Fashionable Jorts posted:

Wasn't there a big MMO project that was also a TV show and each influenced the other, and both sucked?

Fashionable Jorts posted:

Wasn't there a big MMO project that was also a TV show and each influenced the other, and both sucked?

Fashionable Jorts posted:

Wasn't there a big MMO project that was also a TV show and each influenced the other, and both sucked?

gently caress You And Diebold posted:

Defiance was like destiny with the gimmick that the players in game events could influence the tv show's next season

Bootcha posted:

The story of Star Citizen will never be one single empirical work.

Derek Smart will probably write a book that reads like his blogs. Sunk Cost Galaxy will probably remain a sub-10k viewer series ruined by my bias. Gaming Rags will probaby dedicate three 6k word articles about "How did we not see this coming?!" The SC True Believers will only have the collective memories of wasted money and internet friendships that in some cases will survive the collapse but a majority will cast away like ash. I know of one other special party outside of any of the above that may produce something but at this point it's unlikely. Also the film of "Behind the Scenes: The Making of Star Citizen" will be set on fire on the floor.

Ultimately, it will remain an oral tradition passed on from gamer to gamer, and from dev to dev. A cautionary tale about crowdfunding, rockstar devs, and toxic work environments.

The Titanic posted:

CR does have an amazing capacity as identifying his faults after the fact. No doubt he will claim to have been too ambitious, but maybe not immediately.

I firmly believe the original company line will be "technology wasn't able to keep up with us/the engine couldn't handle the next generation we were trying to usher in".

Really anybody can see that throwing high detail models at a real time engine with no consideration for functionality or even rudimentary gameplay is something that nobody has ever tried before. Normal mapping was invented because people couldn't make the leap of saying "well why don't we just skip this step and throw the 2 million poly model in there???!!"

Thank heavens Chris was here to try to make a game using that, and astonishingly discovered it's not possible with today's technology.

Without him we also wouldn't have things like "jank filled arena shooter in space" or hand crafted mission of "attempt to move box from A to B, with 87% failure rate due to jank and bad programming."

If only technology was there to meet him, we'd all have the game of dreams.

User submitted bug reports posted:

• "EMERGENCY ARGON SUPPLY"
  
  
• SHIPS START QUANTUM TRAVELLING BACKWARDS OUT OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM
  
• 300 SERIES FLIGHT BEHAVIOUR IMPROVES WHEN DAMAGED
  
• SOMETIMES STRANGE BEHAVIOR (INJURY, DEATH, TELEPORT WHEN JUMPING A BARRIER IN STAR MARINE
  
• WARPED TO 19 MILLION KMS AWAY
  
• TELEPORTATION BUG
  

quote:

I made f1 to open the mobliglass and instanlty my character was teleported 8.000m away from my ship on the atmosphere. Then my character crashed into the planet without taking any dommages and I can't open my mobligass and i also got infinit oxygene

Beet Wagon posted:

So, it seems like somehow, in the middle of the night, the reddit narrative has shifted to "CIG doesn't have enough money to finish the game" which is uh... exactly what they've been threatening to kill Derek Smart for saying for like three years now, is that right?

Tokamak posted:

Lots of businesses operate on an assumption of projected income. Most of the smart backers have realised that the game won't get made if those projections don't materialise. If the game must be made at all costs, by extension, money must be made at all costs. They have enough money to finish the game, but only if they have carte blanche on fundraising. Citizens are debating whether it is ok for CIG to drop the 'do no evil' clause in the pursuit of meeting projected income.

Scruffpuff posted:

What continues to be amazing to me is how little CIG has accomplished, and how low-quality and worthless the very little they have managed to do is. It's no excuse that "they're aiming high" and "they're doing things nobody has done before" because even were that proven to be true, they've failed at every single thing they've attempted.

Star Citizen is absolute hot garbage, an unplayable mesh of bugs coded by the most inept team imaginable, working for the biggest moron who considers himself connected to gaming.

I've played bad games. I've wrestled with the old Commodore 64 "3 games on one disc" deal that confused grandparents would gift on Christmas. I've played old hacked pirated poo poo, old mods from before the modding community was a thing, loving E.T. on the 2600.

Nothing I've ever seen is as bad as what CIG has made here. In a sane world, everyone who installed and played this game for more than 10 minutes would be at CIG headquarters with torches and pitchforks.

Beet Wagon posted:

Every day I keep thinking "I should stream SC, it might be funny," and then instead I find literally any excuse not to because the game itself is such a fun-sucking black hole of shittiness and mediocrity. Like, if your game sucks so bad that I'd rather rearrange the toiletry cabinet in my bathroom for a third time this month than play it, something has gone terribly, terribly wrong.

Combat Theory posted:

Seb has become a community treasure

posted:

A Heart Breaking Moment
The last time I played SC was during 2.6 era, when I decided to wait until the game matured a bit. However, I have been seeing all those cool screenshots and videos and couldn't help but try it again. Downloaded the game today and oh man, I am genuinely sad to finally learn that my PC is just not enough to play.

Now, I don't mean the usual "I'm getting low fps help" thing. I literally couldn't get out the first door as I woke up in easy hub. Performance was so bad that the highest fps I could reach was 4. It even takes me around 5 to 10 minutes until the game launches.

I don't even know why I'm writing this here. I think I wanted to say farewell or something. It really sucks to learn that I can't play this wonderful game anymore. Hopefully, future updates will make it playable again. Until then, take good care of yourselves fellow citizens.

posted:

I am a fraud analyst and have worked for a major credit card company and a couple payment processors. $27K for a hyper whale is nothing.
I once talked to a guy who was spending $50K or more per month on some space game (it actually might have been star citizen). His account would get flagged and someone would reach out and he'd happily tell you about some ship or another that he bought.

quote:

Forbes: Alleged Video Game 'Star Citizen' Offering New $27,000 Legatus Pack Bundle

I don’t particularly enjoy writing about the game because its fanbase can be rather…rabid when it comes to defending it against any criticism, including “hey, maybe this game should stop trying to milk its whales and figure out a concrete release plan.”

many games could do this, yet few do, and almost none of them are in the same situation as Star Citizen, a game that has raised a ludicrous amount of money already and has fans waiting patiently for years for anything resembling a finished product. As such, this feels at best, like a bad look, and at worst, flat-out exploitative.

Disco Lando on twitter posted:

"I think I value effort more than results, which is interesting considering what a results-oriented person I am. I find I don't care so much if people fail, only wether or not they appear to have even tried.

Make the effort. It's what we all deserve."

quote:

Getting the masses ready for the inevitable implosion?

"Well guys, we tried hard, and that's all that matters.."

Nobody here is talking about the game but you two. If you actually follow this account, you'll see it's very rarely about work. The musings this morning were about my life, as is the overwhelming majority of this feed, outside of work. 👍

TheAgent posted:

well guys, I tried to colonize the moon with the $500 I raised on kickstarter, but we only got as far as the $500 pizza party I threw for my team to celebrate the successful kickstarter launch

at least we tried and dared to do something, unlike other people who just waste their time, money and lives on tangible, enjoyable things

G0RF posted:

Of course he admires Effort more than Results — his final form will be as Lord High Bishop of the “At Least They Tried” Orthodox Church. To believe it is to hold Efficiency in contempt, which has been a defining feature of Chris Roberts game development philosophy from day one, right alongside admiring Fidelity over Fun or Loyalty over Honesty.

If his big takeaway from this entire misbegotten travesty ends up being “Fans who complained never did see the big game dev picture like I did” yet the big game dev picture he saw and defended prized Effort over Results and Fidelity over Fun, he’ll be running the Star Citizen memorial site fifteen years on just like Lesnick is for Wing Commander.

FailureToReport posted:

Well, he's moving.....wonder where to.

TheAgent posted:

holy poo poo

just look at that

look at that man and that room

this is what complete and total defeat looks like

Beet Wagon posted:

"There is no 'community' in my title. Not any more."

Yeah I wonder why that is...

also lmao at the moving boxes. Granted maybe he's just moving out of MoMA's spare bedroom or something, but jeez if that doesn't dovetail nicely with those tweets.

TheAgent posted:

if they really did boot jared or he's "working remotely" or whatever now, I can tell you 99.9% of the office will loving rejoice

no one besides ben and toast and alex like him

you can even hear the digs at him from sandi and chris last atv where they are all "yeah and you can't have too much jared" and they both look at each other and snicker

TheAgent posted:

so they are spending almost $600k a year for just 3 people for various exec global video production positions lol

holy cow
these are all new hires tho

including a new senior writer for some loving reason lol

burn this whole loving thing to the ground, there's at least 3 or 4 stories ready to hit the second the doors close lol

tooterfish posted:

When did they get the doors working?

Scruffpuff posted:

The entirety of CIG is basically in complete and utter turmoil right now. Everyone has different marching orders. People are getting called into offices, each one told a different story, and sent on their way. Everyone is pulling in a different direction and nobody knows whose work is more important than the next guy's. Engineers are being yelled at, devs are being yelled at, QA is being yelled at, nobody knows 100% for sure why. Chris is soaring above it all, alternating between yelling at people and giving many mysterious assurances that things are looking "better than ever before, I have some new things lined up" etc. All in all it's a great place to work, approves of CEO, keep doing what you are doing.

I'll give you another tidbit: this is a sentence told to multiple people in LA: "Do you want to end up like Ben?"

TheAgent posted:

soon


btw CIG literally said those doors cost less to make than this picture irl

lol

FailureToReport posted:

The mental gymnastics are amazing. Chris said they absolutely have enough money to finish, you don't need to pledge more. BUT WAIT, lovely new marketing practices, CIG needs more pledges to keep the lights on, because, ummm, because. Chris wouldn't lie to us

So either:
1. Chris is a loving liar, and Backers can't cope with that reality.
2. They have plenty of money to complete, but they are now EA levels of money hungry and trying to squeeze people for every extra dollar Sandi can stuff into her gucci purse.


Your move Backers.

G0RF posted:

MAN: (starry-eyed)“Honey... you remember that dream we always shared of buying a little beachside bar when we retired?”

WIFE: “No, that was always your stupid dream...”

MAN: ”Because i’ve been thinking—“

WIFE: “About finally getting a job? So I don’t have to keep carrying us both while you sit at home and stream your stupid spaceship game?”

MAN: (chuckles) “Heh, there’s that spitfire I fell in love with...”

WIFE: “I’m serious! I really—“

MAN: (pressing fingers to her lips) “Hush, I want to show you something...”

WIFE: “No. NO! I told you! No more spaceships!”

MAN: “Of course not. Of course not.”

WIFE: “You bought that stupid flying gas station and you still can’t fill anybody’s tank with it! No!”

MAN: “Refueling’s coming baby, Chris said—

WIFE: “SCREW what that lying goofball said!!”

MAN: “Hey baby don’t be like that, this is different—“

WIFE: “I SAID NO!”

MAN: “I know, of course baby. We agreed, I hear you. But come here—“

WIFE: “I swear to god if you — no, stop!”

The shushing noises answer her as MAN covers her eyes and starts pushing her through hallways once again towards what was formerly the guest bedroom, yet has now become the room he calls “Mission Control.”

WIFE: “No!! I don’t want to do this again!”

MAN: (his streamer schtick voice) “Mission control, can you read me? I’m coming in hot!”

WIFE: “Shut uuuuupppp!”

MAN: “I got Spitfire One on my wing and she’s ready to take our next mission! Over!”

Though blinded, she can hear the dull roar of the portable AC unit he’s jury-rigged to the back of his marshmallow-roaster of a PC RIG. The blast wave of heat as they enter the room is unmistakeable, despite the 54 degree setting on the unit. As her protests are reduced to grunts and hisses, he removes his hands from her eyes. Spread across the span of three 4k monitors, a picture of what appears to be some sort of modest drinking hole on some dirty slice of property in the place she knows as THAT STUPID GAME.

MAN: (gesturing proudly across the span) “Welcome to The Space Bar, baby!”

She glares at him, unblinking.

MAN: “You get it? Space bar?”

