[Megathread] Star Citizen

[1001]

What non factual arguments?

That would be "facts I don't agree with = non factual" arguments.

[Odeezee]

haha, really speculation and theorizing leads to meaningful discussion? how? where? all that it leads to most often is just misinformation or people misconstruing things. e.g. having a discussion on the current flight model is a valid point of argument, one in which people can give their objective and subjective views on something currently verifiable, now compare that to speculating about CIG's current monetary burn rate, as something we cannot verify and whose discussions lead to a lot of misinformation going out there which and that is never good.

Back on topic!

Saber Raven Leaks: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x69y8io and http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x69y87z

[1001]

haha, really speculation and theorizing leads to meaningful discussion? how? where? all that it leads to most often is just misinformation or people misconstruing things. e.g. having a discussion on the current flight model is a valid point of argument, one in which people can give their objective and subjective views on something currently verifiable, now compare that to speculating about CIG's current monetary burn rate, as something we cannot verify and whose discussions lead to a lot of misinformation going out there which and that is never good.

This is just where bias starts interfering though. It's all fine to speculate and theorize on things like "the game changer" but as soon as it moves on to a topic you don't like to discuss, speculation and theorizing suddenly becomes bad, even if that topic is based on plenty of examples in the real world...

It's like your spoiler for the Saber Raven, what's the point of it, what can we discuss? All we could do is speculate and theorize based on other ships they sell and how much it might cost. But I suppose that is meaningful

[KyrtF]

haha, really speculation and theorizing leads to meaningful discussion? how? where? all that it leads to most often is just misinformation or people misconstruing things. e.g. having a discussion on the current flight model is a valid point of argument, one in which people can give their objective and subjective views on something currently verifiable, now compare that to speculating about CIG's current monetary burn rate, as something we cannot verify and whose discussions lead to a lot of misinformation going out there which and that is never good.

Back on topic!

Saber Raven Leaks: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x69y8io and http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x69y87z

Unable to verify is not quite the same as pointless discussion

Thanks to liitle things such as the financial reports that are freely and publicly available we do know quite a bit more about CIGs ginancial status than you seem to think or imply.

And for all you might hate it, the industry accepted figure of $14k per man month for a development budget appears fairly accurate, We certainly have no reason to doubt it.

CIG is taking in about $2.5 million a month. According to their own figures. Are they lying? They might be. But if they are, they'd be lying high.

Trouble is that if we go by the rule of thumb budget estimate....CIG are spending more than they bring in
If we go by the rule of thumb estimate but modify the figures to give CIG the benefit of the doubt...say 300 instead of 458 at $10k per momth instead of $14k...then CIG are still spending more than they bring in.
If we go by what we know from reports such as the UK tax reports or the Coutts loan issue...CIG are still spending more than they bring in.

So its more a question of estimating the size of their reserve and how long that will last than questioning if CIG don't have money troubles.

That reserve could be entirely gone...or it might be as high as $50 million.

But so far...none of the discussion about it relies on misinformation. Its an educated guess corroborated by their financial returns, loan documents, industry wide rules of thumb and their own behaviour.

[Rennadrel]

That reserve could be entirely gone...or it might be as high as $50 million.

But so far...none of the discussion about it relies on misinformation. Its an educated guess corroborated by their financial returns, loan documents, industry wide rules of thumb and their own behaviour.

And it still has fuck all to do with actual discussion on the game. Good job, you keep derailing this fucking thread into pissing and moaning about money rather than the actual product that is supposed to be discussed.

[Lucetia]

While it may be nice to talk about the business practices of companies, let's please bring the focus of the thread back to the game at hand "Star Citizen". People may disagree with the company, some may agree. Let's agree that we have our differences and don't need to argue about the company. Keep the thread about the discussion about the game.

[Malibutomi]

I think the problem is 80% of the post is some guys bashing CIG because "mismanagement, will run out of money, etc" others counter them, and 20% is about the game, development, etc.
If it would be the other way around that would be fine.

[Cyclone Jack]

Ok guys.

