Posted on December 19, 2017 | written by GOONRATHI
December Set 8
Posted on December 19, 2017 | written by GOONRATHI
December Set 8
I’m about out of good faith for Chris. It’s been one hell of a wait. If they can’t resolve the garbage performance and start making leaps in development now that “the core of the game is there” I’m going to completely stop telling people about the game. Seriously tired of people giving me shit just because I’m excited for a game that has, so far, disappointed absolutely every single one of my friends, RL and online gaming friends.
I would say they are abandoning ship, but as they only have pictures of ships they can’t really.
Even if Derek turns out right, he’s still a massive jackwad lol
Acceptance stage
Beer4theBeerGod
Still the the most compelling exchange in this whole saga and really ground zero for the anti-SC v SC people and the reason why I really got interested in this whole story. It was all to incredible. Here you have a paying customer (backer) laying out his arguments as to why he feels there are huge issues with how long the game is taking and why so little has been done and your #1 marketing person can’t answer them at all except to get personal and defense. Utterly incredible and completely unprofessional. How could one customer service exchange cause them to get so unhinged? Because the insights Beer provides hit too close to home I think.
The part that I particularly appreciate is that the entire CS exchange started off as me asking why I was banned. Any competent customer service team would have reviewed the request, responded with a very simple answer, and either corrected the action or affirmed their position. A competent community management team would have never let it get to that point, as there would be no subjectivity in the rules or they would have taken advantage of the situation to make an example of me, refund everything, and simply state “given Beer4TheBeerGod’s actions outside of this community we no longer wish to have him as a customer.” Boom, done, move on. They can do that, it galvanizes the community and ostracizes me, and we all move on. As usual they’re not sufficiently competent to do that and then Sandi made the mistake of expanding the scope of the conversation and allow me an opportunity to air my grievances. So I did, and she made the mistake of responding to them without any consideration of the consequences of doing so. She made her personal feelings known, repeatedly displaying an egregious lack of respect for the customers who are funding her lifestyle and an almost dismissive attitude towards some very real and very serious problems with the development, and did so assuming that I would keep those feelings to myself. This lack of professionalism should come as no surprise to a company that secretly labels their customers as “special snowflakes” or links to external information as part of their internal customer service system.
You’re right about this being ground zero; it’s a perfect litmus test for how someone views Star Citizen and what side of an increasingly sharp divide they fall on. Either they read that and think that CIG is run by incompetent amateurs, or they read it and get angry that I violated common decency by sharing a private communication. The latter interpretation is particularly interesting because they completely ignore the contents to focus on what they perceive to be a personal attack, which is why having a reasonable conversation is nearly impossible. You saw the same thing with Erris and INN when they accused me of fabricating the whole thing and then completely disappeared when I called them out and offered to provide any reasonable evidence demonstrating its validity. They don’t care about the truth, they only care about how to reinforce what they already know. This whole fiasco has actually gone a long way towards helping me understand why politics, religion, and attitudes in general are so entrenched.
TheAgent
Where’s this “Crytek is broke” storyline coming from anyways ? Honnest question.
I know they’ve had financial difficulties a few years ago, but then they got a $70M cash inflow from Amazon, so I’d say right now they should be doing fine, aren’t they ?
they actually have the entire turkish government bankrolling them now
It’s really fucking funny that in the video the “why no balanced panel?” comes up right after all three of you said the space doors and other spending are at their discretion. Oh man, so negative! Claiming the studio should have its own agency on its spending!
The shit that bothers me about the “balanced” bitching, and this goes for more than just Star Citizen, is that “balance” is constantly misconstrued to reflect that if a story has 2 sides, then those sides must receive equal time, even when one side is batshit insane.
A balanced discussion of Star Citizen of say 4 people, would have all 4 thinking it’s cool in 2013, 1 questioning it and 3 backing it in 2014, 2 vs. 2 in 2015, 1 backer and 3 skeptics, in 2016, and 4 people knowing damned well it’s bullshit in 2017. That’s what balance is - a proportional reflection of reality, not a constant reassertion of people’s egos and the reinforcement of the belief that “all opinions are equally valid.”
Derek Smart
Really guys? You couldn’t scrounge up one single solitary person to talk on stream about why star citizen is good? It shouldn’t be that hard, there are five, maybe six SC streamers that talk about how great star citizen is for hours every day. Oh wait, they’re paid shills and wouldn’t want to get spanked by Derek on a stream that they can’t shut down…
I reached out to a bunch of them, including Montoya who said on Thurs that he would do it. Then he disappeared. Some even contacted the organizer, then disappeared.
But yeah, they’re all cowardly fucks who only function in their sad little bubble with Shitizens as their audience. Even Montoya, who isn’t as crazy as those other guys like Astropub, Twerk17, BoredGamer, WTFO et al, didn’t want to do the show.
Also, FailureToReport who I also recommended, since he was a backer and has a unique insight, was confirmed. And minutes before we were to go live, he fucking bailed. He had an “emergency”. Leaving the hosts scrambling to find a replacement (which was Kevin) in less than 15 mins! Which is why we started late.
I personally tried to have some of the Star Citizen supporters and streamers (e.g. @montoya_test) on the show, but none of them wanted to come. Which was a shame. I guess they thought it was going to be a Star Citizen bashing stream - which it wasn't.
