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Following my blog about INN, I have added a third update. You can read all the updates below.
UPDATE1:
“Derek is going balls out with this, full guns blazing. If it turns out that INN is being run by this PR company paid for by CIG with backer money – which to be fair is exactly what it looks like – then **** all of these guys, **** them, and here is why:
INN disseminates all of the information coming from 10FTC which is used to part people with their money. It ends up in forums, comments sections and subreddits of other games. People go to INN, lift things from their poor, inaccurate, misleading and lazy transcripts and post them as ‘coming features’, ‘Star Citizen will have this’, ‘this new thing is right around the corner’, and people go to RSI and spend money.
Let me give everyone an example:
INN TRANSCRIPT:
Q: Will planets have multiple biomes? Will flora and fauna be high fidelity?
A: Yes and yes. They hope to one day even have full weather systems for planets. Flora and fauna will be high fidelity because they’re made by the art team before placed.
WHAT WAS ACTUALLY SAID:
Q: Will planets have variant biomes and or weather regions or will each planet be uniform? Do you think current procedural tech will be capable of generating flora and fauna at a fidelity close enough to the art you are producing?
A: “ABSOLUTELY there’s NO REASON why we can’t do this. WEATHER REGIONS is a bit of a DIFFERENT STORY”
“Moving weather and things like that on it? That’s a problem that we’re not yet ready to SOLVE””
“This is one quick example that I can find in 5 minutes, they’ve been spewing this garbage now for how many years? And now it looks like they’ve been getting paid all along to do this? This is how they’ve been selling those ships, this shit gets copied and pasted all over the internet, and people spend money because the whole thing just keeps sounding more and more amazing.
Not only do INN misrepresent what’s being said in these videos and 10FTCs – trust me, I could sit here and effort post for the next two days showing loads more little nuggets like that one above – but they are starting to look like a paid for marketing operation to sell jpeg spaceships.
Which part of Star Citizen doesn’t look like a scam at this point? Anyone?
Bueller?
Whatever Derek has managed to dug up about this I am very much looking forward to reading.”
UPDATE2:
So Dolvak shows up, tried to deny them messing with the transcript. Then once the above was posted in the sub-reddit, he deleted his original post. We already had a screen shot because this is precisely what we expect these guys to do when confronted with evidence and proof.
UPDATE3 (05-09-16)
Since I wrote this article after doing extensive research (most of it involving Stolen Goon Valor – don’t ask), a lot has happened.
First, let me start with the serious part of it all. I reached out to William Usher who has had his run-ins with Shitizens (and the people who love them), and INN (and all 15 people who still read their site), the premier Shillizen site. My goal was to get third-party confirmation from CEO and founder Jake DiMare (aka Wolf Larsen) on the record saying that neither he, nor INN or any affiliated companies, have in fact received any compensation from CIG. Below is that on the record response sent to Usher.
“on the record INN is a community funded fan site that operates at a loss out of love for the game. We have no relationship with CIG beyond being backers and fans of the game. With the exception of that time they donated a ship for a promotional giveaway.“
A source of mine begs to differ, and claims to have more information about how people at CIG are connected to INN through Jake. And that sort of thing is precisely why I wanted to get an on-the-record response from a third-party, because, you know – Shitizens are a disillusion bunch of nutjobs stuck in a combination of sunk cost fallacy, cognitive dissonance, and a healthy dose of abusive tendencies.
So here’s the thing, INN is not purely a Star Citizen fan site. If you look at the content they have produced, aside from the cringe-worthy shilling (accuracy and facts be damned), disinformation etc, it’s clear that it’s way more than that. As a result, they were required to disclose that they are in fact running sponsored content donated by CIG. So if they lied about that, and/or failed to disclose it, aside from all the other crap they do, it’s clear that they can’t be trusted. Period.
Not to mention the fact that even though they are masquerading as a fan site, it should automatically and immediately disqualify them from being the source of any neutrality and which would be in the best interests of the true Star Citizen backers who just want the game they paid for. Instead, not only has Jake, Dolvak and others there, engaged (as per the links in my article above) in the same behavior as Shitizens (you know, the toxic Star Citizen backers), but they condone and continue it to this day. In fact, just this past weekend, people from INN were in a stream (nope – not going to give the link any hits) and conducting that very same behavior.
