Welcome to some more Star Citizen, CI put out a post confirming plans to release Star Citizen Alpha 3.17.2 to live, later today and there are some surprises: They said:

We know that many of you eagerly await the launch of Alpha 3.17.2, and we’re happy to share that we’re currently on track for a live release (later today) Thursday the 28th July.

Dynamic Events

With the release of Alpha 3.17.2, you can expect both the Siege of Orison (NEW) and Jumptown events to be active on a rotating schedule for the two weeks following patch release. Rather than specific times, the events will run the entirety of the day they are scheduled, to accommodate all time zones. The full schedule will be available alongside the patch release.

So multiple Events will be running during the 3.17.2 cycle and there will be multiple opportunities to get involved with them on multiple days so you won’t miss out.

Cloud Imperium Continued:

New Player Cap

With the release of Alpha 3.17.2, we plan to double the capacity of servers to 100 players per server, allowing more pilots to participate in large-scale dynamic events, community events, PvP encounters, and more. We know this change will come as a welcome surprise to many, and we’d be remiss if we didn’t call out the incredible efforts happening behind the scenes to make this possible by our engineering and publishing teams. This change is a meaningful and crucial step towards the full experience of our shared massive universe, and we’re happy to report that the team is making excellent progress.

It is important to remember that an increase in players does introduce more potential for stability/performance issues, but rest assured that we’ll be we’ll be monitoring closely, making tweaks and injecting fixes on the backend based on our observations. This is made possible by our infrastructure now allowing us to deploy server side fixes, without the need for a patch release.

Separately, we’ll also utilize dynamically fluctuating server caps that will prioritize performance/stability. This means that some servers will have a cap less than 100, while others will have more. We plan to continue this initiative moving forward, with the goal of increasing the player cap per server as much as we can, while being mindful of the play experience.

It is likely that we will run with a lower player cap (<100) during the Siege of Orison dynamic event, simply to account for initial gameplay balance/rewards being designed initially for a lower cap. However, Jumptown will likely have a 100 player cap per server enabled (so, get ready for mayhem).

As always, we want to hear from you! Make sure to head over to our dedicated testing feedback threads and let us know about your experience.

That is the best I could of hoped for from CIG a more dynamic server population cap that prioritises stability but is targeted at 100 per server but sometimes gets more.

This will allow for much more in the way of org battles, jumptown could potentially be very hectic, there will be more going on in the verse and larger groups can get together for silliness too. CI went onto say:

Patch Wipe

We announced a wipe for the live release of Alpha 3.17.2 back in June, and want to remind folks as such. While we anticipate wipes to be irregular (our last ones being way back in Alpha 3.8.2 and Alpha 3.15 ), as many of you already expect, we’ll likely wipe again alongside the release of Alpha 3.18. This is simply due to the fact that the backend will have a major rework as long-awaited systems such as Persistence come online.

Database Wipe Stipend

While we don’t like having to initiate a database wipe, especially when it means elements of your hard work are reset, it is a necessary step needed from time to time while we’re in Alpha.

The good news is, alongside the release of Alpha 3.17.2, we have worked with the design team to distribute a generous quantity of aUEC based on the number of hours you played during Alpha 3.17.1. Once the patch goes live, you’ll find these credits have already been delivered straight to your mobiGlas wallet.

So it looks like there will be a wipe in 3.18 as well which was expected but with the wipe in 3.17.2 you’ll get some extra starting money based on the amount of time played in the previous patch. Don’t expect it to be that much tho… it’s probably more of a kickstart.

We do know that CI have rolled out some hotfixes onto the current PTU build to fix being sent to prison after Siege of Orison, Siege dialog audio fixes, as well as 3 server crash fixes.

And we could see another quick Release Candidate Build of the PTU today just to check to make sure all the fixes are holding before being deployed to the PU.

Boom, that’s cool! Alpha 3.17.2 live later today (unless they break it) and it’s a surprisingly feature and gameplay filled patch with a load of extra bits like increased server population and netcode improvements all thrown in.