Roberts Space Industries - Star Citizen

General
1782

Okay I appreciate your response. But what was the official reason for the year long delay of 3.0, because as far as I can recall ‘polish’ was the reason, in 2016 CR claimed that 3.0 was due in december 2016 and delayed it further and further as each given date was passed. He then said june 2016 and after that passed stopped giving estimates.
So what was the official reason for the delay?

https://www.google.de/amp/www.eurogamer.net/amp/2017-07-31-star-citizens-big-alpha-3-0-release-slips-again

"It’s about giving you the ability to buy what’s on the web inside kiosks. It’s about usable turret gameplay, and Items 2.0 so you can customise your own ship with new components. It’s about picking objects and cargo so you can haul commodities across space as a trader and merchant. It’s about gutting a single-player engine to support thousands of players.

“We’ve learned that we can deliver something better than the original 3.0, something bigger, something pretty groundbreaking, something magnificent. That doesn’t always keep to a schedule, but we think it’s OK to take the time to do it right.”

The current 3.0 is a far cry from the 2016 3.0 feature set claim. Servers still can’t handle more than 10 players at a time and NPC can’t even accept cargo deliveries.
Were is the polish that unexpectedly took over a year to do in the current 3.0?

The unconfirmed claim that the huge delay was because they had to port the game to lumberyard seems at least to offer a plausible explaination to what is happening right now with the lawsuit and the state of the current 3.0 demo.

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1783

Giving you this one post because you’re responding to me directly, i want you to see how ridiculous this is. During 3.0 development they were giving weekly feature by feature schedule updates up till release so don’t pretend they stopped communicating. If you actually want to, you can go back and see each weekly schedule update diff on reddit and see exactly where each week’s delays were. Estimiating software development is unpredictable and hard. I-Novae is over a year late now on alpha, go ask them how easy it is to make accurate estimates. Or read this, and realize you probably haven’t done much research into software project estimation.

Actually since they serverside patched interdictions 2 days after release (they were triggering constantly, endless times in the same jump, flooding the server with hundreds of instanced interdictions full of pirates), the servers are running much better even if i join a friend with 48 players already in that server. Like, i can dogfight competently and reliably kill NPCs, usually between 20-30fpsish. A croberts explained and provided some data on, instances can run slow with 2 players or 50 players, the issue is what those players are doing, there are specific activities that will ruin server performance right now which they have solutions in the pipe for. The bigger issue is the stutters, but after scaling down all the textures with a user.cfg those have mostly stopped bugging me too. These arent huge mountains to climb, it’s just the development process. NPCs can accept cargo deliveries but do bug out frequently and stop accepting. The workaround is in a post i made in this thread already, place the box behind the counter where the NPC eventually moves it to anyways when talking to them works (and it does, i’ve done it more times than i’ve had to use the workaround!).

Im not interested in discussing your uninformed speculation on “the real reason for the delay”. Its easy to look for one big reason and then related it to other popular tales of doom but like, you can see the schedule reports, you can see each item get pushed back and re-estimated as they dig deeper into each. If you have that much time to waste go ahead, if you don’t why bother forming an uninformed opinion on purpose.

And as to the shit in the last post: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/faq/rec-faq Anything you buy with real money you keep, it doesnt rent or expire. REC is the currency system for in-arena commander rentals, the game in a game stuff specifically for AC. For now they’re letting REC rented ships also work in the PU, but 3.1 is when in-PU currency(aUEC) is planned to be usable to buy ships in-game, and that isnt intended to expire on a rental timer either, and auec cant be bought with real money either way. So, if what i say is true and each and every one of your ‘facts’ in your last few posts aren’t accurate… well… where does that leave you, again?

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1784

So they do sell a digital currency that is exclusively used to rent digital items. That was my point exactly, and the fact that later this will be limited to the Arena Commander module doesn’t help your case IMO. I do know that the other ingame currency that is purchaseable can later be used to also buy the ships ingame and other items.

Ok no problem, as I said ealier “unconfimed claim” is what I called it, I don’t understand why your reaction is so hostile, it is not like I claimed it as a fact or something like that.

For me it is between 1 and 25 fps, barely playable and fighting NPCs is impossible. I am not the only one though, even in the SC subreddit the overwhelming majority of players even have worse performance than that. This was not my argument, I complained about the lack of polish. Having sub 30 fps and resorting to texture hacks and other workarounds isn’t exactly what I would call a polished experience. Not to mention the thousands of players claim.