Still no blinks

MAN: “See baby, owning a real bar, well, it’s a lot of work, and Mexico, well, it’s a failed Narcostate these days. But I was thinking, ‘what if our dream—“

WIFE: “YOUR DREAM!!!”

MAN: “—of owning a little slice of heaven—“

WIFE: “HELL!!!”

MAN: “—was actually in the heavens, baby? And all those weary travelers we talked about taking care of? At our little getaway bar? Well—“

WIFE: “You just wanted to look at GIRLS! Do you think I’m STUPID?! It was GIRLS! Now it’s GAMES! —“

MAN: “—it looks like there’s a chance for us to buy that—“

WIFE: “—And now there’s no money left for your stupid beachside boobie dreams anymore because you bought all those ships!! I SAID NO!!!”

MAN: “—little getaway plan? But safer? Cheaper?”

WIFE: “No girls! No games! And no stupid SPACE BAR! You’ll just spend it staring at stupid space girls in their space bikinis in your stupid manbaby game all day for the same 60 people who troll you all day! You know it! I know it! And I SAID NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!”

His eyes light up. He sees his window. His little Spitfire left herself wide open and doesn’t even know it.

MAN: “Baby, there are no girls in the game...”

She stares at him, dumbfounded. Her mouth moves but no words come out and he’s not listening anyway. His eyes are on her purse, where her credit card lives. The hidden pouch sewn in the satin lining was no secret to him. He was once a Bosmer nightblade, after all, a master picketpocket known as Filcher McSneakypants. He will have his dream by hook or by crook. And The Space Bar will be his the moment as soon as Hurston joins the PU and his dream, their dream, is only a mouseclick away.

Scruffpuff posted:

I played Defiance a couple years ago and was pleasantly surprised. I maxed out my character to whatever the limit was, then left because I lost interest. I tried it again a month ago and it was a steaming hot pile of poo poo, nothing like I remembered. It's like it literally devolved. Mobs were zigging and zagging and teleporting all over, the game was janky as gently caress, and virtually unplayable, and looked awful. I don't know how something like that happens.

Hav posted:

That pretty much happened with Rift too, and I suspect that layering in extra systems to deepen the crafting/geegaw collecting starts to gently caress with things like database validation.

G0RF posted:

The Space Bar, a player ownable retail structure, is expected to be available in the 3.4 patch. This size 2 outpost includes an outdoor seating for patrons (two maximum) and an ample yet cozy indoor server area.

• NPC bartender not included with structure but available for hire (Warbonds only).
  
• Structure ships “dry” but can be modded to sell a variety of the finest spirits in the ‘verse with purchase of a UEE liquor license. (Warbonds only.)
  
• This outposts like all player-owned structures is hugely vulnerable to munitions from above. It is expected to be a favorite target for Hercules owners and their MOABs, so purchase of official UEE Land Beacon protections are highly recommended.

Subjunctive posted:

Could you explain why that might be? I don't think I understand.

Hav posted:

Just pulling a speculation out of my rear end that the dive in quality after the initial release has to do with cycling out the development team that was originally involved, and hacking in more currency systems because they moved from subscription through the free-to-play wastelands where you're chasing the whale dollar to survive.

Every MMO that went free-to-play inevitably had to court a smaller pool of money, with the exception of Eve, which appears to be the undead hulk of MMOs.

Nyast posted:

look at 3.1.4 patch notes: https://starcitizen.tools/Star_Citizen_Alpha_3.1.4

Does it really look like the patch notes content equivalent of 450 man-months of work ? ( 1 month elapsed since 3.1.3 for 450+ devs ) ?

How do backers not see the mismatch here and raise serious questions is beyond my understanding.

zinglon's ale posted:

im ga













me

no_recall posted:

What the actual gently caress?

Beet Wagon posted:

I generally don't go in too hard on "the financials" because there's so many things we just don't know, but it's loving amazing to me that people just take the funding tracker at face value, especially when CIG themselves have straight up said they're also getting loans, etc etc. I mean, there are people - right now - who don't believe Star Citizen has ever had private investment. This is despite there being a literal private investor making videos about it. These dudes look at the funding tracker and go "Oh my God this is awesome it's a $200 Million project woo!!!" without even the barest hint of critical thought.

Sucrose posted:

I'll give whales of those Free 2 Play games this: At least they're paying for an experience that they know they're going to get. One of those rich nerds could argue that paying thousands of dollars to get in-game goods gives them the same amount of joy that they'd get from the experience of going on an expensive vacation somewhere or some other fleeting experience that's not an exchange for tangible goods. There's nothing really wrong with that, other than the fact that the vast majority of people would think that there's about a hundred different ways that you could blow thousands of dollars that would be more fun than blowing it on "Hero Royale" or whatever. But hey, it's their money, and "fun" is subjective.

The difference is that Star Citizen whales are paying tens of thousands of dollars just for the promise that they'll have a wonderful time with their digital goods in the future when the game actually comes out. Anyone who wasn't deluded would realize that, even if CIG was a competent and non-scammy company, that there'd still be a very real chance that the project might fall far short of expectations or even be cancelled altogether. It's not comparable to making a risky investment either, because they're not investing anything, in an investment (or a gamble) you're spending money for the chance that you might make back more money than you put in. This is just spending.

I struggle to think of anything comparable, other than maybe buying thousands of dollars worth of cocaine from a shady dealer who you know beforehand might actually be selling you piles of baking soda.

Beet Wagon posted:

They appear to have quietly dialed back the Warbond bonuses after the Hercules debacle. From what I can tell, WB versions get:

• LTI
  
• A special limited edition ship number, displayed on their ship in the future
  
• A 10% discount, down from the like 20% discount they had on the Herculese
  

So, with that, two things: First, every one of those sad sack fuckfaces who was saying "They need the money, if they have to piss off older backers to get it fine" was wrong. Apparently CIG doesn't need the money bad enough to piss people off this sale. Looking at you, Montoya and whoever the gently caress else was swinging that particular stick around (Noobifier? Boredgamer? Erris? I can't fucken remember any more). Second: Given that these two (the EX and LX) are not concept ships and are just retreads of an already existing ship, I wonder if the WarBond "benefits" will be enough to move units the way they expect.

Beer4TheBeerGod posted:

Okay, so years ago this is how CIG hyped up ships:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvDs7RDKCag

Now, this is what they do:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6N3uJB_Xjw

Why the change? Because they can. They stopped trying because, Jared's lovely little Twitter philosophy aside, they can get just as much enthusiasm for far less effort. And look at what's being sold; a highly niche ship for a portion of the "game" that's never been particularly popular. It's a racing ship for a game that can't keep more than five people in a match.

Ramrod Hotshot posted:

I've known about Star Citizen for years but only found this thread recently and discovered the extent of this insanity. It seems to me to be a textbook cult with a ponzi scheme-like organization, just like Scientology or the Rajneeshees or something...give us all your money and believe that the great leader will one day deliver your dreams. But this isn't a fake religion, it's a fake computer game. I still have trouble wrapping my head around all of this and it feels like I'm missing something.

I'm surprised this madness is almost invisible from the mainstream press. Is there a recent article written, by like the Atlantic or New Yorker or something, about the whole sordid tale up until now for the layperson?

ZekeNY posted:

sounds familiar from that fiasco:

quote:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strike_Commander

quote:

The Strike Commander project took more than four years and over a million man hours on background development. Very little of that production time turned out to be actually usable in the final product, as at least one and possibly several complete project "reboots" were required to refine the graphical engine to a playable state. Nevertheless, some successful gameplay elements from Strike Commander were re-used by other more notable Origin products such as Privateer and the Wing Commander series. Chris Roberts, in the game's manual, compares the game's long development time with the events in the 1991 documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, a film account of what it took to get the 1979 film Apocalypse Now made.

posted:

Goonswarm Federation should open an official division on Star Citizen

quote:

Goons and every other pro-troll like losers don't do well in skill based games and their fleet is pathetic since they refunded most of their "big guns" already lol

I wish them luck though because not only they will be hunted by the big ORG's but also by the game admins

[quote]Are you trying to insinuate that buying a large fleet before launch will give some kind of meaningful advantage against those who choose not to do so?

quote:

saying skill based and then saying they wont do well because they refunded their big guns is a bit contradicting don't you think? I mean is this skill based or is it pay to win?

quote:

Goons did a lot of extremely creepy stuff to some of the senior staff of CIG. In countries with a functional justice system (not the US) they would risk hefty fines and possibly jail time.

The Saddest Robot posted:

Overwatch was completed before Star Citizen (though I will cede to the caveat that it used a lot of existing assets from Titan).

Overwatch is having an anniversary event.

Star Citizen is suddenly having a "50 year anniversary" for one of their imaginary ships.

It's like they can't stand to be upstaged by any other game, no matter how unrelated it is to Star Citizen.

Koil posted:

posted:

November 2014.

The date has long since passed. New dates have been given which have long since passed. Assurances that 2017 will see the release of Squadron 42 are not even believed.

Reasonable expectations for delivery times are usually a part of a buyer's calculus when pre-ordering. If told in advance "We have no clue when this game will deliver but we need money anyway", many people might not have chosen to back it. And we go through similar calculations all the time as consumers.

If you order a pizza because the commercial for that Old Country Pizzeria said you'd have delivery in 30 minutes, you have the right to expect it within that approximate timeframe.

By around the 45th minute if you don't have delivery, you'd probably start to get annoyed.

If you called and the cook / owner said, "Oh I'm sorry, but I can assure you my pizza is going to amaze you. It's a secret recipe I developed in the 90s, using gaslight ovens, only now, my ingredients are better than I ever dreamed of back then. You just can't get this kind of pie from a soulless chainstore by Big Pizza because they care only about profits and compromise. But my pizza is almost done, I can see it cooking in the oven right now. Here, I'll have my wife text you a picture of what it looks like!"

"The picture looks good enough," you sigh, "I guess I can wait."

If an hour goes past, you'd be getting mad and would probably be getting pretty hungry. Now you call back. It rings and rings and eventually, you get put in a hold queue, approximate wait times are 15 minutes, but then a recording of the owner says "It's taking longer than we expected but we didn't expect so many orders! With this extra demand we've got extra money and we've now increased the size of all pizzas, although we did run out of pepperoni so we've dropped that ingredient from all pizzas. But don't worry, we've tripled the size and now all pizzas will include tri-injected mozzarella layering, a technique Big Pizza wouldn't even dare attempt because all they care about is profits and compromise!"

Well, now you're annoyed, especially since pepperoni was what you expected, but tri-injected mozzarella does sound interesting and oh look, you just got another pic texted to you, of the chef and his team all working on your pizza. You guess you can wait another 15 minutes.

16 minutes later, no pizza has arrived.

30 minutes later, you call. An annoyed kid voice answers, and before you can even finish saying, "I ordered this thing an hour and a half ago please just bring me--" you get quickly dumped to a voicemail box. But it's full and can't take any more messages.

Yet minutes later, you get another text. It's actually a video, called "The Road to Pizzaville." You sit and watch it. It's slickly made, yet it explains the unexpected challenges encountered when the cook and his team started trying to implement the tri-injected mozzarella technique that wasn't even a part of the pepperoni pizza you originally ordered. Unexpected setbacks related to features you never requested have completely destroyed any hopes you might've clung to for reasonable delivery times. Yet happy customers are featured in the video, along with a new-agey bit of stock music, and they're all saying "It will be finished when they finish it" or "I'm so glad I backed Old Country Pizzeria - they really do care."

2 hours in, you're now furious. If you'd known there was any chance it would take this long you'd never have ordered. Yet repeated calls go unanswered. A recording plays telling you've they've closed the voicemail system and you should download their new app. You download it to your phone but it doesn't work on mobile. So you log in from your desktop. You see a bunch of pizza memes. Some other customer has written a novel about how delicious he knows his late Pepperoni pizza sans pepperoni will be while yet another guy theorycrafts about the possibility of quadruple-injected mozzarella layering in his pizza.

