Out of Pod Experience

I'll grant that it's not particularly severe, my focus was more on them doing it at least two years before the game even launches.

Exactly the same thing was said when STO came out. And again with SW:TOR.

What you don't get is that us "sociopaths" do in fact build, we do in fact mine and the people such as yourself who join a pvp game and then call people who pvp sociopaths wont be missed. EVE wont be impacted by SC because SC is nothing like EVE. Its his second attempt at Freelancer.

That was a very nice little speech, not sure why you quoted my post though, since it has nothing to with my concerns about the game.

Nonetheless, regarding for your statements about the community, to get a feel for it I read the EVE thread on the SC forums and the SC thread on the EVE forums (i.e. this one, which is how I ended up posting in it initially).

This thread is largely SC folks trying to convince EVE folks that they are going to compete and EVE is going to lose, and EVE folks explaining why they think that isn't the case.
Their thread is largely undisguised vitriol and bitterness towards EVE and all involved, and pre-emptive celebration of EVE's demise and the tears of all those who have the temerity to like different things.

The number of "yes I play/played EVE" posts in that thread tell us that SC will indeed take people from EVE, but the tone tells us that it will mostly be the worst part of the playerbase, and EVE will be better for it.


As for your little snipe at CCP at the end, well, as with the vitriol on the SC forums, nothing said changes the fact that CCP has been running a successful niche MMORPG for ten years now, while actually working towards a vision, and actually integrating player feedback into a living game design, while SC is still just selling people promises.


Finally, do I have to do anything in particular to get access to the dogfight module, like buy some of Chris Roberts' hopes and dreams before it is released, or can I just pick it up when it comes out? I wouldn't mind having a space game to putter around in over Christmas, I did the same with EVE in 2005 and well, here I am.

Life is hard when you have to work on something which actually exists.

After ten years straight it's getting boring? I'd call that an amazing success. As for financial support, I wonder exactly how much of EVE's money comes from people who have been playing non-stop since day 1.

Bad customers? Who said anything about bad customers? Players who can't hack EVE and end up as bitter SC backers paid their subscription like everyone else. ...?

And? Still leaves the score at 10 years for CCP's MMOG, and -2 years for Roberts'.
What, is Star Citizen so good that any other company must produce at least 2 successful games to match mere promises sold to you by Roberts?

I mean, in general, CCP fixing and adding components of the game that the players actually want, which they used to ignore in favour of killer app features that always went unfinished.

You're really having to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find criticisms of CCP at this point. Most players don't care enough to have a strong opinion on what the devs should so with the game? Yeah, in this and every other game. They have their own vision for the game independent of what the players want? Of course they do, how do you think you end up with a game for players to comment on if someone doesn't design it first? Demands for avatar content? This would be the avatar content that was vocally declared a waste of dev time by the majority of the playerbase before it was released, and caused the biggest subscription loss in EVE history when its true nature was revealed? Yes, they are truly a terrible company for not continuing down that suicidal line.


Let's tl;dr all this. You, like all "SC is great, EVE is terrible" people, are basically talking crap. I have no problem with people criticising CCP as they have done a lot of stupid **** over the years, but you are coming at this from the perspective of "everyone will/should leave EVE because look how bad EVE/CCP are compared to SC/CIG", when the latter has yet to produce a single component of their game, let alone the whole thing. You are floating around in the world of ideas while criticising something which actually exists for having the flaws that come with actually being a thing. Come back when CIG actually does a better job with SC than CCP do with EVE.


And you didn't answer my question about how I get to play with the dogfight module over Christmas.

On a free market, competition is good. CCP has a long history of screwing up and have only recently been putting their act together and, as they promised on 2012 Fanfest, "Delivering".

When it comes to Roberts, let's not forget that he promised a lot when working on Freelancer and failed to deliver. Most pin this on evil publishers and see it as a good thing that he "broke away from the evil soulless businessmen that care about nothing but money" (Which is what businessmen should care about. Money. Game development and sales are a business.).

