CIG Disparagingly Tagging Backers. They've gone too far

As I type this, the CS page has been taken offline; and replaced with a static image from the contact-us page:



https://cloudimperiumservicesllc.zendesk.com/hc/en-us



Here is what happened over the weekend.



A backer whale with over $40K "invested" in Star Citizen, discovered that he was tagged (essentially Blacklisted) in the CIG customer service dB.



https://www.reddit.com/r/Starcitizen_trades/comments/4mmg4y/psa_cigs_blacklist_categorization/



In a hilariously inept (it’s CIG!) move, they didn’t realize that Zendesk tags are public facing.



If you had been tagged, you could find out by going to the support page and opening a new support request. the dropdown should be there if you have been tagged.



https://cloudimperiumservicesllc.zendesk.com/hc/en-us



Some people were calling it a fake.



So others (including myself) went digging. What we found was rather startling to say the least.



Then one person confirmed it; as did several others less than an hour later.



http://i.imgur.com/THVmlKH.jpg



Someone with a tag made a video of it because some Shitizens (abusive & toxic anti-social Star Citizen fans) were claiming the whole thing was fake.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXD7JKT6bcE



In my case, they gave me a special tag. This is a dump direct from the page via Javascript and JSON. From the main CS page, you could just go to the page > View Source > search for “Greetings sourcecode lurker!”



https://i.imgur.com/o0UJmfc.png



A forum thread “Publicly tagging customers in CIG CS?” that appeared on the CIG website was not only closed, it was completely removed. Archive.is capture: http://archive.is/L2G1k



Not only was CIG caught using customer information given to them, then matching it against information (e.g. a Goon is a denizen of the SA forums) they pulled elsewhere, but they were also using it to determine the level of service and attention given to backers who have thus far given them almost $115 million.



Right off the bat, the backer who originally spotted this and posted it on Reddit was accused - by Shitizens - of faking the whole thing.



Others weren't as dismissive:



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Thats very unlikely to be a spoof, Brown Hornet is an early backer and one thing he never does in his posts is joke around. He also mentioned this when challenged in the reddit thread http://imgur.com/1GJd3AS . Look at the fourth paragraph of the kickstarter, it absolutely states every single ship we sell over the next 48 hours will 'never' be sold again. Mr Hornet complained about this and got marked a 'difficult customer' . This is where the problems started, I mean what is it if its not pure rotten lies? LTI was another one that was reintroduced after saying the complete opposite, controller agnosticism was a bait and switch with zero-order gimbal controls despite backers being assured that wouldn't happen. Star-marine ready in weeks?



How could you believe anything they say at this point, I know I don't. I would respect them if they stopped selling ships and said we have raised enough money until launch and are targeting such and such a date for MVP. There is currently no scheduled release date for a game thats 2 years late! Here is feedback on 2.4 from a regular tester on why 2.4 is nowhere near ready for backers even for alpha testing.



https://www.twitch.tv/malogos9/v/70427493



From a 2 hour play through and here's the list of issues:



- 16 fps (worse in dogfights)

- Rubberbanding

- Walking through walls

- Invisible spawning

- NPCs bog down server and spawn x4 at each Comm Array

- Spawning into a wall

- Bugged out FPS weapons

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This comment pretty much sums up CIG:



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Under normal circumstances it would be hard to believe that a company with funding of $114m had taken the time to link customer accounts to social media and discussion boards and felt this information was important enough to record. But then this is Star Citizen so it is not very surprising. It barely even ranks on the long list of bewildering things they have done. But it is another yet another indicator that something is rotten in Chris Roberts’ house.



The narrative from diehard sc grognards has always been that this stuff is fake or exaggerated. Part of a plot (with as yet undetermined goals) orchestrated by the hated Derek Smart and his minions. But the more that’s revealed about the people working at CIG and the way they operate the less water this holds. The Escapist article was dismissed as scurrilous rumour because they used anonymous sources (even though this is a common and normal practice). There was no way Sandi was as crazy as the article claimed, nor could the company’s culture be as poisonous as it appeared. Ridiculous.



Then the beer emails reveal that the VP of marketing can’t even conduct herself professionally in communications with a customer. Those again were dismissed as fake, never mind that would have been a lot of effort for something that could have easily resulted in legal action. Just like was threatened with The Escapist. So far there have been no legal repercussions for either case.



Now we discover that CIG is tagging its paying customers to track their identity across the Internet. The only reasonable conclusion is that this is done so they don’t expend unnecessary effort on certain groups of people who are viewed as being harmful to the project. This has parallels to the behaviour of cults like Scientology.



And surprise surprise, one of the categories is “snowflake”, a term used by Sandi in an email as a derogatory term for people she feels are entitled and unnecessarily demanding. Never mind that they’ve funded her and her husband’s extravagant lifestyle for the past four years.



At this point anyone who can’t see that there’s something very wrong with CIG’s culture which affects both its employees and customers is being wilfully blind.“

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