November Set 4

As I’ve pointed out before, back in January 2015, Roberts delivered a presentation in which he claimed that not only would the first episode of Squadron 42 be released by Fall 2015, but the full commercial release - meaning SQ42 and the persistent universe / MMO - would happen by the end of 2016. He made this claim at 1:32:06 in this video.

At the time of this presentation, the PU wasn’t yet in the alpha stage. He seemed to think that his team could get through all of alpha, get through all of beta, and optimize enough for a decent MMO launch in 2 years, all while concurrently working on a single-player game. By saying this, he demonstrated that he either didn’t know what he was talking about, or he was being dishonest. It was probably a combination of the two.

Now, almost 3 years after that presentation, backers still haven’t seen a mission demo of SQ42, and the MMO is in alpha with, I’m guessing, another 1-2 years of alpha ahead of them. At this rate, I would be impressed if the first episode of SQ42 gets released by 2020, and the MMO gets released by 2023.

If Star Wars Battlefront 2 had Star Citizen’s community self.starcitizen

“Darth Vader being locked behind a paywall unlocked isn’t pay to win. He has his advantages and disadvantages when compared to other characters, he serves a different purpose in matches. It’s horizontal progression, not vertical”.

“Micro transactions and buying heroes and star cards is a nice addition to the game for people who have more money than time. As not everyone can put multiple hours in a game per week”.

“Having gameplay changing items that can be bought with real money in game isn’t pay to win. Think about it this way: 1: You meet a player who has been playing Battlefront 2 for a year. 2: You meet a player who payed for all his items. What’s the difference?“.

“Being able to pay for superior star cards and heroes isn’t pay to win. Star Wars Battlefront 2 is a skill based game. Meaning you can beat people who have star cards much better than yours if you have more skill. So arguing that star cards give you an advantage is irrelevant”.

“Star Wars Battlefront 2 isn’t pay to win as you can unlock everything without paying a cent”.

I absolutely love what Chris Roberts is doing and I love star citizen to death. But what I absolutely fucking hate is the absolute lack of criticism on ANYTHING CIG does, from the community. This is what happened with the Star Wars Prequels, no one opposed George Lucas when he was making the prequels, and the prequels turned out to be shit. Even though I love Star Citizen, I will not stand for gameplay affecting microtransactions.

One thing I don’t see brought up at all is the fact that these morons are going to go through “release fatigue” where, when it’s finally released(hah), there’s nothing to be excited about because they’ve been playing through it piecemeal over an entire decade. Flying in the same spaceship isn’t going to suddenly be really fun because they finally added that one goofy feature they promised years ago. It’s like paying premium to stay in a resort while they’re building it. When it’s finally done, there’s no awe or surprise. You’ve already done everything while enduring endless bullshit.

Around the Verse:

“…and making sure that we can refine that to as small of a list and as concise of a list as what we would consider a MINIMUM VIABLE PRODUCT, to put that out to PTU and to live”

”…we’re gonna review that process, hopefully get a minimal amount of feedback so we can get super close to calling this thing FEATURE COMPLETE”

”…also we’ve got all sorts of art that had rotations all over the place, we had to go back and make sure that everything was placed properly on the shelves and that we’re having all the FINAL STUFF in the game, all the FINAL ASSETS in the build”

“Shopkeeper talk” is second only in annoyance to CIG babble about female player characters on the “Grating Bullcrap They’ve Been Talking About Ineffectually for Years” list.

I mean, dayemn — they’ve been futzing around with Shopkeepers unsuccessfully forever, and to no productive end.

What happened to all the exciting work we heard about in early 2016? The highly detailed animations of ship hawking, TV monitor gawking and champagne dreams? The showfloor buzz, the meta-spectacle of in-game ship fetishizing by NPC hucksters in AstroArmada?

Oh, that’s right… All that work that came out of the Great CIG Management Brain Trust Gathering of early 2016 didn’t go into the _game_… Not that it was wasted, though.

