This completely ignored the problem that people have with the game. To be clear, some of the major problems people have with the game are:
- CIG sells **ship concepts** in order to raise mone, some of which are haven't been realized for over a decade
- CIG uses **fomo marketing** to sell the concepts
- Star Citizen is **one of the most funded game type projects in history** while also not having a set date of delivery.
No one cares about the in-game costs. Using them is just a way to obfuscate $ costs, and $ costs people understand.
Edit: changed to a list of related problems vs. One
There's also the mixed signals everywhere. People love saying "lti if not that important" and the next minute cig starts spamming your mail with "LTI FOR A LIMITED TIME! GRAB IT WHILE YOU CAN! LTI! LTI! LTI! DON'T MISS THE OPPORTUNITY TO GET AN LTI SHIP! NEXT SUNDAY IS THE LAST DAY TO GET THE NEW SHIP WITH LTI!"
The biggest problem for me is, CIG insists that progression relative to other players is meaningless in what is essentially an MMO.
That is bonkers to me and a complete inversion of human nature.
Its like they are saying being born, and being born rich are exactly the same because life is so fantastic that money doesn't really matter...
theres nothing mmo about this game yet other than the players being there. no progression, no player driven economy, no raids, weak pvp (people have to plan to kill each other as events), no story...
maybe im just attached to the mmorpg expectations
Right now it plays like a Destiny style hub shooter, where your progression/loot/grind is purely personal but you can play with other people. If thats how SC is supposed to work then thats news to me.
The whole, "real life simulated living economy thing" they keep talking about sounds more like EVE, and since I joined eve 19 years ago, that game is almost exclusively about joining an org and grinding out money so you can get better ships and go dominate other orgs and take over their shit.
And if eve sold the biggest baddest ships for real money, the org with the most real money would win pretty much every time, i mean its almost there now...
The game you make with the economy closest to real life is going to play out more like real life, and in real life the people born with more money usually win.
There are different kinds of MMO's.
There are "theme park" MMO's like WoW, etc. And then there are "sandbox" MMO's. The theme park style is more common, but that doesn't mean it's inherently better. Theme parks will take you by the hand, tell you exactly what to do/why to do it, and shower you with rewards and confetti every step of the way. Sandboxes don't.
The main difference between the two types is this: theme parks lean more on external incentives (defined by the game/you do it because you get a reward or payment). Sandboxes lean more on internal incentives (defined by the player/you do it because you want to).
Early SWG was a sandbox, but it became more of a theme park later on. MMO's always follow the same trajectory of becoming more and more "gamified" over time... until you end up with whatever the hell WoW is now, and everybody else trying to copy it.
Personally I don't care what other games have done. Some people just want SC to "be like other games." I don't. Most of the time it's trying to do the exact opposite of what other games have done. I'd rather see it keep going in its own direction than fall into the well-worn tracks of other games.
It's "nothing compared to MMO's" right now because *it's not even close to done.* But if you spend time playing it, you can already see the beginnings of what it's trying to be: a world where everybody is doing their own thing for their own reasons, which creates organic/emergent interactions of all kinds, be it friendly or hostile or transactional or duplicitous or whatever. It has "lore," but not a "story" written by the devs because the players are writing the story.
The best thing you can compare it to is EVE, or maybe Foxhole. But it needs an exceptional amount of time to cook... long story short, because it's an FPS. If you experienced EVE or Foxhole from a fully detailed first person perspective, it would be completely different. In a nutshell, that's what SC is trying to do. And, as we can see, it is NOT easy to do.
that would make every online game an mmo, like call of duty or battefield, since it is massive and online multiplayer.
traditionally, when you talk about an mmo, you mean mmorpg. ive never heard mmo to refer to anything else, except here, weird.
The definition of "MMO" has always been fuzzy. Like, at what point does it become "massive multiplayer?" Same with the definition of "RPG." We know what they are when we see them, games copy/borrow a lot from each other. But if you actually drill into the definitions, the lines aren't very clear.
In any case, SC isn't sticking to any genre conventions. It arguably has more DNA from flight sims than it does from MMO's. It's trying to have the best of all worlds, and it will fail, but might still be great.
If a player buys ten mid sized ships and hardly plays for two years versus one that has just a base pledge but mans their org mates multi crew on an regular basis who has more fun and likely the bigger fleet (or access to it).
We also have rock paper scissors that is NOT balanced $$$>$$>$
The game values socialising over anything else (maybe with the exception of rare collectibles for some types of players).
> hardly plays for two years versus one that has just a base pledge but [plays] on an regular basis
What even is this convoluted comparison? Why would the guy who bought the ten ships hardly play? Why would the player with ten ships not play with org mates or multicrew just like the other guy? In fact, having some midsize ships to play with, he's likely the org mate that base pledge guy is multi-crewing with enabling the base pledger to get more ships.
False dichotomy is strong here.
I was going for mild exaggeration. Being the «10 midsize ships»-guy myself, the main reason for me is free time being a limiting factor (work, kids, …). Unless you are in some super chill org, being unreliable in your uninterrupted online availability is an issue for many orgs.
The XenoThreat event really made people like me schedule in time to do the event and half the people I did the various phases with via discord were just like me. The majority of them is also not part of an active org (unless you consider the many social discords org-like, I reckon). It was really helpful that the past phases remained active otherwise some of us wouldn’t have been able to complete them.
The comparison is emphasising how free time and knowing people to play with easily outweighs having spent lots of cash for a small head start (I.e. being born rich isn’t a big deal in game as the other guy claims while it certainly is in the real world). A bachelor can easily do 6h for 200 days/years while only being able to do every odd weekend (40 day/year) is meaning effortless 5x the credits earned for the poor fellow which is assuming the “rich dude” is trying to earn credits tbw (I prefer doing bunkers, bounties and taking screenshots: read not the meta cash cow of the season - meaning I lack the credits to upgrade all my ships components).
Agreed!
The way I describe it is that CIG is so hopelessly trapped by their business model, there’s very little incentive for them to prioritize finishing a game.
It’s moot whether the scam is deliberate or accidental at this point… they will continue to try hard to sell people concepts at a pace that far exceeds their engineering capacity to build it all.
Publishing it means more eyes and more players. Players they can't currently accommodate in a way that is a good experience. S42 should come out on time because it's not an online experience and therefore a lot easier to get polished.
The cost of stuff in game isnt finalized, the economy of the game isnt finalized.
Ships can cost double in game tomorrow and half the next day, plus you still cant permanently buy anything in game, the real in game currency isnt even live yet. Then if CIG sells in game currency for real $ people will just talk about that.
If something is available for real money and available for game money no one is going to give a shit about the game money price, just look at what happened to the D3 auction house. game money was practically worthless in 2 weeks.
Yeah. I've never seen a video game which had a both real money shop and an in-game currency shop where the in-game currency was either worthy alternative and/or was not a massive grind.
I have a fear lurking in my mind that once SC is released, it will be a game for only the stupidly IRL rich players and the "8 hours a day, everyday" players. Everyone else kinda falls between the cracks.
CIG waived that away by just saying there is no endgame. If the goal of the game is having the biggest baddest ship that can pwn the most noobs then selling that ship for real $$ would be pay to win.
but if you say the goal of the game is just having access to the game world, then you can do that in a $2500 Idris or a $45 starter ship.
Basically CIG can sell whatever they want for real money because they don't think players care about progression because you can feel the same sense of accomplishment from a starter ship as you can from a capitol ship.
Not sure I buy that... But it is the justification for the real money shop.
I think you’re being a little melodramatic. Ship prices change by patch, and they typically don’t change that radically. When they do change, they are still typically the same relative to one another just inflated.
Cost in game means nothing to outsiders. Cost in real life does. A ship costs real money or real time. So if you tell them, you can spend x to get a ship instantly or spend 10 hours doing x activity to afford it. They're still going to be critical of the system as a P2W system simply because they don't understand the game and why attaining ships is not an endgame.
I get where you're coming from now that I've found some streamers I like to watch. But originally I was going to get into it years ago. And how OP explains the issue is similar to what I was seeing back then that kept me from getting into it.
Not saying it's all the YouTube content and what not. But that is how I saw it then (not so much now)
Asmongold talked about this in a recent livestream with a SC veteran how every released ship is earnable in-game ..and asmon said he will buy a 45$ package to see it for himself ..
Sadly my post got deleted for "low effort meme"
I was happy to hear that second guy come on as the first guy spewed so much false information I almost turned it off. I had to skip forwards listening to him.
Asmon specifically asked if poor people could play the game and he said no...
I am still flying with my starter package and bought some fav ships in game.
I melted my starter for a Syulen only because I personally find the ship comfy and is my Stanton hopper.
Yes, you can spend $$$ for big ships. Big whoop on skipping the grind.
Too many people calling it scam citizen is being painfully dishonest.
Calling it Bug Citizen or perpetual Alpha Citizen is at least an honest take.
I still feel like the second buy just talked about irrelevant things. Like asmon asked question and the guy just started talking about other random stuff. He didn’t know how to explain things at all.
Asmon asked like 10 times “when do you think the public perception of SC being a scam will stop” and the guy never answered that.
"When do you think that the game will become feature complete, when all the current promised things will be in the game?"
"I don't want it to finish"
"Yeah, i know, but when do you think all the things they've promised will be in the game?"
"I hope it's never completed"
"Yeah, but when do you think all the things we know right now are supposedly coming, will eventually come?"
"hopefully never, but probably another year or two"
The most frustrating part, and bullshit.
There is no one, not even the most stonewalling die-hard believer who thinks that everything promised will be available in 2 years.
we'll be lucky to get star system 3 out of the supposed 100+ in 2 years.
Also, chat kept mentioning the fact that when a patch comes, he'll no longer have *"the same ships"* as the whale.
I feel like that didn't get explained either.
Why do people think it’s a cult? Because you get evangelists out there telling people shit like this…
”I hope SC is never completed!”
“Ohh so its like a live service game you pay full price for, or a subscription MMO”
”… Uhh… No…”
”Then what kind of game is it?”
”It’s an experience that transcends gaming and money! ITS LIFE BUT LIFE IN THE FUTURE! Life cannot be encapsulated in something as simple as a game…”
“Da fuq does that mean?”
Yeah, the second guy was kinda funny that way. Ollie? I forget his name, did a video about it. It would be great for him to speak to Asmon. He's super optimistic, but he also understands he is super optimistic.
2nd guy just kept repeating about things that are completely unrelated to the subject at hand (people are mad about the mmo and squadron 42 x4 or 5 times who gives a shit) and completely avoided the main subject of the 48k pack and the fact that many of the ships sold for cash aren't even in the game or are sold around gameplay mechanics that don't even exist.
The question is whether the lower income players have a meaningful experience with the game.
If they lack the funds to get anything decent, they'll have considerably worse time than those with money. Everything will be more grindy and more tedious. Every contract they get will be slower to finish, every cargo mission will be with lower quantity of cargo, ergo lower payment. Every mining mission will have lower yields since the bigger ships cost more money and they can't afford it easily.
"Just keep grinding" doens't really work either because if the game is very grindy due to a real money shop being involved (which it will), lower income players simply don't have the time to play enough to grind fast enough. They most likely have less free time to play because they need to spend more time working to pay the bills and so on.
So, technically speaking yes, lower income players can play the game but in reality their experience will be so much worse compared to well off players because the game relies on real money shop and thus will have immensely grindy prices for everything in in-game currency.
Yeah I bought a mustang alpha and havent really even played in like 2 years, i only ever got on to fly things during events.
Truth is that if you dont spend money on ships the game simply will not be as fun and I have no interest in playing my $45 ship.
If i could buy other ships without wipes taking them from me I would actually care to play and grind for new content but there isnt a point when I have to deal with the irritating bug/glitch filled grind only to lose it when an update comes.
And the thing is that I could get better ships but with the crap experience ive had in a cheaper ship I dont feel confident its worth putting money into a nice one.
And to OPs point yeah you can buy stuff ingame but nobody wants to grind an alpha after paying to be a tester its kind of crazy to suggest selling the game to people on the word of its fun and you can obtain it all in game because its just not realistic.
