MDrake SC
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Well, looks like the goon leak is back to posting on SA, when he gets the chance. Too bad the SA read access is still paying goons only.
I hope the upset top tier whales are in the $10,000+ range. I doubt Wulf is one of those that can wake up though.
I am very curious which A list actor wants to bail. I am hoping it’s Mark Hamill, but he is also the least likely due to how he jumped aboard in the first place. The reshoot of the mocap was totally expected. This is not a Chris Roberts project unless nearly everything has to be scrapped and redone. Over and over.
Hopefully CIG is running on fumes and the whales have dried up. I want to see something “big.”
@ lir big – Thanks for writing your post #2753. A really good follow up.
Well, my analysis is just like the citizens that maintain the Google chart of the funding… it’s all based on CIG’s counter.
The 6000 whales is an estimate based on the $2+ million they made selling the $350 Reclaimer for 7 days. It was a significant thing to notice because it meant that cultists were willing to pay nearly any increased price. This was all Sept 26, 2014. Well before any signs of scam and cutting promises.
Another way to estimate the 6000 whales is tied to the $600, 890 Jump sale. Only 3,560 yachts were “produced”, which is $2,136,000. It sold out, and people still complained about not being able to get one.
The consistent sales of $2 million basically confirmed the $2-3 million burn rate, which means at least 4000-6000 whales keep the game alive.
The first 2015 vanguard sales made $3 million, because it was an Aegis fighter. No surprise in the slightest at $250 each.
It is a consistent trend. There is without a doubt, 3000 whales at any time. Willing to buy any rare ship they can. This is why I am very certain this scam can go on for a year, easily, as more qualified or expensive developers leave. European developers are paid less than Americans on average. With 2 studios in Europe, no surprise.
Also, Ben said they plan to do a concept sale every 6 weeks… so yes, the scam continues.
Vanduul motion capture… tiny footage at 2:09… They have done so little work on the big scary bad guys. No one even questions it, thinking that it will be a big surprise reveal. As if that Gary Oldman speech trailer wasn’t an utterly poor display of Chris’ writing and directing. I expect more of these tiny snippets to hint that progress has been made, but in reality, they have nothing.
Wasn’t the Starfarer supposed to be hangar ready now? Chris must have not liked it and threw out its work, again. Same with the Vanduul.
We knew about the Vanduul blade. We learned about its sudden $250 concept sale at a “steep discount”. But I did not expect CIG to run a sale for 10 currently flyable “limited” ships, at the same time.
It was only on March 4 that the Sabre and Khartu were on sale again. For the 2.2 patch release only 14 days ago.
That means things are pretty bad. A lot more backers must have silently dropped out. Leaving only the forum vocal cesspool. The chargebacks and CIG’s poor responses to them, are doing lots of damage that we cannot see.
Hopefully this scam is shut down sooner, but knowing the whales, they’ll drop more of their disability funds, retirement, kids college funds, etc. in order to keep the dream alive.
My estimate (ever since the $350 ships became normal) is that there is a solid 6000 hardcore whale backers that buy nearly every ship they can get. With the Blade sale alone, that is $1.5 million. There is a chance that the Blade sells poorly since its stats are pretty bad, especially weapon mounts.
For now, the fund chart says $110,258,506. And we know it isn’t actually accurate since refunds do not cause it to drop.
Well, to be fair… Pirate Swarm isn’t much of a feature. Just using different ships with different AI settings, in Vanduul Swarm. It was not heavily promoted by CIG either. It’s no Star Marine.
And that ends the fairness. Toysrme6v0 and Tazius are the 2 modders that put the original Pirate Swarm together around June 2015, based on AC 1.1.3. The fact that no one at CIG did anything to release the real pirate swarm, was something I noticed. Not only was it something that was easy to do and would add variety to the game, it would be the first minor sign of progress in a long time (this was 2 months before the Gamescom 2015 demos).
And then word gets out that Derek is forcefully refunded by CIG in July 2015, coop campaign (2012 original feature) is downgraded afterwards, Gamescom, Escapist, and the rest is history.
Chris Roberts had the opportunity to create the original game for $23 million, then sell out to a publisher or investor, and get rich legally. Ha ha ha ha ha.
