Apparently you can't call out bad business practices on spectrum

[FZD]

This is starting to get a bit ridiculous.

Was the post removed because "subscription based whale milk operation" is too vulgar? No. It was apparently "a claim of bad business practice," an arbitrary offense that, correct me if I'm wrong, isn't found anywhere in the linked code of conduct.
Naturally you can't discuss this on Spectrum, you can't respond to the mod, there's no feedback/appeal process. Mods just get a free pass on such acts of petty tyranny.
I was disappointed in CIG before. Now I'm annoyed. Attempts to silence such trivial criticism are not healthy.

 

[Deroth]

• Subscribers already had tiered access to PTU, that didn't change
• Concierge was added to a tiered access to PTU due to an elitest attitude many have been showing (I mean, come on, spending $1k used to be an accomplishment, but at this point is it? Really? Even I am in Concierge now.)
• Players that actually play frequently and consistently (which is what CIG THOUGHT they would get from Concierge players) will now get invited to PTU

This isn't a milking of anyone or anything, and it would not surprise me if CIG also wanted to move Subscribers further down the list of Waves but with all the complaints for the past year or so about Subscriber Rewards being lackluster the complaints over that would be even worse than what is being seen from some Concierge.

 

[FZD]

Well, here one is at least free to express their opinion on the matter.

 

[NaffNaffBobFace]

I think the issue with the post is stating that dishonesty has occurred: "CIG being dishonest". We only have what the official statements on the situation and those statements make the situation quite clear.

I'd be willing to change my stance on the issue if anyone provided any proof, but to this point no one has been able to bring any evidence that what was stated in regard to this issue is not what was stated and that it's actually a cynical attempt to channel and cache grab.

By stating dishonesty has happened, it's speculation and in breach to conduct of respect to the project and fuelling the disinformation train to other backers.

Cut out the speculation that anyone is trying to diddle you in the botty-box or change the wording from an absolute to a "I feel like" or "It looks from a certain angle" and you should be able to continue to be pissed off about the situation without incurring any further reprimand... you said first "seems" which makes that part okay but the "being" makes the statement that follows the "Seems" an absolute... as long as you make it clear it's a personal opinion and not anything which could be considered to be an absolute you may even be able to be quite critical without moderation comeback

 

[FZD]

I think the issue with the post is stating that dishonesty has occurred: "CIG being dishonest". We only have what the official statements on the situation and those statements make the situation quite clear.

I mean, maybe you missed it but it actually specifically says "the claims of bad business practices, such as implications of milking backers."

 

[NaffNaffBobFace]

I mean, maybe you missed it but it actually specifically says "the claims of bad business practices, such as implications of milking backers."

Yes, the "being dishonest about it" makes the whole statement an absolute by association regardless of the "Seems" and even that may have needed more effort... Outright making it a personal observation perhaps go as far as saying "I've interepreted X as Z, have I got this wrong?" may be able to let you have your say constructively without being told you have breached community guidelines.

 

[FZD]

Yes, the "being dishonest about it" makes the whole statement an absolute by association regardless of the "Seems" and even that may have needed more effort... Outright making it a personal observation perhaps go as far as saying "I've interepreted X as Z, have I got this wrong?" may be able to let you have your say constructively without being told you have breached community guidelines.

Well, that is certainly an interesting interpretation. I do feel like calling it dishonest when CIG claims that this wave restructuring would be almost unnoticeable with vastly compressed timeline and with the waves happening almost immediately one after the other is warranted though. You've been a backer long enough to know that was never going to be anywhere close to the truth, though I must say I'm still disappointed with the lack of effort of trying to stick to that for even just one patch cycle.

 

[NaffNaffBobFace]

Well, that is certainly an interesting interpretation. I do feel like calling it dishonest when CIG claims that this wave restructuring would be almost unnoticeable with vastly compressed timeline and with the waves happening almost immediately one after the other is warranted though. You've been a backer long enough to know that was never going to be anywhere close to the truth, though I must say I'm still disappointed with the lack of effort of trying to stick to that for even just one patch cycle.

Totally get where you are coming from.

There is intention, there is reality, and when intention is communicated before the reality is clear, interpretation of that intention can only ever set up for disappointment through the filter of executed reality.