Anyone writing as you might "Where is the pizza I ordered?!" is immediately shouted down by people saying "The pizza will come out when the pizza comes out." Or "We voted for this delay so we could get the tri-injected mozzarella tech!" "We didn't order a pizza - we pre-ordered it - therefore they can take as long as they want to cook it!" Or "Well at least this isn't the kind of garbage we'd get from Big Pizza because all the care about is profits and compromise!"

You see a picture of the kitchen, taken very recently. They are unloading bags of flour from delivery trucks. The note from the owner says, "We've finally got flour- now, let's get cooking!"

A note below that from the assistant chef explains that now that they have flour, they are "beginning to crest the hill of crust-baking architecture functionality."

You are now livid. The scales are falling from your eyes and you wonder if you've called some kind of lunatic asylum that thinks it's a pizzeria.

You type up a complaint in the app:

"Wait, what? You've had no flour all along, you're just starting to mix ingredients for the crust? Then what was with that pic I saw of my pizza? Was that even real? It can't have been, you had no flour yet! But what about the Road to Pizzaville?! Have you been gaslighting me the whole time?! What kind of madness is this I just wanted a Pepperoni pizza in 30 minutes! What is HAPPENING?!"

Then the replies from other customers start.

"You're one of THEM!"

"It will be done when it's done. We've always known this since the beginning! You can't rush perfection and I for one know it will be worth the wait!"

"Of course he uses gaslighting, that's part of his secret old country technique!"

"What right do you have to question the chef or his methods? You're just another entitled armchair cook with the intellect of a toddler who knows nothing about pizza development!"

"We invested in the Pizzaria, not the Pizza! They got more funds then they thought they would so they are making a better pizzaria!"

["We voted for them to greatly expand their pizzaria!"] (https://www.reddit.com/r/DerekSmart/comments/6bw8wm/comment/dhq976a) (...when they told us it would mean faster, not slower, pizza production. Oops.)

The discomfort of being set upon and insulted by faceless strangers makes you want to close the app. The contradictions in communications have you trying to piece together an alternative narrative to make sense of it all. Yet either it is lunacy at every step, or you yourself have lost your mind.

You try to distract yourself from all the cognitive dissonance and from the gnawing pains in your stomach by turning on the TV.

It's a commercial. For Pizza Hut. For $20, you can get a deep dish large pepperoni with cheese in the crust. It's not triple injected. It's not a gaslit oven nor an old country recipe. It's just a chain operation job made the same way it's made in thousands of stores across the country by people in a zombie state, performing their actions robotically. But they're probably sane zombies and it'll be ready in 30 minutes. Oh, and they have pepperoni.

It doesn't sound that bad, really.

A Commando posted:

there are complete gaming franchises that bring little to no more game features than already exist in AC and Star Marine. Those are complete, playable games, and I would argue that Arena Commander qualifies as a standalone Title now. Star Marine is like a stripped down Battlefield that needs more gadgets and such, but otherwise is also a fully playable game in its own right“

Beet Wagon posted:

game design the Chris Roberts way is a flowchart with only two boxes. You start at "rip off someone else's idea" and end at " focus on the insanely trivial things to the point that you make the game unplayable"

PederP posted:

The explanation of Object Container Streaming is so dumb and hyperbolic. It's just loading resources in the background. Asheron's Call 1 did that, Legacy of Kain did that. That they're getting away with describing it is a complex and herculean development task says a lot about the "verified" qualifications of the backers. Not being stupid and loading the entire galaxy into memory does not mean memory is no longer a constraint. It very much is.

Also note that this functionality already exists in Lumberyard, which has pretty good support for dynamic streaming of content, interest management, etc. This is not just a requirement for open world games, it's extremely useful for level-based games.

Their inability to leverage Lumberyard advances in dynamic entities, background streaming, etc. could very well be because the way CIG worked around the 4 km x 4 km limitations of CryEngine wasn't through technical ingenuity and good craftsmanship. Everything points toward them using crude hacks and kludges, and thereby basically building everything else on a rotten core.

The Lumberyard developers have repeatedly stated a desire to add support for large worlds and high player concurrency, but that they don't have timelines or details to share (ie it requires major changes to their architecture). They've been hard-core dodging forum questions about why they can't get the tech from CIG, about how Sean Tracy could implement this in 2 weeks, etc. Another clue that CIG did a hackjob.



TL;DR - Object Container Streaming is being sold as a major innovation, but is really just a pile of technical debt and workarounds for being stuck on an old engine branch.

CryEngine and Lumberyard can't do open world. The CIG hacks to enable it anyway make the game a bugfest and impede their ability to handle the mountains of technical debt. This is a crowd-funded death march.

A Commando posted:

I see this game having a very long life cycle assuming expansions, future content, and advancements in technology. I feel this more than a game, and more like a hobby you invest in.

I said come in! posted:

https://twitter.com/RobertsSpaceInd/status/1000783924128370688
(tweet: Happy Birthday Chris Roberts. 50 Years ...on planet earth)

The cult-like status and following of Chris Roberts is creepy as hell.

Beer4TheBeerGod posted:

Jobbo_Fett posted:

Not quite sure why they are @ing Chris considering he literally never uses twitter, despite the obvious marketing potential of doing so. But I guess Sandi, the best marketer in the world ever, knew that already.

And yet he still blocked me.

Pixelate posted:

[*]GETTING OUT OF BED ON WRONG SIDE

quote:

logged out in captains bed of starfarer

when logged in seemed fine

went to get up

got out on wrong side and stuck in ship hull

glitched to death

[*]GAME ISSUE

quote:

i have been a backer since the beginning i built this system to better test this game and add feedback. However, it is hard to offer feedback if my ship will make my entire computer freeze.

32gb ram, a dedicated 960 evo ssd, i7 8700k with a 1080ti the system is only a few days old

Scruffpuff posted:

Chris is focused on making the wrong thing, at any expense. He has no idea what a video game is, what making one entails, what draws people to them, why people play them, and why trying to make them movies is a stupid loving idea that the industry flirted with when CD-ROM became a thing, then quickly abandoned because it's a stupid loving idea in every possible way.

Chris was failing hard during that era, and he never let the idea go. He's been holding onto this idea that "I'M GONNA MAKE A GAME THAT'S LIKE A MOVIE" for literal decades, completely ignoring any and all evolution of the media. Now he has millions of dollars to make the bad idea, and he's spent all his time and money on motion capture because that's what happened in Wing Commander 3 and he doesn't understand why the people making the "game" (little more than connective tissue between his cutscenes) aren't done yet.

This motherfucker stole nearly $200 million, and borrowed untold millions more, and burned it all so he could try to single-handedly turn the industry back 20 years and ruin everything that makes gaming a fun pastime. I'm grateful that he burned all the backers, don't get me wrong, but the fun part of this ride was over late last year and I'm definitely ready for the bonfire stage.

posted:

Hi I’m new to this game and I’m experiencing a lot of lag…

One fix is to turn off your computer and then leave it off for 2 years and then turn it on again, verify your game files and play again.
That should work.

quote:

PCINVASION: Star Citizen’s latest hilariously priced Legatus Pack costs $27,000

Ah, Star Citizen. It never fails to disappoint when it comes to crazy sums of money for virtual items. With $186 million banked from backers and still no sign of a decent game, or even Squadron 42, you can’t help but feel disappointed as a backer.

The latest money making scheme is called the Legatus Pack which comes with 117 ships and a further 163 extra bits and pieces. To be eligible to view instantly what’s on offer in the pack, backers will have to have spent $1000 on the game already. Yes, this one is designed for gamers who are already quite far gone when it comes to backing the project, or perhaps CIG was too embarrased to let everyone see this. Anyone who is not one of those big money backers but is serious about actually buying this has to contact customer support to see the page.

There is a lot that can be done with $27,000. A new car or even a downpayment on a property springs to mind. On the other hand, there’s always the hope that one day some virtual items costing $27,000 will actually be usable in a ‘game’ that is over budget and long overdue.

It has got to the stage with all the different sales and the high price of some items that I am becoming more convinced Star Citizen is some kind of sick social experiment concocted by Chris Roberts to fund a dream and lifestyle. Again, I have to say this in every Star Citizen news story, if you have backed it already then do not spend any more. If you have not backed it, then do not buy in at any level until there is something that starts to look more like a game or Squadron 42 is at least released.

Frank_Leroux posted:

The articles so far say "$27k for 117 ships, WTF?" or words to that effect. Ahem. Forgive the following yelling.

HOW MANY OF THOSE SHIPS EVEN EXIST?

Scruffpuff posted:

Even the article headers tell a passive lie. Take the PCGamer headline for example: "New Star Citizen ship pack unlocks nearly every vessel in the game"

- There is no "game"
- There are almost no functioning "vessels" in the game
- Those that do function are broken
- There is no content
- There are no design documents for what the game is supposed to be

Just the phrase by itself implies a huge game with hundreds of ships - it's a complete fallacy. You can't "unlock" a ship that hasn't been designed yet. CIG just writes down the name of a ship, makes a JPEG, and treats it like its inclusion is a foregone conclusion. Star Citizen is a model-viewer with no gameplay that has a handful of bad 3D objects they're calling "ships" that don't work, are not linked to any gameplay, and there are no plans for. However, they have made hundreds of pictures.

Your $27,000 buys you nothing.

posted:

I’ve been on the ‘wait and see’ side of the fence for 6 years now, but poo poo like this makes me fall right over into ‘maybe the guys calling this game a scam are on to something.’

Close your loving ‘donation’ shop and finish the god drat game

DarkDobe posted:

quote:

That's such a terrible article.
I can't believe what they pass up for journalism these days.
It's literally just some idiots uneducated uniformed opinion.
That might as well be a blog

Coworker here is about 8K + deep.
There are others and I'm hoping they chime in...

:reddit posted:

Tip of the development Iceberg

Hi. I've seen a number of posts lately singing the song of 'CIG is too slow in developing this game', and although I empathize with people getting impatient, I can't help but feel that some (willfully or not) keep forgetting that we only see a tiny, tiny part of the entire development.



In my opinion CIG does well in keeping most of their (asset) development hidden from us, so we will be absolutely mind-blown the day they feel confident enough to pull back the drapes and show us the rest of the Iceberg that is SC and/or SQ42.

Inkel posted:

Ah yes, the Ole CIG has a super-secret dev build that will blow everyone away, and they're just putting out a broken tech demo to the public for shits and giggles..

Daztek posted:

Daztek posted:

stealing a goon's goon valor

Potato Salad posted:

Visually asserting that this project is under water.

Or this project is in deep water.

Or most of the project is on ice.

The project is fracturing and slowly falling apart.

The project is adrift in a sea of salt

The project is barely afloat.

Immersion

Cao Ni Ma posted:

I thought people stopped thinking that CIG was secretly withholding a ton of work from being revealed when they started doing their new schedule and it showed that they haven't even started to work on 9/10 things from the next patch. Its all scheduled to start production except for ships which always have a tiny bit of work done on them

TheAgent posted:

I guess if you don't really play any modern games (because they are all shootman pew pews for kids or whatever) and don't understand the kind of work it takes just to get something out in an engine the developers have been working with for years (or sometimes decades, now), I guess the "look behind the curtain" of Star Citizen development might give you the impression the entire industry follows the same pattern

I mean, sometimes it does, like with that Amy Hennig Star Wars RPG. she wrote a giant rear end script then decided to play hollywood director, all the while rewriting the script and filming more and more mocap and then replacing two principle actors which means all their scenes had to be reshot with mocap, because god forbid you just get someone in to redo the voice and likeness. nah, you slam them back in a $50,000 a day mocap set with full crews and a nice craft services table as your programmers go "ummm what the gently caress do YOU ACTUALLY PLAY HERE AMY, WHAT IS THE GAME" and she's all "WOW loving SHEESH I AM SUPER BUSY I WORK 20 HOURS A DAY DON'T YOU loving DISRESPECT ME WE HAVE PLENTY OF TIME TO FIGURE THAT OUT AFTER WE SPEND ANOTHER $15m IN THE STUDIO"

I'm sad EA killed that loving thing, but Hennig went full Roberts

you never go full Roberts

I feel bad for my friend that left SC to work on that project

DarkDobe posted:

From the MassivelyOP comments:

Mario death mask posted:

Golli posted:

Even the Lore team is poking fun.



