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Star Citizen transitions to Amazon Lumberyard, Releases Alpha 2.6

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
Except that the entire economy is dynamic based on in game events and locations. Which makes setting exact conversion rates a bit different.

We will see, I have to admit I never believe much in developers resisting to the temptation when you plan to use micro transactions to fund something major/necessary to the game operation at best or the honesty behind that position at worst (a bit like planning major state projects with increased alcohol and cigarette taxes and still mantain that you are trying to get people to be educated about the dangers of ether and reduce their consumption massively/reduce abuse). Even a very very dynamic free market can be influenced and their market is still under their control and the fully dynamic bit has to be delivered and its limitations/influence levers may be difficult to find out.
 

tuxfool

Banned
You can debate whether it is a P2W game because of it, but the fact remains that paid advantage is going to be a part of SC if they don't shift to sub-based business model.

Maybe, but they made a promise not to be sub based, and I'd want to see them keep that promise.

We will see, I have to admit I never believe much in developers resisting to the temptation when you plan to use micro transactions to fund something major/necessary to the game operation at best or the honesty behind that position at worst (a bit like planning major state projects with increased alcohol and cigarette taxes and still mantain that you are trying to get people to be educated about the dangers of ether and reduce their consumption massively/reduce abuse). Even a very very dynamic free market can be influenced and their market is still under their control and the fully dynamic bit has to be delivered and its limitations/influence levers may be difficult to find out.
No doubt. Everything you say is true. As you said, we'll see.
 

shootfast

Member
What he helpfully fails to mention is that you can get that stuff with REC. For all his digs about people hiding information, he'll happily twist it to suit his agenda.

Not to mention completely derailing the thread with something offtopic, there is a general star citizen thread.

I truly think crytek sold off the golden goose when they sold cryengine to amazon. Why would anyone go with crytek when they could close at any moment when they could go to amazon for almost the exact same product!
 

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
Maybe, but they made a promise not to be sub based, and I'd want to see them keep that promise.

If they only sold cosmetic bits yeah, but in a game like this anything altering how competitive you are based on how much you spend would justify a sub model, don't you think?
 

Coreda

Member
What he helpfully fails to mention is that you can get that stuff with REC. For all his digs about people hiding information, he'll happily twist it to suit his agenda.

So it seems by playing competitive multiplayer you can earn rental credits that allows a player to 'rent' an item for a week, yet currently there's no way for a player to earn non-rental credits except by exchanging real money via the store.

To me this just looks like an intentional design to charge for more things. Given a user is still 'technically' paying via UAC they could just allow players to earn it like they do for rental credits.

Not to mention completely derailing the thread with something offtopic

Those items came with this patch, no?
 

mcrommert

Banned
Not to mention completely derailing the thread with something offtopic, there is a general star citizen thread.

I truly think crytek sold off the golden goose when they sold cryengine to amazon. Why would anyone go with crytek when they could close at any moment when they could go to amazon for almost the exact same product!

The money kept them running for two years...until now when they had to shut down a ton of studios

Bad for crytek but great for gaming as a whole
 

tuxfool

Banned
So it seems by playing competitive multiplayer you can earn rental credits that allows a player to 'rent' an item for a week, yet currently there's no way for a player to earn non-rental credits except by exchanging real money via the store.

To me this just looks like an intentional design to charge for more things. Given a user is still 'technically' paying via UAC they could just allow players to earn it like they do for rental credits.

They could but then there is a problem where you have backers with massive accumulated quantities of UEC when the game goes live, and there you already have inflated the value of the currency. They also keep UEC separate because when you buy the game you get a fixed amount of starting credits. Everything gets periodically wiped in the alpha, so there is no point in doing anything fixed inside the game world at this time. Ships and items are the way they fund the game, if you don't want to pay for that, then don't.
 

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
Considering how almost all mmo are now f2p no.

