Alright, where to begin... It's getting harder and harder to fit everything into a single post because there's just so much to say, but I'll try to organize my thoughts. For Christmas, we finally got the long-awaited 4.0 update—teased and announced for years. After all this waiting and all these delays, multiple CitizenCons hyping it up and showing the world how this patch would change everything. Meanwhile, we've been struggling with the game since at least 3.18. Bugs, instability, outrageous balance issues, terrible ergonomics—all sprinkled with promises that some feature of 4.0 would make things better. 4.0 launched as a Preview on Christmas Eve after months of delays, in an absolutely disastrous state, getting worse by the day. What was supposed to be the patch of the decade for Star Citizen turned into a complete disaster. You left us through the entire holiday period with an unplayable build. A large portion of the community could barely log in or was stuck in prison. Major game-breaking issues surfaced, and we had to wait over a month for 4.0.1, which was supposed to bring "important fixes and QoL improvements" (I can't find the exact source now, but I'm certain I read this from a member of your team). Even Chris Roberts' latest message was reassuring, with good intentions for 2025, focusing on QoL and bug fixes. And now 4.0.1 is live, and it's somehow even worse than the previous version. Honestly, we should have seen it coming. Unlike what I saw on Spectrum ("9 to 10 times more stable!"—I’d laugh if it didn’t mean so much to me), the PTU was empty. Nobody played on it. From the little I did, I immediately ran into the same bugs as in the Preview version. I analyzed every patch, and I found no major fixes, no significant QoL improvements—just things we didn’t ask for or secondary fixes (okay, I'm slightly exaggerating, but seriously, there were only two or three worthwhile changes, and they weren’t enough). As for stability, how can you possibly assess that when the PTU has a few hundred players at most, while the Live servers have tens of thousands? I don’t have your internal stats, but I’m sure they reflect what I see on Twitch, YouTube, and in the community's comments. And everything is a disaster. People are losing hope. Even I find myself questioning things sometimes these days... Now, if we take a step back, some things are obvious: 4.0 was never going to launch perfectly, not with everything it introduces. And in some ways, it’s a half-success. Before going further, I want to acknowledge the developers’ work. They did what they could, under the circumstances, and in many ways, they succeeded. Server Meshing works, and Pyro is stunning. So let’s be clear: my criticism here is directed solely at the higher-ups—the decision-makers. Now that we’ve set the stage, let’s get down to business. Yes, this is a rant, but I’ll try to be constructive by providing arguments AND solutions. The Release Date of 4.0 Releasing this major patch right before going on vacation was probably the worst decision you could have made. We were left with a broken build and a skeleton crew to pick up the pieces. In game development, when something as massive as 4.0 is released, the studio needs to be ready to handle the necessary fixes. I’m not inside your company, I don’t know all the details, but 4.0 should have probably been released in January, with the full team ready to quickly patch all the issues from the start. That alone would have massively reduced the frustration of waiting for fixes. The other option would have been to release it earlier—say, early November—leaving the last two months of the year to address the bugs before the holidays. I have a hard time believing there was nothing you could sacrifice to launch it on time. If you think about it, the Mission Refactor is one of the biggest issues in this build. And yet… the devs working on it spent the year on "dynamic events" that (I’m sorry to say) nobody cares about. It wasn’t a priority. Save Stanton, Fight for Pyro, that failed Blockade Runner event I don’t even remember the name of—none of these were necessary. Cutting them or pushing them back would have probably allowed the mission team to work on the actual technology and core missions of the game, which are now missing in 4.0. You know, the ones that keep us occupied all year, not just for two weeks when the marketing team wants to sell ships? Which brings me to the next point. Marketing STOP advertising Star Citizen as if the game is finished!!! YOUR MARKETING IS US—THE PLAYERS AND CONTENT CREATORS!!! If you want money, there is only one solution: make Star Citizen playable as quickly as possible so word-of-mouth can do its job. You can run all the dynamic events in the world, release 500 ships at IAE, sell ATLS for $400—it won’t matter! You have the numbers, you see the data, you know very well that 2024 was a partial failure masked by PR. Stop posting pretty tweets as if everything is fine when half the player base can’t even log in. Stop giving us polite non-answers on Spectrum, saying, "there was no wipe in 4.0.1"—when we’ve lost everything: ships, components, weapons, EVERYTHING. Just be… honest? Which leads me to the next point. Major Issues I really, truly feel like the people making decisions don’t play the game. I genuinely think they should have spent their Christmas break just playing Star Citizen instead of whatever else they did. I’m sure they wouldn’t have lasted two days before calling everyone back to fix the major issues. Instead, here we are, a month after 4.0’s release, with 4.0.1 supposedly fixing a ton of problems. Nope. That’s a joke. Persistence We've been losing our ships, components, and in-game purchased weapons with every update for years. Are you aware of that? Do you think another full reset makes much of a difference to us? You’re absolutely right—it doesn’t! At least with a full reset, we don’t get our hopes up for nothing. If you plan to keep patching the game regularly without driving your players insane, I’d say this persistence bug should be one of the first and most important issues to fix. Vehicle Spawning I love my C1 Spirit’s ass, but I’d rather not see just that every time I summon it from a fleet manager at the space station. Did you know this bug only happens when calling your ship from the station’s main terminal, but not from the hangar manager? So, the solution is simple: 1. Have a secondary ship of the same size as your main one 2. Claim it 3. Spawn it to access a hangar 4. Go into the hangar (fighting with a elevator on the road) 5. Watch its massive ass emerge from the floor 6. Call your main ship 7. Watch them merge together 8. Repeat this process three times until only the correct ship remains... and voilà! 9. So much fun! I swear, only the most dedicated players go through all of this without rage-quitting. Or, you know... would it be too much to ask for a button on the fleet manager that lets us spawn an empty hangar of the right size without forcing a ship to spawn? Missions Objectives not registering and markers failing to appear—these are critical issues. I’ve talked enough about missions already in this post, but seriously, this deserves a post of its own. Elevator Maybe it's complicated to get elevators working properly in 2955, but it’s time to invest the necessary resources into fixing them. We've been struggling way too long just to reach our hangars. I know the Transit Refactor was supposed to be part of 4.0, but where does it stand now? Balancing You’ve talked about immersion and player investment in your Vision 1.0, as well as punishing death mechanics. Yet, for ages, the TTK (Time to Kill) has been ridiculously low, and now more than ever. The game’s balance feels like a game of Russian roulette—nothing makes sense. And for years we’ve been told, “Wait for Master Modes, they’ll fix the balance.” Well, Master Modes are here, and every multi-crew ship (except the Polaris) is a sitting duck in PvP. Fighters get blown up in one and a half seconds by shots from behind, without even knowing where they came from. I know engineering gameplay is coming. But let’s be real—you’ve never managed to properly balance anything with just basic HP on ships. So how are you going to make things work when there are multiple components to factor in, along with physicalized damage? I’m genuinely worried about this. Game Access Issues Do I really need to express my frustration over the fact that some players simply can’t play? And that once they manage to get in-game, they either end up shard-locked or stuck in prison for life? Honestly, if you want to make money, just create a mining-specialized ATLS, make it available in prison, and sell it for $200—maybe then you'd actually sell some. But seriously, these issues are catastrophic and need to be fixed urgently. There are tons of problems that need addressing, but I think you’re already aware of most of them. I could write 15 posts as long as this one listing all the issues, and it still wouldn’t be enough. So, I’ll stop here and focus on a partial solution instead.