--Rob Chrissert, Razor Owner

ROB CHRISSERT

CHRIS ROB SERT

CHRIS ROBERTS

lol

posted:

StarCitizen has still failed to produce support for more than 20 players in an area which is kinda important for an MMO - it's been 6 years guys. They can't do it.

PederP posted:

One of the few impressive things about Star Citizen is how they've managed to sell the illusion of hyper-competent development studios. The fans truly believe these developers are the best and brightest in the industry, breaking new ground and innovating where AAA studios are stagnating.

Anyone with actual game development experience, and most people with just tangential professional experience, can see right through this, and see the painful struggle of the developers, fighting an aging engine horribly disfigured and disabled by years of hacks and kludges. Equally obvious is the creative stranglehold, toxic company culture and disgusting perma-crunch. They may not be the most talented developers, but they certainly are among the most tormented and exploited developers.

It must be soul-crushing for the actual CIG proletariat to see the cronies and top brass worshipped as game development titans - based on an endless barrage of videos full of nonsense, hyperbole and outright misdirection and deception. These are the true victims, in my opinion.

They may be collecting a paycheck from a doomed company selling an impossible dream. One could argue that it's immoral to essentially profit from the gullibility of backers. But it's highly unlikely the ground floor developers understood this going into the job, it's very likely they did not have a huge range of options for employment, and sadly a lot of managers are really good at manipulating and browbeating employees into staying even when they're overworked, underpaid, have moral qualms and can see the company heading for the abyss.

But back to my initial point, CIG have been extremely good at building their company brand. I'd argue that among the fans, the company itself has a far stronger brand than the actual game. Backers are buying into the dream of funding artistic and technical genius. Who can put a price on being a patron of Leonardo da Roberts and one of the people making Star Citizer: Mark Lisa a reality? This is the true success story of this strange venture. Creating a company brand capable of collecting millions of dollars in spite of the terrible product being sold.

Thoatse posted:

posted:

TROLLS, REFUNDARDS, AND PEOPLE THAT HAVE GIVEN UP ON WAITING, YET CONTINUE TO POST ON REDDIT AND THE FORUMS NEED TO WALK AWAY FROM SC AND GET LAID!

I prefer the term refundamentalist

SPERMCUBE.ORG posted:

The Chairman went down to Crytek. He was lookin for some code to steal
He had the shills but not the skills. And he couldn't afford Unreal.
When he caught sight of an engine with such fidelity he said "Just one sec!"
And then the Chairman swaggered up on the stage and he donned his black turtleneck.

"You might know me for my movies but I'm a game dev, too
And if you wish to make me rich I'll sign a contract with you
Now you made a pretty good demo but I don't think you'll ever sue.
So I'll break the terms and call the vampire's firm while my artists turn green pixels blue."

A lawyer said, "We're called Skadden and, as your contract shows
We'll take your gold from the JPEGS sold and all the loot from the commandos."

Crytek, document your code and pay your lawyers hard
Cause your engine has been stolen but they claim it's Lumberyard
And if you win you'll get a pile of stolen gold
But if you lose the Chairman gets your code

And Ortwin filed up his response and said, "I don't understand.
What you're lookin for is a cash grab, just another scam!"
And the backers agreed and thought it vindicated Chris
And a band a Youtube lawyers joined in and it sounded something like this:

FULL BURN PLAYS

When The Chairman was done Skadden said, "Well that's some pretty good spin
But discovery will show just what you owe and that's how you really win."

The money's all gone and the game's a dud!
The Warlord's in the house of the rising FUD
ELE's comin', two weeks to go
Derek, does you blog dox? No, mods, no

The Chairman waved his arms because he knew his time ran out
And he paid Crytek straight from the pocketbooks of the devout
Taking credit, the Warlord said, "Chairman, come on back if you ever want another fight
As I implied, back in July, Derek Smart was right!"
And he blogged:

The money's all gone and the game's a dud!
The Warlord's in the house of the rising FUD
ELE's comin', two weeks to go
Derek, does you blog dox? No, mods, no

Beet Wagon posted:

As long as running those four studios doesn't stop them from being profitable (which so far it hasn't) the benefit of making idiot fuckfaces think he's making the game outweighs the cost of having the studios open. Plus, it lets Chris "A Thumb in a Turtleneck" Roberts get to play "Master Game Director" and do things like shoot endless hours of motion capture.

Ultimately, the thing that will determine whether or not Star Citizen was a scam is whether or not Chris Roberts knows he's promising things his team can't deliver. That might not even be the case - there's every possibility that he has huffed his own farts for so long he genuinely thinks this is all possible.

A Commando posted:

Beet Wagon posted:

CIG have completely removed the non-warbond (IE available for store credit) version of the new ships.

There is no way to purchase the new variant with store credit unless you're upgrading an existing ship



Edit:
I guess apparently the reason they pulled the regular version Razor variants off sale is that Disco said (somewhere in a video I'm not going to bother to watch) that this was a weekend-only sale or whatever. Which, if that's loving true just lmao that they

A) Didn't put that anywhere on the sale page and are now suffering the backlash

and

B) Still have the "limited edition" fresh-cash-only ones up for grabs because of loving course they do

posted:

Trolls won't make the game fail, CIG might.
They've done more harm to this project with lovely marketing calls and lack of communication than all the Dereks and goons combined.

BobHoward posted:

They're lying about this being a package actually designed for orgs/corps/guilds; an actual guild package would not look like this. I haven't ever played Spreadsheet Simulator aka EVE (I feel the correct way to experience that game is vicariously), but I know that one of the most successful organizations in the history of that game, Goonfleet, would do poo poo like mass production of standardized ships with optimized fits for specific roles. In any kind of exciting space MMO with fleet battles (which is the basic reason to even have big organizations), you're not going to need or want one of every luxury yacht Croberts & Co. have dreamt up to milk whales, you'll want mass quantities of the best fighting and logistics ships.

These ship packs are, as always, attempting to sucker gotta-have-em-all individuals with money to burn. They can't even offer a true org ship package until there's enough of the game mechanics and meta defined to even know what kinds of ships a fleet ought to have in bulk.

Breetai posted:

Exactly. An org package would be a couple of carriers with enough fighters and bombers to fill them, plus some general purpose cruisers/destroyer class vessels and a few specialist ships. But how many fighters can a carrier hold, exactly? We would need coherent game design to determine that, and we're only 6 years and nearly 200 mil into development.

posted:

AI has one hurdle, which is the dynamic pathfinding for big ships. Otherwise, it can be done in a week by someone like me (Source: Have done it before). For the wizards from Frankfurt working with subsumption it'll take them a couple days.

SPERMCUBE.ORG posted:

Sure it's difficult to make an AI that can pass as human but what about making one that can pass as a backer? I mean I'm pretty sure I've seen chatbots more convincing than that minus 5 iq derek guy.

Beet Wagon posted:

reddit is still theorycrafting that the $1=1000 UEC conversion rate is going to carry on through launch. Which means Agony Aunt's Pioneer is going to cost at least 850,000 UEC.

Missions are currently paying out like 3k UEC at best.

https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/8ngxo8/speculation_on_ship_ingame_uec_prices_version_2/

I'm trying to follow their logic here, but it looks like they're assuming

A) $1 = 1000 UEC will still hold true
B) Ships will increase in price about threefold by launch
C) You will still be able to earn a Constellation in about 60 hours of playtime (per some loving thing Chris said three years ago)
D) Cameron Wilkie's speculation that the Polaris will be 20-30 million UEC was wrong

There's a bunch of flaws in this model, including assuming CIG's final "in-game" pricing model is going to be tied to reality in any way, so we might as well be throwing chicken bones around and trying to read them, but if we take those numbers at face value that means an Idris is going to cost you around 600 hours of play time lol. That's more than double the time I've put into MWO even when I used to play it every day and occasionally leave it running overnight by accident.


Okay, I added it up. If the three main characters I've had in WoW since TBC launched in 2007 teamed up, their total playtime would have earned them 1.5 Idris Frigates.

Seems like a reasonable grind

Sample_text posted:

CR: Yeah, you'll have epic space battles and massive multicrew ships and-
Why does your game run at 12 FPS in the Lumberyard editor?
CR: Oh.....



CR:Yeah this Bomber will stealthily take down capital ships, and you'll launch your torpedoes and-
Why is there only one "capital ship" in the game , and it's not even working right?
CR: Oh....

VictorianQueerLit posted:

I mean this poo poo is all psychological. If you can pretend CIG has actually made progress, or that the ATVs actually show that your money is being well spent, or that development is actually on track then of course it's a small step to go "______ is so cool and only confirms exactly what I want myself to believe!"

Trying to apply reality or objective facts to Star Citizen backers has consistently failed since the kickstarter. Nothing will ever work and anyone operating on a rational basis will constantly be on a different wavelength.

Seriously, an asteroid could end human civilization and they would be in a flooded subway station licking algae off of the walls talking about how they just need to wait for CIG to get a generator going at the offices that most surely survived so they can finish up 4.0. Chris Roberts is such a genius he obviously saw the asteroid coming and planned for it. Nobody will ever break a faith based viewpoint as long as the people that need it, need it.

MilesK posted:

Scruffpuff posted:

The physics still can't handle someone riding in someone else's "ship." Why? Because nothing was abstracted the way it would had game developers been in charge. Because Chris Roberts, idiot, is in charge, no game development was done. Instead they created 3D models of spacemans and spaceships and it's just all going to work because servers.

See the long and the short of it was that decades of developers figuring out how to handle different types of dynamic physics like vehicles, elevators, and the like, all the way back to the original Flight Simulator, they were all doing it wrong. They were all doing what Chris calls "tricks", and what other people call "game development." Chris had the thought "wait, why do all that work - just like, put the elevator in the world, man, and when your shooty mans gets it in, it all just works, because mesh."

And that's why today we can clip through walls at 8 FPS and PC gaming is saved.

Dux Supremus posted:

I clicked on a YouTube video about SC out of vague interest as to what the latest clusterfuck and noticed this:



"Huh, that seems familiar," I said to myself.



It's different enough that you can't say it was directly copied, but it seems pretty clear where the idea came from.

youtube posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_N6LJyeZSwk#t=2487s
I think spending $27,000 on a game that doesn't have a like full release date yet and might never fully release is probably a solid investment plan in the post Bitcoin boom

Scruffpuff posted:

The difficulty with Star Citizen has always been with people grasping the following:

- Chris Roberts can't make this game
- Chris Roberts doesn't know what his own game is
- Chris Roberts has no vision for this game
- Chris Roberts' management style prevents qualified people from making the game
- Chris Roberts thinks he can make the game (this fact is trotted out for the "not a scam" defense)
- The money isn't being spent on game development because CIG is not a game development studio
- Some money is being spent on things Chris thinks are game development (motion capture)
- Some money is being spent on trying to figure out how to make a game
- Some money is being spent to maintain the illusion of game development by aping real studios (multiple studios, websites, videos, decorative bric-a-brac, etc.)

There will be a handful of backers who pull out the "well I knew it could fail, so it's all OK" but that argument is pretty much reserved for the dumbest of backers to fall back on, because the trust CIG asked for when requesting their donations hinged on them projecting confidence that it could be done. They were so confident that they promised, and later rescinded, refunds and financial accountability.

That is why, at its heart, CIG is perpetuating full-blown theft and fraud. But keep arguing the wrong point, streamers. You might be quick to forget how stupid you were to back Chris Roberts, but other people won't - your lives have no value, but your wallet does, and now the world knows how to get into it.

Eifert Posting posted:

If you conceived a child when Star Citizen was announced it would be old enough now to tell you why investing it would be a bad idea.

tithin posted:

How would anyone who invested in SC have children?

Furia posted:

Remember the guy that had his kid and got him a citizen card and started tweeting “welcome to the verse” with pictures of him and poo poo?

