Star Citizen : Arena Commander (DFM) Release Date Confirmed

so in your hypothetical situation where he doesnt have other friends to help him pilot the constellation he is at a disadvantage and therefor it isnt pay to win.... ok... well then he is also a complete dumb **** for buying a ship that requires other people to fly successfully, and i think most people would realize that before dropping 200 dollars or whatever it is.

on the flip side....in my hypothetical situation where he DOES have other friends, it is pay to win. he didnt have to farm for the money, he didnt have to spend the time to get a better ship, he just plopped down cash and boom, instant win.

so in your situation the guy is an idiot... and in my situation it is pay to win. why does either of those sound good to you?

But the same exact ship can be bought in-game for UEE credits. So what's really the issue here? The ship is not unobtainable. So that pretty much throws this nonsense about pay to win out the window.

Unless you're just acting like a petulant child for the hell of it, I think you're upset that you don't have a group of friends who are going to be able to operate a Constellation and you're using this "pay to win" excuse to somehow justify your attitude towards the game and your lack of being able to play it in a desirable way.

to be fair, you started the hostility towards him. as I pointed out and caused a downward spiral.

Its not so much the ship part. its the early adopters that got lifetime free insurance... hell the 3-6 month insurance is bad enough...... other than ok replacement attachment costs... which no doubt will be quite abit... they can stiill freely trash that ship over and over again with no additional costs... no matter what ship it is providing they bought it.

That is pay to win. its an unfair advantage caused by unachievable cash ploughing. having ship advantages on launch day IS pay to win.... most pay2win games you CAN achieve what you buy... just takes forever... unless... you... pay... 2 ... win.

Are we so sure these buyable options won't make it into launch?

to deny it is pay2win ... is crazy mate.... get your head out of the clouds.

Your logic makes no sense, its like saying Buying china gold is not pay2win because you could earn that gold ingame..... its completely besides the point, YOU DIDNT EARN IT.

No, they can't trash the ship over and over again with no additional costs. As I've already said, only the HULL has life-time insurance. That leaves, weapons, shields, engines, thrusters and other pieces of equipment that would still either need to be insured in order to be replaced, or bought anew.

That is the very definition of NOT pay to win.

What ship advantages? The fact that you don't need to pay for hull insurance isn't that big of a deal. Someone who is a better pilot and doesn't have LTI will always do better than someone who is a crummy pilot and has LTI.

This isn't an RPG. There are no skills. Your ship is your skill. And if you're a decent pilot, or a decent smuggler, or a good salvager, or a good bounty hunter, the fact that your ship doesn't have LTI won't mean a damn thing.

Get your head out of your ass and stop criticizing a game when apparently you don't even know enough of the specifics to come to an informed opinion. You and Cylon are acting like children. You're letting one very small facet of the game, a facet that you aren't even truly informed of, give you a negative opinion of the whole. So what, you have to earn some more credits than me in order to get to the same base that I'm at. Tough shit. Do a couple more missions. Bam, problem solved. The game isn't meant to be equal outcome. Equal opportunity is the name of the game and the fact that some of my ships have LTI doesn't change the fact that you can do the same exact things that I can.

and i think you are just coming up with bullshit hypotheticals to make yourself sound right when you arent....

P2W does not have to mean you can spend money and get something that someone playing the game cannot get. it just means that you can spend money to obtain an unfair advantage.

acquiring a ship FAR sooner than anyone playing the game possibly could, combined with lifetime insurance, giving you not only an unbalanced monetary advantage but an unbalanced time AND power advantage.... is P2W.... it just is. im sorry that your fanboy mind cannot wrap itself around that concept, but i suppose that is your failing and not ours.

Got it, you are just upset because some people will be able to play in a way that you can't. We could have wasted so much less time if you had just been honest from the get-go.

apparently fanboys think they are mind readers now too. thats special.

Seeing as how you aren't trying to refute it, I don't know what's left to think. You've been shown the system isn't pay to win. What else is left?

you havent shown me anything, all you have done is back up that is it pay to win by confirming exactly what birdy and i are saying in your own words.

you literally have not told me a single thing i did not already know.

skip to 4:59.

also you guys are aware that this game will have a single player campaign and private servers right?

@lawlessx: That confirms one of the points I was going to make, that a larger ship doesn't automatically mean complete superiority because individual ships play different roles.

Regardless, all of this is just conjecture at this point. In spite of what the video says, it's entirely possible that the more expensive ships will give the player who purchases/earns them an unconditional advantage. It's also possible that the game is more balanced than that. I remember when Dark Souls 2 was coming out, people flipped out when they found out that PvP invasions could happen even when you were hollowed. In Dark Souls 1, this could only happen if you were playing as human. This gave the player a way to "opt out" of being invaded by PvP players since the multiplayer mode is "always on" in that game. In reality, when the game came out it turned out that the PvP matchmaking system was much more fair than this as it gives you multiple ways you can block invasions and the only areas where you are highly likely to be invaded are a few specific points in the game world.

