ColonelRick

Bigger ships will also take longer to replace (all ships aside from presumably your starting ship have to be produced) ;) It's looking kind of unlikely that they'll offer frigates to pledgers, as we're nearing the 21 million mark even without the last three brochures for pledge ships (Hornet, Freelancer, Constellation) having been released. Each of those events seperately will rake in a lot of money, so I don't think they're worrying about raising enough funds to cover the final stretch.

There is a single player portion to the game where you play as a military pilot. Besides that, you can run your own 'server' if you want to, and pretty much play offline, though some aspects of the persistent universe will obviously not be available. There's also Elite Dangerous, which gives you even more control over player interaction (you'll still be online, but you can set it so that you don't meet anyone else but NPCs)

Reading your post, however, it sounds like you pretty much just want to play X games ;)

@nethlem It sounds to me your interpretation of the facts is a little selective. Like I said, and you said yourself; ships are specialised. The Idris is a moving guild/squadron bases in essence, but it requires multiple people to operate it. It's just going to be a thousand dollar paperweight otherwise. Regarding insurance, it's going to cost an irrelevant amount of money. You'll easily be able to cover that with your in-game activities. Think insurance costs in EVE.

Regarding subscription: You get a freaking skin, some subscriber's only swag, and your name somewhere on some kind of in-game monument. That's it. Oh, and the monthly Jump Point magazine covering development (which gets put on reddit instantly) and the Wingman's Hangar show everybody gets to see. If you want to attack the game, that's fine, but the subscriptions are not an effective argument. It doesn't offer any in-game advantage.

To be honest, I think you didn't do a whole lot of reading about the game design itself and just went for the real money aspects of it. Aside from a game package, you don't HAVE to buy anything. I bought my package (Freelancer), a skin, and that's it. If people are crazy enough to spend thousands of dollars on it, that's fine by me. If it turns out that the game is not balanced to where I can reasonably earn my stuff in-game, then I will criticise the developers for it, but at this point there is neither evidence to sugest that they're going to make it super easy or super hard, so exploding about it makes no sense. We will get the first glimpse of real gameplay in December, when the dogfighting module releases, and accusations of pay-to-win may or may not hold more water then.

Also, I really don't get why people are complaining about the stretch goals. The developers need money. Roberts has been clear from the get go that this game would cost around $21 million to make. At first, he planned to raise money on their site and on kickstarter as a sort of seed fund to show investors that there is still a market for space games. When the counter blew past that amount and just kept going, he realised that the more money the community could raise, the less he would need from developers, thus giving him more control over development. At a certain point, the developers realised that if the trend kept up (and it has) they could fully crowdfund the game, which is why they have kept adding stretch goals.

Adding is probably not even the right word for it. All the stretch goals until 23 million (they have overhead due to operating costs, physical packaging for the pledge packages and the cut kickstarter received, so the 21 mil in development funds won't be reached until 23 mil overall) were planned out in advance of the campaign. They are the game as Roberts says he envisions it. Anything AFTER 23 million is additional to the core game, and will probably not be ready at launch.

The only microtransactions in the game will be cosmetic items and starter level weapons. They recently dropped the prices on the cosmetic items after feedback from the community, but prices on the weapons remain kind of prohibitively high. You have to exchange money for credits to buy stuff, and they've imposed both a total amount limit, and a limit on how much credits you can buy in a 24 hour timespan to prevent abuse. Not to mention that the developers have repeatedly stated that the in-game prices for ships will go up once the game goes live.

OP, your example of the Idris is kind of flawed. They will be super limited (couple hundred out of a quarter of a million users, not to mention NPCs) and you'll need 10 people to effectively man one. They can hypothetically be used by a single player, either on their own or with bots, but the combat capability of the ship in that scenario ranges from severely diminished (bots will be bad, compared to human players) to sitting duck (with a single player)

A comparison to the more common dedicated fighters like the Hornet ($100 dollar level) or even the $225 Constellation is more grouded, but also still flawed; you're flying a ship that does not do combat well, so you shouldn't expect to win from someone that has a ship that is kitted out for combat. The ships all have a niche where they perform best, and players should stick to that range. The Aurora is not going to be some monster dogfighter, but it IS cheap to buy, cheap to maintain (commonality with other RSI ships, such as the Constellation) and it has an excellent amount of modifier slots (more cargo capacity, stealth upgrades, engine upgrades, you name it) for a ship its size.

The Hornet is a bruiser, but it carries next to no cargo. Fit it so it can carry more cargo, and it loses a significant part of its weapons. Similarly, the Constellation is fast, well armed, and carries a decent amount of cargo, but it is a jack of all trades and probably uses a horrendous amount of fuel to power those huge engines. The community (and I can assure you there are a LOT more people with Auroras than there are Constellation players) weighs every single statement made by the devs, particularly when it comes to ship design. If it isn't right, the devs won't hear the end of it. See for example the discussion on the Freelancer's cockpit or it's cargo ramp.

HDCP encrypts the output on the HDMI port so that only HDCP compliant displays will be able to display it (they 'handshake' with the source, and get a key) The problem with this is that AFAIK NO capture device is HDCP compliant (which is done on purpose, to prevent easy piracy) which means that people making game videos for youtube etc. are effectively cut off from their material. There is a workaround solution to this, which is to use a device that strips the encryption from the signal. IIRC this is a bit of a gray area, legally speaking.

Without HDCP when playing games, you can just hook up a capture card with a HDMI-in on it, and it should work.

This. They may have gotten people to overlook the €100 premium (as always, prices are straight conversion, so us euros end up paying more than NA, regardless) but with the x months of delay, they're just surrendering the market to Sony. If someone wanted to buy a new console this holiday season and had their mind set on a XBO, even if they've stuck with MS over the years, like me, they could easily think 'let's give sony a go'. Like me. MS has not managed to keep me interested for a while now; I haven't renewed my gold subscription in months because I just felt I wasn't getting anything out of it, even more so when you've gotten used to the freedom that PC offers with regards to multiplayer. They hastily put in the free games thing to take a play out of Sony's book, but I feel plus has been flat-out better in that regard. Even on my Vita, I feel like i've been getting great value out of my plus subscription, and that's only going to get better when/if I get a Ps4, primarily because it's one sub for both platforms.

'Normal' TED and TEDx events are pretty mixed-gender, if the ones I've watched are any indication. As others have said, I think TEDx are more or less independently organised shindigs, so people can push an agenda there if they want to.

RO2 is not for everyone though. It does NOT play like a CoD or a MoH would, even more so because most of the community has moved to more hardcore servers.

I've gone with Justin Mcelroy's story about attending the demo for Sherlock Holmes V (VI?) from E3 2011. No idea how I found that, I just stumbled on it browsing bombcast fragments. It's slightly over one page long, but it will have to do. The weird double spacing requirement is making this take up much more space than it would actually need.