SomethingJones posted:

A support team for a $100 million company telling people, IN WRITING that a chargeback is fraudulent (and we've seen those emails, they've been posted here) is thoroughly disgusting. Your bank offering you the protection of a chargeback (in the EU, I don't know how this works in the US) is an absolute cornerstone of consumer protection. People do chargebacks all the time, for goods not received or goods misprepresented.

Beet Wagon posted:

I was so close to plopping down the $300 they wanted to let me go swim with them, but the options were either scuba dive or stay at the surface, both of which are dumb and bad.


I mean I get that the liability of letting someone freedive in there would be insane, but come on. The thing's only like 35 feet deep.

Samizdata posted:

Thing that always bothers me about videos like that.

"My pathetic ex-boyfriend"

Doesn't that make the poster even MORE pathetic for having dated this person?

Mr.Tophat posted:

I don't give a gently caress, I'm doxxing MoMA.

FrankieGoes posted:

I've only watched a minute of this and it can't be real.

Danknificent posted:

haven't heard from Derek in a while I hope those track suit people didn't 'move him to the concern forum'

SomethingJones posted:

FrankieGoes posted:

Super amateur retard snorkel story. I've snorkeled a pretty fair amount, mostly in Hawaii and Mexico. Probably the coolest was off my brother in laws boat off the coast of Lanai. Second coolest was probably off Molokai when you get way out to the edge and you can see the sea floor drop away into obscurity, and some big and sometimes scary fishies.

But I went recently off the Florida Keys. I was a bit surprised by the lack of good off the beach snorkeling but probably more surprised by the lack of actual beaches. Anyway, we paid some money to get on a boat full of other idiots and get hauled 6 miles offshore to snorkel. I get in and I'm snorkeling around and I'm kind of freaking out. Like I can't get enough air. I probably would have blamed it on the fact that I was snorkeling off a boat and there wasn't anything to "stand up on" within miles, but I'd done that before, so I didn't think that was it. So I paddle back to the boat and clamber aboard and I'm trying to figure it out. Like has my cardiovascular performance really just gone to poo poo or something? Do I have lung cancer? Have I just become a massive puss and I'm having an anxiety attack or something?

So I'm not gonna figure it out sitting on the boat, so I get back in the water and start swimming around again. And I figured it out fairly rapidly. They force you to wear one of those inflatable life vests and they tell you that if you've snorkeled before just don't inflate it, and even roll it up to make sure you get the existing air out of it. Which I did. But not enough, apparently. It had enough air in it that it was riding up against my throat. It probably wasn't actually cutting off my air supply by more than 5-10% or so, but it was apparently enough that my brain was saying "SOMETHING IS loving WRONG." I spent the next two hours tugging the thing down periodically and everything was great. Really good snorkeling, in my limited opinion.

The other funny part of the story is that this was a good sized boat but the only ladder into it was in the middle of the back. And there were big swim steps on either side of it, so you climb halfway up the ladder and flop onto a swim step were you can take your fins off and then climb up the rest of the way. So I look and no one is on the steps and no one is on the ladder, and I'm doing precisely that and as I flop my rear end onto the swim step I land on a 70 year old woman. She shrieked. She had apparently gotten tired and thought that clinging onto the swimstep right next to the ladder was a good idea. Thank god I didn't snap her brittle toothpick arm.

Bonus story: There are still places where you can do stuff that seems kind of insane from a liability standpoint. Lava Beds National Monument being the first one that comes to my mind. There are at the very least dozens of miles of lava tubes you could get lost in and/or kill yourself in, and they give you unfettered and unguided access to all of them as long as you pay 10 bucks at the gate. It's the way things should be, but it's surprising that in some places at least it's still the way things are.

FrankieGoes posted:

I've only watched a minute of this and it can't be real.

G0RF posted:

Well, I don't assume the "let's sell ship DLCs" notion was solely Sandi's invention. Million Mile High Club with no female NPCs? That sounds pretty Sandi-ish, as does a $10 not-black Black Concierge card that people who have spent $1000+ have to buy so they can prove they belong to an exclusive club of megadorks...

As for ship sales? I've not heard a definitive answer-- it seems in part the success of the Kickstarter stretch goals caught them off guard and the decision was quickly made to industrialize the process. 4+ years later, we're still in pre-alpha, we just saw yet another concept ship sale last week, and most ships still aren't in the barely started game. It probably looks pretty genius when you're the one counting and spending the money. But if you're a part of the Dev Team, buried under a mountain of Engineering Debt, I suspect it looks like colossal stupidity.

It is very true that the sales of exorbitantly priced spaceship dlc IOUs has been the heart of their stratospheric success. It is also a deal with the devil that will one day exact a very punishing fee.

Independent of that, Sandi seems especially unimpressive at Marketing / Branding / PR management to me.

Her event planning skills never seem to include rehearsals and failsafes, which is why Chris ends up looking the fool at so many of them. The merchandise strategy has made them look less professional than any other major gaming company I can think of. Their customer support team routinely has had 3-4 week responses times - sometimes impacting their $1000+ customers. She herself can't be arsed to learn basic things about the game and betrays that ignorance often. She pursues an acting career on the sly while drawing what is surely an enormous salary. She coerced their executive producer into starring in an acting reel. She has told so many contradictory stories about her education, her past, her relationship with Chris, and more -- all of which is obvious to those paying attention. She has an unapologetically inflated sense of personal superiority and openly declares it in official communications.

