The Star Citizen Thread v 4

MaxLexandre · Feb 18, 2016

With a separation of earned and paid currency on the matter on the back-end, but as Vovoid said, all merged on the front-end, it can be easier for them.

Because then they can not only let you earn UEC, they can let you buy even Ships in-game at one early stage. Also allowing Trading. Not causing much problems and they could already have a way better test the whole economy as it will be set by-release. And then, things you bought and are included on your package are persistent upon release, and possible wipes during the alpha/beta.

Seems like a Win/Win, players who paid keep stuff, players who haven't paid can earn stuff and CIG still gets to sell UEC and stuff. Everybody's happy.

Voivod · Feb 18, 2016

MaxLexandre said:
Seems like a Win/Win, players who paid keep stuff, players who haven't paid can earn stuff and CIG still gets to sell UEC and stuff. Everybody's happy.

I just hope they have good database engineers to track all these items/currency properly

Asp Explorer · Feb 18, 2016

Unfortunately, I doubt it. They apparently couldn't keep track of who paid what for which accounts or which gifts or packages were granted to / from accounts.

I can see how that could happen, but I cannot see why it could happen - given the rather draconian rules of the USA financial bigwigs, and the availability of quality solutions that do this exact thing.

MaxLexandre · Feb 18, 2016

Asp Explorer said:
Unfortunately, I doubt it. They apparently couldn't keep track of who paid what for which accounts or which gifts or packages were granted to / from accounts.

That's very different, not even Valve gives themselves does the work of investigating and tracking gifts and things like that, that can be charge-backed on attempts of play them, they just ban everyone

And actually they knew, that's why they tracked down the money they lost from the LTI scams from years ago!

That's not the job of "incompetent" database engineers

The system is quite simple, they already have 1 made that is all the ships bought, UEC, everything else is set into separate, One table won't impact the Other, it will just rely on it.

I work with that time to time and can do it, databases are not the boogie man, if hired professional engineers do not have the competence to do something like this, they better fire them ASAP.

Aleksej · Feb 18, 2016

Asp Explorer said:
Unfortunately, I doubt it. They apparently couldn't keep track of who paid what for which accounts or which gifts or packages were granted to / from accounts.

I can see how that could happen, but I cannot see why it could happen - given the rather draconian rules of the USA financial bigwigs, and the availability of quality solutions that do this exact thing.

Could you remind me what are you talking of in the first part of your post?

Asp Explorer · Feb 18, 2016

Aleksej said:
Could you remind me what are you talking of in the first part of your post?

I can't post a link as its NSFW, but there's a long and detailed post about where one SC backer tried to get his account refunded, and gifts he received send back to the gifting account. He ended up talking with (apparently) Sandi Gardner who explained how that wasn't possible and CIG don't keep track of such things.

MaxLexandre · Feb 18, 2016

Asp Explorer said:
I can't post a link as its NSFW, but there's a long and detailed post about where one SC backer tried to get his account refunded, and gifts he received send back to the gifting account. He ended up talking with (apparently) Sandi Gardner who explained how that wasn't possible and CIG don't keep track of such things.

That can't be it because recently the famous LTI charge-back years later, the package that got re-gifted got charge-backed by the original backer and they got into the account of the one who gave the ship LTI for the money that was missing.

So for certain, they do keep track, they got able to track down a situation that happened and was gifted / re-gifted, on 2013, last month.

Voivod · Feb 18, 2016

Yeah I'd be very surprised if they can't keep track of things like that.
Sandi was probably BSing again.

Aleksej · Feb 18, 2016

Asp Explorer said:
I can't post a link as its NSFW, but there's a long and detailed post about where one SC backer tried to get his account refunded, and gifts he received send back to the gifting account. He ended up talking with (apparently) Sandi Gardner who explained how that wasn't possible and CIG don't keep track of such things.

And I have explained here on this forum that I consider that the actions of CIG were rightful. That backer was original or veteran backer. The last LTI sale (November 2013) was the last time when any package/ship bought by original/veteran backers came with LTI and at special price, which was cheaper then the one set for new backers. New backers buying any package were not getting LTI. Also original backers had better price than veteran backers.

