Vapourware Scam Citizen - Only people with too much money can become StarCitizens! WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW MORE?

[Turbo normie]

The only person that I know rooting for SC in 2018 is an autistic transwoman.

 

[Drax]

Nonsense, I will fly my grorious caterpillar when I get my retirement package. You'll all see!

 

[a cut of domestic sheep prime]

They are making 'procedural cuisine'

oh, it was an april fools joke meh

 

[a cut of domestic sheep prime]

gravity is so low the wheels don't even touch the ground

 

[Deathsquid]

They are making 'procedural cuisine'

oh, it was an april fools joke meh

To be fair, no-one knows what this was. This came out like a week before April 1. Procedural eggs could be a thing.

Eggciting.

Try not to get shell-shocked.

 

[Freddie]

Insane people doing insane things is one thing.

But how about the guys who take advantage of the insane people? How do the SC scamsters look themselves in the mirror, how can they sleep their nights knowing that they most probably have ruined more than a few lives? I wouldn't be surprised if there more than a few deaths involving victims "suckers" of this hoax.

Surprising comment from you.

It's old thing, perhaps most easily spotted in other areas of entertainment industry. Say certain dynamics between these corporate crooks and artist for example. In some cases at least, the two are different yes, but also the same. Mirror thing isn't relevant for them like for general population. Thinking of consequences isn't really a thing either.

These two, some may see high fuctioning fucked up people, some may see Sid and Nancy, or better yet, Bonnie & Clyde. In the end, this may end up in something far more uglier than predicted. It's the structure, it's formed around Roberts and his wife. I don't think there are boardmembers who aren't yes men. So once this starts to run out of steam, no fail saves.

 

[Blakemoreland Hybrid Boss]

What is hilarious is that he used CGI in his pitch as an example of gameplay footage.

 

[Xor]

What is hilarious is that he used CGI in his pitch as an example of gameplay footage.

Yeah but AAA publishers do that all the time.

 

[Deathsquid]

What is hilarious is that he used CGI in his pitch as an example of gameplay footage.

Yeah but AAA publishers do that all the time.

Yeah but Star Citizen is the world's first AAAA game.

I'm not even kidding, this is an actual sentiment around this thing.

What is hilarious is that he used CGI in his pitch as an example of gameplay footage.

There's been a lot of claims that the original pitched demo was built for free by CryTek as a way to get CIG to pick the engine. If true, this is all sorts of fucked up and funny.

 

[Makabb]

Not dead?

 

[fantadomat]

Not dead?

This game in a nutshell,slow boring pointless and empty.

 

[Blakemoreland Hybrid Boss]

What is hilarious is that he used CGI in his pitch as an example of gameplay footage.

Yeah but AAA publishers do that all the time.

But no to take millions from backers.

This game in a nutshell,slow boring pointless and empty.

Thw word game is inappropriate here. There is no real challenge or meaningful gameplay. Roberts wanted to be the new Gergoe Lucas and failed. Now he will burn millions to make a simulation of space sin that looks like a movie, but it doesn't do anything else. You know what is the saddest part? All the extra knowledge they gained by trying to implement Roberts' impossible demands will probably be lost and ignored, because the actual game is such a trainwreck. No one will be able to say "But Star Citzen proved you can add all these elements together". It could prove if the development process wasn't such a mess.

 

[Deathsquid]

Said like someone that does not understand game development.

Look, they have boxes. You can pick them up. Once the box pickup pipeline is ready, you will be able to stuff your space chariot full of these and then fly somewhere and fill them with stuff, then fly them somewhere else, and manually unload them, and sell them!

This is an unprecedented degree of fidelity and fun.

 

[Blakemoreland Hybrid Boss]

Said like someone that does not understand game development.

Look, they have boxes. You can pick them up. Once the box pickup pipeline is ready, you will be able to stuff your space chariot full of these and then fly somewhere and fill them with stuff, then fly them somewhere else, and manually unload them, and sell them!

This is an unprecedented degree of fidelity and fun.

And you do? Do you think that these magic boxes will be acompained with a magic solution for those horrendous low FPS that make the "game" unplayable?

 

[Deathsquid]

Said like someone that does not understand game development.

Look, they have boxes. You can pick them up. Once the box pickup pipeline is ready, you will be able to stuff your space chariot full of these and then fly somewhere and fill them with stuff, then fly them somewhere else, and manually unload them, and sell them!

This is an unprecedented degree of fidelity and fun.

And you do? Do you think that these magic boxes will be acompained with a magic solution for those horrendous low FPS that make the "game" unplayable?

Of course. Once bind culling and object containers are implemented, you can load as many boxes as you want into your space chariot without it lagging out the server.

