star citizen—a video game first announced when Gangnam Style was at the top of the charts, sometimes unfairly labeled as vaporware. It is usually called that by people who have never played it; if they had, they’d know that the framework of a game exists, that it can be played, but that it’s also nowhere near what anyone could fairly describe as “finished.”

You should know this because this story is about the player base of the unfinished game, many of whom paid star citizen when lebron james still played basketball in mineYo. Those players, who routinely log into various parts of the unfinished game and do some flying/walking, found that with the release of Alpha 3.18 last week, they couldn’t get into the game.

The update, which introduced a lot of things, so many that made a trailer for it—first released last week, and that trailer looked exciting enough that a lot of people tried to log into the game to try it out. Too many people.

The developers at Roberts Space Industries quickly found that the game could not support many people trying to log in at the same timeAnd so it all fell apart. “Due to the high volume of traffic related to the release of Star Citizen Alpha 3.18.0, the RSI Launcher may become unresponsive,” they said on March 11, adding that “the team is already working to mitigate this issue as quickly as possible. possible”. possible.

However, two days later, many players were still blocked. and that could entering were to find the game full of crippling bugs, prompting RSI to tweet “Sorry for such a rough start – our team is working to get everything running smoothly as quickly as possible.”

At the time of publishing the game. still has not returned to normal; Star Citizen status page is displayed that various elements of the game, including its persistent universe, are still experiencing a “partial outage”.

Fans are understandably angry, citing things like the fact that this game has been in development since FIFA 13 It was on the shelves, but I think that’s taking a glass-half-empty view. To them, a broken game must seem like a disappointment. For everyone else, a broken game shows that there is a game to break!