Star Citizen 3.17 Update – Are Ships Getting NERFED After Being Sold?

Welcome to some more Star Citizen News & Updates with a new 3.17 Open PTU Patch, dev responses on ship combat & nerfs as well as some general news on what’s happening for the rest of the week.

Wednesday, we will have a Roadmap Update.

Thursday CI starts a Spring Merchandise Sale with major savings on existing goods.

There are no episodes of Inside Star Citizen or Star Citizen Live this week, as the former is still on hiatus and the latter falls on Europe’s Easter holiday. We will still see a Newsletter later in the week. Also I was thinking of making a weekly newsletter on monday/tuesday that would highlight the last week’s news, the upcoming week’s schedule and my videos, do you think that’s a good idea, tell me in the comments.

Alpha 3.17: Fueling Fortunes 3.17.0q is in OPEN PTU

There has been a further Performance Pass on the Lorville Hospital

They have Reduced hunger/thirst decay rates
There has been a Torpedo Balance Pass that Adjusted all S5 through S9 torpedos to have a longer life span and more fuel.
Added A2 Starlifter, Starfighter Ion, and Starfighter Inferno to ship shops in the PU (Temporary location of Astro Armada for 3.17.0) this adds them to the Redeemer, Spartan, 400i, Cutlass Steel & HoverQuad that were also added during 3.17’s PTU.

There are a load of Bug Fixes

Fixed an issue causing AI Ships to Desync during PvE combat
Fixed an issue that was causing abnormally low framerates around Port Tressler
The Roc Extraction Laser should no longer pick up more Shards than it can Collect at once, causing them to collide and be thrown
It should no longer be possible for players to spawn in a Landing Zone without the Armistice Zone applying to them
Fixed an issue causing the Carrack’s elevators to not function
Fixed an issue causing the 890j elevators to not function
Fixed an issue causing a player to be unable to remove their helmet via PIT Wheel while inside a ship interior
Equipment in inventory should now equip properly to character and not bounce back into inventory
Multiple ships should no longer be missing their paint tab while using the VMA
Fixed an issue that was causing players to get infinite black screens when respawning after death
Players should now be able to interact with the multi-tool mining attachment after dropping it
Sabre and Raven should now correctly have atmosphere in the cockpit
Hull-A should no longer appear to have more shield faces than intended
Fixed 8 Client Crashes, 7 Server Crashes & 3 Server Deadlocks

Known Issues

Mineable rocks are sometimes spawning inside other rocks (Should hopefully be fixed by the next build release)
Kiosks will inconsistently show rows of blank entries with no picture, price, or information
Custom mobiGlas Casings breaks the mobiGlas functionality
The Player is unable to Place the Mining Gadget on a minable rock
AR Markers are present when opening the mobiGlas which can make it hard to read
Ships can explode after players exit them
Many mineable asteroids can’t be scanned
While docked to a Starfarer the Valkyrie will continuously tilt instead of remaining stationary
The Refinery Yield Bonuses are incredibly high
Players with positive health can enter a state similar to being downed without the incapacitated UI or VFX

The ability to buy components into ship storage will be coming later in the PTU.

CI will be looking at turret updates for a future release too but not for the 3.17 initial build.

CI are ploughing thru those issues, and servers seemed a bit more stable for me when I was getting some river footage, we only hit 1 30k, thru zin did have bad framerates.

If all goes well I think we could see a live build end of next week sort of April 22/23rd time that’s not a confirmation, CI might push before that or a blocker could delay this even further.

I’d love to know your experiences of the 3.17 Open PTU in the comments below.

We had some Dev Responses to Questions on Spectrum as well… there was a

Pips question (Predicted Impact Point) basically where you aim to shoot at your target…

With the consolidated pip for all weapons, how does the pip handle weapons with different projectile velocities?

We used to have multiple pips to show where those projectiles would hit…

So, if you’re using laser repeaters (1400m/s) and laser canons (700m/s) together, which weapon‘s projected impact is the pip displaying? Is it an interpolation between the two velocities?

CI’s YogiKlatt Replied

Reintroducing a bit of nudging freedom on the S7 weapons is on our todo list during 3.17 cycle, but this won’t be in the initial 3.17.0 release. A change like that refers more to balance and tuning and at this point only very vital changes (aka high priority bug fixes) are let in to improve build stability.

There was a follow up question asking do the buffs and nerfs of ships coincide with sale events?

YogiKatt again replies

It shouldn’t really be surprising that ship data changes after the initial release.

Once we (i.e. the space combat team) get a ship from the ship content team, we’ll do a first tuning pass and then then hand it out to players … if possible within ETF / PTU to get early feedback but sadly that is not always the case. Following the initial release we capture player feedback and compare that with the analytics. If we see the need to adapt the numbers we try to adapt them ASAP … and this is of course always after the initial release and has nothing to do with marketing or sale events. However with a lot of players using those new ships we get a lot usable player feedback and data to spot balance issues.

Post release balance changes happened to the Ares and those will happen again with future ships like the Scorpius, may it be buffs or nerfs of any kind. That is just very normal part of the game balance process … don’t try to read any bad intentions into that, there are none. All we do here is trying to establish a stable gameplay environment so that every ship is a valid choice for a player.

There was also a thread that talked about some confusion with cruise mode and speed limits on ships and saying We basically need a “spaceship mode” that is decoupled and a “Airplane Mode” that is coupled.

YogiKlatt again replied:

We won’t revert the current control scheme but we do have prototypes of a trimming system that basically allows you to have a relative forward / backward control that works on analog and digital inputs. Not sure yet when we will be able to try it out with players though.

Boom that’s it for your Star CItizen Updates today.