People who post regularly in this thread love to play the victim and then turn absolutely vicious toward the slightest critique. Of course they could just create a community OT if they wanted to be left alone, but that won't get as many referrals for shiny golden models / free Gladius ship.
Your best bet is focusing on people who may not be replying but are still occasionally checking the thread. Helping them see a more holistic view of the current state of the project.
Actually yeah, this thread should be in community and just post news in discussion when new info comes out.
I'd love the thread to be somewhere that actually promotes more discussion rather than turning into a war every few pages whenever another poster decides to come in, tout everything they say as gospel and ignore any retorts, aka derailing. I couldn't give a shit if more people back it or not, I'd just rather be able to talk about the game without some holier than thou posters actively trying to kill discussion.
Criticism is fine, I could easily write a good few paragraphs of things I'm not satisfied with, I'll bitch about the flight model all day since there's a lot I dislike about it, but let's not pretend we don't also have some people that aren't interested in actual discussion at all and only want reinforcement of their opinions.
Referral links would be a fast path to a permaban for me, so no, that's not a factor. When reddit started up their referral code randomizer, some people asked about starting up something similar here, but I thought it would still be against the spirit of that conflict of interest rule and didn't bother taking it to the mods for them to make a call. Take a look at the OP and there's no mention that referral codes even exist. I have a grand total of 0 "recruits" (people who bought packages) and 3 "prospects" (registered for free flight/whatever but didn't get a package) via the reddit randomizer. Too bad none of those worked out - I was actually renting that gun type via REC when I played and it would have saved me a bit of REC. Edit: never mind, that was a badger and I was using panthers
That rule actually makes it tricky when it comes to trying to link to community content here now. For example, I linked to the BoredGamer "start here citizen" video because it's well put together. I hadn't been thinking about it at the time, but there is a referral link for him in the video description. There's no relationship there of course, but the fact that it's in there could call things into question, so it's an annoyance.
By the way, on the topic of referrals - I'm not a fan. I said so when it was introduced. I can see why they do it, but it encourages all sorts of lousy behaviour which is a pain since it gets associated with the fanbase in general. Regardless, even if there's negative publicity from it, I'm sure the numbers would show it's worked in their favour overall.
I was curious if anyone ever hit those crazy points targets they posted for some of these rewards. They posted a leaderboard here which has the number of lifetime referrals as of when a contest ended on Aug 8.
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/referral-contest
Anyone who had at least 2942 "referral points" would win a free trip to GamesCom. To qualify for a referral point, someone has to register a new account using your code, then spend at least $40 in packages. That works out to a minimum of $117,680 brought in by the referrer (minimum because there aren't any additional points awarded if the referred person spends more than $40).
No one got the 2942 points. They overestimated how much people would participate. BoredGamer, the youtuber I happened to link in the OP, actually came in at #4, with 1402 referral points. #1 was someone from Test Squadron with 1694. The grand prize was an Idris M, which fortunately for them didn't come with a minimum points requirement, they just had to be first. (ironically, winning that grand prize would have made them ineligible for the trip reward if they had made it to 2942 points anyway, lol)
For regular referral rewards outside of that contest, here's the chart.
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/referral-program
By the way, just in case anyone was thinking of them as ship skins, those gold models are literally just small model ships in a little display case.
The Gladius at 10 is probably the best balanced reward of the bunch and I bet that brought in some good results. A mid-tier fighter with a referral target that probably looks achievable for a decent chunk of their audience.
The 25 and 42 point rewards look great at first, with lots of ships, but there's the catch that they're only in Arena Commander (the dogfighting simulator, not an actual ship to use in the MMO). At 75 points and up, it's back to giving single ships that are usable in the MMO, but that's already a high target. The Javelin at 2017's still a few hundred beyond the top people on that chart.
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The subject of moving to community has come up before and it's an interesting topic. In the end, I'd say it's still here because that's the way the site is organized. Threads for unreleased games are in gaming, then the OTs get moved to community a month or so after release.
I share UpDownLeftRight's viewpoint on my favourite kind of discussion here. The Elite community thread's in a good spot where people talk about control setups and the things they're doing in the game. I don't think that's due to the fact that the thread's in community though - I don't think there's any additional moderation that comes into play just because it's a community thread. The discussion is like that because it's a mature game, it has that content to discuss and there isn't that perception that swaying opinion either way can have some effect on whether or not the game exists - it's already there.
If there was just one thread labelled as the long term "gameplay discussion" thread and there was a mod willing to risk their sanity to babysit it (no one has that kind of time), ruthlessly deleting the opinion war posts trying to sway people either way and just leaving the day to day gameplay/tech/etc talk, you'd still end up with a discussion board that has no place to voice negative opinions about Star Citizen (unless there's an event thread going on), which people would rightly object to. So, where does that go? Spin up a new "Star Citizen war zone" community thread for people to duke it out? Maybe two new positive and negative Star Citizen sentiment OTs for respective echo chambers, along with the normal talk thread for people who don't want to get into that? Maybe four for neutral/pro/con/warzone (lol)? Nah, I don't see that structural approach working. Even if so many threads were allowed, people would just converge on whatever one was most active anyway.
If moved to community, the thread would certainly be less visible, which could diminish the motivation for influencers on both sides and maybe temper it to more regular discussion. On the other hand, it's a troll's paradise here with the way people go off, so it's not like that's less fun just because the thread's on a different tab.
So, it's a bit of a wash. In the end, I don't see it making much difference either way, so might as well stick with convention to keep things from being confusing. Things improve on their own when there's new stuff to do and talk about in game.