Star Citizen Is Back Up ... Maybe

Since I posted about the issues yesterday about the launch of Star Citizen's Alpha 3.18 patch, I figured I should follow-up on Cloud Imperium Games' efforts to resolve the situation.

The status of the PU as of 1300 UTC on 14 Mar 2023

Last night (or early this morning, depending on your time zone) CIG performed an hour long maintenance on the Persistent Entity Streaming infrastructure.  PES is the system that allows objects to remain in the game world, even after a player logs off. From everything I read and watched, the introduction of PES last year was a very big deal.

My understanding is for PES to fully work, CIG also needs to implement a technology called server meshing. Star Citizen utilizes a lot of server instancing to allow more than 120 players to play the game at a time. In order to get back to the proper instance where PES saved a player's items, some sort of match making needs to take place to have the player log into the correct instance.

The latest entry on the status page read:

[2023-03-14 Updates]

0350 UTC - Reducing severity to partial outage while we validate the outcome of infrastructure maintenance.

My understanding is that server meshing was not included in patch Alpha 3.18. In addition to helping with PES, server meshing is also required for the game to have more than one system. As most MMORPG veterans can attest, spreading players out to lessen individual server loads is a good thing. Ask the EVE players involved in Sunday's fighting in X47L-Q.

Hopefully the situation is actually resolved and Star Citizen players can go back to dying in elevators. I've never played a game with killer elevators, but apparently the experience is very enjoyable.