At the time it seemed pretty alarming to hear them openly admitting they didn’t really know what their development priorities for the year were — because they didn’t have a master plan stretching across years, they pretty much reset their development priorities at the start of each new year and at the time of filming, the big wigs hadn’t decided yet.

Then it seemed even more damning after the Brain Trust Get Together in California that Priority One was “let’s get our shopkeeper NPCs in the game loaded up with some highly detailed ship hawking movements so the ship showroom in game at least feels abuzz with excitement…” In a space sim without Mining, Bounty Hunting, Trade, Mercenary work, an Economy, Female Players, a satisfying Flight Model or any kind of combat AI…

But as we now know, it was even worse than that. At this point it’s more plausible that the CIG Brain Trust got together to set their priorities for the year and most of it was about the sort of sizzle reel material they needed to start working on for Q4’s big sales push. And the only things that look remotely like what Jake Ross described in that January of 2016 we’re animations and assets later redeployed for a ship sale commercial in a series of year-end commercials to sell yet more ships in a space sim Mining, Bounty Hunting, Trade, Mercenary work, an Economy, Female Players, a satisfying Flight Model or any kind of combat AI…

And now it’s over a year and a half later, and the AI we’ve heard about for years yet hardly encountered in game is proving a big challenge to implement for Shopkeepers — the benign, passive, generally stationary non-entities that are the absolute flotsam and jetsam of MMO-dom…

—

Just give up, Chris. You lost the plot and with more money than you deserved in a dozen lifetimes you’re fighting for your life to salvage something, anything playable amidst the debris field of the once soaring opportunity fortune granted you. You’ve saturated your potential niche market, milked the hell out of the most gullible, and the deflation of the hope bubble is so violent now it sounds like a 130 decibel whoopy cushion eruption under the ass of the god of folly.

The spectacle of you and Sandi trying to be cutesy in your lead-in to Burndown every week is absolutely nauseating. The very need to have a weekly show dedicated to ongoing excuse-making as to why you STILL can’t deliver on a nearly year-overdue update on your Year 5 pre-Alpha is bad enough without the glib, chatty wink-winks that kick it off. Each new installment only adds another chapter to the epic tome “Why Chris Roberts is a terrible game developer, project manager and company leader.” If you lack the awareness to not be embarrassed with each new delay and lack the humility to not be ashamed, plant two other people in that chair who might and use you and Sandi’s time in ways more likely to help the project. Like year long vacations or joint resignations.

I’m loving that the argument that Star Citizen isn’t pay to win comes so close to describing how it doesn’t even make any sense.

“Honestly the capital ships are so unwieldy they will probably be seen as a burden and everyone will stop using them changing the entire game”

Ha. The advantages people paid for are so terrible that when everyone stops using them they will not be considered advantages anymore. It’s funny but it’s also complete speculation about a game that doesn’t exist yet with mechanics that don’t exist and interactions that haven’t happened yet between ships that don’t exist in an economy that doesn’t exist.

You can not say that Star Citizen has no Pay To Win in it because it is the exact definition of it. When you look at a raw exchange of in game assets and currency for money and try to speculate wild hypotheticals to show that there are instances where a player that paid money is not at an advantage over someone who didn’t and redefine the definition of what “Win” means you are showing that you want it to not be pay to win, not that it isn’t.

“I don’t think there is any other game that is trying to do as much as we’re trying to do. So, degree of difficulty 11, not 10.”

Everything is difficulty level 11 when you’re a dumbass. Even moreso when you’re a dumbass who sees a genius looking back at you in the mirror.

I’ve come to appreciate the true genius of “Around the Verse” and related programming isn’t in the intimate look at Development, for as we see with dozens of abandoned prior efforts and misleading disclosures over the years, the view is anything but privileged or trustworthy.

The true genius of CIG programming is in its metronomic, anondyne normalization / sanitization of their absolute, inarguable developmental dysfunction.