If I ever become like that murder everything I love in front of me very slowly

posted:

My new awesome little Turret Gunner named Gunnar
We have several Gunnar's in our circle of friends and family, and we really wanted the name Hunter, but Hunter was taken by my cousin, so we went with the next best thing.

posted:

Welcome my newborn son into the Master Race brothers!
Okay so there is a story behind this. So I was one of the very first Founders of Star Citizen. In fact, my wife and Chris Robert's wife, spoke daily during the initial days. She has since got extremely busy. Anyway all of us Star Citizen guys call our children Turret Gunners. So I asked my wife to name my son Gunner. She said, "Okay". It was as good of a name as any that I could think of. So it stuck. The funny thing was though, my wife is Asian, and she spelled it Gunnar. So that is what it is. Also, it just so happens I know the guys at Gunnar, as I have worked with them for YEARS. I swear by their eye-strain reducing lenses. I do routinely game and work on a PC for 12-16 hours though. So it is a lot more important to me. There is the story!

" posted:

I also spent 150,000 on Star Citizen Ships and Star Citizen Stuffs.

" posted:

After This Video Was Shown, there is no reason that ED should ever be mentioned in the same sentence as SC. Star Citizen is the loving New York Yankees, and Elite Dangerous is the Bad News Bears or some poo poo.

" posted:

STAR CITIZEN just blew the entire industry to pieces

" posted:

Or.. You can spend $30 on SC and get 100000 Times the content, fidelity, and play with people who are not pretty much PVE NERDS.

" posted:

Man, this game is going to be soooooo rad. I can't wait. Well, actually I can. Ive been waiting my entire life for a game this LEGIT.

quote:

I don't really care so much about pulling longtime backers out of the matrix anymore [...] at this point they chose their fate and now that CIG is refusing refunds [...] people are basically stuck with the bed they made. If they're really fortunate maybe they'll get woke before CIG finds a way to close the gray market loophole

quote:

I'm here for the guy who has just heard about star citizen from some so-called friend who wants them to drink the kool-aid and buy jpgs. It makes me absolutely sick to my stomach that CIG is built as propaganda machine of misleading YouTube trailers, absolute bullshit timelines, deceptive marketing practices, predatory sales practices, and cult-like communities that they fostered

quote:

CIG has been spitting out new JPEG concept sales as fast as they can sketch them

Spiderdrake posted:

Nostalgia was waxing in stock when the Kickstarter was launched. A lot of backers had enough positive sentiment toward Wing Commander or its spin-offs. Inversely, because it has been years since he has accomplished anything, Chris Roberts and his failings were something most people were ignorant of. Plus even if they were aware, everyone loves the underdog comeback story.

In addition to nostalgia, kickstarter as a platform was beloved in 2012 and people were more than happy to chip a few bucks into interesting things. This is also around the time consumer sentiment toward the big publishers had soured immensely, so you have an old industry icon where everyone loves his work, an environment where people are tired of toxic publishers and excited to crowdfund a new gaming paradigm. There's an excitement external to Star Citizen and all its workings that it tapped into. You can see this energy all through products at the time. So you have nostalgia, a big comeback, and sticking it to publishers. No charisma needed; External factors galvanized the project from criticism.

Third, vast swathes of work was done by external parties to the aim of advertising a fantasy of a game. I believe the original trailer was made by an external party, and various third parties have done everything to hype Star Citizen. They have paid for trailers, demos, artwork and astroturfing. Paid streamers, paid posters, paid websites and paid twitter posts. People took it at face value that the game was "being made" was what they were presented with. Think about it like this: You're producing a product you never need to ship and you have millions you can spend to try to generate more millions by advertising this fantasy. Instead of working on the game, or working in the game, much of the materials shown are simply advertisements for that product. Language is, as others in the thread have better explained, written in a way that implies all these great things are just around the corner, or worse are actually present and ready to go. The actual product is dismal, a buggy skeleton of anticipation, but it provides the necessary release that the product does exist and is going to evolve into something better.

The PC gaming community is largely incapable of correctly discussing what's happening. Attempts at articulating Star Citizen, even when addressing it as a scam, still let pieces of presumed legitimacy fall through the cracks. The phenomenon is easy to observe: Look at the recent Legatus pack, which was blasted in the media. The phrasing used, while explicitly labeling it a rip off, also implies a game underneath. You can buy 117 ships, they're meant to be used by "orgs", players "consolidate their fleets". There are no ships, no orgs, and no fleets.

Fourth the project has huge momentum and people don't want to admit they've been conned. So it keeps going. They double down to protect "their investment". Because the PC gaming community is so bad at discussing what the project actually is, the end result is they still feel just legitimate enough. Though we have seen whales abandon the project over the last year, its a slow process, and some will go to the end. And the end is not in sight.

The fifth is some sort of weird trauma caused by goons in Eve making these people spite pledge out of fear and the belief Star Citizen will protect them from the goons. I don't know how serious an impact this has. But it does appear to be present.



It's a scam that is set up to not look like a scam. We'll never know if it started as a scam and always was, evolved into a scam, or the environment it exists in has forced it into fraudulent behavior in the hopes it will somehow evolve into the product it once promised. I lean toward the latter; CIG is really bad.

A Commando posted:

If you don't know what your child does online you should check because it's like 50/50 they are committing federal crimes on the starcitizen subreddit that I gotta deal with.

quote:

Now what happened?

Can't say right this second but bad enough that the authorities are involved.

VictorianQueerLit posted:

Quavers posted:

It turns out that early today a long-time fanatical Citizen was threatened in public, doxed, then sent death threats, by another backer who's really not happy with the project and hates the shills covering it up or something. The /r/StarCitizen modteam banned the doxxer, who retaliated in messages to the mods and fanatic, making new alts to do it. They got Reddit Admin and Police involved but nothing's been sorted yet.

If you have a problem with the game you are automatically a "goon" so somehow we are responsible for crazy fanatic friendly fire.

quote:

dsmart on Twitter posted:

They have been telling backers putting in for refunds, that they are complaining to and requesting refunds from the WRONG entity [and that customer's contract is with RSI]

quote:

Customer's complaint is addressed to the wrong entity: his contract is with Roberts Space Industries LLC ("RSI"), and we are responding on behalf of that entity.

Sunswipe posted:

It's so adorable that they think Goons have lost control of Star Citizen. Everything CIG does is dictated by us. Hell, the cape thing is merely because we discussed capes in this very thread a while ago. We're in charge, and I can't believe our basic attempts at subterfuge have succeeded.

History Comes Inside! posted:

There is no way people are going to sit and be passengers with nothing to look at in those lovely seats.

They are gonna be standing on clipping through instrument panels and teabagging the pilot for the duration of any journey.

Like how nobody stands still on the boat or zep in wow, you are compelled to start doing poo poo-tier parkour off of and over any part of the vehicle that looks like you could jump on it.

I kind of want to game to come out just to see all the angry spergs losing their poo poo over everyone else not "playing properly" like the Sea of Thieves guys who don't like having their poo poo stolen in their bad game.

Wise Learned Man posted:

posted:

If he wanted to do further research, he'd only need to look at the latest ATV to see that regardless of how he seems to think that SQ42 isn't being worked on, in actuality, it is. We can see the gas cloud tech, the AI for SQ42 and SC and the interiors of the Bengal Carrier (ALL of which are connected with SQ42) being continually worked on.

I like when shitizens use the term "fact-checking," and what they really mean is "taking CIG's bullshit marketing at face value."

Scruffpuff posted:

It's amazing to me that they literally equate a single thing CIG says with "facts." There are very few companies as divorced from reality as CIG is. In fact when CIG says something, there's a 99% chance it's a lie.

Agony Aunt posted:

Unfortunately backers often do this black and white extreme thing to justify their positions.

The classic to my mind is "I'd rather have a quality game later rather than a buggy mess now"

Looks at the current state of the game....

"Erm... you have a buggy mess now."

posted:

I don't know if I count as a whale or not, I've put in about 13,000 USD into the game over these years.

I didn't spend all this money to troll you, I spent it to make this game a reality. I don't buy into the whole ordeal of Chris, his brother and his wife trying to scam us. He is on camera, the guy is exposing himself, promising to make the game he always dreamt of. Do you honestly think he's trying to shell away the money for himself and his brother, this guy who's whole career basically has been making space games. Use your intelligence, think about it. CIG will soon have over FIVE HUNDRED employees. It's late, sure. It didn't go as fast as Chris thought it would, fine. But they are doing their very best to deliver it as fast as they can. Of this there can be no doubt.

I don't throw money into this game because I've already thrown in so much so I'm afraid it will fail. If this game fails, and let's be honest, it might. I will be sad; not angry. Because I know it can fail, I back this game despite that knowledge. I know it can fail. If i lose the money I spent, it will not matter for me financially, only emotionally; because I sooo want to play it.

Been following since the kickstarter, things are not only moving in the right direction, but faster and faster. I'm content.

posted:

Hell, even Derek Smirk does his part, it feels weird to say, but I doubt SC would be as successful as they are without him

Every good hero needs their antagonist, and DS fills that role perfectly.

dsmart on Twitter posted:

Chris and his cohorts have been shopping around for either a buyer or "strategic partner/investor" for Star Citizen.

No takers so far.

Hav posted:

in no particular order, they claimed to have completely working:

1) Flight model
2) Squadron 42 missions
3) Networking, no we haven't, yes we have, no, we haven't. 1600 people in an instance, remember
4) Doors.
5) Gas mixtures. That was a funny claim in the face of 4) occasionally wandering off.
6) 20 million AI agents

The first claim that Crobblers made, that the game was effectively finished and the flight model was working was neatly bookended by the time he sat down to play in front of everyone and the thing crashed.

A lot of dreams died that day.

Virtual Captain posted:

posted:

Gamers move on, thats just life
I was thinking recently, wondering why I have lost my passion for SC. I streamed it a lot and posted many pics of the game showing off its prowess. Then I realised one day, out of the 8 people I signed up with (close friends) 6 have not logged in for over 2 years and the other 1 logs in once per patch.

My advice is not to think about it too hard. That strategy got you this far why change now? You could even end up losing the faith.

Grubby Hobo posted:

Cao Ni Ma posted:

A lot of people have stopped using the "you don't know about video game development" excuse as the patches content continue to suck rear end and they keep getting delayed. Now the faithful have retreated to "We asked for this" as the primary excuse for CIGs incompetence.

What exiting new mental gymnastics await us this year?

Yes, there has been a definite shift. Now it seems the more intense of the backers can't wait to bail on their previous dreams, and say to CIG, in effect "it's OK, break tons of promises, squeeze us like lemons, just please please please give us the game we want." The whole thing seems to be following the Stages of Grief list:

Denial ("We are right and you are wrong")
Anger ("Hater! Why do you even care? Get out of here! I didn't even read your stupid wall of text")
Bargaining <-- We are here
Depression
Acceptance

Bootcha posted:

This bears repeating.

The Titanic posted:

And to tie this to Star Citizen, it's like a sex worker who's done a million rounds, is busy counting all her money from the last Johns she hosed that day in front of you.

You ask, "Do you really love me, Star Citizen?"

She responds in a horse voice around another drag on a cigarette, "Sure baby I love you."

"Are you only going to have sex with me?" You nervously ask, knowing she's got more cum filled holes than a sperm whale.

"I'm only going to gently caress you over."

"What?"

"I'm only going to gently caress you," she says again, cursing under her breath that you're so stupid, but your childlike innocence pays the bills. It's not easy finding people this dumb. "Now get your rear end over here honey!" She dabs out the cigarette in the smoke filled room and turns to face you mostly naked.

You jump up and walk over, smoke racing round you head as you reach your nighttime lover. You stroke her messy, greasy and strangely still hair.

She looks up to you and says, "You ready to have it all, baby?"

You nod, nervously preparing for your time with Star Citizen. It's been... so long since you've had a really good space game and your cherry is ready to pop.

Star Citizen grabs your head and pulls you down to her lap, where her rear end smelling cock slaps you on the face before she pries open your mouth and shoved it inside.

You choke on it for a while before she slides it out and slaps your cheeks with her wet, smelly shaft. She holds on to your hair and pulls it back so you can look her in the eyes.

