Shekeling citizens - security hole with Star citizen servers show odd numbers with backers

[williamcll]

 

As the free event is going on with Star citizen, a user on reddit has found odd information regarding the backers and the amount of money paid to robert space industries, and some of the numbers doesn't seem to match up to the company's claim about the game:

I will add more information as the situation develops, such as if RSI will make any explanation to this information.
Thoughts: Considering the fact I have no money to afford any of these high end Spaceship games I have not a lot of comment about this situation, but if this actually confirms that the company has been lying this could take a turn for the worse.

[givingtnt]

A con 6 years in the making I tell ya


But.. Please.. let me dream >.>

[Drama Lama]

Star Citizen is never going to be finished 

it‘s just kept running by fans who hope it will be good and finished one day

[Master Disaster]

The fact SC is a scam was obvious from very early on.. all the hallmarks were present. Wild claims, missed dates, broken promises, senior CIG employees going on wild spending sprees, the product getting relaunched multiple times and the ability to spend more and more money constantly being added.

[Helly]

2 hours ago, Drama Lama said:

Star Citizen is never going to be finished 

it‘s just kept running by fans who hope it will be good and finished one day

Just for fun. Please explain to me how an MMO can be finished? Very curious to the answer here

[straight_stewie]

6 minutes ago, Helly said:

Just for fun. Please explain to me how an MMO can be finished? Very curious to the answer here

I'm not sure of a rigorous definition, but a release version would certainly be a good start.

In six years they are only on Alpha 3.8.x

Charging money for an Alpha build is also an indicator of a scam.

[Master Disaster]

1 hour ago, Helly said:

Just for fun. Please explain to me how an MMO can be finished? Very curious to the answer here

Squadron 42 is not an MMO and was promised to be released in 2014 so its now 6 years late. Plus after the third or fourth delay they promised it would be out in the second half of 2020, its now September 2020 and all they have done is gone total radio silence.

 

A few people got very rich and a lot of people invested money in something they will probably never get.

 

Edit - They've been under fire for years for promising to keep up with the blogs and updates then never doing it. The most recent update they made was a promise to release the roadmap they had for the creation of the new roadmap for the game. Yes you read that correct, they promised to release a roadmap for a roadmap and guess what, they didn't even do that.

[Drama Lama]

1 hour ago, Master Disaster said:

Squadron 42 is not an MMO and was promised to be released in 2014 so its now 6 years late. Plus after the third or fourth delay they promised it would be out in the second half of 2020, its now September 2020 and all they have done is gone total radio silence.

 

A few people got very rich and a lot of people invested money in something they will probably never get.

reminds me of the Berlin airport but with taxpayers instead of investors 

Edited September 14, 2020 by Drama Lama

[spartaman64]

4 hours ago, Helly said:

Just for fun. Please explain to me how an MMO can be finished? Very curious to the answer here

if star citizen advertise their game as just an spaceship flying simulator then ok but they advertised more than that. this would be like if wow advertised everything that they normally did (raids etc) and then just have the game just be you creating a character and walking around for 5 years.

[Doobeedoo]

Oof, can't wait to see response about this. Though, I'm not a backer, I follow the game from start, I like the setting and well ambition with the project. Played it few times, but it needs more work for sure to get the feel of it being fleshed out and complete, not just separate gameplay modules. 

The scam or not, some people need to realize few things, in general a game of such scope and detailed systems they work on, takes time. You see way simpler games taking years and get released with not enough content also broken. This is supposed to be a MMO flight sim, RPG and shooter. Another thing, they had goals they met over time and people wanted them to add and work more further, thus creating higher goals over time. So all of that, obviously it will take years and years to make it even beta though. 

Either way, I look forward to it eventually for both the SP and MP parts. 

[Master Disaster]

5 minutes ago, Doobeedoo said:

Oof, can't wait to see response about this. Though, I'm not a backer, I follow the game from start, I like the setting and well ambition with the project. Played it few times, but it needs more work for sure to get the feel of it being fleshed out and complete, not just separate gameplay modules. 