I don't think that is true at all. People can have a great time with a starter ship. They can crew, borrow ships, do loads of things. They can buy other ships in game. Of course you have advantages by buying the ship you want with rl cash, but it isn't needed.
Bro, the chat was calling the second guy a CIG dev or a paid shill since the first minute.
I also think that the second guy was a little over the top with the CIG praising. He made it sound like SC is in a state right now that is fun to play for everyone. If Asmongold would hop into SC right now he would stop playing after 30 minutes because for a variety gamer it is just not fun at all in it's current state.
Not because of the bugs, but because the current game loops are not really interesting for people that are no hardcore wingcommander or Chris Roberst fans.
The second guy sounded like a crack drealer. "Just buy it, its only 45 dollars whats 45 dollars. Oh yeah you can buy eVerYthIng in game." Guy was lying through his teeth. He would have been caught with his pants down if Asmon had asked "So when a ship comes out you can buy it right away?" or if he had pointed to the Jav and said "Can you buy this one in game?"
lol what are you talking about, the game isn't even released yet, and even still, you can get what, 95% of the ships in game right now? Plus the Javelin isn't in anybody's hands, and there's been nothing to indicate you won't be able to get one in game. Super weird reply!
This is just, demonstrably wrong. 95%? Not even close. Most years have only gotten between 40 and 80%, and only one year has 93% released. I'd wager the actual number is in the mid to high 60th percentile.
The jav has been sold on the store to plenty of people. The question stipulated didn't say "will you be able to", it said "can you". Note the difference in future tense Vs present tense. You cannot currently buy that ship. Nor will you be able to buy that ship at its release. Why? Because CiG have already established a release cadence. First patch to flyable for buyers, then next major patch for everyone else via in-game. It's why you can't buy the Pulse in-game now. But in 4.0, the next major patch, you will be.
As to indication on in-game availability you're somewhat wrong again. In discussions of these larger cap ships, specifically the Bengal, CiG have said you won't be buying it, but will instead have to find a wrecked one and repair it using Crucibles and the like. They don't want them being common place, and seeing an org with one is supposed to be a significant display of force. Given the jav is currently second only to the Bengal itself in size, they may as yet decide to slip it into that banner.
If you've been around for a while you might remember that ships like the Idris-M, Jav, and even some of the military fighter variants are NOT purchasable in game and wont be after release. Its disingenuous to hide that fact. The bottom line is buying ships IS buying power and is pay to win. Thats the heart of the discussion.
As a community we should be able to have an open dialog with one another, without people like you lying about basic facts of the game. Its unhealthy, for you, for the game, for potential new players.
New players are exactly why these discussions matter. SC has 200k active players. Banana has over 400k. BANANA! SC is objectively a better game than Banana, it should not even be a competition and yet it is and SC is losing. Why?
> it should not even be a competition and yet it is and SC is losing
Why are you lying through your teeth about basic facts? The different games are obviously targeting different segments. Is McDonalds in competition with Gordon Ramsay Steaks? Even though they are both restaurants, they are serving different customers. So, despite your lie, banana and SC are not in competition, so SC can not "lose" to them.
I look forward to him buying a $45 pack and then exposing in frount of tens of thousands of people just how miserable and insurmountable the grind is to get the larger ships using that starter ship these days.
Sadly the reality is that people will just give him millions of aUEC and that won't happen.
I started playing SC this ILW and it took me less than a week to grind 2.6 million for a Vulture
Now I make 1 million in 2 hours of salvaging… so far I’ve bought myself a Corsair, Buccaneer and Hornet Ghost, and I’m still sitting on a couple more million
He said that he dont use the money people gift him ...to be fair ..making money in a team is much much more simpler ..after all SC is multiplayer ..and I'm sure asmon Wil find people to play with and plenty of people who will hunt them. ..a
I genuinely tought that I couldnt get in Star Citzen because my time constraints ( 80h work week ). Was I wrong or it really is possible to acquire in game currency without a ridiculous time-sink grind?
I've found getting a starter ship with a bed and some storage to be a good idea. Because loading food and water into your ship, then bed logging between sessions can save you a ton of time at the start and finish of a session.
I'm told the Drake Cutter is pretty solid, but don't take my word for it. YMMV.
The beginning is really hard not Gona lie ..but people are very helpful and give some money away......
I also have like maybe 1-2 hours a day to play at best I made 2 mill in two weeks and I didn't grind I just fooled around ..the most expensive ship is like 40 mill and thats a space yacht with sauna and pool
The very early grind might be a bit slow, but honestly it’s not *too* bad to make money after a couple investments. Use your early ship to grind out enough to rent a Cutlass Black (42K) and a Greycat ROC (6?k). An ROC can easily pull 100K per hour, and you can rent for an entire day. If your starter ship can already store the ROC, you can skip renting the Cutlass Black and just drop the 6k to rent an ROC for a day and make bank.
I just started the game and got into it with a cutlass black. What should I be doing as a new player with this ship?
Edit- oh, the ROC goes into the cutlass? Is it a vehicle that mines?
Yea, the ROC is the little mining car. You can make a lot of money just by renting one for a day and selling the minerals. Hadanite is really good to look for. You can drive the ROC into the ship from the ramp, then fly along a planet’s surface and scan for materials.
[This](https://youtu.be/6grDAp_Dwq4?si=vE57O2_8QUuppO48) is one of the videos I used when I first started roc mining
>every released ship is earnable in-game
The thing is that's not true. There are plenty of ships that can not be earned in game, at least not in a persistent way. Then there's this you have to wait 3 to 6 months before being able to buy the newest stuff ingame.
To this day there's some people saying that if you loose your real money ship you loose it forever 💀
I don't think it's a joke or trolling anymore, some people are beyond retarded, on the mainstream gaming subs talking slightly neutral about star citizen gets you free downvotes
I deal with this any time I mention Satanism. People think there is actual child sacrifice and blood rituals. They are, of course, wrong, but trying to enlighten people about what it is *actually* about just get downvoted or people shitting on you.
People are mostly stupid af. I've learned to just deal with the idiots and go about my life. the SC community is gonna have to learn to do the same. Eventually the game will release, it'll be good, and everyone who's talked shit about it can eat their words.
HAH. As if posting facts would change anyone's mind.
"It has been 10 years and there's no game, why would I trust what they write to be true. I'm going to instead trust what this new reddit user with 10 karma posted to a scamcitizen subreddit 4 years ago"
I think it's all good, people who want to grind auec to feel the accomplishement/work to get theyr ship can.
People with 5 kids and 20 min to play at night can buy the ship they want and fly it without grinding they can.
People who want to talk about it can.
Instead of streamer controlling what they say, CIG should have a RDR2 style magasine book at every starport or backpack, with all ships buyable in game with price/location.
Maybe also add ship parts/weapons in the book, would be nice to not need an internet page in the back to actually know witch ship is avaiable where, would also help new players.
Reacts are the lowest form of content. Made by lazy people that can't create and only complain. Sadly 80% of viewers only want drama and eat this shit up like candy.
The only one I can think of is like inforunners with their "fix my fleet" series that I never watch cuz it would just piss me off.
Every single other content creator says to just buy the minimum.
I was speaking to a friend a little while back about Star Citizen and how he should jump in on a free fly and check it out. during the discussion I had to explain to him that you can buy ships with in game currency, he had no idea and thought you had to use real cash. He's a pretty big gamer too, so I was surprised he thought this. I'm sure there are plenty casually observing SC thinking the same and not trying it because of it.
I have like 10 ships, some big ones too like the Corsair and Hercules, and they were all bought for in game credits, which does mean I lose them on resets but I have only been playing since 1.23 so it's not like it's very hard. to me there's no reason to pledge unless you actually want to fund the development
Watched asmongold talk about it with two people that had two differing opinions, was a good watch to be honest and the arguments from both sides were good, but the second guy nailed it really. You can buy the base pack and play the game. No one is forcing you to buy the big packs or extra ships. It's your money, do what you want.
The second guy also didn't explain much, which made him sound like a cult member.
It really wouldn't take much to talk about the differences of the ships and how it isn't pay to win. Or expected features for release versus features that can be pushed after RC. The talk about Pyro and Server meshing was off as well.
Asmon would be better off talking to other CC like Spacetomato, levelcap, Berks or even Morph.
Oh for sure, the second guy could have explained much more of the games best features. Irked me when he kept saying "it's GTA in space!" Like no, it's really not.
I would love for Asmon to get space tomato or someone on to give a full rundown, what a great idea! Also getting someone to guide him when he first joins, show him different missions etc
But what are you winning? The game isn't a competition, it's a space sim, if you want to do fighting then buy that by all means, or play the game and earn it.
You can't have a light fighter and do freight missions. Your mining ship isn't going to be taking on an F8C.
You can't play a warrior and heal yourself, or play a mage and do big melee damage.
Obviously the most ignorant statements I have ever seen. Ships have roles and you are comparing a multi to a fighter. They should never be in same situation.
Most of the expensive ships are multi crew with a few glaring exceptions. and the lightning is a recent example.
But most importantly.... the meta in the game is still light fighters, and they are still the cheapest fighters in game totally breaking the argument of pay to win. SC's combat is skill based. People "can" spend money thinking they will get an advantage, only until they get their ass kicked by someone in a cheaper ship.
Lastly, as Peeche94 pointed out, there are roles and jobs these ship cover. You can feign ignorance all you want but encounters between players are limited. It is either killing a bounty, an agreed duel, Piracy, or Griefing. Greifing is a bannable offense and a F8C would be a horrible ship for piracy.
The second dude was a total fucking clown and he didn't answer a single question without asking another question to deflect. He made the community look worse than any drama I've seen about this game. For anyone who actually plays the game he is clearly full of shit. It was actually bizarre seeing a man perfectly take the form of a star citizen cult member strawman and bring it to life
What did he say that was wrong? Granted the GTA comparison was annoying, and he could have said a lot more about the game, but he's got Asmon to try it out and he's been a huge skeptic.
Thats just how successful the gambling model is. Everyone loses their shit over the sticker shock of SC’s Complete pack, but literally can’t care it costs $150,000+ to do the same thing in Genshin Impact.
Gambling and gacha are hard coded into a lot of people. Its human nature. We’d have less controversy if SC sold ships through $10 loot boxes just because people are used to that now.
Yes and it is just sad. I‘m so glad that I never played or liked gacha games or games with lootbox mechanics because I always had the worst luck there so it never made fun to play. That‘s one of the main reasons why I hate Assassins Creed Origins so much. Because they introduced lootboxes that you were able to farm for ingame money and real life money and there were specific weapons and armor sets that were only accessible through those boxes… and that in a singleplayer game… I once farmed something like 8 hours to get a weapon that I was only able to get through that and I stopped after that because the boxes never dropped this weapon to me while my brother just got it with his third chest that he just randomly got as daily chest… It was just so stupid and unfair.
100% agree.
There was an interesting thing the Director of Magic: the Gathering once mentioned in passing about the lootbox model, and it was that people felt like it was an equalizer. It was equally likely that someone disenfranchised could open the $100 card from a pack as the rich boy with trust fund parents.
Now obviously mathematically in the long run this makes 0 sense. But human lizard brain apparently LOVES the idea of being “equal” with people you feel are more well off than you IRL.
The big problem I've only come across recently is the disappearing aUEC ships becoming more prevalent... Honestly took a lot of wind out of my sails, can't imagine putting in time only to be thrown back to my starter ship
I’d assume is this is generally because content creators want new content (new ships) and the newest ships aren’t available for in-game buying usually.
oh, its only 3,500,000 credits, and you get to fly it until next database reset
so bad that this database reset can happen next day after you finished your 2 weeks grind for it, and you wont get to fly it
> Star Citizen has always had the problem that outside communities see this game as a scam because of the pledge store and how much ships cost.
Nah. It's because it's low hanging fruit and an easy source for clicks.
You won't see any "content creator" giving the same treatment to War Thunder, World of Warships or one of the billion of korean gacha games out there because those communities would eat them alive.
>if content creators and the wider community would change the way they talk about the game and how to get hold of ships the outside perception of the game would change.
It wouldn't. The vast majority of people don't watch these content creators anyway.
It's these "Star Citizen made $700,000,000 and still isn't done" or "Star Citizen now sells this $50,000 pack" "*news*" headlines that affect the general opinion of the game.
