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MinorInconvenience
Feb 24, 2017

Criminal lawyer or criminal, lawyer. Yeah. No difference.

Sappo569 posted:

How about this

CIG releases a new concept jpg for $250 , limited to 1000 or whatever number they make up

Within a few days / hours they show all the 1000 have been sold (but they haven't)

Mena while at CIG hq they've sold 900 to the staff , at 75% off.

Cig staff now head to the grey market , eBay , wherever, and sell their 900 ships to the general public (or more likely one of the big ship middle men) for 50% of the original msrp (or 25% more than what the cig employee paid)

Idiot shill or Internet spaceship collector buys it thinking wow 25% off I made out like a bandit !

Meanwhile cig claims the sale at full price , the employee pockets their 25% off the entire transaction, and the shill continues to praise the crobberts

Yes. I would think that may be happening in a portion of these "sales."

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MinorInconvenience
Feb 24, 2017

Criminal lawyer or criminal, lawyer. Yeah. No difference.

hot balls man no homo posted:

But the primary market gives you option to refund, even if it is past the new ironclad TOS date. Are people really risking losing everything just to save a bit of cash on a ship? Is the faith strong enough to buy without a refund option but still not strong enough to give the full amount to CIG?

I defer to those with more knowledge. But I didn't think that new purchases were particularly refundable under the new TOS? Again, I am just spitballing here.

DapperDon
Sep 7, 2016
Also check out his new conversation stopper that he is sure to be getting a lot of mileage out of. THAT IS ALL! AS U WERE! END OF LINE!


Do these people actually sit around and spend time coming up with this poo poo or is there a list that they copy it from somewhere?

Samizdata
May 14, 2007

The Titanic posted:

What if the "employees" are in on the scam. They don't really have many programmers or artists, but 250 con men and a small handful of people who kinda know how to make a game demo and are good at turning a blind eye. That would explain the glacial pace of production and the hideous amount of conning and lying going on. :tinfoil:

FTFY.

D_Smart
May 11, 2010

by FactsAreUseless
College Slice

Sappo569 posted:

How about this

CIG releases a new concept jpg for $250 , limited to 1000 or whatever number they make up

Within a few days / hours they show all the 1000 have been sold (but they haven't)

Mena while at CIG hq they've sold 900 to the staff , at 75% off.

Cig staff now head to the grey market , eBay , wherever, and sell their 900 ships to the general public (or more likely one of the big ship middle men) for 50% of the original msrp (or 25% more than what the cig employee paid)

Idiot shill or Internet spaceship collector buys it thinking wow 25% off I made out like a bandit !

Meanwhile cig claims the sale at full price , the employee pockets their 25% off the entire transaction, and the shill continues to praise the crobberts

poo poo, that's so diabolical in its construction that, this being CIG, it's totally a possibility.

Achamp
Oct 19, 2005
The two hhhwhat.... The two yutes your honor

Sappo569 posted:

How about this

CIG releases a new concept jpg for $250 , limited to 1000 or whatever number they make up

Within a few days / hours they show all the 1000 have been sold (but they haven't)

Mena while at CIG hq they've sold 900 to the staff , at 75% off.

Cig staff now head to the grey market , eBay , wherever, and sell their 900 ships to the general public (or more likely one of the big ship middle men) for 50% of the original msrp (or 25% more than what the cig employee paid)

Idiot shill or Internet spaceship collector buys it thinking wow 25% off I made out like a bandit !

Meanwhile cig claims the sale at full price , the employee pockets their 25% off the entire transaction, and the shill continues to praise the crobberts

That's where I'm running into trouble with even circumstantial evidence for that claim. In this example you've got probably hundreds of people trying to sell on the grey market simultaneously. What sites are the biggest for SC grey sales? The subreddit gets about 600 unique page views a day. I have to imagine there is a lot carryover from day to day in who is buying and selling. Could you unload 900 ships in that environment? 500? That seems like a lot, and would probably mean most of the seller activity on the subreddit are employees.

