The Star Citizen Thread V10

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Navigare Necesse Est

Navigare Necesse Est
thistle said:
NMS wasn't a scam. They released a game. They - or perhaps Sony, I don't know - lied about what was going to be in it. They've redeemed the game since, even though I still don't enjoy it.

Star Citizen have been and continue to use unethical monetisation methods to fund ongoing development of a game that imo is unlikely to ever be released. It's ponzi-like, and that's being kind. Was is supposed to be a scam, intended? No, Roberts no doubt tried to make a game.

He's just not very good at it. And people threw money at them, and the focus switched from developing a game to making more money.

Scam? Whatever. It's predatory and unethical, and ... it's rubbish as well.
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Come now. Would you call the church's monetisation schemes predatory and unethical? Belief is a basic desire and the pipelines are full of desire-relief. Star-Citisnts just need a bit of salvation just like every other person.
 

Darkfyre99

Darkfyre99
Havvk said:
Personally, we need a game that doesn't hold anything back. I'm personally sick and tired of seeing games that only do "just enough" for what you can do in it and such. I want a game that's like a blend of Elite: Dangerous, Eve Online, and X4 but better than all of them combined at their best. SC, as of right now, is the only thing I ever heard of that's at least trying. Elite Dangerous can never get better graphics and other things because they have to "hold back" for the consoles. Know what I mean?
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I believe you’re twenty years too early for that kind of thing, both due to current commercial computer technology, and because we need better game design AI. Star Citizen, as presented by Chris Roberts back in 2012, was ambitious and achievable. That’s why I was willing to back it.

Problem is that Chris Roberts lied about having been developing the game for over a year before his pitch. He lied about having developed a working engine for the game. Then he started promising the sun and moon for more funding, leading to the scope creep we see today. This wasn’t enough to get a refund, though.

What led me to demand a refund was learning about the many, many, many shell companies that Chris Roberts has created around this game. This reeks of Hollywood Accounting, a practice designed to leach money from a project. Money that backers pledged to create this game, not to enrich Chris Roberts, his family, and his friends.
 

Viajero

Volunteer Moderator
Viajero
StuartGT said:
I don't think the Star Citizen project is a scam. It has a lot of parallels with NMS, Theranos, and Fyre Festival, namely very mismanaged and/or falsely marketed to drum up pre-orders/investments/pledges. Although they are often referred to as scams, they weren't.

While NMS managed to eventually fake-it-til-you-make-it successfully (3yr after initial launch), both Fyre Festival and Theranos crashed down hard when it became very apparent they couldn't achieve what they promised. The owners of the latter two were not charged with false-marketing or mismanagement, but with wire fraud.

We will have to see what CIG manage with SC and SQ42 over the coming years.
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I´d imagine scam is a very lose term used in many different ways in this context but I suspect all of them probably share the trait of at least meaning some kind of unethical behaviour. Weather that reaches legally actionable status or not is anyone´s guess.

In a normal situation I would usually lean towards the Hanlon (or Occam) Razor idea that suggests we should not attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence.

The thing is, the pattern of incompetence at CIG (specifically the one related to time and scope estimates, roadmaps and date announcements in general) has been so consistent and for so long that it is quite hard to believe that by now developers/producers as smart as there can be in CIG (I would like to think there are indeed some smart guys in the room) have been unable to learn from it to improve even if just a tiny bit and, at the very least, build preemptively huge safety margins in their time estimates and commitments for delivery. After all this time with no significant change in that behavior pattern I have to conclude that some elements of actual premeditation and deception ("malice") must have crept in and been added to the incompetence mix. Especially if you factor in the financial incentives created by certain date announcements and related video promotion hype.

Ironically the fact Chris Roberts and his team are embarked in what they probably truthfully consider the most revolutionary project in gaming history (from all funding, development and gameplay points of view) probably helps and allows them to go into deception territory more easily than otherwise. They probably firmly believe they are doing all this for the good of gaming and gamers (in addition to the obvious reputation and financial rewards in case of success).

Now that you mentioned it a very similar situation of continuously delayed and protracted delivery that eventually led to elements of deception, all under the umbrella of a very good cause (revolutionizing the blood testing industry), happened in the biotech startup Theranos.

A recent documentary about the story (there are quite a few, even a book, "Bad Blood", written by one of the investigative reporters in the Wall Street Journal called, John Carreyrou, I strongly recommend btw) called "Out for Blood" includes the contribution of a behavioral economist called Dan Ariely where he described a psychology experiment that could shed some light on how people justify dishonest behavior to themselves.

I recommend to watch the documentary in full but here is a tldr for the intervention by Dan Ariely. I suspect something quite similar may be happening at the head of CIG.
 
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Ian Skippy

Ian Skippy
Havvk said:
Personally, we need a game that doesn't hold anything back. I'm personally sick and tired of seeing games that only do "just enough" for what you can do in it and such. I want a game that's like a blend of Elite: Dangerous, Eve Online, and X4 but better than all of them combined at their best. SC, as of right now, is the only thing I ever heard of that's at least trying. Elite Dangerous can never get better graphics and other things because they have to "hold back" for the consoles. Know what I mean?
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No, you do not need such a game, you want it. And just because you want a computer game doesn't mean it is realistic thing to ask. ED doesnt 'hold back' for consoles, the min specs of the PC version are worse than consoles, and far worse than the next gen consoles that are coming. Blaming consoles is just a cheap trick scam-artists like Chris Roberts do to lure gullible people like you in. You are not going to get 'a blend of Elite: Dangerous, Eve Online, and X4 but better than all of them combined at their best' for at least the next ten years. Not because everyone else on the planet is lazy, or lacks ambition or 'caters to console peasants'. You are not going to get that game because it currently cannot be done. Which is why SC has been a massive failure every step of the way, the entire foundation is broken to the core and they keep piling on more broken stuff because they have known for half a decade now they cant go back and fix it. Whether you accept that simple reality or just throw more money at a scam artist who parasites on people who do not understand how technology works is your call.
 
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Ian Skippy

Ian Skippy
StuartGT said:
I don't think the Star Citizen project is a scam.
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If you sell something knowing you cant deliver that would qualify as a dishonest scheme, AKA scam. The only argument against SC being a scam is that he genuinely doesn't realize what he is saying is false. But when someone says 'work will be done in a few weeks', and then a few months later says 'we are about to start planning how to do the work!' that excuse is flimsy.
 

Havvk

Havvk
Ian Skippy said:
No, you do not need such a game, you want it. And just because you want a computer game doesn't mean it is realistic thing to ask. ED doesnt 'hold back' for consoles, the min specs of the PC version are worse than consoles, and far worse than the next gen consoles that are coming. Blaming consoles is just a cheap trick scam-artists like Chris Roberts do to lure gullible people like you in. You are not going to get a blend of 'a blend of Elite: Dangerous, Eve Online, and X4 but better than all of them combined at their best' for at least the next ten years. Not because everyone else on the planet is lazy, or lacks ambitious, or 'caters to console peasants'. You are not going to get that game because it currently cannot be done. Which is why SC has been a massive failure every step of the way, the entire foundation is broken to the core and they keep piling on more broken stuff because they have known for half a decade now they cant go back and fix it. Whether you accept that simple reality or just throw more money at a scam artist who parasites on people who do not understand how technology works is your call.
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Who are you to tell me what I do and do not need?
 
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