Hi everyone, Earlier today, we opened the gates and welcomed Wave 1 testers to access Alpha 3.18 on the PTU. This upcoming milestone marks a giant technical leap forward on Star Citizen's journey to deliver an uncompromising shared universe. Far from our typical quarterly patch, this release introduces a fundamental change to our entire backend, bringing an all-new set of backend services, granting universal persistence, and even the migration of the entire game-state into the cloud, which significance shouldn't be understated. While things are looking good, we're not in the clear just yet. The biggest task for us now is getting everything running smoothly enough to release to the live servers. The good news is, today's release to Wave 1 has been a tremendous success. We sustained a much higher concurrency than we anticipated and ran into a critical issue that wasn't due to scaling, which is excellent news. In order to properly diagnose the issue(s), we suspended player access and dove into the state of things. While doing that, actions were taken to mitigate/recover the environment, and once everything was operational again, we opened the PTU back up. This is a tangible example of how all of you are helping us bring this behemoth to life. While our Evocati testers on the front-line are crucial to the process (huge shoutout), these releases to additional PTU waves are equally as important. The additional traffic grants us the valuable opportunity to stress test under high loads, and is the most efficient way of uncovering potential issues. And in this case, it was a massive victory for the teams here, as we were able to uncover and diagnose key issues to help further prepare 3.18 for prime time. It's also important to note that we're keeping the servers region locked (US) for now, and limiting the number of shards/instances, so we can maintain concentrated traffic in a smaller environment, as this is the most effective use of our time for data collection for the time being. As a result, some of you will find you're unable to access the PTU, but a little persistence (no pun intended!) usually does the trick. Of course, Alpha 3.18 testing introduces a radically different paradigm than what you all have been accustomed to in previous years. There's going to be some choppy waters as we dial all the new systems in under load, so it's safe to expect various levels of instability, and the style of dynamic and reactive testing response you saw today will be the norm going forward in this PTU testing phase. With that said though, with your activity, support, and enthusiasm, we're more confident than ever. Feedback Threads: Updated Prison Loop Security Post Kareah Update New Derelict Missions Ship Soft Death Salvage – Hull Scraping Buggy Race Track Orison Platform Missions Physicalized Cargo Time Trial Racing and New Race Tracks We'll update you all when we have more information. o7