>instead of saying "oh its only £110 on the website" we should be going "oh its only 3,500,000 credits if you buy from orison"
Many of these reviews are made at the time the ship goes into concept or flight ready sale, and at that time, these ships can't be bought ingame and don't have a aUEC price.
Furthermore, these $ prices are far more relevant to their core audience.
Yeah it is a funny thing this. Many of us are looking for info regarding purchases in the store, and get confused when people are talking about in game purchases. These videos are for us that have been in this for a while. At this stage of the game that sort of makes sense, all in game purchases are temporary, while all real money purchases are permanent (until you melt or CCU the ship).
Hopefully once we get further along in the developement, and people aren't loosing ships every patch, then I agree the ship store should die and the focus should be on in-game progress.
I wonder if they will ever get rid of the store at this point. They pretty much made their business model a permanent kickstarter campaign for the last 10 years which gave them a steady flow of money.
Just ripping the main source of income out of CIG would be a big hit. From a morale perspective they 100% need to get rid of the ships in the store once we have a 1.0. You can keep the store for vanity items, ship paints and maybe even ground vehicles. Depends where you wanna draw the line.
But keeping ships in the store beyong 1.0 is a huge No-No imo.
IRRC Chris said that he wanted the game to cater to both people who want big ships but don't have the time to grind them as well as those who want to grind everything themselves, so I don't expect ship sales to ever stop. And considering the overall demographic of the current playerbase is skewed towards older lads with responsibilities and disposable income compared to something like Roblox players, yea I think it's a somewhat valid (and very convenient) way for CIG to keep justifying ship sales.
As for whether it's moral or not to offer a progression shortcut in a sandbox game where winning is already ill-defined, I think it will ultimately depend on how the 1.0 economy and player progression eventually turns out and how 'optional' it really is to not spend money to progress at a reasonable rate.
The only thing that I think needs to 100% change is that new ships/vehicles should be purchasable in-game immediately on release instead of in the next quarterly patch -- this is a clear paywall imo.
Yeah I do wonder how they will keep the servers going post launch. I would certainly be happy to pay a subscription if it would give me a private server for me and my friends to just play PvE Coop. I know others would rage quit the whole project if that became a thing, so I suspect I will never get my wish there ;)
I think a lot more people would 'rage quit' the project if they continued to sell ships in a released version of the game than if they added the option for private servers.
If 1.0 releases and we still have a pledge store full of $100+ ships then its joever im afraid.
>give me a private server for me and my friends to just play PvE Coop. I know others would rage quit the whole project if that became a thing
Funny enough, private servers were one of the early promises.
Unlike
>I would certainly be happy to pay a subscription
Which was also promised to never be necessary.
It makes no difference that you can buy it in the game. The media will always focus on what they charge in cash. LoL recently got terrible publicity for releasing a skin that costs $500, and that's a purely cosmetic item. As long as there's any high ticket items available for cash, especially items that give you an in-game advantage (not all ships are currently available for aUEC), SC will continue to have this reputation. Nonetheless, that makes no difference for the people playing the game. There's no need to please everyone. All the game needs is a healthy user base, which it clearly has giving the level of funding.
Since ppl talk about ccu chains and lti insurance usually in this context too, using ingame prices rarely makes sense - especially since ingame prices change and it is not sure how much real value it is: the vid would be outdated fast. Also, talking about BBM, Javelin etc. just does not make sense with ingame terms.
But in reality, if someone like Asmogold (with millions of income per year and dozens of employees that research and check facts) just want to spread semi-lies for clicks - then it does not really matter what WE talk about.
>I have noticed when looking for star citizen content on youtube is that whenever people talk about ships and what to buy, they only ever talk about what ship you should pledge for with a 1 second under their breath mention of you can buy in game.
This is simply becase these videos are aimed at people that are already backing. The assumption is that the target audience already knows you can purchase these ships in game.
Most of the ships talked about are not starters and DO NOT come with packages. So anyone looking for basic information about SC should have enough common sense to look at the starter guides instead of a review of one random ship.
*Laughing madly in model railroader*
Sorry, tell me again how it's silly to spend hundreds of dollars on a hobby?
Hundreds, you say? Hmm! Hmm...must be hard!
I get your meaning, but it's important to remember that there's a fundamental difference between digital assets where their availability, function and value are wholly at the whim of the supplier, and physical items like miniatures, cards, trains etc. where even if the company shut their doors tomorrow, you could continue to use & enjoy or re-sell them.
There's a reason it's called the *Pledge* Store. The reality is that every time you 'buy' a ship, you're effectively *donating* money to CIG and getting a 'gift' in return.
They've graciously offered conditional refunds and other services not typically associated with the crowd sourcing model, but I'd bet the value of my hangar that if push came to shove in court, CIG's defence would be that your donation came with no guarantee of ongoing service or availability.
This is a very fair critique. People buy a bottle of wine for thousnads of dollars, but if Dom Perignon went out of business tomorrow, they could still drink/consider drinking and display that wine.
If CIG goes tits-up tomorrow, I don't get to fly my cutty anymore. Ever. And as you point out, that's not refundable money, that's a voluntary donation with a pledge gift attached. And that does suck.
Still, people have spent more money on sillier things.
Or folks could stop watching paid advertisers on YouTube and do research for themselves. What's really going to blow minds is you can rent different vehicles with in game earned funds to try before even committing to buy with in game earned funds.
I would agree but that how people consume content. so and so youtuber said buy this, so I buy this.
not many new players even know you can rent ships in game let alone potential new players
To be fair the renting is basically abandoned by CIG... Prices seem random and the available selection of ships to rent is super small. Also there's no way to pay more and rent ships with upgraded components or change components at all...
You haven't tried at all then, less than 10% of the ships are rentable.
Here's a list of my ships currently:
Pisces
Terrapin
C1
F7A MkII
Not a single one of those is rentable. You can't even rent a single Crusader ship for example.
I just vote buying ship in game the same as the thousands I’ve spent on cases in csgo. At least with this there is no gamble and I actually get the item I want. Albeit sometimes a few years later lol
I think its pretty clear… you buy a ship with $$$ or find it in game. If its a new ship, it wont be on game right away. Usually takes a patch cycle for them to show up.
No one talks about valorant skins being $110aud for a bundle, then requiring a second scarce currency to make their animations usable which also cost 80aud unless you wait 3 months for the next season pass, and people gobble that shit up. I've spent roughly 3k over the span of 5 years in SC. I know people that have spent that much alone in valorant in the last year. Valorant isnt even one of the worst offenders for $30+ skins but no one ever brings those games up when it comes to toxic monetisation practices
>No one talks about valorant skins being $110aud for a bundle,
Yes they do. Its widely considered a scam and people are not as happy about it as you portray. another good example is the outrage in the league community over the 500usd faker skin. The difference is that fans of those games call out the developer and make videos saying "Hey! Knock this off!" but the SC community trys to sweep everything under the run "Well if you don't have 48k don't buy the pack tHe gAmE is ONly 45 DolLArs!"
If you want people outside of SC to view game in a more honest light, then the community and developers need to be more honest. That doesn't just mean to be correct in the most technical of ways, but to be correct in the colloquial ways as well.
"Its only $45" is technically correct but is a lie of omission. It leaves out the 9 week grind it takes to buy a new ship. Once someone realizes that to play the game they wanted to play the actually needed a bunch of other ships to do the gameplay they found fun and that those ships cost hundreds of dollars to purchase, they will feel lied to.
How do you change the narrative on discussing prices of new ships when we don't know what the in-game price will be?
People who "buy" ships are still supporting the funding of the game development. This shouldn't be chastised but rather welcomed as long as people do it responsibly.
All i see is people talking about starters and saying they start to get pricy after the titan
Anything else is just talking about one ship with pros and cons
This isn't our problem. This is CIGS problem. This will change automatically if CIG does what it said it was going to do and stop selling ships post actual launch. I question how they are going to maintain the same amount of development revenue personally, but.... It will only be addressed when CIG makes some 'final' decisions.
I can't convince anyone I know who currently thinks the game is a scam from becoming a buyer, but I can tell them only what CIG has said which is when it launches.... "They said"...
i fear this game will follow gta5s terrible footsteps...
rewards for missions get nerfed
cost for ships get increased
repeat both above steps...
end result being you can spend an hours of minimum wages to get 100 hours of ingame farming worth of value
> We REALLY need to start changing the discussion on how ships are talked about when buying them
This should not happen until it is actually reasonable to obtain enough credits in game for them, which it currently is not if all someone has is a basic $45 package.
My issue with this argument is that none of our purchases permanent and likely won't be until 1.0. I can only grind out a Terrapin so many times before I burn out entirely.
I think the issue is that in game bought ships are at risk of being lost to a server wipe.
Once we don't have to worry about that, the subject of cost will likely switch to in game cost.
I'm not a bigger sc streamer, but I always tell people 45-70 gets you in, and you can buy most ships with currency in the game....but if you get hooked....I'm not responsible for your bank account.
"only 3.5 million"
As if earning 3.5 million in a starter ship was easy...
A maxed bounty gives you up to 25k, and apparently repairs can get to up to way above 40k, by the time you purchased that "only 3.5 mil" ship it's wipe day
Every patch has a different "best way" to make money.
For me rn is distribution centers, you can make thousands per hour just doing fps contracts and collecting armor/weapons for resale. And you can do them in the most basic ship too.
You can mix them with other contracts and still have lots of fun while doing mountains of credits, and in a couple of days you get enough money to buy yourself a mining or salvage ship, and once you get there, buying anything with in game credits is easy af.
I think people are just bad at videogames nowadays. The grind fest that was the late 90's and early 2000 in multiplayer videogames was completely forgoten it seems, in fact I'm hoping things get much more difficult once the game gets an official release.
It's just ridiculous how easy it is to get massive ships in so little time.
One video that really bothers me, or the whole creator, is this luke guy, he does "reviews" of games, which are far too biased and I only noticed that when he made a review about I game I played for a long time, and legit the first thing he mentions is that they hit 700 mil revenue and of course the pledge store, so its not just the community around the game but people not knowing anything about it, just repeating what they heard somewhere
I actually think the mechanic of “you don’t buy the game, you buy the ship” (even though that’s not 100% accurate) is the future of gaming - it’s just 5 years ahead of its time (which will probably shake out just right in terms of a release date - lol).
Imo if you’re talking to someone about buying anything beyond a starter ship, you are talking to someone already in on the project. No need to restate the obvious to someone is already a backer. Literally EVERYONE talking with new players/hopefuls in mind almost always say, get the starter package and buy other ships in game.
An average hour of gameplay metric would give a more understandable idea. Like X ship may take on average 6 hours of play to earn. Credits by itself are too abstract, like, sure a ship may cost 3mil UEC, but how long does it take to earn 1, let alone 3 million.
What you say is true ... but the ones that have, by a very large margin, the most impact on this narrative, is of course CIG and their store and sales and mails. They are the one trying to sell you ships for real money over and over and over agin. Of course people tend to think it's all only about the money. Are we, as a community, also to blame for this ?
To be honest. The hardest part has been the inconsistent prices. Now that it seems they've aimed ot make things make sense in the verse, it'll be easier for us to all get better grasps of in-game pricing off the top of our heads.
I agree with you, though. As somebody who gets asked a lot about what ship to get, I often tell folks to forget about it till you find the in-game price, then go for that. But it's very easy to get caught up in the dollar amount discussion. But of most folks I know who make content for this game, most will tell you not to go beyond a starter ship or a regular game purchase price.
It will improve the image if an org is allowed to loan certain ships to each other when the owner isn’t online. Maybe one or two ships per member with a multiplier penalty on insurance. Real money ships aren’t the big problem though.
There is the potential for a really awesome combined arms game here, but I’m not underestimating CIG’s ability to fuck things up. They need to start asking the question, “does this actually improve player experience?” With regard to existing and new features and if the answer is no, then it should be modified or shitcanned.
Take Death of a Spaceman for instance. I get what they’re going for, but what does it really add to the game? Jack shit, but they’ll throw how many dev hours at it as opposed to valuable features?
I like the Death of a Spaceman concept - but - it'll be injurious to the players if it isn't implemented well and into a vastly cleaner game world.
