some are seeing the light...
warning wall of text incoming...
https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen_refunds/comments/5qsh7p/my_sc_rant/
First and foremost, I'm a former backer of Star Citizen, and that should mean something. In short, I don’t recommend that anyone put any more money into the game.
Here is the deal, most people who start off writing like this usually are pleading for change, and change never ever comes. Words like these come from the highest tier of backers, people who have spent over $1000 to $10000 on the game (like myself), individuals that put their money where their mouth was and backed wholeheartedly into a dream. These people started fleets, Youtube channels, side projects, defended the game against critics, explained the game to new players or potential future backers, helped individuals ingame when tutorials were broken, when explanation was nowhere to be seen, when things were buggy, crap, or void of direction, these are individuals that should be praised by CIG and rewarded for their time, but are instead screwed over.
At one point anyone who spent over a certain amount was recognized as being 'concierge backer', and for a short while that had some meaning an prestige. Sadly as time went on and as more and more people threw money at this project and it became an everyday occurrence to CIG to relieve large sums of cash. Instead of initially warding their early backers in some way, for kick starting the project, they began to treat more and more of their "Citizens” as money spewing sheep, “oh you paid $1000, well why are you whining that’s nothing, someone spend $10000”, it’s insane how hard earned money results in less and less respect by a company that started with of with such good motives.
It’s so interesting watching the attitudes of CIG chage when I first backed the game. Initially concierge was nice, if you screwed up on buying a ship or missed out on a sales date, they would happily give you the opportunity to buy that ship you missed out on, at this point you might laugh and say “well, they are being generous and allowing you to pay them more money”, well yeah, true, but entertainment is entertainment, and at least they had the courtesy to look after those types of high end members that wanted to freely back the game. On average, their tickets were answered faster, and the attitude was towards them was often upbeat and positive, they got most of what they requested, and thy paid for good service right? However as time went on their attitudes changed, they no longer allowed concierge to buy things if they missed out on it, the staff that looked after concierge backers became rude and very unhelpful, basically you waited 2 weeks for a copy paste reply, followed by another 2 “we will get back to you” before you got a person on the other end that was rude and told you that they would not help, this is a reply to an individual that could’ve spent upwards of 10 grand on the game...
Let me ask you at this point, if you were a business owner, and someone put 10 grand into your project, is this how you would treat them?
This became ever more frustrating for concierge backers as more ships came into the rotation and people simply wanted to CCU to those “newer” ships and make their pledge more interesting and fun. Ships were very poorly explained, and individuals thought that one ship did one thing when in fact later it did another. CIG never fixed their websites, and to this date everything on there is largely out of date or subject to major change. Anyone remember the Terrapin? It was supposed to be like a little tank with a SIZE 5 gun, but later they changed that, this was after people backed for one thing, but it turned out to be totally different later. Another example is the avenger, it was one concept ship but ended up being totally different:
https://s23.postimg.org/rqnd1tc63/Avenger_06.jpg http://i.imgur.com/zT1rjZk.jpg
The entire system CIG put in place for melting and un-melting pledges had a some major flaws, flaws that the public told them about early on. For instance, you could not downgrade a pledge, only upgrade it, causing you to put more money sink into the game, if you had an old package that had some form of merchandise attached to the description, you could not buy that pledge back, even if you didn’t want that merchandise at all. Now you might ask, “why would someone melt something and want to buy it back later, isn’t this a convenience you shouldn’t have, why should you be entitled?” Well if you think about it they told us that we can buy back old pledges, they gave us that ability, they said we can do it, then they hit us with a rude awakening that it was specific pledges only, so people melted everything and realized "oh shit, really?" and got screwed (Constellation Phoenix package represent). Later when they complained to concierge support, they got generic replies and were not helped, often this led to even more spending on the game and extra money sink.