So now, just days following this article, they’re on damage control. Because, you know, f*ck Derek Smart, but lets just cover our asses anyway – it’s the only way to be sure. Pretty much the same thing that CIG does when I go sniffing (quick! see if you recall that one time where Sandi was singing the Nazi national anthem at a Star Citizen event) around. And with that, they’ve been doing some shuffling; no doubt in an attempt to distance Jake from his INN role. To wit: this is INN on 04-17-16 to 05-06-16. And here is it today, 05-09-16. See anything different in the top three roles?
It gets better. Jake has been running a Patreon as Wolf Larsen since Feb 2015. Why is this relevant? Well, here is an excerpt from Section 11 of the Patreon ToS (yes – of course we’ve reported it).
“Your Information” is defined as any information and materials you provide to Patreon.com or other Users in connection with your registration for and use of the Service, including without limitation that posted or transmitted for use in Public Areas. You are solely responsible for Your Information, and we act merely as a passive conduit for your online distribution and publication of Your Information. The information and materials described in this Section, as provided by each User, is collectively referred to herein as “User Generated Content.” You hereby represent and warrant to Patreon.com that Your Information (a) will not be false, inaccurate, incomplete or misleading; (b) will not be fraudulent or involve the sale of counterfeit or stolen items; (c) will not infringe any third party’s copyright, patent, trademark, trade secret or other proprietary right or rights of publicity or privacy; (d) will not violate any law, statute, ordinance, or regulation (including without limitation those governing export control, consumer protection, unfair competition, anti-discrimination or false advertising); “
Wolf Larsen is an alter-ego for Jake DiMare. He simply does not exist. And prior to the investigation that spawned this blog, nobody had made the connection.
So, there’s a real person (Jake DiMare), using a fictitious persona (Wolf Larsen), to get money from Star Citizen backers, to fund a site which, for all intent and purposes, is a shill site for Star Citizen, and through which some (not all) of it’s contributors (including the owner/founder) are conducting a social media proxy war against dissenters like myself and others.
And he’s now finally copped to it, complete with a lovely quote. Seriously, read it. No, I’m not making this up. Read it.
“Although we recognize there are individuals who have the opinion that CIG is not diligently building the best video game anyone has ever imagined, we just happen to disagree. We also disagree that all our readers, and the legions of Star Citizen fans behind them, are the world’s largest collection of suckers being deceived by a sweeping, hundred million dollar conspiracy to pretend to build a video game starring Mark Hamill, Gary Oldman, Liam Cunningham, Gillian Anderson, and Andy Serkis.“
So, this is where we are with INN when you pull back the curtains:
- INN is owned by Jake DiMare
- There are no corporation (LLC, LLP or whatever) documents that we could find anywhere on planet Earth for INN. Contrary to statements made by it’s founders and contributors
- Wolf Larsen doesn’t exist. It is the alter-ego Jake DiMare
- INN didn’t publicly disclose they got freebies (among still to be disclosed assets) from CIG. Hence ‘sponsored‘ content
- INN transcripts are littered with bullshit, which in turn decimate and distribute misinformation to Star Citizen backers
- Jake is raising money through a fictional alter-ego from real life Star Citizen backers
- Some INN contributors – including the founder – are part of the toxic Shitizens which continue to plague this project and its community
That’s all for now. Our investigation continues. More to come as it unfolds.
UPDATE4 (05-10-16)
As promised, the resident archivist over at the Stimperor’s Elite Goon Squad has put together some of the most recent INN transcripts which show without a shadow of a doubt that they’re basically not only posting pure bullshit, but also distorting what is communicated by CIG. Knowing fully well that since most people aren’t watching the broadcasts, they rely on the transcribed material. Trust me, it gets worse. And it has been going on as far as when INN started. Basically, Reddit aside, INN as far as we can tell, is the #1 source of misinformation and disinformation about this project. Which pretty much explains why there is so much confusion surrounding what this project is, what was promised, and the current stated. Simple put, they simply cannot be trusted. And I personally believe that Jake DiMare is not being forthcoming about his relationship with CIG as it relates to this project. But as these things tend to go, it’s only a matter of time before it all blows up and gets out. And whatever it is they’re hiding, I’m going to get to it. It’s only a matter of time now.
10 FOR THE CHAIRMAN: EPISODE 78 MAR 7 2016
Q: What are the plans to make future patches smaller and more efficient?
INN Transcript
WORK HAS STARTED on a patching system that will only download exactly the files you need.What was actually said
So yes absolutely we have a PLAN in fact I sat down earlier this week … but yeah I THINK we have a really cool PLAN.Q: How important is positioning relative to an opponent’s in Star Citizen’s flight model, and is it affected by 6DOF?
