I am so happy that this is one space game i stayed well clear off, how right i was all them years ago.

I Finally bought a starter package and started playing this game last year. I played it quite a bit for about a month or so.

The game is amazing and fun. The new cargo delivery stuff is easy to get caught up in for a few hours at a time. There is a lot about the game that is really good......

when it works.....

Here is the problem with the game. it has multiple game stopping bugs and it kills the enjoyment after a short while. When you can't get in an elevator to even get to your ship, when you fall through the floor of an elevator into endless space, when you can't complete a mission because the elevator at the destination you spent time getting to wont work, when you get stuck on your bed at login and you can't even get up and the issue lasts for multiple days before its fixed, when the servers won't let you log in at all for sometimes days on end....

When the above things, especially the elevator issues are an almost daily occurrence you get burned out on the awesome wowzers feel of the game pretty quick.

The fact they don't shut down everything until all the major bugs are fixed is ridiculous. this should have happened years ago.

This game will NEVER be out of alpha and i think it will eventually run out of money and close down within a few years. Thats to bad. because if they just fixed what they have right now and didn't add another thing it would be amazing and i would play it all the time.

How up Chris Robert's Ass is the Guardian with this? Incredible.
These guys should win the Positive Outlook of the Decade award

Numinar wrote on Jan 17, 2025, 04:17:
I'm a SC hater, but will happily eat my words and give them money if it's good and will work on the hardware belonging to a mere mortal like me.

The only way I'd give them money is if they have a separate clean universe, without all the pay-to-win real money buying of ships, land and other things. I wonder if SC backers would cry foul if suddenly their $1000's in purchases were limited to the dirty pay-to-win universe, and not everyone has to play with whales flying everywhere?

IMO Playing games should be escapism, not a reflection of real-world wealth/status, even if you could afford it --- at least in the realm of multiplayer. Or at least separate those who want wealth flaunting to be a thing from those who don't. Cosmetics is a bit of a grey area as it doesn't affect gameplay so I don't care about them, but I know many place high value on how their character appears.

I'm a SC hater, but will happily eat my words and give them money if it's good and will work on the hardware belonging to a mere mortal like me.

Caves of Qud is fucking awesome and took 17 years to create so a long time in the oven isn't always a bad thing.

But it usually is.

The Guardian is usually a pretty decent source of fair and unbiased reporting. They also have a pretty hard stance against wrongdoing and corruption. This reads like a "fluff" piece, it's damn disgraceful and I wouldn't be surprised if the author is a friend, or a delusional whale who got suckered into the ponzi scheme. What a disgrace.

Success is about delivering an actual fucking finished project. You have to be out of your fucking mind on LSD to call 12 years and close to a billion dollars for a game nowhere close to release and no end in sight a goddamned "success".

jdreyer wrote on Jan 16, 2025, 17:52:

Skuggasveinn wrote on Jan 16, 2025, 17:25:

That should tell everyone what the priority is here.

That's the funding model, so 🤷‍♂️.
Banning for exploiting online games is very common. It's not strange.

Please. The game is officially still in ALPHA. I know there are various definitions for "alpha" in software/game dev land, but I'm sure everyone can agree, that a certain degree of TESTING is involved with an alpha version of a game.

CIG should be fucking grateful for testers players exposing the exploitability of their spaghetti code and they should hand out rewards (actual decent developers have bug bounty programs for this very purpose) for doing so instead of banning people. What the actual fuck?!?

Yes, ban people left, right and center once there is an actual game, an actual release, actual persistence, i.e. once the game has officially progressed from alpha to beta and to a release (v1.0) candidate.

Until then let people TEST the game and be grateful if someone finds an exploit/dupe/bugs/glitches. If any action is taken at all then remove the duped shit from accounts and fix the exploit.

But BANNING people from an ALPHA test? lol ... it just shows that CIG don't even buy their own lies anymore ("it's an alpha so please understand why everything feels kinda unfinished"). Every time someone criticizes something about SC they won't hesitate to play the "ALPHA!!!11" card but then they are treating it like a finished game when people take advantage of it in unexpected ways that could be detrimental to their business model (ship sales). A pathetic shit company is what they are.

#ForeverVaporware

You mean some guy at a newspaper reported on something he really didn't know anything about and got it mostly wrong? I am shocked. SHOCKED!

Skuggasveinn wrote on Jan 16, 2025, 17:25:

That should tell everyone what the priority is here.

That's the funding model, so 🤷‍♂️.
Banning for exploiting online games is very common. It's not strange.

The level of polish on the pledge store is remarkable. It’s evident that a significant amount of time and effort has been invested in creating high-quality video commercials and detailed information designed to sell ships.

