Scruffpuff posted:

I have to wonder sometimes what value people place on their time. I've read about people playing a game like Warframe bragging about how they earned this or that frame or weapon or something, and how they grinded 6 hours a day for a month to get it, and crow about how "and I didn't spend any money!"

Someone can buy all the same poo poo for $20, and now, instantly, they've got what the other dude spent 180 hours unlocking. I think the guy who drops $20 is making the smarter choice. If his earning potential is just $15 an hour, and he chooses to work during the time he's not grinding, he saved $2685 by just buying the loving thing. The first guy is basically saying that his time is worth just over 10 cents an hour.

Warframe is a bad example here because it's not a pay to win game, because nothing you buy really gives you any advantages, it's all either cosmetics or just different feature sets to change up the experience. But the concept remains. Pay to win is such a bitch because of that. A few bucks here or there can place you much closer to the finish line and allow you to skip large swaths of the game.

Disposable income is incredibly varied. Some people fight for every penny, others can drop tens of thousands on a hobby. Time, on the other hand, is an immutable constant that nobody can affect. Even the nolifer has to spend the time. They can spend more at once, and more often than the average player, but the time gets spent regardless. Whereas in a true P2W environment, the guy dropping the cash literally time-travels past everybody into the endgame. There is an income level where that becomes not only attractive, but actually the better choice. Particularly if the grind is long, boring, and unfun.

There are games where the act of leveling up and gaining is more fun than skipping it could ever be - I consider WoW and most single-player games to be among them. There are games that are literally painful to play until endgame, and even though nothing about Star Citizen is planned on any level, I suspect it falls into the latter category. The more difficult and punishing the grind, the longer it takes, the more pissed backers will be that somebody paid to skip it.

Of course in Star Citizen nearly everyone who bought in skipped the grind. So it becomes a battle not about pay-to-win, but who paid-to-win the most.

If only anyone knew anything about what the game was, this diatribe would have made more sense.

Mirificus posted:

'fluff'

AbstractNapper posted:

Yeah, seeing as the one constant thing about SC is its sleazy marketing, that video has a target audience and its not technology or game enthusiasts.

They may be professionals but that video fails to convince me that the woman had to be completely naked, and nothing came out of SC so far that even warranted anything that was supposed to be taking place in that video all those years ago.

The Titanic posted:

It could be, but that video is 4 years old. There is no female model today and there wasn’t one then either.

There is a difference between doing these things and using that data for something, and doing these things and then never using that data for anything but a creepy video about how you recorded naked women to your vastly male dominated audience at the height of hot tub ships and other such things.

Also this all took place around the time CR was talking about the characters getting naked, including the women, and it was just creepy. Meanwhile your community is clearly objectifying the female player base, and CIGs reaction is to save the money instead of the moral high ground.

You may be right and I may be wrong. I’ve never done motion capture before so who knows! Maybe it’s all a big happy naked orgy of video game production.

MilesK posted:

Can I own land on that big gas planet?

Mne nravitsya posted:

Are you saying you want to buy a parcel on Lesnick?

Mirificus posted:

AbstractNapper posted:

Yeah, seeing as the one constant thing about SC is its sleazy marketing, that video has a target audience and its not technology or game enthusiasts.

They may be professionals but that video fails to convince me that the woman had to be completely naked, and nothing came out of SC so far that even warranted anything that was supposed to be taking place in that video all those years ago.

Mirificus posted:

Loxbourne posted:

Hi thread!

I was planning recently to write a big effortpost about how Citizens see the world. What their version of G0RF's chart would look like - the high priests at the top, the masses of citizens, the cliques and then across the gulf to goons and refunders and the Anti-Crobbler himself. But it grew a bit big, so I'm breaking a piece off and tossing it to the thread for discussion even if my timing could have been better and the land plots have arrived, holy poo poo.

But I'd like to talk for a moment about something I said in an earlier post. That when Chris sold a big ship, he sold an unstated promise to fill it with players. Players who have to have a reason to want to be an Idris turret gunner rather than buy a ship of their own. Players, in short, who don't actually get to play Star Citizen...

THE FAITHLESS

In other words, the mainstream mass of gamers. People who presumably have only dimly heard of the project until launch day. The people who will flock to the game on the glorious Day of Release, when the clouds open and Chris Roberts descends from Heaven to grant Idrises to the faithful and cast Smart and his Goons into Hell where they shall wail and gnash their teeth as they are never permitted to fly e'en the smallest of Auroras.

A good Citizen is naturally an elitist. He would prefer to disdain the masses as fools, people who turned aside the CRoberts when he preached his message and whose tastes are nowhere near refined enough for the Best drat Space Sim Ever. However, they are caught by a tenet of Star Citizen theology - Star Citizen will be the best game ever and sell millions and millions of copies. The space stations must be bustling and full of players.

Someone must buy your mined space rocks. Someone must gape in awe at your 890 Jump, sometimes even try to attack you (and fail, and be sent to Pirate Jail to think about what they've done).

