You are implying changing scope is a bad thing, but it is not. Change of the scope is the correct decision because funding greatly changed, too. Expanding the game when more funds are available is a good thing. Even if it takes longer to release. As long as they ultimately deliver a bigger game, of course. With at least several years of operation remaining, I am quite confident they will.
Dude.
I write software for a living. Changing scope is such a bad thing that the industry has developed a bunch of ways to deal with it in an orderly manner that still allows developers to produce
something usable, no matter how many times the customer changes their minds in the process.
Changing scope is
always a bad thing. It's
always disruptive and
always causes issues and delays above and beyond what even the most conservative estimate showed. For a project to change scope as much as Star Citizen has is almost certainly going to be fatal (see also: Duke Nukem Forever, Daikatana). It is certainly not a recipe for success; There is no game in video game history that had its scope changed as much as Star Citizen did, and no game in history with such a shaky foundation in terms of its business model.
Tell us, maslo, what's the easiest way to earn Idris money in game? Until you can answer that question (i.e. until such time as CIG has figured out how to build an ingame economy [or, for that matter, a game stable enough to allow development of an economy]), I'd be a bit more wary about any "good news" coming out of CIG.
Funding shouldn't change the original design. Invest the extra in servers or stop taking money.
That makes zero sense.
Au contraire, mon frere, it makes all kinds of sense. We've seen this again and again in crowdfunded projects: The likelihood of a project succeeding depends a lot on how well the project is budgeted and planned out before the campaign even starts. That includes budgeting and scheduling any and all stretch goals. CIG never did that, they just threw out tons of commitments with no real idea of what the scope actually was.