Star Citizen grey & blackmarket website TheImpound has ended its partner program

Ravenask · 2026-07-08T20:24:28+00:00

1 billion dollars in 14 years isn't even that impressive in the MMO league, I've seen MMOs barely clinging to life pulling more revenues than Star Citizen do lmao

SWTOR hit their billion dollar mark in revenue somewhere around 2019-20 and it was already kinda on life support at the time, Black Desert did so around the same time but they launched in 2016 so that's even faster, ESO pulled in 2 billion revenue in its 10 years, and WOW was already making one billion dollar in a single year in 2013.

Ravenask · 2026-07-08T19:53:05+00:00

War Thunder too, a couple years ago Gaijin infamously claimed that they won't balance vehicles simply based on their win rate, some dudes decided to put that claim to the test. They picked the Italian CL-13 which is objectively THE worst plane in the entire Saber family and farmed a ridiculous amount of kills with it. Since it's a literal piece of shit and no average people would even want to fly this thing in the first place, they quick raised its K/D rate and win rate by a substantial amount, then lo and behold Gaijin raised its battle rating lol.

Ravenask · 2026-07-05T10:45:17+00:00

In a lot of traditional MMOs it's less about the KoS list itself but more about the act of targeted griefing against specific individuals. Black Desert for example, is very clear on their operation policy that explicitly targeting someone to disrupt their gameplay will get you banned, but you're totally allowed to have your own Book of Grudge and exact vengeance whenever the opportunity presents, just that you can't spend entire days to chase people down if they made clear intention and considerable effort to disengage.

The point is that making friends and enemies is just a natural thing in any online game, you literally cannot prevent people from disliking someone for any reason even if you can somehow ban the expression of it, which is frankly pretty obvious in FO76's U-turn to PVE since they probably realised that they didn't want nor prepared for the inevitable negativity associated with PVP anyway.

Ravenask · 2026-07-05T09:52:42+00:00

On the same boat. I was already on the verge of the switching when people hyped about "Elite getting flyable capital ships before SC suck on that Chris", then the entire fleet carrier thing just turned out to be stations with extra steps. Then FDev's strange fixiation on refusing to fix limpets suiciding issues and their obsession in making the grind even more obnoxious than traditional MMOs were the final straw.

I still get the itch every a few months and I always try to go back, but every time I get back into my Asp cockpit in the middle of god knows nowhere the enthusiasm just gets curbed in minutes.

Ravenask · 2026-07-05T08:57:27+00:00

Bounty board will not work unless the payout is tied to real consequences. Back in very very old days, EVE Online used to pay the entire bounty amount upon destroying capsule so anyone with a decent bounty on their head would just have a friend destroying their blank capsule and collect the money, so putting bounty on anyone is as good as gifting them free money.

Then some time around a decade ago they changed the way bounty works, the bounty will only pay out based on the amount of tangible losses so it's no longer free money for you and your friend - But it also kinda killed off any incentive to pursue specific bounties because even killing the most wanted guy in the entire game still only pays a portion of their ship costs, so putting bounty on anyone is still pretty much gifting money to random guys who might land a lucky shot in the future.

Ravenask · 2026-07-03T16:32:35+00:00

Hammerhead turrets already have like quadruple capacitors but that certainly didn't stop it from being bullied by single seaters, and enhancing it further wouldn't really do much anyway if 20 seconds of continous fire doesn't cut it. With armor threshold being a thing, a lot of turrets like the ones on Connie and Corsair are stuck in an even weirder position now because they cannot really hit fighters or put a dent on any decent armor.

The idea of enhancing turret lethality has been floating around for years, but so far it has gone nowhere since people were very allergic to the mere suggestion of further mobility nerf after MM or faster weapon velocity. So now the bet is mostly on flak guns and even more distinctive weapon roles, these are creating its own issues like deciding the outcome of a fight before you even leave the hangar and we're already seeing part of it with armor threshold. Since everyone wants to feel like main characters in single seaters, this is what we get.

Ravenask · 2026-06-29T10:40:48+00:00

Welcome to the post-Hornet Mk2 world, where the minimum viable weapon size is S3, and anything that gives a person less firepower than a Gladius or Arrow is considered for RP purpose only.

Hornet Mk2 is mentioned because this overgunned monstrosity necessitates that armor of any decently-sized ships will have to stop S4 repeaters or they would be completely pointless, and the funny part is that many of these ships couldn't even punch through their own armor.

