Star Citizen Alpha 3.18 Testing Update

Hello everyone,

We would like to share an update regarding our plans for the upcoming 3.18 patch releases. Following thorough discussions with our publishing and development teams, we have made the decision to implement a fundamental change to our testing process, with the objective of shortening the delivery time to live. In order to increase our efficiency and remain on schedule for Alpha 3.19, we will be conducting simultaneous release management of both the 3.18.1 and 3.18.2 patches.

We have locked 3.18.1 for external testing, and our development team is now hammering away at it with a set of updated load-testing tools. While load testing has always been a part of our process, we are making changes to incorporate this new method of ‘locking’ and doing ‘final load testing’ internally for all future releases.

We are eager to start testing 3.18.2 on the PTU with all of you, potentially as early as tomorrow (Thursday). By testing 3.18.2 and locking 3.18.1 in this way, we believe we can save time to help us reach our upcoming major milestones. This will also make space for us to create the 3.19 branch as soon as possible, so we can start the process of preparing to go to PTU soon after the release of 3.18.2.

It was important that we communicate this to you early so that there is no confusion when 3.18.2 rolls out for testing, despite 3.18.1 not having hit the live servers yet. We’re excited about this new approach and hope it will bring significant improvements to how we roll out our regular content. As always, we sincerely appreciate your ongoing support and look forward to seeing you in the ‘verse!

UPDATE (03/31/2023): Alpha 3.18.1 has concluded a series of load tests, and while further testing will continue, we’re also unlocking the build (meaning it will come and go on the PTU with all of you again). We have added additional logging to the latest build, which will enable us to gather more information from PTU testing with the community. Separately, we plan to roll out 3.18.2 very soon, alongside a playtest for XenoThreat. Stay tuned for more details!