Gameplay Report: 3.5.1
My Mission: Legitimately try to make as much in-game money as possible, just get it done.
Attempt 1: So I'd heard that there's a new cargo route similar to the "Drug run" you could do back in 3.2 or 3.3, this time involving... Neon? Not sure why stations around the Citizenverse need that, maybe Chris is trying to compete with Cyberpunk 2077. But basically it's a 10% or so profit margin and you can easily cram a half-million credits worth into the cargo hold of a Constellation so I figured why not- let's actually try to grind up to a million credits or whatever and buy ourselves an in-game spaceship. I still have not managed to actually achieve that, after a year of trying off and on. So anyway, spawn Constellation, I realize my credits have been reset by the most recent patch so I only have like 20,000 on me. That's peanuts. I decide to do the "Destroy 3 satellites" combat missions for a while, because they tend to pay 6500 credits and offer literally no danger. If you do the ones at Grim Hex in particular, you don't even need to go anywhere. Just warp a short ways away, take another mission, warp back in and pop them. After an hour of listening to podcasts and blasting stationary targets (thrilling) I'm sitting at 120,000 credits which is enough for a single cargo run to net me more than double a combat mission.
I fly to Cellin and spend several minutes watching youtube to find yet another hidden base with yet another secret kind of cargo. See this is apparently going to be a thing with Star Citizen, I guess. None of the perfectly legitimate stations sell you that is worth any kind of profit. If you want to make literally any money at all, you need to know that there are hidden bases on basically every moon in the game. How do you find them? Youtubers always seem to know where they are, so I just go there and watch them fly down to check the landmarks. That's the other thing about the hidden bases- you can't QT to them. All the other bases in the game, you select them on the map and you can warp within 20km. The hidden guys? You have to find those from orbit with no HUD markers whatsoever. Hope you brought your binoculars! Luckily I'm pretty good at terrain following after the stupid Yela drug labs, so I find this place on Cellin sooner rather than later, even though it's night on that side of the planet. Sure enough, they're selling Neon, the extremely illegal substance. I buy up 120k of it which is like, 1/10th of my cargo hold, and then fly to another base on the other side of the same planet that I hear likes to buy it at a good rate.
So far this has all gone entirely smoothly except for the part where combat sucked and the actual cargo run was literally hidden in the middle of an entire planet. But that's just bad video games- nothing has been truly Star Citizen about this yet. Until I land at the research outpost and go inside to sell my wares. They buy it! In the sense that "Neon" is on the list of things I can sell to them. But they won't buy mine. No sir. Transaction failed, every time. Now this used to happen all the time in the drug runs, and it was due to invisible demand caps- every couple minutes they'd tick back up and you could sell some more, but you had to sell less than their total demand or the transaction would just fail. So I'm not surprised that this bug in a fundamental system of the game is still in place, but I'm disappointed. I continue listening to those good good McElroy boys and trying every few minutes to sell. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. How low is the demand at this place? So I ask on the server. Oh! Nobody knows. It apparently increments so infinitessimally slowly that nobody bothers to come here now. Great! I finally find the rate after fiddling. It is, I am not kidding, approximately 1,000 credits worth of product per minute. I would have to sit here for two hours just to sell the cargo that it took me 5 minutes to pick up. So I get into my ship and fly it out into the vastness of space to log out, hoping to find a server where nobody has touched that outpost for a couple hours. Naturally the persistent logout fails and when I log back in I'm in the pod and my Constellation is gone, along with all my money!
Attempt 2: Not to be deterred, I try again the next day. This time I take my Gladius, the only other ship I own, out to do the initial combat satellite hunting missions and build up a big nest egg. This turns out to be an enormous mistake. With the Constellation I was just ignoring all the NPC's who'd spawn and kind of half-heartedly shoot at me, but now I'm in a light fighter and it is prime time on these servers. I get lit up and have trouble finishing even one mission without having pieces of my ship blown off. Eventually I start to get into a groove but a literal actual player shows up, completely unnoticed by me because there are 15+ NPC targets swarming at any given moment, and pops me in a couple shots. He literally types in the chat "Nothing personal, kiddo- just business." I'm pretty sure he wasn't trolling with that. Like he actually thought that ambushing a player who's out ratting when you have a 16-to-1 numbers advantage is a stone cold maneuver worthy of some flexing in chat. Hokay. I get the Constellation back out of the insurance timer and come back but he's nowhere to be seen, so I am denied my sweet PvP vengeance. At this point I'm not really inclined to keep shooting these beacons, so I get ready to give up and call it a night for this show.