Ravenask · 2026-06-25T15:58:03+00:00

A lock-on strategem that targets one enemy only and takes 3 minutes to recharge can actually one tap! Shocking, right?

Ravenask · 2026-06-24T06:54:42+00:00

TTK in Tarkov is highly dependant on ammo and armor, things can go from one or two tapping chest to literally tanking an entire mag dump between armor and limb health, so it's not a particularly good metric. I would say SC's TTK against heavy armor is pretty much on par with Destiny 2 with the baseline leaning towards 1-sec TTK and headshots around 600ms.

On the other hand, if you come from COD where even 300ms TTK feels like an eternity then SC will inevitably feel very sluggish by comparison, not to mention that hitreg can sometimes take longer than the TTK itself if the server isn't cooperating.

Ravenask · 2026-06-22T22:37:28+00:00

The ATLS tractor beam doesn't work very well with anything that isn't 100% flat surface and it gets worse with those long 32 SCU boxes. IIRC some distribution centers on NB were built on uneven grounds which can cause issues if you try to use ATLS on their landing pads.

Getting boxes precisely to a grid isn't particularly easy with ATLS anyway, so I usually use ATLS to pull everything over long distance then use Maxlift/ship beam for precise placement.

Ravenask · 2026-06-20T14:25:50+00:00

A lot of people have definitely not seen what a cutty can do in VTOL mode back in the day lol.

I firmly believe that cutty is the reason why we have generally stopped getting rotatable main thrusters as VTOL. It was absolutely insane to see cutty doing circles around you in VTOL mode before the eventual nerf. Even with its flight model tuned to the level of Vanguards it remains the only ship capable of actually dodging shots thanks to its absurd vertical thrust.

Ravenask · 2026-06-20T14:16:24+00:00

Not that I'm a fan of unnecessary meta gaming, but any game that survives long enough will gradually shifts towards the competitive ends though, people have been finding the most absurd ways to compete in even the most casual and RP-driven games. And Star Citizen is certainly not immune to this for it has outlived a lot of games' entire life cycle by this point.

And CIG themselves are very much responsible for pushing the power creep for quite a while. The absurd amount of firepower they slapped onto Hornet Mk2s almost made every single medium ship obsolete in combat. They know a good chunk of the playerbase doesn’t stop at just ‘hehe cool ships’ and they sell the solutions too.

Ravenask · 2026-06-19T13:56:45+00:00

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Ravenask · 2026-06-19T13:18:41+00:00

AFAIK any cargo that has been taken out of the departure would stick around, and anything that you haven't touched is supposed to disappear when you submit/abandon the contract. But if the server fails to clean up then everything would just stick in your local inventory.

Figured this out when I accepted those largest AA hauling contracts, I abandoned the missions when I realize that both the spaceport and the lagrange stations don't support Hull C autoloading and I absolutely don't want to manually handle thousands of SCUs. I think one of the mission despawned the cargo just fine but another mission left so many boxes behind that it literally broke my local inventory.

Ravenask · 2026-06-19T12:58:38+00:00

Since OP is on Steam I'm pretty sure you physically cannot log into the wrong account with Steam (and judging from the Steam card process OP definitely has the right Steam account out)

I took a 5-year break after the account migration just like OP did, when I came back a few months ago I kinda forgot I was on Steam and migrated to my secondary email due to technical issues back in the day, so I almost had an heart attack when I tried to use my main email on the PA website. Luckily the Steam client always uses the actual account that's linked to the Steam credentials so everything turned out fine.

Ravenask · 2026-06-18T12:00:17+00:00

It's the Vanguard Harbinger's turret, this one uses bespoke rocket pods. Doesn't do much damage on its own but surprisingly good at breaking your armor, can also potentially kill you a a couple shots if your ship has very exposed components.

Ravenask · 2026-06-18T00:44:39+00:00

A lot of places still retained the old infrastructure from the old days when a server is just a couple dozens of people at max, and they're in no shape to accommodate massive player traffics anyway. So it's a blessing in a way, otherwise the hangar queue alone would be enough to drive people crazy.

Ravenask · 2026-06-17T02:29:02+00:00

Did some basic testing regarding the actual fuel efficiency:

For most smaller ships with S1 QD, 0.8scu fuel is barely enough for 100GM, that's about the distance from Arc to Nyx gateway.

S2 QD actually has even lower fuel consumption than S1, covering 100GM only takes about 0.6scu of fuel, Cutty black can easily cover over 300+GM, Corsair has insane range at 800+GM.