Going for the big purchase.

890jump or Polaris ?!

Personally, I would wait until more gameplay mechanics for both ships are in place. Conceptually, these ships are completely different. Sure, the Polaris is combat focused, but we really have no idea what we'll be doing with the Jump and what mechanics will be in place for it. I would also wait and see what other group-focused ships will be in the game. For example, the recently revealed Pioneer could be an interesting play style for a small group of players.

[Rennadrel]

In a civilized manner.



As I said, in pretty much every kind of discussion.

Especially when discussing about the uncertain or the unknown, alien life, lost civilizations, artificial intelligence, the future of crowdfunded projects, even the technologies that you are now using to pretend that what I’m saying is something outrageous started as simple discussions with a lot of theorization and speculation to the mix.

But yeah, I have to completely agree with you on getting back on topic, because this clearly isn’t going anywhere.




Is that fair though? Is this the only thread where the product and the company behind will be seen as 2 different topics? Will people be stopped from talking about EA in SW Battlefront thread as well or about Bioware over Mass Effect Andromeda thread? Is it really required to start an entire different thread just to discuss company related stuff? O.o;

Those are established companies with track records of failing to deliver quality products, or just making games that wind up having insane budgets and aren't extraordinary. In all my years, I haven't played a game that Chris Roberts has created that I'd deem as being as bad as some of the trash that EA has been churning out the last several years, and Bioware has made more great games than they have garbage games. I have no reasons to believe that Chris Roberts won't follow through with SC, only a real fool would hinge their own reputation as much as he has only to not deliver a great product.

[KyrtF]

Those are established companies with track records of failing to deliver quality products, or just making games that wind up having insane budgets and aren't extraordinary. In all my years, I haven't played a game that Chris Roberts has created that I'd deem as being as bad as some of the trash that EA has been churning out the last several years, and Bioware has made more great games than they have garbage games. I have no reasons to believe that Chris Roberts won't follow through with SC, only a real fool would hinge their own reputation as much as he has only to not deliver a great product.

Lots of developers with great reputations end up makig not so great games...and Chris Roberts history isn't one of 100% success.

For example, many of his gameplay ideas for SC are awful and while this might be expected of a preAlpha when concepts are being tossed around, CIG are trying to get this into a "playable state"

CIG is also of concern when deciding IF SC will ever release and in what form, never mind issues such as monetization of the game. Certain aspects of the game and its development are almost impossible to separate from discussion of the company itself and as Myobi pointed out similar discussions on other topics do involve the company...a point you seem to agree with by trying to show why SC should be made an exception rather than follow normal practise.

[Rennadrel]

Lots of developers with great reputations end up makig not so great games...and Chris Roberts history isn't one of 100% success.

For example, many of his gameplay ideas for SC are awful and while this might be expected of a preAlpha when concepts are being tossed around, CIG are trying to get this into a "playable state"

CIG is also of concern when deciding IF SC will ever release and in what form. Certain aspects of the game and its development are almost impossible to separate from discussion of the company itself and as Myobi pointed out similar discussions on other topics do involve the company...a point you seem to agree with by trying to show why SC should be made an exception rather than follow normal practise.

"Normal practice" can't entirely be applied to a primarily publicly funded development project. Sure, they are going about a lot of things in ways that we wouldn't expect, or even want. Getting the project to a functional state is probably more to appease backers than it is to actually push further in the development process. The more time they spend not releasing things that keep the game from a playable state, it might be more annoying for backers who have expected to be getting extensive testing capability, but for the average backer like me who just wants to see the game ultimately be a quality piece of work that stands above other games, I am fine with the delays. Personally, I'd rather not test a bug laden and extremely incomplete product that is going to have so many changes made, because that just leads to disappointment when the game moves along and it winds up being entirely different.

[Malibutomi]

Unexpected 3.0 cargo and trading show off in Citizen of thr Stars:

[Odeezee]

While it may be nice to talk about the business practices of companies, let's please bring the focus of the thread back to the game at hand "Star Citizen". People may disagree with the company, some may agree. Let's agree that we have our differences and don't need to argue about the company. Keep the thread about the discussion about the game.

thank you. i just abhore misinformation which generally tends to arise from speculation, but my apologies for contributing to that discourse.