-Byshop

what he is saying is complete nonsense

he is posing hypothetical situations and not addressing the actual issue... that you can acquire better ships for real money with no required time investment. this means you dont have to spend the time farming the money, or mats, or whatever and can just skip all that and get an advanced ship instantly. meanwhile, all the other players that dont have hundreds of dollars to drop on a single ship have to spend large amounts of time farming resources to acquire that same ship, and are at a distinct disadvantage vs that other player.

OFCOURSE there are going to be instances where a whole bunch of fighters will get together and take down a corvette. HOWEVER, it required that player to find a bunch of buddies to do that because he wouldnt be able to on his own thanks to not spending a bunch of money, whereas the corvette player just had to plop down cash and forced that escalation with no time investment of his own. and what is to stop the corvette player from calling his other pay to win buddies with corvettes and matching strength? nothing. because with real cash you can just skip the gameplay and immediately escalate power.

if they were going to follow this model, there should have been some sort of RPG mechanic ala EVE Online or something, where it took you time to learn how to pilot the next class of ship. this would have alleviated the power rush that is going to happen when the game first comes out, where bands of players that dropped hundreds or thousands of dollars on this game get together with ships so vastly more powerful than the starter ships that everyone who just wants to play the game gets.... and controlling everything. atleast then they would have had to play the game, "skill up", and give the other players the ability to match power if they were capable. they would still get their ship for no ingame cost thus saving them the time it takes to farm the resources to acquire the ship... but other players would have had the opportunity to purchase those ships with ingame credits at the same time, avoiding a power escalation.

it is just going to devolve into faction A has X number of these ships, and faction B has X number of those ships, so faction A says **** YOU GUYS and a bunch of people go out and drop real money on higher tier ships, thus increasing their combat/trading/whatever potential instantly.

as it stands, the game is pay to win at its very core. it just is. you cannot grant greater power in exchange for real money in a game that pits players against eachother.

@cyloninside: You are also posing a hypothetical situation since you have no idea how the game will play. Yes, on paper what you're saying could be a serious problem but until the game comes out we have no idea if it'll be a real issue of if the "rock/paper/scissors" effect will have a greater influence.

He does raise a very valid point in the video, though, in that the game is a very open space sim. "Win" does not necessarily mean "kill every other player you encounter" and assuming that it is would be taking a very narrow view of what is a very open and complex game. I mean hell, multiplayer at all is -optional- anyway.

See my comment about Dark Souls 2. One of the features they implemented scared everyone that the game would be imbalanced, but I actually find hostile invasions to be -less- of a problem in this game than in the previous because of the other aspects of the game balance.

There's just too much that we don't know yet. A few things that we do know that look as though they may help:

• Only really early backers get lifetime insurance on their ships (late 2012). Anyone after that gets finite insurance (including me).
• That insurance is only on the ship itself.
• The insurance doesn't pay out everwhere (i.e. risk systems above a 5), so that early backer ship or that ship that someone buys through a microtransaction can be lost. Imagine the fun satisfaction of depriving someone of a ship that they paid real money for. Hell, you can even steal ships and there's this whole in-game consequence system around dealing with "hot" ships.
• You still have to arm, fuel, supply, etc the ship you get.
• Even if the monetization model is completely fucked out of the gate, that doesn't even guarantee that the game will be ruined. Diablo 3 had a completely hosed loot/auction house model and that didn't stop them from eventually fixing it.

But of course, this is all guesswork. All of the above bullets are based on FAQs and real data about the game, but who knows. Anything could change in the next year or so until the game comes out. I agree that the microtransaction model is a bit of a concern and with the exception of some backer rewards I would prefer to see it removed from the game completely, but I'm not going to assume that the game is ruined because it's way too early to say something like that.

However, what I'm -not- going to do is completely write off the most ambitious open universe space combat sim I have ever seen that's created by the guy who basically invented the genre just because I see a feature that I may not like, particularly a year out from the game's release date.

-Byshop

Ok ... are you that dense? I even said in my original post "Besides attachment costs" e.g attachments to the hull.... its like talking to a child. Those hulls for the more expensive ships cost a fortune.... I can't believe you think saving all that money per death is not a payed advantage... you are that far down the fanboy goggles you mayaswell be up their asses.

Oh... and I am a backer, and quite clearly as informed as you. so again, nowhere in the forum rules does it state people can't be critical.... you just jumped on the guy for pointing out that the dog fighting demonstration was indeed quite a failure.... tell me how it even looks better (in terms of gameplay) than elite dangerous a project far further along and promises more features.