So this backer has offered a service to "apply" LTI to new backers (popular service back then). NB was buying a ship at high price, gifting it to OB/VB, who would melt it receiving store credit (equal to the price of the purchase - NB high price), re-buy a package at their (OB/VB) low price, and with LTI. The difference between high NB price and their low OB/VB price was accumulating on their OB/VB account.

Several years later NB has requested a refund, and probably due to bank/credit whichever rules CIG had to return them the amount the NB has paid, i.e. the high price. This means that now CIG has lost the money equal to the difference between the prices for NB and OB/VB.

So they have asked OB/VB to return this money.

So actually, this proves that they are very good in tracking this.

P.S. Such ship as Hornet allowed OB to earn about $20 by "applying" LTI. And in that reddit post they mentioned about 100 of such transactions. I think you can estimate how much was it possible to make this way.

Asp Explorer · Feb 18, 2016

That is not the instance I am referring to. I would post a link but it's rather colorful. It can be easily found on Google though. It's also in the middle of one of our favourite comedians blogs, which has been mentioned frequently here

MaxLexandre · Feb 18, 2016

Voivod said:
Yeah I'd be very surprised if they can't keep track of things like that.
Sandi was probably BSing again.

It's like a thing is certain, all transactions are on database, now what is the thing is, they might not have the tools, for CS to be able to do changes on the database without engineers doing it manually, so officially, they will say they can't do it. It's quite frequent, specially if we're talking about a digital gift.

Voivod · Feb 18, 2016

MaxLexandre said:
It's like a thing is certain, all transactions are on database, now what is the thing is, they might not have the tools, for CS to be able to do changes on the database without engineers doing it manually, so officially, they will say they can't do it. It's quite frequent, specially if we're talking about a digital gift.

Well they could do it when they were asking the guy to pay for the package that got refunded.
I still think Sandi was BSing.

Aleksej · Feb 18, 2016

Asp Explorer said:
That is not the instance I am referring to. I would post a link but it's rather colorful. It can be easily found on Google though. It's also in the middle of one of our favourite comedians blogs, which has been mentioned frequently here

You can PM me that link.

dayrth · Feb 18, 2016

Voivod said:
I just hope they have good database engineers to track all these items/currency properly

They don't really need to. Buy what you like in testing and do what you like with it. When it goes live you loose everything you bought but get back your credits. Then you can buy the stuff again for real if you want.

Hydrino · Feb 19, 2016

Aleksej said:
And I have explained here on this forum that I consider that the actions of CIG were rightful. That backer was original or veteran backer. The last LTI sale (November 2013) was the last time when any package/ship bought by original/veteran backers came with LTI and at special price, which was cheaper then the one set for new backers. New backers buying any package were not getting LTI. Also original backers had better price than veteran backers.

So this backer has offered a service to "apply" LTI to new backers (popular service back then). NB was buying a ship at high price, gifting it to OB/VB, who would melt it receiving store credit (equal to the price of the purchase - NB high price), re-buy a package at their (OB/VB) low price, and with LTI. The difference between high NB price and their low OB/VB price was accumulating on their OB/VB account.

Several years later NB has requested a refund, and probably due to bank/credit whichever rules CIG had to return them the amount the NB has paid, i.e. the high price. This means that now CIG has lost the money equal to the difference between the prices for NB and OB/VB.

So they have asked OB/VB to return this money.

So actually, this proves that they are very good in tracking this.

P.S. Such ship as Hornet allowed OB to earn about $20 by "applying" LTI. And in that reddit post they mentioned about 100 of such transactions. I think you can estimate how much was it possible to make this way.

CIG is not out any money for a digital benefit like LTI that has zero cost and was obtained via a transaction they allowed to occur. It is CIG full fault and responsibility.

I've read many negative comments about this issue on multiple forums. CIG would be better off just forgetting about their injured pride or perceived $20 loss (which isn't a loss).

