• SSTF@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Oh boy. Time for an 800 comment long flamewar about Star Citizen. I’m ready.

    • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      I’m proud to be the one to start the fire this time. To be clear I do really want a good game out of all this.

          • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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            8 hours ago

            They’re doing way too much work for it to be a scam. Irresponsible, naive, badly managed, sure. It can just be a bad project.

        • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          It is, it’s also in alpha still. If they were claiming beta in this state I’d be more worried rather than just mad they keep adding stupid shit instead of going full optimization. They have a game, they just need to get it out the door and worry about content in future releases. It’s like the painter who can’t call a painting finished.

          • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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            13 hours ago

            They can claim whatever they want. But if it’s publicly available then it’s a beta regardless of what arbitrary name they give it.

            If it was alpha it should be free.

              • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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                9 hours ago

                It’s been in development hell for over 10 years it’s not going anywhere slowly. They barely even have a product.

                  • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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                    6 hours ago

                    Okay whatever you need to say to justify it to yourself.

                    This game came out before I went into university I’ve now graduated and could have completed a doctorate and it still wouldn’t have been in beta yet. Is the development studio near black hole or something what’s going on here.

            • Cypher@lemmy.world
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              10 hours ago

              The industry definitions of alpha/beta disagree with you.

              Words have meaning and you’re using them wrong.

              • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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                6 hours ago

                You are correct words do have a meaning. A weird thing for you to bring up since you’re the one incorrectly applying labels here.

                Alpha products are available only for internal review, they are not available for public release they are not intended to be viewed by the general populace.

                If you’re charging people money for it then it can’t be an alpha because now it’s an external product not an internal sample.

                • Cypher@lemmy.world
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                  2 hours ago

                  In video games development, and more broadly in software development, Alpha state refers to a feature incomplete and largely untested state and is unrelated to internal/external sales, review, testing or release.

                  Alpha software is not thoroughly tested by the developer before it is released to customers.

                  While outside of recent trends, particularly in crowd funded games development, alpha releases to customers for paid software are less common they do occur and don’t have any bearing on the alpha state of the software.

                  In general, external availability of alpha software is uncommon for proprietary software, while open source software often has publicly available alpha versions.

                  Further

                  A feature-complete (FC) version of a piece of software has all of its planned or primary features implemented but is not yet final due to bugs, performance or stability issues. This occurs at the end of alpha testing in development.

                  And for Beta

                  Beta, named after the second letter of the Greek alphabet, is the software development phase following alpha. A beta phase generally begins when the software is feature-complete but likely to contain several known or unknown bugs

                  I am both a qualified software developer, and have worked in the video games industry. I hope you have learnt something.

                  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_release_life_cycle

          • MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works
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            1 day ago

            After what feels like 20 years, it still being in alpha should worry you more than if this current state was called a beta.

            • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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              1 day ago

              Yes and no. On the other side they’ve essentially rebooted development something like 3 or 4 times. So there’s a chance it comes up roses.