The scam or not, some people need to realize few things, in general a game of such scope and detailed systems they work on, takes time. You see way simpler games taking years and get released with not enough content also broken. This is supposed to be a MMO flight sim, RPG and shooter. Another thing, they had goals they met over time and people wanted them to add and work more further, thus creating higher goals over time. So all of that, obviously it will take years and years to make it even beta though. 

Either way, I look forward to it eventually for both the SP and MP parts. 

In the time since this game was first announced as a kickstarter Rockstar games have released both GTA V & RDR 2 and Rockstar are currently getting shit from the community for not releasing enough games.

 

Its also, apparently at least, had more money spent on it than Rockstar spent on GTA V.

 

Its very close to 8 years since they announced it, its had well over $100 million in revenue and all they have to show is a VERY early Alpha build and a store rammed with ships that cost up to thousands of dollars. 8 years and a hundred million plus for an early prototype and a store.

[NeuesTestament]

3 hours ago, Drama Lama said:

reminds me of the Berlin airport but with taxpayers instead of investors 

Don't worry the airport will be done by the year 2250.

[Doobeedoo]

28 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

In the time since this game was first announced as a kickstarter Rockstar games have released both GTA V & RDR 2 and Rockstar are currently getting shit from the community for not releasing enough games.

 

Its also, apparently at least, had more money spent on it than Rockstar spent on GTA V.

 

Its very close to 8 years since they announced it, its had well over $100 million in revenue and all they have to show is a VERY early Alpha build and a store rammed with ships that cost up to thousands of dollars. 8 years and a hundred million plus for an early prototype and a store.

Well, it is a KS game though. Also R* takes their time in general as we know it. People also want new TES too. 

I'd hope so they spend more money on SC than R* did for such a game heh.

 

Yeah they announced it a while back, but they extended goals many times. The showcase for alpha builds, yeah, it's slowly going and the ship cost thing early on is ridiculous. The store thing is lame to see for a KS game with early stage like so yes. They need to tie up their various gameplays and make the game feel more whole and full and show it well. 

[cj09beira]

8 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

In the time since this game was first announced as a kickstarter Rockstar games have released both GTA V & RDR 2 and Rockstar are currently getting shit from the community for not releasing enough games.

 

Its also, apparently at least, had more money spent on it than Rockstar spent on GTA V.

 

Its very close to 8 years since they announced it, its had well over $100 million in revenue and all they have to show is a VERY early Alpha build and a store rammed with ships that cost up to thousands of dollars. 8 years and a hundred million plus for an early prototype and a store.

thats not really comparable, star citizen's scope is not even comparable, gta V's engine is based on the continued work of decades of gta games, and RDR2 is simply based on the same system, for RDR2 for example all they needed to do was make new map, implement missions, add support for horse riding, not much else, everything was already there.

star citizen started without a engine capable of doing what needed to be done, the company was very small without the huge amounts of workers take 2 already had.

for star citizen to work they needed:

1 - create a studio from scratch

2 - create the tools for planet making

3- much more accurate coordinates (64 bit)

4 - some sort of ray tracing to allow for the stars to cast shadows on the planets

5 - a very different approach to rendering as they need to stream textures and meshes on demand, instead of pre loading levels like other games do, so basically what UE5 will do when it launches, next year

6 - for it to be an mmo the load is just too intense so they need to have multiple servers working together as one, which meant a overhaul of the backend services as you cant assume the server is all knowing.

all this outside of the normal building of assets: planets, buildings, ships, players, clothes, weapons etc.

 

and while you can buy all those ships in the store, you can also just simply buy them in game as now money usually persists from version to version as long as no crazy loophole was found to allow some people to have too much money with no effort.

 

 

[Master Disaster]

7 minutes ago, cj09beira said:

thats not really comparable, star citizen's scope is not even comparable, gta V's engine is based on the continued work of decades of gta games, and RDR2 is simply based on the same system, for RDR2 for example all they needed to do was make new map, implement missions, add support for horse riding, not much else, everything was already there.

star citizen started without a engine capable of doing what needed to be done, the company was very small without the huge amounts of workers take 2 already had.

for star citizen to work they needed:

1 - create a studio from scratch

2 - create the tools for planet making

3- much more accurate coordinates (64 bit)

4 - some sort of ray tracing to allow for the stars to cast shadows on the planets

5 - a very different approach to rendering as they need to stream textures and meshes on demand, instead of pre loading levels like other games do, so basically what UE5 will do when it launches, next year

6 - for it to be an mmo the load is just too intense so they need to have multiple servers working together as one, which meant a overhaul of the backend services as you cant assume the server is all knowing.

all this outside of the normal building of assets: planets, buildings, ships, players, clothes, weapons etc.