For these and so many other reasons, I consider her to be pretty bad at her job. If she was a big part of concocting their cynical financing scheme via ship sales, LTI, exclusives, and so forth, then she might rightly take some credit for the war chest they've amassed. Yet if the game does not deliver features complete (which is certainly never will), and until all ships are delivered as sold, then those gains are ill-gotten. The only genius, then, is a genius for exploiting the trust of others for profit-- and while some call that Marketing, I call it Con-Artistry. I'd sooner call the person or persons who settled on it criminals than geniuses -- and I suspect there will come a day when history does, too.

ManofManyAliases posted:

You really know nothing about CIG, development or business. Comedy or not - just stfu. If you're an adult, you certainly don't act like one. And if you're on the younger-side, then it makes perfect sense.

Sunswipe posted:

My grandfather died in a Nazi concentration camp.







He fell out of his guard tower.

FrankieGoes posted:

Mr. Tophat is a billion times better poster than you.

G0RF posted:

Totally normal-- nothing to see here. If you doubt that, you know nothing about Game Development.

orcinus posted:

Alcohol bath done.
Stimperial scaffold not removed yet.

Tace Vim posted:

Looking forward to the next 10 for the Chairman episode where Chris says, "I sort of get annoyed sometimes when I see this pop up in comments like “Oh Squadron 42 is cancelled or Where’s Squadron 42!?” Squadron 42 was just a game mode for people to play the space-based mission elements of Star Citizen until we could combine everything together: Flying, walking around, shooting, doing all the rest of the stuff..."

Wrecked Angle posted:

Sometimes I like to spend a few minutes imagining what would happen if by some crazy, stars-aligned phenomenon they actually managed to launch a functioning version of Star Citizen.

Can you imagine the CIG we've come to know being tasked with the problems that real games have? Can you imagine CIG balancing weapons? Hell, can you imagine them balancing ships? Ships which one person has paid hundreds of dollars for while the other has just poop-socked the easiest missions. Ah those missions, the missions that need to be just rewarding enough to give players a sense of progress while being just annoying enough to tempt you into buying the currency instead. What will they do about the ebil-goony-griefers? What happens if someone steals your ship?

I sit and think of these questions and ponder for a while, then chuckle to myself and think 'Heh, Star Citizen gets released'.

ManofManyAliases posted:

You really know nothing about CIG, development or business. Comedy or not - just stfu. If you're an adult, you certainly don't act like one. And if you're on the younger-side, then it makes perfect sense.

Danknificent posted:

carry on commando you're ten times the I can ever hope to be

Danknificent posted:

there isn't an thingie big enough holy smokes

G0RF posted:

Well, I don't assume the "let's sell ship DLCs" notion was solely Sandi's invention. Million Mile High Club with no female NPCs? That sounds pretty Sandi-ish, as does a $10 not-black Black Concierge card that people who have spent $1000+ have to buy so they can prove they belong to an exclusive club of megadorks...

As for ship sales? I've not heard a definitive answer-- it seems in part the success of the Kickstarter stretch goals caught them off guard and the decision was quickly made to industrialize the process. 4+ years later, we're still in pre-alpha, we just saw yet another concept ship sale last week, and most ships still aren't in the barely started game. It probably looks pretty genius when you're the one counting and spending the money. But if you're a part of the Dev Team, buried under a mountain of Engineering Debt, I suspect it looks like colossal stupidity.

It is very true that the sales of exorbitantly priced spaceship dlc IOUs has been the heart of their stratospheric success. It is also a deal with the devil that will one day exact a very punishing fee.

Independent of that, Sandi seems especially unimpressive at Marketing / Branding / PR management to me.

Her event planning skills never seem to include rehearsals and failsafes, which is why Chris ends up looking the fool at so many of them. The merchandise strategy has made them look less professional than any other major gaming company I can think of. Their customer support team routinely has had 3-4 week responses times - sometimes impacting their $1000+ customers. She herself can't be arsed to learn basic things about the game and betrays that ignorance often. She pursues an acting career on the sly while drawing what is surely an enormous salary. She coerced their executive producer into starring in an acting reel. She has told so many contradictory stories about her education, her past, her relationship with Chris, and more -- all of which is obvious to those paying attention. She has an unapologetically inflated sense of personal superiority and openly declares it in official communications.

For these and so many other reasons, I consider her to be pretty bad at her job. If she was a big part of concocting their cynical financing scheme via ship sales, LTI, exclusives, and so forth, then she might rightly take some credit for the war chest they've amassed. Yet if the game does not deliver features complete (which is certainly never will), and until all ships are delivered as sold, then those gains are ill-gotten. The only genius, then, is a genius for exploiting the trust of others for profit-- and while some call that Marketing, I call it Con-Artistry. I'd sooner call the person or persons who settled on it criminals than geniuses -- and I suspect there will come a day when history does, too.