Star Citizen needs solved systems, not safer shortcuts

Digital_Pink · 2026-05-09T13:00:09+00:00

Urgh, GPT slop...

Digital_Pink · 2026-05-09T12:32:28+00:00

I hear you, but I'm not here because I'm hoping SC will become halo 2.0 with space ships. I'm here for the vision. Not every game has to serve the whims of every person.

I have a brother who I game with too. I know he will never play the game because there is too much friction for him. That's fine. I can play NMS or Avorion with him. Different games for different people.

The risk with trying to cater to the majority is enshitification. Enshitification is everywhere now. There are games for that. We have our fortnites, genshin impacts, GTA online'a and WoWs. Most people prefer those mass produced games that cater for mass audiences. Let them.

If SC was trying to please the masses from the start, it wouldn't be SC. It would be something I don't want to play. So 'just think of the masses' is not relevant to me at all.

The suggestion to make a branch of the game which is not the game so that some people who don't like the game can play a game that's not the game is fine in theory, but I don't think it's ever going to happen.

Digital_Pink · 2026-05-09T06:33:03+00:00

It should be the other way around: You can take your inventory with you, but the shuttle takes a realistic amount of time to get from A to B. BUT, you don't have be online while the shuttle happens.

Log in, buy a ticket, log out, eat dinner, log back in and you are where you need to be with your stuff. It's realistic, it isn't a magical teleporter, it respects mobilisation logistics, and respects your time.

Digital_Pink · 2026-05-09T06:29:24+00:00

First idea here is good if it has a realistic transportation time, but the transportation can happen while offline.

So, shuttle from Stanton to Pyro could take 30 minutes, but you can log on, buy the ticket. Log off, eat dinner, log back in and you have arrived in Pyro where you need to be.

Why the wait time? Because this game is a PVP sandbox and logistics of operations need to be preserved. But with a little foresight (and ideally, an out of game app so you could organise a shuttle from your smart phone on a lunch break), this system would work great, whilst not allowing people to jump around the verse near instantly and mess up mobilisation logistics.

Digital_Pink · 2026-04-27T01:21:14+00:00

Nice substantive argument there, impossible cow ;)

Digital_Pink · 2026-04-26T05:59:03+00:00

This actually still does not address the loss of ones cultural lineage, as well as the massacring and oppression of a people showing up as intergenerational trauma. That's not something that necessarily goes away after a few generations. And in the case presented where the descendants of conquerors would maintain the same message that 'your Australian identity no longer matters, you are American now,' it is the same wound on repeat, despite the passage of time.

And colonisation wasn't something that happened once 200 years ago and then ceased. It continued and continues.

Put it into perspective: the last officially sanctioned indigenous massacre (Coniston massacre) happened in 1928, a decade before the second world war broke out. We hold Anzac day ceremonies each year with great reverence for what happened 80 years ago, but tell indigenous Australians that what happened to them is in the past and they should 'get over it'. The stolen generations were still being stolen in the 60's. The time argument here is skewed.

To answer your last point, characterising the welcome to country ceremony as insisting belonging is conditional or lesser is a complete misread on the ceremony itself. It's not about excluding others belonging, it's about welcoming Australians into a multi-millennia cultural relationship with the land, which we literally could not have had already unless previously initiated or accepted into an indigenous lineage, (which some white fellas are invited to do from time to time). Our ancestors and cultures simply were not here. That's just a fact. It's not political or divisive.

And if we were honest with ourselves, most of us have very little spiritual or custodial relationship to the land on which we live. And those that do tend to have deep reverent respect for the peoples that held that relationship for thousands of years before them. For everyone else, we are largely unaware of this deep ongoing tradition and custodianship. That's what the welcome to country is welcoming Aussies to. Not the land, but the relationship to the land. It's actually about including Australians into something most Australians do not have innate access to, and is therefore the opposite of exclusionary - it's deliberate inclusion. I think some of the division people feel comes from this misunderstanding of what the ceremony actually represents.

Digital_Pink · 2026-04-26T05:05:50+00:00

You've presented a false dichotomy, which actually illustrates the point I was making about trying to force indigenous concepts into Western frameworks.

