[Megathread] Star Citizen

[Kyanion]

The project is taking no longer than what any other company would need to do the actual project, so since you have never actually played the game or have any interest in it your not in a place to even judge on what they are delivering, its up to the ones who actually play/test the product to decide.

Again, this is your opinion. You don't know what other companies could or couldn't do with this disaster. I'd like to think many game developing companies are smart enough to know that this project is a doomed feature creep mess and would have scaled it back. a lot.

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Man, you keep saying this. I've seen you say this so, so many times in this thread. What gives you this idea? What are you even basing this on?

Nothing? It sure seems like nothing.

If you answer me, try to do it with facts, please. Your opinions aren't really worth much.

Hey come on, this is coming from someone who in 2015 said the game was coming out in a few years. You know the actual release, not this alpha/beta/whatever it is.

[MrAnderson]

Due to a CEO without the discipline to stop his ballooning ambition from indefinitely delaying the delivery of this product.

I have zero interest in ever playing Star Citizen, or Elite for that matter. I am here for the crowdfunded aspect of games in general. Star Citizen is one of the crown jewels in excess of incompetence and failing to deliver what they promised.

Have you guys followed any other game studio or crowdfunded mmo besides Star Citizen or it's a singular obsession?

- https://www.kickstarter.com/projects...elot-unchained
- https://www.kickstarter.com/projects...one-war-pc-mmo
- https://www.kickstarter.com/projects.../?ref=kicktraq
- https://www.kickstarter.com/projects...trepid-studios

Are all the crowdfunded mmo's delayed because of their CEO "ballooning ambition from indefinitely delaying the delivery of the product?"

Are all the other games from studios across the world who also get delayed due to a "CEO without the discipline to stop his ballooning ambition from indefinitely delaying the delivery of this product?"

Missed the article talking about games being delayed all the time in development? https://www.kotaku.com.au/2020/01/wh...ayed-so-often/

Man, you keep saying this. I've seen you say this so, so many times in this thread. What gives you this idea? What are you even basing this on?

Nothing? It sure seems like nothing.

If you answer me, try to do it with facts, please. Your opinions aren't really worth much.

Quite simple, observe the gaming market and acknowledge that there's no game available that combines the scale, scope, fidelity and features of the Star Citizen Alpha despite being shown years ago there's a lot of gamers willing to pay very well for a game of this kind.

[Low Hanging Fruit]

Guys please.. by all means.. keep sending them money.. one day you will play a great game.. for sure..




......




/s

[MrAnderson]

Guys please.. by all means.. keep sending them money.. one day you will play a great game.. for sure..
....../s

The game requires no subscription to play so there's no need to "keep sending them money".
You buy a basic package and can play everything available now and every future update.
For many gamers it's already the best space game available to play so it's only natural that as it gets more updates even more people join.

[Edge-]

Have you guys followed any other game studio or crowdfunded mmo besides Star Citizen or it's a singular obsession?

- https://www.kickstarter.com/projects...elot-unchained
- https://www.kickstarter.com/projects...one-war-pc-mmo
- https://www.kickstarter.com/projects.../?ref=kicktraq
- https://www.kickstarter.com/projects...trepid-studios

Are all the crowdfunded mmo's delayed because of their CEO "ballooning ambition from indefinitely delaying the delivery of the product?"

None of those have a quarter of the funding SC has, so they're working with far smaller teams than CIG is.

CU - Still making slow progress. The game never ballooned out of control with stretch goals, and sought private investment to help them meet their funding needs.
Crowfall - Pretty much the same. Good progress with a smaller team, and seems to be getting closer to the end.
Pantheon - Failed its Kickstarter due to mistrust in McQuaid and reports that he'd already dipped into existing crowdfunding to pay himself an advance, which caused some of the devs working on it on a volunteer basis with the expectation that they'd start getting paid to quit. It has some modest crowdfunding, but more recently picked up some more serious private investment to really make some headway on production. Given that it's been a tiny team for most of it, often on a volunteer basis given the shaky financials, it's in a pretty good spot right now. Also, not ballooned out of proportion when it comes to stretch goals.
AoC - Had a bit of a rough go with allegations of MLM nonsense early on given their odd refer-a-friend program. That died down and following the successful KS program they've largely just gone to work and continue to make progress. This is one of the more ambitious of the crowdfunded MMO crop, but Sherif seems determined to make it happen.

