Star Citizen Online - The search for more money

There's more than that, though:




And so on. SC isn't the last roll of the dice, it's one in a crowd.

a_skeleton_03_sl said:

I really want to get into ED but I want to go all out flight stick but then I worry I will be bored an hour later. So torn.

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Half the reason I've played it as much as I have is because I have an Oculus and the game is just amazeballs with it on. Hodj isn't wrong though, it really does need more stuff to do.

Star Citizen "zones" are instances of up to 48-64 players right? So next to a busy planet you will have a LOT of instances, out in empty space only one for any given place. It will be interesting to see how they will do the "matchmaking", if it will be any good at all... I guess they havent a clue about the details and problems with all that yet. It will be vastly different from EVE, no mass battles at all. At most a small to medium battle (in EVE terms). I really wonder how they will solve problems like 2 "guilds" of 50+ players want to fight, how will they get distributed to the instances? And what bugs will players find and use to play the system

hodj_sl said:

Elite Dangerous needs more shit to do (which they seem to be working on with the xpac, though they'll still need probably 2-3 times as many ships and 2-3 times more shit to do).

I like the game a lot. But its just...it needs more shit to do. I can't make it any clearer than that.

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I remember a story about why the Nova didn't sell well in Mexico.

The way it goes was people steered clear of it because in Spanish, Nova means "it won't go" or something like that. Even though it was a decent, affordable car the name screwed it.

Sometimes I wonder in a male populated genre, and more specifically in an 'older' male genre like space sims... what role the letters "ED" plays in making people's subconscious stay away from it.

Tauro_sl said:

Star Citizen "zones" are instances of up to 48-64 players right? So next to a busy planet you will have a LOT of instances, out in empty space only one for any given place. It will be interesting to see how they will do the "matchmaking", if it will be any good at all... I guess they havent a clue about the details and problems with all that yet. It will be vastly different from EVE, no mass battles at all. At most a small to medium battle (in EVE terms). I really wonder how they will solve problems like 2 "guilds" of 50+ players want to fight, how will they get distributed to the instances? And what bugs will players find and use to play the system

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Design for matchmaking was revealed well over a year ago. It just doesn't exist yet since they are trying to get the basics of the game working.

Some facts on it.

Lets say they can only ever get 50 ships and players in any map. This is still unknown since they are still optimizing but lets just say this was the number at release.

About 15-25 slots would be reserved slots that no org can fill if they already have members in the instance. Example: FoH org has a single scout in a resource area they want to dominate. They come in with 30 ships. Only 24 ships can enter the same instance as the scout. The remaining 6 ships would end up in a secondary instance. Since orgs will understand this limitation people will form groups based around it to maximize their presence in whatever instance they end up in. However if noob org did this without realizing the limitation then matchmaking will assign, based on CIG's internal rules, ships for each instance and split the fleet.

Same is true of fleets defending instances. If the limit was 25 ships why would you try to have 26? It would make sense to have ships on standby to come in as you lose ships to bolster your fleet and I think that's exactly what orgs will end up doing.

Here is the wrinkle. This is done dynamically. There are technically no instances anywhere until one is required to be spun up for a player. NPC activity including where resources (asteroids) are, scrap in space, pirates, merchants and anything else including planets are all abstractly handled by the Economy Module/Server whatever you want to call it. Only when actual players approach will it take the abstract information that it already has (pirates in system attacking merchant ships with 2 jump points) and spin it up for the player to interact with. Once the player leaves the instance is removed after some time has passed depending on what you left behind. Most likely it will store what data trail you left (scrap parts from destroyed pirates) for the next person to find.

So right now we are limited to 16 players in space and 25 on the ground. One of the upcoming updates will push ground limit to 40 players or so. Space will take longer because that's predicated on all of the existing ships being transitioned to the new damage model tech which takes many months as they need to go entirely through the new ship pipeline at least one more time. Once done they will be able to push it up past 16 easily. I say easily because right now some ships are eating up hundreds of megabytes of graphics memory (in some cases over 400+) but the new tech reduces this massively to something reasonable like 25-50 megabytes but likely more for cap ships which we haven't seen and won't until the damage tech is in place.