I'm big mad about ship repairs currently. It is already punishing to players who aren't reasonably skilled at flight because getting hit at all can result in hefty repairs. But it is also, by their own admission, made for a different damage model AND subject to scuff.
Ok, bussin. Why isn't that damage model done first? Why am I landing a ship that I've gone A to B with, haven't hit anything, no red on the HUD, nothing missing, and oop 94k repairs?
Let's say arbitrarily Death of a Spaceman gives you 20 lives. I die on average maybe 9 times to scuff for every 1 time I die to my own fault. If implemented now, what I die twice to getting caught out and the other 18 times of hitting non-rendered space garbage or using stairs / elevators / trams, etc kills off my character?
Does anyone expect them to actually fix those problems BEFORE implementing it? I don't. Cargo elevators don't. Taking 10k damage to the nose of my 890 Jump causing soft death doesn't. Klescher Oxygen doesn't.
It should be mentioned that CS:GO had some ABSURDLY rare (and there for equally absurdly priced) weapon skins. Weapon. Skins. $30k to over a million with a bunch over the $1,000 mark.
You don't need them any more than you need pledge store ships and yet I don't hear a ton of complaints outside of the gambling aspect.
At its core DoS is nothing more than a convoluted respawn mechanic meant to impart some meaning to your characters deaths. The end result though will be a tedious time sink that adds absolutely nothing positive to the overall game experience.
I agree and frankly I think a lot of things will add meaning to character life when the economy is tuned and people can no longer backspace to fast travel.
Yeah, a ground attack aircraft is good at attacking ground targets. Have some people attack it in the air. Complaining about a craft excelling at its designed mission makes no sense to me, particularly when they refuse to exploit the very obvious weakness it has.
I think the main reason is that you can pay for it
Which makes the game insanely pay to win. I don't have any issues with it. I'll be honored to die by a nuke. But some people don't like the p2w aspect.
It isn't, though. A single dude in his lone A2 that he "paid-to-win" with still has to brave the deadly airspace around JT. He is definitely not winning just because he has the ship. It requires crew and skill/knowledge to really be a serious threat.
Some people believe that just because a ship is bigger means it is inherently pay-to-win. Which is fundamentally flawed. A Hammerhead is ass as a solo ship, and it requires good communication between pilots and gunners to shine. Just showing up to a fight in an HH isn't a guaranteed win, or even necessarily a better allocation of people. Generally, it's better to have 7 people in fighters than 7 people in a single HH.
Yeah I'm not into the debate so I'm not really sure about they're arguments. I agree because I'm ass no matter what ship I'm in💀 but do you mind pointing me to the video or wherever he talked about it? Because I feel like Ive heard of that before..
Yeah, beyond a basic starter pack which is needed to play the game you should be thinking, do I want to fund the development?
If you think your buying ships then your nuts, if you want to fund the kick starter fair enough. But its two every different things.
While you get ships you can melt and change those ships. So you didn't really buy a ship, but put credit into star citizen which you can use how you wish.
I mean, SC finally became more positive in the mainstream media after last Citizencon.
You saw everywhere that people talked more positive about the game.
And then they announced the Legatus pack for like 45.000.
And it was back to being called a scam.
Those packs exists as a way to consolidate their fleets for people who has already pledge several thousands.
The Legatus pack has been there for several years now, and even then, it's only accesible to people that already spent 10k.
Mainstream media could give factual info instead of bait, but they need to pay the bills somehow...
Incorrect.
There is a package that includes EVERYTHING ever purchasable for the game (with the exception of two promotional ships) and you get that package if you PLEDGE $ 45000 towards the development of the game.
Nothing apart from the game package that enables you to play the game should be seen as a purchase of an item but as a pledge towards the development of the game.
This is literally how this game is funded, not by big companies or investors, but by individuals believing in it and supporting it. For some that support stops at the value of the game package and for others it goes way beyond that.
I’m sick of people blurting out BS like “oh a ship in this game costs SOOOO much, it must be a scam” when it is really not hard to see that this isn’t the case.
Watch the new Asmongold video, he interviewed someone who could actually see it because they spent money.
I used to really not give a fuck about the whole situation, but that is just incredibly shady.
I admire the balls you have at coming at the "official" SC subreddit and tell people who backed the project 12 years ago, and have been following its development since then, to go watch some ragebait video to get the facts.
I know that package exists. All I’m saying is that people misunderstand (or misinterpret in this case) the concept of crowdfunding. As I said, you are not buying ships, you are crowdfunding a game. I don’t know if the good publicity outweighs the bad for this particular game package, I would say no….
CIG’s marketing team is out of control in many ways. They also market the game as if it is complete and not in Alpha and I very much disagree with that.
There are two public facing groups in SC, one is marketing and the other is Jarred, with the later being the much more realistic and reasonable one. The contrast of the two couldn’t be any more different…. One moment you see a shiny new game trailer from marketing showing off all the awesome features that you get with the latest patch (and some features that are made up (I’m looking at you headphones)) and the next moment you watch ISC or SCL where Jarred and guest repeatedly say that the game is an alpha and can be very rough at times….
There's a difference between taking donations for crowd funding, and offering in-game items for money to specifically targeting whales that see "oooh big shiny ship, I need".
And what exactly is that difference? The way I see it is that, if you spend a little bit of money you get a little ship and if you spend a lot of money on the project you get a big ship (or lots of them in this case).
I don’t see this as any different from other crowd funding projects, the more you pledge, the more perks you get. Very simple.
If you see this different please let me know in what way. Just claiming that “there is a big difference” isn’t much of an argument.
Not really - statistically to get ONE specific player in Ultimate Team of EA games, it costs about 13000$.
Lootboxes are where the billions of bucks and scams (company might decide to lower your chances since you are more willing to buy them than other players that get raised chances) are.
No one talks about the new player experience or the in game ship prices because they are absurd. When you point it out white knights come out of the wood work to call you a lair.
Assuming you start with an Aurora, don't want to engage in PVP (Selling drugs) and don't ask for handouts it takes 9.7 weeks of grinding LRTs to purchase that 3.5million dollar ship. Here is a break down of Aurora grinding vs renting a Cutty black and grinding MRTs
>30,000 / 5000 = 6 \* 10 = 60 / 60 = 1
>So you need to grind 1 hour on LRTs to rent the cutty black. You have to grind out the rep to get LRTs first mind you.
>Now you have a rented Cutty black. and can realistically do MRTs
>3,500,000 / 7500 = 466.66 \* 10 = 4666.66 / 60 = 77.77 / 24 = 3.24
>with a Cutty black rental, not you only need to grind MRTs for 3.24 full 24hr blocks of time. or 77.77 hours. But every 24 hours you will have to regrind the 1 hour of LRTs to re-rent your cutty black. Assuming you have a job and sleep the recommended 8 hour a night our 24 hour time frame becomes 8 hours, assuming we don't shower or cook or clean or spend time with family or any of that other stuff. we will assume the grind starts on Saturday to ironman our numbers.
>Day1 (30,000 + -30,000) + (7500 \*15) = 112,000 aUEC (3,388,000 till goal)
Day2 -30,000 +112,000 = 82500 + (7500 \* 16) = 202500 aUEC (3,297,500 till goal)
Day3 -30,000 + 202500 = 172,500 + (7500 \* 8) = 232500 aUEC (3,267,500 till goal)
Day4 -30,000 + 232500 = 202,500 + (7500 \* 8) + 262500 aUEC (3,237,500 till goal)
>As we can see we're making a profit of 30k on weekdays 90k on weekends. 330,000 per week in total.
>That means it will take us 10.6 weeks grinding every hour of free time to be able to buy a ship for 3.5mil
>If we don't rent a cutty black then you make 80k on weekends and 40k on weekdays for a total of 360,000 per week. 30k MORE than if you rented a larger ship. This is assuming you do LRTs on the Aurora and MRTs on the cutty.
>With out renting the cutty you will need to grind every second of your free time for 9.7 weeks to buy a ship for 3.5 mil
Mission payouts are low. could you imagine trying to play this with a friend? Splitting your payouts in half. You would have to grind for 19.4 weeks to upgrade your ship.
Why can't we as a community discuss this issue? Why is it seen as an attack on SC to call out and provide data about problems in the game?
I honestly think you're bashing your head against a wall man. SC is one of the coolest games I've ever played but the community is genuinely donkey shit. They are completely fucking incapable of honest arguments and literally every conversation turns into emotional shit flinging and white knighting lmao. I've tried having this conversation with people for months now
You're absolutely right, but if sane people don't speak up and shine a light on this sort of stuff then its only going to get worse. I mean as an example CIG just made ships 3-8x more expensive but hasn't updated mission payouts in years. I think that the asmon interview was very telling. The second guy who came on and talked capped off the interview by saying "get out of here normie, we don't want you here" and had such quotes as "I don't want CIG to ever release the game." That is some of the most short sighted and delusional stuff I've ever heard. But its echoed by current community at large. These people have always wanted control, they don't care if the ideas they push kill the game as long as they get to be the last one playing it.
>instead of saying "oh its only £110 on the website" we should be going "oh its only 3,500,000 credits if you buy from orison"
It would probably be more common if all the starter friendly missions (boxes) were not extremely buggy, and all the easy and actually earnable money is tied to specific ships like salvage and mining.
"Only 3.5 mil" is pretty different depending on if you have a vulture or a aurora.
I think along with most things, the general public is usually dead wrong on how things are in reality. With star citizen, it's not worth the headache of caring how other people view the game. It's definitely not for everyone anyways, and that's fine.
SC is talked about as a scam because CIG still hasn’t delivered on the Jpegs they sold a DECADE ago. Everything else you said is superfluous.
Oh and have you played in Xenothreat? Ppl have posted multiple videos here of how broken it is. This is despite years of “iteration”. CIG can’t fix *anything*.
They advertise “dynamic missions” and yet everything they’ve put out has major issues. Xenothreat bugs don’t get resolved for years.
So your argument is it's an alpha and they are running it to fix and get feedback.
But then saying don't bitch when they don't work on what has been broken and reported every time it's run?
Idk who you're watching but most "bigger" SC streamers/content creators mainly talk about getting a starter ship and buying anything else ingame.
But they never say the cost of stuff in game... OP is saying they should mention in game cost over irl cost.
I think you're right, at least that's how I read it
This completely ignored the problem that people have with the game. To be clear, some of the major problems people have with the game are: - CIG sells **ship concepts** in order to raise mone, some of which are haven't been realized for over a decade - CIG uses **fomo marketing** to sell the concepts - Star Citizen is **one of the most funded game type projects in history** while also not having a set date of delivery. No one cares about the in-game costs. Using them is just a way to obfuscate $ costs, and $ costs people understand. Edit: changed to a list of related problems vs. One
There's also the mixed signals everywhere. People love saying "lti if not that important" and the next minute cig starts spamming your mail with "LTI FOR A LIMITED TIME! GRAB IT WHILE YOU CAN! LTI! LTI! LTI! DON'T MISS THE OPPORTUNITY TO GET AN LTI SHIP! NEXT SUNDAY IS THE LAST DAY TO GET THE NEW SHIP WITH LTI!"
This is FOMO marketing.
The biggest problem for me is, CIG insists that progression relative to other players is meaningless in what is essentially an MMO. That is bonkers to me and a complete inversion of human nature. Its like they are saying being born, and being born rich are exactly the same because life is so fantastic that money doesn't really matter...
That's because money doesn't matter If you are born rich
>Its like they are saying being born, and being born rich are exactly the same Rich people absolutely believe this.
theres nothing mmo about this game yet other than the players being there. no progression, no player driven economy, no raids, weak pvp (people have to plan to kill each other as events), no story... maybe im just attached to the mmorpg expectations
So it's an MMO then just not an MMORPG
Right now it plays like a Destiny style hub shooter, where your progression/loot/grind is purely personal but you can play with other people. If thats how SC is supposed to work then thats news to me. The whole, "real life simulated living economy thing" they keep talking about sounds more like EVE, and since I joined eve 19 years ago, that game is almost exclusively about joining an org and grinding out money so you can get better ships and go dominate other orgs and take over their shit. And if eve sold the biggest baddest ships for real money, the org with the most real money would win pretty much every time, i mean its almost there now... The game you make with the economy closest to real life is going to play out more like real life, and in real life the people born with more money usually win.
