Why Star Citizen Is Likely Going to Be a Complete Disaster | Hacker News Reader

Why Star Citizen Is Likely Going to Be a Complete Disaster

reaxxion.com

76 pointsmasta34 comments

Classic Derek Smart, starts the conversation by claiming to be respectful to everyone, then essentially threatening to fight anyone who disagrees with him. Oh, he hedges and calls it "attacks", but if you don't know Mr. Smart, you don't know that he's always treated any disagreement as an "attack".

It's hard to take him seriously. His incoherent, perhaps schizophrenic rambling and threats towards his detractors over the years have certainly soured me. I mean, even here and now, in one sentence he tries to say his games were "popular", but "never caught on." What does that even mean?

>> The first game in the series was released back in 1996. Let that sink in.

Let it sink in that these games were unplayable. Not just unplayable in the sense that they were "boring" or "really buggy". I mean unplayable in the sense that, even if everything were working as intended, the intended operation was designed to be unplayable.

For example, the game actually requires us to go into a (poorly hidden) menu, find the crew member, and tell them to go eat, so they don't starve to death. Does the admiral of any fleet, or even the captain of any ship, contact every ensign under their charge personally and tell them to go hit the chow line? The games are not simulations of space combat, they aren't simulations of managing space fleets, they're simulations of Derek Smart's ultimate fantasy: being a complete control freak.

I can't finish reading this. This is supposed to be a criticism of Star Citizen, judging from the title, but all it's managed to do for the first 5000 words is go on about how great and visionary is Lord Derek Smart.

Some things never change.

I agree, I have also already read several posts (rants) from Derek Smart in the past but never played any of his games. But I must say I have some doubts too about Star Citizen. I'm bulding websites myself and already do this for several years ;) and if a customer or the project leader changes the scope and the amount of features during the development all the time, then it's likely that the project won't be good. I had to learn too, that it's better to start small and then add features over time after the initial release.

So even if Derek's way of saying things is rude, he might be right this time. I hope Chris Roberts will show us that Derek Smart was wrong, because I wan't to play the complete Star Citizen and enjoy all the announced features, but I have more and more doubts because of what happend since the game development started.

Oh btw here is a link to his personal blog where he explains why he wrote this article http://dereksmart3000ad.tumblr.com/post/123125564079/interst...

You brought me back to the 90's there for a second. The Game God flamewars of old were so entertaining. :-)

I had the privilege of being personally flamed by Derek Smart on Usenet in the mid-'90s.

If achievements had been a thing back then, and had Usenet had them, that would definitely have been one.

He may certainly be right; Star Citizen comes across as an insanely ambitious project. But I confess that when I realized this critique was written by the Battlecruiser guy, I jokingly thought: "Well, if anyone knows about overpromising and underdelivering on space combat sims..."

> I jokingly thought: "Well, if anyone knows about overpromising and underdelivering on space combat sims..."

That was kinda the thrust of his article—he's got a history of trying to do what Star Citizen is claiming it'll be, and it's taken him years and never really been that successful. So he sees what's coming out of their dev team, and recognizing the challenges he's had.

I never thought much of Derek Smart, especially after being suckered by the promise of no less than three of his hideously broken excuses for games, but writing for a shitty neoreactionary Gamergate site[1] is perhaps the absolute low of his abysmal career (congrats, Derek, now you've literally shared a banner with such gems as "Why We Need To Fight Against Transgender Acceptance"), to say nothing of the massive pot-kettle color comparison involved.

[1] http://wehuntedthemammoth.com/2014/11/12/rooshs-reaxxion-dou...

If we're going to be judging news outlets by the worst opinion piece they've ever published, then let's be consistent: most if not all American newspapers have published torture apologia. Would you condemn someone published on Huffington Post for sharing a banner with "In Defense of Torture"[1]?

If not, why?

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-harris/in-defense-of-tortu...

