Thanks Jaws. You are saying EXACTLY what I am thinking too. I had to dragg it out of ya.
There is an alternative that does not require massive Pay-To-Play through the publisher, and which appears to be Oleg's plan for BoB And Beyond...
Oleg's Plan:
(1) Modding for Offline play and mod-friendly Online servers.
(2) No Modding for no-mod Online servers.
This is "sharing" the sim for the benefit of all. This will hopefully prove sufficient to grow and maintain a huge interested Offline base that can pay for effective anti-cheat protections without requiring Pay-To-Play.
You see, if Oleg *really* went Pay-To-Play whole hogg, and made a smashing success of it, he just might abandon Offline play development, as like the purely Online gameplay TargetWare developers, Oleg is
not personally interested in Offline play development, at least to my knowledge.