The MMORPG Star Citizen released the new patch “Alpha 3.18” on Friday, which was supposed to give the backers a lot of joy over the weekend, but everything went wrong. The fans were stuck in the launcher and the developers were once again mocked and mocked: The players had to wait so long for the patch and then there were “major outakes”, “big failures”.
What was that patch? Alpha 3.18 was announced as Star Citizen’s “biggest update yet”.
The most important feature was the introduction of “Persistent Entity Streaming”: If objects are now placed somewhere in the universe, they stay there.
This is a milestone for Star Citizen that has been talked about for years. It was actually the big feature that was supposed to determine 2022, but which – like many things – was delayed.
Other features were also added to the patch:
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Players waited 11 months for “new update” – Should be great
What was special about the patch? People have been waiting forever for the patch. The last major update to Star Citizen “3.17” was released in April 2022 – 11 months ago.
The release of the “next milestone” had been significantly delayed throughout 2022, so it was a big deal that 3.18 was finally coming.
Especially since the patch was just announced as the “biggest update so far”.
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Star Citizen speaks of a “super-rough” start
So how did it actually go? Catastrophic. The patch was released on Friday and players immediately noticed numerous errors when logging in: There were login errors, long queues and who then came into the game encountered gameplay errors.
Player anger was compounded by developers keeping a low profile. It was only on Sunday that the tweet came: Yes, be aware that many of the players are having problems getting in touch with Alpha 3.18.
They then spoke of a “super-rough start” and had “everyone on the team on deck” to fix the problems.
Ultimately, Star Citizen even hoisted the emergency flag, and there was talk of “Major Outtakes”.
Meanwhile, 5 days after the patch, the alert level has been lowered to “Partial Outage”. The servers were down for a few hours this morning. The infrastructure of the persistence system had to be adapted.
How are the fans reacting? There is a lot of mockery and malice to read on reddit. You’re just so pissed off because the important patch came so late anyway. And now he’s putting Star Citizen’s alpha in a state where it’s basically impossible to play until more patches bring stability.
That’s why sayings like “I’m really excited about 3.18.3. to play – in January 2024.”
Others say: “Play? I’d be happy to start the launcher!”
The Star Citizen reddit is once again full of memes poking fun at the “Star Citizen experience.”
This is behind it: Star Citizen has a special status because the game has raised so much money through crowdfunding – it currently stands at $554 million. The SF game advertises for the money of the players with great visions and ideas. In theory, this all sounds fantastic.
In practice, however, such a mammoth project is prone to understandable and banal problems such as bugs, launcher crashes and error codes. That happens with large, complex games, as well as with many other titles that are developed conventionally, but these problems are incredibly annoying when you have freed up the weekend to play your favorite game and then nothing works.
But strange things also happen at Star Citizen. No mainstream online game patches on a Friday unless there’s some way to avoid it. Because the developers know that if something goes wrong, the forum will be on fire all weekend.
And Star Citizen is rolling out a patch players have been waiting for months, right on a Friday. You could have waited until Monday to do that.
This combination of claim, dimension and reality leads to bizarre situations:
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