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CIG might need to think about going back to the more nakedly exploitative tactics from the November sale.
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Dec 17, 2016 16:37
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Dec 18, 2016 02:41
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Thoatse posted:Christ Roberts negtivity scenes seem to be common this year. They don't even seem seasonal anymore, it practically seems like a year-round thing nowadays.
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Dec 18, 2016 06:00
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Truga posted:Yeah it's not been under $30k since like 2013 at least? It's definitely slowing down. It was lower than 30k in 2015 and I think earlier this year as well. Also, (following up on other points along these lines) there are clear 24-hour cycles that are probably related to the geographical distribution of the backer population. I am currently offering no evidence for any of these assertions, but might do so later. EDIT: quote from July 2016 boviscopophobic posted:
boviscopophobic fucked around with this message at 17:23 on Dec 19, 2016 |
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Dec 19, 2016 17:12
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Sunswipe posted:Has the Alaskan (alledged) kiddy-fiddler been tried yet? His next trial week apparently got put off again. It is now slated for Feb 13.
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Jan 11, 2017 04:01
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This post was supposed to go in the Theoretical Cetology thread, but it's closed for "archiving", whatever that means. You can check there for the previous forum snapshot/demographic estimate that I refer to below. JAN 2017 RSI DEMOGRAPHICS UPDATE About 6 months and $25M have elapsed since the previous demographic snapshot of the RSI forum population. Updated funding-related statistics are summarized below. The methodology is mostly the same as in my previous post, so you can refer to that for details as well as an explanation of the meaning of each graph. First off, the forum account vs RSI account rate discrepancy has stabilized at about 3.5, meaning that 3.5 RSI accounts are currently being created for every forum account. This ratio obviously spikes during free fly events.   For the funding-related graphs, the basic funding assumptions remain the same as last time, but there are three updates to the methodology. The first relates to closed accounts. Thanks to the wave of refunds post-Streetroller, I learned that is possible to determine with reasonable confidence if an RSI account has been closed, which generally indicates revocation due to refunds or possibly other misbehavior such as hacking. This latest set of summary graphs includes only accounts that were "alive" at the time of the snapshot. The previous set of graphs included a certain number of "dead" accounts, which affected the accuracy of the title counts. The second change is that I've aggregated all titles not associated with a funding level into an "OTHER" title, except for a small set of user titles that I deemed to be CIG-related. These titles, namely "Staff", "Developer", "Creator", "QA", and "Game Master", are assigned the aggregate title of "CIG". Some other user titles that are arguably CIG-related, but which I did NOT include in the CIG set, are "Bug Moderator" and "Moderator". Note that some developer accounts may mark themselves as such as such only by their account name; these would not be included in the CIG count. Finally, to counteract title churn from people changing their title, I look at each account's titles over a number of forum snapshots and use the one that implies the highest funding level. Since user titles can be "understated" but not "overstated", so to speak, this should be a reasonable procedure if user funding levels are non-decreasing. Thankfully, since CIG almost never grants partial refunds, an assumption of non-decreasing funding levels should not introduce too much additional error. (Note: if no funding-related titles are available, then CIG-related titles are prioritized over "OTHER" titles.)       The contribution of concierge-level backers (High Admiral and up) has slightly increased -- 56.4% under the mid funding scenario, versus 53.6% last time. If we compare the graph of estimated average user spending by quarter of enlistment with the previous version, we get the following average per-user increases:  This indicates that accounts of all "ages" are continuing to put money into Star Citizen, possibly more so for pre-2014 accounts. However, note that an increase of $10-15 or so is a small fraction of the likely average transaction amount -- recall that this period includes Gamescom, Citizencon, the anniversary livestream, and the holiday sale, which featured pricy concept ships, cash-only sales, capital ship sales, etc. Depending on what you think the average transaction amount is (which I have not attempted to estimate), you could translate this into an estimate of the size of the current paying backer population. Another longitudinal view of the backer population can be obtained by constructing contingency tables at various time snapshots. For example, the following is a comparison of highest user titles achieved through early August 2016, versus early January 2017. Because of how highest titles are computed, this table contains some unknown fraction of users "leveling up" through spending, and some users simply adjusting previously understated titles upward. I believe that the dominant contribution is leveling up, especially when looking at movement between the higher tiers, but I have not attempted to quantify this.  