 

and while you can buy all those ships in the store, you can also just simply buy them in game as now money usually persists from version to version as long as no crazy loophole was found to allow some people to have too much money with no effort.

One of the most important rules of business, to keep the customer happy its better to under promise and over deliver than vice versa.

 

Its OK for them to keep expanding the scope internally but the people giving them money and are getting nothing in return will start to get annoyed eventually.

 

I'll admit that calling it a scam is probably a bit unfair, I actually don't think they intend to rip anybody off or not deliver a working product at the end of it all however CIG as a company is very obviously being mismanaged and the entire project seems to have the efficiency and work ethics of a small child. I do 100% believe some of the money has been mishandled though.

[cj09beira]

11 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

One of the most important rules of business, to keep the customer happy its better to under promise and over deliver than vice versa.

 

Its OK for them to keep expanding the scope internally but the people giving them money and are getting nothing in return will start to get annoyed eventually.

 

I'll admit that calling it a scam is probably a bit unfair, I actually don't think they intend to rip anybody off or not deliver a working product at the end of it all however CIG as a company is very obviously being mismanaged and the entire project seems to have the efficiency and work ethics of a small child. I do 100% believe some of the money has been mishandled though.

there is quite some things wrong with it that much is true, but not something i could do better if in that case, at least that i saw (lets see where this one leads), there were various set backs that slowed progress, like how they started on dx11 but its a large bottleneck for many of the features so they had to port it all to vulkan (should be done soon), the fact that its an open alpha is slowing everything down, as they have to waste time fixing things at a point where you normally don't making the same feature multiple times etc.

the new roadmap has a roadmap for a reason they are working on getting their internal software synced with the site so that we will get a much more in depth look at what they are doing every day, and they can't simply show every thing without doxing people, should help with transparency which is good

[rcmaehl]

9 hours ago, givingtnt said:

A con 6 years in the making I tell ya


But.. Please.. let me dream >.>

[StDragon]

I'm an early backer. And yes, I feel conned. The hype was real. There was real creativity and a community backing it.

 

Somewhere along the line it all fell apart. Hope and dreams that never materialized the way it was supposed too. It's just a zombie of a project. Even if it finishes, I've lost all interest frankly. Way too late into this to care anymore.

[Drama Lama]

2 hours ago, NeuesTestament said:

Don't worry the airport will be done by the year 2250.

great one year before Stuttgart 21 ( trainstation )  will be finished

[Mihle]

Being worse at developing and spending money on making a game than other developers does not make it a scam people.

[JZStudios]

2 hours ago, cj09beira said:

thats not really comparable, star citizen's scope is not even comparable, gta V's engine is based on the continued work of decades of gta games, and RDR2 is simply based on the same system, for RDR2 for example all they needed to do was make new map, implement missions, add support for horse riding, not much else, everything was already there.

star citizen started without a engine capable of doing what needed to be done, the company was very small without the huge amounts of workers take 2 already had.

for star citizen to work they needed:

1 - create a studio from scratch

2 - create the tools for planet making

3- much more accurate coordinates (64 bit)

4 - some sort of ray tracing to allow for the stars to cast shadows on the planets

5 - a very different approach to rendering as they need to stream textures and meshes on demand, instead of pre loading levels like other games do, so basically what UE5 will do when it launches, next year

6 - for it to be an mmo the load is just too intense so they need to have multiple servers working together as one, which meant a overhaul of the backend services as you cant assume the server is all knowing.

all this outside of the normal building of assets: planets, buildings, ships, players, clothes, weapons etc.

 

and while you can buy all those ships in the store, you can also just simply buy them in game as now money usually persists from version to version as long as no crazy loophole was found to allow some people to have too much money with no effort.