While all of these games continue to raise funds, not a single one has anything close to the aggressive crowdfunding program CIG continues to have and none are remotely close to how much money CIG has raised. Most transitioned to looking to private investment to make up that difference following successful crowdfunding efforts, and none of those private investments seem to have caused any of these games any problems or caused them to change.

Not a one is remotely comparable to SC.

Because some of us do pay attention and have that kind of context for the MMO/crowdfunded genre.

[kenn9530]

Man, you keep saying this. I've seen you say this so, so many times in this thread. What gives you this idea? What are you even basing this on?

Nothing? It sure seems like nothing.

If you answer me, try to do it with facts, please. Your opinions aren't really worth much.

The fact is the current version of the game, it constantly delivers more and more of the game each patch that comes out, so it is actual fact they are delivering at a reasonable pace on what they have promised to have in the game.

Hahaha yeah okay, you can say that all you want, but it is your opinion. I mean not many would agree with your opinion but hey whatever, you do you.

Its not an opinion its a fact since we have a playable version of the game and it already delivers on much of what was promised in the complete game. If the SC community didnt agree on this there would be more than just an occasional complain thread on spectrum, its just your opinion that you think not many agree with nothing that actually backs you up, we have a forum for the actual game where the majority of it is positive posts with very little complaining, if your not posting on the actual spectrum forum itself then your opinions on the game dont matter at all.

[Bhanzai]

Wow, people still donate to this fraud? Hilarious.

[Henako]

The fact is the current version of the game, it constantly delivers more and more of the game each patch that comes out, so it is actual fact they are delivering at a reasonable pace on what they have promised to have in the game.



Its not an opinion its a fact since we have a playable version of the game and it already delivers on much of what was promised in the complete game. If the SC community didnt agree on this there would be more than just an occasional complain thread on spectrum.

This isn't even in response to what I fucking quoted, lol. Well done.

Quite simple, observe the gaming market and acknowledge that there's no game available that combines the scale, scope, fidelity and features of the Star Citizen Alpha despite being shown years ago there's a lot of gamers willing to pay very well for a game of this kind.

Oh please. This has absolutely no bearing on whether or not another company could do the same job better. Especially not when you consider that after ten years, this game doesn't even work, and shows no signs of ever working.

You boys are really knocking it out of the park trying to answer this very simple question.

[Gorsameth]

Server cap of 30 players? Goodness gracious, that had better be a bug.

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The servers were crashing so much that they removed a planet from the game to make more room for more stuff, only to also reduce the player size lmao

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Honestly, if their servers legit can't handle 5 planets and their dozen moons and 50 players anymore, just redesign the Stanton System. Scale it back down to just one planet and it's 2 or 3 moons with 1 or 2 space stations so that players can actually meet each other. Make the planets Microtech, Hurston, and ArcCorp into moons orbiting Crusader. I guess maybe you can replace Hurston with Arial so you can have the prison planet. There you go.

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That's just sad

You want to be the one that gets fired for telling mister Roberts that he can't have EVERYTHING?

[MrAnderson]

None of those have a quarter of the funding SC has, so they're working with far smaller teams than CIG is.

CU - Still making slow progress. The game never ballooned out of control with stretch goals, and sought private investment to help them meet their funding needs.
Crowfall - Pretty much the same. Good progress with a smaller team, and seems to be getting closer to the end.
Pantheon - Failed its Kickstarter due to mistrust in McQuaid and reports that he'd already dipped into existing crowdfunding to pay himself an advance, which caused some of the devs working on it on a volunteer basis with the expectation that they'd start getting paid to quit. It has some modest crowdfunding, but more recently picked up some more serious private investment to really make some headway on production. Given that it's been a tiny team for most of it, often on a volunteer basis given the shaky financials, it's in a pretty good spot right now. Also, not ballooned out of proportion when it comes to stretch goals.
AoC - Had a bit of a rough go with allegations of MLM nonsense early on given their odd refer-a-friend program. That died down and following the successful KS program they've largely just gone to work and continue to make progress. This is one of the more ambitious of the crowdfunded MMO crop, but Sherif seems determined to make it happen.