Note that we have two new pseudo-titles: "DEAD", indicating that the account died off (refunds etc.) between Aug 2016 and Jan 2017, and "UNBORN", indicating that the account was made between Aug 2016 and Jan 2017. So for instance, we can see that of 92 completionists as of Aug 2016, 1 of those accounts got a refund. Of 193 wing commanders as of Aug 2016, 31 were promoted to completionist and 2 got a refund, etc. Notably, 22 CIG accounts "got a refund", which most likely means they left the company. As a rough measure of the propensity of backer subpopulations to level up, we can construct a matrix of outflow percentages. In this table, the number in a particular row/column indicates the percentage of the population with that row's title that advanced to get the corresponding column's title. So for instance, 16.06% of all Wing Commanders in August became Completionists by January. Similarly, 0.37% of Civilians became Freelancers/Colonels, etc. The hottest cells consist of concierge backers (High Admiral and up) moving up one or two levels, and CIG accounts moving to the exits.  If we are interested in inferring refunds specifically, then we need to look at pairs of snapshots that are closer together in time. Otherwise we can miss salient developments -- for instance, if a Civilian in August became a Wing Commander in November then got a refund in December, it would only show up as a Civilian refund in the above table. Using a set of several snapshots I derived the following counts for account deaths per highest title. I also noticed a large number of newly established Civilian accounts showing up as dead. To exclude possible low-effort banhammered trolls from the refund counts, I only counted Civilian accounts if they were confirmed as being alive for at least 45 days in at least one historical snapshot.
Since this is a small and very much non-random sample, the likely accuracy of the funding scenario assumptions (already not that good) is probably far worse for refunded accounts. On the one hand, Civilians are assumed to have a low average contribution partly due to the proliferation of free accounts; however, a refunded account would obviously not be a free account. On the other, high-value accounts may not be refunded for anywhere near their nominal value, due to grey market transactions. If we go ahead and apply the min/mid/max funding assumptions anyway, we get refund totals of $407,420, $674,587.50, and $941,755, respectively. For another estimate, also problematic, we can consider the self-reported refund amounts from /r/starcitizen_refunds. From reading through the posts that stated actual refund amounts, I arrived at an average per-user refund of $1366.10. Applying this to the 1028 non-CIG refundees, we would get a total of $1,404,350.80. These estimates are of course only for the refunded forum population. The multiplier to get the total amount of refunds in the entire RSI population would likely be well less than 2.5, which is the ratio of all RSI accounts to all forum accounts. CONCLUSIONS All previous caveats about the accuracy of these estimates still apply. In addition, there are particular problems with trying to estimate refund amounts. Nevertheless, I think we can conclude that the refund outflows, while CIG certainly would find them annoying, are probably small enough in total that they can be easily compensated for with an extra concept sale (if we don't account for increases in engineering debt). There are indications that funding is leaning even more heavily on concierge-level backers; this might be a good topic for follow-up analyses. Account age does not appear to play a large role in incremental spending. Previously I speculated about a soft per-user average spending ceiling around $200. This now seems to be more of an artifact of the bounded time window the backer populations have had to spend their money in. As that time window lengthens, fresh spending continues apace and it remains to be seen when there will be a large-scale change in backer purchasing behavior.
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Jan 15, 2017 23:57
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Chalks posted:It's basically a chart of their diminishing returns from backers. Back in Q2 2015 if they did some marketing, on average everyone would spend $67. Today, they do that same marketing and not only is their target audience smaller and harder to reach, they'll get less than a quarter of the payback and that's a long term trend. The longitudinal comparison showed an increment in average spending for accounts of all ages, so I now think the correct interpretation of that graph is a combination of a large initial outlay from the earliest purchasers (2013 and prior), combined with a steady increase in spending for accounts of all ages as more time/sales go by. So newer accounts have lower values mostly because they haven't had as much time to spend money. As for new whales, the "UNBORN" line in a contingency table provides an imperfect estimate of new backer dollars:  So for instance, out of 103,589 accounts established between June 2016 and January 2017, 4 of them are now Wing Commanders, 19 are Space Marshals, etc. This works out to something like $1-5 million worth of funding from new accounts, depending on your assumptions. The new accounts are about 90% Civilians whereas the overall population is about 75% Civilians, so that may indicate something about the number of free accounts. The question of how many whales there actually are, and just how much they are in for, is still not satisfactorily answered, but it was my main motivation for starting to look at this stuff in the first place.
