Hey Star Citizen community, I have been a backer since 2012, and I have followed Star Citizen for a long time. I don't play a lot, but every quarter I put my feedback in Evocati, and then usually call it a day, and I really wonder when I will play this game on a more regular basis. After being accepted in the Starbase Alpha, and Dual Universe Alpha, I was left really puzzled how far these games have gone at a fraction of the dev-time and the budget Star Citizen has. But since I have the most information about Dual Universe, lets go with that as an example, because this is what I fail to understand. How can such a small studio like NovaQuark (Developer of Dual Universe), be so sophisticated in their alpha environment compared to SC?: 1. 7% of the funding (They are on 21 million, Star Citizen on 300 million). 2. They did an engine-swap mid-development (https://board.dualthegame.com/index.php?/topic/397-dual-universe-switches-to-unigine-2/) 3. They are working with about 50 people on the game, where Star Citizen exceed 650. 4. They started development (and the whole studio) back in 2014, so they had less time then Star Citizen overall https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1949863330/dual-universe-civilization-building-sci-fi-mmorpg Now it's time to address the elephant in the room, I question myself what is really going wrong here. I know SQ42 plays a big part in this, but lets not focus on that too much. What I want to talk here, is the netcode, both of those games I named, Dual Universe/Starbase have server meshing working, sure it might not be perfect, but both games only know one single shard. This is entirely not linked to SQ42, and Star Citizen had 8 solid years of development for this (while above games, did it in less time). Also regarding persistence, it is just great, you crash, no problem, you are where you are, you stay where you are. Meanwhile in SC, when you crash and the recovery window does not come up, you are screwed, you can basically fly back into orbit again (probably 10 minutes wasted), if you were far from your spawn location, you are looking at 20+ minutes. You probably lost all your cargo etc (this all does not happen in Starbase/Dual Universe). And yes, I do believe Star Citizen can become an ultimate super game (I am a 2012 backer after all), but what I fail to understand is why CIG is so silent about the elephant in the room, where is the proof of concept for server meshing, where is the transparancy regarding this which we got promised back in the Kickstarter days? If I had to guess, I would say that CIG is simply working on too many band-aids, and not focussing on the final product, for example, I think the last leap we have in development of Star Citizen, was back during the 3.0 drought, but that is just me. This is also something Dual Universe solved, by having very focussed testing, also making sure the right concurrency is in the server, really putting every mechanic through it's phases: https://www.dualthegame.com/en/server-status/ If anyone can explain to me how this is all possible (preferably CIG themselves, I am all in for transparency, it was one of the main reasons I backed this project), I would really love that. Also before people say above games look like Minecraft, we are talking about 7% of the budget here, if those games had 300 million, you would have probably gotten those graphics to any standard you could wish for. Which is why I am specifically focussing on the back-end right here, since that seems vastly superior in said games. Oh, and don't even let me start on how base-building/territorial ownership is already working in Starbase and Dual Universe. Also to link to another thread of mine, (because I was hopeful that back in the May monthly report, CIG was actually focussing all-in on server meshing), I also made a thread about how to make SC a better game: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/4/thread/with-the-renewed-focus-on-server-meshing-cig-shoul