Game Discussions Star Citizen Discussion Thread v12

[sovapid]

• A fun, if tricky to verify, claim comes in the form of this spreadsheet. If it accurately represents the major greymarket traders on the trades subreddit, as it claims, the Russian accounts handling collections that run up into the $130K range are... eyebrow raising, shall we say

Eyebrow raising due to not understanding how CIG convoluted pledge systems works.

If I was around since the beginning of SC, it would be trivial to have spend $1,000 and have an inventory of $130,000 of ships to sell. This applies to ships released before the 100i, so around mid 2008. Inventory of newer ships would LTI would take actual cash investment. And thats why you see some sellers switch to 10 year insurance anniversary sale ships, they dont require any new cash investment and can be bought with credits.

 

[VR Golgot]

Eyebrow raising due to not understanding how CIG convoluted pledge systems works.

If I was around since the beginning of SC, it would be trivial to have spend $1,000 and have an inventory of $130,000 of ships to sell. This applies to ships released before the 100i, so around mid 2008. Inventory of newer ships would LTI would take actual cash investment. And thats why you see some sellers switch to 10 year insurance anniversary sale ships, they dont require any new cash investment and can be bought with credits.

InvTotal is supposedly the total number of ships for sale, not their total holdings over time etc.

I haven't dug into myself, but if that's the case, then it's still intriguing

EDIT: Wait, what. You're going to have to explain how you could have an overall spend of $1k but $130k of stuff for sale

I'm prepared to believe it's possible in CIG-land, but I'd need to be walked down those weird CCU avenues...

EDIT2: And by 2008 you mean 2018 right? It just feels that long

 

[sovapid]

InvTotal is supposedly the total number of ships for sale, not their total holdings over time etc.

I haven't dug into myself, but if that's the case, then it's still intriguing

EDIT: Wait, what. You're going to have to explain how you could have an overall spend of $1k but $130k of stuff for sale

I'm prepared to believe it's possible in CIG-land, but I'd need to be walked down those weird CCU avenues...

Yes, with the buy/melt system, I can have one ship on my account that I can actually use in game, but have 100's of ships in my "buy back", ships I've bought, but melted to turn them into credit I can use to buy another ship.

For new money you can get a ship out of buy back whenever you want. Thats how most of these big sellers work. At least with the older ships.

 

[VR Golgot]

Yes, with the buy/melt system, I can have one ship on my account that I can actually use in game, but have 100's of ships in my "buy back", ships I've bought, but melted to turn them into credit I can use to buy another ship.

For new money you can get a ship out of buy back whenever you want. Thats how most of these big sellers work. At least with the older ships.

Ahh ok, so if someone goes on a buy/melt spree they can have a catalogue of ships they can buy back at any time. They don't have to have them all as live / paid for ships etc. Got it.

Ok that does throw a spanner in the works.

 

[Mole HD]

Yes, with the buy/melt system, I can have one ship on my account that I can actually use in game, but have 100's of ships in my "buy back", ships I've bought, but melted to turn them into credit I can use to buy another ship.

For new money you can get a ship out of buy back whenever you want. Thats how most of these big sellers work. At least with the older ships.

Store credit shuffling like you, myself and many others do fairly regularly. If there's a new ship appeared that you want...melt something you don't, convert to store credit and get the new shiny thing. The old melted stuff goes into buyback.

I have a fair few ships, large and small, in buyback...I can either use new cash to get them out if I want them or use the quarterly issued buyback tokens so I can use store credit. Buyback...It's where all the LTi tokens live. That warbond Corsair I melted to store credit yesterday to go off and 'buy' the Cutlass Black/ROC package went straight into buyback for the price I paid for it initially. I can buy it back for that price at any time for new cash or just wait and get it out of hock through store credit the next time I have a token. Using store credit as opposed to cash, there's no VAT added to purchases either.

Additionally, you can upgrade individual ships within a package...The entrepeneur package I have, I upgraded several ships in it to something else...it not only increases the $ value of the package, you can also drag a non LTi ship in there as an upgrade and the ship adopts the LTi from the package. You can't however, sell or melt individual ships from the package once added...only upgrade.

 

[Iron Golem]

Yes, with the buy/melt system, I can have one ship on my account that I can actually use in game, but have 100's of ships in my "buy back", ships I've bought, but melted to turn them into credit I can use to buy another ship.

