you can get all the guns in the verse pretty acceptably fast.

With a full wipe but starting with 10k aUEC (and admittedly a 600i so not entirely fresh start but I didn't use it for bounties so maybe that doesn't matter), i've gotten to full bunker running spec in about 3 hours, and a fair amount of that was waiting for patch stability.

Also, subscribers don't get guns every month or multiple guns even. We've had some pistols before, there's some armour sets drip fed over multiple months. Truthfully, it's not worth using most of that. Just go loot stuff and duplicates. I did just buy 4 sets of aril armour in bright yellow so I was easily visible just because I was bunker running with friends and it simplifies stuff if your armour is bright and single coloured.


Laserbarrage wrote:Not really. You don’t get guns every month and depending on your sub level you may only get one.

There hasn’t been that many sub guns tbh. But also, people can just go raid literally one bunker right now and they’ll have an entire armory stocked full. So not a big deal.

Hopefully eventually with wear and tear and all that it won’t be so easy to stockpile tons and tons of weapons and make millions of credits super easy. In fact, hopefully the entire game becomes harder because currently you as a new player with zero idea of how to play can earn an 890j within a month and that’s if you’re learning slowly from the guides online. I feel like ships like that should be a bit harder to earn lol.

But as for pay to win, it’s too late for that argument. You have people with hundreds and hundreds of ships in their fleets and will start with millions of credits. So it’s not really a big deal.

Plus it’s less pay to win and more pay to skip grind or start with what you want early. Because you can earn all this stuff, often times extremely easily, in game. If you pay for a hammerhead for example did you really pay to win? Win what? You’re not invincible in it. You need 6 other players to man your turrets and systems, you’re vulnerable to one player in an eclipse, you have to pay the crew whether it’s your friends or npcs it’s going to cost most of the time, maintenance, higher fuel costs, etc.

The guy who paid money for the eclipse, did he pay to win? Win what? He can kill that player crewed hammerhead pretty easy, at least in the current build. However if even a cheap low tier fighter comes across him he’s almost certainly dead. It’s a terrible fighter.

The game isn’t really built in a way where you can “pay to win”.

The real pay to win in sc is friends. The more people you have in your every day play group the more unstoppable and effective you will be at whatever you’re doing in the game.


So as you can see, the sub items aren't pay-to-win. You can find them, or will eventually be able to find them, in the game. Then why pay for them? Well, because if I want to go out NOW on my Cutter with the matching Zeus suit, I need it NOW, not after hours of looking for it in loot boxes. The suit doesn't give me any particular advantage, but looks cool as hell with that ship, and I want it. And since they release more and more of these items every month, eventually there'll be hundreds and even thousands. There should already be close to a thousand purchasable items in the game overall, and they all have different uses or fashion looks you can create for yourself etc. And I just want to have all the ones that I like, just like in real life lol. So I think the $10 or $20 per month in perpetuity is a good price, considering also all the other perks you get with the sub.

So that has been a complete 180 essay where I changed my mind mid-writing. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.


P.S. You could also sub-in and sub-out whenever you see some items you like, but that'd be too much micromanagement for me, so I won't bother.

P.P.S. Let's not count the sub's temporary vehicles for the purposes of the Cult Fleet thread. We know what the vehicles are, and we know who's subbed, so that should be enough information (post here when you sub, and again if/when you stop the sub, so we can keep track).

P.P.P.S. Yearly sub passes are currently discounted due to "Luminalia 2952" lol (scroll to the bottom), you basically get two months free: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm ... nalia-2952

P.P.P.P.S. I've tested the 20% discount code I got from the Imperator year-pass (not used it, just tested), and it works all the way up to the Corsair at least, for a discount of about $40. No idea how much higher it goes, but $40 is a good deal if you're planning to buy a large-ish ship. Also, the code can be used by any account: by my clone, for example, or anyone else.


Edit: Having now seen the subscriber store, it absolutely has some very cool gear that you can't easily find in the game, if at all. I'll see if I can post a pic later, it's a lot of stuff.
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icycalm
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Re: To sub or not to sub?

Unread postby icycalm » 22 Jan 2023 18:25

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This is what the Imperator discount coupon looks like in my hangar. I've blanked out the code, which can be given to anyone, even another account.

So it turns out the limit discount is $100, which is way higher than I had hoped. It's basically half the price of the Imperator sub, and you can achieve it by buying a ship that costs at least $500. So if you plan to buy at least one ship of that price or above per year, the sub works out very well for you, especially if you sub during sale times like I did during Luminalia, and pay for a year in advance.

For this year, I'll probably use my coupon on a Hull C, if it ends up seeing the light of day this year. Unless someone else ends up buying it, and they release another $500-class ship. Then I'll buy the other one.

The coupon does not appear to have an expiry date, so you could conceivably hoard them to spend them when you need them. Though I wouldn't quote me on that, and I'd do the research before letting a year go by without using them.

Another consideration has to do with melting. I THINK I've read that if you melt something, you lose all discounts you used for it, so does that mean that the coupon just evaporates, or you get it back in your account to use again? That's another point that needs clarification.
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icycalm
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Re: To sub or not to sub?

Unread postby icycalm » 08 Mar 2023 08:28

Subscriber-exclusive Warbond CCUs like the ones I bought yesterday [ > ] cinch the deal and basically render the subscription free for those who are regularly buying and upgrading ships. I bought three for $15 but they are worth $30, so over the course of a year I will certainly recoup the sub and then some, especially since I got the sub with a large discount during the holidays.

They have basically made the sub a must-have for any ship collector, and then the gear it gives you comes free on top of that.
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Re: To sub or not to sub?

Unread postby shubn » 15 Dec 2023 12:45

The Imperator subscription was recently updated, and now gives the 20% discount coupon every 6 months instead of 12, as well as two vehicles of the month instead of one. Pretty good deal. I'd probably be upping my sub right now if I hadn't already gotten a 1-year Centurion pass back in July.
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Re: To sub or not to sub?

Unread postby icycalm » 16 Dec 2023 20:11

My Imperator sub expired a few days ago. I had bought it last December (December is the best time of the year to buy these subs because they’re discounted). I couldn’t afford to resub this year, which means I wouldn’t be able to access the Subscriber Store for Cult Spec gear, but I noticed that they do accept store credit, so I melted all my Commander gear (most Commander stuff is store-bought) plus a few paints and bits and pieces I wasn’t using much, and I managed to renew my Imperator sub this way. I’ll rebuy all the stuff hopefully in a few weeks when my finances improve, but until then I’ll be playing a Captain because all his stuff is buyable in-game (except the backpack but I kept a few of those).

I’ll be adding the two sub levels to the higher ranks of the Cult Spec in the next update (which might be happening tonight). You really need to be subbed to properly gear up with the coolest shit, and this will be even truer as time goes on and they release more and more cool stuff.
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