I easily found either an employee or a whale if this scam is real.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Starcitizen_trades/comments/5kf3is/storenbys_mall_third_edition_original_concepts/?st=izojtkoj&sh=ea9629a0

Ghostlight
Sep 25, 2009

maybe for one second you can pause; try to step into another person's perspective, and understand that a watermelon is cursing me



Nicholas posted:

Question... If renowned film writer and director, Chris Roberts, died, would he show up in the Oscars "celebrity death" compilation the following year?
He's never written a film and his one directed movie has 10% on Rotten Tomatoes. Alan Smithee has a better chance of a retrospective.

Blue On Blue
Nov 14, 2012

MinorInconvenience posted:

Yes. I would think that may be happening in a portion of these "sales."

The key point here is the brown sea is always filled with people saying Oh of that ship was only a little cheaper I'd buy 1. Heck I'd buy 5 (although that makes zero sense)

So by CIG cutting the price down via the multi marketing level scam. More people would buy them , just not via the normal channels

Samizdata
May 14, 2007

The Titanic posted:

I used to work for a manufacturing company and they scored places like eBay for employees selling gifted/discount stuff from their jobs. They were fired if discovered.

But CIG isn't exactly a core of morality and honesty.

Is that why you said "used to work"?

<hides under desk>

Blue On Blue
Nov 14, 2012

Achamp posted:

That's where I'm running into trouble with even circumstantial evidence for that claim. In this example you've got probably hundreds of people trying to sell on the grey market simultaneously. What sites are the biggest for SC grey sales? The subreddit gets about 600 unique page views a day. I have to imagine there is a lot carryover from day to day in who is buying and selling. Could you unload 900 ships in that environment? 500? That seems like a lot, and would probably mean most of the seller activity on the subreddit are employees.

I easily found either an employee or a whale if this scam is real.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Starcitizen_trades/comments/5kf3is/storenbys_mall_third_edition_original_concepts/?st=izojtkoj&sh=ea9629a0

I mean , this guy appears to be holding at least a hundred jpegs or more himself , assuming he makes actual sales and has to 'restock'

And I just made up the numbers obviously , but even if they did my scam tactic idea for 50% of the ships it would still help surge the funding charts

Instead of the ships sitting unsold in the jpeg warehouse next to lesnicks wing commander porn

Colostomy Bag
Jan 11, 2016

:lesnick: C-Bangin' it :lesnick:

Ghostlight posted:

He's never written a film and his one directed movie has 10% on Rotten Tomatoes. Alan Smithee has a better chance of a retrospective.

If they only had a category for "best waving hands"...

Jonny Nox
Apr 26, 2008




D_Smart posted:

What I predict will be the fate of CIG/RSI/F42 over in the UK

https://www.ft.com/content/4e710e1e-fcfc-11e6-8d8e-a5e3738f9ae4

That they'll hide their content behind a paywall? Bold prediction I guess.

Strangler 42
Jan 8, 2007

SHAVE IT ALL OFF
ALL OF IT

MinorInconvenience posted:

I defer to those with more knowledge. But I didn't think that new purchases were particularly refundable under the new TOS? Again, I am just spitballing here.

The new TOS says no refunds but European and Australian consumer protection laws allow for a refund up to 14 days AFTER delivery. No ship or game means that refunds have to go through. I don't know if refunding ships that were bought after the TOS change was tested at all overseas or in the US but I haven't yet heard of somebody being flat out denied a refund since Streetroller got the government involved. Refund requests tend to get escalated, then you get a plea to watch a video, then after a few emails the refund goes through.

Samizdata
May 14, 2007

Hav posted:

No, gently caress her. She's destroyed confidence in anyone else that actually comes up with a decent prototype.

More seriously, there's a particular way of looking at the world today that relies on marketing stretching what any reasonable person would call an 'objective truth' in order to get paid and this isn't entirely prosecuted to the fullest extent because people hide behind the concept of _knowingly lying_ being difficult to prove against _honest mistake_. Theranos didn't manage to even come close to explaining how they'd achieve the impossible despite people asking the questions; trade secrets notwithstanding.