Graphics? yup thats it atm. people threw millions at a project that could be achieved for far less, because they could pay for advantages while getting the game done.

meanwhile... it wont release until 2016 I BET.

GD Chris is such a boss!

For those complaining about quality I really wouldn't worry about it. Until the PAX East demo the team had been reorganizing pretty much every aspect of their development. It's been two months since then and they've been working non stop with a very large team on the basics of the game.

The PAX demo was also not the build they intended on showing off. They had a more polished version that was connected to their servers in Boston (they weren't on the cloud yet) but their servers went down the day of due to technical issues so they decided to use an experimental branch on their Austin servers. As you can guess that didn't go well.

That's no longer an issue. They have everything in a cloud so servers aren't region based and this gives them the flexibility to increase or decrease the amount of server space they need dynamically. Each matchmaking and private game spins off a new instanced server on the cloud. It's matchmaking using dedicated servers. It's pretty clever. The master server ties them all together but the cloud servers are spun off in the "best fit" region. This means if a bunch of Australians fire up a game the server won't be hosted on the East Coast of the USA but rather in Australia or the West Coast.

In the past two months they've also updated their entire source code repository so they can streamline their updating process internally. Now all of the studios are working on the same content rather than being isolated from each other. Furthermore they updated the CryEngine to CryEngine 3.6 which is the lastest build Crytek offers.

I wouldn't worry about quality. Now that they've got all of their studios up and running and all of the technical hurdles of working on a single game with studios all over the world figured out (for the most part), content is going to flow.

The game is finally exiting the first phase of pre-development. Usually that is done with a much smaller team. They build prototypes (hanger module, dogfighting module) as well as basically outline all of the game's features and solve all of the philosophical "how are we going to do that" problems. Once they have that they enter full development where all of these features start getting worked on in parallel between all of the various teams.

Once Arena Commander is out the content will start flowing much more quickly and to higher quality. Stuff like how they were going to model ship damage, the process it takes to build a ship, how they are going to handle hangers, developing the underlying systems for the hangers, and developing the entire MMO model which connects everything together are all done now. Those early stages are the hardest and must unpredictable but they are nearing completion. The next step is to start heavy development with the entire team. No more backpedaling and making big changes to systems.

It's taken a lot longer than anybody wanted but it should pay off. Unlike other games in the genre that people keep comparing it too, Star Citizen didn't have any real solid work done on it this year. All of the stuff in 2012 and throughout most of last year was prototypes that had to be rebuilt. Elite Dangrous already had a few years of solid development on the core of their game by the time the kickstarter hit. It was in a better situation and thus it was able to get to a playable state quicker. They basically had to rebuilt everything in Star Citizen from scratch after they realized the CryEngine needed a whole new MMO backend, the renderer needed to be upgraded,

Just look how much has changed since 2012:

So chill out.

Well, seeing as you've already proven your reading comprehension skills are shit I'm not sure I can take your statements seriously.

And insurance for the hulls doesn't cost a fortune. So, again, what the **** is your issue? So you'll have to make a few hundred extra credits more than someone else. Big fucking deal. Definitely cause to trash a game over.

You quite clearly are not as informed as me. Else you wouldn't be making such ado over nothing. Elite Dangerous has been in production much longer than Star Citizen. It's not a hard concept to grasp. Here, let me put in five year old terms that you can understand: I have been working on a pretty little picture longer than you. You just started on your picture. Obviously I'm going to be further along than you.

Here's some life advice: Don't gamble. You're bad at it.

wow....

here is some life advice for you:

dont act so sanctimonious... you arent that eliquent or convincing. lol.

anyone that says "you quite clearly are not as *insert descriptor* as me" on a forum instantly loses all credibility.

Geminon preaching credibility? What next? Lucifer preaching love and kindness?

Look, its pay2win, its an economic advantage based on paying real money over time spent in the game, ALL of the rewards for backers are paying for advantages.

There is no denying it, it is what it is. them milking with advantages.

Its not trashing the game, its critising, take the b*astard fan goggles off and accept it.

I am looking foward to Arena Commander, if the bloody thing has had some sort of optimisation yet. but I am well within my rights to criticise something I backed.

Pay2win end of story.

Coming from one of the biggest forum trolls around this doesn't mean much.

It's not pay to win. An Aurora has no inherent advantage over a Hornet. It's all determined by the pilot's skill. Every single reward given to the backer isn't something that is going to drastically change the game in their favor. That would be absurd. Every single one of these items can be purchased in-game at a reasonable.

I don't see how this can be pay2win when there is no such thing as the "best" ship. each ship will have pros and cons so a 1v1 battle will rely on a players skill in flying.

