I don't know if you have ever been impaneled in a jury. You get presented with arguments from both sides who paint very different pictures from the same circumstance and you have to decide either based on the preponderance of the evidence or beyond a reasonable doubt depending on the type of case.
This will be a mess, I'm tired and you will just have to deal with the rambling jumble of ideas.
Now we have heard all the stories coming from Roberts over the years and if we are here most of us are former backers who have requested refunds and left the project and with that we have weighed Roberts statements, CIG videos, what is actually released, the sliding scale meaning all the wild promises Roberts made and then all the incredible scope creep Roberts piles onto the project making delivery harder and less likely at every turn, this balanced against the reversing slope where now Squadron 42 will have a couple of chapters each being a few of another of Robert's games missions (a far cry from the original scope).
They are going from the original 100 systems to 5-10 (but backers claim there will be more content when they have no way to know this and all behavior indicates that the content will be further reduced not increased), weighing in against what we had seen and what apparently has been leaked or discovered regarding the games development, game creation in general, human nature, life experience dealing with people.
When we look at all of the information we see what may have been a terrific idea and dream that began with all good intentions (if we want to be generous) but it has fallen apart and we believe is teetering on financial instability. Why did it get here? Indisputably the choice to use Cryengine and patch it repeatedly for each added level and function has created a huge mess and this one decision more than anything has wasted countless millions of dollars. Now as incompetent as I believe Roberts actually is at managing large projects (see this and read it all to gain the background,
http://gameranx.com/updates/id/70033/article/the-chris-roberts-theory-of-everything/ ) he had to have known how badly this has affected the projects schedule and budget and you can view it as fraud if he knew it was not working and continued to make statements which backers relied upon to take their money. That would be a type of fraud and clearly would be unethical.
Add in the fact that Roberts and Ortwin were involved with some shady characters one of which went to prison for their movie making and funding ventures and financial shenanigans where they were the only people who made money and countless million of investors money got transferred to shell corporations and then to the principal architects of this venture, that would be Roberts, Ortwin and 2 other dudes who all work on this project. Now with a background for dirty dealings that screwed people of MANY millions, Total funding was 700 Million, would you trust these same people to make statements you could rely upon and would you trust them to build the game? If you look here you will learn about it,
http://www.dereksmart.com/forum/index.php?topic=34.15Add in the way they changed the TOS so that backers are in the dark and cannot know what is really going on ion the company. The original TOS allowed backers to see if Roberts missed the delivery by 12 months, then he gave himself another 18 months and he missed that, then he changed the TOS a third time to remove backers ability to learn just where they stood and take away their rights to a refund. Luckily with the help of a California AG refunds have started again but only after the threat of legal action.
Add in the two loans that they claim they did not need, but took anyway, it starts to look bad. Does the circumstantial evidence begin to pile up in one corner and begin to taint the character of Roberts? We have not even gotten into detail, have not gotten into the lies that 3.0 was ready last year but needed polish when we now know he had not begun yet. Lies on top of lies. Just tonight he made statements in interviews that directly contradict the lies he told last year. The problem with being a habitual liar is that it eventually becomes so difficult to remember what lies you told to whom.
But you know what, over here and on the SC refund reddit page, we watch everything he does and says publicly and amass the evidence. You can think this is just mean spirited and you are chasing a White Whale literally and figuratively but somebody has to doo it. One day it will all collapse and backers will be shocked, but we will have been waiting. Hopefully the Attorney Generals will be able to use the documentation and put it to good use but in the meanwhile if we can manage to show some poor backer who is ambivalent about the project the entirety of the scam (as it has become) and they get their money back before losing it, we have done well.
In the meanwhile please look around I promise you that Derek Smart has been right about this situation the vast majority of times. The funny thing is that I had no idea of who DS was a year or so ago. I made some suggestions on the SC forums and was met with the typical hostility that has earned the community the crappy reputation it has. One off the asshats called me Derek Smart. Smart I had no idea what this fool was saying I looked up the name and found tons of information on the ongoing feud. Eventually with the help of the SC refunds reddit board I got my $515 back. yeah I was a fool who got wrapped up in this mess. I'm so happy to be free of it since I stopped playing the game, I found it SO fucking boring, get out of bed, do the same 3 missions, save my rep at Korea or wake up at backstabber central waste dump. Or survival mode in space ships, oh or a really shitty FPS module. He couldn't even do that well. Shattered Horizons did a better job of space combat 8 years ago. It was limited in video definition and scope because at the time only the best PC's could play it at medium display settings. I had an I7 970x so it ran well. In any case we have looked at lots of what you believe is circumstantial but in its entirety it pretty much paints a really ugly picture of this project, its future, its creator.
Please keep an open mind but also realize that you can never get anybody here to ever say "Hey that Chris Roberts is a swell fellow, his game is nifty, has great physics and novel concepts, it's reasonably priced and his marketing has been both forthright and honest. This is clearly the most transparent gaming company ever, I'm so glad we don't have to deal with any of those mean efficient publishers because CIG has done so much with so little."
Yeah there could be a perfectly innocent explanation for this or that, but there is no way they can explain away this pile of evidence. Sorry for being long winded, repetitive and not particularly clear. All this stuff becomes a blur and you have a hard time remembering where you saw this or got the link for that. I do see that Roberts has hired companies to put out tons of positive SC stories so the good stuff gets buried. It wont matter.