I am talking about it from a player point of view for once, not at how to make more money for the publisher/developer ;).
Still, not all of them are and not all of the ones that are do sell something very gameplay altering via micro transactions.
I would avoid the ones that do... if I wanted to gamble I would gamble on something where I could win something back.
 

tuxfool

Banned
I am talking about it from a player point of view for once, not at how to make more money for the publisher/developer ;).
Still, not all of them are and not all of the ones that are do sell something very gameplay altering via micro transactions.
I would avoid the ones that do... if I wanted to gamble I would gamble on something where I could win something back.

They've stated that they want the game to go first, as such that their stated intent is not to let that kind of stuff interfere. But they also have to cover their costs. So ultimately the question remains whether they can balance out the two concerns. They're in a better position, as they don't have shareholders to satisfy, nor will they have dev costs to recoup when the game goes live.
 

nOoblet16

Member
Amazing how a game can have so much funding, yet have such poor art direction.
Nonsense. Art is not limited to fantasy or colours or monochrome style. It takes skill to come up with art that is realistic but in an imaginary environment; spaceships do not exists, interstellar space travel does not exist, space dog fights do not exists, the systems and clusters and planets you see in Star Citizen are not put there by an algorithm but by hand. The planet themselves might be randomly generated at first but it is populated manually by hand and it's location is determined manually too. All of this is important because it takes skill to arrange all this in a convincing manner more so because people know about these things (as such it is realistic) but have never experienced it themselves (which is where imagination comes in)

And if you knew anything about how spaceships are built in Star Citizen you wouldn't be making that comment.
 

Coreda

Member
They could but then there is a problem where you have backers with massive accumulated quantities of UEC when the game goes live... Everything gets periodically wiped in the alpha

I'm assuming players still get to keep the items they bought? The existing players buying such ships and items will already have an advantage in that case when it goes live.

If the final release is the issue they could just inform players who had earned credits any unused UAC will be forfeited upon release. Obviously the system currently is just intended as a means to continue game funding.
 

Jackpot

Banned
You might want to point out the ability to permanently unlock it in the game is not yet implemented. Alpha UEC != UEC.

The only way to get these ships and macrotransactions is pay. And no refunds on the Voyager Direct store!



You can't even earn them in game yet, the thing the backers all surprisingly fail to mention is the ability to do so is "planned", not actually implemented, even though we're in the fifth year of development.

pfft, no wonder he "accidentally" left that out of his explanation.
 
I'm assuming players still get to keep the items they bought? The existing players buying such ships and items will already have an advantage in that case when it goes live.

If going the final release is the issue they could just inform players who had earned credits any unused UAC will be forfeited upon release. Obviously the system currently is just intended as a means to continue game funding.

In the Alpha you earn and use aUEC. It is not real UEC. That system isn't implemented yet so you can't earn it nor spend it within the Alpha.

There for "yes" the items you buy on the webpage with UEC you can keep. But honestly, I don't know anyone that does so. Since all of that can be earned in game, and if you already own a ship to use in Star Citizen, despite it being a choice one could say you are reducing reasons to play title for little reason.

Star Citizen threads - the only threads worse with concern trolling than Microsoft ones

This must be one of them "you dont understand game development" posts isn't it?

/s

It is humorous that is being used as a defense for every misinformed or misleading posts now.
 

shootfast

Member
The money kept them running for two years...until now when they had to shut down a ton of studios

Bad for crytek but great for gaming as a whole

What they did in those two years hasn't been great, heck they should have made the next crysis and downsized. Now they have blown any confidence anyone had in them to remain solvent by not paying their employees that the only game left using cryengine is prey.

I want to know is how much can they use from any new lumberyard code. Lumberyard and star engine are actually close enough that they merged since they both used 3.8 as a base vs cryengine 5 which is totally unmergable with star engine. Can they merge lumberyard updates as they come out or is it forked already and they already got what they wanted.
 

KKRT00

Member
Amazing how a game can have so much funding, yet have such poor art direction.

