Star Citizen Drama – CIG Makes Every Player a MILLIONAIRE
Star Citizen players are all millionaires now. CI had given players too much money to start the new 3.17.2 patch cycle with, so they took most of it away (Please go checkout my video on that, linked below) but CI are now doing a bit of a U turn and giving everyone 1 million aUEC, this is to all accounts for alpha 3.17.2.
CI said in an updated response to the situation:
With the release of Star Citizen Alpha 3.17.2, we intended to provide a generous stipend based on hours played in an effort to grant previously active players additional starting credits. Our intention was to reward players for their hours spent prior to the wipe and give those players a modest head start for progressing in Alpha 3.17.2. As many of you are now surely aware, this did not go as planned. After this stipend was granted, we quickly realized that we had given far too many credits by a factor of 10 or more, due to an error in the distribution script. This was far beyond our stated intention, and robbed the game of incentive to play and progress. After high-level deliberation, and evaluation of how this would impact the overall play experience, we made the decision to rollback the erroneous grants and reset them with the original stipend as intended.
We identified that it would take 24 hours of downtime to do full account resets that would correct everything optimally, and that is if all went well. However, our priority was to minimize disruption and avoid taking the live service down for that long. Instead, we opted for an alternative aUEC correction, which we thought we were able to perform quickly while the game was still live. We conducted some tests on internal servers and found that the program ran in just 10 minutes. Yet once we deployed the fix to live servers, we found it took far longer than anticipated, at nearly 12 hours.
Simultaneously, this process exposed a variety of miscellaneous bugs in our current system that we have been plagued by in the past but didn’t know why they happened. Good news on that front; this debacle actually allowed us to identify the source of some of these issues due to the wallet service being far more stressed than normal. The second bit of good news is that these issues will not be present in our new system that will roll out alongside Alpha 3.18, which has vastly upgraded services and a database scheme that is built for high data for both reads and writes.
Next, we discovered a critical bug with our fix, that caused some players to have their in-game currency reset when logging. There must be a Mr. Bean GIF out there where he keeps making things worse and worse. That was us. This one was just as frustrating for us as it was for you. Fortunately, this issue has now been resolved, and our team is monitoring closely for any edge case issues that pop up. We should be in the clear though! Knocks on wood
All that to say, we are sorry for all the frustration and confusion this has caused some of you, and we recognize that we could have handled it better. Now that things are in better shape, we are going to let the backend services cool off. We know that these wallet issues were incredibly disruptive to many of you, especially those who played Siege of Orison and other missions, who had your hard-earned aUEC rewards wiped out and reset repeatedly. Although we have since fixed this issue, many of you lost out on your aUEC awards. To compensate you for the lost time and aUEC, we will be granting a 1 million aUEC award to all accounts, regardless of play time or account age. We will be distributing this compensation early next week so as to not stress our wallet services this weekend. We do not want to risk burning it all down again when it is just starting to recover.
We’ll continue to monitor closely throughout the remainder of the weekend and into the next. We appreciate your patience and understanding and we’ll see you in the ‘verse.
A lot players are seeing this as a good solution and a solid middle ground.
Obviously with the original amount of money given some players were able to buy some ships or items they wouldn’t of otherwise been able to. CI are only going to step in and take those purchases away if they are “excessive”. So some people did a bit better out of the mistake but as there is a wipe in alpha 3.18 and everyone is getting 1 million aUEC… it doesn’t really matter too much.
Some people are going to be annoyed they didn’t get enough aUEC, some people will be annoyed that everyone got something, others will be pretty happy. CI just need to make sure in the future that they don’t make a mistake in the allocation of free money in the future.
I would quite like to see the starting aUEC for all players be at least half a million aUEC unless there is specific data CI is trying to get. That’s not an excessive amount and allows players to get a bit of a jumpstart on whatever they want to do.
Now there was another issue going on for some players and that is that their aUEC is resetting when they login. Which means they can’t really make progress towards purchase ships that they want.
This should be fixed as of last night, but please let us know if you’re still experiencing this issue.
A couple of other little updates zyloh said:
I can confirm that we plan to run more dynamic events in the 3.17.2 cycle.
There were some elevator issues again in this patch that made it to live CI said:
“We’re definitely onto those pesky elevators!” – i would expect a hotfix shortly personally.
The Siege Of Orison is running all weekend and then next week we have the siege and jumptown running on alternate days so get involved if you want to make some big bucks and have some great fun in Star Citizen!
Boom, that’s it for your aUEC Drama and Stipend update… hopefully the matter has come to a conclusion now.