CIG also constantly changed its information about what was considered exclusive and what wasn’t. For instance, the IDRIS was supposed to be an exclusive ship, LTI was supposed to be an important and limited component, but later it wasn’t. We saw that in Warbond sales and Armada pack sales that the IDRIS was sold over and over again, people initially could only get that ship with high end pledges, naturally they’d want to melt that high pledge down in order to just buy the ship, but here is where the funny part comes in, if you melt your main pledge suddenly you have RSI credit and that is almost worthless, if you decide to purchase anything and you can't purchase most things, your pledge looses the ability to be giftable, meaning you can’t sell it on the Black Market, ebay or anyone anymore or gift it to anyone else, resulting in massive value drop. Secondly, WARBOND sales prevented people to CCU or upgrade to certain ships, and only allowed people with available real world money to purchase a specific ship. So if you backed in the past and had accumulated a LOT of RSI credit, that often meant nothing, you would have to ask for a full refund of your account and then purchase back, but since ships were limited to certain times or dates, when you got a refund, it would take you another 12 months to rectify the problem, again concierge support was relentless in it's execution of this policy, and often people spent $2500 or higher to get that ONE ship they always wanted. Also if yous pent $2,500 in the game for an Armada pack and wanted to reform your pledge to get an IDRIS for $1200, you couldn’t. Downgrades are not available, and their policies won’t allow partial refunds. In short, people ended up spending more money to get a discounted WARBOND type ship over upgrading to it, as upgrades become very limited and would often cost a lot more.
Now here is where things got funky, when the Polaris was on sale, to people who bought it on the day it would cost $750 USD, however if you used the EU currency you only paid $500. Now, if you lived in the US, you never got the EU currency buying option, so you had to change your address on the description to get the discount. Americans would on average pay more money for every ship than people in Australia or Europe. Long story short, people ended up buying more and more ships in order to not miss out on good deals, black market traders would buy cheap ships and put them on sale for cheap, people bought off the black market and it fueled a corrupt way of getting ships. Most americans were getting screwed on currency, and sinking yet even more money into the game to get to those so called "good" limited deals. Now this happened many times, and CIG was ULTRA slow to fix this issue, ultra slow because it made the money, a lot of money, accumulation of $250 on every Polaris sale out of nothing.
Everything in Star Citizen backing is far from obvious, it's not, you back this ship, that's it. Most of the starter ships are totally unplayable and would be near useless in the verse. Could you actually see a Mustang do well? That ship gets blown up in 1 hit, balancing? What balancing, the more money you pay the more powerful ship you get. The bottom line is that you don’t know what you’re doing until at least 6 months in, and by then you realize how much you screwed up your pledge. As an example if you did everything right, backed in 2012 or 2013, got yourself a package and pledge, on release day you realize that you don’t have LTI (life time insurance on your ship). Others who backed in 2016 and figured out the TOKEN ship trick ended up getting it, and hence your vintage old school backing means jack shit to you on when you finally get to fly your dream ship, oh better not crash it or you'll loose all the real world money you backed into it.
The ship system and the buying system is such a mess, that even as I’m writing this I’m having to think just how messed up and entangled it all is. To a new person this would come across as very confusing but there is a simple remedy to it all, keep reading.
You’d think they’d fix it ALL by now, they have money, and SO MUCH TIME, it's not hard to hire a good professional web development team to sort out descriptions but the moral of the story is that all this confusion makes them money.
Now the entire thing of “you’re backing the game and not ships” is such a full out lie. You ARE backing ships, JPG ships that get made and remade again, copy and paste ships that little effort gets put into initially, and then when it is, it’s often buggy and will in the future get remodeled again. As Chris himself said, there will be a 2013, 2014, 2015 version of ships, and people could have vintage version of their ship, which makes no sense, those previous version ships would be buggy, crap, would have massive issues in so many regards, I can’t imagine anyone trying to use the old 300i or the old Constellation Andromeda, it simply is impractical, buggy, and a total nonsense to have around. Now let's stop and interject, do you think CIG would make as much money as it did on selling auroras? If that's the only ship you could buy, would they make 100 million or more?
Another thing, look at the amount of advertisement ships get, they made entire videos around the Hornet, 300i, Constellation Aquila and other ships, money that could’ve gone into development but went into stupid promotional material, poster, stupid around the verse videos, bug smashers, and nonsense that no one cares for. They talk for 4 hours on their videos and show 1 minute of gameplay video if that, shouldn't it be the other way around? Why are we supporting these random developer people, I don't care for them and I don't want to worship them as idols or heros, I don't want to know about them their cheesy jokes or their lives, I just want the damn game.