Star Citizens scope isn't nearly as big as they'd like to lead you to believe. They have randomly generated planets, which takes far less time than procedural or handmade maps like R* does. R* also did a new game engine, but we'll ignore that.

The base point is that SC was set on a kickstarter with a clearly laid out goal that people bought into, set to release in what? 2012? 2014?. Somehow along the way people got it into their heads that a company with the largest amount of funding for a game ever releasing what they initially sold would be an incomplete product.

 

In the meantime, Tesla and SpaceX have launched and taken off, there's been at least 4 other galaxy spanning space games that have released since SC inception, in my personal experience have started up an engineering shop, worked with a scammy customer eerily similar, since left the company that's continued to grow, Rockstar released a new game, and will re-release GTAV...

1. I'd really like to know why people think it takes 8 years and half a billion dollars to make a company.
2. Not that hard. It's randomly generated and even if it wasn't, it's been done dozens of times before.
3. ?
4. Why? If anything a series of point lights would work, and ray tracing also isn't new. Unless you mean system suns, in which case, why? Direct lighting would be fine.
5. From what I've seen the barren wastelands of planet surfaces are repeating textures. The city planet they showed off was repeating buildings. That by definition means it has very little to actually load. Otherwise it's primarily space, which... is 99.99% empty.
6. Sure? But every MMO does that?
7. 8 years into production and still talking about character design is fucking mind boggling. Or planning a roadmap for a roadmap.

2 hours ago, Master Disaster said:

One of the most important rules of business, to keep the customer happy its better to under promise and over deliver than vice versa.

 

Its OK for them to keep expanding the scope internally but the people giving them money and are getting nothing in return will start to get annoyed eventually.

 

I'll admit that calling it a scam is probably a bit unfair, I actually don't think they intend to rip anybody off or not deliver a working product at the end of it all however CIG as a company is very obviously being mismanaged and the entire project seems to have the efficiency and work ethics of a small child. I do 100% believe some of the money has been mishandled though.

As time and radio silence go on I'm not sure I'm convinced it's not a scam anymore. There's at minimum a massive mishandling of management and constantly shifting goal posts. If they had stuck to the original pitch and sold it, it would've been fine and they could've built from there. Instead it's years beyond initial release date and there's not even an alpha for the initial product pitch, meanwhile they're selling $15,000 ships. A lot of it is from "letting the community decide" because the internet is a rational place that understands what's realistic. If SC set up clearly impossible goals in the first place knowing the community would vote for it, and then pour money into it it's pretty.... "ambitious" if not altogether scammy. After 8 years though they barely have anything to show for it, even with needing to work out these "massive systems."

[JZStudios]

4 minutes ago, Mihle said:

Being worse at developing and spending money on making a game than other developers does not make it a scam people.

No, but purposefully selling Jesus tech that you can't possibly hope to accomplish is. Remember snake oil salesmen?

 

[BuckGup]

It's the cartel laundering money

[givingtnt]

8 hours ago, Master Disaster said:

Squadron 42 is not an MMO and was promised to be released in 2014 so its now 6 years late. Plus after the third or fourth delay they promised it would be out in the second half of 2020, its now September 2020 and all they have done is gone total radio silence.

 

A few people got very rich and a lot of people invested money in something they will probably never get.

 

Edit - They've been under fire for years for promising to keep up with the blogs and updates then never doing it. The most recent update they made was a promise to release the roadmap they had for the creation of the new roadmap for the game. Yes you read that correct, they promised to release a roadmap for a roadmap and guess what, they didn't even do that.

It's not total radio silence.
We get I think weekly or bi-weekly updates but the roadmap is not updated. 
They have been keeping up with their new roadmap for the past year and some quite well now for at least the bigger universe stuff. you can do quite a lot now. (though nowhere near finished ofc)

I feel like they're stalling on SQ42 to release when they have something of a big landmark for the PU version of the game.

[Taf the Ghost]

2 hours ago, BuckGup said:

It's the cartel laundering money

I assumed a long time ago that someone had figured out how to use it as a money laundering point and RSI was just simply too incompetent to realize it. They liked all of the money coming in to make their game and simply didn't care. That's been the most charitable conclusion I can come to about what Star Citizen actually is.