But! Someone asks in chat if anyone can help them ferry their dumb little mobility scooter Greycat from a nearby planet all the way to ArcCorp. I am feeling charitable, so I say sure and go down to pick them up. I should explain here- Star Citizen is very broken and very stupid. Recently a new bug came into existence where if you land on a planet and spawn a ground vehicle, your ship will despawn. And you can't spawn your ships from any of the stations that can spawn ground vehicles, anymore. So spawning any kind of ground vehicle is a way to instantly trap yourself on the surface of the planet forever. If you want to spawn one and take it to somewhere that it could actually be used- well, you need a second player's help. So I pick this person up and go AFK because the flight to ArcCorp is literally 15 minutes long and nothing will happen during it. We finally arrive, I warp down to the big space station in the middle of the big city, and land. This proves to be a terrible mistake. As soon as I'm landed, at the pad I specifically was assigned to, I get a criminal rating for "Obstructing the pad" and a bunch of warnings start playing about how my ship is blocking the landing bay and will be despawned. Okay, no trouble, I lower the elevator to let guy with Greycat off the ship and sprint for the elevators- only to be completely mowed down by security for the crime of, I guess, landing where I was told? I respawn at the ArcCorp pods, and buddy with the Greycat makes it to the elevators before their ship, and mine, are both summarily despawned. NO FUN ALLOWED.
Attempt 3: So now I have a serious problem because I am stuck on ArcCorp. Not stuck in the traditional sense- I can spawn ships. But it is next to impossible to get off of ArcCorp. The way Star Citizen works is that you're assigned to a pod at the last place you touched down on a pad, assuming it has any. ArcCorp's pods are located in the city center, and there is a five minute bus ride and wait, just to get back to the space station. But then you have to get one of the like 5 landing pads. And not die to any of the staircases. And it has to not glitch, and open the landing bay doors for you. And you have to be able to fly away from the planet without crashing. And if any of this fails, you will wake up back at the start and have to do the entire bus ride over again. It is a nightmare. Keep in mind this was the flagship feature of patch 3.5 and it is a complete tire fire that everyone tries to stay away from.
But, finally, I manage to get the Constellation back in the air and away from that awful place. I settle in for the 15 minute flight back to the other side of the system. I'm not going to start grinding again but at least I'll land somewhere safe and avoid even saying the words ArcCorp ever again. I finish my long, long jump, just in sight of Port Olisar- and the game hard crashes to desktop. I log back in, and wake up- in the ArcCorp pods again. I log out.
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Summary: I've written genuine impassioned negative reviews of this game. I've written weird distopian hellscape fiction of this game. I've pretended that I really like the game and am just thrilled by the reaming that I am taking every time I log on. I've kind of run out of ways to capture just how much this entire experience sucks. It sucks all. It is amazing. It is the Faces of Death videos, if they were a video game. It is a horror show for sociopaths and sick sad basement shut-ins, and it haunts me. Every feature is broken. No matter how big or how small, every single one. So many of them are almost the kind of experiences you would expect from, say, a bad video game like Big Rigs Racing. But Star Citizen hates you. The game is fractally broken at the macro level, but every individual piece of that is itself also broken. And here's the part that is giving me a religious experience- it is never, ever in a way that makes it fun. I sincerely believe this code is haunted by a malevolent spirit that actively wants you to not have fun. Nothing will ever work in the way you expect it to, and it will always be broken in the way that wastes as much of your time as maximally possible. If you were just going to dump out a broken game, occasionally you'd get an infinite money dupe, or a "Steal NPC ships" glitch or something, but not in Star Citizen! Every bug is precisely and specifically calculated to drain fun from otherwise boring activities. What's more, none of the bugs ever get fixed, except the ones that might lead to you having some fun, like the Yela Drug prices. There was more gameplay over that drug lab in the span of a month than at any other time in the game's history and they destroyed it! One can only conclude that the evil ghost that thrums at the heart of this show doesn't consider anything that brings joy to be "Working as intended." It doesn't see it as a bug that the game will randomly murder you and throw away an hour of your time. But by god, don't you dare find a way to enjoy yourself, because the spiritual force that permeates every line of code in Star Citizen will make you regret it.