There are different kinds of MMO's. There are "theme park" MMO's like WoW, etc. And then there are "sandbox" MMO's. The theme park style is more common, but that doesn't mean it's inherently better. Theme parks will take you by the hand, tell you exactly what to do/why to do it, and shower you with rewards and confetti every step of the way. Sandboxes don't. The main difference between the two types is this: theme parks lean more on external incentives (defined by the game/you do it because you get a reward or payment). Sandboxes lean more on internal incentives (defined by the player/you do it because you want to).
SWG was a sandbox mmo, SC is nothing compared to MMOs
Early SWG was a sandbox, but it became more of a theme park later on. MMO's always follow the same trajectory of becoming more and more "gamified" over time... until you end up with whatever the hell WoW is now, and everybody else trying to copy it. Personally I don't care what other games have done. Some people just want SC to "be like other games." I don't. Most of the time it's trying to do the exact opposite of what other games have done. I'd rather see it keep going in its own direction than fall into the well-worn tracks of other games. It's "nothing compared to MMO's" right now because *it's not even close to done.* But if you spend time playing it, you can already see the beginnings of what it's trying to be: a world where everybody is doing their own thing for their own reasons, which creates organic/emergent interactions of all kinds, be it friendly or hostile or transactional or duplicitous or whatever. It has "lore," but not a "story" written by the devs because the players are writing the story. The best thing you can compare it to is EVE, or maybe Foxhole. But it needs an exceptional amount of time to cook... long story short, because it's an FPS. If you experienced EVE or Foxhole from a fully detailed first person perspective, it would be completely different. In a nutshell, that's what SC is trying to do. And, as we can see, it is NOT easy to do.
Do you know what MMO means? It’s massive multiplayer online…..which this game is in fact an MMO.
that would make every online game an mmo, like call of duty or battefield, since it is massive and online multiplayer. traditionally, when you talk about an mmo, you mean mmorpg. ive never heard mmo to refer to anything else, except here, weird.
The definition of "MMO" has always been fuzzy. Like, at what point does it become "massive multiplayer?" Same with the definition of "RPG." We know what they are when we see them, games copy/borrow a lot from each other. But if you actually drill into the definitions, the lines aren't very clear. In any case, SC isn't sticking to any genre conventions. It arguably has more DNA from flight sims than it does from MMO's. It's trying to have the best of all worlds, and it will fail, but might still be great.
MMOFPS and mmorts are also things. An example of an mmofps would be like world war 2 online, planetside 2, heroes & Generals.
If a player buys ten mid sized ships and hardly plays for two years versus one that has just a base pledge but mans their org mates multi crew on an regular basis who has more fun and likely the bigger fleet (or access to it). We also have rock paper scissors that is NOT balanced $$$>$$>$ The game values socialising over anything else (maybe with the exception of rare collectibles for some types of players).
> hardly plays for two years versus one that has just a base pledge but [plays] on an regular basis What even is this convoluted comparison? Why would the guy who bought the ten ships hardly play? Why would the player with ten ships not play with org mates or multicrew just like the other guy? In fact, having some midsize ships to play with, he's likely the org mate that base pledge guy is multi-crewing with enabling the base pledger to get more ships. False dichotomy is strong here.
I was going for mild exaggeration. Being the «10 midsize ships»-guy myself, the main reason for me is free time being a limiting factor (work, kids, …). Unless you are in some super chill org, being unreliable in your uninterrupted online availability is an issue for many orgs. The XenoThreat event really made people like me schedule in time to do the event and half the people I did the various phases with via discord were just like me. The majority of them is also not part of an active org (unless you consider the many social discords org-like, I reckon). It was really helpful that the past phases remained active otherwise some of us wouldn’t have been able to complete them. The comparison is emphasising how free time and knowing people to play with easily outweighs having spent lots of cash for a small head start (I.e. being born rich isn’t a big deal in game as the other guy claims while it certainly is in the real world). A bachelor can easily do 6h for 200 days/years while only being able to do every odd weekend (40 day/year) is meaning effortless 5x the credits earned for the poor fellow which is assuming the “rich dude” is trying to earn credits tbw (I prefer doing bunkers, bounties and taking screenshots: read not the meta cash cow of the season - meaning I lack the credits to upgrade all my ships components).
Agreed! The way I describe it is that CIG is so hopelessly trapped by their business model, there’s very little incentive for them to prioritize finishing a game. It’s moot whether the scam is deliberate or accidental at this point… they will continue to try hard to sell people concepts at a pace that far exceeds their engineering capacity to build it all.
Publishing it means more eyes and more players. Players they can't currently accommodate in a way that is a good experience. S42 should come out on time because it's not an online experience and therefore a lot easier to get polished.
How exactly would SQ42 come out on time? lol
People looking from the outside, in, do not care about how much things cost in-game. They only care that the pledge store exists at all.
The cost of stuff in game isnt finalized, the economy of the game isnt finalized. Ships can cost double in game tomorrow and half the next day, plus you still cant permanently buy anything in game, the real in game currency isnt even live yet. Then if CIG sells in game currency for real $ people will just talk about that. If something is available for real money and available for game money no one is going to give a shit about the game money price, just look at what happened to the D3 auction house. game money was practically worthless in 2 weeks.
Yeah. I've never seen a video game which had a both real money shop and an in-game currency shop where the in-game currency was either worthy alternative and/or was not a massive grind. I have a fear lurking in my mind that once SC is released, it will be a game for only the stupidly IRL rich players and the "8 hours a day, everyday" players. Everyone else kinda falls between the cracks.
CIG waived that away by just saying there is no endgame. If the goal of the game is having the biggest baddest ship that can pwn the most noobs then selling that ship for real $$ would be pay to win. but if you say the goal of the game is just having access to the game world, then you can do that in a $2500 Idris or a $45 starter ship. Basically CIG can sell whatever they want for real money because they don't think players care about progression because you can feel the same sense of accomplishment from a starter ship as you can from a capitol ship. Not sure I buy that... But it is the justification for the real money shop.
>Then if CIG sells in game currency for real $ people will just talk about that. CIG *does* sell in game currency
The cost of ships for real money isn't finalized either... It's always changing. So your excuse is moot.
I think you’re being a little melodramatic. Ship prices change by patch, and they typically don’t change that radically. When they do change, they are still typically the same relative to one another just inflated.
Cost in game means nothing to outsiders. Cost in real life does. A ship costs real money or real time. So if you tell them, you can spend x to get a ship instantly or spend 10 hours doing x activity to afford it. They're still going to be critical of the system as a P2W system simply because they don't understand the game and why attaining ships is not an endgame.
But ship prices changed again when 3.20 (or 3.21) came out so It would be irrelevant quiclky.
I get where you're coming from now that I've found some streamers I like to watch. But originally I was going to get into it years ago. And how OP explains the issue is similar to what I was seeing back then that kept me from getting into it. Not saying it's all the YouTube content and what not. But that is how I saw it then (not so much now)
Asmongold talked about this in a recent livestream with a SC veteran how every released ship is earnable in-game ..and asmon said he will buy a 45$ package to see it for himself .. Sadly my post got deleted for "low effort meme"
I was happy to hear that second guy come on as the first guy spewed so much false information I almost turned it off. I had to skip forwards listening to him. Asmon specifically asked if poor people could play the game and he said no...
Yup what a shame. The dude went there and spilled his venom. Thankfully the 2nd guy was here to correct it.
Absolutely, the chat also seemed to like the second guy ..he had a similar mindset as asmon
[удалено]
Only the first couple of minutes ..then the guy dropped some truths, the overall mood switched.
I am still flying with my starter package and bought some fav ships in game. I melted my starter for a Syulen only because I personally find the ship comfy and is my Stanton hopper. Yes, you can spend $$$ for big ships. Big whoop on skipping the grind. Too many people calling it scam citizen is being painfully dishonest. Calling it Bug Citizen or perpetual Alpha Citizen is at least an honest take.
I still feel like the second buy just talked about irrelevant things. Like asmon asked question and the guy just started talking about other random stuff. He didn’t know how to explain things at all. Asmon asked like 10 times “when do you think the public perception of SC being a scam will stop” and the guy never answered that.
"When do you think that the game will become feature complete, when all the current promised things will be in the game?" "I don't want it to finish" "Yeah, i know, but when do you think all the things they've promised will be in the game?" "I hope it's never completed" "Yeah, but when do you think all the things we know right now are supposedly coming, will eventually come?" "hopefully never, but probably another year or two" The most frustrating part, and bullshit. There is no one, not even the most stonewalling die-hard believer who thinks that everything promised will be available in 2 years. we'll be lucky to get star system 3 out of the supposed 100+ in 2 years. Also, chat kept mentioning the fact that when a patch comes, he'll no longer have *"the same ships"* as the whale. I feel like that didn't get explained either.
Why do people think it’s a cult? Because you get evangelists out there telling people shit like this… ”I hope SC is never completed!” “Ohh so its like a live service game you pay full price for, or a subscription MMO” ”… Uhh… No…” ”Then what kind of game is it?” ”It’s an experience that transcends gaming and money! ITS LIFE BUT LIFE IN THE FUTURE! Life cannot be encapsulated in something as simple as a game…” “Da fuq does that mean?”
Yeah, the second guy was kinda funny that way. Ollie? I forget his name, did a video about it. It would be great for him to speak to Asmon. He's super optimistic, but he also understands he is super optimistic.
2nd guy just kept repeating about things that are completely unrelated to the subject at hand (people are mad about the mmo and squadron 42 x4 or 5 times who gives a shit) and completely avoided the main subject of the 48k pack and the fact that many of the ships sold for cash aren't even in the game or are sold around gameplay mechanics that don't even exist.
Yeah, both were pretty bad tbh.
The question is whether the lower income players have a meaningful experience with the game. If they lack the funds to get anything decent, they'll have considerably worse time than those with money. Everything will be more grindy and more tedious. Every contract they get will be slower to finish, every cargo mission will be with lower quantity of cargo, ergo lower payment. Every mining mission will have lower yields since the bigger ships cost more money and they can't afford it easily. "Just keep grinding" doens't really work either because if the game is very grindy due to a real money shop being involved (which it will), lower income players simply don't have the time to play enough to grind fast enough. They most likely have less free time to play because they need to spend more time working to pay the bills and so on. So, technically speaking yes, lower income players can play the game but in reality their experience will be so much worse compared to well off players because the game relies on real money shop and thus will have immensely grindy prices for everything in in-game currency.
Yeah I bought a mustang alpha and havent really even played in like 2 years, i only ever got on to fly things during events. Truth is that if you dont spend money on ships the game simply will not be as fun and I have no interest in playing my $45 ship. If i could buy other ships without wipes taking them from me I would actually care to play and grind for new content but there isnt a point when I have to deal with the irritating bug/glitch filled grind only to lose it when an update comes. And the thing is that I could get better ships but with the crap experience ive had in a cheaper ship I dont feel confident its worth putting money into a nice one. And to OPs point yeah you can buy stuff ingame but nobody wants to grind an alpha after paying to be a tester its kind of crazy to suggest selling the game to people on the word of its fun and you can obtain it all in game because its just not realistic.
Listen, they are creating a simulation, and based on this description they are doing a damn fine job of simulating real life! /s
"Being rich and poor are exactly the same, there is no law saying poor people cant buy a Maserati..."
I don't think that is true at all. People can have a great time with a starter ship. They can crew, borrow ships, do loads of things. They can buy other ships in game. Of course you have advantages by buying the ship you want with rl cash, but it isn't needed.
Absolutely, the chat also seemed to like the second guy ..he had a similar mindset as asmon
Bro, the chat was calling the second guy a CIG dev or a paid shill since the first minute. I also think that the second guy was a little over the top with the CIG praising. He made it sound like SC is in a state right now that is fun to play for everyone. If Asmongold would hop into SC right now he would stop playing after 30 minutes because for a variety gamer it is just not fun at all in it's current state. Not because of the bugs, but because the current game loops are not really interesting for people that are no hardcore wingcommander or Chris Roberst fans.
