The prices of the ships can be more justified to not let the what we call "OP stuff" reach the hands of many, gives them money and avoids the problem would be let everybody have things like Capitals for cheap prices. On the other hand, the recent systems they placed make it cheaper for backers who want to buy new stuff to avoid spending too much, for example Upgrade your Ship and Melt ship value into cash value kinda works, once they fully get EMP working, i want one Avenger, would only cost only 5$ to me instead of buying a whole new one for 60$. Some people might like to collect ships like this is Pokemon on space, i just want the ideal ship for myself.
The Star Citizen Thread v 4
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The prices of the ships can be more justified to not let the what we call "OP stuff" reach the hands of many, gives them money and avoids the problem would be let everybody have things like Capitals for cheap prices. On the other hand, the recent systems they placed make it cheaper for backers who want to buy new stuff to avoid spending too much, for example Upgrade your Ship and Melt ship value into cash value kinda works, once they fully get EMP working, i want one Avenger, would only cost only 5$ to me instead of buying a whole new one for 60$. Some people might like to collect ships like this is Pokemon on space, i just want the ideal ship for myself.
How do you know you own the ideal ship when CIG will release other heavily marketed "super-ships" in a few more weeks or months, every time you'll pay another $5 to have the ideal ship for you (based on current CIG marketing). By the time the game gets released you might have doubled the amount you paid, and then new starters with basic packages will earn the same ship in game within a few day's/week's of release (if they can't people will scream pay to win).
The whole melting thing is just a way to get you to spend more in smaller easier to justify to yourself incremental packages, you are still buying a $60 ship you are just buying it for $5 on top of $55 you spent already (and you are giving up whatever you spent the $55 on) so the price is still $60.
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This is the whole crowdfund got about, buy something that you will end up getting for free once it finishes, the point is, if you do it now, you're on the sake of backing the game.
But that's exactly why the Melting and Upgrades appeared, the main ship of the package you firstly bought is something you don't want anymore, you melt it or upgrade to a new ship, many people did this with Saber, as the credit several i know haven't paid a cent for it just melting one older pledged ship, others just paid the upgrade.
So this system has 2 sides, it's cheaper for who wants something else without need to buy Another Ship, and gets people who only want one ship, like me, able to upgrade to something they want. So at the end is cheaper, because if i had the 55$ ship and wanted the 60$ avenger, it would cost at the end 115$ if i couldn't drop the 55$ one, and that's one value i wouldn't be willing to spend.
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The industry goes way farther than that. For years already P2P MMO vendors employ psychologists with questionable motives to tailor "gameplay" specifically to pressure people into keeping their subscription. People already starved to death in front of their PCs because of this and regulators of Asian countries stepped in already.
F2P/B2W whale grooming goes even farther than that, it is specifically singling out weak personalities and completely exploit and ruin them financially, just like some well known cults do. This is completely beyond acceptable and will be outlawed and prosecuted in the future, once the lawmakers catch up on this topic. And they will.
People seriously defending those practices should note: The online video game industry harms itself heavily by doing that and may end up in the shady corner where illegal gambling is now. Once public opinion turns the billion dollar market is gone, because casual people opt out of that "dangerous addicting stuff" and keep their children away from it at all cost. Also society always over-reacts on these topics (remember prohibition?), so the MMO operators should cut back in their own interest.
Exactly my point you don't think $115 is worth it you're not collecting a fleet, and you aren't the only one. So the melt mechanism gets introduced and this allows you to bump up your spending in bite sized chunks $5 a time (so far).
The fact is they got you to spend extra money when you already own the game, and at this stage you have no idea if the ship you currently regard as ideal with still be ideal in a few months time.
Remember there is also "unmelting", so you can spend even more money.
Nobody seriously can defend this practices, you can simply state the current reality, the industry is actually one incredible 80BN$ a year, growing over 5BN a year, it's incredible on that aspect. But the fact is the the most economically successful game development companies are backed up by the biggest marketing machines around. It's becoming basic 101, because it works.
The side i hate of this, is how big companies hit such baiting-aggressive Marketing with Children, making them addicted to points of desperation that already motivated several in-depth studies about how Companies are going too far. Now when it comes to actual Adults, responsible by their own actions and well-aware of how things work, it's fully up to them to decide if and what amounts are they willing to spend on digital entertainment goods.
How exactly? It just transforms your credit into what you had, if you haven't spent the credit. It's mostly because some people Regret melting ships.
That's one side backing up the other, the fact some will be able to spend less money or even none with Melts, is backed up by the smaller amounts on upgrades of the backers like me who do want one ship but don't want to pay too much for it, at least, at the same time. I got to give them this one because it's a very smart system capable to keep both sides happy and keep generating funding.
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Skipping over the discussion, is there a chance that the netcode will never work successfully? That it's too ambitious for the technology?