Same poo poo for Star Citizen; I was interested to see how they'd surmount the technical issues. Answer is that they haven't.

Same poo poo for the laser razor; there are specific problems inherent to the idea that stop it being a reality.

Effectively they're all the same poo poo writ large - Give me some money now and I'll probably give you something of higher value later.

It is the same reason people still fall for 419 scams. A combination of Dunning-Kruger and basic greed. Couple that with a relatively corporation friendly legal environment and there you go.

Samizdata
May 14, 2007

The Titanic posted:

You would at least assume that the guys whose only job is "write fake poo poo" and produce nothing of value towards the game itself could actually check over their dates and plans.

They literally have loremasters who are trying to do these things. It's just all poo poo, all the way down. Nobody cares there. :(

Seriously? Those incompetents get paid to badly do what I do pretty much as a hobby? :spergin:

Talk about evil!

Tippis
Mar 21, 2008

It's yet another day in the wasteland.

Colostomy Bag posted:

If they only had a category for "best waving hands"...

He'd still lose, because of other previous winners.

D_Smart
May 11, 2010

by FactsAreUseless
College Slice

Jonny Nox posted:

That they'll hide their content behind a paywall? Bold prediction I guess.

LOL!! archive link: https://archive.is/tixLw

Scruffpuff
Dec 23, 2015

Fidelity. Wait, was I'm working on again?

The Titanic posted:

Alright you guys got me to play in Citizen land a little.

That Hurricane ship was made/developed 200 years ago, and is the Anvil Hurricane.

Current Star Citizen year is apparently 2945.

That would put the ship design at 2745.

Anvil Aerospace was apparently founded in 2772. Anvil didn't even exist when they made this ship?

So uh, I don't know. Lore masters got to lore? Maybe somebody more in the know can correct my 45 seconds of googling.

This is amazing. The one part of this debacle that they could have gotten done right was the lore - nobody cares about it, so they can write whatever they want. It's a literal blank slate that they can say and do nearly anything they want with, and they can't even get that right.

Is anyone at CIG competent? Or at minimum not blindingly incompetent?

MinorInconvenience
Feb 24, 2017

Criminal lawyer or criminal, lawyer. Yeah. No difference.

Scruffpuff posted:

This is amazing. The one part of this debacle that they could have gotten done right was the lore - nobody cares about it, so they can write whatever they want. It's a literal blank slate that they can say and do nearly anything they want with, and they can't even get that right.

Is anyone at CIG competent? Or at minimum not blindingly incompetent?

I wonder how many employees are left. They look like they have a lot of open job postings.

AP
Jul 12, 2004

One Ring to fool them all
One Ring to find them
One Ring to milk them all
and pockets fully line them
Grimey Drawer
https://twitter.com/AmznLumberyard/status/836311765294145537

Samizdata
May 14, 2007

Hav posted:

It's all good, brah.

The problem is that many people fake it until they make it, but they at least have a chance of making it. There's also something to be said for knowing your limitations.

Which is pretty much my current bone of contention over on Reddit right now. The boundaries CIG are pushing are light years away, and, no insult to any coders in our august company here, but there is only so much code can work around. And that is assuming GOOD coders, not CIG coders.

Thoatse
Feb 29, 2016

Lol said the scorpion, lmao

Streetroller posted:

How do you gently caress up a Zendesk canned response?

Put Chris Roberts in charge.




On another note, you should email Red Bull about their facts, unless I'm misremembering Ortwin's letter from your case but didn't he state to the DA or GA there were something like 500k 'backers' at a time there were ~1.2million accounts?
Red Bull states in bold text that "1,750,211 players have backed the game so far", clearly conflating registered accounts with actual backers.

