Potato Salad posted:

Store Citizen: The only moral refund is my refund

Beet Wagon posted:

So what's the difference between someone trying to get a refund today and my refund? What's the date cutoff after which no refunds should be allowed because it won't sufficiently damage the lives of "stupid" people?

Mr.Tophat posted:

Indeed, refund Star Citizen today, they need a second, third and fourth fund from you dear backer!

Scruffpuff posted:

Well that's an argument we could have until the end of time. This entire "development" was basically an episode of Fawlty Towers from beginning to end. At what point during the episode did Basil go "too far?"

Who loving knows. What I do know is that in July 2018 if someone's only now thinking "hey, what a minute, something's not quite right..." then yeah, that's some down-home stupidity right there with the crazy poo poo CIG's been pulling for years. Stuff so insane normal people don't even believe it until you show proof.

Beet Wagon posted:

Of course, the people that you're seeing attempt a refund today are the last ones out of the ballroom well after the ship hit the iceberg, but I can't understand this mentality where people are going "Oh they 'woke up' too late, they deserve to get hosed."

Does Verticals deserve to get hosed? Yeah. Montoya? Sure, I hope he loses everything and then some. But some dude who wasn't paying attention, or didn't understand, or hell even just had a different "gently caress this" button than I did, I can't see how you can in good conscience say "No, you know what, gently caress that guy for even trying. He should have listened to the insane blowhard telling him it's too late and there's nothing he can do."

Maybe if Derek had taken CIG to court one of the 57 times he promised he would, disgruntled backers wouldn't have to be throwing themselves from the clocktower in an attempt to get the media to notice them. But he didn't, so here we are.

quote:

Its a cult, a big old feedback loop.

When I first started reading about the game I bought the $60 package and scoffed at buying the $80 or $120 or $180 packages.

A couple months later and after being around the community so much, the idea of spending more was normalized to me. Plus, I would JUST spend $40 more and I could get a cooler ship. Plus the game might not be fully funded, I have to help out and get it to be self published instead of letting EA or some rear end in a top hat company publish it!

So now I'm at the $120 bracket.

A couple months go by and I'm still fully involved in the community and the idea of spending more than $120 is super normalized to me. People are spending thousands, it's pretty typical to spend more!

Now I'm buying a package that dosent even come with a ship.

This repeats a couple of times and I'm sitting at $500 spent.

Since nothing new was happening with the game, I stop following the community and i realize after a while that holy poo poo, I've spent $500 on jpegs of internet spaceships for a game that's fully funded and is three years late.

Luckily this was before the refund policy change so I got one no problem.

It's weird how it gets you. When the game was first starting out there were all these hype videos trying to recruit people. They were selling people on a dream. They pulled every single cord they could, everything from "Chris's dream can't be complete if we aren't self published, we don't want the evil publishers to interfere" and stuff like how people dreamed of a proper space sim for decades.

Then they talk up each ship and they put out brochures about them and write up really excellent pieces on how the ship is going to fly. Then the community talks like they actually own the ships IRL, talking about how awesome it is owning X ship is even though only the hanger module was out at the time. On top of that, the beginning ship (at the time) was pretty trash and is literally bad at everything, so flying it feels lame when everyone's flying around and monster machines that look super badass.

Then there's the manufactured rarity as some ships only go on sale at certain times. You feel like you're missing out if you don't get LTI or you don't get that rare $200 ship.

The same thing happened to a pair of my friends who bought in at the same time I did. One followed literally the exact same path I did and ended up with over $240 bought. He eventually got a refund as well when he realized he was struggling to pay school bills and he'd had essentially an interest free loan tied up with CIG for multiple years.

It's so weird not noticing it happening to yourself. It's truly cultlike there. Everything gets normalized to you because everyone's constantly talking about spending their money. When people are talking about how they asked the concierge service some questions about the game, putting in another $100 seems like nothing.

Scruffpuff posted:

Is that really how low you set the bar for intellect? You're going to tell me, without irony, that the average person can be taken in by this farce? The average person?

Scruffpuff posted:

Well that's an argument we could have until the end of time. This entire "development" was basically an episode of Fawlty Towers from beginning to end. At what point during the episode did Basil go "too far?"

