Star Citizen Online - The search for more money

Tuco_sl said:

I think the big reasons you shouldn't worry about whales is:
1. The MMO aspect will probably be semi-limited and optional.
2. I'm betting that pure mudflation will cause the ships bought today by whales to become outdated and easily achievable pretty quickly in Star Citizen. Being able to buy end-game stuff in a game meant to keep folks playing for years makes no sense.

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I'm not worried about it. What I said at first was:

Edit: I imagine salt from all sides if this game makes it live. The noobs that didn't have 10k dollars to drop on good ships will find themselves at a major disadvantage establishing themselves. And the people who bought that really good ship for X dollars will be pissed off that the ship 'only' costs 100,000 in game currency which turns out isn't all that much.

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You know on day #1 of the game the second sentence will be true and if your second point is true as well then my third sentence will also be true. Variise took want I said and decided I was complaining about PvP balance when I was merely stating what will more than likely be a fact of life once this game releases thanks to their P2W ship sales.

Kriptini_sl said:

You strawmanned me, I did not say or imply that "small studios with small budgets innovate the shit out of big studios." Leave your feels out of the discussion, dude, I'm not judging you.

However, if you're implying that indie studios do the exact same things as larger studios andsurvivelike that, then you're deluded. Indies have to innovate somewhat in order to get noticed. They have to have some "diamond in the rough" feature or quality or they'll just blend in with a sea of identical titles.

Just look at concept for Star Citizen. I seriously doubt most of the crowdfunding came from Chris Roberts fans. It's much more likely that the game was funded majorly by people who liked the concept, which is innovative enough.

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After re-reading everything you wrote on the subject to date I would say you have spoken like someone who spent more time arguing about SC here on the forums than it takes to read the most basic section of the FAQ for the game. Since I want to say something really unkind it's best to not say anything at all. Have a great weekend.

Skanda_sl said:

I'm not worried about it. What I said at first was:



You know on day #1 of the game the second sentence will be true and if your second point is true as well then my third sentence will also be true. Variise took want I said and decided I was complaining about PvP balance when I was merely stating what will more than likely be a fact of life once this game releases thanks to their P2W ship sales.

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Last post for this weekend because honestly I have better things to do like Project 1999. Double XP weekend bitches!


So you are making grand sweeping assumptions of what obtaining these ships mean. Some of them are valid as I mentioned. It will have some knock on effects on both pirates and non-pirates alike in terms of gearing. However just like with ships FPS will be more about skill vs gear.

So why do you suddenly give a shit if I have say an extra million UEC over you after the first month? How does that negatively impact you if you and I are both playing PvE? Economy? Sorry but they only allow marginal controlled fluctuations in prices. No single person or organization will ever be allowed to manipulate the economy. It will always be 10% players 90% NPCs everywhere you go.

This isn't Everquest. You and I are not going to be competing for a chance to take out VS based on gear. Major NPCs will be instanced with very few examples that will be unique encounters anyway that only one individual will ever get to experience.

So what could I possibly do to you as a player with a fat stack of cash when the only thing I would spend it on is tuning/upgrades/maintenance and personal gear. The only real impact on YOU personally would come from gear stacked pirates. Attacking you in far away corners will be difficult since tracking people won't be easy. Attacking you in controlled space will get them hunted down and it's not like EVE where you can just run forever. They will have to stay ahead of the news of what they did and they won't easily be able to get away with it but it will be possible. Having said that they will spend the majority of their time pulling NPCs out of suspected trading lanes simply due to profit. As for the fucking psychos that camp noobs and keep rolling new characters to troll noobs they talked about game mechanics they plan to implement to deal with those people. As in they might just move their ass entirely to the pirate spawning grounds where they can get pounded by fellow pirates. Good fucking luck trying to re-enter UEE space as a troll at that point.

Plus there will be people dedicated to just face stomping those people. For example my entire org is dedicated to the Advocacy (Star Citizen in-fiction Police force). That means running patrols vs pirates and hired to guard trade ships.

Having said all this I'm sure some of what you said will be true of some people. It will have no impact on me. Every single ship and buying decision I made was not based on making myself uber. It was entirely a question I posed. Would it be cool if the org or my friends could all hang out and do something unique to have fun? That's one reason I purchased the discounted noob starting package for all of my RL friends last X-Mas and told them NOT to buy anything at all. I told them to leave it to me and they trust me that I will select ships we could enjoy doing stuff in whenever the hell we like.

The really expensive shit nobody here is talking about is the upgrades you will be able to get for your ships and your person. On top of all of that is the tuning system which can melt items that you cannot recover (eg. that expensive shield generator you purchased before the game released). Chris mentioned that they planned the ships to be the base of the game and the upgrade mechanic to be the best and most expensive part. Kind of like buying an AR-15 for $1,000 that came with a $150 scope but then installing a bunch of internals and a new scope and suddenly that AR-15 is 10k. That's what Chris is talking about.

