Posted on December 13, 2017 | written by GOONRATHI
December Set 4
Posted on December 13, 2017 | written by GOONRATHI
December Set 4
Sarsapariller
Worth Watching:
(video: ship explodes buggedly)
THE NETCODE IS FINE THIS IS FINE
Scruffpuff
This is something I called in my July blog two years ago, when I stated the following: “a project with at least one insurmountable problem never passes zero percent completion, no matter how many other development goals are met.”
This is independent of Chris Roberts involvement being its own 100% guarantee of project failure.
CIG keeps showing these small, incremental pieces of complete bullshit, and passes each and every one of them off as progress toward some amorphous goal and endpoint. No, CIG, you’re not X% completed - you’re 0% completed, and you’ll always be 0% completed no matter how much work you do, because your core technology is impossible as designed and built. You fucked up from the jump, and now you’re full-on fucked and there’s nothing you can do about it except scrap everything, fire Chris, start all over again, and plan it right. That’s how you get past 0%.
The Tenets of the Cult of Christ Roberts and the Church of Latter-Day Star Citizens. The words carved on the golden pages of the Great Book of Dreams, whispered by everyone from Ben Lesnick on down:
Star Citizen is the BEST GAME EVER
Self-explanatory but also the tenet that needs the most proselytising and defending. Star Citizen is THE BEST and so it automatically gets associated in their minds with all the other BEST THINGS EVER (the theorycrafting, the dreams of massive battles, the org politics which every citizen expects to win, and so forth). A whole pile of weird citizen behaviour stems from the need to keep Star Citizen’s reputation pristine - and in reality, to keep it on the pedestal in their minds. Star Citizen Good, in all things forevermore. Amen.
Enter the conspiracy theories about Big Publishing Sabotage, the furious projection of SC’s problems onto other games, and so on. P2W? Delays? Boring missions? Even being in alpha for an alarmingly long time. You can tell exactly what the backers are worried about in Star Citizen at any given moment by reading what they’re accusing Elite Dangerous and Line of Defence of doing.
Star Citizen backers are an elite who have recognised an Important Project and invested in it.
Important for tribalism and also for a sense of self-importance. Citizens are big important people. They’re saving PC gaming, you know. That’s why we see weird misuse of financial terminology (pledges are an “investment”) that can even be contradicted in the same post (“CIG owes you NOTHING”). Needless to say, the “invester” stuff gets cited when a Citizen wants to feel powerful and the Might of CIG (ironclad TOS, “refunds are scams”, etc) gets invoked when a Citizen feels another citizen is getting uppity.
Chris Roberts is a genius who surrounds himself with other geniuses. He and his circle must not be judged by the standards of ordinary mortals.
The cult of personality. You gotta have faith in the man himself. Cultists can see Star Citizen is a vastly ambitious game that would normally be impossible to make, they just tell themselves Chris can make it because he’s a genius. A hero from their childhood. Losing faith in Chris’s ability to make the game, or his benevolent attitude towards his followers, is repeatedly described on the refunds subreddit as the moment people decided to pull out.
This is the tenet that supports and partially fuels the LARP-like behaviour from CIG (of course Chris’s ego supplies the rest). Chris and CIG’s uncontested genius is essential to silencing any doubts that might form. CIG has the best people working round the clock on Star Citizen! Networking guy is a “networking God”, Sandi is “the best marketer ever”, and so forth. Any of their employees must be the Best Guys Ever At X. And it’s entirely acceptable to spend huge sums of money to buy top talent, who are instantly promoted to being top talent just because they work at CIG.
A CIG staffer who doesn’t act like Top Talent rankles with the faithful. This is why you’ll sometimes see cultists furiously decry a leaver or even an indiscreet current employee as only a minor flunky. He’s not acting right to fit the vision in their heads of CIG’s Mighty Beings. Chris’s and even Sandi’s behaviour is acceptable to the cult because that’s just how their idea of a rockstar game coder acts. It’s what they’d do if they were him.
I will get to fly my spaceship and it will be glorious and awesome and just like my dreams.
“DON’T TOUCH THE SPACESHIPS”. Self-explanatory and also ineeringly precise. The cultist’s specific dreams are the ones that Star Citizen will conform with. How long do you think B’Tak would last even in the game most of his fellow backers want to play? A citizen knows their ships will be amazing and totally worth the “investment” and let them live out whatever space dreams they’ve brought to the table from their own lives, without interruption from awkward deaths or risk of running out of content. A Cultist will never be bad at his chosen profession especially if that profession is “space badass”. That’s what the faithless masses are for.
As pointed out already, CIG messes with this at their extreme peril. The Grey Market can be accepted under this tenet because “a ship is worth the investment”, but if CIG suggest a ship might not be as good as the citizens thought? FIRE AND WOE.
The masses will admire the ships I pledged to back. They will wish they had one and weep tears of longing.
