It's the festive season. It is heartwarming to see players in chat theorycraft over "bug or feature?". It really brings the community together. CIG also removed two popular PVP modes from Arena Commander to bring those groups to test the open PU more. To balance it a bit, missiles now don't even work as well as they did before and only have enough fuel for close combat.
Game Discussions Star Citizen Discussion Thread v12
- Thread starter Yaffle
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- star citizen
Yeah it's interesting how many cosmetic additions just fall out of the game again. Remember the doctors and nurses who used to attend to your regeneration? They got stuck in a spawn closet a few patches later...
Genuinely, astoundingly, the same on the big picture. (It's still a lovely scene, tacked to a distant wall, next to a counter that goes up by 1 every year...)
Server Meshing is still a bundle of wires waiting to be connected. Everything else is in a jumble waiting to fall through the door of opportunity that it will surely open...
They have added some more space beams though. (Tractor beam and a 'mulching' beam which shakes ships into bits). To go with the salvage beam. And those mainly work. (Although ships do tend to go boom when handling the larger crates involved
).Anything that isn't a beam is always at risk of generally jumbling itself apart. (The Hull C never really worked completely, but is hamstrung by ship-to-station docking being broken. The new 'SQ42 AI' fell through the floor amusingly for their first patch. Currently they seem to have stopped doing that, but they are collecting in insanely large groupings in the spawn closets instead... )
Other changes like the new flight model are still limited to test builds. (They have more test builds now. Several more. Some with $$$ gating
). So y'know, lots of new toys to play with. But the ongoing sneaking suspicion that the playpen itself is made from spit and balsawood...
TLDR: They have new swishy hair. And a brave new plan to build the 100 solar systems with machine learning
Hows funding going / community optimism?Genuinely, astoundingly, the same on the big picture. (It's still a lovely scene, tacked to a distant wall, next to a counter that goes up by 1 every year...)
Server Meshing is still a bundle of wires waiting to be connected. Everything else is in a jumble waiting to fall through the door of opportunity that it will surely open...
They have added some more space beams though. (Tractor beam and a 'mulching' beam which shakes ships into bits). To go with the salvage beam. And those mainly work. (Although ships do tend to go boom when handling the larger crates involved
Anything that isn't a beam is always at risk of generally jumbling itself apart. (The Hull C never really worked completely, but is hamstrung by ship-to-station docking being broken. The new 'SQ42 AI' fell through the floor amusingly for their first patch. Currently they seem to have stopped doing that, but they are collecting in insanely large groupings in the spawn closets instead... )
Other changes like the new flight model are still limited to test builds. (They have more test builds now. Several more. Some with $$$ gating
So y'know, lots of new toys to play with. But the ongoing sneaking suspicion that the playpen itself is made from spit and balsawood...
TLDR: They have new swishy hair. And a brave new plan to build the 100 solar systems with machine learning
As deranged as the dev
. Another stonking funding year... CIG have been somewhat sensible in that they haven't add an uber-concept ship this year. They've leaned more towards $300 range concepts with no new functionality (the Zeus, a riff on the old space shuttle) and adding new features to existing concept ships (the Galaxy, with its marvellous missing modularity, can also now build bases too. Work on base building started in 2017. And in 2024...).
They've supplemented that with a range of new small and mid-range flyable ships (including variants to successful existing ones etc). Many of these mysteriously punch above their weight on arrival
. (The latest example has the alien grav bike that got to keep its shields while all the other existing bikes lost theirs )TLDR: Feature creep is on hold, scope creep continues. CIG are doing just fine by adding new glazings to their hot cakes...
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In terms of sentiment, Citcon was received pretty rapturously, even though under the gloss it essentially pushed Pyro, SQ42 and SM way off into the depths of 2024 again, and possibly/probably beyond. There's lots of scepticism about on those fronts, but it was all essentially washed away for that period.
The annual cycle continues ¯\(ツ)/¯
I did a couple of vids on the latest Citcon litanies:
(I still need to do the third one on base building, Pyro etc. There was a lot of guff to cover
)
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Thanks for the roundup- scares me money is still flowing into this.As deranged as the dev
CIG have been somewhat sensible in that they haven't add an uber-concept ship this year. They've leaned more towards $300 range concepts with no new functionality (the Zeus, a riff on the old space shuttle) and adding new features to existing concept ships (the Galaxy, with its marvellous missing modularity, can also now build bases too. Work on base building started in 2018. And in 2024...).