I mean

Spoiler

 

[Deathsquid]

Also:

 

[Modron]

I don't how many of those my wife's boyfriend things are jokes or real these days. I would not think such tardation is so prevalent.

 

[fantadomat]

I don't how many of those my wife's boyfriend things are jokes or real these days. I would not think such tardation is so prevalent.

I don't know if boyfriend have a double meaning in English. Does it have a meaning just as male friend or is it just a guy that fucks her?

 

[Norfleet]

There is the connotation of fucking, yes.

 

[Beowulf]

I don't how many of those my wife's boyfriend things are jokes or real these days. I would not think such tardation is so prevalent.

I don't know if boyfriend have a double meaning in English. Does it have a meaning just as male friend or is it just a guy that fucks her?

You should ask that question in the Black Geyser thread.

 

[Big Wrangle]

https://medium.com/@baron_52141/star-citizens-new-moves-prioritize-sales-over-backers-2ea94a7fc3e4

Spoiler

Star Citizen’s New Moves Prioritize Sales Over Backers

Cloud Imperium Games has taken heat the last few days for moving the goalpost on Lifetime Insurance (LTI) once again. The small, vocal fan base that helped grow Star Citizen into the large project it is today has been in an uproar. But that vocal minority, the ones who created the discussions that perpetuated Star Citizen’s success, is becoming an increasingly smaller percentage of Cloud Imperium’s sales base, and CIG is now clear of a financial obligation to appease their backers. Their moral obligation is up for debate.

I’ll be honest: I agonized over releasing this article. These are murky, passionately contended waters, and by wading in I risk my working relationship with Cloud Imperium as a content creator. As a disclaimer, the points I bring up are in no way intended as a personal reflection on Chris Roberts or any of the talented individuals employed by CIG, or my continuing devotion to and passion for this game and community. Rather, it is commentary on the way businesses operate as an independent whole. (And if any readers of this work for CIG, I hope you take it to heart that I believe you are doing your level best to work hard and do right by the customer. Even so, a larger difficult conversation needs having.)

The case takes a history lesson as much as a summary to understand. Lifetime Insurance, which grants holders of Star Citizen’s sometimes multi-hundred (if not thousand) dollar starships protection from ever being lost permanently through destruction, was originally intended as a limited time reward for early backers of the game to help generate sales.

After a period it was taken away, with assurances that LTI was non important, and essentially a collector’s sticker. Insurance, according to CIG, will be trivially cheap to buy with your hard earned (or purchased) in game currency. At backer request it was later reintroduced for all who pre-order design concepts of new ships before they are ready to play; essentially, a pre-order within a pre-order.

Chris pledges “To put fun ahead of shareholder profits.”
But with the latest sale of the 100i and expensive Hercules lines of ships, LTI has become a reward exclusive to backers investing new money in the game, rather than trading in old pledges for store credit. Which leads one to wonder: if LTI is not important, why is a coveted feature being taken from those who have already pledged money in a still unreleased game? Are older backers now, in effect, lesser?

It’s easy to guess at the motivations for the change. Generating new funds for the game is important, and LTI was seen (rightly) as a powerful sales carrot to dangle. The rising backer sentiment that those who invested early and have been waiting patiently from delay to delay over the years are now treated as stale money was either not foreseen, or more unfortunately, calculated to be outweighed by the benefit of encouraging sales to newcomers and a growing pool of “whale” big spenders. Feelings are hurt. Words are being said. As always, Reddit is a warzone

A good deal of this anger is rooted in “The Pledge” — a one page letter from Chris Roberts explaining the ways Star Citizen would respect and represent their customers beyond how a big publisher might treat them. In it, Chris pledges “To put fun ahead of shareholder profits.” And as pretty as that sounds, the ongoing nature of that decision can only be made by those investors who own a majority stake in Star Citizen’s operations. While CIG has been quiet about whether private equity holders exist, a kickstarter era interview seems to confirm it— and should investors exist, they would expect a growing return on a very delayed product.

Over the years I have seen many companies, in many industries, begin to prioritize sales over customers as they grow. I’m sure you have too. In the games industry, it’s been a sore spot for years. EA, Valve, Bungie, Ubisoft, Take Two properties, Bethesda, Twitch itself, are all on different stages of the path towards sales team dominance. And yet, no one individual in any of those companies is out to screw the customer. But gamers get angry. We take it personally. We feel like these companies are our friends, or should be. We grew up with their titles, and in thanks for our loyalty, we feel they’ve stopped saying hello and started going straight for the wallet.

It’s sunken cost fallacy monetized to an incredibly clever degree, and no apology is needed for that.
It’s worth noting that the CIG of the kickstarter — Chris Roberts, a dozen people, and a dream — is not the CIG of today. There are five development studios and hundreds of employees globally. People have been hired, fired, acquired, moved and shaken. This isn’t a bad thing. It’s enabled the infrastructure that is turning Star Citizen into not just a dream of the most ambitious game ever, but the real deal, and one now visibly on track to near future completion.

