In the midst of the annual massive Intergalactic Aerospace Expo, Star Citizen players walked the halls of New Babbage’s events center to see highly-anticipated ships, only to find that they’d already been cycled out. Players pieced together what was happening and were upset to discover that, likely due to a bug, IAE was cycling its exhibitor schedule, and therefore its ship displays, twice as quickly—companies were being showcased for 24 hours instead of 48.
How IAE usually works is that for 48 hours at a time, there’ll be two companies showing off ships in the Tobin Expo Center for players to wander around and check out for themselves. The schedule is announced in advance so that players can plan to see the ships on their own time.
After players pointed this out on the official Roberts Space Industries forums, staff soon confirmed the issues with the event.
“Hi everyone, I’ve looked into this and can confirm it’s not working as intended,” Zyloh from Cloud Imperium stated in the forum post about the issue. “The team is exploring options to address it, but there’s a chance we may not have a fix in place before the event concludes, however all vehicles will return for the finale on Dec 2-4.” (Except, the bug is that ships are being cycled through twice as fast, so maybe that'll be this week instead by accident...? CIG, please.)
Players in the thread reported that similar issues were occurring already on the test servers, and it seems they weren’t addressed before the IAE actually went live. Plus, the maps appear to be wrong about where things are taking place within the Expo Center itself, and there have been major issues with the elevators navigating around New Babbage due to this rapid-schedule bug.
Ironically, on the flip side, mission validation for the “IAE Academy” task series is taking 48 hours, according to an official forum response from CIG staff.
IAE is Star Citizen’s biggest advertising and fundraiser event. Taking place annually, the game allows players to play for free and test-fly over a hundred of the game’s pay-to-obtain ships. This year’s IAE comes off the heels of a somewhat successful CitizenCon, though in the aftermath, several hyped-up features of upcoming updates were pushed back (and some pushed up sooner).
