Well, I would have put a time limit on the insurance policy on backer ships. I think having it for one year would have been sufficient and not lost much if any money. Especially since you claim that insurance will be a negligible cost in the end anyways.
I'd give up LTI for my small fleet of pledge ships in a split-second just so that people would stop complaining about it, if such a thing were possible. Chris Roberts also regrets ever offering it to begin with, since it's so widely misunderstood. LTI is nothing more than the waiving of a negligible fee—small for each individual player, but an enormous game-wide currency sink. Currency sinks are very important in massively multiplayer games. "Regular" insurance offers absolutely identical coverage for a negligible fee, and people with LTI ships will also buy new ships (and future variants) as the months and years pass.
The only reason LTI exists is to stupid-proof pledge ships. The game won't force you to pay the negligible insurance fee, so someone's eight-year-old could take out their pledge Hornet without LTI and it would be destroyed forever. LTI prevents this. Again though, everyone now regrets the existence of LTI since such a massive fuss has been made over it.
I generally just have a big distaste for exclusive content. I didn't like it in Wasteland 2 or SRR either, but I'm a weak man and I love RPGs more than space sims. It seems like Chris Robers went further past the line.
In a way, I agree with you. I dislike "collectibles" that are offered for a limited time only, then never again, such as special lightsaber crystals in the late Star Wars Galaxies, certain mounts in World of Warcraft, festival hats in Guild Wars, et cetera. Unfortunately, absolutely all MMOs have them, and as they're often "vanity" items only, their existence is easily defended. It annoys me that if I start playing a game three years into its lifespan, I miss out on stuff. Again though, all MMOs have them with absolutely not even a single exception.
Star Citizen has numerous exclusives: A special wing/nose decal for those who learned about Star Citizen before its official announcement on October 10th (I don't have one of these), two tiers of wing/nose decals for Centurion and Imperator subscribers, a Gamescom hangar decoration (for attendees or available to anyone for $5 until the end of Gamescom), the backer-exclusive system, and for $10,000+ backers, the private space lounge. All of these have absolutely no effect whatsoever on gameplay except philosophically in the case of the exclusive star system, but really, it's just a place I can go that Joe Blow can't and thus essentially a vanity item.
I don't know if I could raise 21 million. I probably couldn't, but that doesn't force me to contribute through some sort of logical trap.
I'm not asking you if you personally can raise $21 million. You definitely couldn't, and neither could I. I'm just wondering what plan you'd have Chris use that is agreeable to you and that would raise as much money. The actual ill effects of the things you don't like are, I think, much less than you, Grunker, and others have built up in your minds, and while there are downsides to the incentives to pledge (and to pledge more $), the upside is no private investors required and all the funds needed to create a very ambitious game.