What other advantages are backers givin? i don't see any exclusive ships or weapons givin

THat is true in theory. Realistically however, some ships will just be plain better than others, simply due to the fact that balancing is not an easy thing to do. That said we don't know how everything will pan out yet, the devs could have made some very intelligent design choices to make sure that the whole lifetime insurance thing may just be a convenience at best. Let's not jump to conclusions here, wait and see.

so far, you have done more "trolling" in just this thread than i have supposedly done in 2 weeks... soooo....

that is not really true... in a 1v1 fght, a fully crewed corvette should utterly stomp a fighter. i guess if that fighter is helmed by the -best- of the best... then ok, sure, there is a possibility, but im guessing a mediocre corvette crew could quite easily best a good fighter pilot just by shear firepower alone.

I doubt that. ;)

Perhaps this could happen, but you should post more than what seems to be a supposition to back this claim. Do you have any link to any video or any thread made by a user of that game?

i dont need to satisfy anything you ask for gelugon, considering literally everything you post is with the intent of simply being contrary. so thanks but no. i dont see you asking anyone else to post "proof" to back up their claims, so you are simply just singling out my statements because of your twisted little forum stalking game that you have going with me and several other users on this forum.

its getting perverse gelugon. knock it off.

Aren't you getting rather paranoid? ;)

With that said, I have to say that I have read the posts of "anyone else" here, and I personally am satisfied by the context of their statements and elaboration. I am even satisfied with some of yours.

Yet your latest post does not. Like I have said earlier, you were making what seems to be conjectures about a corvette versus fighter one-on-one duel.

Conjectures are not convincing.

and....are we supposed to care if you are satisfied or not?

no.

its not paranoia when its a fact. you seem to think you are being ~sooooo~ sneaky, but it is blatantly transparent. get better a subterfuge ;)

Well, if you don't want to elaborate, then don't expect everyone else to agree with your points on Star Citizen. :/

Oh, "fact" indeed, when you haven't even pointing how I am somehow "forum-stalking" (whatever this means beyond some Internet lingo).

Really, you are paranoid.

no, i just dont care to satisfy your little ego fantasy trip that i should have to provide you with enough evidence that you believe me.

and really... you are full of shit.

So says you who make conjectures.

Also, really, you are going to resort to that retort? This is not the first time that you have said that to whoever your detractors are, and if you haven't noticed already, it isn't shutting them up.

Cylon and Geminon should get together and make little troll babies. Seriously GS, I got a warning for bullshit the other day and these clowns are allowed to bully themselves around this forum at will. This site has become a joke.

if this is what your posts look like normally... which they do... i dont think you have much ground to stand on either :S

perhaps you should look at your own posting habits to understand why others feel the need to be an asshole to you. seeing as most of what i see posted is "THIS IS MY OPINION, AND MY OPINION IS FACT. **** YALL THAT DONT AGREE"... i think you should have your answer.

and if you havent noticed.... i STILL really dont care what you think. lol. i means its always the same broken record with you gelugon "blah blah blah IMMA TRY SOUND SMURT.... blah blah blah.... HURRR PROOF PLZ.... blah blah blah..... I SPEND MORE TIME POINTING OUT STUPID SHIT THAN ACTUALLY MAKING A POINT...."

i dont really know what you get out of it. every time you post in a comments section of an article it is followed by a string of like 15 people telling you to **** off.

That's yet another conjecture - unless you can cite one example of such an occurrence, of course. ;)

Also, you are one to talk about others' posting habits when you have some ugly ones yourself, e.g. switching from caps to regular and back again, and, of course, a lot of exaggerations.

gelugon... let me just stop you right there, because you arent even using the word conjecture correctly.

a conjecture is a statement based on incomplete information.... not a statement based on unproven information. please choose a new word to try to sound intelligent with. kthxbai ;)

Ah, you are making a digression. ;)

actually, im not... the definition of a digression is a temporary departure from the main subject in speech or writing.... since you have made this into an argument regarding the content of statements, rather than the topic of statements... it is not a digression at all to point out that the content of your statements continue utilize words completely incorrectly. shall we continue this English lesson? ;)

@Geminon:

You are digressing again. XD

i feel like you dont have a real grasp on anything you actually say....

@Geminon:

I am not going to get into some off-topic semantic discussion. ;)

too late?

@Geminon:

"Too late" at what, and how? ;)

considering that is all you could come back with...i think at this point even you know precisely how annoying you are.

my work is done here.

@Geminon:

Good riddance to you then.

This thread has gone downhill fast. I'm out.

-Byshop

@Byshop said:

This thread has gone downhill fast. I'm out.

-Byshop

seriously what the hell just happened?