Please Stop Destroying My Items

I think it’s long past time that Star Citizen’s persistent universe, actually persisted all player related assets. One of the foundational covenants between a player and a persistent universe is that the game won’t lose my shit or willfully destroy my assets. Star Citizen continues to violate this fundamental convention.

I’m not playing Super Mario. I’m not playing a single player RPG with the ability to pause or explicitly save. I’m playing an online game, in an area called the persistent universe, that doesn’t keep certain aspects of my activity until I reach a golden checkpoint. If I’m not able to land my ship at one of these golden checkpoints, the game disavows all knowledge of my ship’s contents. Why?

I’m not talking about a cup I brought on board. A teddy bear I grabbed out of a habicube and put on the dash for grins. I’m talking about items related to missions and the player professions. This is especially true for assets that, at this point, only the game can place and remove from my ship. It’s really egregious the persistent universe isn’t storing the fact that those items, in particular, exist, the instant the game places them there. Why does it only retain the fact that the items are there when I store the ship?

So few of the planned features related to professions are available in the Alpha, it’s frustrating to lose items related to the ones we do have.  I’m not even sure why this interim mechanic of only retaining your ship’s inventory when you land at space pads was ever considered okay. It’s alpha where many many things can go wrong on the game’s side of things. Why leave us at risk of consistently losing progress?

The sad truth is that I’m always more concerned about the game causing me to lose my things than it being the result of PVP. The game itself is the biggest pirate and griefer. In all this time, I’ve only lost a single load of mined ore to combat. All of my cargo hauling losses are due to the game disappearing it. Being disconnected, crashes, freezes and other unrecoverable incidents that require a player to restart the game, for me, result in considerably more instances of losing progress than PVP ever has. It shouldn’t be this way.

This also goes for having to recover a ship that’s lost in space because of a DC or crash. Reclaiming it needs to stop destroying the ship’s inventory. It should be transported to you at a cost that’s less than and faster than, the replacement insurance. This feature popped up on the ship console for a little while in the 3.5 PTU. Not sure why it disappeared.

I can deal with wipes. I can deal with delays. I can pace myself and enjoy what’s currently available even though, it doesn’t reflect any of the professions I back yet. What frustrates me beyond belief, however, is the game continually breaking a fundamental covenant between a player and a persistent universe. Please stop destroying my shit.