So Here’s The Deal: I’m suing Chris Roberts for consumer fraud in small claims court.
Everything he’s ever said will be used against him as a public figure, and his litany of LLC shell companies don’t protect him.
He either comes to Jersey to defend himself, or get’s a default judgment of being a fraud.
Fucking blow me.
A second lawsuit has hit the thread.
Scruffpuff
StreetRoller pops down a camera and ad-libs a speech with more screen presence, gravitas, better delivery and timing, natural charisma, better enunciation, and a more commanding performance than literally anything Chris Roberts has ever managed to shit out, and obviously better than anything Sandi has ever done.
Off the cuff.
Chris, what is it like being shown that you’re literally shit? That your best efforts in everything you attempt (except stealing and fraud) are blown away by regular guys not even trying?
What’s it like, Sandi, that one guy in a wheelchair on YouTube bitching out your husband just put in a performance that, by itself, is better than all of your IMDB “achievements” combined?
I bet that non-criminals would feel bad about that. I bet Chris and Sandi don’t.
I don’t know. According to the description, you’ve got weird hands — you really think you stand a chance against a hand-wave master such as Chris? Pff. Think again.
lol. Didn’t you already get a refund?
nope.jpg
Figure that one out.
I received money in my paypal account somehow, after being told I wasn’t entitled.
My rights are more important than my money. I’m seeking triple what he stole from me.
I think the best part of his lawsuit is suing for triple damages. The Stimperor approves.
I wonder.
Suppose someone purchases something from company X and requests a refund. Then you get a letter from company X that says (among other things) that you are not entitled to a refund from company X, you should address your inquiry to company Y, but you really aren’t entitled to a refund in any case.
Then after some additional back and forth, you get a letter from company X (or company Y) saying you might be getting a refund out of the goodness of their heart, even though you are not entitled to one.
Then money appears in your account from company Z which is not equal to the amount of your refund request.
Did you actually received a (partial) refund, or simply a donation from a business you have never transacted with?
Scruffpuff
To me the best part is peeling away Chris’ layers of sycophants and forcing him to face at least one person who doesn’t think he’s a visionary, knows he’s not qualified, and knows he’s a fraud. People like Chris generally can’t handle that, which is why he busies himself flying all over, making a nuisance of himself, and immediately getting rid of anyone who sees him for what he is. This will be a fun vacation for him - a staredown with a guy who knows he’s a talentless cunt, instead of crowds of cultists chanting his name while he lurches around on stage waving and spitting.
Jobbo_Fett
Everyone wants the ELE to happen and kill this whole shitshow dead by space coutts
I just want some good character development.
I love you all but I’m ready for this shit to end. The fact that CIG has managed fumble around and fuck up so comprehensively is an insult to my trade. That they continue to lie and manipulate such an impressionable, desperate market segment, all while not only remaining solvent, but enriching the very source of their incompetence, at the expense of their otherwise competent workforce, is nothing less than a scathing indictment on our society.
(tweet: deleted)
I’m afraid that one day Clifford is going to break my creep-o-meter and I won’t be able to tell if someone is a creep anymore even if they give off thousands of tells.
Scruffpuff
Please tell me this is official concept art.
This is, no joke, CIG’s early vision for a drink mixing mini-game that might engage those serving as Stewards on a fleet-whales Genesis Starliner. (I would include Stewardesses as a crew option but as we all know there are no female NPCs in the game yet.)
if you’re a player chartering flights between the three moons of Stanton, and eager to sit in a luxurious cushioned seat for 20 minutes of “look out the window, it’s SPACE!” gameplay, you just might find yourself eventually hunkering for a little cocktail to help take the edge off. At such a moment, you’ll just crane your head upward, use the Star Citizen interaction system to “CALL STEWARD”, and another player will race seatside to take your order. If you’re both using Faceware tech, you can LARP at maximum fidelity levels as you, the weary traveling Cargo Carrier, tell him, the dandily outfitted Steward, “Man, I really need a drink to take the edge off.”
Then he will nod understandingly, wink knowingly, and reply sympathetically, “I have just the thing for a guy like you who needs to take the edge off.” Then he will turn, and move through Chris’s famed 5 stages of accelerating locomotion to the crew cabin. It is there he will engage in this game, and only with this context can you possibly appreciate just how vital such a mini-game will really be to the holistic ongoing adventure that is Chris Roberts’ Star Citizen.
The more accurately Star Citizen’s design goals are articulated, the more like an elaborate prank it all sounds.
G0RF
[EUROGAMER: Star Citizen, I am Disappointed
Oh hey, finally a news story not harping on the latest lawsuit development. Don’t these clickbaiters realize there is a GAME being made here?
Oh wait… Oh no…
Oh
There are so many fair-minded complaints in this write up of 3.0 that to bold them all would make for an ugly sight. It’s the first time in a long time a major outlet has written an actual review of the game as playable, and man, it’s not pretty.
Star Citizen is a bit like an Instagram account: what you see looks amazing but the reality is hollow. As it stands, at major milestone alpha 3.0, Star Citizen does not convince as a game. But as a picture-postcard-maker - as a demonstration of technology - it’s virtually peerless. Standing on top of a canyon on a dusty, windswept planet, looking up at the suns and moons in the sky and knowing you can fly up to them is hair-raisingly cool. Knowing when night comes it’s because of the rotations and orbits of those same planets, of those same stars, is an awesome feeling. And even though there might only be a handful of planets to touch down on (for now), they are truly massive, taking probable hours to fly around. It’s a simulation of the highest detail and largest proportions.
