Quarter 4 2024 Update

A lot has been going on over the last few months. After months of declining interest in large organized missions and game stability issues, our Star Citizen Division has gone into reserve status. I will let Jeffon go into more details below, but the TLDR of it is that large organized events will be put on hold while ad-hoc / popup missions will still occur. Make sure to grab the appropriate LFG tags in Discord (found under the #looking-for-group channel). While we are always sad to see a division change status, we are optimistic that it will return to normal operations when the game returns to a stable state.

Due to the Star Citizen Division going into a reserve state, we are moving the every other week community meeting to once a month. The first Sunday of every month will be the meeting, while the third Saturday of every month will be the Community Game Night. I will let Cannon talk about our September and upcoming October Community Game nights below. We are looking for ideas for November, so please join in the discussion in the #community-game-nights Discord channel.

Like we do at every community meeting, and in each quarterly updated, we would like to thank all those that continue to donate through Patreon or Discord Server Boosting. During the Star Citizen Division reserve state, Patreon donations have been put on hold as the SCNet servers have been shutdown. We thank all our past supporters in helping offset the cost of the hosting.

Discord Server Boosting gives our Discord server a little extra flair from server banners to a custom join link. Our Discord Server Boosters: Ech0Whiskey, FallenHylian, Jeffon, MantisOlthoi, NeddieSeagoon, Razzun, Scrub, Sivien21, WhiteknightR and Zahraphim. Your continued support is greatly appreciated in boosting our server and giving us the many cool features such as the custom join URL and more additional emojis!

Division Updates

Greetings, folks!

Q3 of 2024 has been one of the busiest periods in the division’s history. A lot of things have changed for us and this Newsletter is going to serve as a broad summary of all of these changes and events. How this impacts Q4 will be made clear as we move through.

July

July was defined by PS2 Community Smash 11. We spent the whole month preparing to be the logistics/armor squad for our platoon. We were assigned to BRAC’s platoon alongside FT0M and (after a few rewrites from Fleet Commander Falc’hun) deployed to the Woodman ASE Labs Lattice. After weeks of practice and Joint Ops with our platoon, we won the war of attrition against the TR at Woodman, and our team won the event.

We offer a big thank you to Coralus and the Event Organizers, Falc’hun and the rest of our team’s platoon leadership, Escrinox and BRAC, FalcoArnold and FT0M, EXBR for bringing the spirit to our lattice, Dubnus and the opposing team, and everyone in VVarMachine who helped us prepare. All of these people are the reason this event was as enjoyable as it was.

August

We spent August running almost exclusively Public Ops in an attempt to recruit people from Connery. While there were a number of good Public Ops throughout the month, and we did recruit a few folks, there was not a lot of traffic overall. 

After spending some time on Emerald in preparation for Community Smash, we decided to revisit the topic of running Operations on the Emerald server due to the higher population of players. These discussions were carried out over the month of August (and September). We ran another Joint Op alongside BRAC on Emerald which was also well received and eventful.

September

September marked the return of the VVarMachine Community Game Night, which we hosted in Planetside 2 to make the revival of this event run smoothly. The event was very successful and well received, with around 20 members showing up to give Amerish on Connery a real challenge. We had a great, grindy fight at Crux Mining Operation, which culminated in a dominant run of the Bastion Fleet Carrier (which we hadn’t run in a long time), even if it blew up with a few minutes left on the clock. The next Community Game Night will be on Saturday, October 19th at 8pm EST (5pm PST) in Planetside 2 on the Connery Server again. We look forward to seeing everyone back on Auraxis.

September also brought the vote to expand to Emerald as opposed to moving from one server to another. After much discussion about the benefits, drawbacks, and potential for growth, the division as a whole sees expanding to Emerald as a net positive for our unit going forward.

Q4: Going Forward

Since we are moving forward with expanding to Emerald, we are now running 1 Op per week on Emerald. We will begin recruiting efforts on Emerald in November once we’ve settled in and gathered some resources on the server.

We will also be running some trainings this quarter since it has been a while since the last round, as well as resuming efforts in posting to VVarMachine’s social media accounts, since we have not contributed a meaningful amount from our end in a long time.

PlanetSide 2 will also feature fishing (?) sometime in the near future, as well as an update to directives sometime soon.

Conclusion

I want to thank all of our members for continuing to support the division, as I usually do at the end of these entries. Our attendance has been very consistent since the end of July, with a few extreme highs and lows here and there. We wouldn’t be moving in the directions we want to without your ongoing support.

Alright, time to get back to it. Until next time!

– Cannon, PS2 Division Flag Officer, Written September 29, 2024

Star Citizen Quarter 4 Update: Organization Reserve State.

Hello everyone. Currently Star Citizen is in update 3.24.1 with 3.24.2 in very near future alongside with Tech Preview testing for Server Messing for update 4.0. CIG has been working tirelessly around the clock to bring in tech from Squadron 42 while doing the final polish for the single player game. Additionally, CitizenCon 2954 is upcoming with promised releases and news that we are hopeful to enjoy. Much has changed with the new inventory systems, persistent hangers, and cargo hauling missions and even more is to come with the future updates. However, the state of the game has made it extremely difficult to hold organized events without game breaking bugs or retaining interest.

That being said, the Organization of VVarMachine has made the decision to put the fleet into a reserve status. After having an organized Town Hall for the Star Citizen Division we came to this conclusion due to the lack of base activity from members and how we are unable to run organized operations how we want; causing us to unable to maintain the appearance of an active organization. This means we had to make some overarching changes for the Star Citizen Division and Organization: 

• Members are now able to be in the Org without having us labeled as their primary Org (will remain labeled primary for NCO’s and Officers).
• We will be archiving SC Fleet channels that are not needed during the reserve state. (this will not impact public SC channels)
• TIG and TIS will remain unaffected to current members to save their status in their current grade and position. We will also hold the onboarding of new NCO’s and Officers until the Org is reactivated.
• We will have a quarterly vote to determine if we have enough members willing to reactivate the Org and start doing organized missions revolved around our light milsim structure and gameplay focus.

Additionally, we decided that we will still be holding weekly events that are more laid back and will not count for operational credit for the Organization but to just “play for fun” together.

On the tech side of things, we have decided to shut down our SCNet page for backend changes to upgrade our server infrastructure to remain in compliance with security updates, along with consolidating applications across multiple hosts. While this is in progress, we will be pausing the flow of monetary contributions on Patreon, so that our existing supporters are not paying for resources which aren’t being used. When a re-activation does occur, contributions will be resumed thereafter.

We will continue to remain a loving division of Star Citizen and play together at times and in the future will investigate having the organization active again. Thank you to all our members who continue to join us for other game events and share joy for the future of the Star Citizen Development.

– Jeffon, SC Division Chief of Naval Operations, Written September 29, 2024

Final Thoughts

For SEO and keeping people informed, the old SC URLs (sc.vvarmachine.com, scnet.vvarmachine.com and vvar.navy) now point to vvarmachine.com/divisions/sc/. The SRS server has been migrated so that it can still be used, and the direct connection URL has been updated. We look forward to bringing SCNet back on updated infrastructure to once again service the VVarMachine Star Citizen Division.

We have also brought back the VVarMachine dedicated Space Engineers server! Find out additional server details in the #spaceengineers channel, including instructions on how to join. If you have any questions, reach out to Razzun.

See you online and see you around!