Dumpster Fires

(Obviously, anyone expecting weekly or even monthly updates on this blog was probably highly optimistic.)

So. Star Citizen released its 3.18 patch a couple of weeks ago. Everything worked perfectly and was widely acclaimed as the best patch any company has ever released.

And then I woke up.

If you’re reading this blog, then you probably have read other gaming sites that have described the patch as a complete and utter disaster. While that might be slightly overstating things, I have been heard to remark that, while in the past I would say the game has more bugs than a Starship Troopers movie, now I have to say it has more bugs than the entire Starship Troopers franchise.

For most of the time since its release, I wasn’t able to even log into the game. This was not a unique experience. Posts on the official forums lit up. Gaming sites sat back to watch and eat popcorn. Cats and dogs were living in sin together. Marshmallow men started to wander the streets. (The last two may have been made up. Maybe.)

In some ways, though, this wasn’t completely unexpected. 3.18 was pitched as one of the most significant ones since…maybe 3.0? It was so big a deal that it threw off the quarterly big patch cadence; we had exactly one major patch last year. (This year isn’t looking great either, although we might get three.) It was going to introduce Persistent Entity Streaming, which would allow ships and inventory items to be dropped anywhere…and stay at those dropped locations until someone else came along and acted upon it. I’m still dubious on how that will ultimately work out, given game population and the sheer volume of stuff they can be carrying with them. Not to mention the volume of medical gowns that shows up every time a character respawns after having been killed off.

But I can definitely say that it works. There was a limit previous to this that only allowed three vehicles for a player to be spawned in at once. I was able to spawn in six recently-and most of them I left at an outpost until I returned an hour later, to find them still there. (Two were in bad shape; I think some wind blew ship wreckage on top of them with predictable results.) This is a big deal-there are ship concepts still on the drawing board that will need to be able to carry heaps of vehicles, and while it’s silly to assume they’d all belong to the same player…well, some people go crazy in SC.

This change also allowed the game to do something that the developers have been promising for years, something that kept getting pushed back, and back, and back: the first iteration of salvaging gameplay. You can strip the hull off of wrecked ships now, where you generate recycled material to sell at the various trade kiosks around the star system. Anyone can do this with a hand tool-in fact, the small canisters can even be used to take that recycled material and do some spot repairs on your own damaged ship. (It won’t reattach a wing, but it can likely at least cover up the exposed metal framework.) But it really shines with the salvaging ships in the game, one of which has been actually in game for a few years at least, and the other just recently released with this patch. (I can’t speak to how effective they are-they aren’t ships I have.)

It’s still the first iteration, so the heavy duty salvaging is still on the horizon. But as the mining gameplay loop shows, the devs will likely iterate on it hard.

These are just a couple of the most significant changes in the patch. But…I did use the phrase “dumpster fire” in the title, right? Even though people are having better luck logging in, there are still plenty of challenges. Missions may not actually be accepted when you accept them in the contract manager; it lags like crazy sometimes. Speaking of lag, bounty targets aren’t having their “neutralize target’ marker on them right away all of the time, which means if you kill them off beforehand, you don’t get paid, and you fail the mission to boot. (Technically, it’s “incomplete”, but it’s likely to go away when you log off, which is effectively failing the mission anyway.) More problematic is the fact that hangars at various landing sites don’t acknowledge your requests for landing sites; there’s a workaround, but sometimes that workaround doesn’t work. This can be a problem if you need fuel badly, or worse yet, are about to dehydrate to death and NEED to get inside to buy a drink. Starship claims are a little tricky, as well as storage of those ships. And these are just the things I personally experienced in my limited amount of time I’ve had since being able to log in again.

The devs, fortunately, are aware of all of this, and have been working. The fact that I can log in now more or less consistently is proof of this. There’s a 3.18.1 patch on the immediate horizon that will (hopefully) address some of the more critical bugs. Maybe, maybe not, but we’ll find out. Once the more critical bugs are taken care of, we should be able to get back to the “film” instead of “franchise” comment about the bugs in the game. There are still things I really want to try out that came in the patch, like the starship race tracks (which I will undoubtedly wreck on more often than not, because I suck at racing) and the changes in how cargo hauling (where the cargo can be interacted with now-which makes piracy possible).