INN Transcript
Positioning is always important in Star Citizen which implements pilot skill and ship characteristics.What was actually said
Getting BEHIND someone, or in their BLIND SIDE is a bit of an advantage.Question according to INN
Are you seeking guidance from people in the field when it comes to designing planets and procedural tech?Question as it was actually asked
You’ve talked about consulting linguists for alien languages, are you talking to exobiologists, exoplanetologists and exo-climatologists for direction and help in designing the ecosystems and climates of alien planets?Answer according to INN
They CONSULT with people at UCLA when they have an idea in mind about a certain kind of planet and CONSULT about where it would be most fitting to go , then they add in factors like in game lore and gameplay before deciding on a planet’s location. There will be a small amount of things like an ‘ice planet’ and a ‘jungle planet’ mixed with a combination of real life science.What was actually said
We have done a certain amount of working with a local school here in LA, so at UCLA we’ve been dealing with some sort of astrophysicists in terms of laying out our star systems and what kind of planets will be what distance from the stars. You know very much in Star Wars they sort of focus the planets to sort of feel like it’s a TYPE it’s a JUNGLE or it’s an ICE PLANET or it’s a DESERT PLANET.10 FOR THE CHAIRMAN: EPISODE 75 JAN 25 2016
Q: Thoughts on where CIG will go after Star Citizen is finished? Will you develop additional content?
Answer according to INN
CIG will continue to produce features, content, functionality improvements, and new singleplayer campaigns for Star Citizen for the foreseeable future. (i.e. World of Warcraft, EVE Online)What was actually said
We’ll have what will sort of determine a sort of… MINIMUM VIABLE PRODUCT FEATURE LIST for what you would call Star Citizen the commerical release, which is basically when you say, “OK, we’ve gotten to this point and we’ve still got PLANS to add a lot more cool stuff and more content and more functionality and more features”10 FOR THE CHAIRMAN: EPISODE 83 APR 18 2016
Q: Whenever I lose my guns in space will I have to buy new ones?
Answer according to INN
Generally if you damage your ship when you are flying it you will have to pay to get it repaired. Depending on the type of insurance you have it may pay for the ship and/or custom components. However there will be penalties for making repeated claims to prevent people abusing it: premiums increase, replacements take longer, there is extra scrutiny, etc. An advantage of having an Alpha phase is we get to find a nice balance for this with your help.What was actually said
I’m not stupid enough to say… “it’s DEFINITELY gonna work EXACTLY this way”, cos… you know… you’ve gotta get it out there LIVE and play around. Hopefully with all you guy’s help and playing it we’ll come up with something that is like a really nice balance.10 FOR DEVELOPERS: EPISODE 08 MAY 02 2016
Q: Will planets have multiple biomes? Will flora and fauna be high fidelity?
INN transcript
Yes and yes. They hope to one day even have full weather systems for planets. Flora and fauna will be high fidelity because they’re made by the art team before placed.What was actually said
There’s NO REASON why we can’t do this. WEATHER REGIONS is a bit of a DIFFERENT STORY.
These are the things we’re thinking about
Moving weather and things like that on it? That’s a problem that we’re not yet ready to SOLVE
VOLUMETRIC CLOUDS and all this sort of STUFF … to have MOVING WEATHER PATTERNS and things like that within the planets? That’ll be something for another time I think.
How do we keep THAT FIDELITY for a planet that’s COVERED IN AN ENTIRE CITY, that’s a lot trickier.Q: Will mined out locations be depletable, and will the minerals regenerate?
INN transcript
Mining won’t alter geometry, but an object on the planet. If they do regenerate, they might not look the same or be in the same area.What was actually said
Well it’s… it’s a DESIGN QUESTION it’s really gonna be up to the designers, there’s no TECHNICAL reason why it can’t
You know, it’s kind of a long answer to whether it regenerates or not… I would say NO IT DOESN’T ACTUALLY REGENERATEYes. And they continue to make shit up as they go along. For example, in that same thread, this person was spreading lies about some sort of settlement that prevents The Escapist from talking about Star Citizen. This despite the fact that he knows it to be false. I have since confirmed it to be false; hence this Tweet.
@starship “CIG insist on complete centralized service, does that means all those crazy ships people spend a house to buy will suddenly vanish?“
Yes, that’s precisely what it means. The ships require the game. The game requires the client and server. With no server, the client simply won’t run. Game over.
And that’s precisely what is going to happen.
This is the Star Citizen project right now.
They keep throwing around this word “persistence” and trying to obfuscate the true meaning and nature.
