Star Citizen - Chris Roberts, lots of spaceship porn, lots of promises

That news van is almost, ALMOST as stupid as face tracking. Almost.

When I see something like the news ship, I start imagining it. And in my imagination, it’s pretty cool. I’d fly my news ship to different parts of the universe – maybe I’d do an easy story on the emerging mining industry in a low-population sector, or I could cover a battle between two player-led factions. I could submit my stories and footage to the RSI news station or website and maybe compete with other players’ footage and stories to become the story that ultimately runs, with tiered rewards. Covering emergent stories in online games is? That’d be some cool stuff.

Some people (how people continue to do this at this point, I have no idea) stop there and drop a hundred bucks.

I think about it for more than, like, ten seconds, though. And I realize that in order for my vision to be realized, not only would Star Citizen need to be functioning in the first place, but it would also need a system for video capture and a system for submitting user stories (and then at least one paid human person to select and publish them). Oh, and it would have to be a game that had emergent gameplay in the first place.

IF that news van is ever realized, it’s going to amount to a news-themed skin for a ship, and you’ll have to fill in the journalist fantasy on your own. Which I suspect will also be true of game as a whole – if they deliver ANYTHING, it’s going to be the most minimally viable product anyone has ever seen.

I imagine it as a ship that can scoop up black boxes that are ejected from destroyed ships. You can open the black box for a chance at getting a Space Pulitzer, which is worth ten gigastarbucks. Or it might just contain a Space Obituary, which you cash in for three starbucks by delivering it to any non-hostile Space Editor. Most players will just sell their unopened boxes on the auction house.

Oh, and the ship can be upgraded to carry weapons, so you can make your own news.

I’ve only got 35 bucks in this thing, from way back in the first crowdfunding campaign, but I’m feeling like putting in for a refund now just on principle.

Meanwhile, I didn’t back Elite Dangerous because the original campaign looked a bit sketch, but I jumped in once they went to beta. The first dogfighting missions back then were more 100x more refined and fun then anything I’ve seen when I popped into Star Citizen. Even after all this time, the Star Citizen flight model is still just un-fun and janky. If they can’t even get that right, what’s the point?

I’ve now played ED for like 400 hours, and I’ll probably still be playing it in 10 years. Maybe Squadron 42 will come out by then. But probably not.

I would just like to say Chris Roberts only ever got my money from Times of Lore and Freelancer.

I regret nothing!!!

I am thinking similar things - especially after I seen that CO Pioneer that will be launched in limited quantity. With all these news and doubts, how dare they still sell ships and misled the poor(?) rich guys further!

They have no game. They will never - ever - have a game. There is nothing but these ships to sell and make quick money; and it’s faster than selling $45 packages that nobody is currently buying.

Latest dev schedule is out.

Yeah, I called this one the minute I played it when they released it on Oct 5th:

One persistent bug was a memory leak issue where the game (either on the client or server side) soaked up more and more system RAM until it crashed. The team has been squashing this bug whenever they find it, but with performance issues like this, there is rarely a single solution. As more mechanics and code are implemented, any one of them can cause the issue to return.

According to this, 3.0 probably won’t hit the PTU until sometime around the end of the year - assuming they’re brave enough to pull that stunt like they did with 2.0 and 2.6.

Also, both 3.1 and 3.2 sections have now been removed from the schedule report. That’s pretty ominous if you ask me. MVP here we come!

FYI, the latest Evocati 3.00F build is pure crap. The more they “fix”, the more problems show up. Performance issues, crashes, all still very much a thing.

I can only drink one gigastarbucks per day or I can’t sleep at night.

Yes they will…IF…

…IF they sell one million ships at $850 each. That’d put 'em at the one billion dollars that I think this company (with Roberts at the helm anyway) will realistically need to complete the game as currently pitched. Much more will be needed if the scope continues to balloon.

Then again, if Roberts miraculously manages to collect one billion dollars, at this point I think he’d just change his identity and skip the country. Or hell, build his own real-life space ship, and skip the planet and build his mansion on the moon.

No they won’t. It doesn’t matter how much money they rake in because the problem that stops them from completing the game isn’t money… it’s Chris Roberts.

Now if you’d say a billion dollars and the complete replacement of Chris Roberts and his bonzi buddies by people with actual competence… that might work.

Going by our tracking metrics for their sales which have been on the steady decline, that’s not going to happen. In fact, this sale is probably going to barely pay the expense of this CitizenCon 2017 show on Oct 27th in Germany (!).

CitizenCon 2017 is next Fri. It’s going to be hilarious.

Just look at this. A whole 6 hrs of nothing.

I am surprised that people are attending this conference, if at all. I mean, unless they are there putting up pitchfork and demanding for a game, I am not sure what is the point at all.

Self delusion?

In the normal crazy world this kind of con is only possible with a pyramid deal whereby participants can be convinced they will gain the opportunity to rip off latecoming fools for more money than they put in.

What marvelous insanity allows them to exploit all this money from all these naifs without even the possibility of getting anything more than a video game out of it?

Can you imagine attending a tupperware party where you’re promised that the plastic tub set you will someday (not this year but soon) receive will cook your meals and clean up your dishes afterward. Then you’re given the chance to pay $1,000 for a limited edition tub that you will be able to use to cook casseroles if they can figure out how to keep the plastic from melting in the oven… And you pay up! Because who wouldn’t want to cook a casserole in a custom-design tupperware tub? And if you want to spend your surplus leisure funds on it, it’s a free country, isn’t it?

Yeah, that or worshipping and self validation - gotta go see whether this person, Chris Roberts, exist or not :)

This is a good sign of insufficient testing. In the (complicated) project I’m working on, if a new memory leak appears it will be flagged up within a day at the most, often within an hour. That means there’s only a limited number of possible causes, and it can be tracked down and fixed very quickly.

Yes I can imagine this, and so thank you for putting this awesome image into my head. I’m picturing it in late 60’s or early 70’s in one of our old neighborhoods when I was a kid. All of the moms at first so excited about it, then disappointed, then puzzled, and finally throwing fists at each other.

Autumn gold, avocado, pink.