Star Citizen Online - The search for more money

Rafterman said:

Aside from the feature creep, the expanding into multiple products and the fact the game is going to take much longer to complete than initially estimated, the thing that bothers me the most about this game is the years of fanboys talking about how this game isn't P2W and how ships would be easily accessible just by playing when the fact is, and has now basically been confirmed by Roberts himself, that you're basically screwed if you don't by in now rather than just buying the game later. It's the literal definition of P2W and the more money you spend now the further ahead you will be when the game releases.

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Nah, P2W means you can use real money to do something someone can't do in game. I mean, that's what most of us consider P2W. It will take time and effort, but you can earn the ships you want in game. On top of that, buying large ships now removes actual content for you in the game. I'm guilty of "collecting" more ships than I actually want right now. I plan to give some of them away to friends/family before the game launches because I want to have the fun of growing my merchant/mining operation from something small into something large, expanding into bigger and better ships as I go.

Let me put forth another idea you might not have considered. Forget, for the moment, that this game may fail and not deliver up to expectations. Let's assume it does deliver on the promises and releases to great fanfare. That couldn't have happened without people putting money into the development. Do you have a better idea than selling ships that can and will be stolen, destroyed, and earned in game? Would you rather CR just got a bunch of investors to fund the game, having to listen to their input on design and being forced to release the game before it was ready? That's what happens to most games, is that working well for you?

That's one of the best analogies I've seen about their modularized system.

a_skeleton_03 that's an accurate description of the current state of the game. However why are you writing them off when they have continued to prove naysayers wrong on previously supposedly impossible milestones. What's the logical reason behind that.

They hired a professional to help design the economic model. It's been in Dev so long that one of their members created a huge board game out of it as a sanity check so they can visually see how it plays out. IIRC they were showing it off around last xmas playing it on a huge conference table.

The final AI controlled economic model is still being built and as far as I know the first pass is not in 3.0.

So we established that the current in game price of ships you buy will have little to no relation to game pricing. The more realistically expensive ships (military, capital) will probably scale exponentially higher. It's not inaccurate to suggest that this entices people to want to buy ships now to save themselves big money sinks later. Assuming they don't read further.

Now that this was confirmed by Chris he also confirmed that missions will scale with your ability to complete them and most likely your reputation level if you are doing reputation missions. Consequently your cash in flow will scale with the more expensive ships as those ships open up capabilities early ships lack. This is nothing new as most MMOs have a similar system in place. A level 1 character is not making the same amount of money per hour as a max level character in any other game.

You can't however make a completely linear comparison to other games like say EVE. They both require skill and like EVE SC will have a meta game when it comes to ship upgrades but EVE has no FPS element. Meanwhile someone skilled in a starter ship in SC can rape a bad player in a Super Hornet no problem. That would be the equivalent of someone in a Velator taking out a player in an Imperial Navy Slicer. I suppose it can be done... if the other player is asleep at the keyboard.

a_skeleton_03 you are making statements based on half of what Chris recently said and drew a conclusion and your expectations and conveniently left out literally the second sentence he said that I provided for context.

I bring up the second part of what he said and I'm parroting. Boy do you have an itch to scratch.

Then you are nitpicking words like established when that was clearly a reference "we" as in us here saying the same thing about the first part of Chris statement about ship pricing that you yourself based your earlier conclusion on. Then you try to use that as a cudgel against me for your hail marry concoction to try and get me upset. And I'm the one that's not objective. Lol What?

No this is definitely now a personal dig. Nobody is this stupid. Nobody goes to this length unless they are trolling or have some fucking agenda or perhaps such a massive ego that they have to establish they are right by cutting the other person down. It wouldn't matter what I told you at this point and that's clear for anyone to see. That said I think I mentioned my previous experience here so if you actually gave a shit you can go look it up.

I expected this from the known trolls not you.

a_skeleton_03 said:

I am not nitpicking words, they were YOUR words. "We" here can't establish shit, we can conjecture only. So "we" haven't established shit, I have guessed at a probability myself. I don't think Christ has talked at all about how you will "earn" these ships, has he? Hail mary's and cudgels? WTF are you smoking? Neither one of us are objective you mongoloid. There is NO GAME to be objective about. There are pieces and rumors and press releases and changes and software life cycles and delays and early finishing and model rewrites and all kinds of things but not a finished game. Even when it's done the only thing to be objective about is does it do this exact function. You or I can't be subjective about it being a 'good game' or not.

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Well, I know you weren't talking to me, but I think I can objectively answer some of your question here. I think I understand your objection - you are operating on the basis that everything about the persistent universe (PU) is still just in the planning stage, and you aren't aware of what exactly those plans are. You have a level of disbelief that they'll ever pull it off. That's fair. Can I ask, have you ever played the PU alpha? There's enough of a skeleton there to understand how it could be leveraged into a "Freelancer" type game.

Chris has talked, at length, about his plans for how you'll be able to earn money in the PU in order to buy bigger and better ships. You'll be able to mine asteroids, you'll be able to gather resources from gas giants using ram scoops, you'll be able to run cargo missions, you'll be able to take passenger transport missions, you'll be able to take bounty hunting missions, you'll be able to earn money as a pirate, you'll be able to gather data while exploring and actually sell those data packets. Etc., etc.