They've supplemented that with a range of new small and mid-range flyable ships (including variants to successful existing ones etc). Many of these mysteriously punch above their weight on arrival
TLDR: Feature creep is on hold, scope creep continues. CIG are doing just fine by adding new glazings to their hot cakes...
---
In terms of sentiment, Citcon was received pretty rapturously, even though under the gloss it essentially pushed Pyro, SQ42 and SM way off into the depths of 2024 again, and possibly/probably beyond. There's lots of scepticism about on those fronts, but it was all essentially washed away for that period.
The annual cycle continues ¯\(ツ)/¯
I did a couple of vids on the latest Citcon litanies:
Source: https://youtu.be/SC0fWbrmyyE?si=Otfphn3USQCNg8bR
Source: https://youtu.be/LLp4MVpyN0c?si=vMfM3XqUz36SXCuy
(I still need to do the third one on base building, Pyro etc. There was a lot of guff to cover
No worries
On the plus side there's at least more of an alpha-game now, so noobs can get their $45's worth of play out of that, ducking and dodging between the wipes and dysfunction. So Chris has done something vaguely worthwhile there
I'm sure CIG still slide many of those guys into ~$100-300 spend based on the mirage of progress towards 'actual game' though. And keep their whale replacement going for all the many 5yr burnouts and refundians etc. And there's all the usual wrongs wrapped around those well-oiled gears.
But the way I see it is: Buyer beware. They honestly shouldn't fall for this shtick.
And in the meantime we get to see the deranged experiment continue. With all the fun bugs, absurd claims, and juicy dev gossip that that entails
That's funny, I haven't seen doors, walls and floors putting up much resistance to, well pretty much anything in all the videos I have watched, you sure all of that didn't just fall through the floor at the first opportunity and is not floating around at the center of some planet somewhere?
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They've given off several very honest signals this year that they needed to milk their existing customers more. Finessing ccu chains to get minnows and dolphins to spend more, breaking the glass on the "don't sell" F8C to get whales to splurge, introducing career kits for clueless newbies, etc.
Their marketing department's done real well, it was impressive to see 'em fix the revenue issue.
If you look at the ccugame site you'll see they're basically 200k new players short this year, despite hammering advertisements on youtube more then previously.
They'll probably have gained 660k citizens by the end of this year, which'll be almost 25% less then last year.
CIG tapping into the Hong Kong and Chinese market, with the Great Sinitic Whale Hunt of '23, suggests they've hit market saturation in NA/EU.
Their marketing department's done real well, it was impressive to see 'em fix the revenue issue.
If you look at the ccugame site you'll see they're basically 200k new players short this year, despite hammering advertisements on youtube more then previously.
They'll probably have gained 660k citizens by the end of this year, which'll be almost 25% less then last year.
CIG tapping into the Hong Kong and Chinese market, with the Great Sinitic Whale Hunt of '23, suggests they've hit market saturation in NA/EU.
Viajero
Volunteer Moderator
Yeah, the number of new citizens tells a very interesting and different story to the funding one. Keeping in mind that all these figures are unaudited and come directly from CIG (so anything goes) this suggests most spend still comes from a core of whales (actual player whales, or purely speculative grey market traders with no interest to play at all, and of course money launderers).
A zero of games.
I managed to sneak my SQ42 vid onto /r/Games for a bit while the mods were snoozing...
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/18khdmj/every_squadron_42_launch_year_ever/
They snagged me under the 'no fun' ruling again :/
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/18khdmj/every_squadron_42_launch_year_ever/
They snagged me under the 'no fun' ruling again :/
nearly 500 comments of "griefers are bad" arguing 
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/18kisw0/im_glad_griefers_are_finally_open_about_it/
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/18kisw0/im_glad_griefers_are_finally_open_about_it/
Oof, that last bit. As if the management or supervisors or UI designers on this project are any more competent than the programmers.
Wait, so basically it is has been nothing more than yet another database swap so far?