I do believe that eventually, and if that lawsuit doesn’t sink them, SC can be a awesome game.
But right now the reason for the delay (polish) doesn’t seem genuine since the game at is current state is far from polished, I would speculate (no harm intended) that the only reason they released 3.0 is for the holiday sale and the fact that the backers were annoyed that after a year long delay there still was no 3.0.

And if tomorrow they started selling ships, ingame times, ingame currencies used to ‘rent’ ingame items and would use agressive and somewhat misleading marketing to finance the project I would criticize them for it.

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1785

One line into your post, jesus, im not going to read further. Figure it out yourself, what a waste of time.

1786

I’m sorry, but that’s bollocks. The pessimism wave is a natural progression of the hype wave if it continues without being realised. The only people it won’t eventually hit are those steeped in denial about the state of the project. Enough skepticism/pessimism will put the developers on notice that they actually need to deliver, which in SC’s case might bring some much needed focus to a project defined by wilful scope creep.

That’s a really big if though. I still worry that the addition of more and more complex systems are going to make it a less enjoyable game for many people. Obviously it’ll be great news for the 2-3 people it ticks every box for though.

It’s exactly this loop that will stop the game ever releasing. Every additional promise is another bit of the whole dug. It doesn’t matter how much the extra money that comes of the back of it is, the hole is still getting deeper, and likely quicker than the money is filling it in.

Whilst I agree, there’s a problem. I’m not convinced they’ll be able to get enough subscribers to continue development (on what they’ve promised), and once they’ve “released” the game it’ll be harder to justify selling ships (and now land) for cash.

Also, making major gameplay changes on a “stable” release is fraught with danger, and will make probably make subsequent releases significantly more complex.

Also also, I expect that they’d want to release Squadron 42 at about the same time, which is going to be difficult if they’re still implementing major game systems post release.

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1787

:roll_eyes: Ok I think I figured it out, REC is apparantly not purchaseable, only the 20k REC from the starter package is bought with money. Thanks for the clarification. I take back this criticism.
So ingame items and ships are only purchaseable with the other currency that can be aquired by spending money on the store, or alternatively buying digital ship insurance on the store.

1788

Tell that to the British. They are actually funneling a large amount of tax money into it under the guise of it being a “British” game, to the tune of millions annually.

Beyond that, it’s the usual self denial from Citizens, please keep up the good struggle.

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1789

It’s really entertaining watching people in complete utter denial; CR could pack it up, buy an island and live the good life and supporters like Matt50 would think it was a stretch-goal and fork out more money. And now selling digital land. lol. It’s like selling an F1 game then charging players for the roads afterwards. :star_struck:

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1790

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1791

I don’t understand why trying different methods to attract donations in such a big deal. I pledged I:B and I am able to receive a “custom skinned digital ship + digital copy of the game + beta access when it’s ready” <= scuse me but … Is there something not digital I missed or something? But digital land is a scandal ?

SC-SQ42 is a easily 200+M$ project and 10+ years in development project, with a pretty new context as the investors are the customers and the entire game development is open. To find creative ways to attract new donators, and find various digital compensation that people would like to pay for, is part of their job isn’t it ? Is trying to attract people’s donations a bad thing ? Like when you prepare a KS campaign for month to be sure people are going to pledge ? Why is this different ?

As I said a bunch of times here, the main issue here is that you guys are comparing a model you never seen before with usual closed and locked game project development workflows that you probably don’t even understand.

The ones who trigger are the ones who pollute a thread, where we normally share news about Star citizen game development, with DS blog’s posts and “the game is a scaam” and “get a refund” and “look at this video where someone says the game is never going to be finished I knew I was right”…

If you guys are discussing about laws of physics implied in our atmosphere in another thread, for example, can I come in your thread and spam videos and blog’s posts about Earth’s flatness ? Just imagine that in real life (please return playing with your poop)

I tried to create a separate topic a year ago to debate on the “is it a scam” topic and Inovae chose to close it immediately. If you don’t want to moderate this one so we, the one who want to discuss only on gameplay mechanisms, or last trailers, etc, can exchange about this type of elements, please reconsider the creation of a second topic where debate, popcorn and triggers will not interfere with official news and gameplay experiences sharing.

In the actual state it is impossible to simply discuss on anything positive about this game here

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1792

In answer to the above:

In game advantages for real world money in the AAA market has always been viewed as scummy, why should SC get special status?