Chris once said that he put all the money into the development of the game, but it’s not true, a lot of the money goes into advertising, nonsense, office luxuries, high end rigs, impractical setups and more fund raising, at this point they have so much money, and I ask why they need more? Why would you need Warbond sales? Why would you not rectify the black market, the issues with the website, the LTI, and the currency exchanges, and the only answer I can give to that is that they don’t care, they are making money so why rush to do anything at all.
The worst part is that for every 1 person that realizes the flaws of this company and game, 100 more don't and they've just backed, too late. For every one person that runs out of patience, 100 more are ready to wait out another 3 years.
Honestly, I wouldn’t trust these people with my money, and honestly you shouldn’t either. I’ve outlined a lot of issues that could’ve been addressed, and done so promptly. They could’ve shut down the Star Citizen black market Reddit, they could’ve banned and refunded accounts of black market trade ships, they could’ve shut down the entire GIFT system, they could’ve given all ships BASE hull LTI eliminating this insane greed for ships (which they claim is meaningless anyway) they could’ve acted and fixed their website - a long time ago, they could've added better descriptions and been more attentive to their backers needs and requests, but in reality they didn’t do any of that, they just don’t care, and yet the money rolls on.
You know there are so many wrong things with CIG, that it’s hard to start, I feel like I haven't begun, I'm just putting on my gloves and I could sit here writing pages upon pages of words… but the reality is that they’ve broken promises over and over again, deadlines, over and over again, they are forking out content to subscribers which is old and out of date, their live videos are horrific, it shows that they put the whole thing together hours before the event and were totally unprepared, it’s just a reckless act on their part, and I don’t see how I trusted them with my money for 3 years, 3 years of having money make revenue in their accounts, revenue which no backer is a part of and stands to totally loose, and somehow all of us are okay with that.
At this point you might say “well, no one asked you to put 10 grand into the game, or 2 or even 1”, well genius, if it wasn’t for the support of these high rolling concierge backers (sadly myself included), the game would probably have died off, it’s these individuals myself who put faith into this project, and now that we are pulling back or against it, the public turns around and vomits us out. I honestly believe if it wasn’t for individuals putting in large sums of cash, by now Star Citizen would be bankrupt and everyone would lose their money, not 1 person, everyone. There is no way that if people put in $45 pledges, that they would have the amount they have today, there is no way that the project would become as ambitious as it now has become, in a sense we are the problem, and after all this by backing the game has little or nothing to show. We keep talking about how Star Citizen was developing the core components this whole time, but core components for single player experience maybe, not multiplayer. They are promising 4 thousand players in instancing, heck even 1000, but what we've seen thus far is 24 players on a laggy server. Let's see if we see 100, but honestly, that's still not real proof, certainly it's not close to the 1000 number that they promised.
I wonder sometimes if Star Citizen should’ve been a small game with a small scope that was successful and perhaps allowed funding for a bigger and better title from that. As it stands it’s such a scary and ambitious project. The community has become so toxic to anyone who leaves, or speaks out that you are almost like a communist or Marxist traitor.
So what should everyone do? Here is my suggestion, take it or leave it, it’s totally up to you. I recommend that new players don’t fall into this buying trap, don’t buy any ships, wait until they show us those large multiplayer games they promised us, 4000 people right? Or more? Let’s see it, if you care about Squadron 42, then back Squadron 42 when it's out, if you want the PTU, then wait and let them show you something that’s impressive in that regard and non buggy. Right now the servers are small, 24 or players or less, the fps issues make the game unplayable, what ever happened to waiting and then reading the reviews before actually buying the damn game? They have enough money, let them do the work, why fund them more? All you get at this point is a badly built alpha with server issues and bugs make this a bitter experience. Before anyone backs the project, make sure that they can deliver, and that they have an honest, sincere and friendly sense about them. Let’s play this out and see how far we get. If LTI doesn’t matter, then buying any of those large ships or limited ships won’t matter anyway, and If you can buy most ships IN the game, then it won’t matter backing them now. If UPGRADES change the ships drastically fly or behave, then the base hull won’t be worth much at all, so no loss.
If someone would pick on him for that, he would stop visiting gamers forum very fast. Unless he shows that his the owner of jpgs or he got permison to use them.
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