Star Citizen Analytics Project

[N0mad]

Well, ban evasion would be a very valid reason.

It's quite nice to have a dissenting voice here occasionally.

[jham]

Capitalism. A thing is only worth as much as people will pay for it.

This nonsense can justify ponzi schemes, medical quackery, etc.


Corporations also have moral and legal responsibilities. Not just the customer.


The hilarious part is that now the whales are complaining the in-game ship prices are too low! LOL. So they've been told they're making a "pledge" but the whales aren't acting like it.

[dsmart]

It seems the late cap ship sale for this year brought the numbers for the citcon sale up to previous values. That's nice for them. The wave idea was good. Make sure the top spenders get their chance. Sensible strategy. Must have hurt in previous years seeing posts about wanting expensive ship 'x' but not getting one. At least this way most who both wanted and could afford one, got one.

Well played CIG. Kept the bank balance and majority of backers willing to spend, happy.

To be perfectly honest, this one completely surprised me. Even though we know the funding chart is mostly bs, it's hard to ignore that wave-induced major spike in that Oct funding. In fact, it completely supports the theory that it's a consistent number of whales who are funding this. But they are also the ones who, by doing so, have removed all accountability. Because croberts relies on them for these periodic funding spikes, he has zero incentive to ship a finished game - of any kind. Yes, it's their money, but I gotta say, knowing that this game as pitched is never going to see the light of day, I can't imagine what those people will do or say when the inevitable finally happens. It's bad enough that some of them are already pissed that in-game ship buying is here, and they're pissed that others can get their thousand Dollar chariots by just grinding, and which they claim isn't prohibitive enough. And that's only the beginning.

[dsmart]

The audit was only if they fail to produce the games. Seeing as they are still in production, they haven't, yet, failed.

The audit was for if they failed to deliver the game by a date certain. That was 18 months from Nov 2014. Then they did yet another ToS change that removed and changed it to the new wording. That's part of the scam that we all keep going on about. Classic bait and switch.

You can't seriously believe they have no intention of delivering the games?

I don't believe that anyone here has made that specific claim. I am certain that they are intending to ship one or both games. Whether they do or not, and in what form, is what the on-going debate is about. And as long as they continue to have insurmountable technical challenges, along with scope creep, they continue to reduce the chances of them ever shipping what they promised.

Why would they have 5 studios and 450 staff if that were the case? A proper scammer would have sacked everyone, closed the studios and pocketed any further funding. This hasn't happened.

I can't believe we're still have this silly argument. Right now on the FTC and SEC websites are ENTIRE companies sued and eventually shut-down for running an active scam. Are you actually serious (yes - you are, because you've been saying this forever and a day).

[dsmart]

I would consider a venture to fall into scam mode when they promised one thing and then claim (without a shred of evidence) that backers told them to massively expand the project. When TOS that protect said backers evaporate. When all schedules become meaningless as simply goals and not deadlines, easily shifted without consequence. When all pretense of previous promises become null and void to be replaced with whatever the Emporer declares and the hapless backers can no longer escape with their money.  When all the game creation luminaries who originally poured into the project have left, apparently seeing that this ship is adrift, having told the emporer that this horse wont race and have moved on to brighter pastures rather than have their reputations soiled any further from association with this joke of the industry.
So knowing that his previous generals have all abandoned him as they no doubt told him this was a dead end yet he persists in the idea that he is making teenie baby steps of progress yet creating a buggy mess out of what used to run reasonably well back at 2.6 or so. I would think that he has to know his project began foundering long ago, at least as far as actual progress and goals go. No publisher would continue to fund a money pit that showed so little progress after all these years. Mass Effect Andromeda was COMPLETE (but still a bit of a mess) and was abandoned still. This stillborn project Star Citizen, run buy a man child meglomaniac jibbering idiot only exists because legions of fools persist in propping it up, many posting studio created sequences as game footage and sucking in other hapless fools who too will get ensnared in the 2 week gotcha money, you sucker, trap.

 You will never see things as we former backers do because we are enlightened and you still have you head jammed firmly up your ass. No it is not necessary for Robbers to pack up his circuis tent and move to a country with no extradition treaties for this to be a scam. It merely needs to keep limping along giving false hope to backers while collecting tens of millions of dollars while the ringleader knows his project is fucked. To me this still fits the very definition of a scam because they know that other than an act of God this game will never acheive it's stretch goals but will sucker the backers dry of every space dime for years while in the process. This is not any different than televangelists who claim to do faith healings clutching the foreheads of cancer patients tossing them to the floor declaring the power of Jesus heals you! Roberts and his wife still collect millions in salary while it fails. It's all good as far as he is concerned. It's his job, selling hope to the hopeless.