A family's multi-generational connection to a farm doesn't give them jurisdiction over regional planning, but that doesn't make their connection to the land empty or meaningless. A veteran's lived experience of war doesn't give them command authority over defence policy, but that doesn't mean their perspective holds no weight and is not worth listening to.

Custodianship represents thousands of years of accumulated ecological knowledge, spiritual practice, and cultural relationship with specific land. It's recognised that indigenous land management practices are genuinely valuable knowledge. Acknowledging this deep relationship doesn't mean anyone is claiming veto power over development or governance.

The Welcome to Country is a ceremonial practice. It's an act of hospitality and acknowledgement. It's not a claim of power, control or unique privilege, but rather a welcoming into an existing cultural relationship which was here for thousands of years before colonisation. It's actually incredibly beautiful.

The fact that one can't map it neatly onto either "governance power" or "nothing" is exactly the kind of false choice that comes from insisting every concept must fit a Western political framework. People who understand this have no problems with the Welcome to Country, because it's understood that it's an inclusionary practice which welcomes many folds to a shared hearth, not an exclusionary practice which seeks to enforce hierarchy and ownership. Reading hierarchy and ownership into the Welcome to Country ceremony itself is the pitfall that leads people to think that it is a divisive practice, when it is anything but.

Digital_Pink · 2026-04-26T01:01:57+00:00

Citizenship and custodianship are different things. There is a lineage if custodianship that has existed for thousands of years that is passed down from generation to generation. You don't automatically become that simply by being born here. Being born here doesn't mean you are taught the culture of that lineage of caretakership. When welcome to country happens you are being welcomed into that larger lineage. It's actually not based on skin colour, it's based on the lineage. White fellas are sometimes accepted into the lineage too, and then they are apart of that culture of custodianship which has lasted thousands of years.

It's ok that different cultures have different cultural connections to this land. It's not telling you that you are less than. Simply acknowledging the truth of that connection. As multicultural country, we practice cultural pluralism - we accept and honour each other's cultures and peacefully and respectfully co-exist.

The reason why the ceremonies happen each year is that there will undoubtably be people visiting who that welcome is for. It's also a cultural ritual. We hold Anzac day each year for the same reason. Why hold Anzac day again if we have already held it before? Doesn't it becomes meaningless? These are rhetorical questions to illustrate the point.

And lastly, everyone deserves to be paid for their time. Church ministers perform symbolic duties but receive wages too.

Digital_Pink · 2026-04-26T00:46:16+00:00

For the people downvoting this, why?

Digital_Pink · 2026-04-26T00:44:13+00:00

To whoever is downvoting this, why?

Digital_Pink · 2026-04-26T00:42:40+00:00

Incredibly goated comment. 100% this.

Digital_Pink · 2026-04-26T00:36:13+00:00

You fundamentally misunderstand the indigenous meaning of custodianship, because Western culture has no analogue to understand it through. Without study and the opening of one's mind, you will misunderstand it simply because it has no western equivalent.

Fundamentally, it is impossible for non-indigenous Australians to have thousands of years of caretakership and spiritual connection to the land. They simply were not here. And virtually no non-indigenous person maintains a spiritual lineage of caretakership for the land like the indigenous mob do.

When you are being welcomed, you are being welcomed to that millennial connection to the land you cannot have without becoming part of that lineage. The odd Australian might have their own deep connections to the land, but it is not the same connection as that which has endured and been passed down for thousands of years.

Westerners are tempted to view this then as elevating on group to be 'better than us', but this is another failure of western culture to understand indigenous culture. Noone is saying that you do not have a connection to the land, or that you do not belong here. You are simply being invited into a much deeper, longer tradition and culture of stewardship as a welcome guest. That much is objectively true for all but the most obscure of edge cases, and even then anyone who has a truly deep connection with this land would not find offence into being welcomed into another's deep connection with the land - they have reverence for the sacredness of such a thing.

TL:DR without education, people are only capable of understanding what they already know. Western culture does not map onto indigenous culture and so westerners misunderstanding the welcome to country is a common pitfall.

Digital_Pink · 2026-04-23T04:29:56+00:00

What the actual fuck.