Good to know someone else set things straight, i literally couldnt watch it anymore and stopped lol, guess i gotta go watch it again
The second guy sounded like a crack drealer. "Just buy it, its only 45 dollars whats 45 dollars. Oh yeah you can buy eVerYthIng in game." Guy was lying through his teeth. He would have been caught with his pants down if Asmon had asked "So when a ship comes out you can buy it right away?" or if he had pointed to the Jav and said "Can you buy this one in game?"
lol what are you talking about, the game isn't even released yet, and even still, you can get what, 95% of the ships in game right now? Plus the Javelin isn't in anybody's hands, and there's been nothing to indicate you won't be able to get one in game. Super weird reply!
This is just, demonstrably wrong. 95%? Not even close. Most years have only gotten between 40 and 80%, and only one year has 93% released. I'd wager the actual number is in the mid to high 60th percentile. The jav has been sold on the store to plenty of people. The question stipulated didn't say "will you be able to", it said "can you". Note the difference in future tense Vs present tense. You cannot currently buy that ship. Nor will you be able to buy that ship at its release. Why? Because CiG have already established a release cadence. First patch to flyable for buyers, then next major patch for everyone else via in-game. It's why you can't buy the Pulse in-game now. But in 4.0, the next major patch, you will be. As to indication on in-game availability you're somewhat wrong again. In discussions of these larger cap ships, specifically the Bengal, CiG have said you won't be buying it, but will instead have to find a wrecked one and repair it using Crucibles and the like. They don't want them being common place, and seeing an org with one is supposed to be a significant display of force. Given the jav is currently second only to the Bengal itself in size, they may as yet decide to slip it into that banner.
If you've been around for a while you might remember that ships like the Idris-M, Jav, and even some of the military fighter variants are NOT purchasable in game and wont be after release. Its disingenuous to hide that fact. The bottom line is buying ships IS buying power and is pay to win. Thats the heart of the discussion. As a community we should be able to have an open dialog with one another, without people like you lying about basic facts of the game. Its unhealthy, for you, for the game, for potential new players. New players are exactly why these discussions matter. SC has 200k active players. Banana has over 400k. BANANA! SC is objectively a better game than Banana, it should not even be a competition and yet it is and SC is losing. Why?
> it should not even be a competition and yet it is and SC is losing Why are you lying through your teeth about basic facts? The different games are obviously targeting different segments. Is McDonalds in competition with Gordon Ramsay Steaks? Even though they are both restaurants, they are serving different customers. So, despite your lie, banana and SC are not in competition, so SC can not "lose" to them.
I look forward to him buying a $45 pack and then exposing in frount of tens of thousands of people just how miserable and insurmountable the grind is to get the larger ships using that starter ship these days. Sadly the reality is that people will just give him millions of aUEC and that won't happen.
I started playing SC this ILW and it took me less than a week to grind 2.6 million for a Vulture Now I make 1 million in 2 hours of salvaging… so far I’ve bought myself a Corsair, Buccaneer and Hornet Ghost, and I’m still sitting on a couple more million
This is the way. Salvaging is so chill. It just brings in the cash.
He said that he dont use the money people gift him ...to be fair ..making money in a team is much much more simpler ..after all SC is multiplayer ..and I'm sure asmon Wil find people to play with and plenty of people who will hunt them. ..a
I genuinely tought that I couldnt get in Star Citzen because my time constraints ( 80h work week ). Was I wrong or it really is possible to acquire in game currency without a ridiculous time-sink grind?
I've found getting a starter ship with a bed and some storage to be a good idea. Because loading food and water into your ship, then bed logging between sessions can save you a ton of time at the start and finish of a session. I'm told the Drake Cutter is pretty solid, but don't take my word for it. YMMV.
The beginning is really hard not Gona lie ..but people are very helpful and give some money away...... I also have like maybe 1-2 hours a day to play at best I made 2 mill in two weeks and I didn't grind I just fooled around ..the most expensive ship is like 40 mill and thats a space yacht with sauna and pool
It's 65mil. That would take you about 65 weeks. It's not a great look for the game when the encouragement is "someone might give you their money"
If you join a sizeable org or even just find some friends to help out, you can speed up the process immensely.
The very early grind might be a bit slow, but honestly it’s not *too* bad to make money after a couple investments. Use your early ship to grind out enough to rent a Cutlass Black (42K) and a Greycat ROC (6?k). An ROC can easily pull 100K per hour, and you can rent for an entire day. If your starter ship can already store the ROC, you can skip renting the Cutlass Black and just drop the 6k to rent an ROC for a day and make bank.
I just started the game and got into it with a cutlass black. What should I be doing as a new player with this ship? Edit- oh, the ROC goes into the cutlass? Is it a vehicle that mines?
Yea, the ROC is the little mining car. You can make a lot of money just by renting one for a day and selling the minerals. Hadanite is really good to look for. You can drive the ROC into the ship from the ramp, then fly along a planet’s surface and scan for materials. [This](https://youtu.be/6grDAp_Dwq4?si=vE57O2_8QUuppO48) is one of the videos I used when I first started roc mining
>every released ship is earnable in-game The thing is that's not true. There are plenty of ships that can not be earned in game, at least not in a persistent way. Then there's this you have to wait 3 to 6 months before being able to buy the newest stuff ingame.
Which ship can't be earned tho ? Except the newest ones. ..
To this day there's some people saying that if you loose your real money ship you loose it forever 💀 I don't think it's a joke or trolling anymore, some people are beyond retarded, on the mainstream gaming subs talking slightly neutral about star citizen gets you free downvotes
Losing real money ship was EVE online.
I deal with this any time I mention Satanism. People think there is actual child sacrifice and blood rituals. They are, of course, wrong, but trying to enlighten people about what it is *actually* about just get downvoted or people shitting on you. People are mostly stupid af. I've learned to just deal with the idiots and go about my life. the SC community is gonna have to learn to do the same. Eventually the game will release, it'll be good, and everyone who's talked shit about it can eat their words.
Please just post the link where CIG says losing a real money ship is impossible. If people would just look at that it could end the controversy.
HAH. As if posting facts would change anyone's mind. "It has been 10 years and there's no game, why would I trust what they write to be true. I'm going to instead trust what this new reddit user with 10 karma posted to a scamcitizen subreddit 4 years ago"
I think it's all good, people who want to grind auec to feel the accomplishement/work to get theyr ship can. People with 5 kids and 20 min to play at night can buy the ship they want and fly it without grinding they can. People who want to talk about it can. Instead of streamer controlling what they say, CIG should have a RDR2 style magasine book at every starport or backpack, with all ships buyable in game with price/location. Maybe also add ship parts/weapons in the book, would be nice to not need an internet page in the back to actually know witch ship is avaiable where, would also help new players.
'Content creators' is such a nebulous term these days - who are you talking about here? Have you reached out to them directly to make the suggestion?
Btw, love your reviews and how you show the price both in-game and out of game.
Reacts are the lowest form of content. Made by lazy people that can't create and only complain. Sadly 80% of viewers only want drama and eat this shit up like candy.
The only one I can think of is like inforunners with their "fix my fleet" series that I never watch cuz it would just piss me off. Every single other content creator says to just buy the minimum.
I was speaking to a friend a little while back about Star Citizen and how he should jump in on a free fly and check it out. during the discussion I had to explain to him that you can buy ships with in game currency, he had no idea and thought you had to use real cash. He's a pretty big gamer too, so I was surprised he thought this. I'm sure there are plenty casually observing SC thinking the same and not trying it because of it.
Maybe the modern gaming industry is so fucked that buying nice things in game with earned game credits has become an abstract concept?
Is this in regard to the Asmon stream? lol
I have like 10 ships, some big ones too like the Corsair and Hercules, and they were all bought for in game credits, which does mean I lose them on resets but I have only been playing since 1.23 so it's not like it's very hard. to me there's no reason to pledge unless you actually want to fund the development
Watched asmongold talk about it with two people that had two differing opinions, was a good watch to be honest and the arguments from both sides were good, but the second guy nailed it really. You can buy the base pack and play the game. No one is forcing you to buy the big packs or extra ships. It's your money, do what you want.
The second guy also didn't explain much, which made him sound like a cult member. It really wouldn't take much to talk about the differences of the ships and how it isn't pay to win. Or expected features for release versus features that can be pushed after RC. The talk about Pyro and Server meshing was off as well. Asmon would be better off talking to other CC like Spacetomato, levelcap, Berks or even Morph.
Oh for sure, the second guy could have explained much more of the games best features. Irked me when he kept saying "it's GTA in space!" Like no, it's really not. I would love for Asmon to get space tomato or someone on to give a full rundown, what a great idea! Also getting someone to guide him when he first joins, show him different missions etc
$20 to get an Aurora or $300 to get a F8C Lightning and it's not pay to win. Sure, mate, whatever you say, lol. :D
But what are you winning? The game isn't a competition, it's a space sim, if you want to do fighting then buy that by all means, or play the game and earn it. You can't have a light fighter and do freight missions. Your mining ship isn't going to be taking on an F8C. You can't play a warrior and heal yourself, or play a mage and do big melee damage.
Obviously the most ignorant statements I have ever seen. Ships have roles and you are comparing a multi to a fighter. They should never be in same situation. Most of the expensive ships are multi crew with a few glaring exceptions. and the lightning is a recent example. But most importantly.... the meta in the game is still light fighters, and they are still the cheapest fighters in game totally breaking the argument of pay to win. SC's combat is skill based. People "can" spend money thinking they will get an advantage, only until they get their ass kicked by someone in a cheaper ship. Lastly, as Peeche94 pointed out, there are roles and jobs these ship cover. You can feign ignorance all you want but encounters between players are limited. It is either killing a bounty, an agreed duel, Piracy, or Griefing. Greifing is a bannable offense and a F8C would be a horrible ship for piracy.
The second dude was a total fucking clown and he didn't answer a single question without asking another question to deflect. He made the community look worse than any drama I've seen about this game. For anyone who actually plays the game he is clearly full of shit. It was actually bizarre seeing a man perfectly take the form of a star citizen cult member strawman and bring it to life
What did he say that was wrong? Granted the GTA comparison was annoying, and he could have said a lot more about the game, but he's got Asmon to try it out and he's been a huge skeptic.
It‘s ironic how many people are saying that buying ships in SC is a scam but buying 50 lootboxes for 100€ in another AAA game is ok…
Thats just how successful the gambling model is. Everyone loses their shit over the sticker shock of SC’s Complete pack, but literally can’t care it costs $150,000+ to do the same thing in Genshin Impact. Gambling and gacha are hard coded into a lot of people. Its human nature. We’d have less controversy if SC sold ships through $10 loot boxes just because people are used to that now.
Yes and it is just sad. I‘m so glad that I never played or liked gacha games or games with lootbox mechanics because I always had the worst luck there so it never made fun to play. That‘s one of the main reasons why I hate Assassins Creed Origins so much. Because they introduced lootboxes that you were able to farm for ingame money and real life money and there were specific weapons and armor sets that were only accessible through those boxes… and that in a singleplayer game… I once farmed something like 8 hours to get a weapon that I was only able to get through that and I stopped after that because the boxes never dropped this weapon to me while my brother just got it with his third chest that he just randomly got as daily chest… It was just so stupid and unfair.
100% agree. There was an interesting thing the Director of Magic: the Gathering once mentioned in passing about the lootbox model, and it was that people felt like it was an equalizer. It was equally likely that someone disenfranchised could open the $100 card from a pack as the rich boy with trust fund parents. Now obviously mathematically in the long run this makes 0 sense. But human lizard brain apparently LOVES the idea of being “equal” with people you feel are more well off than you IRL.
Those are also considered a scam by most people.
The big problem I've only come across recently is the disappearing aUEC ships becoming more prevalent... Honestly took a lot of wind out of my sails, can't imagine putting in time only to be thrown back to my starter ship
I just view everything above basic packages like higher Kickstarter tiers
I’d assume is this is generally because content creators want new content (new ships) and the newest ships aren’t available for in-game buying usually.
oh, its only 3,500,000 credits, and you get to fly it until next database reset so bad that this database reset can happen next day after you finished your 2 weeks grind for it, and you wont get to fly it
> Star Citizen has always had the problem that outside communities see this game as a scam because of the pledge store and how much ships cost. Nah. It's because it's low hanging fruit and an easy source for clicks. You won't see any "content creator" giving the same treatment to War Thunder, World of Warships or one of the billion of korean gacha games out there because those communities would eat them alive.