“Burndown” captures that spirit so perfectly, with the agreeable Eric Davis putting a friendly (if somewhat patronizing at times) face on what would otherwise be seen as salt-on-the-wound proof of CIG’s abject inability to overcome the curse of the Frankenengine, to deliver upon the hubristic claims of Chris Roberts, to prioritize the core space sim essentials (designing satisfying game loops, perfecting flight models, fleshing out those basic features pitched five years ago, etc.) and all the rest.

The Sean Tracy NewEgg livestream I dropped in earlier is the same thing. Sean went right on that show and delivered a complete fiction of the present game state with absolutely no hesitation whatsoever, just as his exemplar leader has done for years with bald-faced bullcrap like this, this, and this.

Lies. Massive lies. Constant lies. And continuum of lying so persistent and inescapable it actually becomes immersive.

Normalization of managerial deviance — and pathological public dishonesty is exactly that, CIG — is just as effectively achieved via their programming. The quote above from 10ftC delivered with benign confidence is itself an example of it. The message as delivered is, contrary to all the early bluster and constant mugging confidence, a concession of an anticipated failure to deliver on original scope promises all sugar-coated in Chris’s noxious entitlement. For though he has no plans to deliver what he originally pitched, he has expectations of perpetual subsidy from the chump army to get there, or partly there, or somewhere eventually.

And wherever he’s standing when the money finally runs out will be declared the destination. The journey itself — one of a portly goofball false prophet staggering, stumbling, gasping for breath, leading the exiles through the wilderness without map, compass, or North Star and spouting constant word of the Promised Land over yon horizon — will be declared their promised home and those still following may even believe it. Yet what Chris will no longer enjoy, and indeed what he has already lost, is control of his own narrative. The early years allowed him to project a narrative arc about himself, his game and his studio that was readily believed by most, even many goons, and his claims were repeated breathlessly as fact by the supplicant gaming press eager to amplify hype for the easy clicks.

Those days are long since behind us and they aren’t coming back. The narrative of ascent once so forceful and certain is in now very clearly in terminal decay, a slow downward spiral towards yet another cautionary gaming tale about squandered opportunities and abused trust. About the perils of trusting micromanaging asset fetishists and the tragic, underappreciated virtues of proper scope design and competent project management. Chris had a chance to make history here, perhaps the most opportune chance in this history of gaming. And through deficits of both competence and character, he absolutely blew it, and the price he will pay for his hubris, deceit, greed and stupidity is that the history he could’ve written will instead be written for him.

The best he can hope for at this point is that some salvageable mediocrity survives and that he’s cast as fool in an epic tale of gaming folly. It would be a generous appraisal and it’s more truly stated that any man who profits so handsomely by lying so often for so long is a villain at heart. His only plausible defense is one he lacks the self-awareness and humility to make — that he was lying to himself the whole time, too, and because he so normalized the act of lying to himself, his employees and his backers, and because he drove away the very sorts he needed to call him out, there was no one left to correct him.

Holy shit I thought that was just a insane citizen but its a head CIG employee lol.

Right now it’s still an “us vs them” war, but I think it’s starting to lessen. Once the “us vs them” is gone it’d turn into a “players vs CIG” which is what shouhave happened for a long time.

The irony of the situation may be though is that these supporters who were literally insane abt their support to the point they shielded CIG like frothing monkeys around a banana, may have ultimately hurt the final product.

Imagine if you would when CR went out and started doing tons of motion capture instead of actually making a game years ago, if funding basically stopped and people said “no, fuck you and playing director and your stupid fucking Squadron 42 nobody really wants, we want the game we’re spending $$$ on in the way of digital items and purchases.”

Imagine how differently things would have been if that happened, and Chris Roberts was forced to stop being a playboy millionaire and instead try to actually make a game. Instead of a Gary Oldman you’d have a studio full of seasoned programmers working on the actual product.

But hey, got to protect Chris, right? It was totally worth it, I’m sure.

If you follow the streamers for any length of time their interest in a ship declines as CIG stops talking about it and moves to the next thing. As CIG stops talking about every ship after it’s sale is over and begins hyping the next dumb idea this leads to the Citizens melting older jpgs and buying new ones. Twerk17 recently melted some dumb ass large battleship thing I forget the name of, for the new base building jpg.