While all of these games continue to raise funds, not a single one has anything close to the aggressive crowdfunding program CIG continues to have and none are remotely close to how much money CIG has raised. Most transitioned to looking to private investment to make up that difference following successful crowdfunding efforts, and none of those private investments seem to have caused any of these games any problems or caused them to change.

Not a one is remotely comparable to SC.

Because some of us do pay attention and have that kind of context for the MMO/crowdfunded genre.

Why wouldn't their timeline be comparable to Star Citizen if that's what's being questioned here?

What has funding got to do? Money doesn't magically erase game development hurdles and speed things up or else Amazong and Google wouldn't be having problems developing their own games or companies with deep pockets like Blizzard, Rockstar, Ubisoft, CDPR wouldn't face the exact same difficulties and have long development times.

Oh please. This has absolutely no bearing on whether or not another company could do the same job better. Especially not when you consider that after ten years, this game doesn't even work, and shows no signs of ever working.

You boys are really knocking it out of the park trying to answer this very simple question.

Have you played it? Because a lot of gamers actively do, recurrently. In fact the game has been having not only record years in funding but in player activity and engagement.

Seems like you're the ones having a hard time dealing with these simple facts.

[kenn9530]

snip

No other companies would even try it they are too scared to do it, even massive companies with thousands of staff take 8 years to develop a new version of the game they have been making for years, too many copies of copies of games which are basically just graphics upgrades nothing more.

So the proof is in the game CiG have already delivered and improving on. CiG started from the ground up and no staff, no tech or facilities and have to build it all while developing a game.

[Kyanion]

Its not an opinion its a fact since we have a playable version of the game and it already delivers on much of what was promised in the complete game.

If you say so. I thought the scope of the game changed when the Kickstarter finished and they kept getting more money. Thought it was supposed to be a MMO? 50 player cap isn't a MMO btw.

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No other companies would even try it they are too scared to do it, even massive companies with thousands of staff take 8 years to develop a new version of the game they have been making for years, too many copies of copies of games which are basically just graphics upgrades nothing more.

Scared? More like they realize this 'Jesus tech' that is the server meshing is a nightmare and know it isn't worth the money. WAY WAY too much feature creep. This game is never going to deliver all the shit they promised.

[Elistri92]

Alright, I haven't posted on MMO-Champion in literally 8 years, but I guess here we are. One thing that I keep seeing thrown around by the Star Citizen defenders that I find really, really disingenuous is the comparison between the amount of money that Elite Dangerous and Star Citizen have brought in. The thing that you don't seem to parse is the fact that Elite Dangerous has made that money purely with the sales of the game, no crazy ship packs for sale or anything like that, and with a fairly modest microtransaction system that's purely cosmetic. I play the crap out of Elite Dangerous, and aside from the initial purchase price of the game, and the expansions, I've spent maybe 20 dollars on ship cosmetics over the hundreds of hours I have in the game.

The statement that Elite Dangerous has only made 136,000,000 dollars, which I personally find to be a highly unlikely statistic considering Elite is by far FDev's biggest game and FDev has an annual revenue of 89.4 million dollars is rather silly to throw out. Even if we go with that number, yes Star Citizen's made 350,000,000 dollars but they also sell ship packages for 27,000 dollars which have been purchased. A poster in this thread has even stated that they've sunk 10,000 dollars into the game... if the average player is sinking 10,000 dollars into the game then that's very obviously going to mean that it has a higher income, not because of superior player engagement but purely because the people who are supporting it are fanatically loyal.

Now, for the bit where I throw my two cents in about the game - I'm not going to harp on the game's development time, I've largely been a spectator popping in and out every now and then to see how the game's going. I lost any interest I may have had in the game when they started to release exorbitantly expensive ship backer packages. Releasing a package of ships, (Which yes, I'm aware is every ship in the game) for 27,000 dollars is not a business practice that we as consumers should be endorsing with our wallets in the game industry. There's such a broad swathe of issues that rise up from the premise of selling ship packages like that, not the least of which is that by giving players willing to drop the value of a brand new sedan on the game basically a total lack of consequences for losing their ships.