Added to that there is always two versions of the "truth", the one which lives fully formed by years of experience and first hand witness in the persons head speaking it and the interpretation of the simple single sentence in the mind of the person hearing it divorced from all that other stuff in their head. Rarely can everything be fit into a simple single paragraph.

Just as we could temper and manipulate our language as recipients critiquing to avoid moderation, it could be argued CIG may be able to benefit from using statements of intent such as "We intend for", "The plan is", "What we want to happen is" and then have a "however" (never a but, a "but" never lands as "but" is the key that closes ears to whatever follows) with a few statements of what could cause delays, issues etc and other wording along those lines.

It has been 10 years and there are 1000+ employees and not all of them can be trained in to that careful way of stating information around a shifting set of chriteria... Does this mean we'd prefer they don't speak at all? Heck no they should be able to talk their minds all the time! But if we as recipients can't cut them some breaks it'll end up with only the Corporate Middle-speak Department interacting with the community in a one-way information going out manner.

So I don't disagree at all CIG has a lot of work to do, but maybe, just maybe, so do we as people following a work in progress

 

[FZD]

Totally get where you are coming from.

There is intention, there is reality, and when intention is communicated before the reality is clear interpretation of that intention can only ever set up for disappointment.

Added to that there is always two versions of the "truth", the one which lives fully formed by years of experience and first hand witness in the persons head speaking it and the interpretation of the simple single word sentence in the mind of the person hearing it. Sometimes not everything can be fit into a simple single paragraph.

Just as we could temper and manipulate our language as recipients critiquing to avoid moderation, it could be argued CIG may be able to benefit from using statements of intent such as "We intend for", "The plan is", "What we want to happen is" and then have a "however" (never a but, a "but" never lands as "but" is the key that closes ears to whatever follows) with a few statements of what could cause delays, issues etc and other wording along those lines.

It has been 10 years and there are 1000+ employees and not all of them can be trained in to that careful way of stating information around a shifting set details... Does this mean we'd prefer they don't speak at all? Heck no they should be able to talk their minds all the time! But if we as recipients can't cut them some breaks it'll end up with only the Corporate Middle-speak Department interacting with the community in a one-way information going out manner.

So I don't disagree at all CIG has a lot of work to do, but maybe, just maybe, so do we as people following a work in progress

Well, that's fair enough, and while I do disagree a bit on some details I think we can leave it at that.

 

[BUTUZ]

Usually, on most forums, you can't get away with criticizing the owner of the forum.

I criticized Montoya's choice of shampoo once - I got banned. But then I came back with this secret account, he'll never put two and two together.

 

[Richard Bong]

• Subscribers already had tiered access to PTU, that didn't change
• Concierge was added to a tiered access to PTU due to an elitest attitude many have been showing (I mean, come on, spending $1k used to be an accomplishment, but at this point is it? Really? Even I am in Concierge now.)
• Players that actually play frequently and consistently (which is what CIG THOUGHT they would get from Concierge players) will now get invited to PTU

This isn't a milking of anyone or anything, and it would not surprise me if CIG also wanted to move Subscribers further down the list of Waves but with all the complaints for the past year or so about Subscriber Rewards being lackluster the complaints over that would be even worse than what is being seen from some Concierge.

Backwards.
Concierge was Wave 1 PTU long before Subs got that access, which was about 5 years ago.

 

[Montoya]

I was disappointed in CIG before. Now I'm annoyed. Attempts to silence such trivial criticism are not healthy.

Let me give you the other angle on this.

There is a guy on our discord, like most other people here, he is a bit annoyed about this 10yr mark and the endless delays. So he bitches and cries a bit on Monday. Then on Tuesday he bitches and cries more, then on Wednesday he bitches more, then on Thursday he bitches and cries more, then on Friday he bitches and cries more. Then on Saturday... you get the idea, so I sent him a message saying that it is ok to be critical, we are all critical of this endless hell hole of game development, but to come in each and every day and just complain... Some of us are not interested in seeing that same shit every day. Some people are new and love the game, some people just backed the game last week, they want a place to be excited and talk about the cool new ship they bought.

Moderators and staff, be it here or at CIG try to steer the direction and "feel" the community has.

I NEVER go to Spectrum. You know why? I am not interested in hearing everybody bitching and complaining about the same old shit for 10yrs running. I am well aware of the issues, I don't need to see the same 10 people constantly having a mental breakdown because of some bug or delayed feature.