So yes you will see some people be disappointed that some ships are relatively easy to get. Nobody that doesn't follow the game even realizes that 70%+ of the cost of each ship will be post purchase mods and insurance on the most expensive mods. Chris even mentioned that some very powerful unique mods are planned to cost more than the ships they fit in. Just like in real life (guns, cars etc).

Sylas_sl said:

seriously not trolling, if you two could stop flaming each other for a second, i'm still curious about this:



What gameplay mechanic does this concept ship allow?

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Dude I'm going on like 3 hours sleep and I'm about to hit up EQ. Give me a chance to enjoy myself a little. I'll try to remember to come back to this later and do a more intelligent post. Can't be assed right now.

@tuco

Outside general startegy, you can't compared squadron and reckoning from the point of view of what matters.

Except that the general strategy to fund their continued existence as companies is the important part and all that matters? They are both stopgap games designed to generate enough revenue to complete their flagship mmo.

So you want to ignore everything else? OK I guess. You want to leave everything else out of that equation?

Well no one knows because we don't have the actual books, right?

So look at it this way:
Best case - S42 is awesome, drums up a bit more support, few more buyers into the snake oil spaceship scheme, SC comes out at some point hurray.
Mid case - S42 is OK, pretty much all the people who care have free copies, RSI has to make some serious cuts or changes to make SC come out
Worst case - S42 sucks, I mean, even the hardcore people just don't like it. Everyone starts a panic sell-off of ships and no more money starts coming in. Meanwhile the company is budgeted on bankrolling millions a year in fake ships and they have a panic sell-off on their market. Is SC going to come out after that?

SC right now is comparable to tulplip mania in the 1600s and the bubble is going to burst at some point in the very near future.

Variise_sl said:

Last post for this weekend because honestly I have better things to do like Project 1999. Double XP weekend bitches!


(snip for brevity)

So yes you will see some people be disappointed that some ships are relatively easy to get. Nobody that doesn't follow the game even realizes that 70%+ of the cost of each ship will be post purchase mods and insurance on the most expensive mods. Chris even mentioned that some very powerful unique mods are planned to cost more than the ships they fit in. Just like in real life (guns, cars etc).

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That's a lot of words for "You're right Skanda".

Variise_sl said:

I would very much like to remind everyone what SOE did with SWG when they turned away from classless skills and went to a "progression" path with classes. It's still considered one of the most epic examples of a company shitting the bed in the gaming industry. I wouldn't be surprised if it was used as an example of what NOT to do for MBAs or gaming development schools once you setup your game to play and feel a certain way and suddenly changing that.

We don't need another shitty F2P game requiring 10,000 hours of gameplay to fully obtain imaginary stats. If you put a number that can be increased via money, time etc in front of a person they will naturally attempt to progress in that direction. It will be the only motivating factor beyond the gear to help you move that number up the screen.

Bullshit.

That is not what nearly a million people signed up for. It's supposed to be an FPS experience but with all the other things you could never do in other games.

We are talking about vastly different experiences that people would want from a game. Fuck that.

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I want to say my post was a bit confusing, since I touch on two subjects (worries?)without proper separation: first, how will players "feel" progression, and second, will all these "jobs" actually pan out to be sufficiently fun for players. This also depends on how much fun they manage to make the PvE and NPC missions and such.

I mentioned a paperdoll (stat sheet) because this is a tried and true method in MMO's to give that feel of progression, as long as those stats are coupled to being more powerful in the game.

Having said this, I think accumulating wealth, better ships, better upgrades and weapons, more coordinates of cool locations and a better reputation will go a long way for getting that feel of progression. No stat sheet needed, though I think CiG would definately do wise to implement a LOT of leaderboards, for pretty much every activity in the game. And I am also convinced that they will have some sort of "Achievement" feature/UI, where an inidvidual player(or Guilds) can keep track of accomplishments, like how many derelict ships he has tracked down, asteroid fields discovered, how many ejected players saved, how much fuel hauled and such.

Btw, I think your SWG comparison does not really fly, since the original SWG (the classless SWG) actually was the pinnacle of old fashioned character progression. When I talk about paperdolls and stat-sheets, I am not really talking about Levels and defined classes, but rather on the tried and true mechanic of building up your Avatar to more power (from rags to riches), tracked by the numbers on your paperdoll/stat sheet. There's no denying that the original SWG was extremely rewarding in this aspect. You could build up *anything*.

