I ended up canceling mine too. I didn't like being treated like a mindless walking wallet and I didn't like that what I'd pledged money for is being pimped like a cheap whore.
Want to give me a summary of why you think this way? I just discovered the project today, but it looks like it has waysomewhat more integrity than P:E.
The way these funding campaigns are supposed to work is that the developer should try to earn your trust and convince you that your money will go towards making a better game. Roberts seems to have forgotten all about that. So from the start there have been these problems:
1. Roberts has a reduced obligation towards pledge makers because he is mainly funded by some private investors and apparently he started the crowdfunding campaign so he could prove to them that there is demand for this kind of game.
2. If you pledge, you get permanent ownership of a ship, and the more you pay, the better the ship.
3. You will be able to buy in-game advancement with real currency.
These don't bode well, but you could still think pledging would be worth it regardless (especially before the campaign reached the funding target).
But then it all got into his head and the "I need your money to make the game you want" changed into "Give me your money and I will give you in-game stuff" and "Get other people to give me money and I will sign you up for a prize lottery". You may call that an additional incentive, I call that undermining the pledge maker-developer relationship. So what happened was:
4. On Kickstarter Roberts added a new pledge level at $5 for which he promises to give you some cosmetic in-game item. This is so low specifically to get people who originally pledged on the RSI website to make an additional pledge.
5. He also set new funding goals only for Kickstarter: he added a list with most items labeled "LOCKED" and only the first few revealed. Some of these items are in-game benefits like "a repair bot for all who pledged" and "500 credits for all who pledged".
6. He started the referral lottery where if you get new users to pledge, he will sign you up for a lottery with physical prizes.
These items are very one-sided: notice how Roberts is using his power to withhold or grant in-game priviledges to get you to give him your money; how he is spending his money, which he presumably gets from you, on a lottery (!), turning the funding campaign into some sort of game; and how he is hoping that you will forget the other side of the equation where he needs to justify the costs. In particular, it costs him nothing to give away virtual goods, so why should you give him money for them?
And if you look at his news posts, you can see that in them he is addressing them to the dumb masses. There is no talk of, say, the things that he gets asked about in interviews for gaming web sites, details of the development process, etc. They're for the most part only about in-game fiction and rules and about getting the funding figure up, which includes all the various schemes and bribe offers. They're missing all the information that a critically-thinking person would ask for. You can find a lot of it, but to get it you need to go through all these interviews and forum posts and Reddit threads.
So even though some of these things might happen in any crowdfunding project, to me it's clear that there is a trend here of selling out parts of the game and treating pledge makers like idiots. That's why I say he is pimping Star Citizen like a whore.
I think he is finaly starting to loose it developing this game 10/10. Look at his cap 'GSS Tiger Claw'