Who loving knows. What I do know is that in July 2018 if someone's only now thinking "hey, what a minute, something's not quite right..." then yeah, that's some down-home stupidity right there with the crazy poo poo CIG's been pulling for years. Stuff so insane normal people don't even believe it until you show proof.

trucutru posted:

The average person where? And I'm not even talking about intelligence here, some places are just incredibly more trusting (and great targets for scams) than others.

Beet Wagon posted:

Like I said, seems like an awful lot of people sitting in a lifeboat (or in fairness to some of you who never pledged, back on shore) debating the merits of the latecomers trying to grab a door so they don't drown.

Beet Wagon posted:

IDK man I gotta disagree with you there just in general terms. I mean you are absolutely not wrong, there are a lot of stupid people invested in Star Citizen. But we're looking at it through a hosed up lens. Most people, honestly, haven't even been paying attention. poo poo, every time an article gets posted to /r/games there's dozens of people who go "Holy poo poo I just remembered I backed this, what the hell happened?"

Like I said, seems like an awful lot of people sitting in a lifeboat (or in fairness to some of you who never pledged, back on shore) debating the merits of the latecomers trying to grab a door so they don't drown.

Hav posted:

Gonna deadpan this a bit; products live and die these days on promotion. If they signed any kind of deal, they’d both be talking about it. Deals come with expectations. CiG does not match expectations, they never have. I’d be surprised if they walk away clean from any of their contracts because they have form; their CEO has done it before and will do it again.

All of the sidling up to ‘Amazon’ means nothing, if you produce anything worthwhile, they’d just aquire you,

And ultimately it’s still an off-the-shelf first person engine commoditized by the largest retail disruptor to take advantage of the multi-billion dollar games market by giving ground floor entrance to bedroom developers to poo poo out their stuff on steam.

It’s not a space game engine.

Baxta posted:

Has anyone bothered to rip models out of SC yet? It'd be fun to make a little tool around game with amusing bugs to entertain myself (I have no artistic talent whatsoever)

Mr.Tophat posted:

Debating the merits? We're taking bets on the shore and cracking jokes as bank accounts crumble under the weight of "go on, just one more ship." We're wondering if they are going to get the ship they really need, said lifeboats, and if they remember being told six months ago, "get a refund while you can, this project is titantic," as they scramble for a door that requires a keycard.

Potato Salad posted:

Store Citizen: The only moral refund is my refund

Quavers posted:

Scruffpuff posted:

I'm not saying they shouldn't get refunds. I'm saying I'm not gonna shed any tears if they don't.

Besides, for Chris to reap the whirlwind as he deserves, there have to be victims that were hurt financially from the scam. It's a sad state of affairs but a real one: in the U.S., nobody ever does anything to prevent harm. We wait until people are hurt, then we react. Consider their sad fates the cost of justice.

Baxta posted:

Dont make me have to put \s

Has anyone bothered to rip models out of SC yet? It'd be fun to make a little tool around game with amusing bugs to entertain myself (I have no artistic talent whatsoever)

AbstractNapper posted:

What's the story for this one? Why was it taken down?

Quavers posted:

trucutru posted:

Because there comes a point for some companies where it makes more sense to slap other people with a fat wad of bills and pay for their lovely work than to waste your time organizing the teams and so on required to do that job instead. Time is of the essence here, not money. (Of course, in the case of a Chris Roberts production they'll also get hosed in the time department, but maybe they got conned too? who knows.)

Baxta posted:

Dont make me have to put \s

Has anyone bothered to rip models out of SC yet? It'd be fun to make a little tool around game with amusing bugs to entertain myself (I have no artistic talent whatsoever)

Scruffpuff posted:

I'm not saying they shouldn't get refunds. I'm saying I'm not gonna shed any tears if they don't.

Morphix posted:

I got curious as well and did some googling, looks like it's possible but one may need to update a tool?

https://forums.starcitizenbase.com/topic/7018-tutorial-getting-star-citizen-ships-into-3d-rendering-programs-with-pictures/

Twyst posted:

"Being stupid absolutely must come at some cost, or everyone suffers - guilty and innocent alike. In this case, the collapse of the game and the loss of their funds is the hurt their stupidity brings them."

But that's exactly what you did say lol

Beet Wagon posted:

So this is basically just Star Citizen right?

e: gently caress you Daz I'm leaving mine

Daztek posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3HphgSn0o4