CIG talk about how much money they have and plenty to finish the game. So why worry about this one backer with unofficial LTI that does not cost CIG a penny? Sell it as a feature on Bug Smashers- hey players, this gamer got one over on us and we are cool with that because our community is so awesome giving us so much money, but we are gonna zap that bug!

CIG will lose some backer goodwill over this. And the money they are actually out of, is the money they are wasting chasing this backer and telling him he owes them cash. If they really want to waste customer service time (and therefore backer money), they could lessen the waste by acknowledging their system sucks and allowed this to happen but to be fair, they will remove the LTI benefit from the player and move on. This is a ridiculous issue to waste time on given the CS team seems constantly backlogged.

Voivod · Feb 19, 2016

dayrth said:
They don't really need to. Buy what you like in testing and do what you like with it. When it goes live you loose everything you bought but get back your credits. Then you can buy the stuff again for real if you want.

That won't bod well with people who have BOUGHT UEC and buy stuff with that.
They've been buying ships and stuff before there was even gameplay.

dayrth · Feb 19, 2016

Voivod said:
That won't bod well with people who have BOUGHT UEC and buy stuff with that.
They've been buying ships and stuff before there was even gameplay.

If they have the UEC back to buy it again they won't be out of pocket. All speculation anyway though. I have no idea how CIG will go about this, I just thought this would be the simplest way.

Aleksej · Feb 19, 2016

DarkMatterGenerator said:
CIG is not out any money for a digital benefit like LTI that has zero cost and was obtained via a transaction they allowed to occur. It is CIG full fault and responsibility.

I've read many negative comments about this issue on multiple forums. CIG would be better off just forgetting about their injured pride or perceived $20 loss (which isn't a loss).

CIG talk about how much money they have and plenty to finish the game. So why worry about this one backer with unofficial LTI that does not cost CIG a penny? Sell it as a feature on Bug Smashers- hey players, this gamer got one over on us and we are cool with that because our community is so awesome giving us so much money, but we are gonna zap that bug!

CIG will lose some backer goodwill over this. And the money they are actually out of, is the money they are wasting chasing this backer and telling him he owes them cash. If they really want to waste customer service time (and therefore backer money), they could lessen the waste by acknowledging their system sucks and allowed this to happen but to be fair, they will remove the LTI benefit from the player and move on. This is a ridiculous issue to waste time on given the CS team seems constantly backlogged.

I think you did not understand it. It is definitely a loss, and potentially a loss of at least tens of thousands USD, if not hundreds thousands USD as a lot of people were applying LTI.

The new backer who did this trick to get LTI ship has received a full refund for his/her purchase.

However, this particular OB/VB could have earned ~$2000 during 100 transactions to apply LTI depending on ships/packages LTI was applied to. This money were added as a store credit to OB/VB account, and could have been used to buy ships and modules. This way it was possible to back the game by a negative amount. I.e. it was possible to actually make some money, although in a store credit.

As the new backer was refunded the full price of his purchase, and not OB/VB price, CIG tracked were this difference came from and asked that person to return them this difference. It is clear that they did not request to return all money that were earned this way but only the part that was refunded to new backers. $450 is a significant amount, and this is only the one case we know of. I think that a loss of several tens of thousands USD or even hundreds of thousands USD is significant enough to track how these losses were generated.

However, I do not get why someone even decided to complain about this. OB/VB has clearly made quite some money out of nothing, and were requested to refund as the package/ship is no longer in the game.

Voivod · Feb 19, 2016

dayrth said:
If they have the UEC back to buy it again they won't be out of pocket. All speculation anyway though. I have no idea how CIG will go about this, I just thought this would be the simplest way.

I agree, it would be the simplest way.
Best way to avoid any problems.
However it annoys customers who have payed to buy things and gives others a chance to re-use their money to buy something else.
Both are bad practises from a business point of view though I still think this is the best way to do it.

Zargor · Feb 19, 2016

Oh hello, we are famous apparently!

https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/46gf49/excessive_troll_accounts_posting_here/d05398o