On the bright side… CIG is intending to make progress on fulfilling “The Making of Star Citizen” physical books. I mean, it should be easy enough to use footage from the film documentary, and put it in a book… right?
The physical book is a part of the $250-275 Rear Admiral pledges, for the oldest backers.
Next thing you know… the documentary is 3-6x more expensive than needed because Chris kept scrapping it and redoing it over and over. More people departing means more money, which means more to waste. Ahem, more resources to perfect the product and experience for the valued backers.
Alpha 2.2 is now released. Main news here. Patch notes here.
The $170 Sabre is now flight ready and on sale again. The Sabre cannot be rented for REC, at least for now. The $150 Khartu is hangar ready and also on sale again.
New ship items, coolers, are available to purchase or rent.
“We have increased the number of players and player-ships per instance of Crusader from 16 to 24.” I wonder if that is true… it’s still no MMO though.
Under Important Issues… “Ship geometry can very occasionally disappear or turn invisible.” They still haven’t fixed this glaring issue since July 2015, if not earlier.
The last ship sale was the Khartu thanks to Gillian Anderson on Jan 22, and the Aegis sale with 2.1 patch on Jan 15.
Just another money grab with another patch. Always desperate, yet never creative enough to offer something new.
With the latest 10FTC, we have Chris talking about increasing server instance capacity. Transcript here.
We know they are at 16 players, and are attempting tricks to increase it to 24. 16 players can spawn ships, the other 8 cannot. I don’t really know what other tricks CIG is trying, but the results will be amusing as they attempt to go MMO.
I’m not gonna copy and paste a lot of Chris’ chatter, but I will highlight the main point…
“We’ve been doing a whatever you want to call it; a network LOD and an update LOD that scopes depending on whether you can see things, how far away they are, whether they’re acting, whether it’s another player, whether it’s relevant to you.”
It isn’t exactly the first time Chris has mentioned it… but his recent re-mention of this “method” to increase player counts is significant. It will become their new method of showing progress, or more likely be an excuse that they tried, failed and need a lot more time.
This is significant because Planetside 2 (MMOFPS) uses this methodology for its gameplay and functionality to achieve 200 player and vehicle battles. As a player, you only see around 40-60 players at absolute most. The stuff outside your view and your minor combat area are not rendered or interact-able.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t work during peak hours on a daily basis. During heavy server loads, you will see allies and even enemies vanishing in and out of view, making spotting and killing frustrating. Or worse, you got killed by someone else that you didn’t render, when they should have been because the server cannot keep up on what data to send.
Basically, Planetside 2 was built from the ground up for truly massive battles, but still doesn’t have the ability to perform well at its intended scale.
Star Citizen is not being built from the ground up for massive battles. Technical and network talent from the Austin studio have left. Chris’ habit of having multiple code branches for a game and a show has caused horrific problems for the remaining engineers. They cannot get anything reliable ingame, even at 16 players.
Of course… cultists are really pathetic folks and say things. $2,500 invested and like this. Chris doesn’t play games. Cultists do not play modern games. Idiots galore.
I know Derek’s Line of Defense is being designed for major scale battles, but since it is not released or free to demo, I do not know how he has handled player limits with server performance.
I take a break for 1 and a half days… and so much has happened and been said, or history brought back up. I did notice the PMs being monitored thing back when the goons were talking about it a week ago.
Though seeing that Lowtax has paywalled the SA thread is… slightly questionable and sad.
But I think we got enough info from the goon investor and leak. We know lots of people have left and thus money has been freed up. There are some company share buying events going on. Chris is still wasting money, most likely on SQ42 reshoots, theater trailers or progress shows. Sandi is doing something terrible to employees behind the scenes with the private investigator. Ben is such a terrible person, he deserves many of the insults that are hurled at him. The crazy monitoring and censorship hopefully means things at CIG are VERY bad now.
The ridiculous thing I hinted at sometime ago, but cannot revisit due to the SA paywall, is that apparently backer money was used to own a race horse. It was all traced to a CA Irvine business address with Chris’ name. So yes. Backers paid for Chris’ mansion, cars, 1st class travel, Sandi movies and auditions, and a bloody horse.
The ugly situation is that… this show will be drawn out way farther. Unless the other thing that Derek hinted at has finally occurred, it may be another 4-6 months of CIG lousy patches, videos and refund denial attempts.