Achamp
Oct 19, 2005
The two hhhwhat.... The two yutes your honor

Sappo569 posted:

I mean , this guy appears to be holding at least a hundred jpegs or more himself , assuming he makes actual sales and has to 'restock'

And I just made up the numbers obviously , but even if they did my scam tactic idea for 50% of the ships it would still help surge the funding charts

Instead of the ships sitting unsold in the jpeg warehouse next to lesnicks wing commander porn

5 minutes more of thought made something else clear. If you were handed ships for pennies on the dollar, the options CIG provides for melting and rebuying allows for the secondary "sale of RSI dollars".

https://www.reddit.com/r/Starcitizen_trades/comments/4ajh3f/discuss_how_does_one_sell_rsi_store_credit/?st=izok9om3&sh=869096b7

Get free ships, skins, etc. Melt everything. Sell credit on markdown basis or "rebuy" any popular ship to resell. I don't deny that it could contribute significantly to the counter, but it's too bad there really isn't any evidence of this happening. I just took a quick look at the traffic stats for Trades and the main subreddit. The traffic patterns clearly match except for two months in the past year. Last July, and last December. Both had slumps in the main subreddit traffic, while simultaneous jumps in the trades subreddit. Something else that caught my eye is that periods in the last year had the trade sub with almost 10% of the traffic of the main sub. It would be interesting to compare grey market community size for SC compared to other games.

Samizdata
May 14, 2007

MinorInconvenience posted:

Nothing dramatic, I'm afraid. Backed the Kickstarter many, many moons ago at a low level ($37). Basically forgot about it until I saw the Hellion game go into early access and got curious about the state of Star Citizen. I googled and found so much insanity. So like in response to any good car accident, I have pumped my breaks and started rubbernecking.

Welcome to the UEC's wretched hive of scum and villainy! Happy to have you!

Samizdata
May 14, 2007

hot balls man no homo posted:

But the primary market gives you option to refund, even if it is past the new ironclad TOS date. Are people really risking losing everything just to save a bit of cash on a ship? Is the faith strong enough to buy without a refund option but still not strong enough to give the full amount to CIG?

Of course. Because a Citizen is canny, first and foremost. Because otherwise they wouldn't be a Citizen. They know how to get the biggest bang for their expendable dollar, amirite?

And if they doubted, they would have noped right out of there by this point.

Harold Stassen
Jan 24, 2016
What if the reason Chris said that $1 they receive is equivalent to 4 publisher dollars because for every $4 in funding CIG reports, they really only have $1? :v:

Samizdata
May 14, 2007

MinorInconvenience posted:

Yes. I would think that may be happening in a portion vast majority of these "sales."

Mirificus
Oct 29, 2004

Kings need not raise their voices to be heard


Beer4TheBeerGod
Aug 23, 2004
Exciting Lemon
Here's my theory on how things are going:

1. CIG doesn't encourage its employees to buy ships, or do anything other than take a paycheck and work on the game.

2. CIG does gently caress around with the funding counter in order to fraudulently maintain the impression that the project is continuing to bring in money so that backers will feel confident enough to spend their own cash. The people responsible justify it through some convoluted explanation about how funding is received (such as tax breaks becoming income) or about the need to avoid controversy (such as by adding ten million in one day because a new loan was secured).

3. Chris does not believe for a second that the gross mismanagement and failure to deliver is his fault, and instead blames the backers for constantly pushing him to increase the scope of the game. In his mind the opportunity for refunds absolves him of any wrongdoing should CIG fail, as those who are left know that game development is risky. This is a similar attitude shared by Bernie Madoff (and I highly recommend listening to that episode of Radio Lab).

4. There are three groups of people who work at CIG. Those who live within a reality distortion field and believe that CIG will deliver, those who are too low on the food chain to know how things are going, and those who know things are hosed but have checked out and don't care so long as a paycheck is continuing.

5. "The backers will never know" is a central tenant of the company culture.

6. Development is more about avoiding Chris's attention, or about meeting whatever idiotic spontaneous demand he spouts in as timely a fashion as possible, than providing a game with mechanics. This translates to an almost pathological desire to avoid any kind of negative feedback due to Chris's inability to handle hearing the word "no" from anyone.

The Titanic
Sep 15, 2016

Unsinkable

Samizdata posted:

Is that why you said "used to work"?

<hides under desk>

No, I never decided to steal from any company I've worked at.