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Jan 16, 2017 20:24
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Chalks posted:This is really interesting, thanks for posting it. Average spend per user is particularly interesting, although I guess the statistics are very diluted by free fly events. Even if a free fly user bothered to click on the forums to create an account (which doesn't happen all that often, hence the spikes in UEE/forums account ratios) I wouldn't tell be able to tell if that account was a freeloader -- all I'd be able to see is that they have the default title of Civilian, and an enlist date that occurs in a free fly period. So no, I don't do any adjustment for that. Since the data set isn't ideal by any stretch of the imagination, I prefer to report the numbers as they are, keep the assumptions of the analysis relatively simple, and let people figure their own adjustments to the estimates if they disagree with particular assumptions.
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Jan 16, 2017 20:32
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Contingency posted:How feasible would it be to use the "last active" forum field as a proxy for refund date? People not logging on before requesting a refund through Zendesk would skew the refund date more to the past, but it'd serve as a rough guideline. Would be interesting to see a quarterly breakdown that can be tied to events (Star Marine cancellation, DS ELE prediction posts, post-sale remorse, etc.). Using that field is a possibility, though it has some problems of its own -- for instance, it turns out that there are certain anomalous accounts where just looking at them causes their last active date to be updated. If you filter those oddballs out, then yes, you could look at that field and it might provide some insight into when account closures occurred, if they occurred prior to all of the forum snapshots I have available for analysis. (If the account closures occurred between a pair of snapshots, then we already know roughly when they happened). Looking at account closures vs account age would also be interesting.
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Jan 16, 2017 20:39
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MeLKoR posted:It shows the average backer spending $17 when the cheapest ship costs 3 times that. I don't know what it's showing but that can't be right. What it's showing is "if you take a particular set of assumptions about how much the average forum account with a given title on the RSI forums spends, then this is the average spending per forum account with an enlist date in Q1 2017". The actual numbers in the graph are not supposed to be taken literally (I don't have access to detailed spending information), but more indicative of a trend that emerges in the analysis. So it's really not something that should be considered devoid of the context of the wall of words that surround it. Also, since we are considering forum accounts, not paying backers, it is very possible for an account's spending to be $0, and thus for the average spending per account to be less than the cheapest ship.
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Jan 16, 2017 20:48
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DapperDon posted:Profile not found. Goddamn. Now people are deleting Linkedin profiles now? You might have to log in to see it.
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Jan 17, 2017 20:52
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Cao Ni Ma posted:Wait when it says "present" it means the person is still employed though He either never updated it or reverted the change. The Facebook screencap above shows that at one point in time, he said he was no longer employed in that position.
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Jan 17, 2017 21:11
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Indications are that his RSI account recently disappeared. Hopefully he still has his farm. 
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Jan 23, 2017 06:16
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Brazilianpeanutwar posted:I just bought a Musical keyboard off of Ebay for £20.00, it should arrive in a week, didn't cost me my farm and hopefully I can learn something from it. I hope you got one of these. There are two in every Completionist package.   
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Jan 27, 2017 03:41
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Tokamak posted:"Cresting the hill of the initial tier of functionality" Tony Zurovec, Director of Persistent Universe posted:Well well you can uh, that's something I referred to before which is uh uhh we're very, we've, we're very much focused and we always have been with regards to the direction we're going with the concept of this, you know, object oriented content creation which is to basically distill y'know uhh all of y'know the different pieces uhh of functionality that we're gonna use to build up these larger missions to break them down into these component parts and then just like do, y'know, in an object-oriented language like C++ to basically allow us to y'know pass inputs in, to y'know extract y'know outputs out um so that we can customize them dynamically in these y'know in--in, th, in the scope of y'know a much larger problem and so what this is going to wind up allowing us to do is after we've got that initial library of y'know functionality, designers are going to be able to craft this stuff much, much more quickly than they've been able to do, y'know, cer-- uh, in, in, in the past, umm, and what this effectively means to the player is uhh a much larger amount of interesting things to see and experience and challenges to face, y'know, and solve within the game world.
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Jan 27, 2017 06:55
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TheAgent posted:it did and like every other piece of news about this poo poo project, it isn't being covered by anyone You know what doesn't get covered? Things that didn't happen. SC is stronger than ever and will be the pinnacle of human civilization.
