We're all used to things developing slowly with Star Citizen, but some of that is because they're breaking a lot of new ground with this project. It's a series of firsts, and the development team constantly has to develop new tools to contend with the challenges that the scope of this project presents. This has made development take a long time, and we've all gotten used to the slow pace and kind of come to accept it. With what Turbulent is doing, though, that's not the case. They're just retreading steps that have been walked a hundred times before. They're implementing technology that's been there for over a decade most of the time, and they're doing it slowly and poorly. While CIG is taking some time because they're inventing new things, Turbulent is taking time because they're not good at what they're doing. Incremental patchers are the industry standard now. They are commonplace. Turbulent has been working on getting one implemented for almost a year now. We still don't have it. Nested threads are pretty commonplace at this point, too. Most free forum software has it as an option now. You can even do it with BBforums at this point. But twice now, we've seen Turbulent on ATV bragging about how they've managed to get nested forums in, and talking about how they'll someday fix that implementation to be closer to what we're all used to from, well, the rest of the internet. I haven't seen forum software that couldn't do folders two levels deep in about twenty years. Until Turbulent was tasked with Spectrum, that is - now we can't even have specific ship forums anymore because they don't understand how to implement such a basic feature. Again, there's plenty of free software out there that could do the same thing. In many ways, we'd be better off with CIG just using a bbcode forum - at least we'd be able to structure things in a logical fashion, and it would only take minutes for them to set it up with the functionality that Turbulent is saying will take them months to implement. We're used to slow development because we're used to new ground being tread. We give CIG the benefit of the doubt and a mountain of patience because of that. Turbulent does not deserve that same consideration or patience, because they're doing things that were done ten or fifteen years ago. If they are doing any invention on their part, it's just reinventing the wheel. Where new ground will wind up needing to be tread will be when the voice communications system comes online. Personally, given how much I've seen Turbulent struggle with the most simple things, I'm not confident they'll be able to make it work. Having that work perfectly will be important to the game play experience, too - the plan is to integrate Spectrum's voice chat with in-game positional audio to make using our voice part of the game. The goal is to have us be able to interact with people we're near in game, to hail people in nearby ships to tell them to leave an area or surrender their cargo; it's going to be a big part of how we interact with other players, and given how far behind industry standards Turbulent's offerings so far have been, I don't have a ton of confidence in their ability to deliver there either. And that will wind up hurting the game as a whole. We've also seen what happens when studios like this are given carte blanche from our experiences with Star Marine. The pieces never fit together quite right, and the markers of this can already be seen all over the RSI website. The only way to make things work perfectly together is to have it under one roof. I have a feeling that, like with Star Marine, we're going to wind up throwing a ton of money at a studio, only to throw their work away at some point down the line because it wasn't up to the task. That hurts development and wastes our money. Please CIG, skip the middleman and just take care of this yourselves. It'll take some time to find developers who can do it at first, but it'll pay dividends down the line when you have a competent team that can push the limits and make the social experience in this game something incredible. Elkar Dyn made this post that I feel better illustrates why I have concerns about this - the fact that Spectrum is the way it is makes me worry that when it comes to integrating with the game databases, things will continue to go badly: There is at least one tidbit of technical info we received from Turbulent raises some major red flags on their software/data architecture skills. It has to do with the elephant in the room: the nested vs chronological threads. The fact that, apparently, their storage format is dependent on the viewing format is, let be diplomatic here, special. Even more so because messages in the chronological threads do have (some) data on their 'parent' message, if applicable. The fact that Turbulent, without sarcasm, tells us that it will take some work because they need to figure out what data they need to transform to make the two types transform into each other is just... well, let's just say I do not hire programmers who come up with such a solution, in a job interview programming test.