u/Another___World

I feel like everyone already agreed that the looting part is so unrewarding that the only valuable container on the map is the enemy bodybag.

That's actually really true, I think. And it makes the game priotitize PVP much more than the actual looting. I believe the only problem here is that the queuing up just to die is so obnoxious that nobody wants to get launched into another match after a losestreak, especially a rookie. And I have a silly solution, that might satisfy the larger spectrum of the playerbase.

Just to clarify, I'm talking about SALVAGE ONLY here.

I sincerely think that adding unlimited grey loot safepocket could fix a large part of the game. TO insentivize staying on the map it should X2/X3 it's yield on exfil, so people don't just jump out of the shell with free kit when they have a chance, but still get meaningful progression.

Green loot should be exfillable with dcons. Blue loot should we should be able to put inside extraction beacons, so it gets teleported to the vault without you exfilling with it.

There is so much of the shit I just don't care to loot of a dead player, which would make the game playable and progressable for the silent majority, making it bearable to play this game.

I've pledged my Cutter a year and a half ago, and there is so much genuine love I have for the game. The experience is unparalleled; the first 20 hours I was just straight-up mesmerized by the universe, the deep gameplay mechanics, etc. It's funny that it's true that the game is riddled with bugs, but the amount of enjoyment I got and still do get just completely overrides the frustrations.

I could talk for hours about the Cutter alone, especially in the red paint. There is so much inexplicable vibe going on with that space Scooby-Doo van that I almost felt myself working my way up from the harsh working conditions of Hurston up to a fleet I earned just by playing (I have all Connies, 2 PYAM Corsairs and Cuttys, Buccy, and much more), which is insane in itself (I've been told it's P2W and a huge grind). What inspired me the most is the same thing I fell in love with in sci-fi since my childhood: absolute, blinding freedom.

Of course, there are bugs. A lot of them, in fact. But there simply isn't anything that comes close to what SC can offer both in terms of actual gameplay and brave vision. When I started playing and researching SC, it's crazy to me how much they achieved with relatively little resources. Literally every game, for the most part, is doing the same thing over and over, but CIG decided to make something on another tech level. It's crazy how much the engine does and that I can experience this just for 40 bucks, which right now is in the price range of a mid-tier game.

Unfortunately, due to my gaming PC's death I can't play the game right now, but I still browse Reddit sometimes. I almost instantly joined the SC Reddit when it was still more or less sane when I started playing, and there were quite a lot of people discussing the actual gameplay. But now... Oh man... I almost feel like these people are getting stung by someone to become so malicious. It's crazy how much active, vile hate there is for the game, for the founder, for the team. I'm at a loss for words how much they twist everything to come to a conclusion that CIG is the devil incarnate.

Thanks for existing, LowSodiumStarCitizen. I really, really needed this breath of fresh air to stay sane, because I almost psyopped myself into thinking Star Citizen is an unplayable, worthless game.

https://preview.redd.it/pjgjuqezm9nh1.png?width=2396&format=png&auto=webp&s=a90a5e1dc251397f2c122ef231c6f28adb418761

We all know that The Anomaly messes with spacetime and the time part is especially interesting. I feel like the VCOL codex entries make the most sense when it comes to the theoretical background behind anomaly's presense.

First of all, it looks like Cole has relatively amazing amount of willpower and mind clarity in the anomaly. I feel like it's somehow linked to his wirdlystructured inner monologue. He keeps reassigning names to the ordinary objects around him. Perhaps, anomaly works by obscuring the semantics of objects and his thoughts negate this effect somehow. Maybe, he is trying to breach the semantic blockade, which doesn't let "thinking objects" as he put it himself to name or perceive anomaly correctly. It's quite evident with the Dr. Clarissa Song case, because "Telmyces Mosaica" is elusive in ways that are inexplicable.

The first entry is very telling. He enters the Anomaly and his biomonitor already shows that he's deceased. This is the first concrete reference to the spacetime warp that the Anomaly produces.

I haven't found a distinct story in the second entry, but it seems to be Cole trying, again, to tell a metaphor about the anomaly to research it without assigning direct names to the effects to obscure his own thinking process from the semantic blockade.

The third one is a major shift: he almost directly tells what The Anomaly is all about: it's a reliquary for some time of a being. Even more: the anomaly is a PUMP and Cole is a leef, which went through a broken filter and is flopping in a pipe bend.

This is extremely interesting already:
So, what is the closest semantic projection of the "PUMP" onto the physical property of The Anomaly? It's the timeline! It "PUMPS" time through the pipes and the pipe geometry is the space, but the water is time. What basically happens is that The Anomaly is a type of 4-dimensional prison, which works by building a 4-dimensional cage, which doesn't work as a space barrier, but as a spacetime barrier.
And here's the revelation: this is a quantum effect. The 4-dimensional prison doesn't have to avoid the criminal's partner getting physically close to the prisoner. It can twist the wavefunction of the planet in a way that can look like magic: things appearing out of nothing, plants communicating with birds, sending electromagnetic waves straight into person's brain, etc. It doesn't have to be subtle in it's "magical" properties, if it has the spacetime AS A SINGLE CONCEPT to manipulate. Here we can talk about Sph't as beings, capable of perceiving matter, time and information as a singular, united concept, but I believe it's a topic for a whole new research at this point.

So why is Cole a leef? He went into the Anomaly, but broke the filter. Which means that The Anomaly as a 4-d prison is encoded, but the encoding can be broken by advanced semantics. In a sense, Cole's semantic evasion can be similar to what "Telmyces Mosaica" has done to the colony: he doesn't let The Anomaly perceive him, or at least perceive him as a threat. Maybe there are even deeper ties from Cole to "Telmyces Mosaica" than I already told.

In simplier terms, Cole has obscured his thinking and his presense from The Anomaly, which is a 4d prison encoded by (probably Jjaro) to pump and filter time through itself to avoid the unnamed being(probably W'rkncacnter) from escaping. It does it by twisting the wavefunction of the planet in ways that can be seen as magic, but in reality are just extremely high level of quantum information manipulation.

He closes this entry with a story about a boy, who was killed by a song. The boy dreamed of stars(he's talking about Marathon project). The Anomaly is the song.

The Star is W'rkncacnter
The Dream is the collective dream that people have been experiencing
The Song is The Anomaly.
The song is the code, which is being sang to the boy right now. But it has already killed him, because it encodes the time in a way to prevent an event in 4-d space, irrelevant of time.

The fourth entry tells about people "unbuying" the ground, which served "him"(W'rkncacnter) as the prison. It obviously points to the Perimeter logs, where the research specialists talks about the strange signals from the core of the planet, which launched the cascade of events leading to the colony's demise.

He talks about being the instruments of "it" (W'rkncacnter), but then abruptly regains clarity and notices something: he seems agitated that unnamed "them"(probably, us) are real and can hear him.

The final, fifth entry is breaking the fourth wall inside his cage: he talks directly to us. And it's the voice of W'rkncacnter: he asks us(the player) to destroy "what has to be destroyed", which might be his cage.

So these logs in my opinion clear out what happened very clearly: W'rkncacnter was able to breach the semantic blockade built around him by the failing prison, The Anomaly. Even though The Anomaly succeeded in keeping W'rkncacnter away by killing the colony, he corrupted Durandal to broadcast human forces back into the system to complete the destruction of his cage by inviting the reckless corporations.

The funny thing is, The Anomaly, Telmyces Mosaica, UESC and The Compiler may largely be the actual good guys of the universe, because they keep The Prison hidden and intact, but everyone, who tries to help us to ravage the planet is an active puppet of W'rkncacnter, who needs to break free before destroying the universe.

Thanks for reading through this obscure piece of content, LMAO. Peace.

While it's insanely restrictive for the new players, the experienced player feel like it doesn't even exist. The limited stacks and absolute cheapness of anything in the game is what makes it meaningless for the rich while the newer player will spend his entire wealth to buy enough heals to just restore his health after 1 gunfight.

With the unforgiving nature of this game the CBT experience of assembling a new kit is insufferable coupled with queue times that keep getting longer. This friction is killing the dynamic nature of the game. Please, give us loadouts for the love of God

This is coming from a fellow blast haver.

It's crazy how even mildly critical or controversial takes will get hammered by all kinda of fallacies and downvotes. These people genuinely can't comprehend an opinion, which isn't an echo of the "common truth" delusions they have set up around their community.

There isn't a chance for any type of discussion outside of their set of common topics like whining about a shell or a weapon.

While recon was still buffed very much, there is a borderline cheating tech for thief with the visor seeing people through smoke. I've started playing thief recentrly and it has been a blast! You take 6 smoke with you and energy amps. Not only you have a fucking FPV scouting drone, but you also throw smokes at people when in danger or if you want to push and it's just free thermals on a short cooldown.

This specific interaction has to be nerfed somehow. I feel cheap doing this to people, who have no idea how they die in their top gear. Almost like hacks. I know that sigjams do disable this ability, but the worst case scenario is that you don't see a person who can't see you either.

Noob question. If I eqip knife fight, which stacks knife damage, is it possible to go beyond 100 with melee damage on top stacks or is it worthless?

Lost my stuff by trying to rejoin the game, which crashed me to main menu 3 times. When I finally was let it, instadeath by bots. No refunds in mail. So I guess, I never see my purple kit and my key, right? Or can I make a support ticket like Eve online.

It's funny, because I haven't died in solos for about 20 runs in a row and now it's due to a damn server. LMAO.

The template system is trash and is an artificial entry barrier to an already extremely risky endeavour. Most extraction shooters feature straightforward key purchase and some even provide safe pockets specifically for keys.

Templates offer needless friction in a system already too punishing.

I think that the community is right to point the finger at the management when discussing the shortcomings of this game. There really is a culture of half-assing very important subjects and leaving them in "T0" indefinitely.

However, this also should be addressed from the architectural and strategic point of view. The thing is, the game is really rather an architectural marvel and it's both it's strength and a huge liability.

CIG is a tech company and they pioneer not only experience, but also chart a new way in the gaming industry as a whole. When you compare SC to many other games, it turns out, CIG is the only company that's brave enough to move gaming out of the box it is confined by the current engine tech, which is commendable.

The problem doesn't arise in the final experience design, but rather edge case implementation. What's even worse is that the game has such a complex decisiontree geometry that the edges are EVERYWHERE. Such issues are elevator problems, hangar issues with retrieval, persistence, clipping, inventiry, etc. And these are systemic issues, I want to put emphasis on the systemic, architectural part of these errors. This is not something that is poorly envisioned, but poorly INTEGRATED. In conclusin, the diagnosis is that this is purely an AUTOMATED TESTING problem.

And here I arrvie to the root issue: testing framework. It seems like we are being the actual manual QA personnel and we do help CIG fix a lot of stuff. However, it's obvious that some issues that plague the engine are purely systemic, they KEEP HAPPENING with the same pre-requisites.

What the failure in integration and systemic testing does is that it annihilates performance of the apps on any load, because conflicting parts start behaving uncontrollably. This perfectly encapsulates THE SAME, ordinary, common problems with the game.

What we have right now is systemic collapse. The game has more content, but the experience is degrading.

I believe that the main focus of the dev team should be forming a task team, aimed at figuring this out. If we don't get the thing, the issues will keep overwhelming the team, making them focus on the SYMPTOMS, not the cause.

I really believe what I just said, I really hope to get some dev opinion on this matter.

Just to clarify, I have about 400 hours in this game already, I exfil almost every time I run and have a proper team.

I love the idea of this game. I love to the death some parts of it's execution.

Let's be real. When it works, it's the highest high ever, but can also be the lowest low.

I'd like to present 3 reasons why the game doesn't even show it's high to most newcomers.

First of all, new user experience is still insanely bad. This game should have proper tutorial, maybe even a tutorial map. It has to at least give a glimpse of core mechanics, lore(!!), how codex interacts with gameplay.

The key thing is, this wouldn't be required during the launch as much as it's crucial to have it now. On the launch days everyone(almost) had equal starting conditions. We all had no clue what we were doing and this protected newbies from getting their shit pushed in. This is a completely different situation at all. If Bungie wants ANY new players, they need to invest in teaching them the game in an elaborate manner.

Secondly, it's the crew balancing. This was fixable on launch, right now it will be much more difficult. It hurts my soul to see that the game still doesn't match your gear in trios. This is the primary reason I play solo, because if you need anything done like room keys, quests, events, you will spend 5x more times and deaths than solo. Solo is a completely different game, it's a true extraction shooter experience. Trios are glorified battle royale and they CAN WORK, just not with the matchmaking system we have in place right now. Try to imagine a newbie's experience picking that sweet key and putting on his best gear just to get with 2 guys in sponsored kits. This is amplified by the fact that we don't have any system to balance out crew fill contract objective difference. The game SHOULD give everyone on the team 100% of the item and rep rewards for the quest EVERY team member has and remove all "exfil" requirements. Right now the game design works in a way that you DONT GIVE A DAMN about other people's objectives in terms of in-game economy, it's just too much of a hassle for too little.

The last one is a little more intricate. It's the fact the game has dogshit loot. Even blue keys give you dogshit. As one redditor eloquently put it, there is NOTHING on the map you can find, which is better that other players' stuff. This is the core philosophy every player has to embrace playing this game. This isnt a problem by itself, but it clearly messes up the design of the experience.

Because right now it seems like there are two games: solos and trios. In solos you pick up dogshit and complete quests and in trios you kill people. NOBODY TELLs YOU THAT. Nobody tells you this is a multiplayer stealth game solo and a battle royale in trios. Extraction is somewhere in the heavens, I guess.

I think everyone loves this game for complexity, but the complexity requires the game to explain itself properly. Right now not only it doesn't, it throws you to the 400 level vultures to fight FOR FUCKING DOGSHIT.

I'm addicted to this game and I want to see it flourish, but I think everyone would agree that if we picked this game right now, almost nobody would give it a try or would quit.

I've started carying extra self revives and mercy kits, which I use to rez the runners I down. The first time I did it for fun, but then it hit me. Nobody wants me to do that, the game actively discourages me from saving others. Nothing makes me do that and that's what makes it so precious, so beautiful and sincere.

The only thing this world doesn't have a place is mercy. There is a certain log with Joy AI in the codex, which I won't spoil for you. But it's about the fact that everyone loses humanity in this world, but the feelings that keep us human are grief and mercy, because they seem to pierce the coldness of the world between our hearts and override the madness and death.

This was like a revelation. I feel so much better just going around reviving people. I've never been shot in the back, although I don't allow such moves. Game became SO much interesting.

It's really something like metal gear solid V. A stealth game, where you are better off saving people rather than killing them. But here there is no score or buff for it, you have to feel that yourself. And it works!

I'd like to thank Bungie for such an experience. I'm such a fan of the lore, but the gameplay.. Oh man, they couldn't deliver the lore's message without the brutal, cold, tactile experience of extraction shooters. When it's you, your stuff on the line, when nobody will forgive your mistakes.. Only then it's possible to FEEL something REAL. Not when you shoot mindless NPCs.

Just as anomaly pierced the perception matrix of the colonists to make them feel something that's not real, the game does the same thing. And your descend into madness begins with reminiscing anger, defeat and fear. But the way out is patience, joy and mercy.