Backers have little to no control over what CR does with their money. He can use it to slap together a product that delivers on the features "promised" in a shoddy, barely playable way. The game could faceplant months from start and, last I recall, there isn't a hundred-pages long technical specification of every single feature it has to include. You didn't sign a document legally binding Roberts to deliver the game of your dreams or be in direct threat of a lawsuit.

(If there's an agreement behind him and Kickstarter to deliver the milestone features, he's still not, in any legal way obliged to deliver a quality.)

In two years he could've sank a third of the development fund given to him by that time into the actual game, released a shoddy barely working product, grabbed the rest of the money and bought a dacha in honolulu. 401k composed out of fanboy money and involving sun, sea, barely dressed girls giggling about how you screwed people over and a lot of cocktails with an umbrella. You may say "Oh yes! If he does it wrong there will be outrage on the forums!" but... let's be honest. Unless he's crowdfunded by the russian mob he might as well not care. Just close the browser window and book a flight - cute chicks in bikini are waiting.

EVE did not start the way it is today, and it's worth noting that it is the result of a decade of organic development. Stacking penalties introduced due to "cavalry ravens". It grew from there based on needs of the players and ambition of the developers. This ambition got the devs into trouble - as Fozzie the Wise (or Fozzie the White, he's literally a wizard. Of space.) pointed out, they "tried to do too much".

On the ships page of SC website, there are variants of a ship. "Infiltration" "Scout/Command". What do they do? What is the meta of a non-existant gameplay over which you're building your ships (That have arbitrary stats attached to them)? How will it all work in the grand scheme of things? The mechanics that'd merit looking at a ship and saying "Hey it looks cool, I should look into flying it." aren't there to look at.

But I may be slipping into a "play it for keeps" munchkin mentality here. I mean, in EVE everyone always flies FOTM and you will become laughingstock if you don't fly FOTM, right? Well, I'll be brutally, rudely, pig-level-of-ugly honest here: welcome to MP gaming in general. There's always something you'll get laughed at for using/flying/doing. (Thankfully with online patching existing today, you have a better chance of seeing a buff/nerf.)

I doubt, even if released and surviving, SC will thrive as a sandbox. In a sandbox, bad things happen - mostly due to our human nature. We're violent bastards that sometimes feel like poking someone in the eye just to see how he cries. We can even make a competition out of it - see the customary "posting of tears" that happens when someone harvests them.

If Roberts doesn't stop the "evil people" in the Sandbox he'll have quite the tears on his hands (I mean, look at EVE forums). If he does, he'll destroy it and turn into a themepark space game.

Star Citizen will not be a real sandbox. So in that sense, it will not compete with EVE.

In what it will compete is in being the kind of game many EVE players used to play, and never had a chance to play online because it didn't existed.

In that sense SC along with ED are experimental products. They assume that the old niche still is alive, partly thanks to offline games like the X series, and partly because of EVE, which is not a classical freelancing game but all in all has been the only serious, mature online SF game around for years.

SC and ED wil not be "kid" products. We are 20 years older, and so are the developers behind those projects.

EVE, for several reasons, never tried to be that kind of game, but has been exploiting the niche uncontested. But now the real games of space freelancing are coming back in online form, and EVE will lose monopoly of that niche.

Currently SC, the game that doesn't exist, already haves more unique users than EVE haves after 10 years of space friendship and meanness. And EVE is not going to compete, it can't compete. All it can do is stay true to its colors and be what it has always been -a niche game with 100,000 "good" subscribers and lots of bad customers who will leave it sooner or later.

EVE will never die, assured. But it's bound to become a smaller game. And that will be good for everyone but CCP.

What SC has is backers. Whether it'll have many or any users once Roberts delivers whatever he is going to deliver, remains to be seen.

The more I think of it, I have a feeling that the avatar content in SC will have as much depth as EVE does for stuff not related to the CQ. But, on the flipside, the non avatar related stuff in SC, like the flying, missions, pvp (lol), manufacturing, mining etc will have as much depth in SC as the EVE CQ.

Heh, I just backed Elite: Dangerous too. 50 euros/40 pounds sent David Braben's way.. Now i've got a foothold on more games I can/may play...