Game Discussions Star Citizen Discussion Thread v12

AkenBosch

AkenBosch
Darkfyre99 said:
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.
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My history with Star Citizen started back there in 2012 as well, but went by a tiny bit different: comes a faithful day of 2012, lazy afternoon at work, my colleague at the time calls me at the pc,
- "Would you look at that, a new space game that has just been announced, they say it's a 'kickstarter' where future players can contribute for the development"
- "Wow, that's a nice...looks literally like a new Wing Commander!"
- "It does, it's from the same guy that made Wing Commander! They say out for 2014 at worst, the trailer looks pretty much polished already, it's incredible if that's the game as they say."
-"Ah, I see, it's from that Anvil guy of the old Wing Commanders..."

- flashbacks of dreamcrafting on a magazine article in 1999 about all the things I could have done in Freelancer in a few months -

-"Scratch that one off the waiting list, you'll never see it come out in 2014, or until some producer buys the whole stock off him"

Aaand that's me still waiting from the balcony, with a whole new bunch of fresh white hairs growing up in the brief meantime.


VR Golgot said:
:unsure:
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This kind of thread drama is why I'm still a dweller around here from time to time, I've seen movies with worst scripts than the content emerging from this silly place. :LOL:
 

StuartGT

StuartGT
falafel-gifalafel-hazfalafel-icanhasfalafel-reaction-gif-reaction-%D7%A4%D7%9C%D7%90%D7%A4%D7%9C%D7%90%D7%A0%D7%99%D7%9C%D7%A7%D7%91%D7%9C%D7%99%D7%9B%D7%95%D7%9C%D7%A4%D7%9C%D7%90%D7%A4%D7%9C.gif
 

VR Golgot

VR Golgot
https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/uomwtk Source: https://old.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/uomwtk/please_remove_them_from_prison/

As funny as this first post would be, I like this second guy. He knows his derp…

https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/uomwtk/_/i8fgp9v Source: https://old.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/uomwtk/please_remove_them_from_prison/i8fgp9v/
https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/uomwtk/_/i8fy6tn Source: https://old.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/uomwtk/please_remove_them_from_prison/i8fy6tn/
 

TiberiusDuval

T
Old Duck said:
I thought that at first too, but then people tell me that a few thousand dollars for a computer that can play Odyssey smoothly "isn't much" (then throw in VR gear and 32 button HOTAS and vibrating chairs and ....) so I kinda wonder if we're not already suckers on some level.
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Few thousand? Mine was roughly around 1000, and can run Odyssey nice enough for me. (Though gaming was not main consideration for my rig, more about ability to do some virtualisation stuff, but with decent GPU it can handle gaming too...)
 
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Darkfyre99

Darkfyre99
TiberiusDuval said:
Few thousand? Mine was roughly around 1000, and can run Odyssey nice enough for me. (Though gaming was not main consideration for my rig, more about ability to do some virtualisation stuff, but with decent GPU it can handle gaming too...)
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In seven days, I’ll be able see exactly how much Star Citizen performance has improved for myself, on my current machine. The last few two free flies, my relatively high-end machine struggled to get above 30 FPS at 1080p. Now’s the time to properly level my expectations, because if certain people are to be believed, I should see a doubling of my frame rate and a lot fewer bugs compared to last time. ;)

I’d love to see how my eight year rig could handle SC, but not even I would expect a machine that exceeded Star Citizen’s recommended specs in 2014 to be able to handle Chris Roberts current fidelity demands.
 

TiberiusDuval

T
Darkfyre99 said:
In seven days, I’ll be able see exactly how much Star Citizen performance has improved for myself, on my current machine. The last few two free flies, my relatively high-end machine struggled to get above 30 FPS at 1080p. Now’s the time to properly level my expectations, because if certain people are to be believed, I should see a doubling of my frame rate and a lot fewer bugs compared to last time. ;)

I’d love to see how my eight year rig could handle SC, but not even I would expect a machine that exceeded Star Citizen’s recommended specs in 2014 to be able to handle Chris Roberts current fidelity demands.
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I'm kind of amused about Old Duck's recent SC interest. I mean it seems to me that he thinks his rig will not run Odyssey acceptably but wants to try SC :D

Ok if it can run SC fine, Odyssey will also run very fine.
 

StuartGT

StuartGT
thistle said:
Drew is currently visiting a/the river, chuckling as he informs his viewers that he and Kate are apparently "ED Refugees" according to an email he received :)

Copyright it LTNTDan, protect your rights!
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Drew's quit Elite more times than Bethesda has released Skyrim (a funny quip i stole from Guard Frequency podcast). Still surprising that he can't stop talking about it when playing other games like NMS or Star Citizen. In related news:

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1524793889080717313
Source: https://twitter.com/drewwagar/status/1524793889080717313
 
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Agony_Aunt

Agony_Aunt
StuartGT said:
Spicy comments section already:

https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/uotl74 Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/uotl74/how_long_do_you_think_before_star_citizen_is/
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I think i can say with confidence CIG will never implement the 110 systems they sold to backers.

EDIT: LOL, its being downvoted. Can't go around asking questions like that!

Jeebus wept

Nobody is expecting that '100 star system' and all those game play loops are a condition of release.
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I really need to come up with an idea how to scam these people. They are such easy marks.
 
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McGlashan

McGlashan
Agony_Aunt said:
Nobody is expecting that '100 star system' and all those game play loops are a condition of release.
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I really need to come up with an idea how to scam these people. They are such easy marks.
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So what exactly are the conditions for release? Just like asking what the complete target feature list is, no one will be able to give a definitive answer, not even CIG. If the conditions are already presumed to fall so far short of what was promised, why is the current live build still hiding behind the arbitrary "alpha" tag?
Same old SC obfuscation and nonsense, to avoid any accountability.
 

Agony_Aunt

Agony_Aunt
McGlashan said:
So what exactly are the conditions for release? Just like asking what the complete target feature list is, no one will be able to give a definitive answer, not even CIG. If the conditions are already presumed to fall so far short of what was promised, why is the current live build still hiding behind the arbitrary "alpha" tag?
Same old SC obfuscation and nonsense, to avoid any accountability.
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Pretty much.

Funny thing is, if you go back, say at least to 2016, there was still a belief by some that release was around the corner and that SC will release as a finished product.

A common refrain at the time was "At least CIG will release a finished product rather than a buggy half finished mess like ED!"

I used to make fun of those people and they'd get angry and tell me to wait and see.

Well, here we are, still waiting, still seeing.
 
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