The devs are going to want to make sure things are running relatively smooth real soon; after all, May is when they do their big Invictis Launch Week sales and free-flights for people who haven’t backed the game; being unable to log in would be a very bad look for prospective customers….

Wasted Opportunities

Back in the days before the majority of MMORPGs were free-to-play (or similar), a game might tend to struggled to get new players. After all, you had to get them to buy the game in the first place, and then get hooked enough to pay the subscription fees. So one way they would attempt to get at the theoretical pool of new players would be to have free access for a period of time. Maybe it would be via trial accounts, or maybe it would just make everything open for a week. Didn’t matter-it was a tried and true method to get players to go into your game, and go, “Wow, this is awesome! I’m gonna purchase this so I can keep playing it!” Done correctly, it’s a solid strategy.

But come on. Look at the title of my post. I’m clearly not going to be talking about a success story here. And despite how much I like the game, I’m not going to just ignore problems like this.

The game under discussion here is Star Citizen. And man, does it have a lot of ill-will inertia to overcome to get people invested; the reputation of being a scam (it’s not), the nature of overinflated pricing on ships with real money (they are), and the fact that it’s still years and years away from reaching a completed state (also true). But in order to continue the development, they need that sweet new-player money as much as any subscriber based game did back in the day. So: tried and true method. Ever so often, they do free flight weeks, usually with a limited group of ships-some weeks more limited than others. You would think it would be in their best interest to put their best foot forward.

The best laid plans….

Last week, the game held an annual event referred to the “Invictus Launch Week”, which has a bunch of in-game lore I won’t bore anyone with, but it makes for a convenient time to do a free to play week so people can fly the military-oriented starships (although military ground vehicles are available as well, but let’s be honest-SC is all about the ships). This is something that is known to bring in an influx of people who want to check the game out-especially as the game expands its gameplay. Sounds like a winner, doesn’t it?

But there’s one more inconvenient fact that rears its ugly head-that the game is still in alpha development-which means it has more bugs than a Star-er, I’ve used that joke with my last post. I’d stop falling back on it if it stopped being true. Anyway. To say that the last week was probably a minor disaster would be one of the more accurate things I’ve written lately. Let’s take a look at some of the horrors ahead.

1. The Convention Hall Navigation. This was one of the weeks where you didn’t get the free ships in your hangar to access immediately-you have to go to the convention hall to see the ships to rent them. A good theory. And this was the first year they had the hall at the gas giant of Crusader, in the cloud city of Orison. It showed. Last year, conventions took place somewhere else, and it was an example of doing things right. Primarily by use of signage. Well, they blew it here. There were signs, but no arrows to direct people where to go to get to the hall. There are some maps, but I can tell you from observation that nine times out of ten, nobody bothers to look at the maps-and the maps are only kind-of helpful. So just finding the hall is rough, unless you’re already familiar with the layout of Orison. (Spoiler alert: new players aren’t likely to be familiar with the layout of Orison.)
2. The elevators. This is a bigger problem than just the convention hall, extending to elevators all over, but we’re talking new players right now. When you got to the hall, you had a lobby which had touristy sales stuff (in-game purchases with in-game credits, not real money; it’s sad I have to say that explicitly). To get to the floors with ships, you have to take the elevators. So you press the call button, and one of three things will happen.
   • The elevator will open to reveal the gaseous atmosphere of Crusader. It’s a door with nothing on the other side. You walk into it and you experience the joys of falling through the convention center to your death. Then you respawn at wherever your medical respawn point is.
   • The elevator will open to reveal a void as black as death. Which is convenient, because if you go into it, you get to have the same kind of fun as the previous option.
   • The elevator will open to reveal…and elevator! Congratulations! You’ve almost made it! The reason I say “almost”, however, is that there were periods of time where the only floor you can select in the elevator was the floor you were on-in other words, you couldn’t actually get to the floors with ships to rent. Which kind of makes the whole thing moot.
3. The wallet. Again, this is the in-game wallet with in-game credits in it, not real life wallets. (I have to keep hammering at this. There’s a perception that the only way you get stuff in the game is with real money, and it’s not true.) A bug hit that would, between logins, eliminate chunks of earned credits in the game. Not a huge deal for new players if they’re only here for the free flight-but it looks really bad when they’re deciding if they want to take the plunge on the game. The devs did manage during the week to restore lost credits, but it’s a real bad look.
4. And finally, the biggest (in my opinion) problem: the friends list. When you’re a new player, there’s a better-than-good chance that you’re checking it out on the word of a friend or two. So obviously, you’re going to want to get him on your friends list. It’s a big deal-it allows you to more easily party up with them, it makes it possible to join the same server that they’re playing on (Right now, servers are limited to 50 people. The magic 4.0 patch will change this dramatically, but I’ll believe it when I see it). It’s a big deal. But the backend servers that track this stuff apparently took multiple stretches of hours off, because the friends lists weren’t working. At all. Which made grouping with friends virtually impossible.

