Star Citizen developers roll back roadmap features due to high user expectations

[Puiu]

You have missed the point about Eve completely. You even compared development times for projects that are vastly different. I was using the example of how things have to update over time regardless of when it is released.

Underestimated, overdue projects are not scams. You still fail to grasp this.

If you don't want to fund a dream game, then get lost and stop complaining. Oh but when it is done one day (before cold fusion is ready), then you'll want to have the right to participate.

You are NOT in the meetings in CIG, you do NOT have the full perspective. You sit on the sidelines like other Youtubers and moan instead of help. You take other people's perspectives as fact as well - I would not be surprised if you believe every conspiracy theory out there as well.

Coders are coding on that project every day. The more complex, the more unforeseen issues will come up.

I didn't miss the point.

You compared a game that is in development hell to one that launched and got updates over the years. These two completely different things that, ironically, better expose your problem in comprehending why people call SC a scam.

Why would I need to meet CIG? That's irrelevant when we already have a complete picture of the state the game is in right now. Even if they miraculously complete all of the "modules" they are working on in the next 5 years, it will take even longer to interconnect them and make them function as a complete package. But we all know 5 years is a pipe dream.

CIG is now forced to make a ton of money otherwise it will not last another 5 years and thus the scam nature of their monetisation. they have to work on things they can sell constantly. It's also why they are getting even further behind with development. If Eve devs tried to do this they would be crucified by the players, but you revel in this.

 

[Dimitriid]

Until a public judgement of Fraud is made, people claiming its a scam are simply spreading rumor and adding fuel to the publicity fire, IMO.

Multi level marketing schemes are widely considered a scam and there's nothing illegal about it. Pump & Dump schemes are also perfectly legal as long as you don't have insiders information. Pretty sure consensus would agree with me that they're a scam too.

Calling something a scam on my part was clearly not a legal stance but a moral one: you seem to be grasping at straws to pursue an argument about this being just about individual responsibility and assume any systemic issue would be considered under the law for it to possibly be considered systemic and if that was the case, then society would never move forward.

 

[KitsuneKas]

Yes Chris has probably made many management mistakes, like many other people. Doesn't make it a scam. It would only be a scam if he shut CIG down today.

Chris Roberts' involvement in the project itself is the strongest evidence that it's a scam to begin with. His only two successful projects are Wing Commander (Oh, wait, that was mostly Warren Spector) and the movie Art of War (Oh, wait, that was Andrew Nichol).

Many of the projects his name been attached to he had very little if any involvement in. Hell, his brother, Erin Roberts, is arguably more successful.

Every project he's ever been a major leader of has been a disaster, but he props himself up as a great developer by pointing at his token involvement in other successful projects. Freelancer, the other game he's well known for, was in development hell for years...until Microsoft removed him from the project, at which point it was able to release within months and become a successful project.

The game studio he set up to produce film tie-ins to his film studio never made anything. His film studio produced garbage funded by defrauding the German government, and closed when they closed the loophole he was abusing. Kevin Costner sued him for breach of contract on a movie that never released.

Chris Roberts' M.O. is to overpromise, drag out a project as long as he can, milk it dry until it implodes, and then hightail it to another project and do it again. He is a confidence man to the core.

He won't shut down C.I.G. until it's no longer making him money, whether that's because consumer interest and gullibility finally dries up or a regulatory body takes action.

 

[whateversa]

If Eve devs tried to do this they would be crucified by the players, but you revel in this.

So my response was removed by a moderator. So here is a shorter version.

Eve Online is a 100x easier project to build - you can fly through objects without dying, there is no FPS combat... which is why it has such a slow tick rate (allowing it to scale the way it does). Its is fundamentally a simple project with a lot of 'stuff' that are not really that complex to build from a coding perspective.

Any project will need updates regardless if its still in development or released and this is not limited to gaming (this is why I mentioned Eve online as they had to update as well). Not every change causes major blockers to other pending services that are being built.

