Game Discussions Star Citizen Discussion Thread v12

You know, I read @old Duck’s post completely differently.

Yeah I'm just laughing because the hook throughout was "thousand dollar pretend spaceships". Which are enormous pre-orders. A totally different bucket of fish.

(Or bucket of rare whale ambergris, or whatever actual thing you want to spend your money on ;). And then just leave in a cupboard, or whatever, because you never did get around to making that homebrew perfume... Digitial, physical, it doesn't make a difference. You bought the thing for your crazy hobby, and you got it ¯\(ツ)/¯. That's different...)

EDIT: Soz I know you know this D. I’m just taking another spin round the block on it, because we’ve had the 'hobbyist’ argument raised so many times here. 'Guitarists buy guitars, let hobbyists be hobbyists' etc. And that’s all fine, but those guys get a guitar ;)
 
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I can summarise :)

  • NPC ship traffic (which we introduced back with Lorville years ago, and took out again because of server load and stuff) to maybe come back again. But like much better!
  • Nasty arcade driving model to be addressed in 2022.
  • We have reclaimed lasers. Laser gameplay is good. (No dates. Especially not that 2017 one…)

https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/uobmxo Source: https://old.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/uobmxo/after_watching_the_newest_isc/
 
I love it when folks on here slide right back into describing star citizen backers with that certain middle class down the nose attitude used when talking about drug addicts in polite company...awesome :whistle:
 
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I don't understand the drug addicts analogy then - people you know ridicule them? Wowsers.

As to ridiculing backers (overall) themselves, I disagree somewhat with the notion. I'm a backer (Kickstarter), as are many of my mates (backed at different times over the years, including one with a golden ticket).

What I do - and I don't speak for others, nor care much with what they do - is certainly laugh at the absurdity of spending more than ~£100 on Star Citizen (i.e. similar price to a "collectors edition" for other games), ever since CIG changed their models of funding, development, marketing and director remuneration, through the years since 2015, all well-documented, reported on, and discussed amongst gaming communities. Not to mention the buying of new concept ships (aka jpegs) when so many already-sold-ones have yet to be made.

Further to that, I'll certainly ridicule those who think gameplay-affecting micro and macrotransactions (aka Pay2Win) in games are a good thing 😂
 
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Hey, long time no see the "people are free to spend their money on whatever they please" in the great SC roundabout.

Sure they are. Sure you can bring any leisure expenses down to futile. Doesn't mean there's no consequence. Sure you're free to buy cigarettes, doesn't make them less bad for health, doesn't make Mr Marlboro's fortune from selling self-poisonning devices cleaner.

Not restricted to SC but still, people are voting with their wallets, so validate CIG's outputs but first and foremost their methods. They're not buying a JPEG, they're not pre-ordering a game, they're buying CIG time and a pass for keeping mismanaging this project and absolve themselves.

And yes people are totally in their good right to do so, and CIG would be stupid not taking advantage of it. That doesn't make this mess of project more virtuous.
 
I don't understand the drug addicts analogy then - people you know ridicule them? Wowsers.

As to ridiculing backers (overall) themselves, I disagree somewhat with the notion. I'm a backer (Kickstarter), as are many of my mates (backed at different times over the years, including one with a golden ticket).

What I do - and I don't speak for others, nor care much with what they do - is certainly laugh at the absurdity of spending more than ~£100 on Star Citizen (i.e. similar price to a "collectors edition" for other games), ever since CIG changed their models of funding, development, marketing and director remuneration, through the years since 2015, all well-documented, reported on, and discussed amongst gaming communities. Not to mention the buying of new concept ships (aka jpegs) when so many already-sold-ones have yet to be made.

Further to that, I'll certainly ridicule those who think gameplay-affecting micro and macrotransactions (aka Pay2Win) in games are a good thing 😂
As much as my comments weren't directed at you or anyone specifically, I don't much speak for others either, I suppose we could agree on that :)

My opinions on drug addicts are my own of course.
 
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I'm going to give JackFrags, and the game, one 'positive click'...

He did actually include one particularly buggy segment in his penultimate video. His co-host getting downed for no apparent reason, while also being absurdly desynced... (Co-host's perspective here)

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSREwlHbULw&t=875s

The organic piracy nonsense that surrounds it is actually pretty great. (And I do have a slight suspicion that he simply couldn't edit the bugginess out from the middle of it ;)). It's both the best and the worst of the game simultaneously ;)

Examples of notably buggy, yet amusing, bits that he didn't include would be stuff like this though:


He definitely does his best, alongside the stirring intro music, to make it one big grand swoop of adventure. Rather than a more honest appraisal or 'review' of the overall game. (He certainly doesn't include hat tips to the general grumping about downsides which permeates all the downtime.)

Some examples of the fuller moans his co-host had about the game (mainly after he left in fairness), would be stuff like this ;)


(NB this was all in super stable 3.16 ;))
 
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The analogy that feels right for me about this thread is that's it's a very comfy chair in a nice warm and sunny room, looking out on a half tended garden in an old people's home, full of semi entrenched hostilities that break out now and again. Followed by a nice cup of tea, visiting hours, and dinner where buns get routinely and in effectually thrown across tables.

In summary, it's sometimes funny, often pointlessly ludicrous, but always worth popping in just to say hi.

Now if we could just get those pesky zombie cows to stay in their field, we'd be sorted and could get out into the garden again...
 
