RedEye9 wrote on Jul 6, 2022, 13:04:
I bought a caffè latte at Starbucks, still waiting for the credit card charge to process. Do you think it's still hot.

Obviously you've never been to Starbucks, because you pay before they even start making your order.
Just like pretty much every other cafe. 🤣

Nullity wrote on Jul 6, 2022, 13:01:

The Half Elf wrote on Jul 6, 2022, 00:28:
Give it a shot, ya got nothing to lose.

Yeah I do, my ship(s) and all my loot.

Thank you for the write up. Setting aside all the stigma associated with this game and being objective, that honestly sounds like a lot of fun. However, the PvP aspect just isn't for me. I'll never play any game where you can lose your stuff/progress like that.

If and when the game actually gets a full release, and if there are PvE only servers, then I may give it a try.

While you can lose your gear, if no other player loots your corpse, you can come back to loot everything off of it. But TBH, personal gear isn't ultra important unless you're doing a specific mission that requires a gun (aka. hunting down a target that's in a cave or station) or getting a Tiger Claw device and sneaking onto a station to clear your Bounty.

As for ships, yes players can "steal" your ship but it's just temporary and you can go to any station or base planet and reclaim your lost ship for a small fee. Same if you die or if your ship gets blown up. The only time that you can permanently lose your ship is if you use in-game funds to buy a ship and there's a patch that's going to wipe everything (like the upcoming one). If that does happen, then people who've spent Real Money™ get whatever ships that they've bought on the website. Non-Whales will have to do the usual grinding stuff (varied PvE missions, Mining, PvP Bounty Hunting, Events etc.) to get enough credits to buy back their ship(s). Server wipes are usually rare and last resorts that CIG does when an incoming patch adds something fundamental that requires players to start anew or if there's database corruption (aka. the upcoming patch) that requires a fix.

In a way it's a good thing since grinding missions, mining and doing events is basically the current content of the game and buying all the ships that you want really doesn't give you much incentive aside from griefing, PVPing or goofing around with friends.

The Half Elf wrote on Jul 6, 2022, 00:28:
Give it a shot, ya got nothing to lose.

Yeah although there are numerous bugs in Star Citizen and it seems like there will be no end to the feature-creep, the game's scope and tech is impressive as hell. It's a very unique experience when you can literally run around a space station in first-person, go out of its airlock and leap off into Zero-G and float/propulse yourself in any direction in space towards a distant ship and either get inside of it if it's friendly or use a Multi-Tool to unweld the ship's door to ambush the pilot.

Or being able to fly any ship into a planet or moon's atmosphere and do unscripted stuff like driving a tank out of a Carrack ship's cargo doors and have it launch down to the ground once gravity kicks in is a great experience. I think that the Jump Town event shows off this aspect well since it's primarily PvP/PvE-based and a lot of unexpected stuff usually happens due to it based off of the player's creativity. This video shows what that event is all about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNALKEp8e60

The fact that it's all seamless is something gamers won't really appreciate until they experience it and then play games like No man Sky or the upcoming Starfield and see how limited that aspect is (based off of the things that I've read).

RedEye9 wrote on Jul 6, 2022, 18:48:

Kxmode wrote on Jul 6, 2022, 16:00:

RedEye9 wrote on Jul 6, 2022, 13:04:
I bought a caffè latte at Starbucks, still waiting for the credit card charge to process. Do you think it's still hot.

It's Starbucks coffee. That stuff is third-degree burn hot. You should be good.

I checked w/the judges and your comment wins today's internet.
Today's prize is a Schwarzschild kugelblitz. You do not need to be present to win.
Runner-ups are entitled to a cheese blintze.

Woot! A Schwarzenegger Koodoodleblitz!

Kxmode wrote on Jul 6, 2022, 16:00:

RedEye9 wrote on Jul 6, 2022, 13:04:
I bought a caffè latte at Starbucks, still waiting for the credit card charge to process. Do you think it's still hot.

It's Starbucks coffee. That stuff is third-degree burn hot. You should be good.

I checked w/the judges and your comment wins today's internet.
Today's prize is a Schwarzschild kugelblitz. You do not need to be present to win.
Runner-ups are entitled to a cheese blintze.

Nullity wrote on Jul 6, 2022, 13:01:

The Half Elf wrote on Jul 6, 2022, 00:28:
Give it a shot, ya got nothing to lose.