SC will work a little differently, but I still firmly believe that at least one UI-element should somehow catch our "progress" in numbers (our wealth, the ships we have, our upogrades, our discoveries), so we can ogle something when we hit "C". (or "P" or "H" or "K").

Maybe an armorscore, based on the quality of our upgrades?

/duck

S42 wasn't a stretch goal it was always intended to be developed along side SC. The sillyness started after kickstarter when they had all their stretch goals going with more and more getting tacked on as they went. Now they have to play catch up with all that stuff and turn out a huge ass product.

S42 was the reason I bought in the first place, thinking it'd bring back some nice Wing Commander love.

Tuco_sl said:

I didn't closely follow either game, so what are the major differences? The only one that I can point out is that Reckoning was set from the start to be a seed-game planned to drum up interest and finances for the larger game, where as S42 was a stretch goal that is now coming out before the main game and is planned to drum up interest and finances for the larger game.

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Wasn't S42 the game/Kickstarter and this whole PU thing is the stretch goal?

Tuco_sl said:

I didn't closely follow either game, so what are the major differences? The only one that I can point out is that Reckoning was set from the start to be a seed-game planned to drum up interest and finances for the larger game, where as S42 was a stretch goal that is now coming out before the main game and is planned to drum up interest and finances for the larger game.

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Reckoning was developed by another studio not originally owned by 38S. It originally was going to be another game. They shoe horned reckoning lore intoit and thought it was a good marketing strategy. Reckoning was a console game for the most part that was on the PC. Reckoning was published by EA with a pretty awful agreement.

Meanwhile we never saw or hard or learned about the actual MMO and how everything fit together.

S42 was designed to be there from the start, uses the same game systems and is used to introduce the MMO directly instead of developing lore. The two systems will use the same control schemes.

I don't think they are relying on s42 for income to support the game directly. Like someone said, alot of people own it already. It'll probably get more people to buy useless ships though.

On my phone, but I think I got my point across.

Nija_sl said:

Wow, they need Squadron 42 to be a success? Who is going to buy that game? Put another way, who is going to buy S42 that hasn't ALREADY bought into their cult?

That's so funny. It's exactly like 38 studios. They don't even have a worst case scenario defined.

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Tuco_sl said:

I didn't closely follow either game, so what are the major differences? The only one that I can point out is that Reckoning was set from the start to be a seed-game planned to drum up interest and finances for the larger game, where as S42 was a stretch goal that is now coming out before the main game and is planned to drum up interest and finances for the larger game.

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There are a couple big differences. 38 Studiosborrowedall of their funding and had to pay regular maintenance on those debts. They had to borrow more to pay the interest. They were in a very bad financial situation when Reckoning launched and they really needed it to be a blockbuster in order to stay above water. CIG, as far as anyone knows, has zero debt. All their funding is free and clear. They aren't paying interest, in fact, but rather earning it. Additionally, CIG continues to crowd fund. They make money every day, averaging millions per month. Free and clear. Any sales from Squadron 42 are complete profit - gravy.

Now, are they growing their company beyond what their regular income from crowd funding and investments can support? Are they banking on Squadron 42 to make money to keep them going? Only a few people at CIG could really answer that, and to my knowledge all the statements CR has made indicate that he believes he already has enough money to finish the game.

Blackwulf_sl said:

There are a couple big differences. 38 Studiosborrowedall of their funding and had to pay regular maintenance on those debts. They had to borrow more to pay the interest. They were in a very bad financial situation when Reckoning launched and they really needed it to be a blockbuster in order to stay above water. CIG, as far as anyone knows, has zero debt. All their funding is free and clear. They aren't paying interest, in fact, but rather earning it. Additionally, CIG continues to crowd fund. They make money every day, averaging millions per month. Free and clear. Any sales from Squadron 42 are complete profit - gravy.

Now, are they growing their company beyond what their regular income from crowd funding and investments can support? Are they banking on Squadron 42 to make money to keep them going? Only a few people at CIG could really answer that, and to my knowledge all the statements CR has made indicate that he believes he already has enough money to finish the game.

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Yes, I always thought that CIG's financial position was very healthy and carefree compared to projects that have to keep investors, publishers and retailers happy.

Time for that old slide again:



Now that does not mean they can't still piss away 90 million dollars but still.

There also seems to be a baseline crowdfunded income of around 17000 dollars a *day*, that seems to account for the subs they have. I know that the subs are supposed to pay for all the cool marketing and magazines and stuff, but that's still amazing. I wonder if the tickets sold for Citizencon and other gatherings show up on the Crowdfunding counter too. 2000 tickets at 60 dollars each= 120k. Sold out, off course. The fact that something like their own Citizencon can be almost exlusively paid from box office from fans is also pretty incredable.