The only way you can rationalise it IMO is to equate it to a $ per hour played scale. If you play for weeks/months before the open beta, say even just 100 hours, it’s going to be about a 1 buck an hour. If you’re looking for a game to invest a lot of hours in then getting in now and playing for some time before others might make the price seem more reasonable.
Of course you could pay less and hope to get into the Alpha anyway or just the closed Beta. The only difference is that you’ll have less time to play before it goes free.
Now the main argument regarding the price seems to be “You’ll be shaping the game”
I have my doubts that our (competitive minded) voice will be heard over the casual pub player who massively outnumber us in most F2P games.
I can only point to Echo and the video where Ed states that it’s used to validate feedback from the players and so bring about change. Of course the game is going to be designed by SD and be a representation of what they want to bring to the market but they’ve already shown that player feedback is an important part of that process.
Also another thing that troubles my mind :
“We reserve the right to suspend Instant Access in case of unexpected load or technical issues.”
Revoking my privileges because the hardware can’t cope with the number of packages they sold does not seem a good incentive to buy said package.
This seems more a precautionary warning should they need to do something drastic. Perhaps a master server is falling over itself to keep up with demand, maybe there is a technical issue which means they need to take down all servers for some time. I doubt they’d intend to piss everyone off but reality says they may need to deny you the ability to place under some circumstances and they don’t want to get sued because of it. It is an Alpha/Beta test after all but some people will always consider it an implicit right to access just because they paid.
As you see I need some convincing…
Convince me ! : )
Unfortunately nobody can say whether you’re going to like the game, this is going to be your fundamental concern. If you don’t want to take the risk then you have to wait for some more info that’ll ease your mind. While everyone is also under NDA it’s not like people can convince you through more than repeating the info already made public.
The one thing I can say is that with the forum badges you can see who is currently playing the Alpha. Perhaps you’ll recognise some names, maybe knowing they are in and playing the game will be enough to convince you to some degree of positiveness.
