After clearing that first guild mission I returned to ArcCorp and 4 more certification missions hit the screen. Low on quantum fuel I quickly grabbed the BlacJac certification mission to locate Leslie Holstein on Wala.
While reputation gained in previous patches remains after a patch update, the mission tree resets. After flying to Hurston to work on my rep there and finding none, a sole permit certification mission from the Guild popped up on my screen. So off I went to restart my mission tree with a visit to Yela to locate Kane Yazawa.
It has long been the case that decisions that reflect the views of CIG’s marketing team tend to differ from the views of many of Star Citizen’s backers. One such example is the demise of the beloved space station known as Port Olisar. Many of the technology advances CIG has delivered have rendered the space station obsolete. The station is unable to support these new features including those found in the most recent 3.20 patch.
Herein lies a divergence between how CIG choose to portray the space station’s demise and that of how the backers would have chosen to retire the station. Here is the official version of the suspected end of Port Olisar.
Akin to the Trade Center Towers we are led to believe that station fell from the sky with no reasonable explanation. Today’s Star Citizens are having none of it. Here is the true story of the events after the sabotage of Port Olisar that led it to sink toward the gas giant Crusader.
For years CIG has teased Citizens with the Pyro system. It’s release has been tied to the new static server meshing efforts, another feature set long ago promised as a critical stepping stone to the beta release. Work on this critical technology was thought to have begun shortly after the PES DB disaster which is still being shored up.
One lucky group got privileged access from CR himself(not) and took an up close and personal tour of Pyro. Here is the inside scoop on what Astro Pub found!
Of course, we are talking about the FM. Since the Star Citizen FM was converted to a wasd shooter style of play (face-to-face ToT contests) from the original most beloved WWII dog fighter model(based on the law of uniform circular motion (UCM)) the popularity of PVP has plummeted.
This difference is so stark that dedicated PVPers actually prefer the 3.5DOF FM of Star Wars to Star Citizen’s 6DOF FM. Of course, flying with a gamepad isn’t in the cards for me, but there are a few things to learn here.
I had submitted a concierge request to ask why Wave 1 PTU access was removed from my account. Having not received a response I submitted a new request and I also published a a new thread in Spectrum which was quickly deleted as it was deemed a legal discussion.
Hello, my last request was to ask why I was removed from Wave 1 PTU, I have since discovered why.
When I paid for my entry into the Chairman’s Club it was explicitly stated(contract) that I would be granted Wave 1 access to the PTU. You have modified the terms of the agreement based on your assessment that your testing is not yielding the results you had hoped for. In addition, you have granted subs access to Wave 1 PTU in an attempt to defray provisioning costs.
It is clear that in most jurisdictions, that you must obtain my consent to alter the contract. You have not. Therefore it is clear that you may be in violation of various laws enacted to prevent this type of fraudulent behavior.
So with all due respect, I demand that you immediately restore Wave 1 rights to my account. In fact, all current members of the Chairman’s Club should be grandfathered in. You are, of course, free to alter the agreement for newly arriving members.
But you are not free to alter our agreement after monies have exchanged hands.
I look forward to your immediate reversal of this illegal policy change.
Sincerely Wing Commander Christoper Blair
And I am not alone in sharing my disgust and disappointment of putting the PTU behind a paywall. CIG needs to change. And while I normally wouldn’t give this guy a shoutout, this time he deserves it!
My impression is that after 10 years, CIG expects its backers to log in and test the game rather than log in and have fun playing the game.
Today my daily grind with my new alt was interrupted by news that the 3.20 PTU was available for wave 1 and wave 2 backers. So I do the drill, I go to my settings page and low and behold I cannot copy my account to the PTU despite being a Wing Commander concierge member.
“[M]any players only log in once per PTU phase to briefly inspect the latest features or new ships before waiting for the live release. This led to very high player loads in the first hours of each wave release, combined with comparatively high server costs and download provisioning, but not the sustained play testing we would have preferred. As a consequence, towards the end of a PTU phase, we sometimes lacked the necessary numbers of testers to put the servers under pressure once the most significant bugs had been fixed.”
You have to love today’s politicians. Most have failed to come to grips with the fact that anything they said yesterday was immortalized in a vid for all of time. Yet, despite that, they feel free to deny and lie about what they said, sometimes on the very next day.
Precisely, what was said.
So it is sad that it has come to this. Years of promoting Evocati status. Years of providing a ruse that folks should make use of the Issue Council. Years of moderating Spectrum so as to make it nothing more than a sounding board for white knights.
Bottom line, all CIG needs from us is our hard earned cash.
Sharpening the Tools? Seriously? CIG believes that their preferred group of testers are those that play the most or subscribe for $10/month. Most folks qualified for testing have lives a bit more complicated than playing SC 12 hrs/day. Thus they(CIG) have granted this group higher testing rank that those of us that have invested thousands of dollars over the years to back the game.
One should expect the track record over the the past decade of delay after delay to continue on, well into the future.
CIG could start to address its testing requirements(failures) by weeding out the rot in their Evocati group, these folks couldn’t test a wet noodle. Time after time I experienced problems in wave 1 that should have been resolved by the Evocati. It has been that way since Alpha 3.0. Or how about fixing all those known issues before asking anyone to test, dealing with that is a supreme waste of time which discourages many.
I am sure that you and I have lots of thoughts on how to improve things, but we now know that CIG has already thought of everything and anything that we could offer.
So, unless CIG wants to pay for my time I will continue to play the game and try my best to ignore CIGs efforts to grab more than my cash. If they can’t handle the load, too fricken bad.
And oh yeah, go buy another ship!
And don’t forget to join me and sign all your crash reports with ¯_(ツ)_/¯