Star Citizen Cancels The Red Festival Free Fly Event

The Masters of Marketing in Manchester had a really good month in January. February, on the other hand, is starting out pretty rough with Cloud Imperium needing to cancel Star Citizen's Red Festival free fly event. The Red Festival is Star Citizen's in-game version of Lunar New Year.

Hi everyone,

We wanted to take a moment to update you on the current experience and where our focus is as we work toward improving 4.0.1 and beyond.

As we mentioned in the Letter from the Chairman in December, our top priority is playability - ensuring that your experience in the ‘verse is as smooth and enjoyable as possible. That means dedicating all our resources to improving stability, addressing critical issues, and delivering meaningful quality-of-life updates.

With that in mind, we've made the decision to forgo the Red Festival Free Fly. This reinforces what we said in December: Star Citizen needs to work, and it needs to work well. Right now, our focus is on continued hotfixes and subsequent patches to bring the experience to a much better place.

While there’s no single patch that will instantly get us to where we want to be, 4.0.1 was an important first step. It included a massive list of fixes, but some of the nastier issues impacting your experience remain. Below, you'll find a list of some of our top-priority issues currently being worked on. This isn’t an exhaustive list - many other issues are being tackled in parallel - but we want to be transparent about where our efforts are focused in the short term.

We’ll continue to keep you updated through Patch Notes and additional update posts like this one as we have more to share.

I normally concentrate on Cloud Imperium's finances. This cancellation not only will affect February's sales but the number of new accounts created as well. But the reasoning is pretty important. Part of the marketing strategy probably involves showing the best side of Star Citizen, not its worst. Here are the reasons for CIG not opening the floodgates to new players.

Transit woes. In Star Citizen, the "E" in PvE stands for "elevators".

Elevator in the Room 

We've rolled out a number of transit fixes, however elevators (and occasionally trams) remain a major pain point in the overall experience. These issues can trap players in locations, preventing basic access to the game, which is why they remain one of our highest priorities in every patch cycle. The team has a bright spotlight on these issues right now and is actively working toward more reliable fixes for this.

Logging in and out. Seriously, something most gamers take for granted working correctly.

Character Stowing and Repair

We recently deployed a fix for the most severe character stowing issue, which caused error 60030 and locked players out of the game. However, players still frequently get stuck in specific shards, which exacerbates other issues - especially since logging out and back in is a common workaround for various bugs. Additionally, character repair does not consistently resolving stowing problems. We are actively investigating this.

Personal spaces - The folks over at MassivelyOP may have to name a new game with the worst player housing.

Hangar Woes

Since the implementation of instanced hangars, there have been a variety of problems with the reliability and playability of this system. From hangar lifts that clip and damage player's ships, to not storing ships properly after arrival (gets stuck in “unknown” or “destroyed” states), doors not opening and closing correctly, losing your personal hangar completely, and overlapping with other players both physically and on audibly.

Speed - For those who hate loading screens, Star Citizen is probably not the game for them right now.

Load Times and Initial Load

With 4.0.0, load times have increased, especially when loading into Pyro. Combined with ongoing login errors, this has resulted in players spending extended time on loading screens with low confidence of getting into the game.

PvE issues - I know that Star Citizen is a full loot PvP sandbox game, but the little PvE content present isn't entirely working.

Mission Issues

The mission system underwent a refactor with 4.0.0, temporarily reducing the number of available missions. However, we are still seeing familiar issues, including:

• AI not spawning at mission locations (both ship and FPS AI)
• Mission sharing and reputation inconsistencies
• Concerns about time vs. reward balance, especially for group play

Long distance travel - In a space game, travel between planets, moons, and systems is kind of important.

Quantum Travel and Starmap

Quantum travel continues to experience frequent disruptions, including repeated starts and stops, forcing players to retry jumps multiple times, alongside an ongoing issue where fuel states don’t always sync properly between server meshes. These are areas we’re actively investigating to reduce frustration and improve reliability.

Inventory issues - Sorry, but players like finding all their stuff in their inventory when they log into a game.

LTP and Keeping What You Earn

The system has become unreliable, with frequent reports of lost items, ships, and money. While each case is investigated individually, underlying loopholes and complexities impact overall reliability. Since this pertains to progression and respecting player time, it's a critical issue and top priority.

And on and on and on...

Additional Fixes

As mentioned above, this is not an exhaustive list - many other bugs are being addressed and investigated in parallel. A few examples include:

• Mineables taking too long to fully load in
• Invulnerable actors, which can include both AI and players
• Freight Elevators at outposts becoming stuck and impeding missions
• Collision issues where players may clip through a ship, the floor, etc.
• Power allocation issues setting ship power to 0 or off randomly
• Inability to equip some components discovered in Contested Zones
• And more...

All of the points above came from a statement from an employee on the Star Citizen forums. Honestly, the next a Star Citizen white knight boasts how well the game works, I might just drop the link to the forum post stating that not even the developers believe that. I mean, CIG never cancels a free-fly event. Until now.