The founder of Reaxxion, in his own words:

"While walking to my place, I realized how drunk she was. In America, having sex with her would have been rape, since she legally couldn’t give her consent. It didn’t help matters that I was relatively sober, but I can’t say I cared or even hesitated. I won’t rationalize my actions, but having sex is what I do." [1]

"How far lost is Western society if fat, ugly Indian cunt @nitashatiku has a platform to denounce a productive, intelligent white man?" [2]

"A race to degeneracy hurts Jews less than gentiles because they still retain guiding ingroup values. Gentiles are left in the cultural winds that Jews help create." [3]

"Hundreds of years ago, I would have been a soldier, fighting battles to defend my country against invaders, or invading another tribe to steal their women and land." [4]

"A woman cutting off healthy hair is one step away from literal cutting of her skin with a sharp object, because both behaviors denote a likely mental illness where the woman presents herself to society as more damaged than her genetic condition would indicate, suggesting that she has suffered environmental damage that has reduced her overall fitness. ... She must be monitored by state authorities so she doesn’t continue to hurt herself." [5]

"If you’re about to bust your nut and a girl does tells you “No” or “Wait,” she’s an inconsiderate slut who is now causing you direct harm. A man’s nut is sacred, and for her to impede that should be criminal. I’m serious." [6]

"If she tells you to stop the millisecond after she gets her nut, without you getting yours, I want you to tell her that the point of having sex with women is so a man doesn’t have to use his hand, and that she has performed below the hand." [6]

"That’s why we do all this shit to bang women—to get our nut. If she can’t do that for us, then she’s useless as a living being." [6]

"make rape legal if done on private property. I propose that we make the violent taking of a woman not punishable by law when done off public grounds." [7]

[1] http://wehuntedthemammoth.com/2014/11/12/rooshs-reaxxion-dou... [2] https://twitter.com/rooshv/status/377363307788656640 [3] http://www.donotlink.com/framed?699413 [4] http://wehuntedthemammoth.com/2015/04/28/roosh-v-seduced-and... [5] http://wehuntedthemammoth.com/2015/04/15/pickup-guru-roosh-v... [6] http://wehuntedthemammoth.com/2015/03/21/a-mans-nut-is-sacre... [7] http://wehuntedthemammoth.com/2015/02/17/pickup-guru-roosh-v...

Thanks for the response, but I'm not sure how this is relevant: yes, this guy is a bad person. You have produced quotes in which he advocates doing evil things.

Surely you can agree that, say, defending CIA torture programs is also a bad thing. Given this, would you condone sharing a banner with torture apologia? Do you denounce authors that are published by HuffPo? I would really appreciate an answer to this question.

I think what he's saying is that the founder(s) of HuffPo aren't torture apologist(s), so your comparison doesn't really carry weight.

It's like publishing a paper analyzing the way humans react to exposure to rapidly changing temperature on a site that publishes content that is exclusively torture apologia as opposed to a psychiatric journal. One has integrity, the other doesn't.

I think that's an accidental red herring. Let's try judging this news outlet by their policy, instead:

"Reaxxion is a gaming site for men that was created as a reaction to extremists infiltrating and corrupting video game journalism. It aims to be a community of men who want to discuss gaming without being fed propaganda or labeled sexist because of their interest in specific kinds of gaming entertainment."

I would assume that women are allowed to read the articles, but it doesn't sound like women are encouraged to comment on them. Personally, I have zero time for that kind of crap.

Hm...

On reflection, I also think there's a relevant difference between judging a news outlet by the worst opinion piece they've ever published and judging a news outlet by the average opinion piece they publish. The latter action is also useful for gauging the quality of the site's policy.

>On reflection, I also think there's a relevant difference between judging a news outlet by the worst opinion piece they've ever published and judging a news outlet by the average opinion piece they publish. The latter action is also useful for gauging the quality of the site's policy.

Good point, assuming the median article on Reaxxion is awful, not just a few outliers. (This assumption is likely true, IMHO)

Thanks! I really wish this piece had been published somewhere else; while the author comes with his own baggage there'd have been a better chance of real discussion that way. C'est la vie, and thanks again for listening.

Derek Smart certainly has his own history but his remarks are spot on. Scope creep went out of control fairly early on, I backed this game expecting a spiritual sequel to Freelancer which I felt was a realistic goal. At the time, I was not aware of Robert's history of being removed from the Freelancer project due to delays. However, even in the case of Freelancer I was sold on Freelancer due to some of Robert's promises and quite surprised when the released version was missing many of the promised features. CIG wanting to build and rent out their own motion capture studio to third parties and selling ships for exorbitant pricing left a bad taste in my mouth early on. I will be happy if Star Citizen ends up being a modern Freelancer but I fear many will be sorely disappointed.

