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

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.

In one reddit thread (there are quite a few similar ones), the poster says something like “I’ve always been a fan of space games etc., I just want to park my ship in the orbit of a planet, use a shuttle to land on it, do some missions and get back later”. The replies that followed consisted of suggestions regarding what type the main ship should be, what type the shuttle should be, the possibility of someone stealing the ship you left parked in orbit, running into a difficult mission and remote controlling the main ship for an air strike. And they went on and on with their far fetched delusions through dozens of (upvoted) replies.

These people seem to have “built” a version/part of the game in their imagination so they (naturally) love it and Roberts and his team are regularly giving them just enough to keep their dreams going. This, by the way, is why CitizenCon will feature 2 hours of “Xi’an history, physiology and language” along with “art and tech of stanton”, instead of actual gameplay. :)

The sad reality of it all is that, as per the above, the game - all of it - they paid a conman $160m for, I built over 20 years ago. And it’s still going strong today. I just recently had a 6hr stream of myself playing it, no bugs, no crashes, nothing. Every single feature promised, and which they are dreaming of in Star Citizen, implemented and worked as designed. And I built over 95% of that game - alone.

It makes me so very mad that this has happened to a genre I spent a lifetime (mostly filled with derision because my first attempt was rife with problems because I was an egotistical n00b) fostering. And that money is never coming back into the genre.

But I’m not bitter or anything.