For new money you can get a ship out of buy back whenever you want. Thats how most of these big sellers work. At least with the older ships.

Im trying to wrap my head around this. So if you bought some super rare ship long ago that punches above its weight as far as resale value goes, you can sell it to someone but rebuy it for what you originally payed and keep selling it to people for more?

 

[Agony_Aunt]

It's more because I'm on holiday in Annecy and there's not a lot of interesting news to post at the moment.

Looks nice. Enjoy.

Don't buy any JPGs from men wearing black turtlenecks while you are there.

 

[Mole HD]

Im trying to wrap my head around this. So if you bought some super rare ship long ago that punches above its weight as far as resale value goes, you can sell it to someone but rebuy it for what you originally payed and keep selling it to people for more?

I sold my 2948 explorer package for a substantial bit more than I paid for it...the standalone Carrack I have...and the reason I sold the explorer pack... is also an original concept, which I paid around $350 for several years back. The Carrack itself, should I resell it, would make me a handsome profit since the ship is now selling for $600.

I've also sold my BMM which was $300 if I remember rightly when I bought it...made a killing on that too

 

[Agony_Aunt]

Im trying to wrap my head around this. So if you bought some super rare ship long ago that punches above its weight as far as resale value goes, you can sell it to someone but rebuy it for what you originally payed and keep selling it to people for more?

I wonder if some aspects of the buying/selling/melting dancearoo causes the funding tracker to trigger when it shouldn't. On the other hand, that would mean CIG are in a much worse financial position than anyone would expect, and therefore dependent on even more investor funding... as far as we know, that doesn't exist.

 

[VR Golgot]

Im trying to wrap my head around this. So if you bought some super rare ship long ago that punches above its weight as far as resale value goes, you can sell it to someone but rebuy it for what you originally payed and keep selling it to people for more?

At a guess once you've gifted it (or whatever the grey market mechanism is) it's no longer available for buyback.

(That sounds like it could almost make sense. But every time I try and peek further behind the curtain of the ship buying game another baffling tier of tokens cascades into view. Reckon you have to have some skin in the game to care enough how to flay and play )

 

[Agony_Aunt]

196 seconds if timestamp doesn't work (about 3 mins 20 seconds)

Bored gamer talking about number of devs.

Watch the bugs as they enter the ship and a bit later watch the braindead AI who they are shooting at.

 

[Firkrayt]

Gentlemen, you can't joke here. This is the Star Citizen Thread!

 

[Mole HD]

At a guess once you've gifted it (or whatever the grey market mechanism is) it's no longer available for buyback.

(That sounds like it could almost make sense. But every time I try and peek further behind the curtain of the ship buying game another baffling tier of tokens cascades into view. Reckon you have to have some skin in the game to care enough how to flay and play )

Just look on the whole SC ship market like trading baseball cards or whatever...it's a lot easier to grasp then. But you're right...once you've 'gifted' it, it's gone, you can't infinitely re-sell items, only the once.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

Insert dreams.txt

This is patently not true. The internet we have today is driven by mass media and mass commerce. There is no paucity of that data. I want to buy your secondhand ship that you advertised, is the bread and butter of data running. The game is planned to have the equivalents of Youtube, Amazon and Ebay. We know of Sharrington Cross and Epulae Dining at least, there will likely be more. There is also passenger services and the adverting / payments / booking of those. There will be databases that track players and their activity, their criminality for example. If you commit a crime in one system that data will be carried to other local database systems and so you may be able to keep in front of your criminal record, that is the reason for bounty hunters, it is unlikely there will be a shortage of that information.

People insist to think of the PU as merely trading and fighting.. it's not going to be that way. There will be tourism and local annual events - Sporting events like Murray Cup to stream around the verse. The Opera House on Mars to go see. Fashion Week at Prime on Terra II. Politics and local factional rivalries all of this information streamed around the verse day by day, perhaps even hour by hour. We know we can buy property in the game, apartments, houses etc. How do you find out about these being available and local price fluctuations? Advertising. We see it already in the game now, they go to the trouble of making ship adverts for sales. Right now it is static, but it won't be in the future.