The Citizens must have better ships than everyone else. They paid, dammit (in money, time, and faith), they suffered the jeers and mockeries of the knowlessmen. The Cult’s promised heaven is a place where a Citizen can gun down latecomers and have them gasp in awe at his amaaaazing ships that he was granted as just recompense for his faith in the project. It’s his rightful reward.
My dreams are important to CIG.
The theorycraft fuel. CIG is the best company and Star Citizen is the best game and it’s going to be every good thing I ever dreamed of. The means by which CIG will design, implement, or even know of the Citizen’s dreams are just a sacred mystery of the Cult.
Backers will hiss and snarl at CIG if this tenet is threatened, even though this seems contradictory to other tenets. If this comes under pressure, from CIG nailing down a mechanic or an ill-judged remark on a livestream, the cult get very angry and this morphs into a more threatening form: My dreams are shared by a silent majority who agree with me. CIG would be stupid to go against me and the secret army of backers who agree with me.
This creates one of the sadder cult beliefs - that CIG read the forums and monitor it for good ideas, so their theorycrafting will be recognised and put into the game. If one of the CIG leads said he never read Spectrum, there’d be an explosion within hours.
CIG will reward me for the faith I have shown. I rise in CIG’s esteem by performing acts of faith.
This, this this this, is where a fundamental disconnect exists between CIG and its cult, and if the cult ever do rise up it will probably be because of a fracture that starts here. I could have phrased this as “CIG will reward me for buying more ships”, but that’s not actually how the fandom tell themselves the system works. Citizens believe they will catch CIG’s eye and be rewarded for preaching, bringing in new backers (okay that worked for a while), posting praise on the subreddits, shouting down unbelievers, and owning goons/refunders/Derek with sick burns.
Except…you don’t rise in the fandom by showing faith. Maybe you did once - citizens can remember the days of beer shipments and gift crates and shoutouts on Around The Verse. But that doesn’t work anymore. CIG just expect you to turn up to be milked and get very indignant when you don’t. You gain CIG’s attention by Buying More Ships. CIG are veeeeery careful to cloak Buying More Ships as having faith in Star Citizen. They call it pledging, they constantly thank backers for their support, they dole out rewards like PTU access. Backers see streamers who stream because they’re paid by CIG marketing, but they’re told that the streamers do it out of sheer love of the game. But the fundamental thing that gets a cultist that sweet, sweet attention from the Divine is to buy the current ship on sale. New cash only please, no melting.
CIG can only push this so far. Backers are possessive and resent any suggestion that others might be rewarded if they haven’t shown sufficient faith (and every backer is sure they’ve shown more faith then their neighbours). The anger around the Evocati centres on the way CIG created an inner circle whose members weren’t considered worthy amongst the wider community. Worse, Evocati members describe a broken game even if they do so in effusive tones. They should be singing hymns of divine ecstacy.
===
I won’t claim this maps out all the tenets. There’s one or two around Derek I want to explore in a later post (particularly the idea that the Cult has an ideal of Derek and actually likes it when he acts in certain ways). And most of this stuff is an unspoken understanding between backers rather than things they discuss in public. I’ve mapped these out largely by taking note of what makes Citizens rage the hardest.
But if you’re wondering why an innocuous comment about network performance has produced an absurdly disproportionate response from the Backer Hordes…well, he contradicted one of the unspoken truths of the Faith. That must be shouted down, must must must, before it echoes for too long in a Citizen’s mind and he starts to ask himself forbidden questions.
The only changes of note are they finally notified the state that they are no longer on Sunset Blvd. and **they changed the business activities from “Game Development and Publishing” to “Game Development”
So maybe they need a publisher now?**
e: They also created a new LLC on 11/30/17. Roberts Space Industries LLC (a separate entity from Roberts Space Industries Corp)
nothing shocking here, but extremely funny if true
crobcoin is in
You haven’t considered meshed forums that will support thousands of blogs.
Derek first had to build up his blogs, so technically crying wolf only started two weeks ago
You’re right, Derek’s Wolf Crying is still in alpha, and shouldn’t be judged by normal “Called It” standards. It’s well documented that Cassandra took 8 years to carve her omens into stone before presenting them to Agamemnon.
On the twelfth day of Christmas, Chris Roberts gave to me
Twelve fudders fudding
Eleven whales a-milking
Ten united Stimpires
Nine days of mocap
(Ben) Eight all the pies
Seven frames per second
Six banks a-lending
FIVE DEREK BLOGS
Four polished turds
Three con men
Two turtlenecks
And an invite to Evocati.
Scruffpuff
Here comes Crobber Claus
Here comes Crobber Claus
Right down Crobber Claus way
CIG needs all your money
Send it all their way
Christmas time means lots of JPEGs
They make everything right
Too bad there’s not a game to play cause
Backers just ain’t too bright
I saw mommy kissing Santa Claus,
Under the Christmas tree last night.