In a civilized manner.



As I said, in pretty much every kind of discussion.

Especially when discussing about the uncertain or the unknown, alien life, lost civilizations, artificial intelligence, the future of crowdfunded projects, even the technologies that you are now using to pretend that what I’m saying is something outrageous started as simple discussions with a lot of theorization and speculation to the mix.

you are conflating things again. basically don't make conclusive statements without any evidence, simple. you can state your opinion, but the premise upon which your opinion is based on can be challenged if it is faulty/irrelevant/etc, and remember having an opinion does not absolve someone from lying/being naive/misinforming/being disingenuous/etc.

Ok guys.

Going for the big purchase.

890jump or Polaris ?!

first, i would decide what role i'd like better combat or exploring in luxury. second, i would see how many friends i have that would want to play with me as they are both multi-crew ships and large targets. third, would just be which one is more aesthetically pleasing to you. but it does not hurt to also wait until they flesh out their roles and gameplay mechanics further. i def think that the 890 Jump is sexy af.

Evocati Raven Leak (Chasing the Sunset):https://streamable.com/9ce0i

[KyrtF]

"Normal practice" can't entirely be applied to a primarily publicly funded development project.

Why not? Why should I hold CIG to different standards? I hold them to the same standards as others...I comment more because I want this game but I'm not going to use that to shield them from their own mismangement or developmental problems

Sure, they are going about a lot of things in ways that we wouldn't expect, or even want.

The way they are developing this game is anathema to every good development process developed over much of the last couple of decades.

Think about the gact they don't have viable netcode in the game. You might think it just one more subsystem that can be added when necessary, but from my PoV it's a critical piece of the game that defines so much.

For example....when you are in an instance with other players, you need to tell the server where you are, your speed, your heading, your direction of travel, and what your ship is doing. That's a fair bit of information that needs to be transmitted to the server 30 or 60 times a second. And you need to get the same information for every single entity within the instance as well....ships, missiles, debris, cargo drops, players. And there also needs to be a way to communicate this information to other instances if CIGs ideas on "visibility" are maintained.

So....the netcode needs to be built on basic fundamentals such as how many players per instance and the number of entities that it can hold. Which in turn need to consider the MINIMUM bandwidth capabilities available to your target audience. And all of this, in turn, feeds back into other systems such as world interaction, player communication and server backend systems.

Not to mention VOIP and FOIP.

But the netcode isn't in the game. I'm not even sure what sort of link or bandwidth SC will need and CIGs promise of 1000 player instances seems as fanciful as ever and as relevant because you'll only ever be interacting with a handful.

Getting the project to a functional state is probably more to appease backers than it is to actually push further in the development process.

Sure...I can buy that much of what they are doing is not because of developmental requirements, but simply to keep backers happy and paying out.

The trouble is there is a reason developers don't do polish or balancing or asset creation or whatever till much later in the development process...too much changes so a lot of this work will need to be cut. That means extra time and costs to redo work and effectively burning the money spent on this development. It means extra complexity, bugs and performance issues.

[Majestic12]

While it may be nice to talk about the business practices of companies, let's please bring the focus of the thread back to the game at hand "Star Citizen". People may disagree with the company, some may agree. Let's agree that we have our differences and don't need to argue about the company. Keep the thread about the discussion about the game.

I think this is a bit strange to say considering SC is a crowdfunded game. It's all about the business practices and the company because they're at the center of it.

Do you want us to make a separate topic to discuss CIG, then? And if so, why is discussing EA allowed in topics such as Battlefront 2 but the same scenario doesn't apply here?

- - - Updated - - -

https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen...ease_timeline/

Great chart which shows partially why I ended up refunding after so long. No meaningful release for me since 2015. (Never cared about Star Marine).