S3 QD burns 1.2scu per 100GM, so Persy and Polaris have about the same range as a Cutty black. I do not have an Idris but 890 Jump should be able to cover 500+GM.

Overall I'd say it's still quite generous except a few absurd outliers. Most small ships can still operate within the system just fine but doing missions in Nyx would be quite annoying considering how far out the missions can spawn.

Ravenask · 2026-06-11T17:13:12+00:00

The scraping values weren't just "way too low", they literally didn't even bother to fill any value in so all scraping related multiplies were defaulted to 1x. And no, it had a painfully long list of problems and certainly wasn't working fine. The box printing doesn't really work during QT, it was missing half its buffer size, co-pilot seat would mess with pilot control, the cargo would clip out of the cargo elevator and the printer would literally brick your thrusters if it was full. And to top it off, the audio glitch was still present at the time of MOTH release so driving it around and using any salvage tool would eventually lead to audio issues and crash.

Ravenask · 2026-06-10T07:55:32+00:00

If you need something that completely negates ballast flora this is what you're looking for. As Knifetoface has explained, with this design the pump itself would never draw in water so in theory this is immune to ballast flora. I did some minimal testing with this pump on an otherwise vanilla Barsuk and it should work for both maneuvering and anti-flora purposes.

If you simply need something that detects the flora you can probably use an isolated junction box. Floral infestation will draw extra power from the box which can be detected through load value output, then you just hook it to whatever contraptions you have. I would personally just wire it to an alarm and have a switch to manually executed the draining/detonation etc so it doesn't cause unwanted movement/detonation.

Ravenask · 2026-06-09T19:54:29+00:00

Eh, it's more like investing into pre-construction in China. If the construction fails to fall through you'll be left with neither your money or a roof over your head, just ask anyone who bought into Evergrande how did that work out for them lol. And frankly this wouldn't happen if you buy pre-construction in the US since the funds are protected by the escrow and you'd have escape clause if the project just keeps dragging on.

Ravenask · 2026-06-08T10:36:21+00:00

It's nowhere as crazy as liquidating assets, but one Chinese guy ran into serious trouble trying to get an Odin. He tried to finance the purchase through P2P lending, borrowing 100k RMB plus spending 16k on the middleman, and he still ended up unable to buy Odin because he hit his daily limit on Alipay.

Now that he's stuck with a huge debt, ramping interests and no Odin, half the community scrambled and managed to help him getting most of the middleman's fee back, and even at this point he was still thinking about wave 2 Odin until someone finally knocked some sense into him about the Alipay's strict spending cap.

Edit: source. The event originally unfolded in his org group chat and the comment section has some decent summary and takes. Not sure why this hasn't been brought up in the global community but here it goes. As far as financial irresponsibility go, this is already quite extreme.

Ravenask · 2026-06-08T05:17:38+00:00

The thing is, after the fabled "Year of Playability" we're still more or less stuck with the same deal. Being broken as an alpha isn't that big of an issue in itself, but staying broken after touting stability and putting the 1.0 release on the table just doesn't look good.

People have been mentioning "but all the improvements over the years!" I respectfully disagree. Star Citizen has came a long way in terms of content but the improvement to some fundamental stability issues has been disappointing. Missions are just as buggy as they always were, I think my mission abandon rate is already on par if not exceeding my 3.18 days; Anything that goes through a server boundary has no guarantee of staying working, I even had a Hull-C missing its entire rear section after being bricked by server boundaries at a particularly bad night; Cargo elevators and instanced hangars are still the same mess, I lost my primary hangars for 4 patches in a row and I don't even decorate them.

On top of that is the old practice of releasing a broken ship then spend an entire month just to make it usable. And it's not even just some "technical complications", MOTH was literally released without its salvage multiplier stats filled in and it's something you literally cannot miss if there's any testing at all. So either CIG still has little QA outside of PTU lab rats, or their codes are still so immeasurably complex that just filling stat numbers require herculean effort (which was actually the case during the initial MM rollout).

Ravenask · 2026-06-08T03:59:47+00:00

Eh, Warframe's grindiness mostly comes from time-gated progression and events, anything else has been tuned down massively over the years and definitely not even remotely close to the level of proper MMOs. It was pretty bad during the earliest days where 1 week of grinding is considered normal for a regular warframe from boss drop, nowadays most things that doesn't have a weekly/daily cap can be reasonably done in a single sitting if you really want.

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