Game Discussions Star Citizen Discussion Thread v12

LittleAnt

L
Ian Skippy said:
That's among the weakest possible responses to that, somewhere in between "no, you!" and a generic comment about his mother. I do like the space before the exclamation mark though.
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It's sometimes relaxing to just let go (with all respect) ;)
Can I ask you why you like the space before the exclamation mark? It's not intended, in french we always put space before "!", ";" and "?"

Jack Frag having fun with some really cool stuff inside (tractor beam a box from inside a moving tank!)
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYHR0oPXDn0
 

Cotic

Cotic
LittleAnt said:
It's sometimes relaxing to just let go (with all respect) ;)
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Perhaps you should save that type of letting go for when you play with your 7 year old. There's nothing respectful about it at all.
A counter argument was presented solely using CIG's information to avoid any negative bias and instead of conceding there could be more to it you dismiss it entirely with a very puerile response. All it shows is that you have no inclination to discuss things in good faith.
 

LittleAnt

L
Cotic said:
So lets do some maths.

Based on the community created spreadsheet, for 2022 they have had 271,934 new accounts. We know 1/3rd get converted to actual paying backers (as per CR's statement) so that would account for 90645 new paying backers. The amount raised so far this year is $30.36 million.

Approximately 85% of customers never pay anything over the standard entry fee, so 77050 would only spend $45 accounting for $3.46 million
Leaving almost $27 million from 13,600 new backers, requiring each and every one to spend almost $2000.

The other way to see where they make their money is to look at their marketing. Do they create and market cool low priced ships to entice backers with only a small barrier to entry or is it aimed elsewhere?
We all know the answer to this.
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So if you want me to comment on your calculus, can I have a link to the community created spreadsheet for 2022?

And what's your error margin in your estimation and source of your key numbers (like the 85%)?
 
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LittleAnt

L
VR Golgot said:
And here he is in the same gameplay session, getting very annoyed at some bugs. (His unresponsive ATV blowing around in the wind for 5 minutes)



Strange that stuff like this never makes the cut. It’s a lotta fun ;)
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Your narrow selection of bugs deserve less and less your purpose.
"very annoyed at some bugs", "Strange that stuff like this never makes the cut" and when I go to the source video, it's a 6 hours long video of guys enjoying their gameplay session in a pretty stable server and few bugs... You should recut the source video to at least not facilitate access to it if you want to prove that the alpha is unplayable and not enjoyable :sneaky:
 

Darkfyre99

Darkfyre99
VR jefranklin18 said:
At this point, this thread is only for the lols ;)
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For me, this thread is my primary source for the Alternate Reality Game that is Star Citizen has become. It may be free, but it’s highly addictive. Every so often, I swear I’ll give it up and do something more productive with these not-very-productive slices of dead time, but I can’t resist. My last attempt to walk away lasted about… when was my last post again? ;)
 

Agony_Aunt

Agony_Aunt
Good post from Bootcha over on SA

I'm going to give an additional reason. Why SC and CIG seem to baffle the mind isn't so much one singular reason (other than Chris Roberts himself), but a cavalcade of reasons. And one of those reasons is:

Communication.

I'm not talking about what CIG barfs onto a spaceship sales page, or what marketing or community managers tell their backers. I'm talking about how CIG communicates information, both internally and externally. Information flow. Of the many things I've researched off of tangents of this project, is Safety Science. In short, Safety Science is the study of Risk Management, and Information Flow as a "culture". To begin with, there is the Three Cultures Model:

Pathological organizations are characterized by large amounts of fear and threat. People often hoard information or withhold it for political reasons, or distort it to make themselves look better.
Bureaucratic organizations protect departments. Those in the department want to maintain their "turf", insist on their own rules, and generally do things by the book - their book.
Generative organizations focus on the mission. How do we accomplish our goal? Everything is subordinated to good performance, to doing what we are supposed to do.

