Windows Star Citizen

In reality they have already provided a pay to head start store. They need some form of income to keep the servers going they have what half a million players at the min and the servers are already struggling with the redownloads of 1.1.

Say the live game gets 3-4 million players which is not a huge jump for the hype the game is getting. Then they will need a lot more servers and bandwidth than they are currently thinking. Not to mension the offline building of stuff in bases, EVE basically designated a server just for that purpose as it uses a lot of hardware / bandwidth.

A monthly sub would not be the end of the world if we get stable servers because of it and no pay to win shop. ( pay to win shop would be its end before it begins in truth for many)

 

It is the promise of something incredible we have all bought into. A ships & weapons for cash shop will suck that promise dry. To be fair, a UEC for cash store is also problematic, for the same reasons.

I get they need ongoing income for bandwidth, servers and updates. For me a subscription model would be preferred. World of Warcraft did okay with that model.

 

Its unlikely it will ever hit those kinds of player numbers, firstly because the systems requirements are so high and secondly because its only targetting a core groups of people, its not like a normal MMO which needs to bring in ever increasing revenue to please share holders, publishers and show ever increasing profits to appear like its doing well. It'll just exust in a bubble.

 

What exactly is the money raised from these ongoing ship sales being used for? I know that they had various stretch goals a while back, but are they using the sales money to add further features?

I can see why, especially at an early stage of development, someone would pledge a sum of cash in order to enable the developers to add extra gameplay elements (for example), but I struggle to see an incentive to drop hundreds of pounds on a ship other than to give yourself an advantage from day one. In that sense, these sales definitely smack of pay to win (or "pay to head start" as the case may be).

 

Features? No. We have exhausted all the stretch goals that add features a long long long time ago, which was CR's "bucket list" he came up with when concepting the game originally. Past the $60m mark we also stopped getting new ships/items and the like. Basically there are no goals any more - your money goes in to the development pot, and in return we get more in-depth design documents.

Essentially, you're paying money for CIG to make the best version of the existing features that they can. An example of this was the shift to 64bit addressing, allowing much much larger map sizes. Without additional funding that wouldn't have happened. The PBR lighting is another, and our latest damage state system (revision four I believe?). Without the funding, we'd have the original version and that is it.

Totally agree that the current store is pay-to-head-start, although the game is designed so that even having a mega expensive ship doesn't guarantee you a "win". A better pilot in an inferior ship can still kill you.

 

Id imagine there will be limits to that Cei. Like small fighter craft will probably never trouble the bigger ships as they wont be able to break the shields. EVE has similar situation. Even the best fighter in the game is no match for any of the medium ships let alone the biggest ships.

5 people fired on a afk battleship for 4hours and did not even budge the hp of the ship due to passive regen for example.

System requirements are high today will they still be high when the game launches ( We are still what just under 2 years from launch most games will have higher minimum requirements by launch, WOW has super low requirements today, To raid in 40man you needed at least a duel core cpu and 2gb ram and a mid range gpu card. 10-11 years ago that was some pretty high specs. )

Its a game that has huge hype behind it and you go into other online games and the general chat is alot of discussion about it. Theres alot of people who will buy Day 1 launch copys if it picks up decent beta reviews.

Similar to WOW had a dedicated following in alpha and stuff and come day 1 they had tripple the number of players they expected. Theres nothing that ive seen to suggest that the hype wont follow through into a great game and with it id expect to see alot of players in it.

People will buy it just because of whos made it as well.

 

True, but taking a small fighter up against a Javelin makes no sense anyway. However, saying that, your ridiculously expensive Javelin will get horribly hurt by a handful of well flown Gladiators or a Retaliator. Hornets will be able to kill Constellations etc etc. I don't think it will be like EVE where entire ship tiers can't damage the tier above, but it might be a bit harder.

 

It's a shame space isn't white, that Phoenix would make an excellent stealth ship the way it blends into the hangar.


