Star Citizen Haters, Trolls and Drama Llamas are Plentiful
Previous articles have mentioned the very high amounts of hate towards Star Citizen since the beginning of this website. One of the reasons this site was created was to help dismiss some of the lies that circulated in the community at the time about Star Citizen, many of which have since been fully debunked (see Star Citizen Myths article).
In the past decade, Star Citizen has gone from a myth about a game that could not be developed to what it is today: a high-fidelity, real-time combat, MMORPG with space sim elements and no loading screens besides initial load. Games that have released since Star Citizen's inception continue to prove that this is the right way as recent releases have shown that what CIG is trying to do with Star Citizen really is cutting edge.
Star Citizen's accomplishments have not only not silenced the haters but the whining, trolling and hating of the game and company senselessly continue. It is as though people have become addicted to a Star Citizen hate fetish. The community has been successfully tricked by trolls, whiners and haters to gather their pitchforks and bash the game incessantly.
Bizzare levels of bashing CIG from within and without the community
It is not enough that the Star Citizen community is flooded with external trolls trying to derail the game's development, much of the community seems to be dedicated to the same cause. With this in mind, let's review the current state of affairs and try to determine where the problem is. Here is a rough list of the people trying to damage Star Citizen's development and perhaps why:
- Competitors hiring trolls to destroy the project (competition)
- Envious gamers
- Hardened embittered backers
- Content creators making money on hate and drama
- Regular old internet trolls
The Core Problem? - Lack of Understanding
"Star Citizen Intel Since 2015" has been the slogan of SCFOCUS.ORG since inception. That is what this org does, we gather intel on the game, gameplay and strategy (and we have been doing this a long time). Long enough to notice a clear trend in Star Citizen Hating. At the core of the issue lies people's inability to put things into perspective combined with the mass formation phenomenon. This is basically a way of being where people like to gather behind a cause whether it is right, in their own interest or even logical.
This problem will be broken down into the main misconceptions (lies) that are misleading backers and non-backers alike.
The two main problems confusing the community are:
- Lack of understanding of video game development cycles
- The false assumption that CIG is mismanaged
Understanding Game Development
As a Star Citizen backer (or potential backer), knowing how long Star Citizen and Squadron 42 will take to develop and release is an important concept to have a good understanding of. One of the main objectives with this website was to attempt to collate information and views on the development of both games. Resources to help our own org try to determine the progress of the games can be found here:
- Star Citizen Release Date Estimates - Game development logs about past and upcoming patches and estimates (guesses) about release dates
- Star Citizen & Squadron 42 Completion Estimates - Based on the original funding goals(Official) before this website was started.
In the last 12 months of Star Citizen some of the released features that have made it into backers hands include:
- Persistent Entity Streaming
- Inventory and loot
- Medical and healing gameplay
- Arena Commander Rework
- Misc Hull C
- Tractor Beam (Traversal, items, cargo...)
- Selling
- Crash recovery
- Multi crew mining and salvaging
And yet the community (ourselves included) have said that very little progress has been made when compared with the main features we are expecting.
So what is going on with development? It has been over 10 years of development yet the games have no release dates.
Progress and Development
What is going on with development is that CIG is trying to make three games at the same time with a new gaming studio they have had to grow and build. We have watched as the game has grown from nothing but hype all the way to Alpha 3.20. Without Star Citizen, the other games in this genre would be your only options. We backed Star Citizen because CIG was attempting something massive and different - not because we wanted just one more space game on the market.
Recent releases have shown that CIG is on the right path. Recent Star Citizen updates have shown that the original vision is finished and playable. Congratulations CIG and well done. It has been a long road but savvy Star Citizen followers already noticed this year that the original concept is finished.
Star Citizen is Finished
Our org quietly celebrated this year the completion of Star Citizen's core mechanics during glorious Jumptown combined arms events and during other moments. While the community was busy crying about delays and mostly insignificant issues, they missed the main thing that occurred this year - The game became playable.
The thing is that even looking at our own Playability reports it would not be possible to determine that Star Citizen core features finished this year. Yet this is precisely what happened as other knowledgeable content creators who play the game have noticed as well.
What changed this year? Why do you claim Star Citizen's original vision is complete?
It was not one particular thing that made Star Citizen a fully playable experience. It was a combination of released features that made it and some stability improvements along with optimizations that led to better frame rates. Player counts went from 50 to somewhere under 200 (usually 100+) depending on server loads. The gameplay loops were finished so that players can now:
- Mine
- Cargo trade
- Salvage
- Quest
- Pirate other players
- Bounty Hunt
- Race
The basics of combat are also in where players can:
- First Person Shooter combat
- Flight-sim combat
- Combined arms combat (mixed ground & air)
- Man turrets (multicrew)
- Large battles
There is now a large variety of weapon & component choices where combat is truly exhilarating. A lot of fun can be had with movie-like moments that have had our org members sometimes proclaiming:
"The crazy bastard did it."
While we expect it will be many months before the community and general gaming public even realize this has happened, what is on display is that there is a disconnect between what is currently playable and the assumption spread throughout that Star Citizen has nothing playable or competitive. In game events like Jumptown and community events held by groups like XGR Racing (applause) prove that there is a lot in the game already and that people claiming there's no game to be played are clueless pitchfork agitators rallying behind the wrong cause.
Summarizing Progress
In summary: Progress is slow but fast progress was never promised. What was promised (and what we backed) was quality over time. Time during this development has shown that the progress is real and the quality also. While whiners will continue to proclaim that there's very little progress and focus on the small issues before their eyes, the rest of us will observe Star Citizen's development reaching the end of Alpha with Early Beta closing in.
Content is a lot easier to add to the game than core mechanics. Star Citizen has been content starved for along time and probably explains why a lot of content creators focus on the drama instead of the game. While we do not expect these content creators to change their formed ways, we do expect game-related content will start to grow in comparison.
The CIG is Mismanaged Myth
The CIG is Badly Managed Myth is something we have been reporting about since 2019. Even though far inferior AAA games have continued to release over the last years (including 2023), the community still clings onto this myth.
Let's quickly review without going into too much detail why bad management is a myth. CIG has already achieved:
- Grown from a dozen to a studio of over a thousand (circa 1200 employees)
- Development from nothing to play to a game with competitions with the British Army and machinima creation
- CIG really did make a high fidelity, fps, flight-sim, MMORPG that you can playtest today
- CIG is developing 3 games at once (Star Citizen, Squadron 42 and Arena Commander)
- Over $600M (Star Citizen) + unknown millions with Squadron 42 of funding
- Over 10 years of growth and still going
Yet people within the community still claim (constantly) that CIG is mismanaged. Do people know what mismanaged companies actually look like?
I suppose if you totally ignore reality, other games that have failed to release or released but failed to impress, only then you could get away with spreading such myths.
The Moral of the Story
The strange phenomenon of bashing a game you want developed is real and permeates the community to some extent. Players will ask for the game's development to speed up or complain about how long it is taking (which is the same thing). Understanding how long it takes to build things is difficult. Ignoring the real world examples of things taking longer than people expected is not difficult, it is lazy.
Additionally, spending resources and time hating a game you want to see finished, or bringing out pitchforks when there are unforeseen delays is counterproductive as well as annoying.
Final Words
This is probably not the last time we will visit the strange phenomenon of Star Citizen Hate. Scam! cries have been getting louder as the game approaches completion and people try even harder than in the past to kill this project. There was another game that released this year that had record numbers of posts and comments about how it was going to kill Star Citizen and finally prove how misguided and mismanaged this project is. - It didn't happen. Instead, a few more people realized what is actually going on.