This is as much as I will bother to feed this troll.

Basically all of the above. Well done. 

[dsmart]

Well, ban evasion would be a very valid reason.

Yes, of course

Would it be possible to delete newly made sock puppet accounts on sight and unban one of the old ones instead, so these could be used instead? This would be more practical for post history. Also I wouldn't have to update my ignore list every time to not have to read shitizen drivel again.

Yeah, but it would be the same amount of work and disruption e.g. I could have un-banned his Serendipity account, then banned the latest sock puppet (his 3rd so far btw) - and we'd be back arguing with the same person.

This forum is the only one, which provides low volume relevant information on the Star Citizen trainwreck. Even the SC thread on the Frontier Forums is hard to digest, producing an average of 10k posts per quarter with 80 % noise in it.

Yeah, I agree. And that was precisely why I issued the warning to him earlier this morning.

[dsmart]

The hilarious part is that now the whales are complaining the in-game ship prices are too low! LOL. So they've been told they're making a "pledge" but the whales aren't acting like it.

Yeah, I've been following that fallout - and it's hilarious

[StanTheMan]

I would consider a venture to fall into scam mode when they promised one thing and then claim (without a shred of evidence) that backers told them to massively expand the project. When TOS that protect said backers evaporate. When all schedules become meaningless as simply goals and not deadlines, easily shifted without consequence. When all pretense of previous promises become null and void to be replaced with whatever the Emporer declares and the hapless backers can no longer escape with their money.  When all the game creation luminaries who originally poured into the project have left, apparently seeing that this ship is adrift, having told the emporer that this horse wont race and have moved on to brighter pastures rather than have their reputations soiled any further from association with this joke of the industry.
So knowing that his previous generals have all abandoned him as they no doubt told him this was a dead end yet he persists in the idea that he is making teenie baby steps of progress yet creating a buggy mess out of what used to run reasonably well back at 2.6 or so. I would think that he has to know his project began foundering long ago, at least as far as actual progress and goals go. No publisher would continue to fund a money pit that showed so little progress after all these years. Mass Effect Andromeda was COMPLETE (but still a bit of a mess) and was abandoned still. This stillborn project Star Citizen, run buy a man child meglomaniac jibbering idiot only exists because legions of fools persist in propping it up, many posting studio created sequences as game footage and sucking in other hapless fools who too will get ensnared in the 2 week gotcha money, you sucker, trap.

 You will never see things as we former backers do because we are enlightened and you still have you head jammed firmly up your ass. No it is not necessary for Robbers to pack up his circuis tent and move to a country with no extradition treaties for this to be a scam. It merely needs to keep limping along giving false hope to backers while collecting tens of millions of dollars while the ringleader knows his project is fucked. To me this still fits the very definition of a scam because they know that other than an act of God this game will never acheive it's stretch goals but will sucker the backers dry of every space dime for years while in the process. This is not any different than televangelists who claim to do faith healings clutching the foreheads of cancer patients tossing them to the floor declaring the power of Jesus heals you! Roberts and his wife still collect millions in salary while it fails. It's all good as far as he is concerned. It's his job, selling hope to the hopeless.

This is as much as I will bother to feed this troll.

I think Croberts wants to get SQ42 out of the door. 

This allows him to  show off his Mocap stuff and in the circles he moves in that's all he needs to show off. 

Then it is just a question of stashing enough cash and avoiding prosecution for not delivering enough in the PU...

He can survive the game failing because films flop all the time and he can tell the story for a long time if he just wants to maintain an appearance of success.

[N0mad]

I think Croberts wants to get SQ42 out of the door. 

I don't doubt that they want to make the game. But at every point where a major decision about the game needs to be made they've always gone for the most technically challenging / non-gameplay / high fidelity option - every time, and this is all down to Chris Roberts. For example:

• Concentrating on the PTU rather than a good single player game
• Clothing: because that matters in a space shooter
• Inverse kinematic picking up animations: nice but totally unnecessary
• Planets: they could just as easily had a transition to a large "level" on a planet
• FOIP: in a space shooter?