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Like the moon landing by being an expensive fake? Maybe this period will be known as the bdsse race... /silly
Of course it will have to work, it's simply requiring a decently complex system to achieve the performance required for the what they're doing here. Too ambitious for the technology? No way
It has been done before, the only difference here is how it combines several elements, the space sim, EVA and FPS. They will have to keep hammering on it until it works smoothly, 2.0 shows it works, with optimization and polish it has to be made smooth, and then, increase player limits. This will be ongoing... for as long the game will take to release certainly, even fully released MMOs still have netcode problems these days, so... xD
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Well the EVA is zero gravity FPS and the space sim is like riding an FPS vehicle.
I don't see how these three gameplay elements have to be differentiated as far as networking is concerned?
It's the discussion already happened, things like FPS gameplay are far more netcode intensive than what we usually have on MMOs, it's like to have this kind of gameplay, with everything else, for example a Constellation said with having 70 Netcoded elements, it's where the challenge is, it's ambitious certainly what they described they are developing to support this, technology isn't the limit, what's happening on recent times is games making use of technology that has been available for quite some time on the enterprise level.
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It's your cash max you can do what you like with it, I'm just pointing out that by altering their selling strategy they got you to break your spending limit. It was only by $5 but if enough people do it it's a lot of cash, and $5 doesn't seem like much so doing it again becomes easier.
It is a very smart system designed to make people spend money, and it achieves that.
If your ideal ship has an upgraded military version with a tighter turning circle and better guns/shields, released next week for another $5 (via melting your current ship) will you buy it ?.
Or will you stick with your vanilla ideal ship knowing it's not as good. How many times could this happen before release ?.
Hopefully they aren't doing weekly ship sales, or releasing new ships frequently. Unless i'm mistaken, the pipeline of new ships has greatly reduced... we had what... 5 new ships this year?
So i guess i'm fine, i'll upgrade to where i feel comfortable with.
Well Crytek Engine(CE)was never to popular as network friendly in the past and "we"conclude that their engineers could not solve this problem for past 15 years....However this is the thing past 5 years we witness that multicore cpu's become usual standard and overall hardware improved a lot + the internet connection is probably 2x(reality could be 5x) faster and secure and this things could be crucial in the area of netcode,but there is a problems behind the curtains that are far more important like Latency which is an unavoidable fact of online games, caused by not only network latency, which is largely out of a game's control, but also latency inherent in the way game simulations are run. There are several lag compensation methods used to disguise, reduce, or cope with latency, however their feasibility varies by application....
So I will quote wiki on this below here:
"A single update of a game simulation is known as a tick. The rate at which the simulation is run on a server is referred often to as the server's tickrate; this is essentially the server equivalent of a client's frame rate, absent any rendering system. Tickrate is limited by the length of time it takes to run the simulation, and is often intentionally limited further to reduce instability introduced by a fluctuating tickrate, and to reduce CPU and data transmission costs. A lower tickrate increases latency in the synchronization of the game simulation between the server and clients. Tickrate for games like first-person shooters can vary from 60 ticks per seconds for games like Quake or Counter-Strike: Global Offensive in competitive mode to 30 ticks per seconds for games like Battlefield 4 and Titanfall.[citation needed] A lower tickrate also naturally reduces the precision of the simulation, which itself might cause problems if taken too far, or if the client and server simulations are running at significantly different rates.
Games may limit the number of times per second that updates are sent to a particular client, and/or are sent about particular objects in the game's world. Because of limitations in the amount of bandwidth available, and the CPU time that's taken by network communication, some games prioritize certain critical communication while limiting the frequency and priority of less important information. As with the tickrate, this effectively increases the synchronization latency. Game engines may also reduce the precision of some values sent over the network to help with bandwidth use this lack of precision may in some instances be noticeable.
Various simulation synchronization errors between machines can also fall under the "netcode issues" blanket. These may include bugs which cause the simulation to proceed differently on one machine than on another, or which cause some things to not be communicated when the user perceives that they ought to be. Traditionally, real-time strategy games have used lock-step peer-to-peer networking models where it is assumed the simulation will run exactly the same on all clients; if, however, one client falls out of step for any reason, the desynchronization may compound and be unrecoverable"
Not sure if this explanation will clear a bit of the bigger picture but at least can give you some of the info how really complex netcoding issue is after all.......
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Cheers Max - very useful
Thanks
Question - is the FPS area consensual PvP only - or is there a mission? I couldn't find anything apart from picking up an automatic rifle.
It's fully sandbox, you have a no-weapons zone around Olisar. Over that you can go there, grab the gun, you can find players there, or wait for players to arrive, or just get the guns and go into space to rek some people. Far i understand things like the FPS Station will be Enemy FPS AI, currently on the works.
Ah, OK, PvP only at the moment.
Well, I've had a hour of looking about, it's glitchy (to be expected really), but I can see the very beginnings of something here. Just gotta wait for more content now.......
New article from Forbes http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertc...n-may-not-be-a-scam-but-it-feels-like-a-cult/
and the reddit thread on the SC subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitize..._citizen_may_not_be_a_scam_but_it_feels_like/
Acting like a cult to prove it's not a cult.
I'm telling you the SC community is a never ending source of entertainment.
Sometimes it's a comedy and sometimes it's a horror movie.
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