I get your big objection, though - everything I listed was prefaced with the phrase, "you'll be able to." You want to see results. That's fair - supposedly about 5 of the base professions will be in version 3.0 of the PU when it launches near the end of this year. Trading, cargo hauling, bounty hunting, pirating, mercenary.



They are introducing the base version of their "subsumption' system in 3.0. This is more than just NPC AI - it's the world simulation machine - That's what Tony Zurovec (the guy Variise is talking about) has been working on for the last 3 years. It's the system by which players and NPCs, through their daily actions create missions and activities for people to make money with. Examples are things like:

• NPC pirate 1 destroys merchant ship 37 => spawn mission on mission board for player to hunt pirate 1.
• Player Merchant "Blackwulf" sells 3000 units of iron on planet z => Spawn pirates along the trade routes to planet z => increased pirate activity around planet z = spawn mission board for players to hunt pirates around planet z (AND) => spawn mission board items for resource delivery to planet z

You get the idea - it's a very complex system that, should it work as designed, will mean that there will be an endless amount of jobs and missions to complete in the PU.

But, like I said, I totally get your skepticism, and I don't blame you for wanting to wait and see what actually makes it to release.

LachiusTZ said:

So, this has turned into P2W, still needs more $$$, they dont know how to make all the junk into an actual game, but have professionals working on it (rofl?).

Alright then. Someone remind me to catch up on this again in another year.

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You should be able to get a good idea if it's actually going to happen by checking out version 3.0 that is supposed to drop before the end of the year.

For sure - I don't ever recommend people put more than the base starter cost into this game if they're interested. I think the current alpha and the dream are worth $45! Yes, I'll survive with no thoughts of suicide should this company fold next week.

I like where this discussion is going.

It can not be overstated how often and by how much the "game design" part of making a game is underestimated in both time and difficulty. This sin is committed constantly and we see evidence of it all over the place. I mentioned something similar in the NMS thread, as well as many others to the point where I feel like I am a broken record. But we just keep seeing it.

This happens for a multitude of reasons including that ultimately designers are dependent on game to be relatively feature complete before they can get a good test of their own work, which takes time an effort that is on par with the technical side.

And also design cannot be modularized and paralleled in the same way code can. A game's content and design are by definition an interconnected whole with a 2^n complexity dependent on feature count and scope. For a game the size and complexity of SC the design/content part is 30%-50% of all the work, and it can't be done very effectively during the technical aspects of development. This is why I am extremely skeptical by everything I see and hear about how they are STILL working on some relatively core technical systems. While it indicates progress as a designer all I can think about is how much work I would still have to do at this point if I worked on the project.

I want to add that when I say design is interconnected like that I mean in world/simulation type games. In something like, say, a Mario game most of the systems and content are embedded in the levels themselves with a relatively few long standardized actions that carry through the entire game.

Those games can be treated in a much more modular fashion since the design is so clearly delineated into chunks.

Denaut said:

I like where this discussion is going.

It can not be overstated how often and by how much the "game design" part of making a game is underestimated in both time and difficulty. This sin is committed constantly and we see evidence of it all over the place. I mentioned something similar in the NMS thread, as well as many others to the point where I feel like I am a broken record. But we just keep seeing it.

This happens for a multitude of reasons including that ultimately designers are dependent on game to be relatively feature complete before they can get a good test of their own work, which takes time an effort that is on par with the technical side.

And also design cannot be modularized and paralleled in the same way code can. A game's content and design are by definition an interconnected whole with a 2^n complexity dependent on feature count and scope. For a game the size and complexity of SC the design/content part is 30%-50% of all the work, and it can't be done very effectively during the technical aspects of development. This is why I am extremely skeptical by everything I see and hear about how they are STILL working on some relatively core technical systems. While it indicates progress as a designer all I can think about is how much work I would still have to do at this point if I worked on the project.

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I know you know a lot more about game design than I do, Denaut, and I appreciate your perspective. Are you familiar with Tony Zurovec? He and Roberts got to know each other back at Origin and he apparently won a lot of awards for some of the game system designs he did for Privateer and his "Crusader" games. He, similar to Roberts, moved away from the game industry because of clashes with publishers, but Roberts cajoled him into coming back for SC a few years ago. There are a lot of good interviews where he goes into how important the design aspect of the PU is, and I think you'd find them interesting. Here are a few:

Blackwulf said:

There are a lot of good interviews where he goes into how important the design aspect of the PU is, and I think you'd find them interesting. Here are a few:

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I clicked through the videos you linked (I didn't sit through everything) and these are good examples of what is not actually design. Unless I missed something (let me know what the video and time code is) I heard nothing that went beyond a very high level number of "wishlist ideas" that are generated within the first few weeks of a project.

This is not design. This is what people think design is, and part of the reason that design as a discipline is looked down so much even within the industry itself. Design lives in the details, the rules, the numbers, and the all of the decisions those things generate.

It is a massively interacting network of tiny, tiny dials that have knock on effects across the entire game where an almost insignificant tweak here can render an entire game system over there pointless.