The reason for data runners is because Chris decreed there is no FTL transmission from system to system. Data has to be physically carried through jump gates and only transmitted by comms relays once it has arrived in system. Ships will carry information for interpersonal transactions (the mail), mas media, mass commerce, the news, intelligence gathering etc The list is endless, it has nothing to do with scarcity it has everything to do with perceived value.

The Reliant MAKO News Van is clearly telling us that not only will CIG be adding to the constant stream of data piles, but players will be too. Not all cameras will be attached to ships. All that info scrolling on the screens at the local TDD will have to be manually hauled just like mail bags of old on the pony express. The one thing we can be sure there will never be a shortage of anywhere, is data.

 

[VR Golgot]

I can either use new cash to get them out if I want them or use the quarterly issued buyback tokens so I can use store credit.

So presumably the high volume guys are still going to have a fair bit of disposable cash sloshing about in these trades, if they're limited to 4 freebie buybacks a year? Even if in theory only for the duration of the trade.

 

[sovapid]

Im trying to wrap my head around this. So if you bought some super rare ship long ago that punches above its weight as far as resale value goes, you can sell it to someone but rebuy it for what you originally payed and keep selling it to people for more?

Yes.

Carrack would be a good example. During its original sale it was $350. At that time I buy one for $350 and I'm in for $350. I melt the first carrack and buy another one with the credits. Repeat this multiple times.

Now I have 20 $350 Carrack's in my buy backs. At anytime I can buy them back for $350 of new money. The ship now sells for $600. So lets say I sell them for $650. I have an inventory "worth" $13,000, but I only spent $350.

CIG does do stuff to make this more difficult. You can only melt a ship 24hrs after you bought it, so it might have been hard to get 20 of them (although I think the time barrier wasnt there in the beginning) and the change in 2008 that made LTI ships only available with new money, cant buy them for credit anymore.

 

[sovapid]

So presumably the high volume guys are still going to have a fair bit of disposable cash sloshing about in these trades, if they're limited to 4 freebie buybacks a year? Even if in theory only for the duration of the trade.

Can't "gift" anything you got with credits. So the free buyback doesn't help grey market sellers.

They have to get the ships out of buy back with new money in order for the ship to be giftable.

 

[sovapid]

At a guess once you've gifted it (or whatever the grey market mechanism is) it's no longer available for buyback.

(That sounds like it could almost make sense. But every time I try and peek further behind the curtain of the ship buying game another baffling tier of tokens cascades into view. Reckon you have to have some skin in the game to care enough how to flay and play )

Yes, this is true. Once you gift a ship it is "gone" from your account. The whole system is kinda nuts.

 

[Mole HD]

Yes.

Carrack would be a good example. During its original sale it was $350. At that time I buy one for $350 and I'm in for $350. I melt the first carrack and buy another one with the credits. Repeat this multiple times.

Now I have 20 $350 Carrack's in my buy backs. At anytime I can buy them back for $350 of new money. The ship now sells for $600. So lets say I sell them for $650. I have an inventory "worth" $13,000, but I only spent $350.

CIG does do stuff to make this more difficult. You can only melt a ship 24hrs after you bought it, so it might have been hard to get 20 of them (although I think the time barrier wasnt there in the beginning) and the change in 2008 that made LTI ships only available with new money, cant buy them for credit anymore.

You can buyback warbond stuff with credit...but only 4 times a year with the buyback tokens and you can't then re-sell it...goodness knows how many times I've had that warbond Corsair in buyback only to buy it out with store credit then put it back in there.

You can't buy new warbond ships with credit though like you said...only stuff in your buyback and only with the token one at a time, no multiples.

 

[Tippis]

88 of those are DevOps building pipelines, the other 2 have been working on bartender AI for three years.

Does that mean the hundreds of other employees are artists, marketing and sales? Maybe they have a massive legal department to settle with all the partnership deals that have failed through the years.

…and that is why the discussion of the funding graph hardly even matters. No matter what it shows, they're overspending the vast majority of their income on pointless fripperies that are not relevant to moving the project forward at this stage. They have a billion different problems that they need to solve. Their spending habits are not even remotely geared towards addressing any of those problems. By choice.

The investors are perhaps getting paid, but everyone and anyone else who has ever given CI¬G any amount of cash has been robbed. It's as simple as that. Even if by some freak accident the funding graph should happen to coincide with how much cash they've managed to rob people of so far, it has long since ceased being a relevant indicator for anything related to the project or the state of development.