EVE can get away with having 1000 ship battles where you can press two buttons and spend the rest of the time jerking off, depends on your role, because both game mechanics and fidelity are vastly different. One is a meta game on a fleet level and the other one is completely personal down to the individual. The scales are completely out of proportion for comparison. The typical low end ship is a frigate piloted abstractly from a 3rd person view by a single person. A comparable ship in Star Citizen fits about 90 people comfortably and would require over a dozen people to use all of it's functions as a skeleton crew not including pilots or marines.

The two games are not comparable and it's maddening that people continue to do this 3 years on because fuck it.. weeeeeee.

Remember that EVE wanted to implement what CIG is doing with Star Citizen at least as far as space stations was concerned for the purpose of limited FPS interaction but had to stop.

Tuco_sl said:

The small size per zone is a bunch of bullshit. Their reasoning was that their shit rendered so hot people's PCs couldn't handle it, but I call shenanigans on it. It's probably server-side pussy-footing. Personally I think massive space battles are awesome, but I can respect Chris Roberts for not attempting it.

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It doesn't help that they're using the CryEngine, which isshit. The whole "player's PCs couldn't handle it" might not actually be that much of a stretch.

Sylas_sl said:

man every time I see an Eve Valkyrie video i get so hyped and then I get so sad cus of Dust 514

Dust 514 in case you didn't know is Eve's Squadron 42. It's their FPS module that exists inside of Eve Online and is connected to Eve Online. players exist on the same server, show up in local chat, and you can interact with them.

remember this? from 2011? the intro trailer:

EVE: Future Vision Trailer - YouTube

except CCP went full retard and made it PS3 only, cus Sony was totally losing last gen's console war and started throwing a lot of money around for exclusives.

So much fucking potential of that game with the interconnectedness of it all. My roommate at the time this game came out happened to have a PS3 so I got to play around with it, doing orbital strikes from my ship in Eve Online and blowing up dudes in his match (from a destroyer, i don't think they ever did the dreadnaught orbital strike weapons).

all of it is wasted since there are so little players and so little revenue from it. I doubt CCP will ever do with Valkyrie what they did with Dust and make it actually part of Eve.

Dust should of been the stand alone game that introduced players to the eve universe (that way it wouldn't have had to be a PS3 exclusive and could of launched on all consoles/PC) and Valkyrie should be the built in dogfighting Eve Online Module, with the added bonus that it's full VR.


I guess that's why I never really got the hype behind Star Citizen. Eve was already doing (or had already done) everything that SC wants to do.


what are you talking about, they didn't stop. you can walk around in space stations all you want, it's just kinda pointless. only cool thing about it is you can sit in your hangar and watch youtube videos. They put the actual FPS in their ground module.


Also if zones are limited to 48 people how the fuck do you put 90 on 1 frigate?

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Two points.

1. CCP stopped development on EVE's FPS at the character model and housing level. They wanted to give you the ability to actually interact with NPCs and other players on the station. They spent a ton of time and money on this and the community was rightly outraged that basic functions of the game from early on were still poorly implemented or needed work. This is partly why CCP abandoned this and announced that they would start revamping shit which I think is a great idea but not enough to bring me back.

2. The 40 or 90 people on ship are not seen all at once. The zoning system combined with the instancing system allows them to limit what is shown to other players. This allows you as a pilot to leave a carrier, turn around, come back and face the bridge and see all the bridge crew in action in real time. The tech was shown as fully working a couple of months ago during the MultiCrew demo and it's now fully implemented in the internal build. When SC 2.0 is released you will be able to do exactly that. Mind you a carrier type ship like the Idris won't be available in SC 2.0 you will be able to do something similar to somewhat smaller ships that have this tech enabled. In fact all ships will have this tech enabled as far as I know.

This means you will be able to bring an Org of 200 people into an instance as long as you don't exceed the ship limit and you don't exceed the life support system limit on the ships that crew them. Yes ships will have a life support system so you can't just cram 6 people into a ship that can only handle 3 as you will all die eventually when you overwhelm the CO2 scrubbers.

hodj_sl said:

I don't see how they think they're going to field these massive numbers of players all the time to pilot and operate these ships if this is true.