Sexual contact is a sin to the Stimperor,
So I set the two of them alight.
Just had a couple emails back and forth with an old friend who is in the LA office on this nightmare, and he essentially said that (for him personally) he is just there to pull a steady paycheck, and that he and a couple other devs are using CIG to pay the bills while they work during off times to develop their mobile game. He said that much of the “worker level people” in the company are using this as a “getting paid to work on their demo reels” type of gig, and nothing more, because the passion and morale are gone, and no one ever gets heard for their cool ideas, because management takes their ideas and presents them as their own to upper management.
Also dropped a little tidbit, that a couple of the trolls on Reddit (and maybe here, but he won’t elaborate) are actively trolling the community out of spite because they hate the company and need to burn off steam. I believe I know one of them in here, but he posts very infrequently, so I can’t pin him down yet.
Take it for what it’s worth
actually it is not entirely uncommon that angry employees do this from time to time - or put horrific easter eggs in games and movies that many people never catch - but occasionally they do. As Derek knows the old Fatbabies site, employees would go on their from time to time to rail against and attack people and employers about their/and others games, because they were so disenfranchised by whatever company/whoever manager they were working for.
The Game Illuminati was full of this for years as well.
Not to spoil the E.L.E., but there’s a money panic going on behind the scenes at CIG right now. It goes along the lines that CR thought the game would be done by now, and he also banked on selling fuckloads of copies “off the shelf.”
Obviously neither of those things happened, or will happen. So now they’re juggling the following hilariously contradictory financial balls:
Need to reduce staff to cut costs
Not making it look like they’re cutting staff to cut costs
Needing more staff to get the “game” working
Added expense of hosting “MMO” style persistent game servers
Keeping the ship sales coming to cover those added expenses
Having nothing to show that would encourage continued spending
And last but very much not least:
Rejuvenating the existing flagging backer morale for more cash
Hilariously, and I am not making this up, a marketing push for SQ42 meant to compete with COD and is literally being counted on to bring in millions in new money
Which ball will be dropped first, I wonder?
Hint: the SQ42 major-league push, along with all its advertising and marketing, was supposed to be ready to roll by this Friday’s launch of The Last Jedi.
It was supposed to be ready, but it’s not. The deadline was officially missed. It doesn’t really matter what they show now, or when they show it. The date was everything.
Good shit. Like actually previews in theaters?
Actual financial forecasting was done based on that becoming reality.
Jobbo_Fett
Twas the night before Christmas, when all thro’ the house
Not a peripheral was working, not even my mouse;
The locks were spun by the coders with care,
In hopes that St. Roberts soon would be there;
The vackers were nestled all snug in their pods,
While visions of pirate slavery danced in their heads
And Moma in her ‘kerchief, and I in my cap,
Had just settled our brains for a long winter’s parp—
When out at the door there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from the pod to see what was the matter.
Away to the carpet I glitched in a flash,
Tore open my anus, and threw up udhelsgsvwof.
The moon on the breast of the naked commando,
Gave the luster of mid-day to objects below;
When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,
But a miniature sleigh, and eight tiny engineers,
With a little old driver, so lively and quick,
I knew in a moment it must be St. Roberts.
More rapid than eagles his hands explained,
And he whistled, and shouted, and call’d them by name:
“Now! Lando, now! Lesnick, now! Brian and Tony,
“On! Erin, on! Sandi, on! Coders and Artists;
“To the top of the cash! To the top of the pile!
“Now sale away! Sale away! Sale away all!”
As dry leaves that before the aegis hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle, blast off to the sky;
So up to the stratosphere the coursers they flew,
With the engine full of bugs—and St. Roberts too:
And then in a twinkling, I heard on the spectrum
The prancing and pawing of each hand waving.
As I dreamed in my head, and was turning around,
Down the turret St. Roberts phased through the bound(ary):
He was dress’d all in black, from his head to his foot,
And his clothes were all tarnish’d with coke stains and soot;
A bundle of ideas was flung on his back,
And he look’d like a peddler just opening his pack:
His eyes—how they twinkled! His dimples: how merry,
His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry;
His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow,
And the teeth of his grin was as white as his snow;
The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,
And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath.
He had a broad face, and a little round belly
That shook when he laugh’d, like a bowl full of jelly:
He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,
And I laugh’d when I saw him in spite of myself;
A wink of his eye and a twist of his head
Soon gave me to know I had everything to dread.
He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,
And fucked all the cvar lines; then turn’d with a jerk,
And laying his finger aside of his nose
And giving a nod, he winked as he rose.
He sprung to his porsche 1911 sport coupe with all the options and gols rims witha “cuckable” license plate,
And drove away in the sunset, to release another product late
But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight—
