Starport: Galactic Empires - The Admirals Club

The Admirals Club

Starport is well known as being one of the first mmorpgs that used the free to play business model. The game itself is free and has no monthly subscription fee. Instead, players have the option of buying extra items from the Admiral's Club.

The Admirals Club is one of the more unique item malls in the gaming industry. While most item malls allow you to buy much more upgraded items and thus have a powerful advantage over those who don't buy, the Admirals Club strives to avoid "pay2win". While it does give its buyers an edge, it is not an "I win" button, where you can buy your victory.

The buying rate is 1,000 admiral tokens for $1 U.S. dollar, with a minimum purchase of 5,000 admiral tokens per transaction ($5). Users pay using an online transaction via a major credit card, debit card, or PayPal. Users paying through a card will have their transaction processed immediately, while those using PayPal have an average wait time of 1–2 days before they get there transaction processed.

All items purchased in The Admirals Club are purchased via admiral tokens. Some of the items that can be purchased are as follows:

• Warp fuel- As mentioned earlier, in order to balance full-time gamers to part-time players, the developers created warp fuel so as to limit the amount of play time one can play. The item mall rewards its buyers with the chance to buy 1 gallon of fuel for 2 admiral tokens, up to 5000 gallons of warp fuel for 10,000 admiral tokens.
• Intergalacic's Ship- The intergalactics were an ancient alien race that used to dominate the galaxy thousands of years before the humans arrived. They have long since been extinct. Some deep-space explorers have uncovered the blueprints behind some of their technology, including their ship, known simply as the Intergalactic's ship, or IGship. These explorers will sell an exact replica of this ship for you to use, for a fee of 10,000 admirals tokens per ship.
• Artifacts- These items are used to dramatically improve a ships' stats. Early explorers have found artifacts of the old intergalactics that were used by their race to improve their ships. Artifacts can be found all around the galaxy. Any player can take the time to search for them, however they are hard to find and they may not necessarily get the exact artifact they want. The Admirals Club allows players to purchase the exact artifact they want without taking the time to search every planet within every system of the galaxy. Some examples of ships stats they improve are speed, handling, warpfuel efficiency, etc.
• Tourney Points- Tourney points are bought for 1 of 2 reasons: either to enter a tourney game, or to transfer admiral tokens you own on one server to another server you are playing. They are the only item that can be transferred from server to server. They are bought with 5,000 tokens per tourney point. They have a sell rate of 4,000 tokens. So this means that if you decide to move 5,000 tokens to another server, you will end up losing 1,000 tokens in the process.
• Nukes- these are the most powerful ship weapons in the game. They can be bought using in-game credits at certain pirates only starbases (only people that are pirates can enter] that sell nukes, but this leaves people with positive reputation nowhere to buy nukes, so the developers allowed anyone with admiral tokens to buy nukes at a price of 250 per nuke. Nukes can also be created with the use of a Weapon Factory, which is buildable on any colony.