Coming back to that comment from Sunny-CIG, I bet they see 100 of those comments every day. As a moderator then can choose to ignore it since its not a direct violation of TOS, and watch as the entire Spectrum forums devolves, yet again, into endless threads of people complaining about the same issue from a month ago, disenfranchising all the new arrivals who do not care about wave 1 or wave 2 and just want to hang out with other fans of the game.

OR... prune some comments and give the silent majority some breathing room from the endless complaints.

 

[FZD]

Let me give you the other angle on this.

There is a guy on our discord, like most other people here, he is a bit annoyed about this 10yr mark and the endless delays. So he bitches and cries a bit on Monday. Then on Tuesday he bitches and cries more, then on Wednesday he bitches more, then on Thursday he bitches and cries more, then on Friday he bitches and cries more. Then on Saturday... you get the idea, so I sent him a message saying that it is ok to be critical, we are all critical of this endless hell hole of game development, but to come in each and every day and just complain... Some of us are not interested in seeing that same shit every day. Some people are new and love the game, some people just backed the game last week, they want a place to be excited and talk about the cool new ship they bought.

Moderators and staff, be it here or at CIG try to steer the direction and "feel" the community has.

I NEVER go to Spectrum. You know why? I am not interested in hearing everybody bitching and complaining about the same old shit for 10yrs running. I am well aware of the issues, I don't need to see the same 10 people constantly having a mental breakdown because of some bug or delayed feature.

Coming back to that comment from Sunny-CIG, I bet they see 100 of those comments every day. As a moderator then can choose to ignore it since its not a direct violation of TOS, and watch as the entire Spectrum forums devolves, yet again, into endless threads of people complaining about the same issue from a month ago, disenfranchising all the new arrivals who do not care about wave 1 or wave 2 and just want to hang out with other fans of the game.

OR... prune some comments and give the silent majority some breathing room from the endless complaints.

And if they said something along the lines of "Hey no big deal but we pruned this message because 'milking the whales' is not a nice way to phrase it" I'd understand. It'd be a bit silly, but if I squint I can sort of see the point.
That's not what it said though. Their approach was "Nice opinion but you can't talk about our bad business practices and if you don't shut up we'll temporarily suspend your account."
That just doesn't feel right. That really feels like a bad business practice.

 

[Deroth]

Backwards.
Concierge was Wave 1 PTU long before Subs got that access, which was about 5 years ago.

At no point did I state which 'had it first', only that Subscribers already were setup with tiered access to PTU prior to this most recent change. To add to that, I was also indirectly implying that at this point, and with the current state of various things, there are probably far more Concierge than there are Subscribers.

And if they said something along the lines of "Hey no big deal but we pruned this message because 'milking the whales' is not a nice way to phrase it" I'd understand. It'd be a bit silly, but if I squint I can sort of see the point.
That's not what it said though. Their approach was "Nice opinion but you can't talk about our bad business practices and if you don't shut up we'll temporarily suspend your account."
That just doesn't feel right. That really feels like a bad business practice.

I had a post once on Spectrum that got pulled and I received a similar notification. Summed up, I was merely suggesting adding some special skins to honor First Responders or at least Medical Professionals with a skin for medical ships when they were being put through the ringer at the start of COVID. However, there were people that somehow interpreted my post as a political attack on various governments' responses and handling of COVID (even though I made a point of not entering that arena with the post), freaked out, and because of the volume of people reporting me the CIG moderators responded.
So, I'm guessing a few people saw your post, got irked, reported you, then you got that response from CIG. I get how frustrating it can be to get handled that way, especially when you see how much seems to get overlooked on Spectrum of a far worse nature, but at this point I just look at most of Spectrum as just Reddit-Rehash (the best part of Spectrum is the Patch Notes.)

 

[Richard Bong]

At no point did I state which 'had it first', only that Subscribers already were setup with tiered access to PTU prior to this most recent change. To add to that, I was also indirectly implying that at this point, and with the current state of various things, there are probably far more Concierge than there are Subscribers.

My point was the perk is one of the advertised benefits of being a Concierge member. so keeping the subscriber perk but not the Concierge perk, which was already set up as wave 1 doesn't make sense. If you're going to downgrade one, downgrade both.

