Star Citizen drama on the internet – who’d have seen that coming, right? If you run a search for Star Citizen drama just on the current version of Massively OP, you’ll find piles of threads that qualify, all the way back to the 2015 “long troll” mess.
But the current drama brewing on Reddit isn’t about the Crytek lawsuit, endless alpha delays, subber perks, feature creep, refunds, or ridiculous whaling. Nope. It’s about losing hope. Right now, a massive thread has racked up 1500 upvotes from the Star Citizen Reddit community, as players weigh in on a long concern post from a fellow backer with $4500 in the game.
Criticizing both CIG for turning a “neat little space sim with multiplayer coop missions” into an “MMO [he] didn’t ask for” and the community for letting CIG get away with it, Redditor firefly212 (as reposted by Sean_Murray_ [but not that Sean Murray]) writes that he has MS and his “body gets a little worse with each passing year,” so it’s doubly frustrating that the game is taking so long.
“There’s also a degree of denialism in the defense of CIG’s frankly shady marketing tactics… they say stuff [about the ship sale LTI grace period] then just kind of dance around it with creative wording… then they move on to [a totally new LTI plan] and play semantic games with what a ‘pledge’ is. Even for the Q&A’s, where we get hypothetical transparency, to Q&A’s frequently don’t match the product like the uniquely Aegis Starfarer Gemini. […] Add onto that a complete lack of transparent financials, TOS that lock people into arbitration that costs two hundred bucks to file for, and the fact CIG/RSI haven’t voluntarily issued a refund since january, and what you’ve got is a bunch of pissed off people who feel like they’ve been conned, but CIG won’t let them just have refunds and go away. There’s even more denialism when it comes to the actual development process itself… you get attacked vitriolically if you point out that CIG seem to have an inability to feature lock anything, or that when you say something is ‘right around the corner’ in 2016, people may be frustrated when it doesn’t come in 2017, and you can’t even put out a roadmap to it in 2018, for fear of accidentally showing backers just how far away SQ42 still is from done. I’ll grant you that I manage AI/ML/HL projects, not gaming things, but if I missed my stakeholder facing goals as consistently as CIG/RSI do, I’d be fired, and rightly so.”
1200 comments later and the community is alternately nodding along in agreement or roasting the OP, basically airing the game’s biggest problems (chiefly, development progress and refund hassles) in an open forum.
“The game may be brilliant eventually, and I get why so many of you want it to happen, but I don’t see why I have to be dragged along in this adventure that’s nothing like what I originally signed up for,” he concludes. “I don’t hate the backers, or the game, but I do want off this crazy ride.”