[Wilian]

Those are established companies with track records of failing to deliver quality products, or just making games that wind up having insane budgets and aren't extraordinary. In all my years, I haven't played a game that Chris Roberts has created that I'd deem as being as bad as some of the trash that EA has been churning out the last several years, and Bioware has made more great games than they have garbage games. I have no reasons to believe that Chris Roberts won't follow through with SC, only a real fool would hinge their own reputation as much as he has only to not deliver a great product.

You might've not played a 'bad' Chris Roberts game, but you've played a game that was horribly mis-managed, delayed over and over again, delivered half of it's intended content and has had either publisher to threaten pulling off from financing or have Chris removed as the actual project manager and replaced with someone who can deliver actually finished product.

This assuming you've actually played Chris Roberts game beyond the original Wing Commander games (well, the first ones at least).

Because that's what has happened and this mess is not something new to him. It is his standard procedure. It is one of the reasons I knew not to back this game when it came to Kickstarter, I could make educated guess as to which direction the project will go with no restraints applied. A fucking mess.

[Odeezee]

…and your point is? I’ll say it again, this is an online discussion, not a trial.

facts are not confined to courtrooms.

A good discussion isn’t necessarily riding on how much evidence one can pull out of his own ass in order to prove shit to someone else. Yes, you can share your opinion, and as I said, you can also use data available to theorize or make assumptions, as long as you don’t try to pass it around as fact.

literally what

basically don't make conclusive statements without any evidence, simple.

means.

…and yes, obviously one’s opinion/theory/assumption can be wrong and be based on misinformation, of course anyone is entirely free to challenge it and you probably should if you disagree with it, it doesn’t even mean that you have to prove him wrong, you can simply do it by providing him a different/your perspective on the matter.

ummmm, what? so don't prove him wrong, but do prove him wrong? in case you are wondering, my whole issue is with misinformation being passed off as factual when it is literally conjecture.

Sadly, that’s not how it usually goes down around here, is it? At the first sign of disagreement people just turn aggressive and start throwing silly tags and accusations at each other… let’s take @KyrtF for example, how many posts can you show me where he is being disrespectful towards another user? Yet, almost every single of his posts is received with shit like, “hater” this, “ignorant” that, “stop attacking us”, hell… I even seen people going as far as making alt accounts just to shit on the guy, and THAT is what ruins what could actually be a good discussion, it’s not the posts that you happen to disagree or find “irrelevant”, I understand it would be pretty convenient, but that’s not really how it works, but hey, feel free to keep twisting and painting it however it pleases you, I’m done with this.

ummmm, no. that guy is the perfect example of a troll or someone feigning ignorance; he purposely misrepresents information, formulates severely disingenuous arguments and uses conjecture and Strawman arguments to try and obfuscate the issues being discussed, let me illustrate it for you showcasing his own words:

Thanks to liitle things such as the financial reports that are freely and publicly available we do know quite a bit more about CIGs ginancial status than you seem to think or imply.

do we have access to financial reports, yes the ones from Foundry 42 in the UK only, but the financial reports do not show how much is spent on salaries/wages and other associated fees, also does not take into account that they get 25% of their development costs back from the government each year in the UK, and also neglects that the cost of living and therefore salary are lower there compared to the US studios at least (not sure about Germany). context is key.

And for all you might hate it, the industry accepted figure of $14k per man month for a development budget appears fairly accurate, We certainly have no reason to doubt it.

i mean really? standards do not apply to all companies equally, regardless of how accurate it is because we are looking at a specific company which has not released any of that information, so he basically said nothing as we do not know if it even applies, but notice how he made a declarative statement without any evidence to back it up for this specific company.

CIG is taking in about $2.5 million a month. According to their own figures. Are they lying? They might be. But if they are, they'd be lying high.