Nonsense. Art is not limited to fantasy or colours or monochrome style. It takes skill to come up with art that is realistic but in an imaginary environment; spaceships do not exists, interstellar space travel does not exist, space dog fights do not exists, the systems and clusters and planets you see in Star Citizen are not put there by an algorithm but by hand. The planet themselves might be randomly generated at first but it is populated manually by hand and it's location is determined manually too. All of this is important because it takes skill to arrange all this in a convincing manner more so because people know about these things (as such it is realistic) but have never experienced it themselves (which is where imagination comes in)

And if you knew anything about how spaceships are built in Star Citizen you wouldn't be making that comment.

Fully agree!
https://a.pomf.cat/ulhmrz.webm

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It looks like there is a clear paid advantage in the game but you are downplaying it because the business of SC isn't sustainable, therefore CIG must sell advantage to cover the costs.

You can debate whether it is a P2W game because of it, but the fact remains that paid advantage is going to be a part of SC if they don't shift to sub-based business model.

It seems like there is an easy path of bashing all the people who write "Scam" or "Trainwreck" about SC, but it is very hard to debate about things like a business model, in-game shop, development goals and deadlines.

The difference here is that Star Citizen is properly designed sandbox game and in such sandbox games the P2W model just doesnt work. You can buy as much UEC as you want, the biggest ships as you want, the best fitting for ship you can get, but you will be still vulnerable to attack from multiple smaller ships, to countermeasures, to stealing/hijacking or aboarding.
P2W only works if player can get such an advantange that lower levels/lower tier gears just do not even scratch it, by design this is not Star Citizen.
 
I like the coincidental wordplay that by calling the game a train wreck, someone derailed this thread.

I don't care that somebody can throw $70 into the development pot to have some missiles in the final game. That is what people seem to be spending their money on - 'hey, money = helping the devs and I get a neat thing in the final game'. And it seems like a terribly optional thing to me.

I also don't think it's a terribly big deal that they didn't mention switching their underlying Cryengine 3 fork to Amazon's one. As it isn't, at the end of the day, and as it says in the original post it didn't cost them time or, presumably, much in the way of costs. TBH considering Crytek's probable imminent collapse, this will be seen as a smart move in a few months I'd bet.

It is a shame that this thread went off topic into scandalizing the devs. I'm much more interested in hearing feedback from folks that have checked out the patch.
 

Coreda

Member
In the Alpha you earn and use aUEC. It is not real UEC. That system isn't implemented yet so you can't earn it nor spend it within the Alpha.

Despite it being a choice one could say you are reducing reasons to play title for little reason.

Can a player instead earn aUEC to buy those items? Not looking to reduce reasons to buy the game, I'll likely be doing so when its released, but for clarification on how players can obtain such in-game items currently since some were brought up as new items in the patch.

Edit: ending up searching the RSI forums instead and it appears players can't spend the alternative aUEC currency on in-game items from the store, whether temporarily or not.
 

tuxfool

Banned
Can a player instead earn aUAC to buy those items? Not looking to reduce reasons to buy the game, I'll likely be doing so when its released, but for clarification on how players can obtain such in-game items currently since some were brought up as new items in the patch.
If you're concerned allow me to make a tldr.The plan is that when the game is released no items will be for sale, only the game and a limited amount of UEC. That is it.

UEC is the only currency in the game universe.
 

Eolz

Member
Do I have to use the PTU to access these updates?

Is moving my account to the PTU difficult/worth doing?

2.6 is now live for everybody.
To use Spectrum (basically the game's version of Discord), you'll need to copy your account to the PTU though (super easy to do, nothing to download).
 

StereoVsn

Member
Move to AWS makes sense considering biggest part of the game involves persistent universe (in theory) which Amazon would be a no brainer choice as a support partner considering number and locations of geographically distributed data centers that they have and a huge number of packed services that they provide as part of AWS.

I am sure that Amazon enticed them with discounted rates since it's a decent PR move for them for now and potentially a large customer if the game succeeds. Plus if they used to be on Google that's getting customer away from competition (Google is #3 behind AWS and Azure).

