Greetings Citizens,

We’d like to start by wishing a happy Thanksgiving to Star Citizen backers everywhere. We’re thankful for all the support you’ve given us… and nowhere is that support more visible than the Star Citizen Alpha 2.0 PTU! We truly appreciate the incredible effort backers have put into working with our team to locate, recreate and ultimately annihilate the bugs blocking the public release. And in between, we’re very excited about how much fun everyone seems to be having (with a special shoutout to the emergent gameplay we’re seeing on streams and videos!) Thanks to your work, we’re releasing a new patch to the PTU today… and we’re adding another 50,000 Citizens to the test group! From here forward, testers will be added for Alpha 2.0 PTU by Citizen Number… so if you were one of our first backers, come join the fun and help us test!

Now here’s our first update on Star Citizen Alpha 2.0 Development since releasing to PTU! Server instability is still our archenemy of the week but we have it firmly locked in our cross-hairs! Reinforcements have arrived with 16,500 backers who now have access to the 2.0 build! Never before have so few been so helpful to so many. This feedback is crucial in helping us get the Live build ship-shape and stable for the rest of the community. We’ve even tried to bolster your testing efforts by putting work in to the server bots system to improve the quality of our crash tracking information.

The code team are tracking call stacks and reviewing the dumps, debugging and collating information from the Issue Council and QA. The release has been a huge success in terms of throwing up new issues and shedding even more light on any of those nasty “hard-to-repro” bugs that we never would have had the testing bandwidth to deal with internally. This is what Star Citizen Alpha and the PTU is all about.

Our Game Support Manager Will Leverett is in communication with the PTU players about how people can help and we will of course be increasing the number of eligible accounts as soon as possible. For those who already have access, we really appreciate you taking the time to write up solid bug reports.

Since 2.0 was released to PTU, the development team has been sharing videos from the community of all those amazing encounters that are already starting to flourish in this new gameplay environment. We’d like to share one favorite from “KingKongor” that really caught our eye, and have been included below.

The clip shows the player losing his ship at a Comms Array and then calling for assistance. Another player answers his request and very kindly arrives to pick them and take them to safety. But then out of nowhere, just before they were able to board the ship, a pirate comes flying in and blows the rescue ship to smithereens! You really couldn’t write it. Fantastic stuff!

So that’s your lot for this week! We’ll keep on pushing and pushing to get you all more stable builds as soon as humanly possible, and we’ll increase do our best to increase the backer numbers too when it’s the right time to do so. Please keep those bug reports coming and we’ll keep our eyes peeled for more entertaining game footage!

No bullet points this week, it’s just all hands on deck for more stability to get the build Live to the whole community.