"I hope you liked that, baby. Gonna cost you though another few hundred bucks. Next time I'll let you buy me a dinner at a restaurant. But don't worry, I'll always have more for you because you're special to me, after all you spent so much money so you could suck my dick I gave you my golden card. You should feel special. Don't you feel special, bitch?"

You nod. Because you do feel special. It's not every day you can be part of a family like this and you really love how you are treated and the rewards you get like being dick-slapped in the face after being lied to. You pay her $750 for the adventure and the promise of something coming soon if you just keep believing!

You're Star Citizen's special boy, after all.

quote:

User submitted bug reports

• 20 minutes before you can even start to do anything , Hello we are here in the 21st century , i'm not trying to load a game with my C64 casette player..
  
  
• OXIGEN TIME GROWS INSTEAD OF DECREASING IN EMPTY SPACE
  
  
• REPEATERS SHOOT THROUGH SOLID ROCK/ASTEROIDS AS IF THEY WHERE NOT THERE
  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkSjYnjRiBE

A Commando posted:

Don't worry about us backers. Six years later we already got something running on our PCs that's more extensive and in many ways more fun than many games fully released nowadays.

Personally, I played the alpha for tens of hours, and I enjoy it more with every update. For the $30 I spent six years ago, I've got more than my money's worth, and I'm gonna get much more down the line.

VictorianQueerLit posted:

quote:

Even IF I were a shill, I wouldn't spend a modicum of the amount of time on this site as I would on Spectrum and/or Reddit, as those would be the larger pool of targeted audience that I would want.

since this is the best source, hands down, for real information on Star Citizen on the entire internet that includes testimonials from actual former employees and leaks from current employees with realistic and logical breakdowns of the realities of the project that this is the best possible place to install a contrarian retard that just makes poo poo up wholesale simply to push a narrative.

A lot of the stuff you say is so wrong that no reasonable person could actually believe it but it probably does wonders when an uninformed observer finds this thread and reads a bunch of "UM ACTUALLY" from you that creates the impression there is actually a debate or that there is some possibility that what you are saying is right.

You post nowhere else on this site and have dedicated years at this point to being brutally owned, thousands of times, with some of the dumbest arguments I've ever seen entered into any debate, in any context. Calling you a shill is actually one of the more generous ways we could describe you and what you do.

VictorianQueerLit posted:

I hope as this poo poo explodes into a supernova of lawsuits that we actually find out about how much money was spent astroturfing online communities and streams over this dead on arrival crysis mod.

posted:

[Hard Talk] A lot of the time, CIG Devs are like... "we'd like to do this". What about "What have we done?"
I watched the latest Calling All Devs, and I'm starting to get disappointed by this language. It's been a constant throughout CIG's history, and it worries me.

"We'd like to accomplish X or Y." "We'll think about this suggestion." "Gotta talk to the other devs." "Not important at the moment, it's on the backlog, tho." "Did I mention backlog?"

So the question is, what has CIG accomplished thus far, and have they been sharing much of those accomplishments with us?

After six years, we've seen certain things, but a lot of people have said, "We'll start seeing more coming since this key tech has been finished"...and it's still fairly far from the truth, going by what has been demonstrated.



I would have hoped to see a lot of the economy subsystems implemented by now, but we're still only seeing the bare-bones of it.

What we have seen more of, though, is new ship concepts.



For a game project that's garnered a lot of press for bringing in a mountain of backer dollars, has five different studios globally, and over 400 employees...

...it feels slow. A lot of the language and content we're seeing from CIG is still on the speculative end of the spectrum, not on the prototyping side.


Are we seeing a repeat of Digital Anvil, something better, or something worse?

posted:

It's pretty clear the game has no solid design docs, planning, or project management and just bumbles around whatever Chris has decided is important each week. And honestly, it's been like this for years.

The main professions are either missing or just barely there, the flight model is poo poo, the engine is riddled with core problems like serious collision and physics issues, and none of this ever seems to make progress while clothing, shopping terminals, dumb poo poo like procedural food gets center stage.

The cutlass and hornet have each been redone a half dozen times while the merchantman is still concept art and suddenly there are tanks and land claims. The star farer is a year old but refueling still does not exist, the reclaimer can be flown but none of its special mechanics are in the game yet.

posted:

Basically, nothing is done that should be done by now, and the pace and approach they are taking means this is a permanent development project until funding cannot sustain it anymore... it's not a goal to finish and ship a product.

We may get a lot more, and we may have fun with what we get, even. But will it ever be the fully-scoped game? No, I don't believe it will.

And that's solely to do with how long it's taking to get anywhere. You can't rush development, but you also cannot extend it indefinitely.

Perhaps Chris was wrong... perhaps technology was not ready to support his vision?

posted:

Almost 13,000 viewers, and this is what "normies" think of Star Citizen

Worth Clicking: https://clips.twitch.tv/CarefulPricklyDelicataWTRuck (video: "[What do I think about Star Citizen?] Star Citizen is.... In life guys, theres something called a stupid tax; and the dumber you are, the more you pay. Do I even really need to connect the dots there?")

posted:

SC is a complex situation. Let the game speak for itself.

SPECTRUM posted:

A Goodbye letter to CIG from a 2012 kickstarter backer - A Rant.

I not only spent 35 dollars for just the basic game package, but I also nearly spent $4,500 on ships and subscription fees in support of this project like millions of other fans have done. And we have spent 6 years defending this project from critics who said that this was a scam and giving free marketing to our friends, families and coworkers saying how great of a game Star Citizen was going to be. And after 6 years, what do we have to show for our efforts? The game looks gorgeous, but the gameplay is hollow! Its like a $100 toy with a huge cool looking Buzz Lightyear box packaging only to open it and discover that all you bought for $100 is a small stick figure. What pisses me off most is your very sketchy business practices! In the beginning of it I also defended it because you needed the money for developement and it was a cool way for players to get in on the action. But after 6 years of this, with nothing but hollow gameplay to show for it, its quickly getting old! You entice players to spend 400 to 700 up to 27,000 to basically cheat and get everything they want for no effort. You know who else does that? EA, Battlefront 2, Destiny 2 and lovely mobile games. The very people we were giving the middle finger to when we backed Star Citizen because Chris Roberts said they would be different and show publishers how cool games can be made ethically. Well...I guess its true: you can be the hero long enough to see yourself become the villain. And that is why I am going to stop defending CIG. You no longer respect our money. Do you know most of us [pour] blood sweat and tears to get the money we have, and you purposefully slap us in the face and tempt us to spend that kind of ridiculous price tag for just 3d objects??? Money we could have used on a newer car, or new PC or our mortgages or paying our student loans or other cool game projects that actually have a lot more content to show for our effort. What do you have to show for our money invested in you? A hollow shell compared to what we were promised. Oh, and you also promised us kickstarter backers that I would be able to get the full Squadron 42 game as a perk for being a kickstarter backer. But now you have sliced that into Episodes so you are going to seriously slice that campaign and say, you want the full story? Well, f... you give me money! And where is that Soundtrack CD that you promised me? hmmm? NO where to be found. why couldn't you just sell the starter ships with basic access for star citizen and the full campaign of squadron 42. Where you CANNOT access the cooler bigger ships unless you spend time in the missions and live that in-game life as the Sci fi character that you always wanted it to be. Because for the past 6 years I have been waiting to play that character that SC promised I could play as (Which was being a bounty hunger) and I probably wont be able to for a while longer at this rate! One big part of it is Chris Roberts management of the project. Hes trying to build everything at once and sometimes backtracking and reworking stuff they had already completed. That kind of wasted time has really hurt the project and its image.

And I don't just blame CIG and Chris for this. We the community have not kept CIG's feet to the fire like we should have. Risking pulling the plug on developement unless we got the game we deserved. CIG no longer answers to us because all we have become is a cult of fanboys who refuse to criticize them at all, and those who do they vilify, ridicule and kick them out of the community like blasphemers. Who does CIG answer to? If there was a publisher who believed in the game, they would have kept CIG accountable, making sure that the game was delivered within a reasonable amount of time and that the gameplay was fun and addictive. They don't have that accountability, so they can just continue milking our pockets holding that carrot over our head that one day they will have the game complete while they continue to pull money out of our wallet. Money I have worked very very hard for. Well, I am no longer following that carrot. I have had it with you CIG. If you refuse to have a fun, additive game by now and all you have to show is a big fancy tech demo, then I am done with you. I hope other players start to realize whats going on and pull out of the game. Maybe then you will actually care about this project and narrow its features so you can actually finish what you started! And I hate saying this because I have been devoted to Star Citizen for 6 years! And all I see is they have become the very villain that I was giving the middle finger to back in 2012. It makes me sad and I don't want to be apart of its decline anymore. Goodbye Chris Roberts and CIG. I hope you wake up one day and change your business practices to not be so shady and complete this drat game. Because at this rate, Ill be an old man with a walking stick by the time you do!

Beet Wagon posted:

It really is loving remarkable how many brains this game has broken without even launching.

VictorianQueerLit posted:

It's so loving autistic and dumb it's hard to get your mind around but when you or I think "Simulated decompression" we might point to any other game that lets you get blown into space and have your character die. Chris Roberts is selling actual blood filled circulatory systems that need correct ratios of gases to function. He has been swearing he is going to create The Matrix for seven years now and nerds want to believe it so bad they've gone literally insane.

All of this poo poo has been completely impossible from day 1 and I've long held the opinion that if we had quantum computers he would have just upped the stakes on his sales pitch to include modelling every single atom in a spaceship to sell the world's most perfect simulation.

BULBASAUR posted:

I was one of the goon greymarket traders. At the time when SC had really huge hype and a reasonable chance of being real the ship market was complete madness. Bitcoin was becoming popular, but why bother with cryto when you could buy a $400 digital good and be guaranteed to flip it for $500 in a few months? You could do it through paypal or ebay and even have seller protection while you did it. Some ships that you could buy for a few hundred sold for thousands of dollars.

Goons started to cash out of the game and the greymarket traders were how they did it. We started to sell ships as favors, especially when people started to see the writing on the wall, but it grew into a side business. I think I helped goons get back about ~$20,000. I personally made about $7,000 from their tips and my own trades. It was fun.

As the hype faded the margins started to go down. RSI started to make it harder to trade and refunds became a topic people were pushing in the community. It was starting to take too much work for me to care, and I knew a market crash was inevitable due to the hype going away, so I stopped trading and cashed out. These days you can still flip ships, but it's nowhere near as lucrative and the risks are way higher.

Trillhouse posted:

This poo poo is so weird. Like we joke about it being a cult but it’s really not far from the truth. The fierce defensiveness of SC fans is literally insane. Even the ones that aren’t sending rape/death threats are either blowing up about it being a false flag (lol) or circling the wagons to protect the rest of the community.

For SC diehards, posting is a battle and they are the soldiers on the front-line. It’s so bizarre.

big nipples big life posted:

A Commando posted:

A Commando posted:

My name is {{DOXX FREE GUARANTEE}} and I've been trying to build a crashed spaceship in my basement to live stream gaming from. I play a game called Star Citizen and I want to enhance the experience. Money has gotten tight as I am getting married soon, and I don't want the soon to be wife ripping my head off for spending all our money on this.

Scruffpuff posted:

10 For the Architect

Question: Will prostitutes be allowed in your hotel?

Answer: Well, umm, ERRRR, well obviously you might, uhhhh, you might want to, err, you know, maybe you have RELIGIOUS REASONS to not want, uhh, prost... pross.. prosstt.... hookers in your HOTEL, you know, maybe making NOISES while you're sleeping, and uhh, for those people I'd say there will DEFINITELY BE LIMITS to whether or not you can have hookers, or escorts, or STUFF LIKE THAT.

But uhh, for those tenants who might have a WIFE WHO SAYS NO, because maybe he HASN'T WASHED and smells like, really bad, or maybe a situation where your girlfriend is RIDING THE COTTON PONY, or stuff like that, uhhh, uhmmm, so definitely in those cases we want something where maybe you can CALL THE FRONT DESK and, uhh, maybe they go ahead and SEND SOMEONE UP, or have some kind of DEAL with another hotel, so, uhhh, there will DEFINITELY BE SOMETHING LIKE THAT, it's something we've talked about, it's something we want to do.