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Jan 28, 2017 07:14
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BitBasher posted:Is that the way it actually looks? the camera view is steady but the helmet (and radar) bobs up and down as someone moves? That looks totally wrong. A helmet doesn't bounce up and down on my head with my footsteps while my eyes stay in the same place. WTF? Yes, I think everything used to bob together, but when they added "vision stabilization" (i.e. removing headbob) they didn't extend that change to the helmet UIs. It looks incredibly stupid.
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Jan 28, 2017 23:03
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CptVHart posted:COMMUNITY/ISSUE COUNCIL/STAR CITIZEN ALPHA 2.6.0/ISSUE REPORT Most stuff on the Issue Council doesn't get responses, but 13 people made sure to mark this one invalid. https://robertsspaceindustries.com/..._for_awhile_now
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Jan 29, 2017 01:00
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Colostomy Bag posted:Have you ever aggregated the funding amounts per hour? Seems like if the 75% amount were true it would show quite a bulge in the European time zones during normal waking hours. These are the raw* hourly incomes over the past week. You can see that there are peak hours straddling the midnight GMT boundary, but there is noise that obscures the pattern a bit. You can also see that random $10000+ spike which is not, despite what one might think, actually a Wing Commander pack (unless store credit was used) and a probable War Pack ($5000).  These are the smoothed high-res income data over the same week. It's a bit easier to see the 24-hour cycle here since the noise is smoothed out.  Finally, this is the average income per hour for the first four weeks of January. The big peak is 20-21 GMT, but I'd say 20-0 or 1 GMT are usually pretty busy hours. It's not really clear what that means; it could indicate Germans who are arriving home from work, Californians on lunch break, East Coasters buying ships at work, people on disability with erratic sleep schedules, ...  *) The hourly incomes are actually interpolated from time points that aren't sampled exactly on the hourly boundaries. boviscopophobic fucked around with this message at 04:33 on Jan 30, 2017 |
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Jan 30, 2017 04:27
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D_Smart posted:It's probably bollocks. That sort of money requires SEC paperwork and all that. If it's not an "investment" but merely purchases of jpegs over several years totalling $1M+, surely there wouldn't be any reason for the SEC to care.
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Feb 3, 2017 23:31
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AP posted:Did you mean 4 v 4? http://www.imperialusa.com/garlando-g-5000-wenge-foosball-table.html That'll be one Grand Admiral, please.
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Feb 4, 2017 15:28
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quote:Pilot facial idle animations have been added for all ship variants! Why do pilot facial animations depend on the ship?
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Feb 8, 2017 18:18
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Funding so far in 2017 is lackluster compared to the previous two years, but the comparison is arguably unfair because we have yet to see any major sales events this year. However, new account signups are slowing even compared to early 2015, which may not be a good sign. The huge influx in 2016 was due to the announcement of the SQ42 package split. 
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Feb 10, 2017 05:07
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I recommend reading the Studio Report thoroughly and seeing how many red flags you can spot. I was going to compile a list but it was just too much. https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/15704-Monthly-Studio-Report There's also this extremely reassuring item in the Production Schedule Report: 
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Feb 11, 2017 04:48
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Propagandist posted:
Those don't look like rabbittes.
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Feb 11, 2017 09:03
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Tijuana Bibliophile posted:
Collision checking is off during grid transitions, how very fidelitous.
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Feb 12, 2017 16:56
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Baxta posted:I gotta ask. I googled but it didnt help. Tony Zurovec, Director of Persistent Universe posted:
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Feb 12, 2017 18:48
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AP posted:The dev tracker on the front page only links to gold posts, when This is a known issue. Everything is normal. Fixed in Spectrum
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Feb 13, 2017 21:41
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posts he can choose to exclude a post from the dev tracker by not making it gold.
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Ol Cactus Dick posted:Speaking of Spectrum (lol), did they manage to release that yet or is it typical CIG? Spectrum is supposedly rolling out when 2.6.1 goes live.
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Feb 13, 2017 22:51
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HycoCam posted:I know far, far more people that play Farming Simulator than Star Citizen. Farming simulator has gotten very good. Multiplayer support, map creation, cool custom controllers, and lots more that make it more than just a game. Do you think anyone has ever sold their spaceship so they could play Farming Simulator fulltime, because they have no obligations to anything except their spaceships and their creditors, and walking away from Farming Simulator certainly doesn't feel like an option?