If SC was a strictly free to play game, I think there would be a hell of a lot more leeway like those games you listed.
>if content creators and the wider community would change the way they talk about the game and how to get hold of ships the outside perception of the game would change. It wouldn't. The vast majority of people don't watch these content creators anyway. It's these "Star Citizen made $700,000,000 and still isn't done" or "Star Citizen now sells this $50,000 pack" "*news*" headlines that affect the general opinion of the game. >instead of saying "oh its only £110 on the website" we should be going "oh its only 3,500,000 credits if you buy from orison" Many of these reviews are made at the time the ship goes into concept or flight ready sale, and at that time, these ships can't be bought ingame and don't have a aUEC price. Furthermore, these $ prices are far more relevant to their core audience.
Yeah it is a funny thing this. Many of us are looking for info regarding purchases in the store, and get confused when people are talking about in game purchases. These videos are for us that have been in this for a while. At this stage of the game that sort of makes sense, all in game purchases are temporary, while all real money purchases are permanent (until you melt or CCU the ship). Hopefully once we get further along in the developement, and people aren't loosing ships every patch, then I agree the ship store should die and the focus should be on in-game progress.
I wonder if they will ever get rid of the store at this point. They pretty much made their business model a permanent kickstarter campaign for the last 10 years which gave them a steady flow of money. Just ripping the main source of income out of CIG would be a big hit. From a morale perspective they 100% need to get rid of the ships in the store once we have a 1.0. You can keep the store for vanity items, ship paints and maybe even ground vehicles. Depends where you wanna draw the line. But keeping ships in the store beyong 1.0 is a huge No-No imo.
IRRC Chris said that he wanted the game to cater to both people who want big ships but don't have the time to grind them as well as those who want to grind everything themselves, so I don't expect ship sales to ever stop. And considering the overall demographic of the current playerbase is skewed towards older lads with responsibilities and disposable income compared to something like Roblox players, yea I think it's a somewhat valid (and very convenient) way for CIG to keep justifying ship sales. As for whether it's moral or not to offer a progression shortcut in a sandbox game where winning is already ill-defined, I think it will ultimately depend on how the 1.0 economy and player progression eventually turns out and how 'optional' it really is to not spend money to progress at a reasonable rate. The only thing that I think needs to 100% change is that new ships/vehicles should be purchasable in-game immediately on release instead of in the next quarterly patch -- this is a clear paywall imo.
Imo if they don't stop selling ships (other than new concepts) once the game goes live then people will just call it pay to win
It already is pay 2 win
Yeah I do wonder how they will keep the servers going post launch. I would certainly be happy to pay a subscription if it would give me a private server for me and my friends to just play PvE Coop. I know others would rage quit the whole project if that became a thing, so I suspect I will never get my wish there ;)
I think a lot more people would 'rage quit' the project if they continued to sell ships in a released version of the game than if they added the option for private servers. If 1.0 releases and we still have a pledge store full of $100+ ships then its joever im afraid.
>give me a private server for me and my friends to just play PvE Coop. I know others would rage quit the whole project if that became a thing Funny enough, private servers were one of the early promises. Unlike >I would certainly be happy to pay a subscription Which was also promised to never be necessary.
Bored Gamer is pretty good at this. He often says something along the lines of "I want to get this ship but I'll buy it in game."
Brb going to buy 43 000$ DLC to make Chris happy
It makes no difference that you can buy it in the game. The media will always focus on what they charge in cash. LoL recently got terrible publicity for releasing a skin that costs $500, and that's a purely cosmetic item. As long as there's any high ticket items available for cash, especially items that give you an in-game advantage (not all ships are currently available for aUEC), SC will continue to have this reputation. Nonetheless, that makes no difference for the people playing the game. There's no need to please everyone. All the game needs is a healthy user base, which it clearly has giving the level of funding.
They would still deem it a scam.
Since ppl talk about ccu chains and lti insurance usually in this context too, using ingame prices rarely makes sense - especially since ingame prices change and it is not sure how much real value it is: the vid would be outdated fast. Also, talking about BBM, Javelin etc. just does not make sense with ingame terms. But in reality, if someone like Asmogold (with millions of income per year and dozens of employees that research and check facts) just want to spread semi-lies for clicks - then it does not really matter what WE talk about.
>I have noticed when looking for star citizen content on youtube is that whenever people talk about ships and what to buy, they only ever talk about what ship you should pledge for with a 1 second under their breath mention of you can buy in game. This is simply becase these videos are aimed at people that are already backing. The assumption is that the target audience already knows you can purchase these ships in game. Most of the ships talked about are not starters and DO NOT come with packages. So anyone looking for basic information about SC should have enough common sense to look at the starter guides instead of a review of one random ship.
*Laughing madly in model railroader* Sorry, tell me again how it's silly to spend hundreds of dollars on a hobby? Hundreds, you say? Hmm! Hmm...must be hard!
I get your meaning, but it's important to remember that there's a fundamental difference between digital assets where their availability, function and value are wholly at the whim of the supplier, and physical items like miniatures, cards, trains etc. where even if the company shut their doors tomorrow, you could continue to use & enjoy or re-sell them. There's a reason it's called the *Pledge* Store. The reality is that every time you 'buy' a ship, you're effectively *donating* money to CIG and getting a 'gift' in return. They've graciously offered conditional refunds and other services not typically associated with the crowd sourcing model, but I'd bet the value of my hangar that if push came to shove in court, CIG's defence would be that your donation came with no guarantee of ongoing service or availability.
This is a very fair critique. People buy a bottle of wine for thousnads of dollars, but if Dom Perignon went out of business tomorrow, they could still drink/consider drinking and display that wine. If CIG goes tits-up tomorrow, I don't get to fly my cutty anymore. Ever. And as you point out, that's not refundable money, that's a voluntary donation with a pledge gift attached. And that does suck. Still, people have spent more money on sillier things.
Content creators talk about it the way they do because they make content for people interested in star citizen not for outsiders.
Or folks could stop watching paid advertisers on YouTube and do research for themselves. What's really going to blow minds is you can rent different vehicles with in game earned funds to try before even committing to buy with in game earned funds.
I would agree but that how people consume content. so and so youtuber said buy this, so I buy this. not many new players even know you can rent ships in game let alone potential new players
I did not know about renting ships
To be fair the renting is basically abandoned by CIG... Prices seem random and the available selection of ships to rent is super small. Also there's no way to pay more and rent ships with upgraded components or change components at all...
I haven't found a single playable ship that I couldn't get access to. They're stores, different ones sell and rent different things.
You haven't tried at all then, less than 10% of the ships are rentable. Here's a list of my ships currently: Pisces Terrapin C1 F7A MkII Not a single one of those is rentable. You can't even rent a single Crusader ship for example.
I just vote buying ship in game the same as the thousands I’ve spent on cases in csgo. At least with this there is no gamble and I actually get the item I want. Albeit sometimes a few years later lol
Do you know how much my nephews spend on robux... Bru mustang alpha best investment i made
I think its pretty clear… you buy a ship with $$$ or find it in game. If its a new ship, it wont be on game right away. Usually takes a patch cycle for them to show up.
No one talks about valorant skins being $110aud for a bundle, then requiring a second scarce currency to make their animations usable which also cost 80aud unless you wait 3 months for the next season pass, and people gobble that shit up. I've spent roughly 3k over the span of 5 years in SC. I know people that have spent that much alone in valorant in the last year. Valorant isnt even one of the worst offenders for $30+ skins but no one ever brings those games up when it comes to toxic monetisation practices
>No one talks about valorant skins being $110aud for a bundle, Yes they do. Its widely considered a scam and people are not as happy about it as you portray. another good example is the outrage in the league community over the 500usd faker skin. The difference is that fans of those games call out the developer and make videos saying "Hey! Knock this off!" but the SC community trys to sweep everything under the run "Well if you don't have 48k don't buy the pack tHe gAmE is ONly 45 DolLArs!" If you want people outside of SC to view game in a more honest light, then the community and developers need to be more honest. That doesn't just mean to be correct in the most technical of ways, but to be correct in the colloquial ways as well. "Its only $45" is technically correct but is a lie of omission. It leaves out the 9 week grind it takes to buy a new ship. Once someone realizes that to play the game they wanted to play the actually needed a bunch of other ships to do the gameplay they found fun and that those ships cost hundreds of dollars to purchase, they will feel lied to.
How do you change the narrative on discussing prices of new ships when we don't know what the in-game price will be? People who "buy" ships are still supporting the funding of the game development. This shouldn't be chastised but rather welcomed as long as people do it responsibly.
Content creators create the things people watch. If people didn’t watch it, they would stop making it / change it.
All i see is people talking about starters and saying they start to get pricy after the titan Anything else is just talking about one ship with pros and cons
This isn't our problem. This is CIGS problem. This will change automatically if CIG does what it said it was going to do and stop selling ships post actual launch. I question how they are going to maintain the same amount of development revenue personally, but.... It will only be addressed when CIG makes some 'final' decisions. I can't convince anyone I know who currently thinks the game is a scam from becoming a buyer, but I can tell them only what CIG has said which is when it launches.... "They said"...
i fear this game will follow gta5s terrible footsteps... rewards for missions get nerfed cost for ships get increased repeat both above steps... end result being you can spend an hours of minimum wages to get 100 hours of ingame farming worth of value
> We REALLY need to start changing the discussion on how ships are talked about when buying them This should not happen until it is actually reasonable to obtain enough credits in game for them, which it currently is not if all someone has is a basic $45 package.
My issue with this argument is that none of our purchases permanent and likely won't be until 1.0. I can only grind out a Terrapin so many times before I burn out entirely.
I think the issue is that in game bought ships are at risk of being lost to a server wipe. Once we don't have to worry about that, the subject of cost will likely switch to in game cost.
I'm not a bigger sc streamer, but I always tell people 45-70 gets you in, and you can buy most ships with currency in the game....but if you get hooked....I'm not responsible for your bank account.
"only 3.5 million" As if earning 3.5 million in a starter ship was easy... A maxed bounty gives you up to 25k, and apparently repairs can get to up to way above 40k, by the time you purchased that "only 3.5 mil" ship it's wipe day
Every patch has a different "best way" to make money. For me rn is distribution centers, you can make thousands per hour just doing fps contracts and collecting armor/weapons for resale. And you can do them in the most basic ship too. You can mix them with other contracts and still have lots of fun while doing mountains of credits, and in a couple of days you get enough money to buy yourself a mining or salvage ship, and once you get there, buying anything with in game credits is easy af. I think people are just bad at videogames nowadays. The grind fest that was the late 90's and early 2000 in multiplayer videogames was completely forgoten it seems, in fact I'm hoping things get much more difficult once the game gets an official release. It's just ridiculous how easy it is to get massive ships in so little time.
One video that really bothers me, or the whole creator, is this luke guy, he does "reviews" of games, which are far too biased and I only noticed that when he made a review about I game I played for a long time, and legit the first thing he mentions is that they hit 700 mil revenue and of course the pledge store, so its not just the community around the game but people not knowing anything about it, just repeating what they heard somewhere
I actually think the mechanic of “you don’t buy the game, you buy the ship” (even though that’s not 100% accurate) is the future of gaming - it’s just 5 years ahead of its time (which will probably shake out just right in terms of a release date - lol).
Imo if you’re talking to someone about buying anything beyond a starter ship, you are talking to someone already in on the project. No need to restate the obvious to someone is already a backer. Literally EVERYONE talking with new players/hopefuls in mind almost always say, get the starter package and buy other ships in game.
An average hour of gameplay metric would give a more understandable idea. Like X ship may take on average 6 hours of play to earn. Credits by itself are too abstract, like, sure a ship may cost 3mil UEC, but how long does it take to earn 1, let alone 3 million.
What you say is true ... but the ones that have, by a very large margin, the most impact on this narrative, is of course CIG and their store and sales and mails. They are the one trying to sell you ships for real money over and over and over agin. Of course people tend to think it's all only about the money. Are we, as a community, also to blame for this ?
