Star Citizen Alpha 3.17.2 – Incoming Hotfix

Hey everyone!

During the post-launch period of Alpha 3.17.2, we identified several issues with how in-game transactions are both made and completed, thanks to the enthusiastic expenditures players made at the start of the patch cycle. The high amount of player activity at launch, alongside the Siege of Orison event, was a perfect recipe to rile up our backend. For those who really want to see under the hood: To try to avoid any major in-game outages during peak concurrency and keep some of the old legacy systems available, we had to favor availability over durability by accelerating the writes to SPC (super pcache) and allowing a lag between SPC and the game state database to build up. This came at the degradation of data consistency and durability, especially considering SPC wasn’t built to work in these conditions. As a part of the collateral damage, some of the records committed to LTP became inconsistent over time but we believe this issue affected a random minority of character LTP records.

That said, the state in which these complex caching systems got into allowed us to focus on analyzing some of the data patterns of where bottlenecks occur. This knowledge is already being re-used in stress testing scenarios for Persistent Entity Streaming. We’ve received an immense amount of Issue Council reports for these issues too (especially the most egregious ones such as logging in with an empty wallet), which has given us a wealth of data to be able to tackle them. Thank you to all of you bug-hunters!

As a result, we have been steadily deploying fixes for these issues over the past few weeks on the PTU, and we are now prepared to roll out some of those fixes to the Live servers, with even more (and larger/long-term) fixes coming in our next major update. The short-term goal is to make sure that the SPC service doesn’t enter this state again until those larger fixes are deployed in Alpha 3.18.

A side effect of these fixes necessitates a potential slight loss of player progress. With this update to Live, all players will be reset to the LTP database, which is essentially the same as performing a Character Reset. For those unaware, LTP keeps track of your wallet as well as ships, components, weapons, and armor (both purchased in-game and looted), but doesn’t retain any consumables (food, drink, ammunition, med-pens, etc.). The good news is, that any items that were able to successfully sync with LTP will be retained when the fix goes live, but please note that if any progress did not sync to LTP properly, you would discover this loss post-fix. We’re eager to get this hotfix out later this week, which will hopefully stabilize the backend and ideally prevent further loss of progress/items ahead of 3.18’s launch.

Thanks to all of you for your patience and understanding as we roll out these fixes, and we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience.

See you in the ‘verse!