This is not a hierarchy scale of bad-to-good. Think of it as the flavor of communication exchanges, seen in tone of messaging. Pathologic and Bureaucratic organizations tend to be "reactive" cultures, where as Bureaucratic and Generative organizations tend to be "proactive" cultures. When things are in control and no unexpected (or "anomalous") events happen, you might not actually see or be able to interpret how an organization actually communicates as a culture. Speaking of, we have a set of ways in which an organization might respond to anomalous information, which does have a scale:

(1) First of all, the organization might "shoot the messenger".
(2) Second, even if the "messenger" was not executed, his or her information might be isolated.
(3) Third, even if the message got out, it could still be "put in context" through a "public relations" strategy.
(4) Fourth, maybe more serious action could be forestalled if one only fixed the immediately presenting event.
(5) Fifth, the organization might react through a "global fix" which would also look for other examples of the same thing.
(6) Finally, the organization might engage in profound inquiry, to fix not only the presenting event, but also its underlying causes.

The scale of reactions might appear like this:

Suppression.........Public Relations.....Global Fix
---@--------@------------------@---------@-------------@---------@
........Encapsulation.............Local Fix.................Inquiry

Good information has these characteristics:

(1) It provides answer to the questions that the receiver needs answered.
(2) It is timely.
(3) It is presented in such a way that it can be effectively used by the receiver.

The above criteria sounds very simple, but in practice they are often very difficult to meet. For example, the first criteria is often the most violated. Information should respond to the needs of the receiver, not the sender.

Information flow is a vital resource. Better or worse information flow leads to better or worse functioning. It's not a case of requiring lots of information, no. More data/information isn't necessarily better. There are two critical reasons for attending and paying attention to information flow.

(1) First, when information does not flow, it imperils the safe and proper functioning of the organization.
(2) Second, information flow is a powerful indicator of the organization's overall functioning.

So...
How does this apply to Star Citizen and CIG?

There are so many things I could list about what we've all seen with CIG's communication and information flow culture, I'd be writing this for days. Hell, you could probably even spot some signs in CIG's own post-patch post-mortems. But here I'm going to give you two examples of CIG's Pathalogic Culture of Information Flow

First, the old roadmap before it turned into a gaslighting show had SQ42 entering "beta phase" in Q3 of 2020. As the Q3 deadline approached, zero information was being communicated to backers about the status of this "beta". Q3 ended, without so much as a peep from CIG as to the status. It was only during the virtual/online CitCon in October where Roberts left it specifically to one of his subordinates to break the news that SQ42 would not be entering beta this year. They then said more information would follow as to the status of SQ42. Obviously, this hasn't happened outside of the monthly reports where we hear about the mess hall, Vanduul spear animations, and bedsheet cloth physics.

In this case, the information the receiver (the backers and the rest of the world) wanted (where's my SQ42 beta), was Encapsulated for multiple quarters if not years, and then put through a Public Relations strategy. The answer only provided information as to "is it beta?", and did not provide any further information, nor was it timely, and the information provided cannot be used effectively by the receivers as to the status of the project. This leads to further evidence of a "reactive" culture of a Pathologic/Bureaucratic organization.

The second example, doesn't really have the same timetable of events, but absolutely shows just how inflexible and unready even CIG's best department (Marketing) is at dealing with anomalous information. So for awhile Chris Roberts public appearances has been cut off, behind a blackout. Then, we see him pop up in cute little videos with his family, project related, from his wife Sandi's (the on-again-off-again VP of Marketing) twitter account. Earlier this year, Chris hasn't been heard from for awhile, not since an uncharacteristic quick opening for CitCon and a Letter from the Chairman evoking the Kennedy USA/USSR space race. Then all of a sudden, Sandi starts tweeting out that CR and some of the big execs at CIG are visiting the newly created Montreal office. That's kinda big news, the big boss coming down to establish the roles, goals, and culture expectations of the new office. You would think the Star Citizen website would be on top of this event, providing links and context to this visit. You would think the Marketing department would have been prepared to make this visit part of the media content for that week.

