Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26257239-20150724203251/@comment-25467429-20151009160529

This whole thing's gotten way off my original point, which is that as a tournament prize going forward it would be a nice incentive if they did the same headstart level thing they've done this time around. Period.

Sure. you can say it's fact that PA put the prices there on purpose - that's obvious, otherwise they would've changed them by now. There's no harm, I believe, in challenging their reasoning, as their reasoning is flawed/misleading. Saying the superplanes are luxury goods for those that put enough time and effort to get them is rubbish because it implies that if you happen to be skilled enough and play enough, you reasonably stand a chance at using them, when in fact it is entirely about money. Folks claiming you can level up these planes in less than a few months without buying any fuel or claiming nonsense about what it means to be an ace doesn't help.

Aggressively, you can estimate an average income of 20,000 credits per use of unit of fuel. Most of the superplanes cost 70 mil credits to get to level 10. That works to 3500 sorties/units of fuel. No casual player is going to hit that mark, which is why I said know what the tournament prize is, because if you're a relatively casual player there's no point saving up and dropping fuel and money to win a superplane you'll never use. That 3500 fuel number equates to 583 days straight of not spending credits on anything else, and a 6 fuel units a day average burn. That's a year and a half. Claiming you can do that in 3 months, 90 days,  would mean earning 777,778 credits a day. Using the same 20,000 credits a sortie model, that means 38-39 units of fuel a day. I don't care how lucky you are, you're not keeping up that rate of fuel use without buying a ton of fuel. You're not winning 3-5 units of fuel as mission rewards at nearly a consistent enough rate to say that's how you're earning the fuel needed, or money drops enough to substantially offset the credit earnings needed. Even at level 5, that's up to 25 mill credits, 1250 units of fuel, 13-14 units a day for 90 days.

So, to reiterate my original point - It'd be nice to see them repeat what they did with Avaanche and Windhover. Either way, know what you're going for in a tournament, becuase if you can't use it, then you're just wasting your time and money.