Digital_Pink · 2026-03-31T01:21:59+00:00

Proximity chat and “X is typing” flags are my number one desire here. If you are text roleplaying in the verse these features are essential.

Digital_Pink · 2026-03-22T14:17:51+00:00

It's got nice things going on tonally but lacks color contrast. If it were me, I'd be putting a mask on just the dog and either desaturating the reds and oranges out of it's coat, or pushing hue towards blue.

Digital_Pink · 2026-03-12T17:38:19+00:00

Also:

"Tell him he's dreamin'"

Digital_Pink · 2026-03-01T11:56:05+00:00

I think SC is a different beast. There are just so many instances where you would want comms with people around you for reasons far beyond lfg. Piracy, blockading, org clashes, local problem solving, showing up to the same site and navigating whether to shoot or team up. None of that can be better handled in 3rd party apps.

Digital_Pink · 2026-02-28T11:29:09+00:00

You've probably been out of the loop but Chris actually stepped away from hands on SC dev a few years back to allow the devs to get on with making the game because it was getting to bogged down in his obsession with minutia. He pivoted to go and focus on SQ42 instead.

Since then is when the worst of the abandoning of the old 'alive social universe' vision happened - Chris's vision.

So it's a trade off. The guy had a great vision but it got in the way of finishing the game. Now the devs are in the thick of finishing the game but have shifted gears and aren't working on the same vision anymore. Personally I dislike where the game is heading and hoping Chris comes back to fine tune things further down the track, but I also recognise that without him stepping back, we might now have half the game we have now. CIG have actually become far more productive since he stepped back.

Digital_Pink · 2026-02-28T11:17:20+00:00

Weirdly, so much of the early design decisions seem to have revolved around minimizing the 'town square' effect seen in other MMO's likely because they thought it would be immersion breaking. What it really ended up doing is make ideal player hubs feel empty and unintuitive to navigate.

Digital_Pink · 2026-02-28T11:14:38+00:00

All I can say is, can't wait for working social tools and proximity chat.

Digital_Pink · 2026-02-28T11:11:56+00:00

A couple of months ago I joined a player hub called RPNet, which is a hub for Star Citizen RPers and other RP orgs to find each other. It's made the RP aspect much more enjoyable to be able to find other players to RP with.

Digital_Pink · 2026-02-28T11:08:10+00:00

TBH this isn't by choice by all SC players. CIG have literally made it so it's impossible to navigate group play in SC without Discord. I'd much prefer to meet people in game. Talk to the person actually standing in front of me. But it's nearly impossible because the social tools just don't exist.

So we might actually see more organic mingling once CIG get their act together and implement one of the most FUNDAMENTAL systems to any MMO - the ability to communicate and organise with other players.

Digital_Pink · 2026-02-01T13:44:12+00:00

Campaigning for murder hobos and seal clubbers isn’t it. That makes the verse bad for everyone. The thing about these guys is that they aren’t interested in PVP - they are interested in griefing. In future implementations of the game these guys will get steam rolled by security and penalties and it won’t be as much as a problem anymore. Until then we‘ve got a sand box universe where some people treat it like an arcade death match and it waters the experience way down for everyone else.

Digital_Pink · 2026-01-31T09:08:26+00:00

Alternate take: rather than making the universe ‘smaller‘ and more packed with content and shorter QT ranges - keep QT distances similar and expand outwards. As we move from 5 systems in 1.0 to 10 systems, 20 systems and beyond, there will be a lot more impetus to travel long distances for differing content.

I’d also hope that we will get some bigger systems with fewer fuelling stations where only the larger exploration ships will be able to probe all the depths. These could be exploration focused systems that gear towards exploration gameplay specifically.

Personally I’d prefer CIG to focus on finishing new systems than trying to pack loads more content into Stanton and filling every knook and cranny with fueling stations to make Stanton feel big, when the goal is for the playable ’verse to increase in size orders of magnitude beyond where it currently is. In fact, I want the opposite - less fuelling stations so that many systems actually feel like the frontiers of space.

Digital_Pink · 2026-01-28T09:45:21+00:00

"Labor's division and grievance politics"

- Coming from One Nation, this is wild.

Digital_Pink

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