With the RMT purchased ship packages, you're never at risk of losing your ships for good, which is immeasurably dangerous to the new player experience of the game for new casual players just coming in. What happens to the player who's coming in on a much more casual package when someone who's dropped the big 27 grand decides to rock up and grief with their capital ship by just murdering all the 'Poor plebs' by destroying all their ships they may have worked hard to grind credits for with no risk of consequences. The technical issues that the game is suffering aren't remotely what bothers me about it, games suffer significant technical issues for a time until eventually the developer figures out how to fix those technical issues and then they don't.

My issues stem from the business practices, and the idea of saying 'It's okay to charge thousands and thousands of dollars for an in game item.' I recently had this argument with someone IRL who was a big supporter of Star Citizen, and when I made this point they tried to reply with the argument of why I didn't think it was bad for Ferrari to sell a car for hundreds of thousands of dollars. The difference is that a ship made for a game is done once it's done, you don't have to manufacture a brand new ship every time you want to sell that ship... so the cost of development is the only cost you have in it, whereas with a real life automobile, you obviously have the significant material costs.

When I posed that to him, he had no response... it seemed to genuinely take him aback. I don't think a lot of Star Citizen fans genuinely actually stop to think about the relative costs of what they're spending when they put all this absurd oodles of money into the game. If you want to put all that money into the game, go ahead, but pretending that there will be no flaws with it and that there aren't real genuine consequences to the game's playability as a result is simply denial. For your sake, I hope I'm wrong and I hope that when the game does eventually come out that it's everything you had hoped it will be, but I simply can't support the developers or the game myself for many reasons.

[kenn9530]

If you say so. I thought the scope of the game changed when the Kickstarter finished and they kept getting more money. Thought it was supposed to be a MMO? 50 player cap isn't a MMO btw.

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Scared? More like they realize this 'Jesus tech' that is the server meshing is a nightmare and know it isn't worth the money. WAY WAY too much feature creep. This game is never going to deliver all the shit they promised.

I never said it was a proper MMO atm, but you could say the same about WoW since pretty much most of the time you wont see more than 50 players around you anyway unless your afk in a capital.

Its also not jesus tech, the server meshing and everything its connected to is a number of systems working together to spread the load among many different servers, a version of what SC will use is what duel universe currently uses.

A space game needs alot more features than you could even expect, what they are delivering on is actual depth in the features thats they are implementing, i never expect any game not just SC to deliver everything it promised as long as it delivers enough they can work on the rest later.

snip

There are consequences like going to jail and spending hours trying to get out, if that player gets a reputation then everyone is going to stay away from them or go after them, player bounty hunters, navy will go after criminals in massive fleets if you get max criminal status and if its just intentional griefing for the sake of it then those players can be reported.

Any ship can be destroyed no matter how much money you put into it and if you dont have the correct insurance you can lose all your ship upgrades when its destroyed.

Lifetime insurance is only a basic cover. you can spend millions on the best upgrades and need to get appropriate cover or you lose everything, losing a large ship may come at having to wait weeks to get a new one such as a capital ship or spend millions for faster delivery.

[MrAnderson]

zip

You realise there's people who've spent thousands in Elite and many other games right...

A ship made for a game is not "done". It's updated and iterated like everything else during development.

There's a reason why SC already has 100+ ships available all already with modelled interiors while in Elite only has 40 and they remain empty shells.

Same reason why SC already has fleshed out planets with atmospheres and environmental effects and Elite only has barren variations of barren brown and grey moons.

[Kyanion]

I never said it was a proper MMO atm, but you could say the same about WoW since pretty much most of the time you wont see more than 50 players around you anyway unless your afk in a capital.

Okay and in SC if the server cap was more than 50, how often would you see other players? Not often. What difference is there exactly? Oh yeah one CAN have more than 50 people on the server. My bad! Stop comparing SC to games that have a track record of success and are actually released fucking games.

