Mr.Tophat posted:

When all this is over, I'd love to know a final scorecount for this debacle in SA.

Number of bans, probations, new-regs, refugees, custom avatars, that sort of thing.

AP posted:

That video is great, he managed to get through an airlock, find his ship, use the lift to enter it, climb a ladder, open a door, find the pilot seat, all with no points of reference and everything being invisible.

The bug looks more fun that the current normal gameplay, at least he's puzzle solving.

AP posted:

Jobbo_Fett posted:

You stop being a person and become a ship

Chalks posted:

Yeah, that's exactly what I thought when I saw this too. The environment isn't rendering, only player characters are visible. The ship is invisible... initially.

At the very least there is some sort of state change going on. I'd love to know exactly what's going on under the hood.

Lime Tonics posted:

I think something is wrong with their forums, my perma-deleted account is back?

Not good.

Edit : no, it's still deleted but I can sign in? weirdness.

Chalks posted:

I've got some chap on twitter who refers to himself as a "freelancer" asking me questions about it:

https://twitter.com/WilliamUsherGB/status/702644634065960961

Looks like he's a bit of a gamergater but I guess if he wants to write an article on this then all power to him.


One thing I do want to make clear is that I don't think there's any legal issue here with what CIG did. They're a private entity and I used their messaging service after agreeing to their TOS. They're entirely within their legal rights to read my PMs and to ban me for discussing consumer laws.

I just think it's morally hosed up that they're doing this and I think people should know about it.

Beer4TheBeerGod posted:

Same here. I wonder if it has something to do with me posting there?

skaboomizzy posted:

This is the Stimpire, son. Nothing ends.

Beer4TheBeerGod posted:

"NOTHING feels better than seeing a new build go out and having people discover what we've been working on for the first time"

That just about sums up CIG's definition of "open development" better than anything else.


Funny Ben, you did a wonderful job of chasing me away.

Ben, you are a bad person. You are a liar, your are a sycophant, you exist exclusively to perpetuate a myth and maintain a revenue stream. You will say anything to avoid controversy and maintain the illusion that you are competent and things are going fine, and frankly it astounds me that anyone believes you anymore. You, personally, are responsible for the creation of the most toxic community I have ever encountered. At least your community manager embraces how hosed things are and admits the truth, like how Star Citizen should not be in alpha. You refuse to acknowledge any of it. You are a coward, inherently afraid of conflict, because deep down inside you know full well that you are incapable of handling it. I regret ever defending you, ever thinking you are capable of anything positive in your life, ever thinking there was a part of you that was worth being optimistic about.

You were never 'good' to me, in spite of countless attempts on my part to convey something meaningful. Your first words to me were how I was a troll. Your last words to me were a lie. I was a fool for thinking you were a good person, that you would ever do or say anything that goes against the man you genuinely love or the project you have dedicated your life to. You are, quite simply, the last person who should ever speak another word about welcoming criticism or welcoming other people.

quote:

Howdy folks,

I have reviewed the thread in question and all of the associated messaging available to me.

Let me begin by stating what I’m surprised isn’t obvious: Cloud Imperium Games is not in the business of preventing women from playing our game. Part of the Star Citizen dream is to build a game that crosses traditional gamer boundaries and includes an experience that everyone can enjoy. Certainly, we are not sitting around in smoky boardrooms dreaming of ways to exclude 50% of the planet in our space adventure.

And then let’s go ahead and address the elephant in the room: obviously, a group from the Something Awful forums are using this as an opportunity to troll the forums. As always, this is extremely tedious. The user in question is also part of the Something Awful group, which made the moderator dealing with the issue believe the entire thread was a setup. This would not be the first time SA Goons have created an issue.

However, on review and in spite of the sheer volume of concerned Goons coming out of the woodwork on this, I do not believe the thread was necessarily a setup and that several mistakes were made in terms of moderation. I will now discuss my read on what happened and let you know the actions I am going to take.

On Saturday, a user named Lauresh posted a thread called “Female Gamers Group,” about creating a group (separate from an Org, per my read) for women to give them a safe space in the Star Citizen world. The thread goes pretty well for the first several pages, with all parties acting as they should. When one user started posting sexist crap they were properly flagged and probated. As with so many touchy internet threads, people became agitated, emotions flared and so on. The thread was closed as toxic and the original poster was banned.

Let me stress right now: I do not believe anyone on the moderation team banned Lauresh because they are a woman. I am 100% confident that it was because of the 30+ flags complaining about other users in the thread, with profane messages attached: “loving ban this retard,” “for the love of god would someone please stop this person from making GBS threads up the thread already,” “mother loving trolling” and so on. Lauresh seems to have flagged not only sexist posts (which should be warned/probated) but also anything complaining that the thread was a setup (‘you’re a Goon, you just want to fight, etc.’)

That said, I believe that our moderator made the following mistakes:

- Lauresh should have been given a 24-hour cooling probation instead of a 7-day probation. Bans here function on a strike system for each infraction: a warning, then a 24-hour probation, then 7-day, then a month and then a review for permaban. While Lauresh had been banned before (and warned several times before that,) their previous ban was overturned and should not have counted as a strike. This probation should have been for abuse of the flag function and nothing else. Her ban should have been better explained at the time.
- The thread should not have been closed. While moderators are empowered to close toxic threads and this one was unquestionably toxic, I will advise against doing so for “important” topics such as this one.

On the greater subject of women in the Star Citizen universe, the answer is that yes we should go out of our way to create a safe space for them. Women online, and especially women in gaming, have it very, very tough in ways that men absolutely do not understand. This isn’t an argument for the community to have, it’s a fact. Our moderators (and game designers and programmers and everyone else involved in Star Citizen) should do everything possible to create a safe environment, not encourage typical internet knife-fighting in this regard.

Men don’t have to deal with this sort of thing, and it’s so systemic. For years I was part of a community that simply didn't have women. At first I thought it was because space sims didn’t appeal to women… but I came to understand it was because of how immature the average forum user was towards them. It broke my heart hearing from women who loved fighting aliens but who had to pretend to be men in order to even talk to anyone about it, lest their PM inboxes fill up with come-ons and their social networking get invaded with awful dudes.

Let me give you an example from right here at the RSI forums that will maybe resonate: a few days ago our lead moderator’s girlfriend posted a ‘welcome’ thread and he replied welcoming her to the forums. Another user then responded with a picture of the two of them together (as on ‘but you guys know each other!’) My immediate reaction was that was pretty funny that William got shown up. Later that night, though, I realized: that picture was discovered in the first place because someone saw a female username posting about Star Citizen and had to Google it for pictures. And that sucks.

Obviously I don’t know how to fix any of that, but I’d love to start talking about it here instead of pretending it isn’t a problem.

In the meantime, I am hereby instructing William, our lead moderator, to do the following:

- Return the ‘Female Gamers Group’ thread to the forums. The thread should be heavily moderated to remove sexist comments and ban users who make them. Let us try to have a serious conversation here.
- Unban Lauresh with a single strike (24 hours) rather than two (7 days.)
- Remove the moderator who banned her from the active roster pending further review. As I said above, I am confident that Lauresh was not banned because she is a woman, but I will not feel comfortable until we review all of this moderators’ recent actions.

And as if it even needed to be said, there is more than enough room for a female-only group in the ‘verse. Making connections like that is what our Organizations system is for, and there’s absolutely no additional room to argue with that.

Chalks posted:

I've got some chap on twitter who refers to himself as a "freelancer" asking me questions about it:

https://twitter.com/WilliamUsherGB/status/702644634065960961

Looks like he's a bit of a gamergater but I guess if he wants to write an article on this then all power to him.


One thing I do want to make clear is that I don't think there's any legal issue here with what CIG did. They're a private entity and I used their messaging service after agreeing to their TOS. They're entirely within their legal rights to read my PMs and to ban me for discussing consumer laws.

I just think it's morally hosed up that they're doing this and I think people should know about it.

Ostentatious posted:

It's an artistic statement by the game developer for the meaninglessness of the pixels people spent hundreds to thousands of dollars on

Chalks posted:

Accidental ban amnesty?

I noticed that their system does behave rather weirdly if you're banned, some pages say you're not logged in but refuse to give you a login button etc.

Napoleon Bonaparty posted:

EminusSleepus posted:

CIG is using Cloudfront as their CDN for the CIGPAtcher and the pricing is like this



https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/


from what it looks like it takes several hundreds of Terabytes to even make a dent

and downloading from my place is much more expensive lol

literally a hog posted:

I'm terible at using reddit but I think the Star citizen mods hid your thread?

It has over 500 posts but doesn't show up for me when I browse the subreddit.

EminusSleepus posted:

CIG is using Cloudfront as their CDN for the CIGPAtcher and the pricing is like this

https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/
from what it looks like it takes several hundreds of Terabytes to even make a dent
and downloading from my place is much more expensive lol
I have tried downloading it 6x today which is around 27GB per download so
(27GB*6)* 0.140 = $22?

Chalks posted:

I don't know how reddit works, but I specifically messaged the moderators of that subreddit and told them my story to check that they were happy for me to post it. Even told them that I was a goon and didn't want to cause a big mess for them.

They said it was fine to post but they couldn't guarantee that I would get a warm reception, and wished me luck. Overall they were really very cool about it, so I'd be surprised if they decide to go back and censor it later.

The link seems to be working but I'm like you and I don't know how reddit is supposed to work in terms of what appears on what page. I'm just kinda ignoring the thread atm, it gave publicity to the issue and that's the only reason I posted it there.

It might be something to do with the upvote/downvote fight meaning that the thread itself has a big fat zero rating overall. There doesn't seem to be any sort of "controversial" category so I guess if you get an even number of votes you disappear no matter how popular the discussion is. Someone guilded me for it though.. what ever that means!