I've seen a few posts on forums, about this research race, and the sentiment expressed is "lol at roleplayers, giving up isk like that".
which, in a way... If we look at what happened - people either gave up their things, for no isk, or bought things at higher than normal prices, for no reward. A lot of roleplayers kind of punished themselves, for the sake of this research race thing, and for what ? to change the order in which concept art is shown ? All four ships are probably going to be released at the same time anyway, so what was this whole thing for ?
Other than to troll the roleplay community ?
Just like those events a while back, about going into lowsec/nullsec to shoot those pirate laboratory things, that ended with a lot of players losing a fair bit of isk.
kind of looks a bit like there are some at ccp who see live events as a stick to beat roleplayers with, haha look at those stupid roleplay nerds, lets devise new ways to try and make them quit, hahahahaha.
CCP does nothing, and people bitch that they do nothing. Then CCP does something, and people bitch that any prize that is offered isn't worthwhile. Or, in this example, bitch because they think they can't get the prize for
themselves which
obviously makes it a bad prize. Because obviously if you don't get something out of it it's a waste of time and money, right? A punishment, trolling, intentional griefing, harharhar.
I really don't get that belief at all. RP does
not require rewards. At all. If you're RPing for a reward, then, quite frankly, you're doing it wrong.
Those of us who donated did so because having our imaginary faction win an imaginary research race is something we consider a better investment of our imaginary money than the various other imaginary past-times we are able to partake in in this imaginary universe. And guess what? Most of those of us who actually participated, enjoyed ourselves. Which is, you know, the whole point. You seem to think that we felt 'forced' to spend our money on this race, and that it's a 'punishment'. If it was, then we wouldn't have bothered (and a lot of people didn't and that's perfectly fine). But those of us who donated spent our money because we wanted to spend our money, because, once again, it's
imaginary money.
Everything we do in this game is a pointless waste of time because
none of it has any purpose beyond personal fulfillment. It's up to
us to decide what's a worthwhile investment and to make our own fun with what we do.
PIE collectively put about 20-25 billion isk into this race. I, for one, consider that a 20-25 billion well spent. That money normally just sat and collected dust in people's wallets or went towards ship replacements in an in-game war that has even less impact than this race. I personally bankrupted myself and sold off everything I had that was faction cruiser and above. And yet, instead of feeling punished, or mad for losing all of my money, I feel quite happy in the knowledge that my contribution actually helped my imaginary faction win something. Because, you know, I'm a roleplayer, and I find enjoyment out of using my imagination to add meaning to things that otherwise have none. This was, in fact,
exactly the kind of thing that I want to be spending my money on. Helping my IC faction win an IC research race is a far better use of my money than buying a mission-running battleship or another 20 slicers for the pendulum war.
Also, no, they're not being released at the same time. In December only the Amarr ship is coming out, all the others will have to wait for later expansions. But frankly it wouldn't matter if they did come out at the same time because, personally, just having my faction win is more than enough reward.
Isk is imaginary money. Unless you can pull a Somer and find a way to monetize your in-game earnings in RL, there is
no worthwhile use of it. Whether you are losing your money on ship replacements, on fuel costs, on manufacturing, or whatever, it's all just as pointless as losing it on a lore-building event. What
matters is that you find
fun in what you do with it.