These “features” in 2.4 are not in the vein of persistence.
- aUEC
- Item Purchases
- Hangar Configurations
- Ship Loadouts
- Character Loadouts
- Crusader Reputation (Criminal and Defender)
- Ship Ammo and Missiles (Crusader only)
These are standard gaming features which are no different from any game that has the capability to save state, progress etc. Heck, any single-player game that you can resume – or even from a manually saved game state – can be described as being persistent if you take this CIG meaning into account. Going by the above, Star Citizen is as persistent as Counter Strike, Team Fortress 2, and their ilk.
It’s pure and utter bullshit.
The fact that the game itself is instanced, completely throws most of that “persistent” notion out the window.
Aside from that, this whole 2.4 Evocati nonsense (which I wrote about here) is another example of missteps.
For example, it used to be dev -> PTU -> Public. This process allowed a closed testing of a build before it goes public. Most of us devs do this; but since we’re self-funded, we have valid (e.g. costs) reasons to limit the size of our “focus test group” before making a specific build public. In the case of this crowd-funded game, which has been paid for many times over, they have no plausible reason to restrict backer access. None.
Problem is, due to the fact that they – foolishly – decided to build a twitch based MMO on cloud (Google Compute) instances, coupled with the fact that they are pushing an average of 30GB (!) updates (they’re not patches in the proper sense of the term) per user with each update, means huge bandwidth and cloud instance costs. And when you take into account (run a Wireshark analysis with the game and see for yourself) the size of the packets they are sending back and forth, it’s easy to see just how ridiculous this whole architecture is. Like truly, and utterly horrid. And he has admitted this as recently as last month in one of his 104TC self-own sessions.
So now it’s dev -> Evocati -> PTU -> Public. And the Evocati part is basically just another PTU, but with an NDA (!) attached, and a smaller set of invite-only backers. Seriously, they attached an NDA to a crowd-funded project. A project which only backers who have already paid for the project, have access to anyway.
So those cloud computing/storage costs alone, are the primary reason why they are not going to be able to keep this Star Citizen game running for the long term. Unlike leased and/or colo servers, cloud costs are very high. For a quarter of what they are paying each month, they could have bought or leased servers, and saved a ton of money. Which appears to be what he said back in 2014.
And they could have stuck with the original plan and let backers spin up and host their own game sessions, while CIG only hosts some firs-come/first server official servers, and a master server which allows game sessions to talk to each other, and populate a server browser with available games etc.
So now, without the ability for backers to spin up their own game sessions, this means that once CIG folds – as I’m 100% certain that they will – the game can no longer be run. Which is pretty much the same thing as when publishers pulling backend (master server) support for multiplayer games after a few years.
This should be a major concern for backers; but most aren’t even thinking about this objectively, so they really can’t see all the problems that are coming.
Also, before Chris decided that he was making an MMO after all, despite statements to the contrary, the game was looking like a standard session based game as I described above. Meaning that any player could spin up – and host – a game session and allow others to join via a server browser. Just like most games – which are not MMO games – do. Heck, even Line Of Defense supports both types because a standard MMO style client-server is a bit more difficult and involved, on consoles. But of course, seeing as he had already started selling a “persistent universe”, he pretty much increased the engineering debt and subsequently tanked the Star Citizen (aka PU) project. Simply put, you cannot have the “persistent universe” as described, with instanced client sessions. Like, at all. Heck, right now, they can’t even get more than 12 people in an instance, without the game choking, glitching, crashing etc.
Aside from all this, having paid for this game – in full – and given their ‘open development‘ (that nonsense is already out the window), every backer is entitled to the game; and at all times. Legalities aside, allowing some backers, and not others, to access the game, is a decision made by people who are morally bankrupt. You know, the same people who frequently make promises they can’t keep, write-up a ToS they have no intentions of abiding by – and which they get to abuse without reason, have a habit of lying to backers – incessantly and with impunity. These are the people backers gave over $113 million to build this game.At the end of the day, Star Citizen (PU) as has been described, will never – ever – see the light of day. As I have said before, they’re going to keep putting in crap designed to make money, removing and/or scaling back promised features, while focusing on SQ42 because that’s what Chris (who wants to be a movie director, more than he wants to be a game designer) wants to focus on; and because it’s the only aspect of a “game” that is capable of being delivered as a “finished product”. And once that happens – if it happens – he’s going to bail.