Zaphod42 posted:

bind culling won't even solve the problem of having 30 actual ships so close to each other they really do need to be rendered and interact with each other all the time.

The game simply doesn't work as intended lmao. Bind culling matters for performance with a huge universe, but it doesn't make a difference when players are expecting to fly with 30 of their buddies constantly.

Nobody spent any time engineering this thing, its just stuff being dumped on Unreal/Lumberyard and then kludging some kind of executable out of the result. Its never going to work that way.

thatguy posted:

Star Citizer: if you want to have fun buy something else

Controls posted:

Prospecting for Deposits: To scan for deposits, use the "ping" mechanic. Enter the ship's scanning mode (TAB) then hold and release RMB to scan. Any minable deposits will appear highlighted with a UI targeting bracket around them. Note: A ping will also temporarily increase passive radar detection range.

Scanning Deposits: Enter mining mode (RCTRL + TAB) and aim the mining reticle at the rock you wish to scan/mine. Your ship will automatically begin the scanning process and revea/ the contents of the rock.

Fracturing: Use LMB to activate the ship's mining laser. Keep the 'Rock Energy Level" inside the optimal window (green) by adjusting the 'Laser Throttle" using the mouse wheel. Once the 'Rock Energy Level" is inside the optimal window the 'Fracturing Sensor" bar will begin to increase and once at 100% the rock will break apart into smaller chunks. Chunks that can be further shattered/mined will highlight orange when targeted whereas chunks that are now extractable will highlight purple.

When the "Rock Energy Leve/" bar exceeds the optimal window and goes into the red, the "Overcharge Sensor" bar will begin to increase. If the "Overcharge Sensor" bar goes to 100%, the rock will explode violently damaging the player's ship and destroying all extractable material.

Extracting Ore: To extract ore from the purple highlighted bits of rock, switch from 'Fracture Mode" to 'Extraction Mode" using RMB, then using LMB to activate the extraction tractor beam. The "Cargo Capacity" bar will begin to increase as the ore is extracted to the ship's cargo.

Selling Ore: Ore can be sold at GrimHex, Levski, and Port Olisar at specific kiosks located near the Admire Clerk desks. Interact with these kiosks (F), select the Prospector from the top left ship drop down menu then select "Sell to Refinery"

kw0134 posted:

Mining is one of mechanics that, to be fidelitious, requires nearly zero abstraction. Stick your implement into the deposit, retrieve a quantity of material, repeat as necessary. From a game perspective that's boring, so most games jazz it up. Complications are tossed in to make it something you might actually do for fun.

But CIG hosed it up. This is trivially complex and requires a tedious amount of micromanagement. Other games make it "exciting" by embedding it in the context of the larger world; you might have to do it while in a dangerous environment. Or it's part of a much larger profession chain that allows the player to anticipate the end product. Or perhaps the problem is locating, arriving at, and securing the site which makes the actual mining a simple task since the journey itself was the hard part. There are many variants, but it's always part of a much larger whole.

This implementation is terrible. Mining is never exciting by itself, and even its pointless busywork can't be justified on the grounds of realism since current practice is to shove everything into a smelter and see what floats above the slag. There's no other game system that interacts with it besides the cash store. It's busy work with literally no pay off. Even when CIG moves forward, the"game" moves backwards.

TheAgent posted:

I would have been very surprised to see FPS AI in 3.2

its broken as gently caress and needs a ton of work to actually function, especially because it requires FPS AI to fly the ships and be able to enter/exit them

its a huge problem because now the space pirates in space will all need complex AI, because if their ship is disabled they are supposed to be able to defend the ship or EVA out and attack you

its a massive, massive job that's been in a loving nightmare state for 4+ years

it's been handed off to over 3 different teams over that time, and each one has quit without showing any real progress on it

Scruffpuff posted:

quote:

If this was any other game the community would be breaking out the pitchforks. And yet, as usual, CIG get a free pass, nay, even praise for it.

It's why people call it a cult. Check any doomsday cult - they don't get shaken out of it when the apocalyptic date comes and goes, they have all different reactions. Some get angry. Some collapse. Some just latch onto a new date. They almost never snap out of it, because to become a member of a cult like that in the first place, you usually have a baseline cognitive defect that facilitates it.

The remaining backers can't wake up. These are the people you leave plugged into the Matrix.

tuo posted:

I can't wait to spend 150 dollars to be privileged enough to fire a mining laser at a rock in the alpha version of a game which should actually exist so as much people as possible can playtest firing a mining laser at a rock.

If you think CIG can't sink any lower in milking their community, Chris just goes "hold my beer"...

XK posted:

Actually, you're right. It's moon mining. It's hard to tell from the dark video. Shale would also never exist on a moon without sedimentary processes. And you mine shale by lopping off sheets of it.

And

Why the gently caress did they choose shale for one of their first mining resources? Really? Shale? Glad I have a mining space ship so I can get loving shale.

Quavers posted:

Evocati leaks

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6lbra9 (video: what mining looks like)

The Titanic posted:

Promises are only an edit away from being nothing at all.

Star Citizen the mmorpg has not even started to be developed yet, they are struggling to build a limited player, single server arena game.

Squadron 42 has potentially the "best shot" at being realized, since its only a single player game. Erin Roberts has also gone on record as saying this is his main focus, and immediately following that is the next episode of Squadron 42. Star Citizen is potentially not even on the road map.

Nunes posted:

I love the gamepad resting on his junk while using a hotas/keyboard. Is he trying to enjoy some rumblepack action?


This picture really reminded me of a behavior my ex had where she would need to get a picture of her doing a thing or being into a thing, where in reality, she has never done or was interested in said thing. For example if I was at the archery range with her, she would need a picture of holding a bow like she was shooting and all the details about it would be just wrong. She needed these pictures however to show everyone on social media how cool and good she is... just like how Star Citizen is cool and good.

SPERMCUBE.ORG posted:

3D glasses with a VR headset? My god... That's like six D's!
This man is a visionary!

SPECTRUM posted:

2018 is Where it all Began.

Previous years were spent building the company, the tools, and various methodologies. The hangars, SM, AC, and even the initial PU was for community benefit and early proof of concepts. Now the actual Persistent Universe (the game) is officially underway.

Quavers posted:

posted:

I have over 3,000 dollars pledged since Nov 2013. With that out of the way let me say that my faith was misplaced and I regret supporting this project. While the money equates to less than I have spent on coffee in that time I still feel like every dollar has been wasted. The lack of progress overall is shameful. It has been 5 years and it is still a broken mess hiding behind the alpha designation. This isn't cute anymore, CIG needs to poo poo or get off the pot.

posted:

I think what really tips me over the edge is that they shamelessly roll out new concepts and implement new ships when some of the ones they sold 5 years ago still aren't even close to finished. And maybe not even started yet.

DapperDon posted:

The way his hand goes into Garriots face makes my blood boil. How disrespectful can one man be?

Beef Hardcheese posted:

My favorite part is right around 1:12 when you can see the change in Gariott's face as he realizes that no, Chris isn't leading in to some joke, or taking the piss. He actually does not understand what he is talking about.

Zaphod42 posted:

Okay I thought I knew what bind culling and object streaming and all that referred to but I've seen people interpret it different ways and something was bothering me so I went and looked up more or less wtf CIG is even talking about...

...these are basically all just networking optimizations... even if they complete them they won't change the frame rate. At all. It'll make the game more responsive if there's network lag, but it will absolutely not modify frame rates.

So even IF they deliver it in some patch not now because they suck, it still won't fix the problem of the game running 15fps.
They made a bunch of ridiculously high resolution assets in an existing off-the-shelf engine without any idea what they were aiming for and made something that simply doesn't run on modern hardware.
I guess if they delay the game until 2028 maybe then we'll have machines so fast that it'll render at 60 fps, and that's why they're not concerned about performance

Neither bind culling nor object container streaming refer to render culling. They're networking, they improve server performance.
And if the game is running at 15fps not because of graphics but because its waiting on network packets, then CIG have done something truly unholy.

E: both terms are horrible misnomers that don't really do what they say they do. Its seriously buzzword design. Maybe somebody at CIG misunderstood and thinks they're doing more than they are. Either way, these are all network optimizations and there's no reason you need to do that before implementing asset streaming or physics culling on the client.

Hav posted:

I think you’re falling into the trap of assuming that when the rubber meets the road, it’s attached to a wheel, hub, transmission, powertrain and engine, rather than just a jpeg of rubber.

Scruffpuff posted:

This is the trap most professionals fall into when trying to figure out what the gently caress is happening with Star Citizen. They're like a mechanic trying to figure out why the car won't start, "Maybe it's this, maybe it's this" and it's their competency that makes it impossible for them to actually see the real problem.

A professional mechanic won't see why the car isn't starting, because a mechanic would assume the car is otherwise ok, and would not expect it to be a JPEG of a car with a beehive where the engine should be, no gas tank, Twizzlers sticking out of the beehive as "wires", and a watermelon in the back with a piece of cardboard stuck to it that says "Fuel."

This project is a loving hacked-together cargo-cult joke from stem to stern. There's nothing to troubleshoot.

GreenElephant posted:

I've been seeing a lot of "Hey, only 20 people are working on ships, the rest are working on mechanics/etc so it ain't hurting speed at all, fools" recently and want to add my two cents on this.

Dear citizens reading this, it isn't true. In fact, the 50+ half done flyable ships are a constantly increasing millstone around CIG's neck. In addition to the hours of design, modeling, tech debt, QA, textures and effect works on the ships themselves, here are the bigger problems caused by the continual required reworks:

Code complication: Every time a coder makes even a small change in a ship mechanic, for example, changing how thruster values work or adding a new tag to a ship zone this means going through EVERY old ship and updating, testing, and merging into the latest version. This probably means hours per ship for even the smallest change and much more for larger modifications.

Backward asset compatibility: Retouching & testing every ship asset to fix something before a release usually doesn't happen as it's too time consuming, especially when older ships won't even export with the latest version of the tools because nobody has updated it to use the new 3.0 control panels or whatever – so the coder is asked to continue supporting the "old way" as well.

You end up with multiple versions of code doing the same things, item system v1, v2, etc. The code turns into unmanageable spaghetti because you can never make completely breaking changes unless you're prepared to release something with only a single ship or two being functional.

Unfortunately, releasing an update that doesn't include most ships (or having a year with no updates...) while baseline technology is still being figured out would make a big impact on funding, so can't do that.

Programmers start to avoid breaking changes completely and look for quick/cheap hacks that won't interrupt existing systems to avoid another re-work. Nobody wants to be the person to say “ok, we can fix collision, but we'll have to create a new collision mesh style for every room” so you get stuck in kind of a local maxima where true engine fixes can't happen and you band-aide everything.

Daztek posted:

https://i.imgur.com/NkQNzQ3.gifv

https://i.imgur.com/9GChClQ.gifv

posted:

They said 100 star systems complete by 2 years ago. Even if that was ambitious, their current completion level is a joke. They need a Microsoft to come in at this point again and start cracking the whip because Chris has demonstrated before that’s he’s absolutely incapable of making a game on his own.
They have a very talented team but the captain is drunk at the helm.

juggalo baby coffin posted:

Folks, I'm talking about Dwarf Fortress. The Ultimate Auteur (and Autism) game.

It's super detailed, it simulates loving everything from air concentration to the boiling temperature of dwarf eyelashes. It doesn't have a story, it's more of a hardcore universe sim sandbox. It generates fantastic stories for everyone who manages to get into it. And it's the product of one (well two, but primarily one) man's fevered imagination.

It took me a while to put together, but I think what Chris Roberts wants to make is AAA Dwarf Fortress in Space. Or that's what he wanted to do before he decided to just start stealing money. The thing that really clued me in to it is the loving argon value. What other game in existence has an argon value for every single tile in the game? Dwarf Fortress. What other game spends tons of development time on crazy little systems like procedurally generated meals? Dwarf Fortress.