Wait wait.

You can’t fly most of these ships and I’m not sure anyone has mentioned the mechanics to even make these ships in game. But you can buy them, obviously, and process your fictional jpeg into some form of currency?

This thread is seriously like a slowly circling motorboat around the greatest wreck in the history of gaming. I know this shit is all old to regulars, but I still hit things every week I’ve been reading that make me sit up and goggle at the screen.

Maybe the internet has broken me, but that door looks a bit like goatse.

No ring ofc.

Oh man, I totally see it

Every time they declare “This will shut them up!” and it just doesn’t. Then again if they had pattern recognition Star Citizen wouldn’t still have backers.

CIG Employee

Also, not to burst your bubble, but you might find Star Citizen to be a terrible first-time job. It’s late in a project, the documentation is patchy, no one would have a lot of time to explain things and many systems require you to write code that works with their incomplete feature set while being structured to be easily adapted to their eventual feature set. Then again, what do I know? Maybe that’s your bag.

What insures SC will never be a VR experience though is the ridiculously twitchy speeds everything moves/flies at, even the biggest ship instant accelerates and rockets off the pad like it’s made of balsa wood and it’s not an anomaly. I know no one here believes it, but the flight model isn’t actually noclip -it just looks nearly indistinguishable because accel is tuned so fucking high but it’s exactly what they want in order to appease the kbm shooter crowd this game is really being made for once original sim whales were bled out and became the minority.

Even if they solved the technical issues with framerate, IK/walking rigs, immersion animations, locomotion, canned aim and cover animations etc, they are still left with a game with mechanics that are still incompatible with VR. Also they were pressed on the use of 6dof tracked controllers and they officially ruled out ever supporting them. Really the only way SC sees any type of VR action beyond some shitty vorpx pukeport is if they make a completely separate branch of the game for it that does not mix with the main branch. It’s like they took practically every step imaginable to ensure they will never be able to utilize this technology, even if they ever manage to work out the technical side of things that they are not even trying to work on.

Travis and Chelsea Day were a husband and wife couple, both ex-Blizzard, who came aboard CIG in the early days as funding was taking off like a rocket. Travis was an experienced developer and producer who had worked on both Diablo 2 and 3. Chelsea was a similarly experienced Blizzard customer support manager, making for quite a power couple. Their appointments did much to soothe early backer concern at the runaway stretch goals.

Travis worked as a producer at CIG until June 2015. His solid experience and measured tones on CIG videos did a lot to shore up backer confidence during the long period when Star Marine was “weeks, not months” away. He left quietly, ostensibly to go back to Blizzard. A certain amount of backer unease followed his departure.

Chelsea on the other hand became a community icon, a regular on CIG’s videos and the face of the customer support unit’s concierge team. She became popular with backers for quick, friendly responses and above all being willing to hook whales up with rare and valuable ships if they missed a sale. In those days that was ships like the Idris-M and Scythe. Chelsea’s popularity stemmed from the way she wouldn’t just grant refunds for these rare and expensive ships, but she would put a refunded ship back in “stock” and let another backer buy it if they asked.

Being a CS rep, and also being a feeeeeehmale, this brought her to the attention of CIG’s truly wonderful and caring fanbase

Some of the first rumblings of disquiet on these forums started when Chelsea began to share stories about the kind of people who kept calling up the customer support teams and asking very inappropriate questions - including, yes, the infamous backer who apparently kept asking for video footage of the female CS team members’ feet. This was the time “The Wulge” got his nickname from apparently having a habit of sending the CS team dick picks long before he targeted fellow players. Goons began to joke about how CIG were clearly longing for release day so the community managers wouldn’t have to suck up to whales and could start purging the creeps. Sadly these days we know better.