Yeah I do, my ship(s) and all my loot.

Thank you for the write up. Setting aside all the stigma associated with this game and being objective, that honestly sounds like a lot of fun. However, the PvP aspect just isn't for me. I'll never play any game where you can lose your stuff/progress like that.

If and when the game actually gets a full release, and if there are PvE only servers, then I may give it a try.

I don't think there will ever be PvE servers. Squadron 42 is the single player game in the same universe and same engine, but it will be more storyline based. Star Citizen is the MMO.

RedEye9 wrote on Jul 6, 2022, 13:04:
I bought a caffè latte at Starbucks, still waiting for the credit card charge to process. Do you think it's still hot.

It's Starbucks coffee. That stuff is third-degree burn hot. You should be good.

I bought a caffè latte at Starbucks, still waiting for the credit card charge to process. Do you think it's still hot.

The Half Elf wrote on Jul 6, 2022, 00:28:
Give it a shot, ya got nothing to lose.

Yeah I do, my ship(s) and all my loot.

Thank you for the write up. Setting aside all the stigma associated with this game and being objective, that honestly sounds like a lot of fun. However, the PvP aspect just isn't for me. I'll never play any game where you can lose your stuff/progress like that.

If and when the game actually gets a full release, and if there are PvE only servers, then I may give it a try.

RedEye9 wrote on Jul 6, 2022, 11:44:

Razumen wrote on Jul 6, 2022, 11:04:

RedEye9 wrote on Jul 5, 2022, 21:04:
I found it hard to believe that after you buy a package you can't install the game and start playing immediately.
They surely have the capability to allow you to buy something and start playing since they do free play weekends every other day.

What other platforms do they let you start playing before the your payment has been processed?

Steam, GOG, Epic and other platforms process instantly for me, same as most other online purchases I make. Hence my comment.

You do understand that free play weekends literally means...FREE play, right? As in you don't have to buy anything at all.

I've had to wait for some purchases to clear before, so again, why should he get to play before the purchase is cleared?

Razumen wrote on Jul 6, 2022, 11:04:

RedEye9 wrote on Jul 5, 2022, 21:04:
I found it hard to believe that after you buy a package you can't install the game and start playing immediately.
They surely have the capability to allow you to buy something and start playing since they do free play weekends every other day.

What other platforms do they let you start playing before the your payment has been processed?

Steam, GOG, Epic and other platforms process instantly for me, same as most other online purchases I make. Hence my comment.

RedEye9 wrote on Jul 5, 2022, 21:04:
I found it hard to believe that after you buy a package you can't install the game and start playing immediately.
They surely have the capability to allow you to buy something and start playing since they do free play weekends every other day.

What other platforms do they let you start playing before the your payment has been processed?

As I have mentioned often, I enjoy playing the Star Citizen and embrace the bugs (in the sense that I acknowledge they exist, given the alpha, and try to report).

@Half Elf, feel free to send me a friend request - Zmrzlskrz is my name on there.

Dan =0)

jdreyer wrote on Jul 5, 2022, 15:52:

The Half Elf wrote on Jul 5, 2022, 14:51:
So I recently re-pledged to Star Citizen, and I have to say I really like it. Once I got some settings tweaked and watched some videos I'm having a blast. The community (inside the game) has been amazing as hell.

I haven't bothered to DL and play in years. How feature complete does it feel? Obviously it won't be content complete for years, but what, if anything, do you think it is missing?

So try to answer everyone's questions....