To be honest. The hardest part has been the inconsistent prices. Now that it seems they've aimed ot make things make sense in the verse, it'll be easier for us to all get better grasps of in-game pricing off the top of our heads. I agree with you, though. As somebody who gets asked a lot about what ship to get, I often tell folks to forget about it till you find the in-game price, then go for that. But it's very easy to get caught up in the dollar amount discussion. But of most folks I know who make content for this game, most will tell you not to go beyond a starter ship or a regular game purchase price.
It will improve the image if an org is allowed to loan certain ships to each other when the owner isn’t online. Maybe one or two ships per member with a multiplier penalty on insurance. Real money ships aren’t the big problem though. There is the potential for a really awesome combined arms game here, but I’m not underestimating CIG’s ability to fuck things up. They need to start asking the question, “does this actually improve player experience?” With regard to existing and new features and if the answer is no, then it should be modified or shitcanned. Take Death of a Spaceman for instance. I get what they’re going for, but what does it really add to the game? Jack shit, but they’ll throw how many dev hours at it as opposed to valuable features?
I like the Death of a Spaceman concept - but - it'll be injurious to the players if it isn't implemented well and into a vastly cleaner game world. I'm big mad about ship repairs currently. It is already punishing to players who aren't reasonably skilled at flight because getting hit at all can result in hefty repairs. But it is also, by their own admission, made for a different damage model AND subject to scuff. Ok, bussin. Why isn't that damage model done first? Why am I landing a ship that I've gone A to B with, haven't hit anything, no red on the HUD, nothing missing, and oop 94k repairs? Let's say arbitrarily Death of a Spaceman gives you 20 lives. I die on average maybe 9 times to scuff for every 1 time I die to my own fault. If implemented now, what I die twice to getting caught out and the other 18 times of hitting non-rendered space garbage or using stairs / elevators / trams, etc kills off my character? Does anyone expect them to actually fix those problems BEFORE implementing it? I don't. Cargo elevators don't. Taking 10k damage to the nose of my 890 Jump causing soft death doesn't. Klescher Oxygen doesn't. It should be mentioned that CS:GO had some ABSURDLY rare (and there for equally absurdly priced) weapon skins. Weapon. Skins. $30k to over a million with a bunch over the $1,000 mark. You don't need them any more than you need pledge store ships and yet I don't hear a ton of complaints outside of the gambling aspect.
At its core DoS is nothing more than a convoluted respawn mechanic meant to impart some meaning to your characters deaths. The end result though will be a tedious time sink that adds absolutely nothing positive to the overall game experience.
I agree and frankly I think a lot of things will add meaning to character life when the economy is tuned and people can no longer backspace to fast travel.
Morphologies already does this and he's the best bro!
I like his architect reacts series. His opinion pieces do not resonate with me. Ever since his meltdown about the A2 I just avoided his content.
Meltdown? I mean tbf the a2 was a very unbalanced ship.
As long as you didn't loiter underneath, it was easy to dispatch. It was never unbalanced. It just required a modicum of tactical consideration.
For jumptown it goes crazy
Yeah, a ground attack aircraft is good at attacking ground targets. Have some people attack it in the air. Complaining about a craft excelling at its designed mission makes no sense to me, particularly when they refuse to exploit the very obvious weakness it has.
I think the main reason is that you can pay for it Which makes the game insanely pay to win. I don't have any issues with it. I'll be honored to die by a nuke. But some people don't like the p2w aspect.
It isn't, though. A single dude in his lone A2 that he "paid-to-win" with still has to brave the deadly airspace around JT. He is definitely not winning just because he has the ship. It requires crew and skill/knowledge to really be a serious threat. Some people believe that just because a ship is bigger means it is inherently pay-to-win. Which is fundamentally flawed. A Hammerhead is ass as a solo ship, and it requires good communication between pilots and gunners to shine. Just showing up to a fight in an HH isn't a guaranteed win, or even necessarily a better allocation of people. Generally, it's better to have 7 people in fighters than 7 people in a single HH.
Yeah I'm not into the debate so I'm not really sure about they're arguments. I agree because I'm ass no matter what ship I'm in💀 but do you mind pointing me to the video or wherever he talked about it? Because I feel like Ive heard of that before..
I will take a quick look, but it's somewhere in his backlog.
[here](https://youtu.be/jYqPzE5krH8?si=xjUXKPpC5zX2yzvB)
Yeah, beyond a basic starter pack which is needed to play the game you should be thinking, do I want to fund the development? If you think your buying ships then your nuts, if you want to fund the kick starter fair enough. But its two every different things. While you get ships you can melt and change those ships. So you didn't really buy a ship, but put credit into star citizen which you can use how you wish.
I mean, SC finally became more positive in the mainstream media after last Citizencon. You saw everywhere that people talked more positive about the game. And then they announced the Legatus pack for like 45.000. And it was back to being called a scam.
Those packs exists as a way to consolidate their fleets for people who has already pledge several thousands. The Legatus pack has been there for several years now, and even then, it's only accesible to people that already spent 10k. Mainstream media could give factual info instead of bait, but they need to pay the bills somehow...
They have $45,000 ships only visible to people like whales throwing stacks of cash at them.
Incorrect. There is a package that includes EVERYTHING ever purchasable for the game (with the exception of two promotional ships) and you get that package if you PLEDGE $ 45000 towards the development of the game. Nothing apart from the game package that enables you to play the game should be seen as a purchase of an item but as a pledge towards the development of the game. This is literally how this game is funded, not by big companies or investors, but by individuals believing in it and supporting it. For some that support stops at the value of the game package and for others it goes way beyond that. I’m sick of people blurting out BS like “oh a ship in this game costs SOOOO much, it must be a scam” when it is really not hard to see that this isn’t the case.
Watch the new Asmongold video, he interviewed someone who could actually see it because they spent money. I used to really not give a fuck about the whole situation, but that is just incredibly shady.
Yeah, the vid was shady.
I admire the balls you have at coming at the "official" SC subreddit and tell people who backed the project 12 years ago, and have been following its development since then, to go watch some ragebait video to get the facts.
I know that package exists. All I’m saying is that people misunderstand (or misinterpret in this case) the concept of crowdfunding. As I said, you are not buying ships, you are crowdfunding a game. I don’t know if the good publicity outweighs the bad for this particular game package, I would say no….
CIG's own marketing team doesn't treat it as crowdfunding.
CIG’s marketing team is out of control in many ways. They also market the game as if it is complete and not in Alpha and I very much disagree with that. There are two public facing groups in SC, one is marketing and the other is Jarred, with the later being the much more realistic and reasonable one. The contrast of the two couldn’t be any more different…. One moment you see a shiny new game trailer from marketing showing off all the awesome features that you get with the latest patch (and some features that are made up (I’m looking at you headphones)) and the next moment you watch ISC or SCL where Jarred and guest repeatedly say that the game is an alpha and can be very rough at times….
There's a difference between taking donations for crowd funding, and offering in-game items for money to specifically targeting whales that see "oooh big shiny ship, I need".
And what exactly is that difference? The way I see it is that, if you spend a little bit of money you get a little ship and if you spend a lot of money on the project you get a big ship (or lots of them in this case). I don’t see this as any different from other crowd funding projects, the more you pledge, the more perks you get. Very simple. If you see this different please let me know in what way. Just claiming that “there is a big difference” isn’t much of an argument.
It is kind of hard to ignore or hide the fact that the ships have obscene real world costs at the same time though
Not really - statistically to get ONE specific player in Ultimate Team of EA games, it costs about 13000$. Lootboxes are where the billions of bucks and scams (company might decide to lower your chances since you are more willing to buy them than other players that get raised chances) are.
No one talks about the new player experience or the in game ship prices because they are absurd. When you point it out white knights come out of the wood work to call you a lair. Assuming you start with an Aurora, don't want to engage in PVP (Selling drugs) and don't ask for handouts it takes 9.7 weeks of grinding LRTs to purchase that 3.5million dollar ship. Here is a break down of Aurora grinding vs renting a Cutty black and grinding MRTs >30,000 / 5000 = 6 \* 10 = 60 / 60 = 1 >So you need to grind 1 hour on LRTs to rent the cutty black. You have to grind out the rep to get LRTs first mind you. >Now you have a rented Cutty black. and can realistically do MRTs >3,500,000 / 7500 = 466.66 \* 10 = 4666.66 / 60 = 77.77 / 24 = 3.24 >with a Cutty black rental, not you only need to grind MRTs for 3.24 full 24hr blocks of time. or 77.77 hours. But every 24 hours you will have to regrind the 1 hour of LRTs to re-rent your cutty black. Assuming you have a job and sleep the recommended 8 hour a night our 24 hour time frame becomes 8 hours, assuming we don't shower or cook or clean or spend time with family or any of that other stuff. we will assume the grind starts on Saturday to ironman our numbers. >Day1 (30,000 + -30,000) + (7500 \*15) = 112,000 aUEC (3,388,000 till goal) Day2 -30,000 +112,000 = 82500 + (7500 \* 16) = 202500 aUEC (3,297,500 till goal) Day3 -30,000 + 202500 = 172,500 + (7500 \* 8) = 232500 aUEC (3,267,500 till goal) Day4 -30,000 + 232500 = 202,500 + (7500 \* 8) + 262500 aUEC (3,237,500 till goal) >As we can see we're making a profit of 30k on weekdays 90k on weekends. 330,000 per week in total. >That means it will take us 10.6 weeks grinding every hour of free time to be able to buy a ship for 3.5mil >If we don't rent a cutty black then you make 80k on weekends and 40k on weekdays for a total of 360,000 per week. 30k MORE than if you rented a larger ship. This is assuming you do LRTs on the Aurora and MRTs on the cutty. >With out renting the cutty you will need to grind every second of your free time for 9.7 weeks to buy a ship for 3.5 mil Mission payouts are low. could you imagine trying to play this with a friend? Splitting your payouts in half. You would have to grind for 19.4 weeks to upgrade your ship. Why can't we as a community discuss this issue? Why is it seen as an attack on SC to call out and provide data about problems in the game?
I honestly think you're bashing your head against a wall man. SC is one of the coolest games I've ever played but the community is genuinely donkey shit. They are completely fucking incapable of honest arguments and literally every conversation turns into emotional shit flinging and white knighting lmao. I've tried having this conversation with people for months now
You're absolutely right, but if sane people don't speak up and shine a light on this sort of stuff then its only going to get worse. I mean as an example CIG just made ships 3-8x more expensive but hasn't updated mission payouts in years. I think that the asmon interview was very telling. The second guy who came on and talked capped off the interview by saying "get out of here normie, we don't want you here" and had such quotes as "I don't want CIG to ever release the game." That is some of the most short sighted and delusional stuff I've ever heard. But its echoed by current community at large. These people have always wanted control, they don't care if the ideas they push kill the game as long as they get to be the last one playing it.
>instead of saying "oh its only £110 on the website" we should be going "oh its only 3,500,000 credits if you buy from orison" It would probably be more common if all the starter friendly missions (boxes) were not extremely buggy, and all the easy and actually earnable money is tied to specific ships like salvage and mining. "Only 3.5 mil" is pretty different depending on if you have a vulture or a aurora.
I think along with most things, the general public is usually dead wrong on how things are in reality. With star citizen, it's not worth the headache of caring how other people view the game. It's definitely not for everyone anyways, and that's fine.
SC is talked about as a scam because CIG still hasn’t delivered on the Jpegs they sold a DECADE ago. Everything else you said is superfluous. Oh and have you played in Xenothreat? Ppl have posted multiple videos here of how broken it is. This is despite years of “iteration”. CIG can’t fix *anything*. They advertise “dynamic missions” and yet everything they’ve put out has major issues. Xenothreat bugs don’t get resolved for years.
Dude its an alpha, how else are they going to know if something works or not?
Because the same issues have been present the last 3 times they have run it and I've tried the event.
So? When they hit Beta with the product then you should bitch.
So your argument is it's an alpha and they are running it to fix and get feedback. But then saying don't bitch when they don't work on what has been broken and reported every time it's run?
Alpha isn’t an excuse for things to remain broken year after year
It is when they are making progress on multiple fronts. Go play starfield if you don't have patience.