So the Faithless who buy after release get to be in Outer Heaven (a concept you sometimes see in real no-questions-asked cults). In the ‘verse, but firmly second class. They can man the turrets. Scrub the hot tubs. Be the redshirts and helm officers and people who report “Vanduul on the scope, Captain!” while the Faithful command from the bridge. There will be entire skillsets (like shield balancing or power management) that the Citizens never touch. But by heck they'll toss peons out the airlock (and out of their orgs) if they don't give their captain full shields when he calls for it in the heat of battle. It'd be like being the healer in a WoW raid if your tank was also paying your salary.

Perhaps, with much grinding and proof of their faith, the Faithless might aspire to own a ship one day (but it had better be after many months of tub-scrubbing). In which case they can be cannon fodder, escort fighters, perhaps pirates and targets for bounty hunters. The people who man all the dozens of planes lined up on the deck of the Citizen's pocket carrier. The people who foolishly charge the Citizens' guns and die so the Citizens can call themselves space aces.

It’s the Faithless who the insurance mechanics are for. A good Citizen has multiple ships and just flies off in another one. But someone with one ship they had to save for years to afford? Get scrubbing that jaccuzi. This is the dark secret of LTI; LTI on a ship means you never run the risk of being reduced down to Faithless level by a run of deaths.

It helps that a Citizen's natural contempt for the masses means he expects the Faithless to log in and immediately become pirates and griefers, because they're such dumb CODdies. They’ll run everywhere in the spaceports and ruin our immersion (so punish them. Ideally by forcing them to spend longer manning our turrets; some nice heavy fines would do it). They don’t understand the game like a Citizen does. Really, it’s what’s best for them and they’ll see that. Come the day.

A good citizen rebels when CIG suggest new players who haven't proven their faith, haven't sacrificed, haven't paid and faced the real-world consequences of paying (a citizen's going to have felt the impact on his wallet of all those ships, after all) might be able to own big ships in less than 100,000 hours. Surely Chris wouldn’t do that. We need people to stuff into crates and introduce to the inevitable consequences of piracy and it sure as hell ain’t gonna be the Citizens, they paid too much to put up with that. Their whole identity is built on being the big people in the ‘verse. On being whales.

This basically means the average Citizen sees themselves as a kind of MMO slumlord, keeping a horde of Faithless latecomers in poverty to keep their guns manned. It doesn’t occur to a Citizen for a moment that the Faithless might work this out and refuse to buy in. An unspoken tenet of the Cult of Star Citizen is the masses will kneel in awe when the glory of the full game is revealed to them. Kneel and beg for forgiveness, and in their mercy the Citizens will let them load cargo with their bare hands.

People who ask awkward questions about how, exactly, this is going to work get an incredible dose of rage. You're threatening a core tenet of the Star Citizen fantasy.

Seen Space Jam? You know that vision of the future the villain gives Michael Jordan of being chained to a basketball hoop, terrifying children in cinemas across the globe? That's where the faithless, the filthy faithless gamer on the street who didn't buy in when he had a chance, sits in Star Citizen theology.

Enjoy your hot tub.

Gosts posted:

I had an interesting conversation with a backer in twitch chat. We were talking about prices for games, time in development, etc.

They said: "I want CIG to have as much money as possible so they can make the best game they can make."

I didn't know how to respond to that. There's too many places to start.

I understand now, though. It's not that the backers don't understand game development (most of them don't) they just don't understand project management in general. Money does not make a project go faster. It doesn't even make it better, unless the money is well-spent. Money is just a thing you use to get stuff or people. It's the stuff or people you have and how they work together that do things.

You need to have developers who know how to make the project, and adding more developers means the ones doing work need to train them to know the entire codebase. Eventually you'll just get too many people and too much code and they won't be able to go over and optimize stuff they haven't known from the beginning. CIG cannot buy a game loop. CIG can't buy game mechanics. CIG can't buy optimization. CIG can't buy anything except for people to sit and make new assets; but it doesn't matter how many assets you have. It won't make the game work better. If the programming team hasn't gotten the frame rate above 15 in the past 5 years, then they won't- not without reducing the scope of the game. (They already did, by reducing players in an instance.)

People say you can have it fast and cheap, cheap and good, or good and fast. But you can't have all three. It's a triangle that always has one point missing. But CIG doesn't have any of those three; it's been six years, it's the most funded game ever made, and it doesn't qualify as a game by any stretch of the imagination. It's a cryengine sandbox that barely runs and has no goals or meaningful world interaction or permanence.

SelenicMartian posted:

AHahahahaha

To business



























Sandi's showing the biggest baby she's ever eaten.

The AtV ending is amazingly bad. Chris and Sandi sing.

tooterfish posted:

Taintrunner posted:

Apparently something huge happened? Can I get a quick rundown?

his nibs posted:

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle to wed

Dusty Lens posted:

Abuminable posted:

I'm going to be in the middle of my plot of land the size of Manhattan and nature will be calling, but thanks to the insensitivity of Matt Sherman, there will be no toilet to be found.

Mr Fronts posted:

Is he SERIOUS? How the gently caress is my spaceman going to get missions from Miles Eckhart if he stinks of poo poo because the toilet facilities aren't working?

GrizzlyAtoms posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-BYzaDwNoE