Honestly, if you're not able to see through the issues and understand the underlying vision at this time then take a break. Everyone who has put any money into it has seen something in there, but the state of the game wanes and waxes, just wait longer if this is still not the patch for you.

I don't know if server meshing will be the magical fix, but personally I play this game maybe 6 weeks a year for a whole stint, but enough bugs that I need to take a break, and then finally jump back in when I'm ready.

It's not healthy to allow yourself to death spiral in frustration, just don't think about it for a good while, and then check in where it's at then.

The game is in active development, and I can tell you as both a regular software developer, and a games developer - games are a completely different beast, and generally come together at the very last moment even on the best projects.

That is a fascinating experience and launch for 3.24. Being evocati, I tested this update, watched it progress and mature.

That being said, none of these issues existed in the test builds. By the end of the release cycle, evocati was ROBUST.

I'm wondering if these issues are caused by extreme load on the servers with everyone hopping on to see the update

Uninterested 3rd party, but maybe the game could sustain such a long development cycle by licensing some of the new technologies they've developed to other game devs.

Maybe they are worried someone would complete their project before they do.

Best of luck to all citizens, of the stars and of the earth.

I'm in that boat as well. I backed around a decade ago and while I haven't made it to the chairman's club, I'm still embarrassed by how much I've put into this dumpster fire due to the fomo and ever looming price increases on stuff. I basically don't play anymore, but I follow the patch notes and occasionally drop into the testing chat or subreddit and see what the latest is.

The main arguments I see from people are that it's in alpha and that x or y was never promised (or wasn't promised by a certain time) and that's all bullshit. Yes, the game is in active development. Yes, bugs are going to be created and slip through testing. Yes, scope changes and things need to be reworked. Yet year after year after year CIG has shown how incapable they are at squashing bugs properly while still adding more features which just compounds onto the underlying problems. As for the feature promises, they make a big deal about x or y coming around a certain time. Is it a promise? No, that would be insane, but they feed the community what they want to hear with targets, build that hype and take in money, then last minute it's oh, we've gotta push it back, BUT IT'S COMING DON'T WORRY!! Really, what a surprise you guys ran into issues with yet another thing and had to push your projections out yet again. Every year it's the same cycle. How long has 4.0 been on the horizon? I also found it a bit insulting when Jared went on ISC (IIRC) not too long ago and was like "we never promised anything, that's the communities fault for getting too hyped." Like broooo, you guys intentionally drive the hype and then blame us when we get excited??

The project has been poorly managed for years and I don't expect it to get better. I truly hope they succeed because it really has the potential to be something special and ground breaking (at least as far are the server meshing tech goes) but I'm done supporting them in any way. I've handed over way too much money. I've wasted countless hours trying to work around the bugs that plague almost every single patch. And all the times I tried to defend them online just made me look like a clown as they continued to pump buggy builds out one after another. Eventually, you just can't find a reason to stand up for them because you feel like you're enabling bad behavior. Unfortunately, the wonder and awe the game used to inspire is long gone for me. It's been a really disappointing ride watching the one game I really wanted get mismanaged the way that it has.

I haven't played the game in like...6+ months, and I gotta say it's great to get away.

There's plenty of good, polished games, and Star Citizen will get worse before it gets better due to "all the stuff" in the wings waiting for 4.0.

The game will not get better as long as the universe is run on one server. 4.0 is a requirement for a good game, and even that won't be good out the box.

So I agree with osprior – don't worry about it. Do other things.

Very buggy

First you MUST change you point of view: Star Citizen is a non quality environment.

This means, that developers can push any shit untested to LIVE. This results in stuff not working because its untested and it contains many bugs.

If you cannot accept this, I advise you not to play on .0 patches because the shit is unbearable.

Next thing: because they dont care about quality, you should expect, that only the new stuff has a slight chance of working (mainly because they fix their shit when it arrives at .1 - if these lazy bastards have enough time to provide .1 - just look at 3.23.2 ...)

If you follow the development of SC, you might get aware that they have begun to tackle the end game stuff, like meshing and all the other stuff they need to have if they want a MMO. Problem here is, that this stuff is complicated and with their normal effort putting out shit and let players determine if it works, there is only a slow speed possible. Also with constantly putting out untested shit, you might want to work on many things at the same time to get SOMETHING done after the years.

You see: as stuff gets more complicated, they cannot develop stuff for multiple years like they did in the past, they shit it out as soon as it compiles and use the players to find all the stuff that is not working. This does not create much fun in the "playable alpha" I can tell you (recently clowns like jared try to shape the reality into "LIVE" is also a test environment because "its alpha, bro" and their "pay to test" attitude has pissed off many players from PTU. You can foresee that this will get worse in the future).

And there are CIG specialities. For example their MMO designers believe that they are the king of the hills and dont need to look at proven stuff that worked in other MMOs. So these utter idiots brought us stuff like negative reputation, forced solo play because as group you share everything, a mission board that seeks its peer in term of utter shit design and utter shit implementation (negative reputation can lock you out of stuff, they love that players have to wait (because missions are first come, first serve - in an MMO. This already works LIKE SHIT with 100 player shards - I refuse to imagine what these utter designer idiots will do on larger shards). The smell of incompetence hits you quite hard when it comes to MMO design.

So basically you need to have patience. CIG gets stuffed money into their back with no ending in sight. This removes a major constraint that software projects have (time is money - you need to produce something worthwhile with the time (money) you have - in the real world). Because money is no constraint, time is also not. Why produce quality stuff if you have endless money and you can shit out untested stuff to LIVE and then "its alpha, bro" ?

If you compare CIG to real world software projects, you will fail because real software projects dont have endless money. Take for example the quality of CIG backend stuff. Where in the world you can construct backend services that silently fail and failing is on a rate like 50% - 100% ? The quality CIG produces is so low that you cannot compare it with real live stuff, where participants are expecting quality for the money they gave.

If SC would be a "chef" competition, CIG would shit on the plate and describe it as "its alpha, bro".

I know It'S aN AlPha and all, but shouldn't basic new functionality and most bugs associated with it be dealt with in the PTU and not live?? I'm just sayin'!