Guard Frequency Episode 260 | The Sniffa System

Comments

6 responses to “Guard Frequency Episode 260 | The Sniffa System”

1. 

   seannewboy

   May 14, 2019

   cq2) I really hope so.

   Wonderful show everyone.

   Reply
2. 

   Ken from Chicago

   May 17, 2019

   After weeks, perhaps even a month of riding high, basking in the sun, doing multiple victory laps for weeks on end #TonyWasRight must end not with #TonyWasWrong but #TonyWasWrongWrongWrong. How wrong was Tony? Let us count the ways:

   Geoff said: Due to #StarCitizen’s massive scale, coverage will always get major attention.
   Tony said: No, this is #Forbes, a major news mag for non-gamers. That’s why this article gets big buzz.
   1 #TonyWasWrong:
   How do we know? #Kotaku and even the #Escapist got major buzz for doing in-depth articles on SC that got lot buzz and coverage using quips from their articles. Also, #GeoffWasRight.

   Tony said: To non-gamers, SC is vaporware & the only counter CIG has is to release SC or #Squadron42.
   2 #TonyWasWrong:
   How do we know? As the resident IT tech, Geoff can confirm that “vaporware” is merely a concept that is promoted as a product but never released. It is a specific thing, be it games, applications, even hardware (e.g., the Theranos medical kit mentioned by a feedbacker). However the alpha versions—plural—of SC has been released for years. We just got 3.5 version released last month. So, no, SC is most definitely not “vaporware”.
   3 #TonyWasWrong:
   But wait, there’s more wrongness contained in this one claim. Tony was also wrong in claiming the only counterargument that SC is vaporware is by releasing. How do we know? There are other tools in CIG’s arsenal:
   • Anyone can buy access to the SC alpha for a mere $45.
   • You can just wait for one of the recurring Free Fly / Fly Free periods and play for free.
   • Watch any of the millions of YouTube & Twitch videos of people playing SC.
   #TonyWasWrongWrongWrong

   But wait, there’s more:
   Tony said (as paraphrased by a feedbacker): That CIG needed a moderating force to temper CR’s grand vision / feature creep.
   4a #TonyWasWrong:
   How do we know? Tony himself has spent several months since the reveal of the $46 million investor investment complaining about the LACK of grandeur, the timidity in the roadmap, the lack of “significant” advancement in gameplay. At one point it took Brian to actually translate Tony’s complaint (about this very deficit in the upcoming roadmap) into something Geoff, Brian and the audience could even understand. You can’t complain about feature creep AND complain about a lack of major new features in a game at the same time. You can, but, to paraphrase Matthew 12:26, if the Devil fights the Devil, then he is divided; how can his kingdom stand? If the Devil can’t make such an argument, then surely cannot a mortal man, a “devil’s advocate” if you will. Moreover, look at the results of “adult supervision”:
   • 7 years of work and Blizzard scraps mmo Titan & uses it remains for Overwatch, a shooter.
   • Destiny had great combat gameplay that you repeated over and over and over in a threadbare game with almost no lore and no alternatives but fighting endless bullet-sponge bosses.
   • Destiny 2 failed to learn from the various DLCs for the original and repeated the mistakes of the original game.
   • Anthem is yet another major game that is far less promised despite so much work.
   • Mass Effect 3: Andromeda was a horror show.
   • Need I mention the lockbox fiasco of Star Wars: Battlefront 2?
   • How about Battlecruiser 2000 AD? It had “adult supervision” yet was released ahead of Derek Smart’s objections that it wasn’t ready. How well did that turn out?
   4b #TonyWasWrong:
   Last week, Tony said he saw nothing wrong in the feedbacker’s message. If that’s the case, then that means his complaints last year about the lack of major new features in the roadmap was wrong. Which one was wrong, Tony? Either way, one was wrong. You can’t have both.