Star Citizen. Holy shit Star Citizen. Selling fake land in a game that doesn’t exist yet for real money. Enough said.
the slow pace of this game’s development coupled with the incessant drip of paid and arguably pay-to-win pixel ships — and now pixel land claims — all from a multi-million-dollar company whose combined crowdfund all by itself is currently bigger than all the other crowdfunded MMORPGs put together? It has worn on my very last nerve.
Boy, this was just the year of Star Citizen doubling down on “sell something that doesn’t exist yet but we promise will at one point exist,” huh? Systems that aren’t even yet in obvious development can now be bought in advance for a bunch of money! This isn’t shady at all! Runner-up: Guild Wars 2 and the amzing mount-skin lockbox.
Star Citizen. The longer that time goes by without a full game release, the more ridiculous it seems to be “selling land on the moon” (or pretend spaceships) that fans can’t fully enjoy right now. The expansion of this model to selling land claims was truly ridiculous and highlighted one of the big problems with many of these early access and crowdfunded MMOs.
I have to echo the Star Citizen here because it really tops my naughty list of worrisome features in a business model: It stacks payment mechanics on like they’re sprinkles and the tiers and access is further convoluted by its early backer roots.
haha
Jeffrey McArthur passed away on Friday in Exton PA, aged 61.
An avid gamer and geek through and through, Jeffrey was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer in December 2015 and came to our attention early in 2016 when he made a video asking if he “was too stupid to play Star Citizen”, which resulted in him facing abuse from some of the more toxic members of the SC fanbase.
After undergoing surgery and chemotherapy, a CT scan in July 2016 showed his cancer to be gone, and he continued working and making many videos on his hobbies, gaming, computers, and Dungeons & Dragons.
In August this year, another CT scan showed his colon cancer had returned and spread, eventually metastasizing to his stomach. With a prognosis of only a 50% chance of surviving to the end of the year, Jeffrey decided not to undergo chemotherapy again, chosing to enjoy what time he had left to live without suffering the side effects that chemo had on his senses.
Jeffrey faced his death with immense grace and dignity, and I am very grateful to him for sharing his story with us along the way.
Rest in peace, Jeffrey.
so i figured it was time i did some sort of effortpost given that i’ve been following this shitshow on and off since it started. this is less a post for true FUD-sippers, and more one as a response to all the people who have said ‘well yeah its a scam now, but you guys have been calling it a scam for years, even when it was a legit game’.
This is how we knew it was a scam from very early on
So picture this. You know a guy, he’s an architect. He’s built pretty decent buildings in the past. He tells you that now he’s going to build a mile tall tower. ‘Ok’, you think, ‘I wanna see that. It’s going to take some clever engineering to pull that off’.
At this point he’s promising something that sounds difficult, but still within the bounds of what reality might permit. People are getting close to mile tall buildings, the limiting factors are mainly the cash cost and needing the right site to build it on.
Then the details start to leak out. How he’s planning to make this building. ‘It’s going to be made of bricks and mortar,’ he says, ‘With a floor plan of 10 feet by 10 feet.’
At this point the jig is up. That’s not happening. A mile tall building is possible, but not like that it isn’t. But people who don’t understand how buildings work at all are still suckered in by it.
That’s what happened with star citizen. It seems like the average (non-paid) true believer is weirdly ignorant of how games work. I’ve seen a ton of posts from shitizens about how ‘I’ve not played a game since ninteen-dickety, but I’m coming back for star citizen and I’ve bet the farm on it.’. If these people had kept up with games technology at all they would have smelled a scam from a mile away.
Now I’m not a game dev, but I’ve played a shitload of games, and modded a shitload of games. You come, over time, to see how things work, see where the shortcuts are to make it all work. You get to understand the tradeoff games have to make to deliver their core gameplay at reasonable performance. You also gain familiarity with the strengths of the major engines, as these days there just aren’t that many.
But Chris Roberts comes out and says ‘No shortcuts! Vast scope! Sim level physics! Hundreds of concurrent players! Fast paced FPS style combat! Top notch graphics! Cryengine!’
Which sounds great, but is OBVIOUSLY NOT GOING TO WORK. If someone tries to sell you a truck and says it handles like a sports car and gets the mileage of a subcompact, you know it’s a fucking lie. But because so many people know so little about game development, and have been tricked by a guy who has presented himself as Space Game King Arthur, returned in gaming’s time of need, they give him money. Lots of money.
So two things happen when a game has over-promised:
A) the scope of the game is drastically cut back to something plausible and people are disappointed.
B) development staggers along pursuing an impossible dream until it runs out of cash and burns out.
When Star Citizen was relatively new I figured that A would happen. The dumb shit would get cut, the shortcuts would be put in to allow the game to work, dumbasses would be disappointed, but we might get a space game out of it. And I do actually love space games. The whole reason I bought E:D was because a friend linked me to star citizen and it gave me a hankering to fly around in a ship. I would like star citizen to be a real game and have all the stuff its promised. That would be great.
But what really killed Star Citizen for me was the fact that they cut off path A to themselves. They started selling expanded scope as pledges and shit. Stretch goals are one thing, they can get cut or delayed, but when you’ve 1:1 said ‘Pledge here to get a fucken electronic warfare ship’ you’ve honor bound yourself to implement electronic warfare. Add to that the extremely predatory pricing of all that shit and it became clear that this was more than just an over-scoped, over-ambitious project.
