I miss my youth. For all sorts of reasons, but partly because it was a time when the intent of a remark and the context of a word's use actually mattered. We could use extraordinarily 'offensive' words on each other with great affection and zero malice and we all knew when someone had crossed the line. Offence used to be taken, not given.
(...)
I don't think our culture is enriched by our verbal cowardice. I think it emboldens and empowers otherwise weak people willing to play on ever more convoluted victim narratives. The future belongs to them; a bleak, repressive back to front and upside down future where excellence in any sphere will be a very real handicap to whatever poor fool fails to hide their natural flair or talent. [sad]
QFT, +rep.
And it appears that FD never did really need our help. There was a budget to develop ED and the KickStarter money that was portrayed as vital, was just a bit of icing on the top.
A company that's existed for 20 years shouldn't be scrounging for handouts to launch a product.
(...)
They just took the p out of naive gamers.
You seem to miss one thing, that is the state of "space games" (for a lack of a better term) at that time. They were non-existent. There was this belief of major game publishers that the audience for that is not existent (games are for kids, complicated games are not successful, blahblahblah). Whatever the reasons were, there was drought on the market. I was not surprised to learn that they wanted to put that theory to the test before investing millions of pounds into new Elite development. And lo and behold, it turned out that people who played the original as kids/teenagers now have a disposable income
But IMHO it was not the success of Elite Dangerous or Scam Citizen who "opened the market" of space games again, it was I think the outcry that was heard at No Man's Sky premiere. Suddenly there was this commotion all over social media over a "stupid space game". And that's was the straw that broke the camel's back on that ridiculous belief that there is no market for space games, I think.
True, but I guess it wasn't done just for cash and finance but also for marketing. I wouldn't have known a new elite is being worked on if it wasn't for the kickstarter. On the other hand, my first impression wasn't really great: If it needed a kickstarter - it might well crash and burn like startups do sometimes. That was my 1st takeaway.
Same. I heard about a Kickstarter and was all like "well, good luck".
Well since you were the only one who took the time to answer, the least I can do is answer back.
Coming back to the leper part, I will continue to think that it's distasteful to use it. But since we carry out conversations on this forum in English, and since language use inherits cultural norms, then I will just have to adhere to what the majority of English speakers consider normal.
I can provide some insight as a non-native speaker. I am familiar with the words leper and leprosy, but actually never associated LEPer with that. Somehow it doesn't connect like that for me, I find it a funny conglomerate of LEP and -er. Something akin to "board hop-per" or, even better: "buckyball-er". Yeah, "buckyballer" is a perfect example. Also a few posts back I explained how that's even more funny in Polish, the "LEP" being "flypaper" and catching all those... enthusiast people
Why do you think spending you money in advance provides you any advantage as a customer?
Amazingly, there are some. Playing a game on release is an experience, being one of the first to play it and discuss with like-minded friends. We actually saw it on this very forum on release of X4: Foundations. The thread went on actively for two weeks at least, and still pings in my subscribed threads from time to time.
Lately, there is also the experience of taking part in drama surrounding a rocky release, sadly. X-Rebirth, Fallout 4 VR, Skyrim VR, Doom VFR. Out of these three, only X-Rebirth I pre-ordered on "good faith" in Egosoft. The rest had hefty discounts and in the content-starved VR landscape back then, where a "shot a duck in the foot experience(tm)" was €20 getting these BIG titles for ~€30-40 I think was a real bargain. And each of this titles had problems on release but thanks to the discount, the later three didn't leave a bad taste in mouth. For the record, I didn't have any serious problems with X-Rebirth too, but for friends it crashed and burned which soured the entertainment value of talking about the game with them.
There is also this new "profession" called "influencer" (snicker) on youtube or twitch, these people have a genuine interest to preorder and play something first. Some even get pre-release copies, like Obsidian Ant did. But for the average joe there is no incentive to part with the money before seeing the goods, and certainly NOT giving it to a stock traded company which is doing MORE THAN FINE. I don't know why this "poor indie studio" mentality is still present in 2019, but some people need a reality check tbh. Frontier Developments is almost TWICE the size of Bethesda Studios judging by employment numbers.
Last but not least, I also find the comments of "no I do not preorder things! I have a LEP!" genuinely amusing. It's like saying "I do not preorder things, but I paid 3-4 DLC preorder prices in advance" [haha]. Note - if I had a chance to justify that kind of money paid "in blanco" at that time, I probably would. Now? No way in hell, the goodwill is spent on that one.
![[VR] Mad Mike](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/27/27910.jpg?1553527108){kind=avatar}
