Sorry but I feel this is already pretty normal discussion, especially given the negative news -- both the relatively buggy gamescom demo plus the uptick in the number of must fix bugs.
If you want a primarily positive thread (regardless of news), I strongly recommend creating a Community thread with specific guidelines.
Regarding your other comments:
1. I'm sure some backers were aware of the risks, and even if they weren't, it's kind of in the past. What I (and perhaps others) hope to do is share a balanced viewpoint so that new potential backers and lurkers have a better sense of the risks. Not everyone keeps up to date with all the news. I'm glad you feel most backers are still optimistic but in my opinion that's not that strange or even a strong sign.
I wasn't specifically talking to you, it was just in general as I've seen many a post that was negative in the extreme.
Everybody is allowed their misgivings about a certain project, but it seemed like it was taking over the thread and that's not helping.
The Gamescom presentation definitely could've been better, but the parts are, albeit slowly, coming together and I can see where it is going. And no, it's not going down the drain and neither is it not going to come out.
There are just some people with an agenda in here and that isn't helping anyone. I get that you want to warn people of the potential risks, but being negative and cynical all the time isn't warning them and is only going to put them off entirely, instead of letting them decide for themselves. Again, not aimed at you personally, I am speaking in general terms here.
2. GTA V was in development for 5 years, sure. But its not comparable to SC. First, SC is at the 5 year mark and is no where near release. Maybe not even halfway. Second, GTAV had a ton of content, including a strong campaign, locations, decent AI. SC has a handful of crafted stations on procedurally generated planets with a not-yet-functioning mission system with no AI.
Is one "spatially larger" than the other? Sure, but that's almost a meaningless statement when most of it is empty. No Mans Sky is vastly larger than SC ever claims to want to be, and was developed by 15 people or so. Does that mean SC (a smaller game spatially) should take 400 people 1 year to make? No of course not.
Okay, so GTAV was two years in pre-development and in those years they made very clear how they wanted to create it and what guidelines the 1000(!!!) developers that were working on it had to follow in the next three years.
Star Citizen started with a grand idea by Chris Roberts, which admittedly got bloated thanks to the Stretch Goals and feature-creep, and they didn't have everything set in stone yet (unlike the case with GTAV). And No Man's Sky was half a game when it came out, missing promised features (multiplayer, for instance) and a lot of other stuff.
It was, despite it having a "vast procedurally generated universe" still pretty empty with the same gameplay loop over and over. It took them at least a year to finally implement some stuff that made it more fun. NMS was the biggest letdown of 2016 to many. It's a bit better now, but it was a very empty game when it came out and quite a lot of people got burned by it.
(Like vanilla Destiny, which missed an entire story because they effed with the development of it six months before release. They're lucky the gameplay loop kept people happy.)
But Star Citizen isn't comparable to NMS, despite both being spacefaring games. NMS isn't an MMO, Star Citizen isn't using procedurally generated planets, they're implementing a ton more stuff in SC than NMS could ever hope to dream of. If NMS wants to implement all of those systems, they'd be working on it for another two years at the least.
And yes, the first two years of SC development were basically a bust and it set them back quite a lot. That's a shame, and I really wish it didn't happen, but it's not as bad as some people would like to think and convince others of.
3. In the same post you handwave away bad management and in the next paragraph talk about how losing an entire year of development (and who knows how much of the money) to shoddy 3rd party studios means we should be optimistic?
It's not handwaving as much as it is "okay, we know about the issues that happened earlier, the developers acknowledged it as well, can we move past that now?"
I'd rather see some more constructive posts than the blatant cynicism and, on the other hand, overly defensive posts. I am not a fan of cynicism myself, and while I rather be optimistic and am often an idealist, I am very much realistic about the project and its development hurdles and missed deadlines.
They try to keep us up to date as much as possible and that is all we can do about it. Sure, people need to be notified of all the possibilities and issues that can come across while the teams are developing the games, but the negative attitude some people exude here isn't helping. Try and be constructive instead of blatantly saying that everything sucks and the game will never come out etc.
And yes, this also goes for those who aren't even willing to admit that development of the game can be very rocky at certain points.
4. I'm not even sure what you mean by a rushed game with no content whatsoever. The examples you mentioned (Bethesda, Assassins Creed, etc) while buggy tend to have TONS of content.
The rushed game with no content wasn't about those games, it was more of a generic statement aimed at the state of Star Citizen. If they rush it now, and it's buggy with no content, people will be up in arms. Clearly that is what some people want as they keep complaining that the game is
still in development etc. But the earlier examples are of games that were filled with bugs on release and in some cases virtually unplayable and many people agreed that the games were rushed. I'd rather they take their time with it.
5. Regarding your last paragraph, one could just as easily say "Please stop with tone policing and unbridled shilling of this clearly mismanaged and delayed project. There's no need to try to rope more people in by being extremely defensive about criticism toward the game like some kind of cult." It's all a matter of perspective, and the only objective news lately has not been great.
Don't get me wrong, I totally agree that people shouldn't be extremely defensive, it's what I said in my post as well.