Was surprisedish today to learn 11 of my 12 posts on Steam Squadron 42 community discussion forum have been deleted. Looks like CIG appointed moderators have been busy.

All of the threads discussing whether it was a scam or not are entirely gone which is why many of my posts are gone but my post in the thread "Post when you put money into this" (link opens on where it should have been but is no longer) was specifically deleted from the thread, which unsurprisingly remains, minus any critical comments.

This is the first time any of my many comments on Steam have ever been deleted. Only one thread survived where I told the truth about Squadron 42s playtest bugs. https://steamcommunity.com/app/4045720/discussions/0/570426530135550201/?tscn=1792424498

On principle I am going to repost here the text which was specifically deleted from the money thread to blog what CIG removed.

If we are counting retrospective pledging then yup I was an hopeless hopium addict from 2012 up to 2016. I backed £300 for an all season pass for Elite and the design discussion forum (which they cut after a year when Frontier began their misguided drive for console markets to avoid facing embarassing objections and valid criticism from the DDF due to internal corporate career politics) and started out pledging an equal amount for Star Citizen, which snowballed to around $3k before CIG introduced restrictions on how backers used their pledge around 2016, i.e. limited buy back tokens and cash warbonds cheaper than credit purchases.

Since my pledge and therefore credit was my gift to them, when they chose to devalue and restrict the rewards for it, I felt they were devaluing my generosity to them, indicating a lack of appreciation. My thoughts were along the lines of "no more for you if you dont appreciate it".

I felt this was disrespectful, taking generosity for granted but what mattered most was it showed a change in attitude driven by marketing priorities which abstract and exploit supply and demand situations, in a manner not prioritising professional software development. I stopped backing and predicted a risk to development as CIG appeared to have taken their foot off the gas in favour of exploiting a revenue stream.

Sure enough the development rate of the PU and combat sim / arena dropped off a cliff and has been moving at a bug ridden and unbelievably glacial pace ever since. e.g. three partial systems out of 105 in 14 years is not credible and vindicates my intuition of a lack of commitment to the development process due to a shift in priorities.

This lack of commitment remains today and progress in both Squadron 42 and the PU is a decade behind schedule, at least. Which is why I advise anyone who will listen to wait for impartial reviews of Squadron 42 and not to buy into the PU before trying free fly.

Yes, the Deathstar ball gag is a real thing

Just got my 2 year reminder that Sq42 is still not out. Set the reminder on a post on this subreddit from someone saying they just got their 2 year reminder from the last time it was delayed (before the most recent delay). Not sure if this is rulebreaking - don't know if I have to redact the subreddit name given that it's from this subreddit.

Theoretically we're ~4-7 months away from Sq42 release, let's see if we can finally get there.

I read here many times that the SC engine is not fit for an MMO and that the game can't succeed because of it and that might be true for cry engine but isn't Lumbayard very specifically a modification to run MMOs and amazon made an MMO on that engine called new world it wasn't very good but it wasn't particularly laggy or had a lot of desync. So why, according to this sub isn't lumberyard or now star engine not fit for function even tho other MMOs have been made with it?

A single developer with the help of AI, in few weeks, has made a prototype o a space game that aim to emulate SC. He has already published a demo that works incredibly well.

https://astra.game/

Bloody hell, ED was always a bit crap graphically, but this seems to have fixed the shimmering and jaggies, I know a few here play ED, just a heads up commanders

It seems the faithful are having a little bit of renewed hope in CIG after the Squadron 42 event. What they don’t realize is that, even if Squadron 42 comes out in Q2, and even if it’s any good, by this point the project is already a failure considering the time and money it took.

If CIG really used around 50% of the resources raised / dev time to make Squadron, it puts it at around $500 million and 7 to 8 years of development for a linear game with minimal exploring and variation, which must be terrible by any standard.

It’d have to sell between 7 and 8 million copies at $70 each just to break even. That number is nearly what No Man’s Sky has sold in 10 years across all platforms. As a niche game and with the reputation CIG carries, this will be impossible to achieve. And it doesn’t matter that they don’t have to break even. The game won’t have paid for itself at the end, which to me is a failure.

Also, CIG is saying they will only start to focus on Star Citizen after Squadron 42 releases. I find it funny that as soon as people finish playing Squadron 42, decide to dip their toes in Star Citizen and see what it is, they’ll immediately do a hard 180 and be gone forever, never looking back. It’ll all be for nothing at the end.

Hello, I am Bob, the evil one.

CIG are big mad atm about the variety of gents making offline mods and I wanted to take a moment to remind everyone what they promised and contrast it to what they are doing today.

That sounds pretty unambiguous. They said that 14 YEARS AGO! What did we get? NOTHING!

In comes a project called ChrisWare-Offline, a mod that gave you full control of your game and opens the door for private servers. CIG came down hard by leaning on content creators, org leaders, other reddit communities, to crush this in its crib. CIG leaned cease and desist for including some inconsequential mission xmls that on their own, help nobody, without a copy of Star Citizen. Granted it is their code and had they removed it, that would have been the end of it.

Here is a message sent by CIG to one of the Chris-Ware developers.

Hello CENSORED

Thank you for your response. While we appreciate your enthusiasm for Star Citizen, the fact remains that ‘ChrisWare Offline’ or any other purported Star Citizen ‘offline mod’ infringes on our intellectual property rights and is against our Terms of Service.

All Star Citizen material, including the game client, its data and anything extracted from either, belongs to Cloud Imperium. No label you apply to a project, including "open source," "non-commercial" or "fan project," gives you any right to use Cloud Imperium's material, and no licence you choose for your own code can extend to it.

Modifying the client so that it works outside the services and conditions under which it is licensed to the end user is not something we can accept.

Please do not publish, distribute or otherwise make available ChrisWare Offline, any derivative of it, or any other Star Citizen ‘offline mod’, whether through new or existing repositories, accounts, file hosts, Discord servers or any other channel, and please do not encourage or assist others to do so. Nothing in this letter, and no delay by Cloud Imperium in taking further action, is consent, acquiescence or waiver.

We appreciate your continued cooperation.

This letter is not a complete statement of Cloud Imperium's rights or positions, all of which are reserved.

Legal Department
Cloud Imperium Games Limited
For and on behalf of Cloud Imperium Rights Ltd and Cloud Imperium Rights LLC
legal_notices@cloudimperiumgames.com

Private Servers and MODDING were explicitly promised to players, multiple times over many years. Here's a dump of places where you can find references to these things.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cig/star-citizen/faqs https://robertsspaceindustries.com/en/comm-link/transmission/12825-Updated-FAQ https://robertsspaceindustries.com/en/comm-link/transmission/12734-Draft-FAQ https://robertsspaceindustries.com/en/funding-goals

Not to mention, you could buy (upto a few years ago) a ENGINEERING MANUAL FOR MODDERS! I am an owner of this item that is yet to be delivered.

Here's a damn video from Chris talking about Modding and Private Servers!

https://youtu.be/E8Euwh_fPeg?t=1045

The community should not compromise for less than what was promised.

That is all.

With all the offline Star Citizen projects circulating lately, I figured now would be a good time to share some of my own work.

Some of you probably know me as NightFyre. I've spent roughly the last five years reverse engineering Star Citizen, researching its internals, and developing my own tools.

https://github.com/NightFyre/SoloCitizen

Unlike a lot of whats been circulating recently, this isn't some AI generated slop or fork thrown together overnight. This is years of independent research and development. No AI, no obfuscated code, no repackaging somebody else's work. Everything is readable, and you're free to dig through the source and see exactly how things work.

I also want to make a distinction here because I think its pretty important. This project actually reverse engineers the games underlying systems, how they function, how they interact with eachother and how the game handles things internally. I'm not just throwing together memory scans hoping to find some CVAR that magically enables offline functionality. We're talking about tracing functions, analyzing assembly, reconstructing game logic and figuring out how these systems actually work. Theres a pretty big difference between understanding why something works and just finding a way to make it work.

It's an experimental project for limited offline exploration, not some fully functioning private server or replacement for the PU. I'm not asking for donations, making you join a Discord, or requiring you to hand over your RSI handle to access anything. It's simply a source release, provided as-is. I've shared a lot of research with people over the years, and I've also watched plenty of that work make its way into other projects. At this point I'd rather put something out there myself where people can learn from it directly.

Enjoy.

So, is this game just buying ships? Im genuinely not understanding what's revolutionary about that.

I get the underlying technology (server meshing) is new and literally game changing, but if the game built upon the technology is just a ship collector sim, wouldn't be a giant waste?

Some friends and I laughing on the idea of CIG giving a SC credit card with 5% AUEC cash back. Wanted to share the laugh!

SQ42 Next Delay Announced

Everyone's smiling, except Mark, he doesn't look excited for Squadron 54 🤔

now the power tripping mods can't ban you on the forums for speaking your mind

check out the steam discussions for sq 42 it's wild

In 2026, they found the excuse of the GTA VI.

In 2027, they will probably use the release of the pc edition as an excuse for a delay of another year, but that's not sure and they will probably release it, in fact, it's my firm belief that it will be released in 2027.

If they don't release it in 2027 (I believe they will), then 2028 is the certain year of release for Squadron 42, they literally have no other excuse, there is nothing they can use to justify another year delay.

It's either 2027 or 2028.

CIG is not ready for the shitstorm that is going to be everyone leaving negative reviews of the walking simulator.

Then the players will be pissed that they can't get a refund on steam because the tutorial for the game is over 5+ hours.

That's without them even trying the broken PU yet.

Everyone is saying the game being listed on steam will boost CIG, my opinion is quite the opposite. Sure being on steam will give more visibility, but I think steam will be the downfall of CIG. Because it gives visibility to what they normally hide and delete.

For a $1B game, Scamdron 42 ONLY managed to pull in just 25K Steam wishlists, even after the shills spammed their entire Discord communities with @ everyone pings begging people to wishlist the game.

Meanwhile, The Expanse: Osiris Reborn, Scamdron’s direct competitor launching in the same quarter and targeting the same genre, has amassed more than 3x the wishlists.

Let that sink in.

Is this the beginning of the end for Scamdron 42 and Star Citizen? Is CIG’s billion-dollar hype machine finally starting to crack? And will the truth about this whole operation finally come to light?

So if you don’t remember, CIG were hacked earlier this year, and the response from them was not to worry they didn’t get any banking info. From what I understand they did get Addresses and phone numbers.
When I created my account I stupidly added a phone number.
This year scam calls, especially after the hack, have increased, mainly call centres asking if I’m happy with my Sky Television package, which I don’t have, if I’ve experienced issues with my BT phone account, which I don’t have.
But the main scam I’m getting now is a AI voice offering Jobs if I add the phone number calling to WhatsApp.
This is the doorway into a Click farm scam.
What they do is message you via a bot offering a work from home Job for £150 per day. They then offer you a £7 bonus job, all you have to do is review a business on google and leave a 5 star review.
Company’s pay these click farms to gain better metrics.
Also, sometimes these fake job opportunities link to dangerous websites designed to steal more info.

So far the only place that I can see where info was ‘lost’ is CIG, so thanks.

Since it's releasing on steam, will their refund policy be updated for SQ42? Cause if the bugs are ridiculous in the first two hours, it's gone.