The Star Citizen Thread v5
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I'd really be interested in SlickReed's take on why they've only implemented in-game buying for clothing and not space ships or ship weapons. While it's true you can rent ships and weapons for swarm or racing that's not in the PTU. Also what it your take on them exclusively making this game pay to win? If you've scoffed and muttered it's not, I'd like to direct your attention to the fact there have been no announced ships that can only be earned in-game. Nor is there any real idea on the in-game cost besides CR saying that you better buy now while the cost is *cheap*.
To be clear I'm not salty at all, I was one of the first 300 to back on kickstarter. I haven't asked for a refund for my measly 60 bucks *pledge*. I just don't understand how people can't see the fleecing going on of the backers, and I believe you posted a bit a go you had 4.5k in this pre-alpha of a game. How many of those ships you bought are playable?
I'm betting this post will get lost in the great flood of messages, but I'm curious.
To be clear I'm not salty at all, I was one of the first 300 to back on kickstarter. I haven't asked for a refund for my measly 60 bucks *pledge*. I just don't understand how people can't see the fleecing going on of the backers, and I believe you posted a bit a go you had 4.5k in this pre-alpha of a game. How many of those ships you bought are playable?
I'm betting this post will get lost in the great flood of messages, but I'm curious.
Hello Artemus
The current in game purchase options are using alpha UEC that gets wiped every major release. Its purpose right now is for testing like much else in the alpha. The REC you earn in AC you can use to rent weapons and missiles in the voyager store that can be used in the PU, i believe ships as well can be rented but im not 100% on that. i have org mates that do this all the time so i will ask one of them about the ships.
By definition I do not believe Star Citizen is pay to win being that when the game is released you can earn everything in game. I do see however how thats sounds when you compare a Completionist package to a Aurora starter package.
The way i look at buying ships is paying to skip the grind and if you are apart of a large org that has fleets of different roles with plans to either do large scale fleet battles or exploration then the sooner you get to that content the better in my view. in EVE you would spend alot of time getting to the big ships you wanted and once you got there the real fun started. I personally would like to skip the first part in Star Citizen. It has been said many times from CIG that ships will cost anywhere from 2 times to 10 times the cost they do now when compared to what is cost to buy UEC in the store now.
As far as my flyable ships most of them are in the PU now, the ships I am really looking forward to are the Polaris, BMM, Hull C and B and the Carrack. These wont be in the game for a while but they are the most interesting to me. Myself and some org mates went in on a Idris together but that ship wont be in the PU for a while but its mostly done because it plays a big part in SQ42, last update was they are working on the final missile room.
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Ships have never been rentable in the PTU which was the point of his question, why (in your opinion) are they not rentable? ie would it have anything to do with them trying to maximise ship sales perchance?
You could earn everything in Dungeon Keeper, it was just going to take a significant amount of time and effort to do so. Or you could go to the cash shop and pay to skip all of that. Everybody calls that type of nonsense pay to win, and it's exactly what's occuring here except that you're paying now rather than later.
And yet why skip "the grind" if you want to play this game for years? Isn't it about enjoying the journey not paying idiotic amounts of money to skip the content that CIG have taken so long to produce?
So in effect, paying for a significant time advantage over someone who doesn't pay, which might as well be called pay to win.
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I hate the way wallet warriors try to justify this 'pay for advantage gameplay' especially when you're dealing with things that cost so much money and are purported to take a significant amount of time to obtain. They open their wallets so they don't have to put themselves through the grind but they're more than happy for everybody else to do so.
I guess they can't have the peasants getting these things too quickly because otherwise it would devalue their 'hard earned' (scoff) purchases.
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Not so much "skipping the grind", as "skipping the content". Your assumptions about SC's end game are built precariously on its ability to support enough players in an instance to make large scale battles possible, which they haven't even been able to demonstrate in a standalone FPS module, or having enough "space" to make exploration possible, which might not face the same technical hurdles (except for the planetary tech of course), but which faces the very real practical hurdle of the time it takes to create a system being far greater than the time it takes to explore it.
And who are you planning to wage these large scale fleet battles against? Inter-org politics is pie in the sky stuff when they are still struggling to lock down the very basic mechanics needed to allow for the grind you want to skip. You may assume it's just "emergent gameplay" which is all down to the players, but without things like territorial control or economic warfare it would be utterly hollow, and those are very large cans of worms. So maybe co-op battles against AI fleets? How much replay value is that going to have?
It's a good thing you're in no hurry to see a return on the thousands of dollars you've put into the game, and it's not surprising you're working so hard to keep up the "everything's fine" pretense, in an attempt to keep those dollars coming for the extraordinary amount of time it would take to develop the game you imagine you're going to be playing (by which time everything they've done will be out of date and need to be reworked from scratch to be compatible with ship pipeline 10.0, item system 50.0 etc etc but that's another story).
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So basically by your definition, you have a game that you can play normally to finish but if that game sells a big red button you can buy for real cash that says "WIN" on it, you press it and win the game, it's not Pay To Win?
So there's not as single pay to win game in this world of yours.
SC white knight logic sure is interesting.