So, what does a new player conclude from this? “This game sucks. I’m out of here.” The prospective new player decides the game is a mess and stays away; if they’re kind, they may say they’ll be back when the game’s in a better state. (Don’t get the hopes up.) And the irony is, it actually is in a decent state under most circumstances, but the devs put this up not long after one of their quarterly patches-which had its own issues with bugs-and one can get the feeling that there were a lot more bugs that showed up with the patch that installed the convention center.

And that, in a nutshell, is a wasted opportunity. You don’t want to drive new people away-you want them to see how awesome the game is, which would give the impression that it’s going to get more awesome as time goes on. Not give them the impression that it’s a dumpster fire. If there’s one time you really want things to work right, it’s during your free play weeks, and last week, the developers failed hard.

One hopes that lessons were learned enough for the big November free play period; they really don’t need another experience like this one.

The Lost Year: Star Citizen

The last of my usual MMOs to remark upon is Star Citizen, that game that tends to bring out strong opinions. People will either love it or hate it, and I’m pretty much in the former with no apologies.

For a game that doesn’t (yet) have the depth of the other MMOs I play, I’ve spent a remarkably large amount of time in it-in fact, it’s probably got the majority share in my gaming time from the past year. And while it still has a long way to go to meet the goals that were set for that game years ago, progress is visible. In the last year alone, it got reputation systems in place, an inventory system that’s locked to players, locations, or vehicles, a medical system that’s more than just a sack of health points, widened mission variety, and of course, more ships released. (Of course, they’ve also listed up new concept ships too, so I’m thinking we might be at a net-zero as far as “how many more until the ships are all done”.)

While I haven’t managed to find my preference in gameplay loops-I’ve enjoyed many of them, and that’s a big deal to me; it helped keep me in Star Wars Galaxies back in the day-I have at least managed to nail down the loop that I’ll likely not spend a lot of time in. While I am a competent miner, both in ground vehicles and in space vehicles, I find that I just can’t bring myself to enjoy it. But that’s okay-when I can go onto a moon one day and defend a bunker against bad guys (or kill off the good guys-Hurston Security, I hate you forever), get into a dogfight in the skies above an outpost the next day, and the following day go hauling cargo from the inner moons to the outer planets, and use different ships for each of those days…well, it’s a nice realization that even more loops are coming, some of which I will do and some of which I won’t. (Refueling ships in space from space-tankers is coming VERY soon-may have already done so by the time this post gets released-isn’t in my list, as I have no tankers, but I may well need to refuel at one at somebody else’s at some point.)

The biggest difference between SC and the other MMOs, of course, is that progression is a very limited affair. You can earn credits for more ships in-game, and nowadays you can actually loot first-person shooter equipment at bunker locations, too, but you won’t find much in the way of levels here. Except maybe in the reputation system, which has grown from its initial implementation, and is likely to keep growing as more gameplay loops go in.

Game still has more bugs than a Starship Troopers movie-I’ll always say that if you can’t handle lots of bugs, stay away from SC until at least Beta (sometime in the distant future-I’m betting on 2952). But they aren’t as horrible as one might expect-usually-and there’s a lot of fun to be had playing. And hey-they have free flight events every so often, with one on the docket in a couple weeks. Of course, that tends to add to server loads like crazy as heaps of people come to take a look and discover it not at its best….

Can’t win sometimes, right?

Anyway, still flying, still enjoying myself, and isn’t that the only thing that should matter to me from a game?