[MrAnderson]

Okay and in SC if the server cap was more than 50, how often would you see other players? Not often. What difference is there exactly? Oh yeah one CAN have more than 50 people on the server. My bad! Stop comparing SC to games that have a track record of success and are actually released fucking games.

You dont play the game remember doesn't matter how many players the server has you'll never see any of them. Why do you care? Anyone playing Star Citizen who wants to see other players just needs to hang out at popular hubs, join a party, accept bounty hunter quests or get it's crime stat up so that bounty hunters come to him.

Star Citizen has a track record of crowdfunding success and has released a popular alpha build which has been updated regularly and played by a lot of backers.

Why do you care so much and why does it make you so angry? What's the catch here?

[Kyanion]

You dont play the game remember doesn't matter how many players the server has you'll never see any of them. Why do you care? Anyone playing Star Citizen who wants to see other players just needs to hang out at popular hubs, join a party, accept bounty hunter quests or get it's crime stat up so that bounty hunters come to him.

Star Citizen has a track record of crowdfunding success and has released a popular alpha build which has been updated regularly and played by a lot of backers.

Why do you care so much and why does it make you so angry? What's the catch here?

Why do you respond to me if I don't play the game? What I say has no bearing on whether you play it or not. Of course the moment someone says something you don't like you attack the poster, not the statement I said. You cannot argue about the server cap being 50 and WoW being thousands. It is just a fact that those are the caps.

As far as 'seeing' other people in SC, oh boy seeing up to 50 people when the game is based around ship combat where ships can have large crews. Woo. You sold me. I can't wait to get into a ship battle with like 10-15 ships with each ship being piloted by 10-15 people at a time. That will be fun. But guess what, it does not exist. It can't exist until the server lets more than 50 people on it without melting down. Considering how they are removing content and this server meshing is not in you hope to not see other people so you guys don't lag out. Fun.

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Star Citizen has a track record of crowdfunding success and has released a popular alpha build which has been updated regularly and played by a lot of backers.

Yup also has a track record of missing deadlines by years, kicking the can down the road, failing to deliver on promises, plenty of jaded backers who have not gotten what they paid for. As far as a 'lot of backers' and 'updated regularly'. What do you mean? Another ship for people to buy? It sure isn't tech to let more people into this MMO. Numbers of people playing the game sure don't seem that great considering the money involved in this game. As far as space games sure it is the king of a small hill, when it comes to MMO? Not even fucking close.

[kenn9530]

Okay and in SC if the server cap was more than 50, how often would you see other players? Not often. What difference is there exactly? Oh yeah one CAN have more than 50 people on the server. My bad! Stop comparing SC to games that have a track record of success and are actually released fucking games.

It is a space game so your not really supposed to see players all the time anyway, but there wont be a 50 player limit and everyone will be on the same universe, there will most likely be some limit on how many players/ships can be in the same area but that will be what the server can handle.

You do know that a WoW server is more than just one server right, you understand what the server in SC actually does atm and its more than an average server usually would have to do, its kinda pointless moaning about something that will be changing in SC so each system will have multiple servers spreading out the loads.

[Kyanion]

It is a space game so your not really supposed to see players all the time anyway, but there wont be a 50 player limit and everyone will be on the same universe, there will most likely be some limit on how many players/ships can be in the same area but that will be what the server can handle.

Okay and in WoW you're not supposed to see everyone all the time either, yet you two have loved harping about wow's problems with 50 players. But right now there IS a 50 player limit and has been one for some time, for a game where you're not supposed to see players that often you sure won't see them because of this cap. You can talk about when the cap is lifted but you don't know when it is coming. For a MMO that is a major fucking problem. Period.

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You do know that a WoW server is more than just one server right, you understand what the server in SC actually does atm and its more than an average server usually would have to do, its kinda pointless moaning about something that will be changing in SC so each system will have multiple servers spreading out the loads.

I know what SC servers cannot do and that is have more than 50 players at a time. SC is a failure as a MMO because of the server limitations. Until that is resolved it will always stay a niche game.