This company devotes considerable resources to events, promotional videos, and other content intended to encourage people to make pledges. To be honest, if they hadn’t done so—questionable as it may seem—this studio might have gone under years ago. The primary reason the project is still afloat is that people continue to pledge funds.

Recently (yesterday) 600 accounts were banned for item duplication. The company justified this action by claiming that the duplication had a “negative impact on the game economy.” However, that explanation seems questionable: for there to be a negative impact on a game economy, there first needs to be a fully functioning game and a stable economy in place.

The swift action to ban these accounts during an alpha test appears to have been motivated by concerns over players generating in-game currency and acquiring ships worth millions of credits. This activity likely reduced the perceived need for players to purchase ships through the pledge store with real money. Also the newest ships are never purchasable from within the game with in-game credits, only with real money from the pledge store.

That should tell everyone what the priority is here.

jdreyer wrote on Jan 16, 2025, 14:57:
This will reach 100 comments for sure.

I'M DOING MY PART ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ

The article does recall 2016 allegations of developer "crunch" (which ironically usually immediately precedes a release)

They crunched their asses off back then not to create a game but only to create flashy demos and trailers for CitizenCon and several other sales events per year (including E3/Gamescom presentations at the time).

You can't even really blame them. There were more than enough gullible fools who opened their wallets for pretty ship JPEGs and flashy trailers. CIG made millions upon millions from these showings.

Chris has pretty good instincts though. He realized immediately that the allegations of crunch and a focus on those ship sale events instead of the actual game could hurt their reputation so they dialed down on the sales events (e.g. by no longer participating in E3 etc.) and claimed (an obvious lie in hindsight) that they would be focusing more on getting shit done. A plan that seems to have not "quite" worked out so far...

As I said in another thread, I'm an original backer and always check in from time to time (every two/three years or so) and I was appalled by what an unfinished piece of shit this so called "game" still is (Alpha 4.0 "preview" version).
That shitfluencer's comments in the article are laughable. It's his "livelihood" so of course he is going to say only positive things about it.

The reality is that the game is a broken mess and it will never live up to expectations because it has exactly turned out as many of us non-believers said: It has already become an unmanageable mess and it will only get worse from here if and when CIG are dumping more gameplay systems on top of the already stinking pile.
This project is doomed to fail. It will never be possible to keep it polished and balanced because there are simply way too many individual systems and dependencies to keep the whole clusterfuck together in the long run.

The Half Elf wrote on Jan 16, 2025, 16:06:
PirateSoftware said it best that the only thing that keeps expanding is the pledge store, where you can spend 100's of dollars on pictures of starships. And even then to get a fully
working starship as advertised could take years after that.

I'll bet PirateSoftware is jazzed someone said something positive about him after the last few days.

Well, gee, after reading that I've completely change my mind about the game and Chris Roberts!

Time to buy me some internet spaceships.

To Stanton and beyond!

The game has potential and problems. The main problem is Chris Roberts and the mismanagement of funds and the teams.

And Olli43 is probably one of the worst people you could "interview" for the article as him and many other Youtubers are constantly given free ships to give away in contests that increase their subscriber/view rate.

The potential of Star Citizen (not Sq42) is unmatched by anything out there, but they money is running out and CIG/Roberts know this. They tried shopping around SQ42 last year to Microsoft and apparently it didn't go well
diue to the amount of time/money and they still hadn't released a game.

As for "putting fans at the heart of it", that's a bunch of bullshit. PirateSoftware said it best that the only thing that keeps expanding is the pledge store, where you can spend 100's of dollars on pictures of starships. And even then to get a fully
working starship as advertised could take years after that.

jdreyer wrote on Jan 16, 2025, 14:57:
This will reach 100 comments for sure. If it doesn't, I'll point out that this post is still in early alpha.

You should start a kickstarter, promising 1,000 comments for just $1,000 kickstarter money, than a whole forum on this topic for $100,000 kickstarter money, followed by the promise of a whole new internet only on topic with never before seen new network tech for $1,000,000. Then, sell JPGs of servers and message boards of this internet 2, for a few $1,000 per JPG.

Promise more every year, and sell more JPGs, until you think you have enough money and the whales are getting angry. Then, fire everyone (in small amounts, not at once!), take the money, and run after 15 to 20 years of making money. PROFIT!

jdreyer wrote on Jan 16, 2025, 14:57:
This will reach 100 comments for sure. If it doesn't, I'll point out that this post is still in early alpha.

I think this will be the most accurate comment on this story.

If Russia stops fighting, the war ends. If Ukraine stops fighting, Ukraine ends. Slava Ukraini!

Amen.

Imagine if you were one of those funding the project and were told that you were giving them an interest free loan for 20 years with no guarantee of a fully functional game at the end. Because I am betting this shit will not be complete in 2032