   Lennon said: CIG just should have released the Wing Commander sequel CR was originally pitching in 2012 and then work on SC as it has turned on now.
   Tony said: He agreed.
   5 #TonyWasWrong:
   How do we know? Tony has said this before about releasing Alpha 1.0 just before year’s end and not worry about polishing all the bugs; that the backers would understand. CIG did release the alpha and backers complained so much about the bugs that CIG techs had to work during the holidays to patch the bugs. Also, that was the methodology behind #EliteDangerous and Tony has complained about it being boring, lacking features found only in third-party wikis, websites, add-ons (or in the SC alpha).

   Lastly, for now:
   Tony said: Marketing for CIG isn’t all that hard.
   6 #TonyWasWrong:
   How do we know? Wait, this wasn’t discussed last week was it? Yes, this is a belated catch on Tony’s wrongness from TWO weeks ago when the Forbes article first broke and went all up in CR and SG’s personal business, or at least history outside of CIG. Tony said it was important to know if the chief of marketing had earned the job.

   Brian said: Look at SC’s massive success as the Number One crowdfunding product as a success at her job.
   Tony said: How hard could it be, that it’s really only about pitching a video game as exclusive golf club membership that no one else has replicated video game.

   IOW, Tony argument is in fact the best evidence that not only doubts about her getting her job as head of marketing are unwarranted but that she’s IS a marketing genius, able to do what no one else has done. Also, #BrianWasRight. (I’m sure if Henry was here he would have been right as well. He’s cool like that. But I digress.)

   This one hurts most of all because the singular marketing success of SC goes to the heart of not only Tony but of the Guard Frequency podcast itself. GF was started as an SC-centric podcast 260 episodes ago, roughly 5 years ago but SC hit a dry spell, newswise. Yes, SC released press releases and video shows but the news revealed was so very thin, so very dry that Tony & friends changed the format of GF from SC-centric to more general space sim but something happened. After a while the dearth of general space sim news lead them to change to an Elite Dangerous-centric podcast. Apparently marketing a space sim was indeed not quite a lead pipe cinch but rather a somewhat more difficult task than just pointing at cool spaceships.

   It hurts me to say how much Tony was wrong because as much as I disagree with him, I empathize for his plight. Contrary to many in the audience, I don’t think Tony is a “hater” of SC. He started this podcast with idea of following his beloved Star Citizen game that ostensibly would be released within a year of starting the podcast. Look at video of GF #26, where he is interviewing Chris Roberts following the The Next Great Starship contest.

   20 seconds into the video he has a huge smile on his face, a smile of joy, of wonder, of love of the game. Tragically, over the years, that joy, that wonder, that love of the game has been eroded and undermined by delays, missteps, CIG making many unforced errors (sorry, Tony, stop trying to make “self-owns” a thing, not everyone is a soccer fan, this is the USA, baseball is way more popular and even for non-sports fans, “unforced errors” is self-explanatory, but I digress). Yet, deep in his heart, even if he won’t or can’t admit it to others or himself, he WANTS to be wrong about his misgivings, doubts, concerns and fears over SC. He wants SC to prove him wrong and for the love of game to be rewarded.

   The worst truth is not that Tony was wrong but that Tony was WRONGED. He and every other fan of space sims, space shooters and space games were wronged in the latter half of last decade when TPTB of video gamemakers arbitrarily decided to turn away from space games, at least those not based on Star Trek, Star Wars or Halo. Nevermind that almost since we had computers that among the first computer games were Space War and Star Trek and later Space Invaders. The foundation of Star Citizen is built on disproving TPTB that we really do want an awesome space sim. Had the TPTB kept up their development from FreeSpace, Homeworld, Master of Orion, Star Control, etc. imagine where we would have been instead of having so much time lost, so much potential squandered.

   Imagine Star Citizen … multiplied many times over.

   — Ken from Chicago

   P.S. I’m going to work on a Reader’s Digest version just in case you have a really slow news week and don’t have time to read the whole tome on the show.

   Reply
   1. 

      Lennon

      May 20, 2019

      “GF was started as an SC-centric podcast 260 episodes ago, roughly 5 years ago but SC hit a dry spell, newswise. Yes, SC released press releases and video shows but the news revealed was so very thin, so very dry that Tony & friends changed the format of GF from SC-centric to more general space sim…”

      Speaking as one of the people who started this crazy show, the original intention behind GF was that we would cover its development, play through the alphas and betas, and eventually become a show that would also report on in-universe events in an in-universe way. We wanted to be the first “news agency” to report on all the incredible emergent gameplay that was going to come out of Star Citizen. We wanted to bring you in-universe happenings from the front-lines of Operation Pitchfork, the breaking news of a commander finding a new jumpoint-route to a star system, the grand-theft of a Javelin from a competent crew of 20 by a band of pirates — all the player-made stories that make games such as EvE Online and Elite: Dangerous more than just the sum of their mini-games. We wanted to be a show that you would listen to whilst playing the game, and feel completely immersed. We would, of course, continue to cover patches and improvements, but the idea was you’d jump into your Mustang, hit play on our show and then jump over to the Banshee system, QT to Loronas for that double-agent mission you picked up, and we would entertain you in-universe as you went. This is why a lot of early shows include us reporting on the fictional pieces — it was all helping to build us up to being an in-universe podcast. Importantly, we knew that the transition to in-universe wasn’t going to be immediate, hence the covering of the alpha and betas, but all signs pointed to the fact that within 3 years we’d be there, in some form.

      The delays happened, the scope increased. We kept trying, with segments such as WTFITDFM (and the sequel, WTFITFPSM), but it rapidly became clear that Star Citizen had changed way beyond what we first created the show to do, and so Guard Frequency couldn’t continue in that regards. It wasn’t that the news was thin (one thing Star Citizen has never been short on is discussion points), but that the show was being forced into something that we didn’t envisage it to be. And No Man’s Sky was promising great things, Elite: Dangerous had recently launched, Starfighter Inc was starting to demo things and Infinity: Battlescape had started their kickstarter. The future looked bright for the space-sim genre. I remember the night Tony and I had a frank discussion about how SC was drifting, how we couldn’t do the show we wanted, and so we either adapted to becoming a space-sim show or we closed doors. The rest is history.

      That original vision wasn’t lost though. Galactic Public Radio and the Elite: Dangerous RPG segments live on as a legacy of what we hoped to do with Star Citizen, albeit in a lesser form than our original vision.

      Reply
3. 

   Ken from Chicago

   May 17, 2019

   [Abridged version:]

   After weeks, perhaps even a month of riding high, basking in the sun, doing multiple victory laps for weeks on end #TonyWasRight must end not with #TonyWasWrong but #TonyWasWrongWrongWrong. How wrong was Tony? Let me count the ways:

   Geoff said: Due to #StarCitizen’s massive scale, coverage will always get major attention.
   Tony said: No, this is #Forbes, a major news mag for non-gamers. That’s why this article gets big buzz.
   1 #TonyWasWrong:
   How do we know? #Kotaku and even the #Escapist got major buzz for doing in-depth articles on SC that got lot buzz and coverage using quips from their articles. Also, #GeoffWasRight.

   Tony said: To non-gamers, SC is vaporware & the only counter CIG has is to release SC or #Squadron42.
   2 #TonyWasWrong:
   Resident IT tech, Geoff, can confirm that “vaporware” is merely a concept that is promoted as a product but never released. Yet alpha versions—plural—of SC has been released for years. We just got 3.5 version released last month. So, no, SC is most definitely not “vaporware”.
   3 #TonyWasWrong:
   The claim that the only counterargument that SC is vaporware is by releasing Squadron 42 is also wrong. You can play the SC alpha right now for $45 or wait to play for free during a Free Fly event or just watch any of YouTube / Twitch videos of people playing SC. #TonyWasWrongWrongWrong

   But wait, there’s more:
   Tony said (as paraphrased by a feedbacker): That CIG needed a moderating force to temper CR’s grand vision / feature creep.
   4a #TonyWasWrong:
   Tony spent several months since the reveal of the $46 million investor investment complaining about the LACK of grandeur, the timidity in the roadmap, the lack of “significant” advancement in gameplay. Either less is more—or it’s not. Moreover, look at the results of “adult supervision”:
   • Blizzard’s mmo Titan, canceled after 7 years & recycled as a mere shooter,
   • Games with great game combat but fairly thin lore or alternatives to the same shooter: Destiny, Destiny 2, Anthem
   • Mass Effect 3: Andromeda was a horror show
   • The lockbox fiasco of Star Wars: Battlefront 2
   • Battlecruiser 2000 AD, the published released it ahead of Derek Smart’s objections that it wasn’t ready. How well did that turn out?
   4b #TonyWasWrong:
   If Tony was right to complain about SC’s feature creep being too much then means his complaints last year about the lack of major new features in the roadmap was wrong. Which one was wrong, Tony?

   Lennon said: CIG just should have released the Wing Commander sequel CR was originally pitching in 2012 and then work on SC as it has turned on now.
   Tony said: He agreed.
   5 #TonyWasWrong:
   CIG released the Alpha 1.0 just before year’s end, bugs and all, following Tony’s advice that the backers would understand. CIG did. Backers complained so much about the bugs that CIG techs had to work during the holidays to patch the bugs. #EliteDangerous did this and Tony has complained about it being boring, lacking features found only in third-party wikis, websites, add-ons (or in the SC alpha).

   Lastly, for now:
   Tony said: Marketing for CIG isn’t all that hard.
   6 #TonyWasWrong:
   This is a belated wrongness from TWO weeks ago.
   Tony said: It was important to know if the chief of marketing had earned the job.
   Brian said: Look at SC’s massive success proves her success at her job.
   Tony said: How hard could it be? It’s really only about pitching a video game as exclusive golf club membership that no one else has replicated in other video games. IOW, Tony argument demonstrates how she singularly is successful in marketing SC. Also, #BrianWasRight. (I’m sure if Henry was here he would have been right as well. He’s cool like that. But I digress.)

   The singular marketing success of SC goes to the heart of the Guard Frequency podcast itself. Tony & friends changed the format of GF from SC-centric to more general space sim but something happened. After a while the dearth of general space sim news lead them to change to an Elite Dangerous-centric podcast. Marketing a space sim was indeed not quite a lead pipe cinch.

   As I disagree with him, I empathize for his plight. I don’t think Tony is a “hater” of SC. He started this podcast 5 years ago with idea of following his beloved Star Citizen game. Look at video of GF #26, where he is interviewing Chris Roberts following the The Next Great Starship contest.

   20 seconds into the video he has a huge smile on his face, a smile of joy, of wonder, of love of the game. Tragically, over the years, that love of the game has been eroded and undermined by delays, missteps, CIG making many unforced errors (sorry, Tony, stop trying to make “self-owns” a thing, not everyone is a soccer fan, this is the USA, baseball is way more popular and even for non-sports fans, “unforced errors” is self-explanatory, but I digress). Yet, deep in his heart, even if he won’t or can’t admit it to others or himself, he WANTS to be wrong about his fears over SC and for his love of game to be rewarded.

   The worst truth is not that Tony was wrong but that Tony was WRONGED. He and every other fan of space sims, space shooters and space games were wronged in the latter half of last decade when TPTB of video gamemakers arbitrarily decided to turn away from space games not based on established IP. The foundation of Star Citizen is built on disproving TPTB that we players really do want an awesome space sim. Had the TPTB kept up their development from FreeSpace, Homeworld, Master of Orion, Star Control, etc. imagine where we would have been instead of having so much time lost, so much potential squandered.

   Imagine Star Citizen … multiplied many times over.

   Reply
4. 

   Pringle

   May 17, 2019

   The faithful spin yarn
   Their plot armor fits perfect
   Cozy mansion moat

   Reply
5. 

   Ken from Chicago

   May 18, 2019

   After weeks, perhaps even a month of riding high, basking in the sun, doing multiple victory laps for weeks on end #TonyWasRight must end not with #TonyWasWrong but #TonyWasWrongWrongWrong. How wrong was Tony? Let us count the ways:

   1) Kotaku and The Escapist got major buzz from their in-depth investigations of Star Citizen. So, sorry, Tony, Forbes is not unique in getting buzz from their in-depth article. #GeoffWasRight
   2) Sorry, Tony, SC is not vaporware to non-gamers. It has had alpha versions released for years. Vaporware is merely a concept that is promoted as a product but never released. #AskGeoff
   3) CIG (sorry, it will be the “Sears Towers” until my dying day, not “Willis” nonsense) can easily show SC is not vaporware now:
   a. $45 let’s anyone play the alpha.
   b. Anyone play for free any of the recurring Fly Free events.
   c. Anyone can watch YouTube and Twitch videos of people playing SC now.
   d. Sorry, #TonyWasWrongWrongWrong.
   4) CIG needs a moderating force to limit CR’s grand vision / SC’s feature creep. Let’s look at what “moderating forces” has brought us of late:
   a. Blizzard’s mmo Titan, after 7 years, axed & recycled as a mere shooter.
   b. Games with great game combat but thin lore or alternative gameplay:
   i. Destiny
   ii. Destiny 2
   iii. Anthem
   c. Mass Effect: Andromeda was a horror show.
   d. Star Wars: Battlefront 2 was a lockbox fiasco.
   e. Battlecruiser 2000 AD, over Derek Smart’s objections, was released early by its publisher. It became a laughingstock.
   4) If Tony was right to complain about SC’s feature creep being too much then means his complaints last year about the lack of major new features in the roadmap was wrong. Which one was wrong, Tony?

   5) Sorry, Tony (and Lennon), CIG released the Alpha 1.0 just before year’s end, bugs and all, following Tony’s advice that the backers would understand. CIG did. Backers complained so much about the bugs that CIG techs had to work during the holidays to patch the bugs. #EliteDangerous did limited release (with plans to upgrade later) and Tony has complained about it being boring, lacking features found only in third-party wikis, websites, add-ons (or in the SC alpha).

   6) A belated wrongness from TWO weeks ago, Sandi is a marketing genius. Tony proved it. He argued she merely knows her audience and how to get rich golfer types to part with their money like no one else has done before or since. EXACTLY. She uniquely was able to market SC in a way that no one else has come close to duplicating. Thank you, Tony, for proving #TonyWasWrong to even imply otherwise. SC’s success proves her skill. #BrianWasRight (I’m sure if Henry was here he would have been right as well. He’s cool like that. But I digress.)

   SC’s success in marketing goes to the heart of the Guard Frequency podcast itself. Tony & friends changed the format of GF from SC-centric to more general space sim but something happened. After a while the dearth of general space sim news lead them to change to an Elite Dangerous-centric podcast. Marketing a space sim was indeed not quite a lead pipe cinch. #TonyWasWrong

   While I often disagree with Tony, I empathize for his plight. I don’t think Tony is a “hater” of SC. You may all have got on this podcast for different reasons but you’ve all come to the same place. Now Tony is asking more. He put together this podcast 5 years ago with the promise of Star Citizen coverage. It may seem like madness but look at video of GF #26, where he is interviewing Chris Roberts following the The Next Great Starship contest. Look at Tony’s face. That is love, love of the game. #Shiny

   20 seconds into the video he has a huge smile on his face, a smile of joy, of wonder, of love of the game. Tragically, over the years, that love worn down by delays, missteps, CIG making many unforced errors (sorry, Tony, stop trying to make “self-owns” a thing, not everyone is a soccer fan, this is the USA, baseball is way more popular and even for non-sports fans, “unforced errors” is self-explanatory, but I digress). Yet, deep in his heart, Tony WANTS to be wrong about his fears over SC.

   The worst truth is not that Tony was wrong but that #TonyWasWRONGED. He and every other fan of space sims, space shooters and space games were wronged in the latter half of last decade when TPTB of video gamemakers arbitrarily decided to turn away from space games not based on established IP. The foundation of Star Citizen is built on disproving TPTB that we players really do want an awesome space sim. Had the TPTB kept up their development from FreeSpace, Homeworld, Master of Orion, Star Control, etc. imagine where we would have been instead of having so much time lost, so much potential squandered.

   Imagine Star Citizen … multiplied many times over.

   Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.