But here's the whole thing: Dwarf Fortress didn't start out fantastically complex. It didn't have argon values, freezing temperatures of dwarf blood, or even a Z axis when it first became available. It was a fairly simple ascii game, but it still created great stories. The systems that were most important for those stories were in there. The core gameplay loop was there.

Scruffpuff posted:

Chris is not coming at it backwards, so much as he has no idea how to come at it in the first place. Ideas are implemented in the order that they come into his head. He has no vision and no plan. He has no idea what the game should become. He knows to imitate what he's seen in other games, but he doesn't understand what he's seen or why it's in those games in the first place.

He's basically putting a pile of carbon, water, magnesium, and other basic organic minerals in a pile on the ground and not understanding why it hasn't turned into a tiger yet.

TheAgent posted:

quote:

quote:

RIP Star Citizen

Starfield is the end of it

I remember this being said about Mass Effect: Andromeda

I mean everything should kill star citizen but its backers are too loving stupid to die

Beet Wagon posted:

Make no mistake, Starfield will not kill the unholy, shambling corpse that is Star Citizen. The faithful will continue to fuel its creation until the day Chris himself throws in the towel. After all, all Chris has to do is promise to deliver whatever Starfield doesn't (capital ship combat? Shale mining?) and they'll stay. But the post launch market for something like Squadron (the sales Chris plans to use to reinvigorate Star Citizen development) just took a huge hit.


However, what Starfield will do (and this is why it's so funny) is come out first, and further cement the idea that Star Citizen is the knockoff in the brains of the average game-buying dude. Their post-launch market is vaporizing right before their eyes.

The problem is Chris knows he needs fresh milk. His plan was to launch Squadron first and use the funds to finish Star Citizen proper, and that plan just took a big hit regardless of whether Starfield is even good or not.

Beer4TheBeerGod posted:

Starfield will not kill SC. What is dead may never die. Infinity War didn't kill SQ42, it just made it irrelevant. What Starfield will do (assuming it comes out next year which I would expect given typical release cycles) is just be more competition. Something else for people to compare CIG products to and wonder where all the money and time went. SC won't be out next year, so once again Chris Roberts will have yet another IP to steal from.

Golli posted:

Star Citizen will never evolve into something objectively good, all attempts to eradicate it (even nuking it from orbit) will fail, but only a crazy person would claim that it is what all other games should aspire to.

Star Citizen is the cockroach of space games.

TheAgent posted:

quote:

But to the point. The next patch is the day. Actually, probably the patch after that. If you’re seeing this, it means you saw one of the 40 different videos about game development where there doesn't seem to be a lot of game development happening. That's thanks to Chris's vision for Squadron 42, a version of the future where Asian Space Turtles are building a spacewall, where wearing four to six leather jackets at once is en vogue, where drone, slaved weapon systems, AI, and most of today's readily available technology is in pieces. And, while this world is full of boring gameplay elements like mopping, mining, drink mixing, passenger flying, don’t let the Hairy Roberts spill on you while traveling at speeds less than a World War 2 jet. Star Citizen and Squadron 42 are a mix of some weird multiplayer and singleplayer and we're not quite sure how it's all going to fit together. Is it an action-RPG, a spacesim or what, exactly? You’ll be able to create your own character and… actually, will you be able to create your own character? We have no loving idea.

Zaphod42 posted:

Lmao I'm drinking and watching the last around the verse because gently caress it and they're talking about how hard it is to render fog, because its so much harder than normal things, and "a naive approach would have individual voxels"

Fog is like super easy to render wtf

I guess they do have a pretty nice cloud / nebula rendering system going on but its really really really easy to just pump a ton of particles around scaled based on distance, poo poo you could render the whole thing in a shader but I guess that wouldn't be up to the insane level of fidelity that croberts has dreamt

Seriously though no PC is gonna be able to run this game smoothly, they're basically designing everything on movie CG budget without any concern about performance


"One thing we always struggle with is, to make interesting space environments"

Literally just said that verbatim

Colostomy Bag posted:

Star Citizen is absurd on so many levels one simply can't comprehend it all at once.

Scruffpuff posted:

Star Citizen is thousands of disjointed, submoronic, unworkable ideas, all tossed together into a poo poo stew, being stirred by an inept team, and paid for by society's castoffs.

Daztek posted:

*jumps into death laser* *nothing happens*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaYlk7sDMCo

posted:

Somehow, CIG stumbled onto this notion of selling scope creep, and selling DLC before there's a game for the DLC to sit in... and now it's more profitable for string us along, selling DLC, than it is for them to actually turn a product out the door.

It occurred to me that the only way CIG will ever get its poo poo together, that it will ever feature lock, that it will ever get a product out the door, is if you make it financially worse for them to continue without delivering a product.

SPECTRUM posted:

Completely broken game. 50 Euro for nothing. DONT BUY

Bought a starter package for 50 Euro. So what do you i got ?

A ship and nice graphics.

AND:

1. Countless crashes
2. Countless game braking bugs
3. loving bad fps perfomance for a game that is 5 year in development
4. Lost cargo and ingame money EVERY loving TIME after crash - this is loving serious?
5. NOTHING to do - empty universe. Yes of course you can do missions, but hey they dont loving work - because of the countless bugs.
6. Cant communicate with the other players - wtf is this

Hav posted:

quote:

I've had some tangential relationship with AGILE development in my job, but one thing I don't seem to get with CIG is :
Who is the "product owner" a.k.a the customer representative ?
Is it Chris?
In AGILE , the product owner is the person with the "vision", but also, AFAIK , the person who interacts with the (key representatives of the) customer.
So no, "my vision, my game, my way or the highway" doesn't fly in AGILE. In fact, the whole reason why the customer is willing to accept the AGILE methodology is because they get more say/input in the product, AND they get often releases so they can provide frequent feedback. Often ,here, means two week (lel)., not quarterly releases.

Not everyone uses pigs (involved stakeholders) or chickens (associated stakeholders) when figuring out the customer or involvement. Note that hiding behind technical sounding terms is stock in trade for SC as well, talking about things like serialized variables or atomic update of structures give the impression of being all cutting edge for people that haven't actually done it. For example, the most transparent development ever will talk about 11/22 key items completed, but not the actual items themselves. It's fairly obvious that they're moving towards the light spec model of single line stories, but how this applies across the board, I have no clue.

quote:

massivelyop: THE STAR CITIZEN SUBREDDIT IS IN THE MIDDLE OF A MASSIVE FLAMEWAR AS A BIG BACKER LOSES FAITH

the current drama brewing on Reddit isn’t about the Crytek lawsuit, endless alpha delays, subber perks, feature creep, refunds, or ridiculous whaling. Nope. It’s about losing hope.

a massive thread has racked up 1500 upvotes from the Star Citizen Reddit community, as players weigh in on a long concern post from a fellow backer with $4500 in the game.

posted:

you get attacked vitriolically if you point out that CIG seem to have an inability to feature lock anything, or that when you say something is ‘right around the corner’ in 2016, people may be frustrated when it doesn’t come in 2017, and you can’t even put out a roadmap to it in 2018, for fear of accidentally showing backers just how far away SQ42 still is from done.

posted:

I missed my stakeholder facing goals as consistently as CIG/RSI do, I’d be fired, and rightly so.

the community is alternately nodding along in agreement or roasting the OP

Virtual Captain posted:

June Set 3



Game Credits
Crying Old Woman: Sandi Gardiner

lofi posted:

It's looked that way forever.

They're probably meant to fall off but the physics is broken.

lofi posted:

If I'd sunk the price of a new car into a computer game, I'd be pretty reluctant to give it up. I imagine a bigger danger than revolt is the feeling that 'I've done my share, now it's the turn of the people who weren't smart enough to buy in when I did'.

Taintrunner posted:

IT OPENS WITH A lovely QUOTE

PIANO DINGS

EMPTY SCENERY. A SPOACESHIP!!!

DUDE STANDING ON ROCK

BAD SPACESHIPS!!

SOME SORT OF BATTLE SCENE??

CYBERPUNK PLANET LANDING?

SPACESHIP CRASH!!!

HALLWAY GUNFIGHT!

VIOLENCE!!!!

all of this is cinematics

Pash posted:

My god that trailer, "Captured in Engine" my rear end. We know the game can't run that smoothly with a quarter of the ships on the screen at any one time. That trailer is lying through its teeth as it implies even half of that is doable now.

Scruffpuff posted:

So my wife just watched the E3 trailer and all I could hear was "this is complete bullshit - 0.01% of this poo poo isn't even in the game - there is no game" and I can't disagree.

So I checked out the YouTube video and let me tell you how surprised I wasn't to see it was titled "Alpha 3.2 Teaser". This fits in nicely with the passive lies CIG has been telling from day one.

See when you make a trailer, and you call that trailer "Alpha 3.2 Teaser", what you're implying is that everything in that trailer will be in the 3.2 patch. Instead, they showed 100% faked shots of things, none of which are in the game, and as icing on the cake, there's technically no game for them to be in.

How CIG is getting away with this year after year is absolutely mind-boggling. All these trailers are complete fantasy of things that someone at CIG thinks might look cool in a game or something. Does CIG know that game development isn't a constant stream of "hey here's some cool ideas we had in graphic form" but that eventually you have to start designing and eventually, worst-case-scenario, coding a game???

Or does Chris think CGI trailers eventually just turn into the real thing like the chick from Weird Science?

Beet Wagon posted:

lmao I hadn't seen the chatroll yet, god drat. Imagine being the guy making this knowing your life's work is a loving laughingstock all through the industry. If CR isn't at supervillain levels of "I'll show them! I'll show them all!" yet, he's gotta be close.

Agony Aunt posted:

Nice, someone did a breakdown of SC's dishonest trailer

quote:

0:14 Space scenery not in game. Also that planet, I can't tell if it's Daymar or not and I don't think contrails go that far.

0:25 Derelict space Javelin not in game.

0:26 I've never seen this orbital in game, only in trailers.

0:28 None of this would ever be happening in game. I'm not sure if this location is in game (because there's too much emptiness to explore, not because I haven't played). It looks like a cave so I'm assuming no.

0:31 Another Javelin wreckage not in game. The Blade isn't either but that is 3.2 content.

0:34 Same orbital from 0:26

0:36 ArcCorp, not in game until 3.4 at best.

0:39 600i not in yet, possibly in 3.2 but not favorable. The Cutlass looks like the old model so also not in.

0:42 I don't think that armor is in game.

0:43 There definitely aren't that many NPCs in stores.

0:49 A montage of action which looks cool but would never happen in game begins.

0:59 Cover mechanics aren't in game.

1:03 I don't think either the armor or the suit are in game for players.

1:08 Hurricane not in game (scheduled for 3.2).

1:15 Situation which would never happen in game at a derelict which isn't in game while characters use a bunch of animations not in game.

1:16 Capital bridge which isn't in game plus lots of SQ42 outfits which aren't in game.

1:20 A ton of capitals which aren't in game.

posted:

"Your Universe is Waiting." That's bullshit, no it isn't half the stuff in the trailer is not anywhere near in game.

The marketing department is actively destroying what little remains of the projects reputation and they are setting CIG up for legal problems down the road by spewing misleading and dishonest assertions in pursuit of ever more money.

Chris needs to reign in Marketing, Stop micro managing everything and focus on making a game, not on selling the idea of a game. People Like Sean Tracy, Brian Chambers, Erin Roberts and Mark Abent need to be able to Tell Chris and Sandi "No, we cannot do that, we have too much in the backlog" in a binding way. Core systems get pushed and pushed and pushed back, central mechanics are only in their conceptual stage, there is NO UNIVERSE waiting, there is one planet, three moons and one planetoid. There is NO GAME YET, STOP SAYING THERE IS AND STOP SELLING IT LIKE THERE IS.

quote:

Kotaku UK: Latest Star Citizen Trailer Shows A Lot of Not Much

The legend 'in engine' footage was watermarked on the entire trailer for Star Citizen, which really raises eyebrows when what you're showing is quite clearly not the experience of playing the game. Anyway, whatever: this is our latest look at Star Citizen, a game the subject of an enormous Kotaku UK investigation and over which many questions still hang.