I pledged when it was first offered, played for 30 mins and refunded. Now years later (and with a 3070ti card, but still rocking a top end 10 year old system), it's very impressive, but can at times be a slide show. The tech behind the game so far is fucking AMAZING (considering it's the Crysis engine). Wake up out of a bunk, get something to eat and drink, go put on my heavy armor and biggest backpack, head on a train to the Hanger Hub, call my ship, get on a elevator to a hanger, open one of many doors (depending on the ship), get on the ship up to the cockpit, sit down in the pilots seat. I flip on the power systems, contact control to open the hanger doors, give a little verticle thrust to get my ship off the ground and retract the landing gear. I fly out of the hanger and towards space to clear atmosphere. I hit my mobiglass (the interface for everything from friends, chat, ship systems, contracts, reputation standing either), and pick a bounty hunting mission for a guy who's hiding out in a cave. Select the mission. close the mobiglass, see a target for my mission and turn on the Quantum Drive (warp drive) to get it to spool up while I align the target. line it up, make sure it calculates and punch it. So it's on a nearby moon on the back side, so I have to use the Orbital Markers (every planet has them one for each side) and go around the plant. Hit the Quant again till I line up the target location and typically you can do a short jump through the atmosphere and near the target (roughly 20-50k out). So I hit the engines and come in to see the cave entrance and keep trimming my engines to slow down and hit the landing gear. I land, exit my ship and head inside the cave. Heading into the cave I do have a marker for my assigned target, but he has company. I turn off my headlamp and take them out from the darkness (many years of playing SWAT, Rainbow Six, etc come in handy here). So I down a guy.. I run up and I can loot EVERYTHING off of him. His undersuit, his helmet, his armor, his guns, anything on him is up for grabs. Nice thing is I'm in a cave mission so these guys have been hand mining ore (why I brought the big backpack) and start stuffing it. You can drag bodies, turn them over, etc. I do this kill my target and exit the way I came. I get a mission complete, credits and rep. I open up my mobiglass again and I can go investigate a crash site, deliver questionable cargo, go help security forces defend a bunker, go hunt down bad players with a crimestat (players who do bad things are flagged with this and get a contract on them to kill them). I can go do one of the random weekly events like 9Tails (a criminal gang) attacking a station. I can help by locating and defeating them, or I can just deliver medical supplies to the station for money and reputation.
So I get bored and have some money burning a hole in my pocket and want another ship. There are showrooms where you can go and climb into and go through some of the ships before you buy them.
I buy a cargo ship and a Greycat (think of it like a tractor with a mining laser on it) and load it up into the back of the Freelancer I just purchased and go out and decide I want to mine. Well do I want to mine by hand (which you can do in the cave mission I just described), go out in a Gretcat, or get a Prospector and go out to the Halo Belt (which is not marked on the map) and mine in space out of the way of prying eyes of pvp pirates?
Or do I want to go get armor and weapons, or go get a cool jacket and boots while eating a hot dog and having a coffee?

The tech behind Star Citizen is fucking AMAZING. I land on a planet with high winds to load up my greycat (again the tractor miner) and get blown over by a gust of wind, my ship is being buffeted by the wind. I can put a glowstick on my armor when I'm in a cave, go rescue people with my medical ship, I can just be a uber for someone who had a bad moment, the sky is the fucking limit.

BUT It is an alpha, there are bugs, you will die, you will lose cargo, your gear etc. Risk vs Reward is the name of the game, and Star Citizen is the most technological gaming experience I've had in my life. No loading screens at all.

As for the video.... christ it's ugly, but I have edited my user.cfg file (and finally got a 3070ti) and I haven't had this much EDGE OF MY SEAT dogfighting since Xwing. Ya remember in Xwing when you'd land and see your ship shot to hell but still made it back? This is that. I've taken a headshot on a mission into a bunker that blurred my vision until I went to a medical facility. I've had both wings shot off my ship and still barely made it back to someplace safe (like a A-10 Warthog sort of story). There seems to be an issue with the game when recording videos, and this guys system was just NOT up to the task, or he did a install and run the game. There is a shader issue of when you first start the game, you should quit the game and start it back up and it makes things much much much better.

So here's the bad.....
Servers only hold currently 50 people. The next 2 major patches 3.18 is to finally add persistent server saving, so if I put down 10 bottles of water and the server crashes, those 10 bottles of water will still be there when the server comes up, and then after that Server Merging, and from what I have heard of it is that the servers sorta merge and depending on where you are you get all those people on other servers in the same spot. Sorta like WoW's ability to play with people on other servers, but my knowledge on this is very limited.
This game is alpha. And any of us older folks who everplayed old school beta's (or even Alphas) will understand this, but most Beta's these days are done as marketing bullshit to get pre-orders.
There is an amazing reporting system called the Counsel that you can look up issues and see if others are having it, work around etc.
After seeing what is done with the engine and the game I can fully say that I see why it has taken 10 years to reach this point. The nearest comparison tech wise is No Man's Sky. Granted currently there is only 1 system and there are locations that are BADLY optimized, what they have in the game is impressive.