I could go on. TLDR: they could have concentrated on getting a single player game out the door and if they had scaled back their ambitions and "fidelity" they might have done it. But Chris is incompetent, he gets fixated on meaningless and technically complex additions to the visuals and seems unable to focus on making anything other than the next tech demo and seems more interested in making and interactive movie than an actual game. For all these reasons they'll never manage it.

[dsmart]

I don't doubt that they want to make the game. But at every point where a major decision about the game needs to be made they've always gone for the most technically challenging / non-gameplay / high fidelity option - every time, and this is all down to Chris Roberts.

It's a lot simpler than that: scope creep

[Backer42]

I could go on. TLDR: they could have concentrated on getting a single player game out the door and if they had scaled back their ambitions and "fidelity" they might have done it.

I might even had played it back in 2014/2015 to get my aging rig to its knees. And then moved on to PlayStation for some real SP games. (As I did in 2016, just without Squadron 42 in-between.)

But Chris is incompetent, he gets fixated on meaningless and technically complex additions to the visuals and seems unable to focus on making anything other than the next tech demo and seems more interested in making and interactive movie than an actual game. For all these reasons they'll never manage it.

I think Chris is an impostor and just got away with it in the early days with no Internet, maybe by buying and reselling or stealing someone else's shit. That "legacy" is what he is banking on and I firmly believe, that does not really exist. That's why it was so important to get Ben "Developer" on board, reassuring Chris everyday, that he really did Wing Commander.

When I watched the live stream with Chris playing his own game (which for me happened to be shortly after watching the video where he pretended debugging the same game), the penny has finally dropped: This guy is a complete computer illiterate and never developed a video game ever in his life. Not in the 1980s and not today. He has not a fucking clue, what he is doing, nor does anybody else of his entourage.

The only thing that changed is that you can't get away with pretending anymore in this day and age. "Fake it till you make it" doesn't work anymore in the connected era within a billion-dollars industry. There are small indie developers who know what they're doing proving wrong his "never been done before" narrative, which might have worked in a 1980s publisher boardroom. And the whole world knows instantly.

The famous psychiatry doctor impostor Gerd Postel stumbled over the same issue: 100 years earlier his stunt might have worked until retirement, but he tried it at the end of the 20th century, when people recognizing him as a mailman were a few hours of a car drive away and not days on horse. So of course, he met somebody by chance and got caught.

That's the magic of the Internet: It will not only debunk Croberts' Star Citizen, but his entire legacy as the big scam it was from the beginning. He built an entire career on pretending.

[dsmart]

I might even had played it back in 2014/2015 to get my aging rig to its knees. And then moved on to PlayStation for some real SP games. (As I did in 2016, just without Squadron 42 in-between.)
I think Chris is an impostor and just got away with it in the early days with no Internet, maybe by buying and reselling or stealing someone else's shit. That "legacy" is what he is banking on and I firmly believe, that does not really exist. That's why it was so important to get Ben "Developer" on board, reassuring Chris everyday, that he really did Wing Commander.

When I watched the live stream with Chris playing his own game (which for me happened to be shortly after watching the video where he pretended debugging the same game), the penny has finally dropped: This guy is a complete computer illiterate and never developed a video game ever in his life. Not in the 1980s and not today. He has not a fucking clue, what he is doing, nor does anybody else of his entourage.

The only thing that changed is that you can't get away with pretending anymore in this day and age. "Fake it till you make it" doesn't work anymore in the connected era within a billion-dollars industry. There are small indie developers who know what they're doing proving wrong his "never been done before" narrative, which might have worked in a 1980s publisher boardroom. And the whole world knows instantly.

The famous psychiatry doctor impostor Gerd Postel stumbled over the same issue: 100 years earlier his stunt might have worked until retirement, but he tried it at the end of the 20th century, when people recognizing him as a mailman were a few hours of a car drive away and not days on horse. So of course, he met somebody by chance and got caught.

That's the magic of the Internet: It will not only debunk Croberts' Star Citizen, but his entire legacy as the big scam it was from the beginning. He built an entire career on pretending.

Very well stated. Also, thing is that even the devs who have worked on this project, know the truth about his involvement and influence. And during the lawsuit discovery, Crytek will also know the truth once they start going through version control logs. Everything will unravel soon enough; and this being the industry that leaks everything, eventually it will all come out.

[dsmart]

[jwh1701]

That just boggles my mind and I cannot understand how or why for the spending, but I believe the chart etc like schedules are all bs.

[dsmart]

Yeah, it's bs. But we don't know to what extent.