After a fairly long install process with the download server running slow, I found the game was running pretty decently although loading times have seem to have gotten quite bad... does it take more than 3 minutes for you guys to load up the hangar for the first time?
Switching between Hangar and Arena Commander wasn't too bad, that took roughly 45-50 seconds.

I also got a text from my optician that my new corrective lenses are ready to be picked up today, so I'll be giving the combat a trial run this evening to see how well the colours display for me and more importantly if I can see the UI well enough to see my targets.
I saw that the Ghost is available in the DFM which is excellent, it'll be really useful to get to practice in the combat ship that I own.

Now I just need to finish sorting out my mounting setup for the HOTAS (it sits on my hobby trolley at the moment). I'm debating between the wheel stand that has the mount designed for the Warthog and Saitek gear, a height adjustable laptop table or simply getting a basic metal frame and building something.

 

Getting pretty board of people saying theres no sound in space in the trailers..... WE KNOW, GET OVER IT

 

Load times have been bad for ages. Makes sense seeing as the masses of testures that need to be moved around. I hope that do first person graphics and space graphics as sepperate settings, as I can get great FPS in space, but is hits hard in the hangar...

 

I know right? Instead it's going to look like a beached whale. The Retaliator on the other hand is a total ninja.

Load times for me are about 3mins as well off an SSD, but once in-game it's pretty reasonable.

 

Ah good, it's not just my client running slow.
It's definitely understandable that it takes a bit to load with all of the graphical assets in the hangar, it just concerned me a little as the last time I loaded the game up (about 2-3 months ago) it was pretty fast... though a lot has been added since then.

I'm hoping that we'll be able to lower the signatures on our ships so that you could have the possibility of something like that Phoenix, or another bright white ship, as a distraction while a small crew of Ghosts & a Retaliator lurk in a flanking position.

 

Yep, signature is part of the mechanics. Heat and electrical, and with the right kit installed you can manipulate it to be "stealth" (The Ghost was described as doing this). Combine with the low visibility of a matte black ship and a competent pilot/RIO should be able to do magic.

 

Awesome, I'll have to set a switch on either the stick/throttle to alternate between low signature and full power when it's working properly.

 

CCUs seem to be a bit confusing. For example, is there a way for me to upgrade from an Avenger to a Hornet Ghost or something, but keep all my rewards.

 

If you're upgrading a ship from a package, you'll keep all of the other package contents (such as the LTI, hangar, limited items, physical goods and so on) the ship just gets swapped and has the LTI applied to the new chassis.

For the Avenger, it looks like the upgrade path is:

Avenger -> 315P (+$6) -> Hornet (+$54) -> Ghost (+$18)
The Hornet to Ghost upgrade is in Ship Upgrades rather than the Cross-Chassis Upgrades section.

I can't see a direct Avenger to Ghost upgrade option so it looks like you have to go through a bit of a chain upgrade.


Edit:
Also possibly worth noting that if you only have the basic 'discount' hangar, when you upgrade to the Hornet chassis your hangar may also upgrade to the Business style one (if you don't already have it as an option).
Some people on the RSI forums have been saying that their have changed with the upgrade, though I can't confirm it as I already had that hangar to start with.

 

It seems like the multiplayer servers ae utterly borked currently, hopefully they'll get it fixed soon As it currently stands you can't join any MP games, so I wouldn't bother trying.

https://forums.robertsspaceindustri...update-searching-for-match-match-not-found/p1

 

Those wanting an SSD just for SC, may want to look at today's "Amazon Deal of the Day", a 250GB Crucial BX100 for £59.99.

10ftC:-

 

Hmm... one of my ship's guns is missing... could've sworn it had 2 guns...

 

Hehe almost bought a Retaliator.

Went to pay and stripe UK transaction was declined. Got a green tick from stripe, but failed on returning to the website.

Raised a ticket, but I cant see it getting cleared up as it was a waste of time the last time this happened when I was going for the Orion. Really wanted that so added my American Express to my pay pal account and then removed it again. Dear god don't want an unlimited card on pay pal.


Possibly my last game purchase was the Orion.