@RogueSix, you mean like if I was a pirate and was somewhere on a route between a hotbed of mining and a refining station I would use a interdiction ship to stop a ship like the Prospector (a single person mining ship) and take over a ship (can't really disable ships right now) or blow it up? That's a thing in game with ships.
I can take a ship designed with EMP's to disable ships. Hell you can even dump more power or less power into ship systems to sneak past security patrols, or get the jump on a pvp bounty hunter target. You can board ships and take them over. It's not just talk, it's actually in game right now!

@RedEye, yes you can. Granted you HAVE to have a ship package to play the game, but as soon as ya purchase it you can join right in. Been that way since they first opened the servers.

@Korrd, I'm telling you as someone who had Wing Commander on floppy disk's and CD ROM, THIS IS THE NEXT WING COMMANDER. And it's not just single seater ship combat. You can have heavy fighters, heavy fighters with a gunner (like a Y-Wing), hell a Hammerhead (which is 4 guys on each corner in turrets and someone flying and room for a co-pilot). Or hell take a Supper Guppy C2 cargo ship and throw 2 tanks in the cargo bay and open the front hatch (or rear) and let them have at it, all the while ya got guys with railguns firing on ships!

There is a huge stigma on Blues about people who play this game and the money they spend on ships, and most of it is from ignorance. There is a fly free event coming up soon, and I suggest ya try it. I tried the last one and while it is flawed, there is nothing else like it, or will be like it.
Do I want to spend more hard cash on a game that may finally be released before I hit retirement age (10 years)? Yes and no. Yes because what they have is amazing, no because Chris Roberts is the king of feature creep. There are systems being added to the game like water physics and sheet physics (not sure why as ya just lay there till ya get up) that make me scratch my head, but they have so many different studios working on different parts of the game that this sorta game could not be done by 1 studio in 30 years, and with all the money in the world.

Give it a shot, ya got nothing to lose.

Like the guy says in the video, after all these years Star Citizen is complex and clunky mess that is nonetheless impressive. But I was sold on a successor to Wing Commander and I wish that's all it was. I'd be happy with the old formula of space combat missions interspersed with static scenes where you interact with various characters. I wish someone would make games in that genre instead of whatever Star Citizen/Squadron 42 has become.

I found it hard to believe that after you buy a package you can't install the game and start playing immediately.
They surely have the capability to allow you to buy something and start playing since they do free play weekends every other day.

That SC road map looks like an interstate highway with 30+ lanes.

jdreyer wrote on Jul 5, 2022, 15:52:

The Half Elf wrote on Jul 5, 2022, 14:51:
So I recently re-pledged to Star Citizen, and I have to say I really like it. Once I got some settings tweaked and watched some videos I'm having a blast. The community (inside the game) has been amazing as hell.

I haven't bothered to DL and play in years. How feature complete does it feel? Obviously it won't be content complete for years, but what, if anything, do you think it is missing?

Feature complete? Are you joking?

Just look at the looooong list of specialist ships. The vast majority of those ships don't really have any gameplay yet. If they do then it is a very basic version, a far cry from the "fidelity" Roberts promised back in 2012 - 2014. They still have mountains upon mountains of features to "complete" and I have huge doubts that we will ever see the promised level of detail during our lifetime.

A quick example would be electronic warfare. There are specialist ships just for electronic warfare. How do you develop gameplay around that promised feature that is fun and engaging? Or the science and research ship... what will that ship actually discover, research and how will it fit into the greater context?

Basically, you could just scroll through the list of ships and then do a quick Google search on whether there is already any gameplay for the specialist role of a given ship. The simple and straight answer is 'nope' nearly every single time. We are many, many years away from feature complete...

Hardline Mike wrote on Jul 5, 2022, 17:27:
I love how this guy with a 3080 playing Star Citizen on Low is still stuttering like a motherfucker

Nvidia is working out the kinks on the new 3000 series and they definitely need better drivers. /s

I love how this guy with a 3080 playing Star Citizen on Low is still stuttering like a motherfucker

The Half Elf wrote on Jul 5, 2022, 14:51:
So I recently re-pledged to Star Citizen, and I have to say I really like it. Once I got some settings tweaked and watched some videos I'm having a blast. The community (inside the game) has been amazing as hell.

I haven't bothered to DL and play in years. How feature complete does it feel? Obviously it won't be content complete for years, but what, if anything, do you think it is missing?