It is obvious that societies gender activities, objects, careers etc. and social structures guide men and women to do certain things regarded as appropriate for their gender role. Recognizing that is not reinforcing gender stereotypes, but a necessity to be able to talk about that. And it is possible to do that without ignoring the flexibility of the gender order allowing transgressions to a certain extent and the diversity of people that don't resemble stereotypical male and female beings.
All what I am saying is is that Star Citizen provides a stereotypical hypermasculine realm with big guns, big cars, eh ships, huge tasks, cool dudes, killing and making money. And its playerbase attracts mostly dudes who can identify with that stuff or want to play that masculine role offered by the 'game', as well as with the group of cool and nerdy dudes making the game. Definitely there are women and girls in that community, but it is obviously the minority (look at the conference videos, in the forums etc.).
In the end I plead for more girls in Star Citizen and especially in the military industrial complex as well. We will definitely need female soldiers to establish that feminist regime to wipe out male dominated videogaming [mad]
Kind of opposite to how FD are doing it. FD are doing cosmetics for purchase rather than ships to get additional funding. I do prefer FD's approach, although i don't think there is anything wrong with the other way around as long as those things are earnable in game, even if they take a long time to get.
I do take issue with them selling ships that people cannot fly right away (even if only in a limited way in the Alpha). Also, if those ships are fundamentally better than cheaper ships, then naturally it is going to get the pay-to-win label.
Its a bit like in TF2 - many weapons (for example) are simply variants, eg: more damage per shot in return for less shots per second, and i'm fine with those, not pay to win. But there are some that are objectively better, and those i find pay-to-win. Is it bad? Not too bad, you can actually unlock weapons (and other stuff) in TF2 just by playing from time to time, but even so, its still a leg up by opening your wallet, and that is pretty much the definition of pay-to-win.
Its also why ED is open for some level of criticism about the pay-to-win nature of Horizons. Its not too bad, after all, there is only any real "win" in ED if you are doing direct PvP, everything else is not really so competitive, so little win to be had, and with indirect PvP (like working the BGS), its not like Horizons offers so much that can't be dealt with in others ways. But, at the end of the day, its an expansion, and expansions often add power creep, pretty much the nature of the industry.
(this is a bit offtopic, but interesting)
What would you like to see implemented in terms of furthering gender equality in gaming (and even theoretically in star citizen) could you give me some examples ?.
What sort of game
What sort of player roles
What sort of gameplay mechanics
The reason I ask is after FDEV showed the powerplay factions portraits there was a rash of "GAAH look how racist FDEV is they got the balance wrong", but there was never anything approaching suggestions of what would be acceptable beyond "they are wrong" even when directly asked for and the threads all boiled down to complaining for the sake of complaining.
Total offtopic - lets go to extremes -> make male option for Lara Croft and female for Duke Nukem..
Back to topic:
About SC -> they just want your money they do not care what gender you are, but they know that man are willing more to spend hundreds and thousands of $ on dreams...
and they know graphics sells (big ships, big guns, graphic "fidelity"...)...
btw I wonder why they do not have nice looking women near ships...
anyway: They made ~500k - refunds in 3 days after total noshow...not bad..
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Major issue with make believe gameplay from SC backers problematic that very little of that is based into current technical capabilities of game. They just make up stuff saying it will all work in the end while CIG struggles with simplistic networking and scenery.
You are making the mistake of thinking that those activities are in fact masculine. And by doing so you are promoting gender arc types and making the problem worse.
I'm always deeply disappointed when feminism strives to be as bad as their male counterparts.
As someone with three sis I always approach "woman this" with caution yet full support...
However SC advertising is aimed at boy masculine feelings. It is mostly due of it being generic copycat of other well know sci-fi franchise tropes. Also they did very directed marketing during early years towards guilds which are mostly boy clubs.
However SC advertising is aimed at boy masculine feelings. It is mostly due of it being generic copycat of other well know sci-fi franchise tropes. Also they did very directed marketing during early years towards guilds which are mostly boy clubs.
Exactly. And the design of the game world does reflect this. I mean, come on, servers are filled by clones of exactly one generic white dude and there was not one important female character to see so far in the huge lore (at least I don't know about any). There were rumors/I heard/It was said/Somebody posted on reddit/A guy I don't know sent me a PM/In one of the hundreds of marketing videos it was said that there will be the option to play as a female character in Squadron 42. But hey, where is that female character and who did the mocap? Why is it so hard to create a female playermodel, I mean men and women are not separate species with different physical characteristics of relevance (or do they model genitals as well?).
They already did female character mocap/animations
https://youtu.be/PG-oJWaPLyg?t=174
But like a lot of features its MIA...
https://youtu.be/PG-oJWaPLyg?t=174
But like a lot of features its MIA...
Found these links, one from a couple of months ago, and the YouTube one from last year
https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/56ad11/who_plays_the_female_player_in_sq42/d8hnlgk/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFRSM0iB2oU
Last one looked 10 years ago.
Yeah I think there won't be issues with female characters, they will have them in game. Their advertising comes off very generic thus male oriented. I don't think it's intentional, they are just lazy
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