He has a point and the domain expertise/experience but he doesn't say whether the failure of Star Citizen will involve Chris Roberts running around the internet and getting in massive flamefests with random users and threatening to sue everyone all while claiming all sorts of improbable qualifications. Or whether it will inspire parodies like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtB_jvznaNM

We can only hope!

Derek Smart criticizing a space sim game about being overly ambitious? Now I've seen everything.

Did you read the article? His point is that having failed to manage scope several times he has developed an eye for it.

That's kind of what I was hoping from Chris Roberts when I backed. I knew he had issues managing scope before and I was hoping this was going to be a more experienced Chris Roberts focused on shipping working software and not selling more things he is going to have to develop.

The timeline isn't so much what bothers me it's the threat of running out of funding. CIG is not transparent about burn rate so it's hard to tell how much runway they have although they claim they have it covered, but the numbers don't make sense to me.

I almost stopped reading the piece as soon as I figured out who the author was; I initially missed the byline in the left column. I never had any problem with Derek Smart's games -- I tried BC3000 around 1999-2000 and just didn't get into it -- but I found his online antics and personality off-putting. I skipped a great deal of the chest-beating in the article to get to the actual meat.

It seems odd to be in agreement with Derek Smart, but I think he's right. Chris Roberts didn't stop at simply promising the moon; he's teasing the Oort Cloud at this point.

Chris Roberts is working on his magnum opus. I have very little faith in anyone claiming that this guy is going to tank the effort. Also, I have to wonder if this dude has paid any attention to the COPIOUS amount of world detail being dumped into the universe, or actually played in any of the released fighting sandbox, or paid a visit to CIG's offices (since you can, you know, drop by for a visit to see how development is going).

Disclosure: I have thrown a few thousand dollars into the Star-Citizen-shaped hole.

Actually he isn't saying he is going to tank it at all.

He said that the current project is impossible and the only way to complete anything is to fix the scope.

However his prediction is that once they try and fix the scope the backlash will be terrible.

Sorry, I worded my comment rather poorly. I meant to say that I think CR has been handling things very well so far, and I personally believe that he has the experience necessary to keep things under control during this process, and to make SC an historically-good game, with a long, successful life. Those are the odds I'm playing.

Elite Dangerous, however, is fantastic if anyone was looking to scratch that space flight sim itch.

Haha! Excellent.

I feel lucky not to have given money to Star Citizen. When it started out, I was hoping for something that included deep space exploration - but it appears that it's basically just a really expensive combat sim. If there are plans for that, I've certainly not heard about them and everything about the ship design so far points toward a combat sim only.

In the meantime, I see $400 dollar ship models and have to wonder: who buys this stuff?

People privileged enough to have $400 to throw at a game.

Wow! Derek has been entertaining me online for nearly thirty years now and instead of that realization making me feel old, it actually makes me feel kind of young. The parts without the words "I" or "me" sprinkled all over them made it an insightful article from someone who's opinion is based on substantial knowledge of this subject. Good or bad. Hi Derek, I know you must be reading these :)

Derek Smart?! It must have been at least 15 years since I last heard of him. He was pretty insufferable back in the usenet days, and still doesn't seem to have gotten noticeably less full of himself. An article supposedly about Star Citizen seems to actually be mostly about himself.

But if his point is that this is a niche of massive egos and impossible ambitions leading to failed games, there might be something to that.

This is an opinioned based comment.

This piece reminds me of Trump's blustery presidential candidate announcement.

Probably the most accurate description of the article so far.

It only took him 15 years to stop calling himself "Doctor Derek Smart" - good for him!

But did he ever apologize to the Coke machine?

"[Derek Smart]. Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time...a long time."

Just to share here in case you don't want to read the article... the tl;dr version is accurately summed up as: 33% "I'm the greatest at this", and 67% "Star Citizen isn't gonna work because I can't see how (and remember, I'm the greatest)".

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