The possibility of in-game advantages and the outright refusal to nail down features before selling them to people, who then go on to feel at risk of missing out on said advantage, is manipulative at best even if that isn’t the intent of CIG. Again, for some reason I’m supposed to give SC special status vs a AAA published studio doing this.

Saying people ‘don’t even understand’ this model because it’s something they ‘haven’t seen before’ is outright insulting to their (and my) intelligence. You’re better than that, Kamui, and if you’re not, you should try to be.

They’re not undergoing ‘entirely open development’. If they were, you’d have seen the team working on (to pick an example out of the blue, of which there are many candidates;) Procedural city planets, before the big shiny reveal trailer. Practically everyone here has seen ‘open-development’ from a whole range of indi games, it’s nothing new, and it’s also a pretty meaningless buzzword. CIG show what they’re comfortable with showing, the same as any dev team. (and there’s nothing wrong with that, I’m just again stating how it’s no reason to give the project any special status vs others.)

I’ve never been anywhere near the whole ‘it was a scam from the start’ side of the tin foil hat brigade, but I’m more than happy to read through the drama alongside the entertainment value the game provides itself.

No one’s stopping you talking about your experiences within the game. Have you ever thought about getting discussion away from being so negative by talking about positive experiences you’ve had? By contributing to the discussion in a way that doesn’t directly play into the hands of people who enjoy seeing a mental image of you beat your head against the desk while they eat popcorn? Your thread was deleted because no one really wants or needs another troll thread.

As fun as it is to poke fun at people who look a bit too hyped about the project, they actually bother to contribute to the discussion about SC in a positive way, with talk of fun little adventures they’ve had. Even seeing as many problems with SC as I do, I still enjoy reading those snippets of fun. Because it’s fun. Have I said fun too many times here?

If you want a safe little echo chamber of people dreaming about their perfect game together with no deadline to be seen; been there, done that, it gets boring after a while, trust me.

TLDR:
1: SC isn’t so special as to make any complaints magically not apply.
2: Please don’t treat people here like children who can’t make sense of things right in front of their face, it’s insulting.
3: If you don’t like the lack of positivity about the game here, why not add to the positivity about the game here rather than whining about your troll thread being taken down?

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1793

IB isn’t waggling the carrot of additional ships for you to buy after you’ve backed the game. That’s a bit of a difference.

It might be now, it definitely didn’t start that way.

Is their job to develop and release a game they promised, or find new things to promise in order to get additional funding? Because they’re not necessarily the same thing, and they come with different sets of priorities.

Wasn’t that thread a literal flamebait at a time where they’d just got this one under control? That might have been something to do with it.
Don’t get me wrong, some of the shit some of the people are posting here isn’t necessary, and they should think about how much of a useful contribution they’re actually making.

It’s also really not this community’s job to provide it, either. Sure, I’d like a better ration between positivity and negativity, but as I’m here, I’ll take what I’m given. If I wanted to stroke CR’s ego, I can do it over on their forums where I’m sure they’re a lot happier to oblige in ego-stroking.
It’s the crusader/missionary attitude of “I must spread Star Citizen positivity everywhere” that’s exactly what makes it so easy for people, especially professional trolls, to talk even more trash about it. This is one of the things I hate most about the internet and people on it in general, and I speak as someone who formerly was a gleeful troll in a different life.

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1794

I couldn’t agree more with your post. And the quote I am replying to is a familiar accusation circulating gaming communities. Personally I don’t believe Chris Roberts started SC as a scam. The feeling I got while I supported SC was one of honesty and integrity. Unfortunately CR got caught up in his own myth despite evidence to the contrary, i.e. the Freelancer fiasco, which had to be taken over by Microsoft to be completed. What’s more, all that money no doubt reinforced CR’s hubris and things have been spiraling out of control ever since. SC is now a massive black hole sucking everything it can out of it’s supporters pockets to stay alive - when that happens it’s inevitable corners are cut and dubious decisions are made, even to the point of corrupting the original vision and intent. As far as I’m concerned, SC didn’t emerge as a scam but it has definitely morphed into one, IMO.

1795

No special status. Just different things.

The global trend to products dismantling, to increase their profitability, pollutes the entire world (not only video games) and is a real nightmare. You are confusing investments with profits.

