I'm posting this for anyone who doesn't stay up to date but might be seeing a bit of drama and wondering about it. Even more since Star Citizen has had a few good things happened with it. Good things like 30k basically gone and a recovery for if they come back, start of medical, and a few other things. During reading this note Star Citizen raised over $500 million, and some are projecting a possible $1 BILLION in 5 years. Advertisements being passed off as gifts CIG for the end of the year tried to do a 12 days of Christmas thing where they gave 1 thing away for free for 12 days. If the link still works you can check it out here. https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/18448-Celebrate-Luminalia-2951 The items in the giveaway Day 1: Some Luminalia Sweater Day 2: Spectrum badge Day 3: Some wallpaper/picture of a ship with boxes falling out of the back. Day 4: Mustang - IceBreak Paint Day 5: Caterpillar - Deck the Hull Paint Day 6: An ad for their new bike. It was a picture of the handle on the bike they showed on day 12. Most people overlooked this and joked about it Day 7: Aurora - IceBreak Paint Day 8: Another Spectrum badge Day 9: Another wallpaper/picture but this one of an upcoming ship going after another. This could be seen as an ad also since there is no holiday thing in the picture as far as I can tell. Day 10: A pretty cool knife Day 11: Caterpillar - IceBreak Paint Day 12: A picture of an upcoming bike. Seen above in the pictures. Here is the thing. Because there was some confusion about if we were getting a free bike when it comes out or not. They changed the description to Reveal-Wallpaper Basically, they passed off an advertisement as a gift. Someone on reddit or somewhere else said it best. This is as if you were a kid and your parents printed off an image of an xbox. And then said you can get this if you pay us the money for it. This is why advertisements SHOULD ALWAYS NOT BE MARKETED AS A GIFT. Even more if it's a digital item since it's free to copy the thing to your hangar. What could've happened is they could of moved the knife towards the end and thrown in some more spectrum badges or other junk. And have this towards a side ad. Sadly, because of this mix with other things. There is several things that can happen. This is most likely, but CIG will do absolutely nothing and sweep it under the rug. The problem with this is if this was the only screw up then that's one thing. But there has been several. And what is worse, combine this with past and future screw ups and it can hurt them in the long run. But again, this is most likely on this. CIG gives a discount on the bike to anyone who was in the event. A lot of people will still be PO, but at least it looks like they are trying. Even if that trying is them making money off you. They give the bike away for free to anyone in the event. This is something I think they should've done. Like it isn't like these bikes make them a ton of money anyways in the grand scheme of things. And when we get ground stuff going on, people who didn't interact with this event or newer they will want to buy something all their friends have. IMO this is the smartest move, but I think it's highly unlikely. (Keep in mind how many hundreds of millions they gotten and how much they brag about their new buildings in multiple countries. They aren't even close hurting for money) Cutlass Steal Price Note I'm not really a cutlass fan, but for those of you who don't know the new ship is basically a drop ship. It will be able to hold the bulk of the server at this time, and it's more than less the Cutlass Black with more seats. Again, I'm not really into the Cutlass ships or dropships to start with, but you can clearly see there is a massive jump in price for virtually nothing. If someone who is into these ships want to add more, then please do so. I think some of the problems with this was also there was no real advertainment on this. Like they mentioned it in some Star Citizen video, and late into it. But other than 3rd party word to mouth, there hasn't been much on things from CIG as far as I can tell. Ares Ion This ship was meant to be a sniper for capital ships. Basically high impact but low defense. It's basically a ship built around a cannon. They nerfed the damage but a bit. They changed it from being a big slow heavy cannon to a repeater. They lowered the damage from 3,000 to 1,500. IMO they could've just nerf the thrusters, slower shots, and so on while keeping the ant-capital ship ability. One thing that has been pointed out is The Scythe and Glaive have both had the same 3,000 alpha damage as the Ion had (along with better turn rates and agility) since 3.14 hit. But they are horrible in PVP. https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/qsopst/ion_gun_nerf/ The Scythe and Glaive have both had the same 3,000 alpha damage as the Ion had (along with better turn rates and agility) since 3.14 hit. Do you think the Scythe/Glaive were too powerful? In my experience, those ships still got absolutely destroyed in fighter-vs-fighter PvP. The benefit of firing roughly once per second wasn't that you could snap shot another fighter, but that you could spend more time evading incoming fire (like from turrets on big ships you're intended to kill) and line up a shot once per second while retaining maximum DPS. Inferno and other ships nerfed (UPDATE) Someone in the comment said I missed this. I honestly don't know much about this nerf, but I guess that got nerfed somehow. There is other ships people are complaining about, but most of that is broken features that will most likely be fixed on a gold standard pass. So I don't think they are a special thing to really add. But maybe for some it can add that little extra sting. Luminalia Presents Nerfed to 250 aUEC What happen during the event is you could find little presents around some cities and maybe other areas. You could then take them to the admin office to sell them for 1,000 aUEC each. It is expected this nerf to came in because they wanted us to test Jumptown events. My problem with this is they could've lower the present spawn rate, how many spawns at any point, or done a number of other things. Like it messes over person like me who has no care about going to Jumptown or interacting with that. Even more so now that it's an event and that means you can't sporadically do the event. Like with mining or most of the other things you can do without having to real world time everything. More There is other things like the 3.16 being lacking and a few other things. And for the most part each of these on their own it's nothing or maybe close to something but not really. But all these NON-FORECED ERRORS happening in a row and it happening at the end of the year. It's pretty bad. What this feels like is new management that is in the wrong career field. Or maybe the wrong industry. If this happens more and more in the future, then maybe this might be it. Like it's pretty hard to be this tone deaf and so many non-forced errors happen at once. I'm assuming at the end of the day CIG will just learn from this, but not speak of it or go out of their way to fix or acknowledge the problem in any way.