Trouble is that if we go by the rule of thumb budget estimate....CIG are spending more than they bring in
If we go by the rule of thumb estimate but modify the figures to give CIG the benefit of the doubt...say 300 instead of 458 at $10k per momth instead of $14k...then CIG are still spending more than they bring in.
If we go by what we know from reports such as the UK tax reports or the Coutts loan issue...CIG are still spending more than they bring in.

i mean really, how can you even defend this? so he is basing his entire accusation on evidence that he claims he does not even trust because of "reasons" also floats the accusation that they could just be lying, but is somehow still good enough to use to make declarative statements about the financial health of the company????! O.o /sigh that's just a snippet from this page from alone, now please explain to me how that fosters ANY type of meaningful discussion?

- - - Updated - - -

Evocatic Q&A SPOILERS: a non-ETF backer asks his ETF friend some questions about the tests they are running and the conditions and general gameplay during the ETF (all the info so far has checked out) all from PlzGibv3PatchCIG on reddit.

First

Second

Fourth

Fifth

Enjoy!

this Tessa and the ICC Probe missions are not in 3.0 AFAIK. There is no ICC Probe to QT jump to. concerned me and i hope the devs bring her back!

[1001]

do we have access to financial reports, yes the ones from Foundry 42 in the UK only, but the financial reports do not show how much is spent on salaries/wages and other associated fees, also does not take into account that they get 25% of their development costs back from the government each year in the UK, and also neglects that the cost of living and therefore salary are lower there compared to the US studios at least (not sure about Germany).

But they do show how much is spent on salaries/wages, it says it right there in the report. It also says how much total costs are. £9.8 million for wages and total costs of £17,329,047. It also says how many staff it's for so it is pretty damn easy to work out a cost per employee per month.



As far as I am aware they get up to 25% back from the UK government, it should be noted that very few businesses actually qualify for the whole 25% reimbursement. Is there any link to show they get the full 25% rebate?

The issue I see here is that you want rock hard facts even when people post something saying that X is approximately Y which seems like an easy way to dismiss any validity someone's argument might have.

[KyrtF]

no. that guy is the perfect example of a troll or someone feigning ignorance; he purposely misrepresents information, formulates severely disingenuous arguments and uses conjecture and Strawman arguments to try and obfuscate the issues being discussed, let me illustrate it for you showcasing his own words:do we have access to financial reports, yes the ones from Foundry 42 in the UK only, but the financial reports do not show how much is spent on salaries/wages and other associated fees, also does not take into account that they get 25% of their development costs back from the government each year in the UK, and also neglects that the cost of living and therefore salary are lower there compared to the US studios at least (not sure about Germany). context is key.i mean really?

Actually - the reports DO provide information on wages and costs, factors like tax breaks are not unique to the UK and ARE factored into overall budgets and my own estimations cut the number of employees from 458 to 300, AND reduce the monthly cost from $14k to $10k. That goievs CIG an estimated burn rate of $3 million a month, against an income flow of about $2.5 million.

This is a rule of thumb...it is intended to give a guide and not provide a 100% accurate figure. The simple truth of the matter is that we DO know more about CIGs financial position than you say we do. It's still guesswork, but its educated guesswork. More, given the number of employees and the work they are doing, $3 million a month isn't going to be abnormally high.

As it is, the only relevance this has is trying to factor in whether or not CIG has enough money to finish the game. And the odds are good, IMO, that they do...just not the game a lot of backers seem to expect or describe. The key differentiator, IMO, between ED and SC was the amount of handcrafting that the companies were planning. SC planned a lot to create a densely packed universe filled with plenty to do. ED planned to procgen a lot and handcraft certain areas of the galaxy. Part of the reason NMS was so quick to release is that they handcrafted relatively little.

But handcrafting takes time. Lots of time.

And what I have noticed is that the amount of procgen in SC seems to be creeping upwards as time goes by. The game CIG is creating now is not the game that they were pushing even two years ago and it is VERY different from that described at the kickstarter. Does CIG have the money to create the gameworld a lot of people seem to be expecting? I don't think so.

But I do think we'll get a game.

[Malibutomi]

...and the brainfarting about CIG's financials goes on without any real points, same people going on and on about the same things without even considering the others argument, and against the moderator's warning.

Meanwhile lots of info about cargo: