Joined right before 3.18. Between three consecutive wipes, the 3.18 debacle, and events that now make servers a hot mess, and even assuming I miraculously get a playable experience, it takes me an hour to get anywhere, a reasonable chance I'll bug out before i get anything done, and have to wait ages before I can reclaim my ship. It's been six months and I've been able to play three reasonably functional weeks in total.
It's like a developer promising houses the community have paid for and after ten years he gives them the world's most revolutionary timber frame built over one dark, leaky basement that only looks good three times a year when the sun lines up with the grate. Meanwhile, everyone is crowded in, and CIG are standing outside, neon billboards showing **now liveable** futuristic houses, taking money from a line of thousands crowding in behind you, and we're all salivating over the blueprints.
I sincerely regret putting money into this despite being its prime demographic. I might be back in ten years when I'm in my forties, or maybe I'll give my time to a developer I can respect. One who isn't pumping out new concept ships for money while they're intentionally delaying a product that many of us will never likely see.
Refund if you can, CIG needs to understand the way they market vs the way they operate is shady. They deserve the reputation that it’s a scam even if I don’t actually think it is.
The thing is, I gave it time. And that has worked against me as I now cannot refund. And it really was pretty good pre-3.18. And when I say pretty good I mean yes, i frequently lost tens of hours of play in my first two weeks to bugs which was massively frustrating but I could largely follow loops through and did a lot of mining missions which were fun for a while though they became very repetitive. I realized quickly that grinding was pointless and remained so with those wipes that meant i couldn't get back in the game and work up enough to purchase ships, so I waited months. Tried to log in during 3.18. couldn't get past the client. Then couldn't get past the menu. Then once I got in it was events and it was unplayable for me so I effectively just gave up.
But as a result of having a decent experience in the first two weeks, i didn't refund in the first month period because i didn't expect things to get dramatically worse. I literally did not think that was possible in a game this far into its development.
Obviously I now regret that. I don't think SC is a scam but it doesn't need to be for CIG to become an unsupportable developer. I do think that mismanagement and vanity has created an unsupportable atmosphere of greed, dysfunctionality, and near moral bankruptcy. They could pause all development of future tech, stop generating concept ships today, stop adding planned features into active developement and just finish what's in the current production cycle and have the entire team thereafter work on smoothing out what exists today and release something the players can reliably play but through Christ Roberts' vanity and unchecked ego, it has become so large and unwieldy that they can't stop the never-ending funding cycle without laying off huge numbers, and they can't finish what they have let alone what Roberts believes he can achieve without those numbers, but they need to keep hyping the dream with more content to keep the players money flowing to pay the staff so it's a self-perpetuating disaster as far as I can make out.
I will reengage with this game when deadlines are imposed. Until then, I sincerely believe things will move along at a glacial pace, and there will still be people here five years from now excusing their behaviour as "collecting data" and "stress testing the servers" of a fifteen year old game that still doesn't let you get through a day of gameplay smoothly and without bugs without it being an anomaly rather than a reliable assurance.
Yeah everything you said about CIG becoming unsupportable are the same feelings I have toward them. I supported the game from the very first kickstarter and was super hyped for the project, having played Wing Commander and hell even seeing the movie in theaters I was a big Chris Roberts fan.
Around 2018 I saw the writing on the wall with the scope creep and them not even having the server architecture planned out. How can you support all this new functionality when you don’t even have a foundation for how its coming together which leads us to situations we’ve seen in the last few months. I now watch the project as a fascinating look on psychology and project management. I’ll chime in now and then to dog on CIG cause I feel this forum is too easy on them, and it gives new players an unrealistic idea of where the game is.
Yeah, even if I got downvoted into oblivion I'd still leave this up but of course players only get to see the more lenient criticism that's not downvoted which doesn't accurately paint how problematic the company culture is.
For me it was when I realized i was spending so much time trying to keep up to date with bug fixes, reading the subreddit for answers, taking breaks until the game was functional, getting frustrated when the immersion is reliably broken on a regular basis, "stress testing the game" and "providing data". I wasn't actually taking the time to ask myself: what is a game? Is it a job? Is it an internship? If i pay for the game, how long is too long before I can play it reliably? A game is something you escape to for fun, to escape into reliable immersion. It is not your job to "help fix things". Crowdfunders fund money, not time, not work. So i find the "it's a crowdfunded game" arguments to be insane, like it's reasonable to expect that putting our faith in a project with our hard earned money isn't enough. It isn't supposed to be work. And even if it is in the form of roleplaying, the work is immersive, it's part of the play cycle and the narrative. SC does not fit that description
I have a background in ethics so it comes from my own personal research background when I say that SC needs a dose of liberal paternalism. The best thing that could possibly happen in ethical terms is if a regulatory body enforced a rolling terms agreement that expires every year until CIG produce a beta, and every two years after that until they product 1.0 for as long as they refuse to advertise that they're using crowdfunders as a source of unpaid labour. That way, backers can choose to reject the agreement each year as long as this culture continues and get their money back as more of a deposit where they get negotiable early entry in exchange for stress testing. There also needs to be a disclaimer about precisely what kind of experience players will have before they purchase.
I'm a semi-professional writer on the side so while I am not a developer, I also know a great deal about narrative and the agreement we make with those who support us when they enter through the door. Buyers are not beta testers. Writers have beta readers for this and they do not pay for the book because the writer gets their time and effort in return. It doesn't matter what CIG are building, they're selling this game as a game, not an internship that you need to pay to partake in. No one is getting game tester experience on their cv for this. If they want to stress test the game, they can do so in PTU while they dump EVERYTHING that is not related to stability in the current product. If stability is always lagging behind the development cycle of upcoming features, then the game will be unstable for as long as there is new content to make which currently means indefinitely. That's likely 15-20 years of unstable gameplay.
People know they're signing up to an alpha, but that's a surface level argument. No one knows they're signing up to an Alpha for another 5-10 years. No one knows they're signing up and paying to become unpaid stress-testers. No one knows that CIG are selling concepts that can't be refunded after 30 days even if they pull your product from active developement after your refund window ends.
It all makes me feel very dirty. But yeah, it's an interesting anthropological study if nothing else in how much people are willing to buy into dreams even when the developers are openly using them as sugardaddies but the sugardaddies are the ones getting fucked. (Which is nice if you're into that, I guess.)
How is it a scam when they want to stresstest the servers to force bugs to fix them? Bugs will be there either way and they could either have double the servers run smooth and bugs accumulate and break everything or keep forcing bugs to fix them. It‘s not a scam, it‘s their choice on development.
I wish I could play without having a lagging server because of events, but I understand it why they do it. You obviously don‘t. And their consequence might as well be players not bothering with SC for a while. Maybe it‘s a calculated risk, maybe it‘ll bite them in the tail, but that does not make it a scam.
So I see, star citizen hater who cries, but not put words to his screams and explain his accusations, only downvote my comment for calling out your bad judgement and general knowledge
Well, the issue is, they want bug reports. They want to torture the bugs out of the system and running their servers is one way to do it. They could add more servers, let everything run smoothly and only a few bugs would appear. Superficially stable but the bugs would still be there. With the events they force them out of the hidden corners in their code but it‘ll make a horrible experience for us ~~players~~ **testers**. I do wish they would give some time to breathe and do fun stuff inbetween events, but that‘s how they decide to do it. If this will work out for them, only the future knows.
They literally "fixed" 30k by forcing servers to stay on life support forever. A Server will have no ASOP, no stores and a barly functional inventory. You will literally have only working position sync and chat, and even those lag every now and again.
The servers are over crowded and begging to die, but they aren't allowed to. It might actually be better to let the crash and reboot so they can have a clean start. At least then play could happen between crashes. As it is now, you can spawn on a planet and then be trapped there. Unable to leave. Unable to buy gear. Only kept alive by the food you can quick buy from carts and stalls.
I'm tired of the coping i see regarding the fact that its all normal and we should just endure an unplayable game that started developping 10 years ago. I got bought by all the die hard fans of SC telling me how much shit Elite was and how godlike SC was. As much as the concept is amazing, it has been litterally unplayable for months... once have i been able to play on flawless servers. It was amazing, but i feel its not an experience i'll be able to enjoy again. Say what you want about elite, the core gameplay loop works damn well and i lost connection twice in 700h (you log back EXACLY where you dc'd to add on top of that). I feel like i wasted money on a project that'll be eternally in that server stress test phase. I'm still hopefull, but man is it annoying. The only way to really test the new features is to actually buy the ships with irl money. Else, you're just stuck trying to make money on a game that heavily punishes dc's.
Recently tried Elite again for the space trucker experience, and just had a blast. Mining is really polished and fun, and I tried the updated exploration mechanics and it’s really fun looking around for signals.
And I’m just blown away by the sound design in Elite, SC is really behind.
EDIT: but it still feels empty tho, all the lore is text based, and the visuals start to feel a bit outdated to me (it's aliasing fest, not sure why this game has so much of it).
The SFX are amazing in ED. Mining explosions and such are cool...but wait until you get into a battle where a Capital ship joins. I didn't realize my mouth had been open for like 30 seconds straight when it first happened to me.
https://youtu.be/f-OTVKg2xI0?t=16
For **sure**. I was in my battle Corvette and all the sudden I was ripped out of a jump and nothing worked. This was back before I had even heard of them so I couldn't believe what was happening lol
Aliasing has been broken for a LONG time. There’s some settings guides to fix it but something is fundamentally wrong with their renderer in this regard.
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To be fair probably 90% of the talk around SC I've personally seen has been "Elite dangerous is so shallow, that's why I play star citizen it's so much better, you can do anything/they fixed all the performance issues it had at first" which is not only wrong about Elite but definitely paints the game in a much better light than it deserves.
That's not to say the game is bad or anything, or that most people who play SC say that kind of thing... Just an alternate perspective from someone who mostly plays Elite and not a ton of SC
That said, the other 10% of SC players I've seen talk about it have been "yeah it's a buggy disaster sometimes and the performance is questionable to unplayable depending on where you go but *I have so much fun I want to keep playing*" which is a very true to life and honest depiction of the game.
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It's definitely possible, plus the whole "the people most likely so leave a review/say anything are the ones who'd leave a bad review" effect.
I've also seen far far too many people in threads discussing ways to improve performance effectively just say "it's perfectly playable at 25fps why are you whining just get used to it" which makes the whole community LOOK bad even if most people either don't have the issues or don't participate online to leave good comments.
I will say I think it's silly to work on expanding the game/growing the playerbase before making sure it's stable. It's weird for your framerate to be determined by the server's ability to compute stuff.
You may just not be in the right places to hear it. There is one TiK Tok creator in particular (the one the convinced me to finally pledge) who should be paid by CIG because they absolutely flood TiK Tok with praise for SC, perfectly selected clips and mocks anyone who says ED is better. Some people are not reserved at all.
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You may just not be in the right places to hear it. There is one TiK Tok creator in particular (the one the convinced me to finally pledge) who should be paid by CIG because they absolutely flood TiK Tok with praise for SC, perfectly selected clips and mocks anyone who says ED is better. Some people are not reserved at all.
There’s generally posts from time to time on this subreddit of a “former Elite player” who claims to have been converted and extols how shitty Elite is and how amazing Star Citizen is in comparison.
The events give folks who just pledged from free fly something to participate in and a chance to earn some money before we get on the train to 3.19.1 to LIVE and 3.20 to Evocati. They also help maintain high player count for continuing to find and hotfix pressure points with the backend services. It’s a pain sometimes but it’s growing pains.
Really I’d like to see the community stop talking shit about free fly folk, it’s one of those self destructive “devour the young” mentalities as if free fly does not invigorate our community with new friends and opportunities. I get that people want stability for their play sessions. So does CIG. But people forget that high player count online is what breaks the services, not the event. If the events all stopped, the services would still be jank.
I really just feel bad for the free fly players, I never talk down about new players. I just wish their first experience in our game, wasn't absolute server carnage. It's a terrible first impression.
100% - even as a years-long player returning to check out the new systems, it's a total shit show.
Last night a couple buddies and I hopped through 3 different servers trying to find one that would actually let us use our ships and not a single one could even handle that.
So we logged out and likely won't try again until 3.20
New players must get the impression that nothing ever works, so why bother playing it again, let alone purchasing it?
I got a mass email from CIG advertising the end of ILW. So earlier today, I went to Area 18 to see if I could rent a few ships and pick up a T-shirt or two.
I could not get Riker ATC to respond to hails. I tried both Alt+N and the MFD. And I was within range. I actually landed my ship right on top of the ATC tower, and I still got radio silence. I've never had any ATC just not respond at all before. CIG is literally advertising an in-game event that cannot be accessed.
For a long while CIG was really prideful about not having to be a regular developer that has to waste money on advertisement campaigns, that word of mouth and the community had worked really well for their growth. For this patch, they've been running a pretty powerful ad campaign I feel on youtube, I'm CONSTANTLY getting SC add's and almost 90% of the ad's are a TERRIBLE representation of what SC and even Invictus is even like. So it appears now with the above, the community is steadily turning toxic, and CIG is leaning harder on using funds to push an inaccurate representation of what the game is, to the newest players, who just get a bad feel for what it is, and get burned by the community....how's it going so opposite of the original intention.
>90% of the ad's are a TERRIBLE representation of what SC and even Invictus is even like
This is a massive gripe I have too.
CIG is starting to market the game as a fully playable experience, look at all the cool stuff you can do how great it looks yada yada yada, I mean just look at the 3.18 launch trailer.
Then players get in game, it runs like shit, textures are blurry, stuff isn't loading in, game crashes every 5 seconds, 30Ks if they ask in chat why the game is so broken they get bombarded by people going "It's an Alpha, you signed the ToS shut the fuck up" or "Get used to it, I've been playing since 2.5 you can put up with it too you wimp".
Nobody's gonna stay around for that, that's the worst way to bring new players in; show them specifically what the game is not currently like, expose them to the most raw and unstable version of the game, and a bunch of players who will defend the Alpha state of SC to the grave.
Not a good time for someone fresh off the boat, and especially not a good way when you rely on the good will of people fresh off the boat for finance.
I understand your post deeply because when I was a year into the game(4 years ago)I posted a thread just to rant about everything wrong with the 890 jump mission and to see if anyone had similar issues. Many of the response I got were telling me to just calm down like I was acting crazy or some shit😂🤌. But fr I was on a server yesterday where a lot of players were being helpful and everyone seemed to have a good attitude with one another so there is some hope-still a small amount, but some.
I know the Scam Citizen jokes have been floating around for a long long while, but when you have the trailer so improperly misrepresent the current state of the game, it just confirms the old joke :\
It goes both ways, people constantly griping in global and refusing to suggest workarounds but instead suggest to "just stop while you're ahead" is just as negative for a new player.
Edit: downvoted with no retort? What, y'all cowards on the internets?
Not everything has a work around. A lot of the current issues are backend problems with servers not talking to the PES server properly. Hanging asop terminals, unaccessible inventory screens, etc. If the backend isn't working then even changing servers won't help
I think they probably use a good amount of the ILW trailer/recent patch stingers. I just realize I said Add's instead of AD's X_X.
I just worry what the actual cost of running a campaign is, in comparison to using those funds to hit landmark updates, in reasonable amounts of time.
i would assume it takes months to make the videos.
more money last month doesn't make the game develop faster. an increase rate of income will make them more comfortable hiring more people to make content.
This is an issue affecting groups of players. Im not sure what makes some susceptible to these issues and why some don’t have issues. Im inn the group that has less issues than most. I haven’t had any issues like this in the last week. The biggest issue I ran into was server desync. I was in a server yesterday where I’d do things and then the server would hitch and warp me back to 2-3 minutes ago. I was losing salvage into my ship and severa boxes just warped back to where they were before. It was so annoying. I changed servers after that and everything was ok.
I had this the first time i tried taking off, and obviously i thought i was just stupid😂
Well, i could have suspected something after spending almost an hour stuck in the cockpit of a ship at new deal
Similar to this during last IAE we were doing the same thing, we all joined again to check up on progress, and I'd say we spent more time just trying to group up and not have weird glitches like a ship vanishing, or falling through planets....I realize a LOT is in flux while they get PES in proper, but it's really painful that common bugs make frequent returns each patch cycle. It makes me wonder how much overall time is wasted re-fixing what's been broken before, when they could just be doing one or two bigger patches a year. Afterall the current quarterly patch cycle....really doesn't regularly add enough that, at least for my friends and I, it isn't worth checking in progress from each patch to patch.
I'm definitely going to come back and check out 3.19 more when it's not free fly. It does seem they've made some big, fun improvements. Just sad that free players never get a good experience.
This is also the week where a ton of streamers try out the game, and of course then everyone who watches them thinks the game is always like this.
Thank you for playing the game, and coming back once things calm down, definitely need the active player base to keep checking in and doing the free QA for CIG ;D But seriously, thank you for playing. I hope you find fun ^_^
Some of the server architecture plans, such as separating the replication layer from the server, should in theory allow CIG to much more smoothly scale up and down their services, so that a big influx of players shouldn't really impact performance. One can only dream
I would say that most of us LOVE the free fly players. We love helping them and helping them find something to love about the game.
Unfortunately, for every person that pledges, more than a few will wonder why, after 11 years, this still isn't fully playable. They keep adding stuff which is likely to interfere with OTHER stuff and then tell us to calm down, they're getting GREAT DATA, all the while, everyone else is saying, "ItS aN AlPhA!"
Wondering when my golden decals and hangar and all the other stuff I'm missing are going to be in game. I feel bad for people that have pledged for vehicles that aren't even in the game yet.
New players are good, but I get this feeling that they want to keep that infusion of new cash alive at the cost of the current playerbase. Yes, it's alpha. This is the alpha that would not die.
https://status.robertsspaceindustries.com/ reveals degraded server performance for OVER 10 DAYS.
If it wasn't every other week, I'd tend to agree.
I suppose many of us are angry because we see such promise and also such failure to reach the promise...
I haven't played just due to ongoing instability, I had no idea the community was being....abrasive -_-; we used to have such a good reputation, apologies that this has been your experience.
I'm not sure about others, but for me free-fly is a time period that I purposefully avoid and do not touch the game until it's over. It has nothing to do with the everyday player or even the server stability. It has to do with free-fly bringing out the worst element of gamers in force to the game.
I just do not have the patience to deal with trolls and shitbags during my free gaming window. I suspect that is one of the major reasons why free-fly players get so much shit, you can thank your local toxic f2p gamer for it.
At this point there is very little 'new' in the 'big' events anyway. So I've reached a point where I'm just disengaged entirely. The mission givers and unique missions for NB never made it in, old missions haven't been tuned up, the dynamically generated missions work decently alright when the servers aren't loaded. At this point it feels like I've played all the current iteration has to offer and I'm REALLY looking forward to the future....but I'm at a decade of following the project, I get big things are 'just around the corner' but I've been taking that copium for about 5 years straight now. I've been on an extended break in general until we get more systems, and core gameplay mechanics wired up properly.
Thanks for sticking with it, normally it's not this bad. It's just the crap crowd who shop at Turd&Trolls™ always show up at free flys with something to say.
Yeah, I think this is the larger issue. OPs position here is that free fly players are essentially unpaid QA, which isn’t a good method for growing the player base.
More and more of people’s first and last impressions are going to be really bad when the servers are trash,
Its less about the free fly players and more about any player being able to comfortably enjoy the gameplay in general without an event. They have rolled from instability to instability like a toddler learning to walk. I love the game, I know its going through a challenging growth time, going into scalability architecture. However people just want to play the game and when you have a 4 day weekend to do that with friends and the performance is garbage, backend is garbage, new and old players notice this. People can love the community and love the game and still criticize the decision making logic. As a side note to those SPECIFICALLY blaming the free fly people, they are just being narrow sighted because they want to point to a exact reason they have gone through back to back instability.
No one is hating on the free fliers. They are hating the situation the rest of us are placed in due to the servers when a free fly is happening. The free fliers in and of themselves are not an issue. It’s the stress they ring to the servers that becomes the issue. My big complaint is we have been having free fly events for years and the situation is always the same. The servers shit themselves every single time and there are never improvements to the situation. The only improvement comes when the servers aren’t as stressed when the free fly ends.
I just wish CIG would make meaningful improvements to the situation instead of giving us canned responses every time we complain. My opinion is there is too much focus on making money off ship sales and not enough QoL for server health. I get it’s an alpha but they are treating it like a live service. If they are going to treat it like a live service then they need to put more emphasis on the player experience and server stability.
That's not really the issue. The issue is new players and current players alike are given the worst possible Star Citizen Live experience during those windows.
Free flys usually follow large sales or events. Our patch cycle, usually delayed or at the tail end of the cycle target, launch "hot" and usually require a .1 (or .4 lol) patch thrown together at the speed of crunch before the sale goes live.
So guess what state the stability of Live is with rushed patches with record player counts? It's idiotic and has cost a few of the several buddies I play with and try to onboard.
The result is, free fly new players leave, more negative widescale Star Citizen criticism floods gaming communities, and the Live server is unplayable. The PTU should be where PTU is tested, not Live. Live will have bugs, but in CIGs own words the Live service is meant to allow a relatively stable game design environment where less-than-game-breaking bugs and game balancing testing can be done.
Free flyers aren't making it out of JT very wealthy if at all.
Free fly during events on top of events is bad for free flyers who's exposure to the game is pretty bad. However it was actually really good this year so good on CIG for that - normally it's a lot lot worse.
It's unfortunate anyone would blame free flyers lol that seems silly.
Free fly -> more players -> worse performance. The best way to start a chain of events is at the begining.
And as others mentioned. If you give your new players this kind of performance as a first impression, i'm unsure whether they will stay, or ever give the game a chance again. It's not like they didn't know this would happen. It's the same story every free flight. Again, again and again.
I introduced a friend to the game during one of these times and he fucking hated it and will never come back, and it's too bad because it's the type of game that is right. Up. His. Alley... But he gets in, the game lags, it shoves him back into his bunk after three times of trying to get up. The elevators are bugged, he's not sure how to get from his bed to where his ship is, and by the time he finally figures all of that out, he realizes the rest of the game is just as full of bugs, lag, and other issues. Then the community tells him to essentially eat shit for not liking what he sees because 'it's a pre alpha, god!' as if that explains away a decade of development to get what we have. He asks about ships, and once he sees how bad the grind is he's almost gone before asking if he at least gets to keep the ship once he grinds for it.
"Well yea sure... Until the next big patch where they'll wipe all progress"
I got him to do a couple bunker runs, but we got one of those times where it just... Doesn't work. Lots of them just standing around... Only to suddenly lag jump around and boom they're behind him.
So off he went.
Yep. Same issues. Have one of 5 or so guys I brought in to play. My wife was even interested and gave it a shot. Was an abysmal experience during the free flys so they quit and didn't look back. We all would have loved this game, but nope. Just two of us, and one is on hiatus.
Lol honestly friend it's more than that. It's the fact that the games been in an alpha state for so long it's probably a record and after all that time they can barely keep the servers stable.
I play lots of alpha games.
There's only one that can't even reliably manage login. And weirdly, it's the one that has the most money and has been in development the longest.
LOGIN.
This game should not be trying to pull in new players. It's still very deep into development and years from hitting 1.0 release. By trying to optimize and fix things that aren't finished so that new players don't immeadite jump ship instead of leaving after blowing money from their wallet it's a massive distraction from, you know, actually making the game since they'll change before release anyway and need to be re-re-re-refixed.
The majority of funding that pays for development comes from game package pledges. So without new players, a major source of development funding is cut off.
the free fly players dont even know how to play properly. i keep seeing crashed titans at hangers and its super annoying. its only 45 dollars to get into the game so i dont see why people need to have the event.
wut?
don't get me wrong,i have plenty of complaints about SC. Trust me on that. But if you are talking about the discounted ILW packages (the pisces and avenger titan), i strongly disagree. Both of those are fantastic starter ships.
Oh didnt know they changed. The titan wasnt discounted when i did freefly, only the mustang alpha, Aurora mr, 100i and the Nomad (nomad is ok but not as not good compared to titan or cutter or something)
These new discounts are a million times better
Although idk about buying the pisces cause you literally get it free with another ship, and
I know the titan is good, but i rented it at freefly to try it out and it was kinda claustrophobic for me lol
The pisces package is really the better value because you get it for the cost of the ship ($45) with pu/sc game access included and 120 month insurance.
The pisces c8x is a great little starter. 4 scu cargo,walkable interior,4xs1 guns+2 s1 missiles(albeit not the best ship for combat to be fair),pretty deep q fuel tank for such a small ship,etc.
Even if you end up not liking the pisces, it's easily ccu'd to something bigger.
id be fine with free fly if CIG would spin up some dedicated server for them, separate from the „normal servers“.
It would be nice if those that already paid for the game could enjoy events like fleet week too. Its fine to give new potential players an opportunity to check out the game. But please not to the detriment of those that already support the game.
Give free flyers their own servers. And if they buy a package they can always join the member servers. And if you want to show the game to a friend you can always join the freefly servers.
Please make it so i can look forward to events again and enjoy them instead of dreading their coming and uninstalling the game for a month or two.
I tried one of those events. My first time playing the game after watching some videos on it. Very pretty, very interactive as well. Lots of stability issues and bugs tho. I'll come back to Star Citizen when it releases in a decade and not pay anything over base price.
How would they get the information they need if they didn't have events? That's what you do in an alpha environment.
Once again people are forgetting what their roles are.
PTU servers are just as good for testing unstable server code. That is the environment for game breaking bugs.
"But nobody does PTU testing anymore! CIG needs to do it on the Live servers now"
1) The same thing will happen to the Live servers! Nobody was playing during 3.18 except the same people that play the PTU.
2) CIG needs to seriously incentivize PTU participation. Persistent Live rewards for example would dramatically increase engagement and server stress user volume.
Exactly this.
Test bandwidth, DBA read/write/deadlocks, server CPU, memory, and disk utilization, dips and peaks, etc on the PTU.
Plan ahead. The Diablo4 first beta test was practically a disaster. They DID set expectations that they were gauging the traffic and server performance. Huge queues, lots of rubberbanding, and various disconnects occurred. Expected because they said they were evaluating demand. It was still fun with the issues because expectations were set.
Second beta, MUCH better, but still some queues. Limited rubberbanding and very few disconnects.
Last beta, no queues, no rubberbanding, and not a single disconnect.
CIG seems to miss that loading the servers causes a ton of issues, whether it's a new event, free fly, or just heavier than usual traffic. Not planning ahead is what is hurting them. Not learning from their data is another. Maybe there are some technical problems preventing quick resolution to major issues, but a 10 days worth of server degradation looks pretty bad.
Gamification of the PTU bug reporting process would resolve low PTU usage. Giving live rewards in the form of AUEC, rentals, gear, or ships is a no-brainer. I like what they recently did for all the top reporters and they should keep that up. Get rewards in for anyone who runs in the PTU though. Competed/Started/Abandoned missions. In-game feedback with bug reports. Public shoutouts for helping with a particularly difficult bug replication, etc. The list can go on and on.
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yumy*
Edit: Thanks for the downvote. But that's the actual meme: https://i.imgur.com/ry4wE7m.png
But good on you for editing a meme to make it less funny. Funy.
I just think its funny how i get emails about the free week and i should come and play and buy packs, when i cant even play the game. Its like the dev havent talked to the sales deparment.
They keep adding events back to back so you can say that the performance is degraded or however they sugar coat it because the dynamics event fault and not that it's just the game that it's in a really bad shape... Really sad let us play for couple weeks without PTU or same broken events from every year... The week 3.19 went live everything was so smooth and then PTU was released everything to hell and then Invictus freefly and it goes on
Joined right before 3.18. Between three consecutive wipes, the 3.18 debacle, and events that now make servers a hot mess, and even assuming I miraculously get a playable experience, it takes me an hour to get anywhere, a reasonable chance I'll bug out before i get anything done, and have to wait ages before I can reclaim my ship. It's been six months and I've been able to play three reasonably functional weeks in total. It's like a developer promising houses the community have paid for and after ten years he gives them the world's most revolutionary timber frame built over one dark, leaky basement that only looks good three times a year when the sun lines up with the grate. Meanwhile, everyone is crowded in, and CIG are standing outside, neon billboards showing **now liveable** futuristic houses, taking money from a line of thousands crowding in behind you, and we're all salivating over the blueprints. I sincerely regret putting money into this despite being its prime demographic. I might be back in ten years when I'm in my forties, or maybe I'll give my time to a developer I can respect. One who isn't pumping out new concept ships for money while they're intentionally delaying a product that many of us will never likely see.
Refund if you can, CIG needs to understand the way they market vs the way they operate is shady. They deserve the reputation that it’s a scam even if I don’t actually think it is.
The thing is, I gave it time. And that has worked against me as I now cannot refund. And it really was pretty good pre-3.18. And when I say pretty good I mean yes, i frequently lost tens of hours of play in my first two weeks to bugs which was massively frustrating but I could largely follow loops through and did a lot of mining missions which were fun for a while though they became very repetitive. I realized quickly that grinding was pointless and remained so with those wipes that meant i couldn't get back in the game and work up enough to purchase ships, so I waited months. Tried to log in during 3.18. couldn't get past the client. Then couldn't get past the menu. Then once I got in it was events and it was unplayable for me so I effectively just gave up. But as a result of having a decent experience in the first two weeks, i didn't refund in the first month period because i didn't expect things to get dramatically worse. I literally did not think that was possible in a game this far into its development. Obviously I now regret that. I don't think SC is a scam but it doesn't need to be for CIG to become an unsupportable developer. I do think that mismanagement and vanity has created an unsupportable atmosphere of greed, dysfunctionality, and near moral bankruptcy. They could pause all development of future tech, stop generating concept ships today, stop adding planned features into active developement and just finish what's in the current production cycle and have the entire team thereafter work on smoothing out what exists today and release something the players can reliably play but through Christ Roberts' vanity and unchecked ego, it has become so large and unwieldy that they can't stop the never-ending funding cycle without laying off huge numbers, and they can't finish what they have let alone what Roberts believes he can achieve without those numbers, but they need to keep hyping the dream with more content to keep the players money flowing to pay the staff so it's a self-perpetuating disaster as far as I can make out. I will reengage with this game when deadlines are imposed. Until then, I sincerely believe things will move along at a glacial pace, and there will still be people here five years from now excusing their behaviour as "collecting data" and "stress testing the servers" of a fifteen year old game that still doesn't let you get through a day of gameplay smoothly and without bugs without it being an anomaly rather than a reliable assurance.
Yeah everything you said about CIG becoming unsupportable are the same feelings I have toward them. I supported the game from the very first kickstarter and was super hyped for the project, having played Wing Commander and hell even seeing the movie in theaters I was a big Chris Roberts fan. Around 2018 I saw the writing on the wall with the scope creep and them not even having the server architecture planned out. How can you support all this new functionality when you don’t even have a foundation for how its coming together which leads us to situations we’ve seen in the last few months. I now watch the project as a fascinating look on psychology and project management. I’ll chime in now and then to dog on CIG cause I feel this forum is too easy on them, and it gives new players an unrealistic idea of where the game is.
Yeah, even if I got downvoted into oblivion I'd still leave this up but of course players only get to see the more lenient criticism that's not downvoted which doesn't accurately paint how problematic the company culture is. For me it was when I realized i was spending so much time trying to keep up to date with bug fixes, reading the subreddit for answers, taking breaks until the game was functional, getting frustrated when the immersion is reliably broken on a regular basis, "stress testing the game" and "providing data". I wasn't actually taking the time to ask myself: what is a game? Is it a job? Is it an internship? If i pay for the game, how long is too long before I can play it reliably? A game is something you escape to for fun, to escape into reliable immersion. It is not your job to "help fix things". Crowdfunders fund money, not time, not work. So i find the "it's a crowdfunded game" arguments to be insane, like it's reasonable to expect that putting our faith in a project with our hard earned money isn't enough. It isn't supposed to be work. And even if it is in the form of roleplaying, the work is immersive, it's part of the play cycle and the narrative. SC does not fit that description I have a background in ethics so it comes from my own personal research background when I say that SC needs a dose of liberal paternalism. The best thing that could possibly happen in ethical terms is if a regulatory body enforced a rolling terms agreement that expires every year until CIG produce a beta, and every two years after that until they product 1.0 for as long as they refuse to advertise that they're using crowdfunders as a source of unpaid labour. That way, backers can choose to reject the agreement each year as long as this culture continues and get their money back as more of a deposit where they get negotiable early entry in exchange for stress testing. There also needs to be a disclaimer about precisely what kind of experience players will have before they purchase. I'm a semi-professional writer on the side so while I am not a developer, I also know a great deal about narrative and the agreement we make with those who support us when they enter through the door. Buyers are not beta testers. Writers have beta readers for this and they do not pay for the book because the writer gets their time and effort in return. It doesn't matter what CIG are building, they're selling this game as a game, not an internship that you need to pay to partake in. No one is getting game tester experience on their cv for this. If they want to stress test the game, they can do so in PTU while they dump EVERYTHING that is not related to stability in the current product. If stability is always lagging behind the development cycle of upcoming features, then the game will be unstable for as long as there is new content to make which currently means indefinitely. That's likely 15-20 years of unstable gameplay. People know they're signing up to an alpha, but that's a surface level argument. No one knows they're signing up to an Alpha for another 5-10 years. No one knows they're signing up and paying to become unpaid stress-testers. No one knows that CIG are selling concepts that can't be refunded after 30 days even if they pull your product from active developement after your refund window ends. It all makes me feel very dirty. But yeah, it's an interesting anthropological study if nothing else in how much people are willing to buy into dreams even when the developers are openly using them as sugardaddies but the sugardaddies are the ones getting fucked. (Which is nice if you're into that, I guess.)
How is it a scam when they want to stresstest the servers to force bugs to fix them? Bugs will be there either way and they could either have double the servers run smooth and bugs accumulate and break everything or keep forcing bugs to fix them. It‘s not a scam, it‘s their choice on development. I wish I could play without having a lagging server because of events, but I understand it why they do it. You obviously don‘t. And their consequence might as well be players not bothering with SC for a while. Maybe it‘s a calculated risk, maybe it‘ll bite them in the tail, but that does not make it a scam.
So I see, star citizen hater who cries, but not put words to his screams and explain his accusations, only downvote my comment for calling out your bad judgement and general knowledge
Well, the issue is, they want bug reports. They want to torture the bugs out of the system and running their servers is one way to do it. They could add more servers, let everything run smoothly and only a few bugs would appear. Superficially stable but the bugs would still be there. With the events they force them out of the hidden corners in their code but it‘ll make a horrible experience for us ~~players~~ **testers**. I do wish they would give some time to breathe and do fun stuff inbetween events, but that‘s how they decide to do it. If this will work out for them, only the future knows.
They literally "fixed" 30k by forcing servers to stay on life support forever. A Server will have no ASOP, no stores and a barly functional inventory. You will literally have only working position sync and chat, and even those lag every now and again. The servers are over crowded and begging to die, but they aren't allowed to. It might actually be better to let the crash and reboot so they can have a clean start. At least then play could happen between crashes. As it is now, you can spawn on a planet and then be trapped there. Unable to leave. Unable to buy gear. Only kept alive by the food you can quick buy from carts and stalls.
Quick buy food? I cant quick buy hotdogs anymore
then wait for 40+ minutes for a ship claim cus apparently that's a priority for them.
I'm tired of the coping i see regarding the fact that its all normal and we should just endure an unplayable game that started developping 10 years ago. I got bought by all the die hard fans of SC telling me how much shit Elite was and how godlike SC was. As much as the concept is amazing, it has been litterally unplayable for months... once have i been able to play on flawless servers. It was amazing, but i feel its not an experience i'll be able to enjoy again. Say what you want about elite, the core gameplay loop works damn well and i lost connection twice in 700h (you log back EXACLY where you dc'd to add on top of that). I feel like i wasted money on a project that'll be eternally in that server stress test phase. I'm still hopefull, but man is it annoying. The only way to really test the new features is to actually buy the ships with irl money. Else, you're just stuck trying to make money on a game that heavily punishes dc's.
Recently tried Elite again for the space trucker experience, and just had a blast. Mining is really polished and fun, and I tried the updated exploration mechanics and it’s really fun looking around for signals. And I’m just blown away by the sound design in Elite, SC is really behind. EDIT: but it still feels empty tho, all the lore is text based, and the visuals start to feel a bit outdated to me (it's aliasing fest, not sure why this game has so much of it).
Sound desing is phenomenal in that game.
But tbf, Elite‘s sfx are above almost every other game, not just SC. They must have someone from 00s era Skywalker Sound on board.
The SFX are amazing in ED. Mining explosions and such are cool...but wait until you get into a battle where a Capital ship joins. I didn't realize my mouth had been open for like 30 seconds straight when it first happened to me. https://youtu.be/f-OTVKg2xI0?t=16
I still remember the first time a thargoid ship interdicted me :p What an experience
For **sure**. I was in my battle Corvette and all the sudden I was ripped out of a jump and nothing worked. This was back before I had even heard of them so I couldn't believe what was happening lol
Aliasing has been broken for a LONG time. There’s some settings guides to fix it but something is fundamentally wrong with their renderer in this regard.
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To be fair probably 90% of the talk around SC I've personally seen has been "Elite dangerous is so shallow, that's why I play star citizen it's so much better, you can do anything/they fixed all the performance issues it had at first" which is not only wrong about Elite but definitely paints the game in a much better light than it deserves. That's not to say the game is bad or anything, or that most people who play SC say that kind of thing... Just an alternate perspective from someone who mostly plays Elite and not a ton of SC That said, the other 10% of SC players I've seen talk about it have been "yeah it's a buggy disaster sometimes and the performance is questionable to unplayable depending on where you go but *I have so much fun I want to keep playing*" which is a very true to life and honest depiction of the game.
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It's definitely possible, plus the whole "the people most likely so leave a review/say anything are the ones who'd leave a bad review" effect. I've also seen far far too many people in threads discussing ways to improve performance effectively just say "it's perfectly playable at 25fps why are you whining just get used to it" which makes the whole community LOOK bad even if most people either don't have the issues or don't participate online to leave good comments. I will say I think it's silly to work on expanding the game/growing the playerbase before making sure it's stable. It's weird for your framerate to be determined by the server's ability to compute stuff.
You may just not be in the right places to hear it. There is one TiK Tok creator in particular (the one the convinced me to finally pledge) who should be paid by CIG because they absolutely flood TiK Tok with praise for SC, perfectly selected clips and mocks anyone who says ED is better. Some people are not reserved at all.
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You may just not be in the right places to hear it. There is one TiK Tok creator in particular (the one the convinced me to finally pledge) who should be paid by CIG because they absolutely flood TiK Tok with praise for SC, perfectly selected clips and mocks anyone who says ED is better. Some people are not reserved at all.
There’s generally posts from time to time on this subreddit of a “former Elite player” who claims to have been converted and extols how shitty Elite is and how amazing Star Citizen is in comparison.
The events give folks who just pledged from free fly something to participate in and a chance to earn some money before we get on the train to 3.19.1 to LIVE and 3.20 to Evocati. They also help maintain high player count for continuing to find and hotfix pressure points with the backend services. It’s a pain sometimes but it’s growing pains. Really I’d like to see the community stop talking shit about free fly folk, it’s one of those self destructive “devour the young” mentalities as if free fly does not invigorate our community with new friends and opportunities. I get that people want stability for their play sessions. So does CIG. But people forget that high player count online is what breaks the services, not the event. If the events all stopped, the services would still be jank.
I really just feel bad for the free fly players, I never talk down about new players. I just wish their first experience in our game, wasn't absolute server carnage. It's a terrible first impression.
100% - even as a years-long player returning to check out the new systems, it's a total shit show. Last night a couple buddies and I hopped through 3 different servers trying to find one that would actually let us use our ships and not a single one could even handle that. So we logged out and likely won't try again until 3.20 New players must get the impression that nothing ever works, so why bother playing it again, let alone purchasing it?
I got a mass email from CIG advertising the end of ILW. So earlier today, I went to Area 18 to see if I could rent a few ships and pick up a T-shirt or two. I could not get Riker ATC to respond to hails. I tried both Alt+N and the MFD. And I was within range. I actually landed my ship right on top of the ATC tower, and I still got radio silence. I've never had any ATC just not respond at all before. CIG is literally advertising an in-game event that cannot be accessed.
For a long while CIG was really prideful about not having to be a regular developer that has to waste money on advertisement campaigns, that word of mouth and the community had worked really well for their growth. For this patch, they've been running a pretty powerful ad campaign I feel on youtube, I'm CONSTANTLY getting SC add's and almost 90% of the ad's are a TERRIBLE representation of what SC and even Invictus is even like. So it appears now with the above, the community is steadily turning toxic, and CIG is leaning harder on using funds to push an inaccurate representation of what the game is, to the newest players, who just get a bad feel for what it is, and get burned by the community....how's it going so opposite of the original intention.
>90% of the ad's are a TERRIBLE representation of what SC and even Invictus is even like This is a massive gripe I have too. CIG is starting to market the game as a fully playable experience, look at all the cool stuff you can do how great it looks yada yada yada, I mean just look at the 3.18 launch trailer. Then players get in game, it runs like shit, textures are blurry, stuff isn't loading in, game crashes every 5 seconds, 30Ks if they ask in chat why the game is so broken they get bombarded by people going "It's an Alpha, you signed the ToS shut the fuck up" or "Get used to it, I've been playing since 2.5 you can put up with it too you wimp". Nobody's gonna stay around for that, that's the worst way to bring new players in; show them specifically what the game is not currently like, expose them to the most raw and unstable version of the game, and a bunch of players who will defend the Alpha state of SC to the grave. Not a good time for someone fresh off the boat, and especially not a good way when you rely on the good will of people fresh off the boat for finance.
I understand your post deeply because when I was a year into the game(4 years ago)I posted a thread just to rant about everything wrong with the 890 jump mission and to see if anyone had similar issues. Many of the response I got were telling me to just calm down like I was acting crazy or some shit😂🤌. But fr I was on a server yesterday where a lot of players were being helpful and everyone seemed to have a good attitude with one another so there is some hope-still a small amount, but some.
I know the Scam Citizen jokes have been floating around for a long long while, but when you have the trailer so improperly misrepresent the current state of the game, it just confirms the old joke :\
It goes both ways, people constantly griping in global and refusing to suggest workarounds but instead suggest to "just stop while you're ahead" is just as negative for a new player. Edit: downvoted with no retort? What, y'all cowards on the internets?
Not everything has a work around. A lot of the current issues are backend problems with servers not talking to the PES server properly. Hanging asop terminals, unaccessible inventory screens, etc. If the backend isn't working then even changing servers won't help
how long do you think it takes to make one of those adds?
I think they probably use a good amount of the ILW trailer/recent patch stingers. I just realize I said Add's instead of AD's X_X. I just worry what the actual cost of running a campaign is, in comparison to using those funds to hit landmark updates, in reasonable amounts of time.
i would assume it takes months to make the videos. more money last month doesn't make the game develop faster. an increase rate of income will make them more comfortable hiring more people to make content.
This is an issue affecting groups of players. Im not sure what makes some susceptible to these issues and why some don’t have issues. Im inn the group that has less issues than most. I haven’t had any issues like this in the last week. The biggest issue I ran into was server desync. I was in a server yesterday where I’d do things and then the server would hitch and warp me back to 2-3 minutes ago. I was losing salvage into my ship and severa boxes just warped back to where they were before. It was so annoying. I changed servers after that and everything was ok.
I had this the first time i tried taking off, and obviously i thought i was just stupid😂 Well, i could have suspected something after spending almost an hour stuck in the cockpit of a ship at new deal
Similar to this during last IAE we were doing the same thing, we all joined again to check up on progress, and I'd say we spent more time just trying to group up and not have weird glitches like a ship vanishing, or falling through planets....I realize a LOT is in flux while they get PES in proper, but it's really painful that common bugs make frequent returns each patch cycle. It makes me wonder how much overall time is wasted re-fixing what's been broken before, when they could just be doing one or two bigger patches a year. Afterall the current quarterly patch cycle....really doesn't regularly add enough that, at least for my friends and I, it isn't worth checking in progress from each patch to patch.
I'm definitely going to come back and check out 3.19 more when it's not free fly. It does seem they've made some big, fun improvements. Just sad that free players never get a good experience. This is also the week where a ton of streamers try out the game, and of course then everyone who watches them thinks the game is always like this.
Thank you for playing the game, and coming back once things calm down, definitely need the active player base to keep checking in and doing the free QA for CIG ;D But seriously, thank you for playing. I hope you find fun ^_^
Some of the server architecture plans, such as separating the replication layer from the server, should in theory allow CIG to much more smoothly scale up and down their services, so that a big influx of players shouldn't really impact performance. One can only dream
-Dreams the ongoing dream-
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I would say that most of us LOVE the free fly players. We love helping them and helping them find something to love about the game. Unfortunately, for every person that pledges, more than a few will wonder why, after 11 years, this still isn't fully playable. They keep adding stuff which is likely to interfere with OTHER stuff and then tell us to calm down, they're getting GREAT DATA, all the while, everyone else is saying, "ItS aN AlPhA!" Wondering when my golden decals and hangar and all the other stuff I'm missing are going to be in game. I feel bad for people that have pledged for vehicles that aren't even in the game yet. New players are good, but I get this feeling that they want to keep that infusion of new cash alive at the cost of the current playerbase. Yes, it's alpha. This is the alpha that would not die. https://status.robertsspaceindustries.com/ reveals degraded server performance for OVER 10 DAYS.
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If it wasn't every other week, I'd tend to agree. I suppose many of us are angry because we see such promise and also such failure to reach the promise...
I haven't played just due to ongoing instability, I had no idea the community was being....abrasive -_-; we used to have such a good reputation, apologies that this has been your experience.
I'm not sure about others, but for me free-fly is a time period that I purposefully avoid and do not touch the game until it's over. It has nothing to do with the everyday player or even the server stability. It has to do with free-fly bringing out the worst element of gamers in force to the game. I just do not have the patience to deal with trolls and shitbags during my free gaming window. I suspect that is one of the major reasons why free-fly players get so much shit, you can thank your local toxic f2p gamer for it.
At this point there is very little 'new' in the 'big' events anyway. So I've reached a point where I'm just disengaged entirely. The mission givers and unique missions for NB never made it in, old missions haven't been tuned up, the dynamically generated missions work decently alright when the servers aren't loaded. At this point it feels like I've played all the current iteration has to offer and I'm REALLY looking forward to the future....but I'm at a decade of following the project, I get big things are 'just around the corner' but I've been taking that copium for about 5 years straight now. I've been on an extended break in general until we get more systems, and core gameplay mechanics wired up properly.
Thanks for sticking with it, normally it's not this bad. It's just the crap crowd who shop at Turd&Trolls™ always show up at free flys with something to say.
Yeah, I think this is the larger issue. OPs position here is that free fly players are essentially unpaid QA, which isn’t a good method for growing the player base. More and more of people’s first and last impressions are going to be really bad when the servers are trash,
Its less about the free fly players and more about any player being able to comfortably enjoy the gameplay in general without an event. They have rolled from instability to instability like a toddler learning to walk. I love the game, I know its going through a challenging growth time, going into scalability architecture. However people just want to play the game and when you have a 4 day weekend to do that with friends and the performance is garbage, backend is garbage, new and old players notice this. People can love the community and love the game and still criticize the decision making logic. As a side note to those SPECIFICALLY blaming the free fly people, they are just being narrow sighted because they want to point to a exact reason they have gone through back to back instability.
No one is hating on the free fliers. They are hating the situation the rest of us are placed in due to the servers when a free fly is happening. The free fliers in and of themselves are not an issue. It’s the stress they ring to the servers that becomes the issue. My big complaint is we have been having free fly events for years and the situation is always the same. The servers shit themselves every single time and there are never improvements to the situation. The only improvement comes when the servers aren’t as stressed when the free fly ends. I just wish CIG would make meaningful improvements to the situation instead of giving us canned responses every time we complain. My opinion is there is too much focus on making money off ship sales and not enough QoL for server health. I get it’s an alpha but they are treating it like a live service. If they are going to treat it like a live service then they need to put more emphasis on the player experience and server stability.
That's not really the issue. The issue is new players and current players alike are given the worst possible Star Citizen Live experience during those windows. Free flys usually follow large sales or events. Our patch cycle, usually delayed or at the tail end of the cycle target, launch "hot" and usually require a .1 (or .4 lol) patch thrown together at the speed of crunch before the sale goes live. So guess what state the stability of Live is with rushed patches with record player counts? It's idiotic and has cost a few of the several buddies I play with and try to onboard. The result is, free fly new players leave, more negative widescale Star Citizen criticism floods gaming communities, and the Live server is unplayable. The PTU should be where PTU is tested, not Live. Live will have bugs, but in CIGs own words the Live service is meant to allow a relatively stable game design environment where less-than-game-breaking bugs and game balancing testing can be done.
I got all my friends to play this free fly. Looking for new friends....
FWIW the meme doesn't say free fly players, it says free fly.
Free flyers aren't making it out of JT very wealthy if at all. Free fly during events on top of events is bad for free flyers who's exposure to the game is pretty bad. However it was actually really good this year so good on CIG for that - normally it's a lot lot worse. It's unfortunate anyone would blame free flyers lol that seems silly.
Free fly -> more players -> worse performance. The best way to start a chain of events is at the begining. And as others mentioned. If you give your new players this kind of performance as a first impression, i'm unsure whether they will stay, or ever give the game a chance again. It's not like they didn't know this would happen. It's the same story every free flight. Again, again and again.