Cloud Imperium has made a series of shrewd business moves to enable their unprecedented success, and the ability to refund a pledge for store credit — melting, as we Citizens call it — was not least among them. It was backer beneficial, but also incredibly effective at encouraging just a few dollars more of spending.

You may find the following situation familiar. A new ship comes out that matches your gameplay style way more than the two small ships you have from early development. Melt those suckers down, and you can cover most of the cost of the new ship. What’s $20 more? But then there’s that next ship a few months later. You rinse and repeat a few years, and it’s easy to see how passionate backers can balloon from that first $60 into the thousands. It’s sunken cost fallacy monetized to an incredibly clever degree, and no apology is needed for that. It’s up to individuals to control their spending. To borrow a quote, “It’s not personal, it’s strictly business.” And at least the game’s return value keeps increasing in kind.

Even so, it’s difficult to dismiss that the new Warbond Only LTI is a textbook definition of an anti-consumer move, and it certainly isn’t the first step in that direction. Warbonds, the term for cheaper ship SKUs that can cannot be purchased with store credit, have become a case study in devaluing old money.

…Why sink development costs into something 100 people will buy when the profit from minimizing the expense of one purchase is so much greater?
Using past purchases (a definition which includes giftcards) often covers only 85% the cost of a new ship compared to pulling out your wallet, presented as a roughly 15% discount on Warbonds. Now, with the case of the A2 Hercules gunship, there is the addition of the free Tumbril tank — a $100 value on it’s own, bringing your previously spent pre-order money down to 75% value, on top of missing out on Lifetime Insurance, a feature many backers consider a point of pride.

You can see the appeal. Marketers have been writing this book for decades. Isn’t it so much more pleasant to think about as a nice discount, with LTI and a free tank thrown in?

Backers have not let this go unnoticed, and in my estimation, nor should they. This same tactic, which depends on the sales of the few outweighing the discontent of the many, are what have led to gross cost inflation in other video games for years.

Consider Rockstar: In 2009, a $40 microtransaction in Grand Theft Auto IV would get you two complete multi-mission story expansions with new characters, voice acting, weapons, and vehicles. By 2015, a $40 microtransaction in Grand Theft Auto V would give you the purchasing power for one car. Sure, it angered fans — but why sink development costs into something 100 people will buy when the profit from minimizing the expense of one person’s purchase is so much greater? Customers voting with their wallets can be ignored.

The danger comes from ignoring small pushes along the way as companies hedge their bets on how far customers will bend before they break. Most recently, EA finally achieved that devaluation breaking point with Battlefront 2, whose $20 lootcrates gave only a distantly remote chance of unlocking the new characters they promoted, and were incredibly difficult to earn in game. After extreme backlash, EA rolled it back — but not out of the kindness of their hearts. They had pushed the profit margin as high as the could, and could now comfortably set it just below that marker, confident in their market research.

It should come as no surprise that many feel “The Pledge” has been skirted, if not ignored.
Cloud Imperium has not nearly approached this level of customer squeeze yet, but the move marks a keen understanding of maximizing backer spending, and left uncontested these devaluations might be a sign of things to come. The laws of business would predict it, and only Chris has the power to ensure the pledge is upheld, and only so far as the game’s investors allow.

As for the argument that Cloud Imperium is justified in devaluing the purchasing power of old pledges as the game’s ongoing development is still in need of finances, I’m not sure I buy it without knowing what CIG’s margins are. For me, a question is begged: is the near $200 million of steady backer funding predicated on a respectful way of doing business not enough? And if not, why is CIG of all companies so cash strapped that a sales decision must be made that would be known to upset a sizable portion of of Star Citizen’s active backers? The decision to open 5 studios was on them. It should come as no surprise that many feel “The Pledge” has been skirted, if not ignored.

These aren’t pleasant subjects, but they are worth considering and entirely reasonable to air publicly. At the end of the day, the only people who can determine when anti-consumer decisions cross the line are the backers themselves. And to reiterate: I do not think this devaluation is malicious in spirit, or a poor reflection on the morals any of the individually talented people at CIG — it’s just the natural, if not inevitable, flow of every day business.

For my part, I say debate on. As much as I passionately love and believe in the game, community, and people working at CIG including Chris, I would prefer if my dollars invested in the game are just as valuable as a newcomer’s the entire duration of the pre-order period. (Yes, pre-order — not pledge. Not this far along.)

Should the backers take devaluation in stride, let us hope that like with so many other companies our personal love for the people and game do not lead to a bad deal.