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Feb 14, 2017 03:42
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alf_pogs posted:star citizen diary part 3 quote:I open the rear hatch but careen into the ship's bay so violently my head protrudes through the hull, and I die a few moments later. quote:It is ALPHA build.. Therefore there are lotsa bugs and issues.
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Feb 14, 2017 05:32
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The Valentine's Day sale is pretty sad so far. However, I doubt CIG was counting on it to bring in all that much cash compared to a typical concept sale.  The total take so far is about $113K. Thanks to the "stock limits" on some of the items (Aurora starter package, Mustang starter package, Starfarer Gemini, Starfarer Gemini two-pack), we can see how well individual SKUs are selling as well as get an upper bound on the amount of fresh cash spent on those items. The starter packages ($35 each) are warbond editions and thus cash-only; the Starfarer packages can be bought with store credit if I understand correctly. I only started checking stocks a while after the sale began, so the time axis in this plot does not start at 0.  The trends are fairly linear over the sampled period, with the Aurora selling at about 10.7 units/hour, Mustang at 13.4 units/hour, Starfarer Gemini at 2.9 units/hour, and the Starfarer Gemini two-pack at 0 units/hour. The enticing 8.8% discount on a two-pack (which I believe has limitations placed on it with regard to individual melting and such) hasn't brought backer wallets out, and so the number of two-packs sold has been firmly stuck at... 2. The total amount of cash accounted for by these four SKUs is at most $29,575 if no store credit was used. Is it believable that roughly $83K, minus maybe $15K-ish of usual daily revenue, was spent on the unlimited SKUs? I leave that to you to decide. boviscopophobic fucked around with this message at 06:29 on Feb 15, 2017 |
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Feb 15, 2017 06:23
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Raskolnikov posted:
It's funny how their fuckups never seem to go in the backers' favor though, you'd figure that that would happen by chance at least once. At least the two-packs not being separately giftable is still better than selling a ship without an engine (or power plant, whatever).
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Feb 15, 2017 20:35
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Winter Stormer posted:His explanation is wrong and he's clearly just not reading the warning that Recode thing is spitting out, but at least he backed into better style for anything that isn't 25-year-old C After he was done disabling the physics and went to get back in the (jittery) ship, the commando tried to snap to the ladder except ended up offset by about 10 feet. He paused the game pretty quickly after that 
boviscopophobic fucked around with this message at 04:05 on Feb 16, 2017 |
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Feb 16, 2017 03:51
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Chunjee posted:How are you posting and streaming at the same time? I feel grief! 
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Feb 16, 2017 06:18
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Thinking about buying Squadron 42 along with Star Citizen during our Valentine's Day sale? That'll be $20 extra, please -- a savings of negative 5 dollars over the regular price! (Apparently there is no $15 Squadron 42 addon, the only way you can purchase it is to buy a game package with SQ42 included.)  
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Feb 16, 2017 16:57
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Colostomy Bag posted:Minus the split of two AAAA games: Nothing screams "charitable donation for game development with no expectation of return" like convoluted arbitrage schemes. Also, while we're on the topic of charity, somebody please donate to rehome a Starfarer Gemini two-pack. None have been sold for 43 hours. boviscopophobic fucked around with this message at 17:16 on Feb 16, 2017 |
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Feb 16, 2017 17:13
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Space Crabs posted:This is where the rubber meets the road. This is where we see how desperate the backers are. They ran out of fake demos and are now spending all year to make a fake game. Backers will not understand why it is a fake game and be unable to parse the difference between a game and a fake game. This is why CIG should probably be considered technically insolvent -- a year's worth of Potemkin game development won't represent any substantial progress toward their promised features, yet to fund this activity they will need to make yet more promises in order to sell even more ships, ground vehicles, weapons, real estate, etc. In the end they're further away from the goal than where they started, but executive bonuses have been paid for another year, so yay!
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Feb 16, 2017 23:41
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Possible new development: CIG asked for photo ID before they would issue a refund. https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen_refunds/comments/5umcd9/fredfredbug4_gets_a_refund/
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Feb 17, 2017 19:55
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nawledgelambo posted:so since we're on the topic of refunds and that whole data collection that bit CIG in the rear end, I figure now would be a good time tell everyone that a source tells me that if you have gotten/requested a refund, you are essentially blacklisted, and purchasing a ship in the future may be problematic if the game ever comes out (lol) I think Sarsapariller might have something to say about this rumor!
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Feb 17, 2017 22:17
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