 

[JoeBlobers]

"How dare you question us, paying contributors!? Each feature will come out when it's ready! Keep it up and I will turn this spaceship around and there's no Disneyland for ANYONE!"

Seriously hilarious to find people still defending them. If you invested in this game let this be a lesson: never support kickstarters or crowd funding efforts: you're being taken advantage of. Anything that can be done with kickstarter should be done not as a good will donation but as an investment when you get legal protection, guarantees and actual stock on the company so if the game actually comes out and succeeds you get something real and tangible for taking a risk with it in the form of stocks on the company.

"How dare you question us, paying contributors!? Each feature will come out when it's ready! Keep it up and I will turn this spaceship around and there's no Disneyland for ANYONE!"

Seriously hilarious to find people still defending them. If you invested in this game let this be a lesson: never support kickstarters or crowd funding efforts: you're being taken advantage of. Anything that can be done with kickstarter should be done not as a good will donation but as an investment when you get legal protection, guarantees and actual stock on the company so if the game actually comes out and succeeds you get something real and tangible for taking a risk with it in the form of stocks on the company.

Seriously how can't you acknowledge than new backers are joining every single day (+200.000 just in 2020) because they can test/play the latest build several weeks per year for free? I can understand that few hundreds don't even understand what they are doing for with their own credit card but +1.000.000 individual, all dumb, stupid and blind?
No, reality is different. SC alpha DOES offer a unique experience, despite bugs and crash because of the very meaning of alpha.

Supporting, playing SC does not interdict anyone to play others games, including NMS, ED or EVE.

 

[Squid Surprise]

Seriously how can't you acknowledge than new backers are joining every single day (+200.000 just in 2020) because they can test/play the latest build several weeks per year for free? I can understand that few hundreds don't even understand what they are doing for with their own credit card but +1.000.000 individual, all dumb, stupid and blind?
No, reality is different. SC alpha DOES offer a unique experience, despite bugs and crash because of the very meaning of alpha.

Supporting, playing SC does not interdict anyone to play others games, including NMS, ED or EVE.

Who was it who said "there's a sucker born every minute"... it's credited to P.T. Barnum I believe...

The argument of "lots of people are doing it, so it must be a good idea" has never been valid.... ask those who voted for Hitler in 1933....(I'd say Trump, but hey, let's not go there)...

If you are satisfied that your money has been well spent, more power to you - I suppose there are some people who really think an alpha version of a game is worth hundreds of dollars... I point out that World of Warcraft, which is FINISHED costs $15 a month - and is generally considered pretty expensive...

 

[wiyosaya]

Multi level marketing schemes are widely considered a scam and there's nothing illegal about it. Pump & Dump schemes are also perfectly legal as long as you don't have insiders information. Pretty sure consensus would agree with me that they're a scam too.

Calling something a scam on my part was clearly not a legal stance but a moral one: you seem to be grasping at straws to pursue an argument about this being just about individual responsibility and assume any systemic issue would be considered under the law for it to possibly be considered systemic and if that was the case, then society would never move forward.

I guess we will have to agree to disagree on this.

I get your "moral" standpoint.

Yet, at this point, the controversy of SC/SQ42 is widely known, and it has been known for several years. Yet people ignore that fact, invest, then claim "I got ripped off". It is only when people, themselves, recognize that they "got ripped off" such that enough people complain to relevant authorities and then the relevant authorities step in and take steps to remedy the situation. That is, as I see it, how society progresses.

The fact that it is legal ATM, does not mean that it should be. It is in such cases, where people recognize that something that is legal should not be legal, when things change and society moves forward.

Other than the cases brought by SC/SQ42 "investors", nothing else has been done in court, and you can bet that there is a court out there, somewhere, that could step in and shut SC/SQ42 down - if indeed, it is skirting the law in some form. Even if it is not, then there are still people out there that are able to implement laws that would cover the situation. My bet, though, is that such a law would shut down "crowdfunding" of any sort, and lots of people out there would not be happy about that.

