Star Citizen fans react angrily as ‘biggest update yet’ launches with widespread issues

videogameschronicle.com:

The latest major update of crowdfunded space sim Star Citizen has been causing sizeable issues for players, resulting in a backlash from the game’s fanbase.

Star Citizen launched as a Kickstarter campaign in late 2012, and raised $2.1 million at the time. In the decade that has followed, the game has remained in ‘alpha’ state, and has continued to generate revenue through crowdfunding, with over $500 million raised to date.

Alpha build 3.18 was released on Friday, promising what developer Cloud Imperium Games claimed was the “biggest Star Citizen update yet”.

However, players quickly started complaining that they were unable to log into the game, with those able to connect reporting major bugs.

Shortly after the update launched, the game’s status report page warned of a “partial outage” on Saturday, stating that the game’s launcher could become unresponsive due to high traffic.

This was followed later in the day by a message reading: “We are currently investigating an issue preventing users from logging into the RSI Issue Council.” By Sunday the issues had continued to escalate, and on Monday the game’s service status was updated to ‘major outage’.

The latest update, posted today, reads: “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 Persistent Universe. However, at a point in the early morning