They are not merely cosmetic, though a lot of people think they don't affect the gameplay barring The Jackel when it was released (later patched) and the new weapon, plasma gun or something, which a lot of people say is OP.

The balancing is not perfect yet as Immoli pointed out, but everything you can unlock is supposed to be a "side-grade" that merely facilitates an alternative play style. Everything except purely cosmetic things can be unlocked by XP. Actual upgrades, like extra ammo or minor extra health etc are generally cheap in XP. They want skill to determine the outcome 95% of the time, and indeed, having +50 health or +5 ammo rarely matters. The free classes, pathfinder, soldier and juggernaut, are the most versatile and can fill most roles adequately or very well out of the box. Actually, the soldier is arguably the best deathmatch/dueling class.

If you like the game then do pay them a little. Any real-money purchase will give you permanent VIP-status, which boosts all XP earned by 50%, and a booster will give +100% on top of that for a limited time. Also, they recently introduced badges, which are one-time achievements that give quite a lot of XP. New players can easily get over 10k XP's worth of badges just by trying out different things in the game.

I am not into point making or being the first. I am looking for entertainment.
But I am not into team playing either. I prefer old school games in which you can play alone (UT 1999)

I dunno, most people in here seem to say it's balanced, personally, while I don't think it's completely in the Pay2Win territory yet it also isn't completely balanced for F2P players.

while upgrades for existing weapons are cheap enough, unlocking new stuff just costs way too much XP. Making some classes really suffer, like soldier and technician are generally subpar to the ones with unlocked weapons. Plus newly released weapons tend to be a lot more powerful than old ones, that seems to be the trend at least.

I'm not realy sure if I want to continue playing this or go back to TF2.

The only things you need to pay for are skins. Everything else can be unlocked by playing.

A few things. If you buy even the cheapest pack there is, you get +50% XP for life. I think if you like the game giving just a little to the developers makes sense. The cheapest packs is €7.99 (not sure how much if you buy in $, probably 9.99). If you buy a booster pack you get another 100% XP on top.

So, somebody who pays nothing unlocks things 3 times slower than somebody who gets a booster pack. Doesn't seem over the top to me. Sure somebody can unlock everything by just paying for it but tbh it takes some of the fun out of the game (for me at least). Very few things can be considered an absolute must to unlock. You can play very well with only the initial 3 free classes with a few unlocks.

Anyway, now as the leader of a Tribes: Ascend clan/guild I'm going to try and recruit you. Hope you don't mind :P
The clan is called Silicon Warbunnies and we are a part of an international multi gaming community called The Conclave (10 years old). We support multiple games from Tribes, to BF3, WoW, LoL and others. We are a mature community where you will find very little drama. We use Team Speak 3 to communicate while gaming.
If you are interested then visit us a http://conclave.cc or feel free to PM me for more information.

Forgot to mention, most of our Tribes members so far are from EU and play on EU servers. We do have two or three who play on NA servers and would definitely welcome more.

Thank you for your attention,
Aningan.

I played it a lot a while back, but stopped when there was sudden influx of snipers. Probably won't ever touch it again, unless they remove that entire fornicating class (not very likely) or change the sniper projectile to something other than hitscan bullshit.

Playing and loving it, mostly. I'm rank 15 or 16 or so at the moment.

I'm not a Tribes veteran of old of any kind, but I can understand the problems some vets seem to have with the game. Balance and some mechanics are skewered.

- First team to ignore both their and the enemy base wins. Defenses are fairly easily taken care of by even a pathfinder and zerg rushing a flag is simply more effective than using "strategy" and thinning out.
- One spinfusor hit clears the enemy flagstand from any mines. Eh.
- The game's less team-oriented than you'd think and than reviews led you to believe.
- The exp system, while an incentive necessary in today's times break the game on many levels - too many people stay at the base to defend it, for example, because it gets a lot of points. Flag capping and actually doing stuff necessary for victory... not so much.
- Bullet weapons are able to kill anyone in mid-air, and it doesn't even require much skill. It doesn't suit the Tribes gameplay.
- a couple more

Nowadays I mostly casually pop in for a round or two of arena or TDM to pwn some fools. Still fun.