After all, Cloud Imperium itself is just a company, and for a company this subject isn’t personal. For a company, it’s strictly business.

 

[Deathsquid]

I like how every image in that article is a concept image and just one vehicle, a Space Halo Jeep is actually in the game early pre-alpha build.

 

[Azrael the cat]

I don't how many of those my wife's boyfriend things are jokes or real these days. I would not think such tardation is so prevalent.

I don't know if boyfriend have a double meaning in English. Does it have a meaning just as male friend or is it just a guy that fucks her?

There's a connotation of fucking, but it varies between countries, cities and age-groups.

Women are more likely to use it where I'm from, largely because they regularly use 'girlfriend' without any connotation of fucking, and so some use boyfriend the same way. The non-fucking version is always phrased so that either the context of the preposition makes it clear that 'X' is neither your exclusive boyfriend/girlfriend, nor exclusively your boyfriend/girlfriend - saying 'my boyfriend/girlfriend' is assumed to mean fucking, but 'a boyfriend/girlfriend of mine' might not be. It's usually used by people in more morally conservative sub-communities, where there's enough gender segregation that having a friend if the opposite gender is noteworthy (like 'an aerospace engineer friend told me that...') and that people won't make the mental leap unless you actually specify the gender (e.g. person 1: "All guys are interested in is looks", person 2: "I don't know, I've got a boy-friend I've known since we were kids, and he only ever dates well-educated women".

Think "boy-friend" vs "boyfriend". I still hear a lot of 60+year olds using it in the non-fucking sense, same for people who didn't go to uni and are in gender-segregated jobs.

One thing seems universal though: if the speaker is married, or in a long-term relationship, theynever use it in the non-fucking sense. By that stage, they've learnt that it's the type of verbal slip that really agitates your loved one, even if they know you didn't mean anything by it, because it shows a lack of respect for their feelings & your relationship, and so they don't do it.....

.....or they do it anyway because they're the type of fucked up psycho-tramp that, when in a long-term relationship with a specific guy she really likes, starts quietly stressing out about whether she's still as attractive to generic 'guys' that she doesn't particularly like, because it's doubly debilitating if even those guys don't find her attractive, and if her guy thinks she's beautiful there must be something wrong with him, and they need to compensate by giving the impression that they've got multiple guys on the go while maintaining plausible deniability to the guy they're actually with, but that only goes so far, and....

YEAH: THAT GUY'S DEFINITELY GETTING CUCKED

 

[fantadomat]

I don't how many of those my wife's boyfriend things are jokes or real these days. I would not think such tardation is so prevalent.

I don't know if boyfriend have a double meaning in English. Does it have a meaning just as male friend or is it just a guy that fucks her?

There's a connotation of fucking, but it varies between countries, cities and age-groups.

Women are more likely to use it where I'm from, largely because they regularly use 'girlfriend' without any connotation of fucking, and so some use boyfriend the same way. The non-fucking version is always phrased so that either the context of the preposition makes it clear that 'X' is neither your exclusive boyfriend/girlfriend, nor exclusively your boyfriend/girlfriend - saying 'my boyfriend/girlfriend' is assumed to mean fucking, but 'a boyfriend/girlfriend of mine' might not be. It's usually used by people in more morally conservative sub-communities, where there's enough gender segregation that having a friend if the opposite gender is noteworthy (like 'an aerospace engineer friend told me that...') and that people won't make the mental leap unless you actually specify the gender (e.g. person 1: "All guys are interested in is looks", person 2: "I don't know, I've got a boy-friend I've known since we were kids, and he only ever dates well-educated women".

Think "boy-friend" vs "boyfriend". I still hear a lot of 60+year olds using it in the non-fucking sense, same for people who didn't go to uni and are in gender-segregated jobs.

One thing seems universal though: if the speaker is married, or in a long-term relationship, theynever use it in the non-fucking sense. By that stage, they've learnt that it's the type of verbal slip that really agitates your loved one, even if they know you didn't mean anything by it, because it shows a lack of respect for their feelings & your relationship, and so they don't do it.....

.....or they do it anyway because they're the type of fucked up psycho-tramp that, when in a long-term relationship with a specific guy she really likes, starts quietly stressing out about whether she's still as attractive to generic 'guys' that she doesn't particularly like, because it's doubly debilitating if even those guys don't find her attractive, and if her guy thinks she's beautiful there must be something wrong with him, and they need to compensate by giving the impression that they've got multiple guys on the go while maintaining plausible deniability to the guy they're actually with, but that only goes so far, and....

YEAH: THAT GUY'S DEFINITELY GETTING CUCKED

Thanks for the clarification mate .

 

[Blaine]

Was digging through my old YouTube favorites and found this, figured those of you still lurking in this thread for whatever reason would get a kick out of it: