Yesterday, I was playing and decided to do a regular old Contested run, this time in Ruin station.

So I went to Ruin, and kitted up and got two of the three keycards and noticed that the timed door was opened before getting the third.

I went through the timed door, and into the vault, picked up the comp boards, and started loading up the components, and I did something I don't usually do.

I started looking at the guns.

I knew already that Ruin is a great source for pulverizer LMGs, and P8s. You can also get those good shotguns there.

What I didn't know, is that nearly every gun that spawns in that vault, that has an optic, is a nightvision optic.

I did not know that.

I picked up one gun, and through sheer chance, hit the shift key. Immediately, it lit up.

It was my first night vision optic that I've ever found.

I was happy as shit, but thought that it must have been a 1 in 200 chance or something. But I did go around looking at the other guns, and decided to see if I could get any other cool attachments from them.

So I picked up another gun, and hit shift, and again, it lit up.

So I picked up another.

I left Ruin with FOUR night vision optics. FOUR.

I then checked my inventory there. I've run Ruin's contested zone a lot recently.

I found a bunch of more of them. I'd been picking them up, not realizing what they are, and storing them. I have a shit ton of night vision optics. They apparently aren't that rare.

I'm sure many of you know this, but I didn't know this, and I'm sure some of you will be happy to learn this. If you want night vision optics, they aren't that hard to get.

Now if I could only find a thermal optic, I'd be set.

Back in 4.8, I lived in Stanton.

In 4.9, I've lived in Pyro...

I think for 4.10, I'm moving to Nyx.

Is it worth it? I've loved running contested and Hangars (and frankly still have to run Hangars quite a bit) but I'm thinking about moving to Nyx for 4.10.

Change things up.

Questions:

• If you're going to live in Nyx, which station should you set as home? I do intend to run content in both Stanton and Pyro still, seems downright sadistic that they keep the jump portals so far from one another.
• Is it actually worth leaving Pyro (I've enjoyed Pyro) for Nyx?
• What will replace Contested and Hangars there?

Thanks in advance!

This is not a post I wanted to make.

I've been planning something for a while. I've been running contested and hangars, and trying to get an F7A MkII. I have many sets of compboards. I've become experienced with every one of the contested zones.

I've been planning on getting that F7A MkII, and then doing a huge review of Contested and Hangars... along with a guide. The Guide is now mostly written... every section except Hangars.

But I can't finish with Hangars...

Because Hangars, are tough.

Hangars is really tough content.

Contested

So you can run contested solo, and while you will find PVP there, its not every time you run it.

If you're an average player like I am, you'll win 1v1 fights about 50% of the time, and 1v2s maybe 15% of the time if you get the drop on the two guys. I've been running Contested, solo and with a friend, and I've amassed a large horde of compboards.

I have enough compboards to almost certainly get an F7A, ya know... statistically.

But then I ran Hangars.

Hangars

Hangars is not at all like Contested.

The first time I ran Hangars, we got lucky, there was no one there, and I was able to get a Scorpius. I wrote a review for that Scorpius here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/StarCitizenUniverse/comments/1vlkdym/why_i_dont_like_the_scorpius/

And I want to say that I'm a bit happier with it now than I was initially. Its a nice ship.

Anyway, I ran it once and got the Scorpius, and the next time I tried to run it my buddy took his compboards, and I cleared (checked to ensure that no one was in there hiding) Hangars. I didn't clear Hangars well enough though.

You see the way Hangars works is really simple. There's a large EVA room that you go through and put the boards in. Putting the boards in is buggy, and takes between 3 and 10 minutes depending on how buggy it is for you. The room itself is intentionally designed to be complex, large and... offer poor visibility. Its pretty easy for someone to hide in there.

So the plan was for one of us to clear it while the other hangs back, and only once we're sure its cleared, do we bring the guy with the compboards in. I cleared it, and fucked up. Despite me checking the room, someone was there. He was a sneaky bastard. When my buddy inserted all the compboards and ran through the red door to get the ship, the sneaky bastard dropped down behind him and killed him. I fired and hit him a few times, but he reached cover, and managed to medpen while I was still running forward towards him in the open, and he gunned me down.

We lost the boards - and the ship.

We did it again, using the same strategy. I went and cleared the hangar, and he came in behind me. Well, I cleared the hangar alright, but he came in through a side entrance and two guys killed him before he made it to the main hangar. I tried to recover the boards, and they got me too.

We lost a second set of boards - and another ship.

We were 1 for 3... we got a ship one time and lost two sets of compboards. I've still got plenty of sets of compboards, but every time we go to run it since them, we leave the boards and wind up just PVPing. Hangars is always camped, and its often camped by rather large groups.

I think... at this point, that I need a bigger group to do this. I think that instead of a 2 man, I need a four man crew to properly do Hangars without losing an excessive amount of comp-boards and ships.

Hangars, is tough.

Does this experience match yours? Are you regularly running hangars either solo or as a duo and finding success? Do we just need to "git gud"?

This is not a post I wanted to make.

I've been planning something for a while. I've been running contested and hangars, and trying to get an F7A MkII. I have many sets of compboards. I've become experienced with every one of the contested zones.

I've been planning on getting that F7A MkII, and then doing a huge review of Contested and Hangars... along with a guide. The Guide is now mostly written... every section except Hangars.

But I can't finish with Hangars...

Because Hangars, are tough.

Hangars is really tough content.

Contested

So you can run contested solo, and while you will find PVP there, its not every time you run it.

If you're an average player like I am, you'll win 1v1 fights about 50% of the time, and 1v2s maybe 15% of the time if you get the drop on the two guys. I've been running Contested, solo and with a friend, and I've amassed a large horde of compboards.

I have enough compboards to almost certainly get an F7A, ya know... statistically.

But then I ran Hangars.

Hangars

Hangars is not at all like Contested.

The first time I ran Hangars, we got lucky, there was no one there, and I was able to get a Scorpius. I wrote a review for that Scorpius here, and I want to say that I'm a bit happier with it now than I was initially. Its a nice ship.

Anyway, I ran it once and got the Scorpius, and the next time I tried to run it my buddy took his compboards, and I cleared (checked to ensure that no one was in there hiding) Hangars. I didn't clear Hangars well enough though.

You see the way Hangars works is really simple. There's a large EVA room that you go through and put the boards in. Putting the boards in is buggy, and takes between 3 and 10 minutes depending on how buggy it is for you. The room itself is intentionally designed to be complex, large and... offer poor visibility. Its pretty easy for someone to hide in there.

So the plan was for one of us to clear it while the other hangs back, and only once we're sure its cleared, do we bring the guy with the compboards in. I cleared it, and fucked up. Despite me checking the room, someone was there. He was a sneaky bastard. When my buddy inserted all the compboards and ran through the red door to get the ship, the sneaky bastard dropped down behind him and killed him. I fired and hit him a few times, but he reached cover, and managed to medpen while I was still running forward towards him in the open, and he gunned me down.

We lost the boards - and the ship.

We did it again, using the same strategy. I went and cleared the hangar, and he came in behind me. Well, I cleared the hangar alright, but he came in through a side entrance and two guys killed him before he made it to the main hangar. I tried to recover the boards, and they got me too.

We lost a second set of boards - and another ship.

We were 1 for 3... we got a ship one time and lost two sets of compboards. I've still got plenty of sets of compboards, but every time we go to run it since them, we leave the boards and wind up just PVPing. Hangars is always camped, and its often camped by rather large groups.

I think... at this point, that I need a bigger group to do this. I think that instead of a 2 man, I need a four man crew to properly do Hangars without losing an excessive amount of comp-boards and ships.

Hangars, is tough.

Does this experience match yours? Are you regularly running hangars either solo or as a duo and finding success? Do we just need to "git gud"?

I find that whenever I talk about the future of Star Citizen, there's this divergence between what I see as the clear future for the game, versus what other people see.

I see Star Citizen as a game that essentially merges Eve Online and Rust. We could call this vision, "Rust Online" but I think its more commonly referred to in the community as "Rust in Space" which works well enough.

The case for Star Citizen being Rust in Space, is pretty simple.

Star Citizen is clearly a hardcore PVP Sandbox game. It is most similar to survival games, particularly the survival games that are leaning towards being PVP MMOs like Ark and Rust. The MMOs it has most in common with, are the current popular full loot MMOs, Albion Online, and - more thematically - Eve Online.

People hate this, interpretation of game's direction. They hate it, because they hate Rust. I don't understand why they hate Rust, I think Rust is great. But people hate it.

Anyway, this vision of the game, has one very important thing going for it.

Its not made of bullshit.

And that's important, because a lot of Star Citizen fans have a vision of the game that is... indeed made of bullshit. And its made of bullshit because CIG has been floating a vision of the game that is also made of bullshit.

So lets talk about the bullshit.

"Its a simulation"

Is dumb as shit. Its dumb because its been tried before with disastrous results.

Do you see any other multiplayer games out there, that function as simulations? No right? There's a reason for that. Its been tried before. You think that no one has ever tried to make an FPS where you coordinate with simulated NPCs? They have. Those games have just sucked. They've sucked and failed in the market.

Because it turns out, that its really hard to do that, and even if you somehow manage to get it right, it doesn't add much to the game.

Even among single player games, there aren't many games that get anything out of being a "Simulation". I could write a whole article on just this topic, but to summarize it and move on, Oblivion's radiant AI was a failure and was largely cut, Simulation games do benefit from being simulation games, but that's a genre that doesn't merge well with multiplayer action games. The only "Simulation game" I can think of released in the last 20 years that did well outside of the simulation genre and Oblivion is "Animal Crossing", and I don't see that adding a lot of value to Star Citizen.

If they go after this, most likely scenario is that they fail and its regarded as a buggy mess. I mean, no one even has any idea of what they exect the simulation to add to the game. If you think I'm full of shit here, please inform me in the comments, because whenever I bring this up, I get vague bullshit answers, or people just repeat that they "want a simulation". This isn't an argument, this is cult nonsense.

"Quantum/StarSim"

Makes no sense. CIG's approach to an economy makes me legitimately wonder if any of the game's designers have actually played a modern PVP Sandbox MMO. Eve Online's economy was brilliant. People will tell you that mega corps controlled the economy, but those people are stupid and are wrong. Players controlled the economy. Everyone and no one controlled it. The economy ensured that things were available and for a reasonable price across the game world.

With Quantum, CIG is attempting to fix something that ain't fucking broke, and that's a bad call.

Look, if they just go the "Rust in Space" route, they're going to have a hard road ahead. They need base building, and raiding. The raiding needs to feel "fair". If they want to do a good job of it, they need offline base raiding, because scheduling shit in a video game is horseshit. That means they need to give players the tools necessary to properly defend their bases, even when they're not online. It means that those tools have to be complex, because players are smart, and out thinking them via base defense requires a really deep and complex system. Rust is the only game out there that has really nailed this. If you're good at base building in Rust, you can log off and feel secure. You can raid and not have to do a handshake. Its not an easy thing to pull off. For Rust to do it they had to add a whole programming system to their game.

So Star Citizen has a lot of shit to build, just to make "Rust in Space" work. They really don't need to add a bunch of vague and perhaps entirely unachievable "Nevah been done before" Jesus Tech to their plates.

In conclusion, a Rust in Space design for Star Citizen has the advantage that its something that is actually achievable (other games have done similar things). Its not a vague vision for a revolutionary game that no one has ever seen. Its not based on Jesus tech. Its not based on CIG being the first team ever to make a simulation not just work - but actually add value to the game experience.

This should be the goal for the team. Not chasing vague bullshit. Not trying to fulfill promises that were made long before they were ever properly thought through. They have the tech, and the talent, and the money, and the ambition to make StarCitizen a blockbuster hit game. After 14 years, and a billion dollars invested, its time to dump the pie in the sky bullshit techno-babble, and concentrate on achieving what can actually be achieved.

Star Citizen, should be Rust in Space. It could be the best PVP Sandbox MMO ever made. It could be one of the greatest games ever made.

But the biggest threat to them ever pulling this off, is a wildly overly ambitious scope that honestly doesn't seem very thought through. Cutting scope is the mark of an experienced developer. Knowing when to cut shit because it doesn't make sense, is perhaps the most critical skill in all of software engineering.

There's no shame in working on an achievable design.

This is something that doesn't affect me personally, so I generally don't care about it, but the idea came to me recently.

CIG has been selling large ships - FOR YEARS. For years CIG has been selling ships that don't work, or at the very least aren't optimized for solo play.

They've been doing this, with a promise, and the promise, is NPC crew and blades.

And NPC Crew and Blades... are no where on the horizon.

Now again, I didn't fork over 10 or more times the industry standard cost for a game to CIG for such a large ship. I don't own a Hammerhead, or Redeemer, or Valkyrie. My personal gameplay enjoyment isn't entirely screwed by CIG.

But if it had happened to me, I'd be pissed.

Because they've been saying NPC crew and Blades is coming for the last 10 years. And it just hasn't happened.

And it shouldn't even be hard to implement.

Here's how you implement a T0 NPC crew:

• When you pull your ship from storage, its already got crew on it. They're not moving around, they're sitting in seats already.
• As long as you don't attack them, they just kind of sit there, manning turrets or whatever.
• If you attack them, they mutiny, pull pistols and try to kill you.
• If you don't attack them. They sit there until the ship gets stored.
• If the ship gets abandoned, they leave the moment the ship gets "BRICKED" while you aren't looking, which is probably pretty quickly in most cases.

There, a really simple T0 NPC crew implementation that would take next to nothing for CIG to do.

Again, I don't own a Hammerhead. I don't own a Reclaimer, or a Hurricane. I did recently get a Scorpius from Executive Hangars, but that's the closest thing I have to a multicrew ship. I never bothered to buy gimped ships from CIG knowing that they aren't planning on making the ships useful in any way any time soon.

But so many people have.

And I don't see any outrage about this, at all.

And it blows my mind.

Yesterday, I got a Wikelo Scorpius. I don't know the full name, its the sneaky one. I got it by running executive hangars. Its got the fancy paint job.

And I was moderately excited about it. Its a heavy fighter, an elite - best version - kind of heavy fighter.

I checked the components, they're all Grade A, either military or Stealth - mostly steath.

I was excited about it, until I figured out what it was.

Its a god damn multicrew heavy fighter.

The problem with multicrew

Is that it sucks.

This game takes forever to get going doing ANYTHING. If I'm running contested, and I spawn at the station, it still takes me like 8 minutes to start running contested. I still have to spawn in my hangar, and check my kit (do I have a tractor tool, do I have medgun), and hunt down what I don't have (fuses, ammo, cruz drink). The inventory system is great, I love it, except that it doesn't fucking work. I'd love the inventory system in this game if it worked, but it rarely does. Gotta drag shit back and forth several times. Its a pain in the ass. CIG really needs to discover fuzzy search.

(As an aside, I bet the guys that wrote the inventory system are pissed. I bet the problem with that system, stems not from their code, but from the server code. I bet that they implemented it beautifully, and it passes all its tests, and works perfectly according to the contracts and interfaces they were given, and then when inserted into the actual running game, it shits the bed and everyone hates it and blames them. I bet that how it went for them. Too bad, because its a great inventory system... just doesn't fucking work)

To go through all that to do something, and then DOUBLE IT, just to do what you could totally already do solo in a ship. Makes no sense.

Like if I want to do a space combat mission with other people, I want those other people in other ships. This is for a lot of reasons. First, three's total shield strength. Shield strength adds with the number of players if you all bring separate ships, and its static if you multicrew. Secondly, enemies can only fire at one ship at a time. If you're all crammed into one ship, that's gonna be everyone's getting fired at all the time. If you're all in different ships, then only one of you is being fired upon, and everyone else's shield is either full or recharging.

I know that a lot of people, really love multicrew, and I do too. I love multicrew...

When I'm doing ground missions.

If I'm with a group of guys, and we're going to go do some kind of ground based FPS, then I love multicrew. It just eases logistics. Everyone's in the same place, going to the same place. For that kind of thing, multicrew is a blast. No one can get lost, you can share shit if you run out of say drinks. There's a lot to like about that - for ground missions.

But I just don't like it for anything ship combat related. I don't want a ship that forces one of my friends into a worse combat experience than they'd be in if they brought their own ship. I don't want a ship that forces my friends to be less combat effective than they'd be if they just brought their own ship. The Scorpius is nice, it is, but two Guardians is better. Two guardians is going to beat the snot out of a Scorpius any day of the week.

I get the lazy argument kind of. If you have someone that for some reason isn't really interested in playing the game, and just wants to kind of not play it, but jump in only at the moment of combat to fire a turret gun, then yeah. In that very niche case, I guess the Scorpius makes a lot of sense.

But I don't expect that to happen very often.

So now I'm stuck with this ship, this - admittedly - highly effective very elite ship... that I can essentially never run. Maybe CIG will release NPC crew in 4.10 eh? lol...

Honestly, I think I'd have preferred a Syulen. That's a starter ship, its 1/5th the price, but it looks cool, and it transports a tiny bit of cargo. I'd probably get more use out of that than the Scorpius.

I guess I'll have to track down that missile attachment and neuter it into being a missile boat. Maybe I can find a use for it that way. Its still a stealthy elite ship.

This is a kind of weird post, but I think its correct.

The guys defending CIG now, are mostly doing it out of a place of... deep misunderstanding.

This, is a hardcore cutthroat game. Its even worse than that, its a high stakes hardcore cutthroat game.

What this means is that the game is designed to allow you to lose, and furthermore, its designed to allow you to lose - a lot. The losses are supposed to hurt.

And my impression of the White Knights, the most fervent CIG defenders, is that they hate this aspect of the game. Most of the guys defending CIG and Star Citizen also hate the fact that its a high stakes PVP game. They're fervently defending a vision of Star Citizen that isn't real.

And I've been a part of the community for years, on the main sub, on spectrum, and I've seen this drama play out over the last few years.

Some people used to think this was all a bug or something. Like they released full loot into the game, and people thought it was some kind of a mistake, or failed experiment that CIG would correct if they spoke out about it enough.

But that was years ago, what has CIG done in the meantime? They've released excellent content around high stakes PVP, with Contested and Hathor. They've doubled down. They've even explicitly announced base raiding, which was something that people thought would eventually go in, but that we had no official confirmation of.

This is a game that revolves around tribal resource wars. That's the game.

There's this... divergence, between what Star Citizen is, and the White Knight's perceptions of Star Citizen. They keep thinking this is going to be a chill space game, and CIG keeps adding in more things for us to kill each other over.

And that's going to eventually... come to a head. Not today, not tomorrow... but eventually.

I think most of the white knights will just accept this. I think those guys are mostly too invested to walk away from the project, and the truth is that losing in a video game isn't this huge deal. People need to just check their egos, and accept that they're playing a game with high stakes, and get used to that. They need to take an anger management class or something, and learn to calmly carry on when things go wrong.

I think they'll mostly accept this, but there's gonna be a hell of a lot of drama between now and then.

How to get a crafted Parallax Rifle:

The best rifle in the game, is a Parallax rifle.

But not just a Parallax, a high tier crafted Parallax.

A regular parallax, can be acquired by running ASD, its a fairly rare drop, but it drops there. I've gotten several of them. If a regular parallax is good enough for you, you can stop reading here. That's the easiest way to get a Parallax rifle.. oh wait, there is an even easier method, but lets not get ahead of ourselves.

For those of us that want more, who want a crafted rifle... read on...

To get a high tier crafted Parallax, you need the following:

Gold - This you can farm on Fairo (I think its Fairo, its one of the planets in Pyro).

Tungsten - Can be farmed on the same planet as gold.

Now, because this is Pyro we're talking about, when you farm this, there will be a risk that you will come back with say, 875 gold and 925 Tungsten, and get murdered by an Eclipse as you go to land at Checkmate... but its a risk you'll have to take. Its part of the price of a crafted Parallax.

But that's not the biggest risk involved in getting a crafted Parallax rifle.

The biggest risk, is in running Hathor.

You have to run Hathor, because the third ingredient used to make a Parallax rifle, is Carinite. And Carinite only drops in Hathor.

Turns out I wrote a guide to Hathor not long ago:

https://www.reddit.com/r/StarCitizenUniverse/comments/1utaenn/hathor_a_review_and_guide/

Run Hathor, get Carinite... and you can make a Parallax.

That is how I got my Parallax rifle... but there's another way to get one.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

How to get a Parallax rifle (alternative method):

Today, I learned about another way to get a Parallax...

And its a much better way.

Step 1: Camp a place that players come through often, where PVP is enabled

Step 2: Wait for an unsuspecting victim with a crafted Parallax (this is the hardest part)

Step 3: Incapacitate victim by shooting them.

Step 4: Get into position behind them

Step 5: Medpen victim to bring them back to life

Step 6: Do a rear takedown of the victim stunning them, causing them to drop their crafted rifle.

Step 7: Kill victim permanently and take the rifle.

----

I know about this second method, because someone taught it to me today the hard way =P

Losing

I write in here a lot about losing. People need to get over losing. The thing that differentiates games like Rust, and Ark, and Atlas and Eve Online... and Star Citizen from the average game, the thing that the Carebears can't tolerate - is losing.

Today I lost big. How many of you have lost as much? I recently put up a poll here asking how many of us have even run Hathor, and the results of that poll said that only about 16% of the posters here have run it.

Most of us hide away from losses.

But that's why I was able to get into this game, and very quickly, wind up with a crafted Parallax rifle in the first place.

I could, cry about this. I could complain about it. I could do what the anti-PVP types do, and bitch about the game, but the truth is, that losing that rifle, brought a smile to my face.

I was laughing as I was losing it.

The guys that got me, they were good. They taught me something. They taught me that you can set up ambushes and take people's weapons in this game, if you're good. That is valuable knowledge. More valuable than a Parallax I might say - more valuable even than a high tier crafted Parallax.

And I, dear reader, am passing it on to you. Take it and do with it what you will.

The game is more interesting, more dangerous, and more fun with mechanics like that in it.

And - for the record, I have the stuff to build a bunch more of those rifles, because I am willing to take risks. Easy come, easy go.

Play the game as its meant to be played, and the (really big) losses won't even matter to you.

I want to be clear here, or people will start questioning my credentials as a hater.

• I'm not happy with CIG's monetization strategy.
• I'm not happy with the general buggines and unplayability of the PU
• I'm not happy with SQ42 not releasing 10 years past the date when they said it was ready

I'm not a white knight, I swear. I have a whole reddit that I made to back me up - r/AstroturfAlpha.

But I am happy with the general direction they're going in from a game design standpoint.

Hathor and Contested... are good. They're very good. ASD is very good too.

Now, this is all theme park content, and I would prefer Sandbox content... but its the RIGHT kind of theme park content. Its theme park content that is cut-throat, that has risk and high reward. Its good content.

Hathor is great. Its risky, but not too risky. There's PVP, but you can still do it solo if you're determined. Its like all good PVP sandbox content, there is risk, but people vastly overestimate the amount of risk, and so its totally doable - even solo.

Contested is the same way. I've run Checkmate, Ruin and Orbituary's contested zones many times now. They are all excellent. Checkmate is mostly PVE. The goal is to run one of the two paths to get your comp boards quickly. Orbituary forces you into a kill zone where enemy players have the high ground and you have to drop your rifle, and fumble for a fuse to stick in a door. Ruin is the best though, as you're forced to farm keycards, and then wait for entry into a timed door, where you spend a good chunk of time vulnerable, wondering if someone's going to show up and wreck your run.

Ruin also gives you the hilarious, and very fun option of just holding the vault. You can run ruin, get the cards to open the doors (and prop the doors open) and - just not fucking leave. You can stay there, and two guys can do a pretty good job of holding off an enemy team with plasma grenades. If someone tries to get through that timed door, you just chain plasma grenades while the other one of you fires with a machine gun, and its pretty hard to breech that corridor. That's how I ran ruin, and I got all the boards me and my buddy needed in one day doing that =P

FYI, the comps there spawn - I believe - on an hourly timer, so if you just stay there for an hour, you get two printings of the boards there, AND you're guaranteed to get the high tier size 2 and 3 components that spawn in the vault rooms as well - once an hour, every hour, for as long as you hold the vault.

You just need to be willing to lose, trying to do it. You need to be willing to go and risk dying to someone you never saw. Happened to me a time or two (well, lets be honest, I died many times running Contested), will likely to happen to you too, but the rewards are definitely worth it.

I have advocated against this game going the theme park content route, and I stand by that. I prefer sandbox content. Theme park content grows stale. Sandbox content never does.

But, if they're going to add theme park content.... THIS is the theme park content I want.

Bravo CIG. Atta boy for you guys. Credit where credit is due.

Content so good even the haters have to acknowledge it.

I've put up a few threads adjacent to this topic.

Threads where I explain what should be cut, but I don't think I've put up a thread explaining "why" shit must be cut.

I kinda just figured that people would understand why, that it would be obvious, but from the comments I've gotten, I know that its not obvious. A lot of people really don't understand why scope needs cutting.

So, I'm gonna try to make the case for it here (how many of you will only read this far and then go write an angry comment I wonder).

Star Citizen has taken 14 years to get to this point, and needed a billion dollars in funding.

What we have now, has taken a really fucking long time, and I thought that since everyone knows that, everyone understrands why scope must be cut, however, apparantly I have to also point out that.

Star Citizen is still extremely far away from meeting even its meager 1.0 release goals. We're looking at 5-10 more years of this shit.

And that should hopefully end the debate.

Do you want this game to be this buggy and unplayable for another 5-10 years? Do you want that? Why would you want that?

Even if they were to cut scope extremely aggressively, a 1.0 release is still 2-3 years away.

This game is going to, no matter what, wind up with 16 years of development, and probably like 1.4-1.5 billion in backer money spent. Its gonna get there even if the game's scope is cut to the bone. Even if a chainsaw is taken to its scope, its going to hit 16 years and 1.5 billion and still be a broken mess.

Even if they drop Quantum and just add a player driven economy. Even if they drop stations and just focus on planetary base building. Even if they drop 9/10 NPCs and just try to deliver a more survival game like experience. The game is going to pass Duke Nukem Forever as the longest game ever developed.

If they don't cut all this shit. If they still attempt to have NPCs doing everything that players do. If they develop planetary bases AND space stations. Its gonna take forever.

A good base raiding system isn't exactly easy to do either. It took the Rust guys a lot of fine tuning to get that game to where it is. Its going to need a lot of testing. There's gonna be bug fix issues, and cheating issues they likely won't nail it perfectly on their first try. Its gonna be a lot of work by itself.

Base raiding is going to take a lot of time, and if they do a good job of it, it can carry the game by itself, but if they do a bad job of it, this will be a mediocre game. Base raiding is critical, and its going to take a lot of developer effort to get right. The state of the art out there is better than you think. In Rust, you can program your whole base and all its defenses yourself using an in-game programming system. That's a lot of work. If they want parity with that, they're going to have to add that too. Big features, big commitment, big investment.

And we're 14 years in already, and I'm not sure they've really started in earnest.

Cramming everything else that they want in is going to ensure that many of us are fucking old by the time we play this. I mean, really old.

The game has taken too long to get to this point, and release is further off than you think. They might not release until 2035. They might not release until after that. Not cutting scope is how you wind up with a broken unplayable game that gets leapfrogged by devs using newer better tech.

Its a terrible choice.

At some point, you have to put on your grown up pants, admit that this isn't working, and do what you need to do to release.

How old do you want to be when you finally get to play the released product?

Hathor is in, its been in a while, and its damn good content. I'm curious... how many of us have run Hathor, how many of us have not run Hathor, and why haven't we run Hathor?

Everyone talks about how no one wants PVP in this game right? Well... how many of us have done the PVP content? I wanna know.

I am a jerk.

That's what I am when I'm gaming at least. I'm a jerk. I wasn't always a jerk, but I sure am now.

Now this doesn't mean that I'm good, or highly skilled. I'm not trying to impress anyone with my edginess. I die a lot, I lose, but I keep playing.

And it started with Rust.

Before Rust, I had played Eve Online, so I'd gotten a tiny taste of the cutthroat life, but it was always in groups. I would play Eve, and be part of a fleet, and would kind of tag along as we'd kill other players and take their stuff. It was how Eve Online was played.

But with Rust, Rust took it to another level.

And when I started playing Rust, I was nice. For a little while there, I was a nice guy in Rust. I played Rust when Rust was very new, and there were still nice people playing Rust. I remember one night in Rust, a stranger showed up at my campfire and gave me a bow and a cheap set of armor, and some arrows and basically saved me. I was a newb, and this end game player in end game gear saved me. He COULD have killed me, but he didn't. I thought "This is who I want to be, this is the kind of player I want to be in this game".

I never became that guy. Never gave out gear to newbs, never paid anything back. I went the other way.

Rust breaks you. Nowadays, if you play Rust, you know what you're getting into, but if you played it when it first started, you didn't know you were playing Rust. It wasn't a household name yet, it was just some weird indie game. Every time I tried to be nice, or at least most times, I got stabbed in the back, and every time I shot first, I won - I was rewarded. And this teaches you how to play the game.

And eventually you get over the ethics of it all, and the game opens up for you, and its this really interesting high stakes game, with tension and fear and rewards for taking risks. I loved Rust, still do.

A few years after that, I was looking for the next Rust, and in 2016, I found it. It was a game called "Star Citizen".

Star Citizen was this crazy space simulator, but you could shoot people and take their stuff - just like in Rust. I liked the idea. I bought it.

I played it, it wasn't ready. That was okay. I bought it to support the project. I bought it because there aren't a lot of games like Rust out there, and I wanted more of them, and this was one of them, so I wanted to support it.

I figured that in a year, maybe two at most, I'd be playing this new Rust in space. But for now, it wasn't ready, so I went out and played more shit.

I played Ark, which was even more hardcore than Rust. In Ark, there were no wipes, at least when I played it. In Ark, you can farm for months or even years and lose it all in a night.

I played Atlas, which was a spin-off of Ark, which is the closest game out there to what Star Citizen is. It had ships in ships, and NPC turret gunners, and multicrew, and it was another hardcore PVP sandbox, where your choices mattered, where there was real risk. It was fantastic. Sadly its new player experience was pure horror, and so it never really caught on, but it was great while it was around.

I played more Eve Online, then Mortal Online 2 - another fantastic game. I played it for about a year I guess before my guild died in my timezone. I was loyal to my guild, so I couldn't leave, but I was playing the game alone every night if I didn't leave, so one day I logged off, and never logged back on. It wasn't a game I chose to quit, I just ran out of people to play with and it faded away. It was very good though.

Then Albion Online, which looks on the surface like some dinky little phone game. It looks so silly and cartoonish, it really shouldn't be on this list, and yet it was the same kind of game, but more polished than the rest. Albion is fantastic, I still play Albion Online.

And between all of these games, I'd stop and look for more games in the genre. I'd look for more Hardcore PVP Sandbox games to occupy me. And there weren't many. There just weren't many projects pursuing this kind of gameplay. I would look, and I'd see projects - like New World - that shy'd away from the PVP, that changed course and abandoned it. I kept wondering why none of the big name game makers, Rockstar, Bethesda, why aren't any of them putting out a better Rust? Rust was built by one guy in about two years (although its gotten plenty of fantastic support since then, kudos to Facepunch). Certainly a big game developer could take that core Rust idea, and really run with it.

And through all of this, I kept an eye on Star Citizen.

I kept an eye on Star Citizen, because while all these games were great, they were also all from small teams. They were all indie games or near indie games. They were all underfunded, and it showed. Mortal Online 2, Ark, Atlas, all done on shoestring budgets.

I wanted a blockbuster PVP sandbox game. That's what I really wanted, and what I was hoping for.

I give CIG a lot of shit in here, and I think its deserved, but what keeps me glued to this project is this.

Star Citizen, is the only project out there, that is following the Sandbox PVP formula, and heavily investing in it.

And if you hate Rust, you probably don't like reading that. If you hate Mortal Online 2, and Ark and Atlas and all the murderhobo games... then you probably don't think of Star Citizen in that way, but its how I see Star Citizen.

Its the one bright light in the genre. A genre that is being neglected. A genre that has produced numerous hits, but all hits from indie dev studios. A genre that should be getting more support from the greater gaming industry.

I give CIG a lot of shit, because I want the project to succeed, they are the only company with the balls to heavily invest in this genre.

And so I find myself disgusted, when I came back to the game, after patiently waiting ten fucking years, and find that its a bug riddled mess.

That said, its still got balls. Its still that core game I want. Its still a game where you can win or lose, where you can take risks and get away with things you can't get away with in other games. Its still got that charm, that Rust appeal. Not many games have that.

So while I'm disappointed, I'm still stuck watching this project, because its my only real hope for a big budget serious PVP sandbox game.

Its the only hope for it.

They need to not fuck it up.

Just want to see how many of us believe in a 2026 release of SQ42.

And frankly this topic hasn't been talked about much. It deserves to be discussed. This is the biggest CIG related news in 2026 if true right? Why aren't we talking about more? Why hasn't more been released?

Is how "The Simulation" will improve the game.

And I'm specifically talking about the NPC simulation that CIG is planning. The entire game is itself a simulation, but that's not what people mean when they talk about Star Citizen being a simulation. They're usually talking about Quantum/StarSim.

So, I'd like to see what people believe "The Simulation" will add to the game.

Because I've put some thought into it, I like to think I've thought about it more than most, and my belief is that it will add very little.

I personally see no value in pursing "The Simulation". And I know that most people disagree with that, but what I never see - either from CIG or from Fans - is concrete descriptions of how the simulation will improve the game experience from the player's perspective.

But maybe I'm just wrong right? What do I know?

So please, denizens of r/StarCitizenUniverse that support "The Simulation". Please explain to me how, in concrete terms, "The Simulation" will improve the experience for you.

And I want real answers here. I don't want you to just tell me "I just want to play in a Simulation". That's not a real answer.

What do you think will happen in the game if its a simulation that would not happen if its not a simulation. How will players directly benefit from the game as a simulation.

And I also want to restrict this to shit that wouldn't also happen if we just didn't have a simulation at all. So like, if your answer is "I could pirate NPCs", well... you'll already be able to pirate players right? Its not really adding much.

If your answer is "We can disrupt the flow of goods from one place to another"... well... you can do that if its not a simulation right, by pirating players.

What exactly, does this genuinely add to the game? If you support this, if this is the capstone feature of the game for you, if its the thing that makes you excited for the project, then surely you must have some idea of how it will benefit you right?

So many people out there continuously complaining about PVP in the game.

"Light Fighters are too strong, I can't beat them in my prospector! Its not fair!"

"Its not a fair fight when I take out my Golem Ox and encounter a pirate in an F7A MkII"

"The murderhobos lose nothing when they sit and camp for hours on end looking for a target and kill me! They risk nothing!"

