limitedduck

I would say private server is more what you're referring to, also CIG's wording, but maybe agree to disagree. A quick search says that they haven't cancelled that feature, but it'll appropriately be the very last thing they work on

How are they gone? The current servers are hosted by CIG, there's no p2p or player hosted servers. How would that even work for an MMO?

Meshing tests have gone up to 2000 and the shards that were left on overnight were 300-500. The current evocati build of 4.0 has meshing enabled, just limited to 100 for now

Personally, I don't think they should be aiming for 100 anymore, even if it was promised. That number was for the original pitch and was arbitrarily high since it was for a much shallower and easier to create game

Today was day one of Citizencon and CIG revealed a lot of stuff that shows they're still working to give players the game they want. Most of it was actually tech to answer the scalability problem for everyone wondering how they're going to get to 100 star systems when they still only have 1

The problems they're calling out aren't really specific to anything though. They're just kind of generalizations that sound like they got formed from news articles rather than observing the development progress.

You have the option to buy most ships with real money, but the general cycle is about 6 months after release into the persistent universe the ships are purchasable with in-game money. The only reason to spend real money on SC is if you can't wait those 6 months, want to support development, or don't want to bother with in-game money for whatever reason. There are some exception ships though.

As for the detail, there are big differences between SC and ED. For one, SC ships have completely modeled interiors since the intended gameplay is for you to manually board your ship from outside. ED has no ship interiors as far as I know, just cockpits and exteriors, no matter how big the ship is. SC also has more ships than ED even excluding all the SC ship variants, ground vehicles, and ships that don't do Quantum jumps, the frame shift equivalent of ED.

True, I forgot about this.

I think people can take issue with the funding model while still believing in the development effort as a whole. The funding model can change, after all.

I'm not comparing their scale, just the ability to enjoy something without it seeming like there's much there to others. But if you want to compare, I was imagining MC back before even the Nether. I had plenty of fun just mining and stacking blocks to build whatever, nothing like what became available toward 1.0. SC is kind of in the same situation, but their timeline is just 20x greater because of the scope.

What tech demos are you referring to specifically and how are they not connected? I guess there's flight tech, fps tech, cargo tech, economy tech, etc, but you can walk to your ship, fly off, land somewhere, shoot guys, loot some cargo, put it on your ship, fly back to a city, and sell it, all in one go. One thing that's actually disconnected is Arena Commander, but that's specifically for people that want more traditional, arcadey pvp.