Crowdfunding, is no different than any other high-risk investment. There is no guarantee with any crowdfunding project that a tangible product will ever be produced.

Roberts/CIG/RSI could release what they have today and say "its finished" even though it is not complete and has bugs - much like "No Man's Sky". We all know what happened with that - yes, No Man's Sky went out the door with bugs, but they continued to work on it and, as I understand it, have improved it over time; yet no one is saying that its a scam. I wonder why? Because someone said, "Its finished and we're releasing it"? I get that this is an oversimplification of what is going on with SC/SQ42. Yet projects like No Man's Sky go out the door with bugs. They get reputations of having bugs and have to survive that.

Putting a "finished" stamp on any software product, speaking from a developer's standpoint, is somewhat of a fallacy. Virtually all software products have bugs, and will have bugs for years - some bugs exist from the time they are released and no one discovers them because the software path that leads to that bug are never exercised.

If you want to call my standpoint grasping at straws, fine - that's your prerogative. As a developer with almost 30-years of experience developing and shipping software software used by professionals, I see it as a simple fact of the software development process.

(My $0.02 of grasping at straws)

 

[Xallisto]

God forbid those investors want a return on their investment, who could possibly have seen that coming!!!

 

[Squid Surprise]

God forbid those investors want a return on their investment, who could possibly have seen that coming!!!

They ARE NOT investors - they were never promised any ownership stake, revenue % or any other monetary rewards for their payments... they are simply donators (see: "suckers")... they are NOT entitled to a refund - unless the courts decide that this was all a scam...

 

[Gezzer]

I been a support since about 2015 and played the alpha and enjoy the potential I see. People gotta keep in mind a lot of the tech need to make the game CIG is making themselves, where other games already have the resources. Sure it's taking a long time but it doesn't mean you have to slander CIG and what there trying to do

I too pledged my first time in 2014 and to date I'm a little embarrassed over my total in pledges TBH. While I understand everything CIG is attempting and how the level of polish each alpha release requires means more time used to that purpose, I've been starting to question how committed they are to releasing a full product any time soon.

IMHO they keep falling prey to feature creep, and it seems to be getting worse. The latest is a full CoD/Battlefield clone within the game. Before it face over IP was my biggest WTF. While I'm not a big fan of the state Elite: Dangerous was released in, all breadth and little depth. It seems that CR's "masterpiece" is going for so much depth and complexity that any release just gets further and further away.

I'm by no means a game developer, but I wonder if CIG could of released a less ambitious game and then added to it as they already stated they were going to with SC. Maybe a bit more like ED then the grand vision they currently have. I'm really starting to ponder if I'll see a release before I retire in 4 years or so. My biggest fear is that I'll be dead before it, and I actually know of a few that had that happen.

Oh well, a fool and his money and all that...

 

[Puiu]

So my response was removed by a moderator. So here is a shorter version.

Eve Online is a 100x easier project to build - you can fly through objects without dying, there is no FPS combat... which is why it has such a slow tick rate (allowing it to scale the way it does). Its is fundamentally a simple project with a lot of 'stuff' that are not really that complex to build from a coding perspective.

Any project will need updates regardless if its still in development or released and this is not limited to gaming (this is why I mentioned Eve online as they had to update as well). Not every change causes major blockers to other pending services that are being built.

"Eve Online is a 100x easier project to build" - and congrats on being so wrong that your comment just became a joke. No wonder you keep making these kind of excuses for SC, you don't know anything about programming, but you still like talking about it as if you are a senior programmer.

FYI Eve had a full blown FPS game called Dust 514 attached to it where the ingame actions could affect the MMO side and vice-versa during the late PS3 era (I still wish they would make a sequel). It also had walking on stations in the main game, which was removed after players wanted a different direction for the game and it wasn't developed further. You think SC was the first?

Notice the age of these videos?