 

[Deroth]

My point was the perk is one of the advertised benefits of being a Concierge member. so keeping the subscriber perk but not the Concierge perk, which was already set up as wave 1 doesn't make sense. If you're going to downgrade one, downgrade both.

Doing so wouldn't have bothered me, but I have already pointed out reasons as to why I suspect they didn't (already getting a lot of complaints over Subscriber perks being 'less than' for the past year or so and that Subscriber numbers are likely far lower that Concierge numbers at this point.)
Since the quantity of Concierge is likely far higher than CIG ever expected when they had established that perk they could've restructured Concierge, which is already tiered for other perks, to increase the criteria to reach each tier of Concierge, but do you think that would've gone over any better? CIG didn't take anything away, they just made access for Concierge for that one perk tiered like all the other perks of being Concierge.

 

[Radegast74]

At first I was kinda pissed about the whole "wave restructuring" thing...the cure for me was to watch people in first waves with PTU access play a buggy as hell build LOL

I'll be curious to see if this "restructuring" has the desired impact. I can see a potential problem with longer-term backers (with significant bug reporting experience) being left out, and a bias for new(er) players to have more play time, since this is really all new to them. We shall see.

The topics I haven't seen addressed really are a) how this seems to show more of a shift of game-related decisions being directed and made by sales & marketing, and b) the "mixing" of subscriber money with game dev & operational spending budgets. I always thought they had a blurb about subscriber fees being meant for promoting the game and making extra content, so that backer money didn't have to cover any of that. Not a big deal, but still...

Since the quantity of Concierge is likely far higher than CIG ever expected when they had established that perk they could've restructured Concierge, which is already tiered for other perks, to increase the criteria to reach each tier of Concierge, but do you think that would've gone over any better? CIG didn't take anything away, they just made access for Concierge for that one perk tiered like all the other perks of being Concierge.

^ I totally agree with this. CIG never expected so many people to hit the $1000 mark. On the other hand, restrictng Wave 1 to $25,000, and Wave 2 to $15,000 is kinda ballsy.

Final thought, which I'll post over in the Starfield thread, but, watching streams of Starfield makes me better appreciate what Star Citizen is trying to accomplish, and has already accomplished.

 

[Richard Bong]

Doing so wouldn't have bothered me, but I have already pointed out reasons as to why I suspect they didn't (already getting a lot of complaints over Subscriber perks being 'less than' for the past year or so and that Subscriber numbers are likely far lower that Concierge numbers at this point.)
Since the quantity of Concierge is likely far higher than CIG ever expected when they had established that perk they could've restructured Concierge, which is already tiered for other perks, to increase the criteria to reach each tier of Concierge, but do you think that would've gone over any better? CIG didn't take anything away, they just made access for Concierge for that one perk tiered like all the other perks of being Concierge.

Complaints about Concierge perks has been going on longer and promisses made by CIG to improve Conciere Perks have been going on as long.
And, yes, something was taken away from Concierge. Wave One Access for all Concierge members, an advertised perk for spending more than $1000. The number of Concierge members is irrelevant to this perk. According to https://support.robertsspaceindustries.com/hc/en-us/articles/360002542733-Concierge-Levels-and-Rewards it is still a Concierge Level advertised perk.

 

[Thalstan]

They should have tiered the rewards better, or at least done another “if you are concierge by X date you get the above. After, you only get the below. Aka, grandfathered them in.

Also, perks are only for value in your hangar. If you give away your ships, that value is lost.

Last, be engaged with your whales. Yeah, there is a lot of anger in that forum right now, but it’s a self inflicted wound. Going to the concierge forum and laying out the issues and asking for feedback would have been a much better approach. People would still have been upset, but they would have felt like they were at least heard.

 

[Montoya]

And if they said something along the lines of "Hey no big deal but we pruned this message because 'milking the whales' is not a nice way to phrase it" I'd understand. It'd be a bit silly, but if I squint I can sort of see the point.

Yeah that would be the adult and logical way, but you can imagine the backlash from that.

"CIG mods are soooo triggered!" and "CIG mods are such losers they can't handle any criticism and are trying to silence us!"

There is no wining scenario for the mods in this case where a comment does not directly go against TOS, but still needs a little prune.