What happened was the opposite. The only information that came out of that Montreal office visit came from Sandi's tweets. The CIG website didn't have any reference to the office visit, and the marketing media content that week completely omitted any mention of the visit. To this very day, not a loving peep has come out of any official CIG channel about the office visit. CIG's Marketing department, for all we talk about as the strongest aspect of CIG, was and continues to be incapable of processing this anomalous information. Arguably, this information was Encapsulated within Sandi's tweets. The information provided did not in any way have the characteristics of good information. While it can be argued that the anomalous information itself was "proactive" (ie without prompt), how it was handled by the CIG organization itself leads to further evidence of a Pathologic/Bureaucratic organization.

These two examples, plus the years of insider leaks and published articles both external and internal, ranging from the Forbes article, the Kotaku/Escapist articles, the post-mortems, to the Jennison letter, to theAgent's "hello" posts, hell even to the recent SCLeaks post about bad communication; all of these show a consistent culture of bad communication and worse information flow.

And again, information flow is a powerful indicator of the organization's overall functioning. It is not empirical evidence, but it's a really loving good way to gauge if a company has internal management problems.
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Cotic

Cotic
LittleAnt said:
So if you want me to comment on your calculus, can I have a link to the community created spreadsheet for 2022?

And what's your error margin in your estimation and source of your key numbers (like the 85%)?
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No I am not doing this. I provided information to show that the claim of new players being responsible for the funding increase is in all likelihood false.
If you want to claim otherwise it is on you to prove it, not for me to disprove further or break down numbers, sources etc.
What you're doing is a common tactic known as ONUS IMPROBATIONIS (“Burden of disproof”), making a claim and then putting the onus on other people to disprove it and then constantly drilling down on what they say rather than providing any sort of evidence to back up your own words.
 

VR Golgot

VR Golgot
LittleAnt said:
Your narrow selection of bugs deserve less and less your purpose.
"very annoyed at some bugs", "Strange that stuff like this never makes the cut" and when I go to the source video, it's a 6 hours long video of guys enjoying their gameplay session in a pretty stable server and few bugs... You should recut the source video to at least not facilitate access to it if you want to prove that the alpha is unplayable and not enjoyable :sneaky:
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You know full well what the point is Ant. Leaving a significant bug out of the edit to suggest a 'fun operation' alone is dubious. He could make vids showing SC in all of its aspects, which are still fun for the viewers. But he hasn't in this case.

The full vid has various bugs and issues as it happens. (Including one which leads to the host losing his refinery load and getting exasperated with the game, yet again. I take it you don't want me to list them all? ;))

It's not about suggesting the alpha is 'unplayable' or 'not enjoyable'. I never said that, and have frequently said the opposite. Try actually responding to people's positions rather than making up hyperbolic versions of them :rolleyes:
 

Navigare Necesse Est

Navigare Necesse Est
Cotic said:
No I am not doing this. I provided information to show that the claim of new players being responsible for the funding increase is in all likelihood false.
If you want to claim otherwise it is on you to prove it, not for me to disprove further or break down numbers, sources etc.
What you're doing is a common tactic known as ONUS IMPROBATIONIS (“Burden of disproof”), making a claim and then putting the onus on other people to disprove it and then constantly drilling down on what they say rather than providing any sort of evidence to back up your own words.
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The only trick he knows basically.
 

LittleAnt

L
Cotic said:
No I am not doing this. I provided information to show that the claim of new players being responsible for the funding increase is in all likelihood false.
If you want to claim otherwise it is on you to prove it, not for me to disprove further or break down numbers, sources etc.
What you're doing is a common tactic known as ONUS IMPROBATIONIS (“Burden of disproof”), making a claim and then putting the onus on other people to disprove it and then constantly drilling down on what they say rather than providing any sort of evidence to back up your own words.
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OK, that what I though. If you don't want to discuss how you calculate your 2000$ per new player I will let you believe that your source numbers are accurates and the margin error on your calculation is tiny.
For me to be able to give you MY estimation, the least I need is to have the source of your numbers to be able to use them in my own calculation (which will be not the same as your calculation completly missing at least all margins of error and some logic facts).
How do you want me to discuss your numbers (it's you asking me to respond to it) whithout giving me the tools to do it.
 
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