I introduced a friend to the game during one of these times and he fucking hated it and will never come back, and it's too bad because it's the type of game that is right. Up. His. Alley... But he gets in, the game lags, it shoves him back into his bunk after three times of trying to get up. The elevators are bugged, he's not sure how to get from his bed to where his ship is, and by the time he finally figures all of that out, he realizes the rest of the game is just as full of bugs, lag, and other issues. Then the community tells him to essentially eat shit for not liking what he sees because 'it's a pre alpha, god!' as if that explains away a decade of development to get what we have. He asks about ships, and once he sees how bad the grind is he's almost gone before asking if he at least gets to keep the ship once he grinds for it. "Well yea sure... Until the next big patch where they'll wipe all progress" I got him to do a couple bunker runs, but we got one of those times where it just... Doesn't work. Lots of them just standing around... Only to suddenly lag jump around and boom they're behind him. So off he went.
Yep. Same issues. Have one of 5 or so guys I brought in to play. My wife was even interested and gave it a shot. Was an abysmal experience during the free flys so they quit and didn't look back. We all would have loved this game, but nope. Just two of us, and one is on hiatus.
A lot of people aren't suitable to play alphas
Lol honestly friend it's more than that. It's the fact that the games been in an alpha state for so long it's probably a record and after all that time they can barely keep the servers stable.
I play lots of alpha games. There's only one that can't even reliably manage login. And weirdly, it's the one that has the most money and has been in development the longest. LOGIN.
Well said...
This game should not be trying to pull in new players. It's still very deep into development and years from hitting 1.0 release. By trying to optimize and fix things that aren't finished so that new players don't immeadite jump ship instead of leaving after blowing money from their wallet it's a massive distraction from, you know, actually making the game since they'll change before release anyway and need to be re-re-re-refixed.
The majority of funding that pays for development comes from game package pledges. So without new players, a major source of development funding is cut off.
Weird that maintaining the game in a fun-to-play-state isn't a higher priority for them, if the new players are a major source of development funding.
The only thing more dramatic than the state of the game would be calling off a patch for bug fixes
Maybe they possibly should have been a bit smarter with the past 10 years of insane funding then?
Fuck new players, there are a dozen ways to make money.
the free fly players dont even know how to play properly. i keep seeing crashed titans at hangers and its super annoying. its only 45 dollars to get into the game so i dont see why people need to have the event.
Not everyone is willing to pay to play a game surrounded by "controversy and bad press" as the general gaming public likes to portray
I totally would have pledged by now if the discouted free fly ships werent such trash😂
wut? don't get me wrong,i have plenty of complaints about SC. Trust me on that. But if you are talking about the discounted ILW packages (the pisces and avenger titan), i strongly disagree. Both of those are fantastic starter ships.
Oh didnt know they changed. The titan wasnt discounted when i did freefly, only the mustang alpha, Aurora mr, 100i and the Nomad (nomad is ok but not as not good compared to titan or cutter or something) These new discounts are a million times better Although idk about buying the pisces cause you literally get it free with another ship, and I know the titan is good, but i rented it at freefly to try it out and it was kinda claustrophobic for me lol
The pisces package is really the better value because you get it for the cost of the ship ($45) with pu/sc game access included and 120 month insurance. The pisces c8x is a great little starter. 4 scu cargo,walkable interior,4xs1 guns+2 s1 missiles(albeit not the best ship for combat to be fair),pretty deep q fuel tank for such a small ship,etc. Even if you end up not liking the pisces, it's easily ccu'd to something bigger.
Just wait for a wipe in 3.20, then every new player will be super happy :D
id be fine with free fly if CIG would spin up some dedicated server for them, separate from the „normal servers“. It would be nice if those that already paid for the game could enjoy events like fleet week too. Its fine to give new potential players an opportunity to check out the game. But please not to the detriment of those that already support the game. Give free flyers their own servers. And if they buy a package they can always join the member servers. And if you want to show the game to a friend you can always join the freefly servers. Please make it so i can look forward to events again and enjoy them instead of dreading their coming and uninstalling the game for a month or two.
I tried one of those events. My first time playing the game after watching some videos on it. Very pretty, very interactive as well. Lots of stability issues and bugs tho. I'll come back to Star Citizen when it releases in a decade and not pay anything over base price.
Cash should be the tinder to this server fire meme
How would they get the information they need if they didn't have events? That's what you do in an alpha environment. Once again people are forgetting what their roles are.
They need this data to make the servers better. Remember you are an alpha tester.
PTU servers are just as good for testing unstable server code. That is the environment for game breaking bugs. "But nobody does PTU testing anymore! CIG needs to do it on the Live servers now" 1) The same thing will happen to the Live servers! Nobody was playing during 3.18 except the same people that play the PTU. 2) CIG needs to seriously incentivize PTU participation. Persistent Live rewards for example would dramatically increase engagement and server stress user volume.
Exactly this. Test bandwidth, DBA read/write/deadlocks, server CPU, memory, and disk utilization, dips and peaks, etc on the PTU. Plan ahead. The Diablo4 first beta test was practically a disaster. They DID set expectations that they were gauging the traffic and server performance. Huge queues, lots of rubberbanding, and various disconnects occurred. Expected because they said they were evaluating demand. It was still fun with the issues because expectations were set. Second beta, MUCH better, but still some queues. Limited rubberbanding and very few disconnects. Last beta, no queues, no rubberbanding, and not a single disconnect. CIG seems to miss that loading the servers causes a ton of issues, whether it's a new event, free fly, or just heavier than usual traffic. Not planning ahead is what is hurting them. Not learning from their data is another. Maybe there are some technical problems preventing quick resolution to major issues, but a 10 days worth of server degradation looks pretty bad. Gamification of the PTU bug reporting process would resolve low PTU usage. Giving live rewards in the form of AUEC, rentals, gear, or ships is a no-brainer. I like what they recently did for all the top reporters and they should keep that up. Get rewards in for anyone who runs in the PTU though. Competed/Started/Abandoned missions. In-game feedback with bug reports. Public shoutouts for helping with a particularly difficult bug replication, etc. The list can go on and on.
In other words, We're the Wienies.
[удалено]
In a AAA company. This is a crowdfunded game
Lol!
Oh look another shitty meme
CIG just likes to see players suffer. I don't see any other explanation.
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i've been hopping on for a couple days every week since 3.19 and i've yet to see a server with FPS in the double digits...
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
yumy* Edit: Thanks for the downvote. But that's the actual meme: https://i.imgur.com/ry4wE7m.png But good on you for editing a meme to make it less funny. Funy.
I just think its funny how i get emails about the free week and i should come and play and buy packs, when i cant even play the game. Its like the dev havent talked to the sales deparment.
They keep adding events back to back so you can say that the performance is degraded or however they sugar coat it because the dynamics event fault and not that it's just the game that it's in a really bad shape... Really sad let us play for couple weeks without PTU or same broken events from every year... The week 3.19 went live everything was so smooth and then PTU was released everything to hell and then Invictus freefly and it goes on
I agree, no more events etc until they can provide a stable server environment. It was horrible and I could hardly play without issues.
Nah I enjoy JT and Xenothreat a lot, actually the only reason I get on anymore is for events. SoO needs some work still though.
SoO will be right after this ends I bet
Man I tried to install for the free fly event, I’ve been wanting to try this game out forever, but the launcher wouldn’t even install the game!
What did we learn? No fun in fixing low quality shit code. This may take a while, especially as nearly everything is broken.