Alas, Chelsea’s popularity with the backer base also put her in the sights of people who simply could not tolerate sharing the spotlight. These were also the days when attractive female CS reps who appeared in CIG videos had a nasty tendency to disappear if they drew too much viewer attention away from the High Queen of Marketing. The exact details aren’t known, but the body language in the videos spoke volumes - spoke them so loudly that even the backers began to pick up on it and ask questions on the RSI forums. In one video (I think an anniversary stream or something; it was an all-hands team thing) Chelsea was spotted visibly rolling her eyes as Sandi spoke, and after that the writing was on the wall. She left at the same time as her husband, again going back to her old job at Blizzard.

Chelsea is still fondly remembered by the backers to this day, particularly those who bought in at concierge level. Quite a few complaints and concern threads (and more than a few refund requests) have cited how later customer services teams are “nowhere near as good as Chelsea”.

Chelsea would be replaced for a few months by another female deputy customer services rep, supposedly a “Deputy Head of Marketing” - a woman who would in turn depart during a purge of suspected leakers around the time of the AEGIS Potato debacle, when someone leaked the name of an upcoming new ship just prior to CitizenCon only for CIG to frantically rename it to try and discredit the leak. Someone left a placeholder up on the website and the CIG store proudly began selling the “AEGIS POTATO” until someone typed the new name in.

TheAgent-sourced (and Bootcha-supported) rumours said she quit on the spot in disgust after witnessing her colleagues being fired by Sandi for refusing to hand over their mobile phones to CIG’s private detective agency so they could be checked for leaks.

After that Sandi began tweeting about training a new CS team in Europe en masse, the same people who would turn out to be running the ticket queue that labelled backers as “snowflake” or “goon” and cross-referenced them with their suspected usernames on other sites. But the saga wasn’t over yet!

In early 2016, perhaps in a sharing mood or perhaps in a moment of drunken weakness, Bootcha let slip a little more info from his time as a CIG investor. We knew that after Derek’s first spectacular leaks, Ortwin and Chris panicked and brought in a private detective agency (hired with backer money) to try and flush out the leakers. Apparently their report fingered none other than…Travis Day.

We’ll never know if Travis really was a source of some early leaks (Bootcha’s comments were pretty sceptical and suggested he thought that the agency were just trying to find a patsy to justify their fee), but again the reasoning told us all we needed to know. Supposedly, the reason they considered Travis the most likely leaker was that he had a motive to seek revenge on Sandi for her poor treatment of his wife.

Truly, Cloud Imperium Games is a wonderful working environment.

One more one!

“Moved to Concern”

A nasty little trick popular with moderators on the old RSI forums. To defuse rising backer angst, Lesnick & co created a “concern” subforum for angry backers to post about things that bothered them about Star Citizen. This kept them out of more public-facing forums where backers might be put off buying ships. Needless to say, any thread expressing dissatisfaction with Star Citizen (or even one where the conversation turned in a heretical direction) would be swiftly yanked from the public eye and moved to the Concern forum.

However once moved to Concern, the other shoe would drop. There were very strict rules about threads created in the Concern forum, one of which was that all threads had to have a poll so Citizens could vote on whether or not they felt the thread highlighted a major issue (and other laws about speaking respectfully etc). A thread created elsewhere would of course not meet the requirements…and so be immediately locked. Sometimes the hapless thread OP would be banned, too.

Backers quickly learned not to create threads that could even potentially be deemed concern threads, lest they be banned by association. A rather grim and pathetic culture sprang up whereby a backer raising a concern would feel the need to start their post with two or three paragraphs reaffirming their support for the project and their loyalty to CRoberts, lest the mob descend and an RSI moderator wade in to brand the thread with the mark of Concern.

This trick became no longer necessary when the fanbase was unceremoniously moved to Spectrum in mid-2016 and the old RSI forums were “archived” and quietly deleted. Spectrum came with a full suite of mod tools enabling a moderator to make a heretical thread (or even a user’s entire post history) disappear with a click of a button, and angry backers all moved to Reddit instead.

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WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT YOU PLAY

Every Star Citizen trailer features 100% in-engine content using actual game assets. Our aim is to show you the game we’re building, not to stun you with pre-rendered cutscenes. With the attention to detail we’re putting into Star Citizen’s world, you’re forgiven if the two seem like one and the same.

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