Thank you for enduring my word salad sincerely, I hope you too as well find mercy and joy.

For the 350 hours I've spent on Marathon, most of it was more of a miserable addiction rather than actual fun, though my reptile brain could disagree.

But recently I've played crew fill with a couple of german dudes, who changed my whole perspective on the game completely.

The thing is, the game tried to fool you into believing it's something like Apex. Cool movement, lots of abilities, colorful environment.

But despite my disbelief, it should actually played the same as Tarkov.

The match I've had with those Germans went like this: first of all, we'd immediatly take high ground and spend next couple of minutes just listenting to the envitonment to identify immediate threats.

Then they started to move to their preferred POI through local highgrounds and cover, always covering each other. First it looked like a silly LARP, but we haven't lost once simply because they were always on alert, properly defended from most angles and ready to engage.

This might sound trivial, but it's actually not. If you played Insurgency series or even more obscure, X-COM2, you'd see where I'm going. Treat any threat as instant death and you'd simply exclude the option to lose.

I'm seeing a lot of people just running around carelessly even at 200+ level, but the game is about being smooth. This translates into gear economy really well. Smooth is fast. It's a marathon.

Am I the only one experiencing this? I haven't had a single crash since launch, but last patch I've already counter 3 and lost geat because of them. I wonder if it's the game's problem or just my PC. Has anyone experienced this since last patch?

I absolutely adore how there are sometimes at least 2 narratives hidden in almost every epidosde. I can even feel I'm getting smarter from watching it, lol.

I wanted to ask what are your favorite episodes, which feature multiple metanarrative? Mine is probably S8E4 "Silence".

I play in Central Asia and there is a complete catastrophe happening in Marathon right in front of my eyes. It was bearable at the beginning of S1, but it has been progressively worse every week.

Right now my queue times are 15min+. It's still bearable more of less. However this is not the worst offender. I am level 9, I've had 4 runs this season. My first run my team of new guys was wiped out by purple shields, the next I didn't find anyone and the last 2 we were wiped again. I loved this game to death in S1, but rght now I quit and I unfortunately know this probably won't get better.

I don't think this is sustainable at all. Waiting 20 minutes to get nuked by the only people in my region, who are obviously kitted out. I wasn't even angry much, just sad. I just don't see myself playing it. I really want to force myself to play, but I cannot find a reason why

I saw this happen to SA and didn't really believe it, but it was not exaggerated one bit. Expect the game to completely die everywhere except Europe and NA. This is not a rage or hate post, I just feel crazy thinking about this really happening to me.

I was deeply inspired by current machine learning flagship tech such as semantic and mechanistic interpretation and it gave me an insane idea: what if the objects we see as shells are completely different from the "reality" of the world.

First of all. as shells, we are a bioautomatic filter followed by the shell pilot interface filter.
Secondly, it's a known fact that the planet exhibits anomalous memetic hazard.

So shouldn't we experience the same insanity that the colonists did? Maybe we should. But imagine this:

The shells have embedded perception filters, which project the hazardous semantics of the reality onto a much simplier plane, which (while reducing fidelity of the world), might save our ability to reason clearly.

Imagine the anomaly as X-dimensionary threat, which covers the area with incomprehensible geometries, feelings. It overrides the basic software and wetware of the colonists.

But we are different: we turn everything into geometric shapes in such a way which doesn't hurt our interaction with them. If there is a chair with an anomalous 14-d mesoamerican demon embedded in it's core, I might as well semantically segment this object as a box with rough edges and title "14", if any interaction with it would result in my death. So we just turn the world into something that it isn't, but into something that lets us interact with it completely in the same way.

Otherwise our hardware would have gotten to face such objects that with their form override the programming of our brains and circuits.

So basically the Marathon is the same ship with the same forms from the same game as it was 20 years ago, but we as the more modern fighters have the tools to compensate for memetic hazards.