AP
Jul 12, 2004

One Ring to fool them all
One Ring to find them
One Ring to milk them all
and pockets fully line them
Grimey Drawer

Beer4TheBeerGod posted:

1. CIG doesn't encourage its employees to buy ships, or do anything other than take a paycheck and work on the game.

They probably do as it shows commitment to the project and is an ego boost to CR. I don't think it's in any way significant though. Even if some were selling on the 2nd hand market the sales are so slow that's it's not a significant amount to CIG, employees might be making a few quid but then again they'll be out of work at some point.

AP
Jul 12, 2004

One Ring to fool them all
One Ring to find them
One Ring to milk them all
and pockets fully line them
Grimey Drawer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0-QE4UgR4U

Mirificus
Oct 29, 2004

Kings need not raise their voices to be heard


Samizdata
May 14, 2007

The Titanic posted:

No, I never decided to steal from any company I've worked at.

I was, of course, good naturedly teasing, you know. And I was rather thinking more the "gift/heavily discounted" angle, FWIW.

Kosumo
Apr 9, 2016

cool new Polack jokes posted:

What if the reason Chris said that $1 they receive is equivalent to 4 publisher dollars because for every $4 in funding CIG reports, they really only have $1? :v:

I'm taking from what he was say is that "He is the publisher for his game therefore for ever dollar 'pledged', he pays his development 'company' 20 cents and takes 80 cents for his 'publishing' company", the publishing company being just Him, Sandi and Ortwin.

All though I joke, it was strange how refunds where coming from diffirent companies - has that stabilized yet to all refunds coming from the same place?








p.s. Chris Roberts is a scummy oval office.

aleksendr
May 14, 2014

Kosumo posted:

I'm taking from what he was say is that "He is the publisher for his game therefore for ever dollar 'pledged', he pays his development 'company' 20 cents and takes 80 cents for his 'publishing' company", the publishing company being just Him, Sandi and Ortwin.

All though I joke, it was strange how refunds where coming from diffirent companies - has that stabilized yet to all refunds coming from the same place?








p.s. Chris Roberts is a scummy oval office.

There is also sources saying he is double and triple dipping for his salary, getting simultaneously paid as CEO of CIG, Director of SQ 42 and collecting royalty as author of SQ 42 script.

Strawman
Feb 9, 2008

Tortuga means turtle, and that's me. I take my time but I always win.


The Titanic posted:

No, I never decided to steal from any company I've worked at.

Then what happened to the watertight compartments? :colbert:

Blue On Blue
Nov 14, 2012

aleksendr posted:

There is also sources saying he is double and triple dipping for his salary, getting simultaneously paid as CEO of CIG, Director of SQ 42 and collecting royalty as author of SQ 42 script.

And sandi is getting paid for all her acting and other appearances on the various cig prosuced shows , while still collecting pay as marketing director

Does any of this seem out of the realm of possibility ?

XK
Jul 9, 2001

Star Citizen is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it's fidelity when you look out your window or when you watch youtube

I think it's funny that shitizens have been making like it's a big deal that Amazon is partnering with CIG, and it's some sort of really important development relationship for Amazon, while at the same time Amazon payments strictly disallows use by crowdfunded developers.

https://pay.amazon.com/us/help/201457400

quote:

Can I use Amazon Payments to crowd-fund my project directly from my website or application rather than using the above listed third-party provider?

We're sorry, but we don't support merchants who engage in crowd-funding using their own websites or applications. We currently permit crowd-funding through a limited number of providers, including the provider listed above.

The only third-party provider they specifically mention permitting, Crowdrise, is a crowdfund site specifically for charitable causes only.

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Kosumo
Apr 9, 2016

Sappo569 posted:

And sandi is getting paid for all her acting and other appearances on the various cig prosuced shows , while still collecting pay as marketing director

Does any of this seem out of the realm of possibility ?

Other than her lack off talent, vile manner and only getting the job through nepotism, I hope she is getting six pay checks, after all she does the work of six people and is the most qualified one in the company, so she wrote to Beer. (something like that right?)

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