Edit: As far as releasing this sort of info to the public, there is a lot of Crazy going on in this thread. There are NDAs, business contracts, negotiations, and other commercial considerations that could easily prevent this sort of thing to be public ally released.
 

fresquito

Member
Okay, so I just tried it (PU only):
  • Same shitty controls.
  • Same shitty performance.
  • Same shitty interactions.
Uninstalling this garbage. Someday I will be able to climb the ladder of my ship and not end up in the roof, I swear.
 

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
Fully agree!
https://a.pomf.cat/ulhmrz.webm

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The difference here is that Star Citizen is properly designed sandbox game and in such sandbox games the P2W model just doesnt work. You can buy as much UEC as you want, the biggest ships as you want, the best fitting for ship you can get, but you will be still vulnerable to attack from multiple smaller ships, to countermeasures, to stealing/hijacking or aboarding.
P2W only works if player can get such an advantange that lower levels/lower tier gears just do not even scratch it, by design this is not Star Citizen.

In a way this game could be an interesting case study of free market capitalism ;).
 

Eolz

Member
Might as well post the new pics from that german magazine here as well.

Some new images in there - album: http://imgur.com/a/JlNcu

1
mzZwg7u.jpg


2
eeFdXNB.jpg


3
ZApxRlE.jpg


5
ygXJmUX.jpg


9
l7KK106.jpg


10
VweRDo8.jpg


11
jivIo2l.jpg


12
2MCztUL.jpg


13
DIqjK0l.jpg
 

Raticus79

Seek victory, not fairness
You might want to point out the ability to permanently unlock it in the game is not yet implemented. Alpha UEC != UEC.

Are you seriously arguing that there should be a way to earn credits that can buy things in the final production release by playing the alpha?

Don't see any issues with that?
 
Are you seriously arguing that there should be a way to earn credits that can buy things in the final production release by playing the alpha?

Don't see any issues with that?

I don't think I suggested that anywhere.

I just said don't talk about proposed features as if they're already implemented using the past tense, as backers tend to do.
 

Woo-Fu

Banned
The engine switch was needed and is good news, IMHO. It isn't like switching to an entirely new engine and the way things are looking for Crytek it only makes sense for SC. Could be some other benefits of working with Amazon too.

Course I'm thinking that and I see $70 missiles and I just chuckle and shake my head. 100% pay to win, sad.

I think I'd buy a lottery ticket before I'd put any money into this game before its 1.0 release. 100% pay to win, sad.
 
So in short, this game... after all the criticism it's endured, is now changing engines or has it already happened a long time ago?

They've done it over the last twelve months on the backers dime and hid it from the backers throughout, only telling them when they were done by burying the news on Xmas eve just before they shut down the studio for two weeks.

Red flags all over this project. If they misled them for 12 months what else are they lying about?
 
Finally got my HOTAS set up properly. About 100 keys all customized.

Flight model feels really bad in this game for some reason with the HOTAS. Like leaps and bounds behind Elite Dangerous. I need to try it with a controller to see if that feels better.
 
Okay, so I just tried it (PU only):
  • Same shitty controls.
  • Same shitty performance.
  • Same shitty interactions.
Uninstalling this garbage. Someday I will be able to climb the ladder of my ship and not end up in the roof, I swear.

You sure you tried it? The entire movement system has been changed, in ships and on foot.

Finally got my HOTAS set up properly. About 100 keys all customized.

Flight model feels really bad in this game for some reason with the HOTAS. Like leaps and bounds behind Elite Dangerous. I need to try it with a controller to see if that feels better.

Yeah this his repeatedly been an issue for me. The HOTAS just doesn't work on a game where you can turn this fast.
 

atpbx

Member
Come to think of it, I'm surprised no one figured it out via data mining along the way. This came out of nowhere.


You would think the the shitlord and his "sources" and "inside agent" would of told us about this some months ago considering CIG have been working on it for months.
 
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