The analogy that feels right for me about this thread is that's it's a very comfy chair in a nice warm and sunny room, looking out on a half tended garden in an old people's home, full of semi entrenched hostilities that break out now and again. Followed by a nice cup of tea, visiting hours, and dinner where buns get routinely and in effectually thrown across tables.

In summary, it's sometimes funny, often pointlessly ludicrous, but always worth popping in just to say hi.

Now if we could just get those pesky zombie cows to stay in their field, we'd be sorted and could get out into the garden again...

'Old people throwing zimmer frames at each other' kinda sums up this whole forum ;)
 
Nope, don't think so. I was just expressing an opinion from the content overall...in a general sense. It does lean toward ridicule at times and focuses way too much on the spending habits of individuals. There's not much going on with SC worth discussion...so let's make fun of the backers. Hell...even I do it :D
When I originally backed Star Citizen up in 2012, I was prepared to pay a “subscription fee” in cosmetics, similar to what I’ve done in other MMOs that didn’t charge a subscription, to the tune of $120 a year, as long as I felt it was worth playing ,and I felt the developers were doing a good job, after the game released… in 2014. This was to be the game that would keep me occupied until Elite Dangerous got a couple paid updates under its belt, so that the game would resemble Frontier: Elite 2 in content. I figured I’d be playing it for 4-6 years, perhaps longer, if even my pessimistic timeline proved to be over generous, so I could’ve easily paid $1000 to CIG had fulfilled those 2012 promises.

But they didn’t, and much like Mechwarrior Online, development of SC moved away from what I’d been promised, in a direction I don’t consider as much fun. Rather than holding CIG in general, and Chris Roberts in particular, to those promises, the community rewarded failure financially. Which really baffled, but at the time I had dismissed it as part of the original pay-to-win aspect of the game.

Still, as long as they seemed to be developing the game in good faith, I was willing to keep up my end of the bargain. People in general tend to underestimate the amount of work required, and overestimate their own abilities, especially in video game development, so I tend to add a generous 50% to any time estimates I’m given. So I wasn't surprised that it wasn't ready in 2014. Disappointed, but not surprised. I was surprised, however, by the state the game was in when 2015 came to a close.

This made me curious about why the project was so far behind, despite having raised a hundred times the original estimate, so I started diving into the details of this game’s development. It didn’t take long to to get a sense that this game wasn’t being developed in good faith. It started with the revelation that Chris Roberts, through the “Roberts Family Trust,” had bought a mansion in LA, which is something I consider inherently dishonest. It's a method of evading individual taxes, while still receiving the individual benefits.

Then came the discovery that he had kept secret his years long marriage to his head of marketing, a struggling actress who had no previous experience at the job. And, of course, there was the blinging out of his LA headquarters and the lavishly appointed annual conventions, which is something successful game developers do, and successful in no way described CIG's repeated failures to deliver on their promises. A deep dive into the public and independent audits of the UK branch of the company included a six-figure "directors remuneration", which was essentially the Roberts Clan paying themselves twice to do their jobs... and rewarding themselves very generously as well.

Finding out in 2017 that CIG was not one company operating in three countries, or a very understandable three companies in three countries to take advantage of local tax breaks, but over two dozen shell companies, was drove me to get a refund. That reeked of "Hollywood Accounting," which is a way of legally draining profit out of a project, in order to avoid fulfilling your promises to those who supported you making it.

In the case of Hollywood, this is a way studios avoid paying copyright holders, writers, directors, actors, and all the other people who helped make the movie, their fair share in its success. It's a practice I consider unethical, but the fact that Hollywood studios do this is well known. The fact that CIG was doing this, on the other hand, was alarming. Because in the case of Star Citizen, the role of the studios were the Roberts Clan, and the people who were being denied "their fare share in its success" were the backers themselves. This was the ultimate violation of every promise CIG had initially made, as well as an utterly unethical abuse of the crowd funding model.

And still bafflingly, backers continue to reward incompetence with ever increasing financial success. So if I occasionally ridicule backers, its not for how much they spend. If CIG had fulfilled their promises, and retained my attention long enough through great gameplay I enjoyed, I could've easily been one of those people who had spent $1000 not on virtual pay-to-win space ships, but on virtual decorations for those space ships, my virtual avatar, my virtual property, and so on. Instead, that $1000 has been spread over multiple games, including single player space games like Space Engineers for camoflage patterns and a variety of windows that have no in-game advantage, and Surviving Mars, so I have a wider variety of "radio stations" to groove along with as I keep one ear out for alerts from the game as I clean the bathroom.

I ridicule backers for not caring that a crowd funded project is not only being grossly mismanaged, but has also been used made multi-millionaires of four people... the very same people that crowd funding is supposed to reward last.
 
I'm going to give JackFrags, and the game, one 'positive click'...

He did actually include one particularly buggy segment in his penultimate video. His co-host getting downed for no apparent reason, while also being absurdly desynced... (Co-host's perspective here)
.......
(NB this was all in super stable 3.16 ;))
An interesting mix of very impressive, really quite janky, vaguely tedious and boring, and insta-death by bug.

In other news I'm looking forward to Starfield.
 
Further to that, I'll certainly ridicule those who think gameplay-affecting micro and macrotransactions (aka Pay2Win) in games are a good thing 😂
You're free to do that, but the way you do it comes across quite petty IMO - borderline "ignore list" petty. Mocking and ridicule are tools of bullies, not thoughtful debaters.
 
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