I am going to say it again, this whole project is FUBAR and there is simply no saving it. And the gamers, as well as the engineers who have worked so very hard on it, are going to be the ones burned the most; while Chris, his family, and exec friends at the top of the food chain, would have personally benefited financially from it all. Though the risks were always there, at the end of the day, the backers, private investors, banks – everyone who has ever put money into this shit-show, stands to lose it. All of it.
Reminder: The current ToS v1.2 expires on May 31st. So now we wait and see what they do/say come June 1st. You can read more about that here.
Meet the guy who is silently and routinely humiliating Chris Roberts. Like a boss.
Yes – it’s all about making money. Which is precisely what I said they were going to do next. Forget about core game play mechanics; lets do the features which enable us to sell stuff.
Of course pgabz now has a video for that too. And there’s also a new one about failed promises.
They were always building a game. The engine they were using, how they were going about doing it, and the fact that they simply can’t build the game they promised, are what the issue has been about since day one. Over on my Discord channel (invite code), this person said it best.
“Scruffpuff – Yesterday at 10:30 PM
The core of the issue for me (I can’t speak for others, everyone has their own trigger here) is that they are not, in any way, building a game. There is no plan for an actual game here. Not a single gameplay element has been designed at any level. But we do have assets – things like ships, men, clothes, and things like that. Before we even had a working engine, they were building ships. AND – polishing them over and over and over again until the asset was perfect – even though the asset itself did not work properly. Redoing helmets over and over. Motion capture over and over. They took the absolute last steps in making a game, and made them first.
Now they’re hoping to take all this high-fidelity assets and plug them into an engine. Then, at the end, hoping to make a game out of it all.
RSI is keeping everything pretty vague too. People on the forums genuinely believe it will have all these features they want – some of the features they want are mutually exclusive. RSI doesn’t seem to mind this. Which tells me that either they don’t know yet themselves, or worse, they don’t care.
“Let them think what they want, as long as they keep buying.”
I’ve been following this since the beginning and I still have no idea how the game works. Take one facet as an example: exploration. OK, we know from the PTU what a single system looks like. There’s nothing to explore – nothing to find. They say they’ll make 100 systems. OK that’s still really small. WoW is far bigger, yet “exploration” does not exist in that game, because it’s too small. What exactly will “exploring” mean? In Elite there are so many systems you can genuinely check out new ones. In EVE they had an exploration minigame. What does it mean in Star Citizen? Nobody knows. But they certainly all imagine these wild Star Trek fantasies.
Or another one: Mining. Mining (which is not in the game) will give you I assume some kind of ore? (nobody knows) which you can refine? (nobody knows) do you do it onboard or at a refinery (nobody knows) and does that mean you can craft? Craft what? How? Where? Will there be a market? Can you trade? Give away? Are these virtual items or physical ones that fit in your hold? Does anyone know anything at all? Never mind that – sell this new mining ship.
He wants to make a 90’s style Wing Commander game/movie with modern tech, but old outdated methods more than anything else.
So these guys sell a bunch of mining ships whose purpose is completely unknown, and unknowable, at this point. Then, they use that money to make a single-player game in which the ship cannot be used. I don’t even know what to call that.
Basically Star Citizen is a charity for Chris Roberts to create Wing Commander 2017 without having to pay for it, or get a publisher.
That’s it.
He knew nobody cared enough to fund it, so he sold it as something else. He originally intended to deliver the PU, then it was too hard, so he said fuck it, let’s do the part I CAN do.
He’ll worry about the rest later.
I think after this is over we’re going to have to take a good look at how we define “scam”. People who backed a couple years ago are not scammed. People who back today are getting bait-and-switched. So it’s sort-of-a-scam at this point.
I think selling PTU mining ships and using that money to create a single-player game where you can’t use the ship is veering dangerously close to an open scam.
There’s an implicit guarantee that he will go back and finish the PTU, but if that were possible, why did he suddenly shift all hands to SQ42? Why is that one tiny piece of the puzzle so much more important? Why the laser focus?
Remember that all last year it was about selling Star Marine to the media. Pictures, videos, conferences, teasers, gaming articles – Star Marine, the COD-killer, JUST around the corner. Then all of a sudden it’s gone, and now it’s all about SQ42.
Someone said it months ago and I wish I still had the post, explaining that Chris wasn’t around to see game development make all these mistakes and learn from them the first time around, so he’s walking head-first into all the same mistakes, not realizing there’s a reason we moved to other tech.
We don’t know for sure, but as I said, that doesn’t mean we can’t examine the evidence and make an informed prediction.”
Well that didn’t take long. Someone has published the supa sekret Star Citizen 2.4 patch notes
