Trouble In Paradise with Star Citizen’s Latest Update
Welcome to some more Star Citizen, Alpha 3.17.2 even tho I believe it to be the best patch we have had for Star Citizen by far still has it’s problems, we have a schedule for what’s happening for the rest of this week, we’ll address some concern over pledge melting “changes” and tiny flags are being added to the game but it’s actually the start of something pretty cool.
I am a little confused, I’ve seen various posts and comments with Alpha 3.17.2 having some erratic problems with Elevators blocking players progression in some areas. Tho it doesn’t happen all the time but some landing zones seem to get broken. New Babbage apparently being one that seems especially affected as are Bunker Missions when spawning NPCs from elevators. It’s a massive shame as this blocks accessibility to general gameplay for some players. BUT that is not a problem i am having nor are a large amount of the player base.
Some players are also reporting stability issues and crashes, we had seen that CI were running the siege of orison with 120 player server caps which appears to not of been intentional.
They had originally said that they wanted to run the siege with less than 100. CI have since confirmed that servers should be set to 75 when that event is running and appear to have fixed that. I’d like to thank one of my mods and friends Huntress for finding that out for me!
Infact CI are able to deploy hotfixes and updates server side significantly more easily now so a lot of issues you may be having can get fixed in some cases at least faster than ever before.
It’s quite possible that the server cap increase and netcode updates have broken something they had just fixed or at least made server degradation cause elevator and stability issues.
That I am having a fantastic time in game and haven’t had any issues yet at all in the live build and many players are also having similar experiences.
Star Citizen is clearly not optimised appropriately for the scale of all hardware and there are a ton of edge case bugs that will eventually get fixed.
There are some important development updates coming later this week, mostly later today:
Wednesday has the latest Roadmap Update, paired with all of the details in a Roadmap Roundup post. Plus, July’s Monthly Reports will be coming out too.
Thursday’s episode of Inside Star Citizen is all about racing in the ‘verse, taking a look at recent additions for Stanton’s speedsters as well as a look into the near future.
This Friday, Star Citizen Live has the VFX team on the show creating new visual effects while taking feedback from the viewers in a Gamedev episode at 3pm UTC on the SC Twitch Channel.
Players have been concerned by a new updated screen when they melt / reclaim a pledge.
The reclaim is no different from before it just add more clarification and checks to make sure you don’t reclaim a package / ship in error.
There are some interesting Flair items for RSI Subscribers that will lead to greater customization for ships in general.
You can get some tiny flags. There are 3 available a UEE one for Centurion Subs, a United Planets of Earth one for Imperators (who also get the UEE one) and there is a United Nations of Earth one available in the sub store.
So why do we care about little flags well CI said:
Show your love for the UEE and what came before with these Subscriber-exclusive holographic cockpit flags, available now and compatible with all ships in the ‘verse that have a dashboard hardpoint set up.
So this is part of dashboard customization and we should now start to see more and more little items like these that will start to turn up on your dash both for Subs and just generally in game for all players to find.
If you subscribe before the 9th August you’ll be able to get included in the drop of those items.
And Subscribers have access to the Drake Cutlass Steel in game all August.
Alpha 3.17.2 still has the problem of these items being lost if you die with them on your body, you can do a character reset to get them back BUT CI have said:
It’s important to note that this is only a temporary solution to get you those items back quickly. We’re exploring a number of alternative recovery options which we plan to implement later on down the line.
All of these sub items are also Earnable in-game with CI saying:
As we’ve mentioned in the past, our goal is to make most offerings available to be earned in-game. For this reason, we’re excited to share that many of the Subscriber flair items have been added to the in-game loot table as a rare drop, starting in Alpha 3.17. More specifically, most pre-2022 items (those that can be player carried) have been added, with future flair being added after a 3-month exclusivity window.
Note: Some digital items that are exclusive to events, such as items from a CitizenCon Goodies Pack, etc., will not be making their way into the in-game discoverable loot system.