"Someone shot me in contested, I didn't see them they took my comp boards!"

If the people that play this game, put the same energy into pressuring the devs to fix bugs, as they do fighting the notion that PVP in a PVP game is okay, then the game would run perfectly and be bug free.

For every murderhobo that kills a player, 100 players die to bugs. For every player that steals your cargo, 100 players lose cargo to bugs.

Its ridiculous. PVP belongs in a PVP game, the bugs do not, and the bugs do vastly more harm than PVP does.

And its always the guys that are against PVP that seem to defend CIG for not fixing bugs.

What is the purpose of the free fly events? Generate positive buzz about the game?

Because if that's the goal, I honestly don't see how free fly events help that goal.

The game is incredibly buggy right now. Its usually very buggy, but at this point its just unplayable.

I've been trying to do contested stuff, and have spent like 4 hours today trying to farm PYAM red cards.

I successfully brought back one.

The rest of the attempts were bugged out. Couldn't leave station, had to exit to menu. Got there, but had some weird glitch where my gun would sporadically shoot and I couldn't move a fuse into my hand to access the fuse door. Lag spikes causing me to crash. Disconnects causing me to have to start over.

Its been a miserable experience.

And if its like this for the new players that try the game out during a free fly event, then this is a poor advertisement for the game.

I believe that if CIG wants to generate buzz about the game, they have to focus on bug fixing, and cutting scope.

What will put this game into good shape, is this:

• Fix the bugs
• Add an economy
• Add an end game

Those three things - if done correctly - will make this game a hit. They're not that far off. The game is not that far away from being exceptional.

But these free fly events, where we showcase how unplayable the game is to new players... I just don't get it. Do we expect them to be impressed by just seeing a ship? If they try to actually do anything, they're going to be disappointed.

I've been playing Star Citizen, and I haven't just been doing hauling contracts. I've been running Hathor and Contested.

And as I play through each, I can't help but think back to that statement that the game's theme park content is there as a tutorial for the game's eventual sandbox content. I think it was said specifically that the game would feature a theme park mission chain/story that would serve as a tutorial for the game's sandbox content for the 1.0 release.

Now, I don't know for sure whether contested and Hathor are a part of that tutorial mission/chain. Its possible that they aren't, but I tend to think they are.

Once you see them through that lens that CIG has put forward for us, once you think about the game in terms of theme park content which acts as a tutorial for the game's sandbox content... well... Hathor and Contested... they look to me like they're teaching players to take risks.

I saw someone else say something today that I think was particularly insightful.

I saw someone say, that the game feels like a scam, because they market it as if its a working game, a game as a service, while leaving it broken and excusing the eternal brokenness with claims that its an alpha.

And I think they're right. I think they hit the nail on the head.

When you watch a CIG video, you get clips of gameplay, but its not representative gameplay is it? You get little clips where the game is working as it should, which isn't what people's actual experiences in the verse are like. Not at all.

The marketing message is:

Hey come play, the game is great, and its beyond anything out there in the gaming world. Here's a cool ship that you can own!

The truth is:

The game is broken as fuck.

The coverup is:

Its an Alpha

They present the game as if its working, as if its not contiuously broken, as if every gameplay loop outside of Gilly's isn't affected by a constant stream of never ending bugs.

The guys over in the r/starcitizen_refunds reddit, they're wrong, and they've been wrong for a while. This isn't a scam in the sense that they aren't building a game. They definitely are building a game.

But it IS a scam in the sense that they're marketing this as a normal game as a service, when its not that. Its a borderline unplayable buggy mess.

And its a sweet deal for CIG.

Entice new customers with impressive gameplay footage and features. Leave out the fact that everything's always broken and the game is unplayable - there's a reason it has a metacritic score of 2.9. Have the unplayableness of the game evict players from the game for you reducing server costs (its like a commercial gym, a customer paying is an asset, but a customer using the gym is a liability). And excuse all the bullshit with "Its an Alpha".

How many times have you seen someone suggest that someone "Take a break" from Star Citizen? What's that, you're getting annoyed at how all this is managed, why don't you shut up and go away then? We don't want to pay the server cost anyway.

I mean, maybe the refundians were right after all?

This morning I got on, and I mined a bunch of 927 Aslarite, 870 Iron and 750 Hephestanite.

I had enough Iron and Hephestanite to make a bunch of crafted killshot rifiles, not good enough to sell, but certainly good enough for my own use.

I had enough Aslarite to make a really top tier set of Antium Armor with after I gather the Tungsten and Gold.

About a hour and a half's worth of effort, and I got very, very lucky, so I won't be able to replicate that.

I put up the work order in the refinery, everything looks good. Its gonna take 15 minutes to process.

I figure, I want to go back out, might as well sell the leftover ore right?

I sell it, for 40k aUEC. Not much, but it clears the prospector for the next run.

And... of course... it sold the ore for the work order too.

So here's my question.

Is this even a bug, or is it designed to fuck you over?

Is it even a bug, or is it like using the pads in the game, where if you go out there without your helmet you die immediately, and there's no real warning about it.

Did CIG specifically design this to fuck you over?

My guess... is yes.