I had heard stuff like this in the past, but forgot about it. This actually seems like a crippling feature. Having a couple people pilot and operate a ship? Maybe. Fielding guilds of thousands of players to fully equip, outfit, operate and pilot a fleet? Really?

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Only the largest ships will require a massive crew. Every single ship can be piloted by 1 person. Other crew stations can be manned by NPCs you hire. However some stations just cannot be done by NPCs since the AI doesn't exist to a degree where complex information can be communicated to the player accurately or very well. For example on an Idris you will want a tactical officer/captain that will overview the general actions and direction of the ship. A pilot to actually set a course or enable manual override in an emergency, a radar operator, communications officer, etc. Some other jobs like manning the missile launcher can be done by an NPC same with manning turrets or even fighters that you can order to launch. Some complex tasks you will have to communicate with NPCs directly however so that adds some limitation.

Basically one person in theory could pilot an Idris. Will they do well? Nope they will be utterly hopeless but they can do it if they are willing to jump up and run from station to station.

Another important point. Stations will be modular so you can assign multiple tasks to one person. However there may be limitations places on this on purpose to encourage you to play with other people.

So realistically an Idris may need a solid crew of maybe 12 people. That's pretty reasonable for a small capital ship. Even half that can accomplish some tasks just not very well. If they come up against another ship just like them but with twice the crew they will automatically be at a severe disadvantage since Humans will be able to do a much better job in most cases.

But technically the Idris will likely able to handle a crew of 90 if you want to geek out and fill out every possible role you can think of. If some ex-Navy guys are in your org they can probably come up with some funny roles for people to play but I doubt anyone will do it consistently. It would just be fun to do in the occasional outing but absolutely not necessary.

IMO an Idris crew would be 25+ since you should have every major station manned, fighter pilots and a Marine contingent to repel borders or board other ships for "inspection".

EDIT: Forgot to note that major stations will have their own mini-games or at least some will. For example the missile loader will have to clear stoppages and that will take skill NPCs will likely lack and will take much longer to clear. Radar operator will have their own mini-game of using various settings and dials to try and get just the right image of objects or whatever. EWAR officer same thing... etc.

hodj_sl said:

Just imagine 90 nerds all screaming at each other to jump to warp drive and fire all forward facing photon torpedoes on ventrillo or whatever people use for voice chat nowadays.

No thanks.

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Don't ever play EVE.

Erronius_sl said:

I have friends who host games at their place occasionally, and I just never felt like I wanted to take part. Partially because I've heard stories of conflicts/frustrations and I don't really want to trudge through that. Plus that particular group of friends has a few people who tend to try dominating groups (unconsciously) and if you aren't in to playing second fiddle things tend to go poorly at times.

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Yeah this my worry as well. You need people to do their jobs but some people just shouldn't be allowed near leadership roles. I'll put my hand up and I'm one of those people. I'll happily man any station on a cap ship knowing that my contributions will lead to victory or defeat but yeah leadership is fucking hard. No thanks.

Then there is the issue of people playing favorites. To be honest frustration comes primarily from poor game design combined with Alpha mentality. I want to be near the top of the list of amazing players but don't like it when other people at the top figure out some meta and cheese their way to the top. That's entirely the fault of the developers. Players will naturally go for the cheese. The Missile spam version of AC was a good example where it was stupidly OP and basically a ton of people that knew how to meta would just cheese the game and ruin it for everyone. For a time AC was called Missile Commander as a result and the playerbase cratered since most people felt the game was unfair.

So how good SC is in the end relies entirely on the developers getting the gameplay just right and minimizing the cheese. But ultimately like any other game the top players will almost always have the top gear and cheese their way to the top. Assuming they aren't using cheats.

Mist_sl said:

Referral program - Roberts Space Industries


STAR-C3G4-2XMJ

All aboard!

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This tells me the money is slowing down.

Skanda_sl said:

This tells me the money is slowing down.

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It isn't slowing down if anything it really picked up. They are simply drilling new wells.