CIG works on the development of a game with ZERO pay to win¹ microtransactions in it when it is released, like I-Novae. Like I-Novae Studios did, they asked for donations, and proposed some digital content in exchange. Like I-Novae with its IndieGoGo page, they are still, and continuously searching for new donations. Where I-Novae chose to lock their game concept immediately after the KS campaign (goodbye I:QFE), and to stop investing time and money in more donations research (coherent with locking the game concept (goodbye volumetric clouds)), CIG did the opposite.

SC is the I:QFE of CR. In the same situation (with the possibility for I-Noave to reach their secret I:QFE stretch goal), today you would be complaining about Flavien trying to sell you a T-Shirt with googly-eyed asteroids in it (imminent patent filing).

As for the "never seen before thing : concepts separately are old, and CR was not the first guy to think of an open and unlocked development, with customers as investors, etc … but it’s the first time all these concepts are united in such a big project, at this scale. SC is not the first game in its genre, but it is the first to achieve such a beautiful game development flow (even if not perfect, and that it took years of “couacs” to reach it). I maintain that you guys don’t understand what you’re looking at.

I’m really bad in english and it takes me hours to answer correctly in this language (and I’m not sure if the meaning I search to express is obtained in the result) so I stop my answer here for the moment.

@Topperfalkon I tried to answer to you at the same time, directly or indirectly

¹ : added after PlayBenni’s note

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1796

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/faq/united-earth-credits

How do I get UEC?

Many fans who pledged during the early stages of the crowdfunding campaign have Original and Veteran Backer Rewards which contain UEC. Those UEC will be removed from that reward package and added to the UEC Ledger on your account. And of course, once the game is launched, you will be able to earn UEC through gameplay.

If you wish to purchase more UEC before that time, you can do so in the Pledge Store. UEC is available for purchase in increments of 5,000, 10,000, and 20,000 UEC. Once purchased from the Pledge Store, the corresponding amount of Imperials will be added to your UEC Ledger. These purchases can be funded with RSI Store Credit or through direct purchase.

Correct me if I am wrong, but purchasing UEC will be available even after the game launches AFAIK.

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1797

No UEC will not, but I forgot something though. My bad => micro-transactions will be available but only for cosmetics (ship skins, etc). I forgot that because I’m not interested at all in it. Gameplay items (like ships, etc) will not be purchasable with real money though.

edit : note that cosmetics will be purchasable with UEC too (nothing exclusive to real money).

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1798

STILL waiting for the balanced weapon and controller document they promised would be out in 30 days in July 2015…

They can’t even produce a Word document in 2 1/2 years…

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1799

Examples of CIG Incompetence

  1. Legal Team - The Crytek lawsuit was obvious from the moment they switched to LY
  2. Public Relations - I’ve harped on this for years. Spouting bullshit left and right to create sales
  3. Project Management - Complete disaster. Anyone who is a PMP can see this
  4. Graphics - No thought put into polygon count of an MMO
  5. Software Dev. - No thought put into the vast amount of positioning data of all game objects… (grabby hands & crates)
  6. Network Dev. - Should be shutting down this whole game object thing. Although graphics is so f’d up, they haven’t really stressed the server side yet
  7. Illfonic and the sub-contractors - They’re bailing for a reason. They ALL can’t be incompetent.

There appears to be no thought of how much data will need to be supplied to the client in order to implement Chris Roberts grand vision. You’re gonna need Google Fiber to the Home to play this game as its envisioned.

I believe point 2 is so critical, I was calling for a class action lawsuit for false advertising in 2015. There should have been legal advice at that time. If there was, it appears to be “create shell companies”, instead of “hire a competent PR team.”

1800

…i wonder if this is how will people act when inovae gets really late? :thinking:
where were some of you when we were sold game called Elite dangerous.
Game that was clearly in bare bones scaffolding alpha phase, being called finished product ?
And they promised a lot alright. These guys at least have the guts to call it what it is - an alpha build.
Did they messed up ? yes.
Is it way past estimated dates? yes.
Does constantly slamming it over our heads fix it ? no.

Thing is they take voluntary donations. This is not politicians stealing from people. These people have option not to do it. It is their …questionable decision.

besides Inovae has now amazing opportunity to attract those that leave SC. And since most news is on forums. It is first thing they see. BAM
What do they see as a main most active topic ? :roll_eyes:

What Kamui does is exactly what i have done back during kickstater for infinity battlescape on Elite dangerous, KSP and some other forums.
Although there were some people that were less then enthusiastic they said their peace and left.
I was never met with anything like what some of you guys demonstrate right now.

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1801

So,

Your argument is “Negate all consumer protection laws”???