The developers of Star Citizen at Cloud Imperium Games have taken to Twitter to apologize to the users for widespread issues following the deployment of update Alpha 3.18.
While this outcome was far from unexpected given the size and scope of the update, which is the biggest since 3.0 in 2017, including relevant tech innovations, on top of the fact that the game is still in Alpha, players have found themselves having to deal with plenty of problems like the impossibility to login, save their characters' looks, or use terminals.
The developer acknowledged the issues on Twitter and apologized for what it defines a "super rough start," mentioning that the team is "all hands on deck" in order to get things running smoothly as soon as possible.
We're aware of the issues many of you are experiencing when attempting to connect to Alpha 3.18.
We've updated the Server Status page with more details.
We're sorry for the super rough start - our team is all hands on deck working to get things running smoothly as quickly as possible. We'll keep you updated!
The message on the Status Page describes the problem in more detail, warning of a "major outage."
Since the launch of Star Citizen Alpha 3.18.0 our teams have been monitoring a number of issues players have been encountering while attempting to log into the game. These have primarily manifested in the form of 19003 and 19004 with a mix of other similar codes.
While monitoring those issues, the team has been able to tune and make adjustments to the entitlement processing flow to ensure that a large portion of player attempts were still successful and able to make it into the PU.
However, at a point in the early morning UTC, the environment entered into a state which would require a more disruptive recovery process.As of 1300 UTC the environment has been in the process of recovering from the state it was in but we wanted to advise that, while this recovery is in-progress, players will experience periods of extreme difficulty getting into the PU. We expect players to see a mix of errors from the 19k, 30k, and 60k ranges.
Alpha 3.18 includes a lot of feedback and new content, but more importantly comes with technology that makes every item (including starships) dropped, placed, or abandoned in the world persistent.
In the meanwhile, Star Citizen's growing crowdfunding campaign continues to progress despite the issues related to the update's launch and the game has recently hit $554 million ($554,559,934 at the moment of this writing) pledged from backers.
The number of registered users has also recently passed 4.4 million and it's now at 4,436,844, albeit not all of them are paying since many register accounts to access the popular free fly events that provide a chance to test the game without pledging any money. According to the latest information that creative director Chris Roberts himself shared in October 2022, 1.7 million players are actually paying customers. Of course, that number is a few months old, so it could be higher now.
Star Citizen recently ended its best year ever in terms of crowdfunding, with a whopping $113 million pledged in 2022, marking a 31% increase over 2021. The tally has been consistently increasing year-on-year since 2018.
Full disclosure: the author of this post has backed Star Citizen all the way back when its crowdfunding was first launched in September 2012.