But once you’ve seen the eye-popping sights, once you’ve flown down from space onto a planet and then back up again - once you’ve seen the beautiful Blade Runner hubs with their rebellious posters on murky walls and flickering neon lights - there’s little to do. You can buy fancy-looking guns, you can even buy a great big railgun, which charges up and then very satisfyingly unloads, but there’s nothing to kill.
Likewise, you can buy various suits of armour off mannequins in shops - one of the game’s many lovely flourishes of detail - but there’s no real need to other than to look cool, other than to pose for screenshots. Most shops don’t have any interactive stock and so, like the hubs and the universe around them, they contribute to the feeling of touring a giant Hollywood set: all front and no substance.
There are a handful of missions to run, but they’re tepid and boring. One, for instance, is an off-the-books private investigation which, admirably, can go either way depending on the evidence you find. You are to search an eerily quiet, abandoned comms station to get to the truth. It sounds OK, doesn’t it? But there’s no excitement, just a few computer terminals and panels to interact with. No threat, no danger, just a mission to solve an insurance claim of all things. Then it bugged and I couldn’t complete it as intended. It was all so typically Star Citizen.
Even the spaceship dogfights struggled to impress me, owing to a distinct lack of heft from the available weaponry, which feels tinny and machinegun-y rather than thumping and deadly, like a Star Wars laser cannon - and more or less the same as when I last played Star Citizen two years ago.
But that’s OK, right? This is early access and all we expect is a working core, really, with some taster content around it - enough to prove the concept and excite us like PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds did, or any number of other early access games.
I realise that Star Citizen’s professions - careers to pursue, such as salvaging, smuggling, bounty hunting and so on - are still to come, like so much else. Besides, this is a sandbox where we’re supposed to make our own fun. Forget about all the buckets and spades which aren’t there and concentrate on simply enjoying the sand with friends. But the problem is, you can’t - you can’t enjoy it. And this is the game’s biggest crime.
Star Citizen is a game about spaceships - it sells them to players for hundreds of dollars, for crying out loud. These are the creations it revels in and celebrates. You can see it in the wonderful animation each spaceship has for climbing into its cockpit, and you can see it in the way each craft buzzes to life as power courses through it. They’re beautiful machines - and for that money, they ought to be. But the game can’t keep up with them. What is the point of owning a Lamborghini if you live in a neighbourhood with speed bumps and a 20mph speed limit?
Simply put, Star Citizen has a frame-rate issue so bad it ruins everything. It’s not a client-side problem, because there are glimpses of 60 frames per second when servers are fresh and populations low, but it’s something to do with the net code. What it means is that you’re unlikely to ever see more than 20 frames per second regardless of graphics settings, regardless of PC (within reason), and usually you’ll hover around 15 frames per second.
What good is having a futuristic marvel of a machine if you can’t feel the thrill of piercing a planet’s atmosphere and roaring along the canyons below, buzzing the proverbial towers? Furthermore, what good are panels to turn things on and off, or exit vehicles, if the choppy frame rate makes it an ordeal targeting them? I was genuinely stuck in the passenger seat of a buggy for this reason - a buggy ride that would have been gawp-inducing if we had witnessed it at anything more than a slideshow. I had one glorious glimpse of 60 frames per second but within 10 minutes the server had reverted to headache-land.
Star Citizen alpha 3.0 was supposed to show the world what this game was all about, to prove the concept - that’s what all the delays were in aid of. Why take so long and then shoot yourself in the foot? And we’re not even talking massively multiplayer yet - we’re talking servers struggling under the strain of 50 people.
It feels petty to slam a game in alpha, in early access, for performance issues. Yet in Star Citizen’s mega-profile case it feels so indicative of the story so far: unfulfilled promise(s). ‘Trust us,’ say Roberts Space Industries, ‘we’re building something spectacular and it takes time.’ But how much more time will it take before what is spectacular actually becomes fun to play? And how much trust is left? When I hear a friend of mine, my Star Citizen tour guide, my expert on hand, who’s into the game for hundreds of pounds, talk about reining in Chris Roberts, it makes me wonder.
Star Citizen remains a tantalising prospect, and a controversial one. Perhaps the solutions I am after are right around the corner, mere moments away. Perhaps the core is inches from completion and content will soon be piped in willy-nilly and with joyous abandon, and the dream realised. Or perhaps we will be here a year from now, still stewing over the same issues. I, like many others, was led to believe alpha 3.0 would be the turning point, but what I see is an ever-growing mountain to climb, and my hope wanes.
Star Citizen, I am disappointed.
As a game developer, an illusion that I labored under for years is that you spend most of your time building an engine and then someone else comes along and scripts some missions on top of it relatively late in the day. Then I realized that’s why I was making terrible games. The content is key and needs to inform the engine development. Where it sounds like SC is at, is a very bad place to be after 5 years.
There isn’t too much of interest. Accountancy. Basically they no longer hold any cash reserves in the company, but things like bank balance and debtors (tax credit) don’t hold much informative value since we’re comparing June to December.
What is interesting is that the rumours of cutting back in staff numbers seem untrue. If anything they are increasing staff numbers in the UK exponentially. Foundry 42 Ltd employed an average of 221 people in 2016 which rose to an average of 284 people in the first six months of 2017. Wages in 2016 totalled some £9.8m but the first six months of 2017 totalled £6.05m. They have been fairly consistent with an average gross salary (inc ER’s NI) of around £45k per employee.
There’s a curious increase in “other creditors” that totals around £1.6m (up from £50k at December 2016). This is due for repayment within one year. It’s not the other companies. Not really worth speculating what it is though.
It remains to be seen if they reduce the accounting period for the other UK companies, or if they extend them. Head says they should reduce and file a six months set. Heart says they will extend and file an eighteen month set. I really don’t think there is a third “CIG option” to file a normal twelve month set of accounts…
For the record though, their mean number of employees were:
