Why wasn't the issue that causes players to be unable to buy and equip magazines a priority in this patch?asked by Jinx13

Magazines are a complicated facet. The way they work now is not the way we want them to work. So the way they work now is obviously you have a magazine, but you don't necessarily interact with the magazine itself. You interact with it on the gun level. You interact with the magazine in your PMA. But again, that's not necessarily the long-term solution. The reason why magazines are so underpinned by the PMA right now is there's no persistency in the PMA. So for example, we can't store that you've got a partial mag or you've got partial ammo. And where we want to go in the future is really deal with it on an actual bullet level, so that you're physically stripping magazines, you're physically putting bullets in. And we've actually started a lot of work on that. And the problem that is called out is not a trivial fix to do. So what we've got to do is weigh up: okay, do we spend significant time trying to fix this issue, or do we take a little bit more time but deliver what we actually want the experience to be? And what we actually want the experience to be is obviously underpinned by iCache in terms of persistency. It's underpinned by physical inventory, in that you can pick up things and manipulate them in your hands. So I think recently we did that for some of the grenades. That was something that was really close to me in terms of the throwing that we released in 3.11. Throwing, obviously, it's a better throw, it's a better experience, so that's core fundamental. But one of the main reasons why I pushed for Throw T1 was because you could go up to a grenade in the world and you could pick it up, and you'd press G to throw your grenade, and you'd drop the grenade in your hand and pick the one off your chest. Or if you didn't have one attached to your armor, it wouldn't do anything. So there were two systems there, the carryable system and the throwing system, and they didn't talk to each other. Now, when I came on board, we wanted to make sure, and this is why with force reactions we're being careful, that it's great a feature being systemic, but it needs to be systemic and talk to all the other systemic features. And so when we're talking about throwing, that means, okay, I should be able to pick anything up and throw it. And you'll notice that we've started to add things like default item actions. For drinking, for example, you press left mouse button, you drink. If you get a grenade, you can throw it. So we wanted to do that for magazines. We wanted to do that for MedPens. And Luke touched on it in the prison: we don't really spawn things in people's hands. This is the first way that we're delivering, with the commissary machines, the multi-tool physically being given to you. And there are currently issues with that flow because of the way it's set up and how it interacts with you. Because if you look at a MedPen, for example, you can't pick it up and put it in your hands. You have to attach it to your suit for you to actually then use it as a MedPen. Or if you store it, then you have to go into your PMA and then equip it. Whereas what we really want, and it's something I've touched on before in terms of the external inventory and the physical inventory and the personal inventory, is that you should be able to open up and be like, okay, I see my character. I can see all the items that are physically attached to him. I can manipulate those items on the fly without having to go into the PMA, because the PMA is kind of a bag of holding that won't exist in the physical inventory world. That might be a list of all the items that you own across the universe, but they might be in your hangar or in your hab or in your ship or in this locker or somewhere else. And you're going to have to deal with things on a player level, on a player scale. And so from a magazine perspective, to come back full circle, it's getting the work for the magazine to be able to go in your hand. And then that's actually not just, oh, why can't we just carry it? It's like, okay, well, now I can take the bullets out because it's only partially full. We already have the chamber logic on the weapons, for example. You've got a magazine in and you rack it, it takes one out of the magazine, one in the chamber. But we want the ability for you to be able to take that out. It's got 29 bullets in. I should be able to take the bullet out of the chamber. I should be able to then manipulate those containers. I should be able to find ammo out in the field. If I've taken someone out, I'm like, okay, their cartridge doesn't fit my gun, but the caliber of bullets does. So I can pick up their magazine, I can strip the bullets, I can then put those bullets into the magazines that are going to fit the gun that I'm using. So it's not that we don't see these problems and go, they're not important. It's that we have to weigh up the bigger picture of: okay, where do we want this to be? What do we want the experience to be? Where's the best bang for buck? How are we going to deliver the best experience for the player going forward? And so that's where we're at with magazines, and magazines really are just the tip of the iceberg. It's magazines, it's physical inventory. Obviously, that's underpinned by iCache, and that's something that we're working on. We've got multiple teams working on that endeavor. It's something that we really want to push live. It's going to change how you play Star Citizen. It's going to give credence to why you have some of these large ships with lots of lockers and lots of storage space that is not just the cargo hold. That you can be like, I want to store my Caldera environment suit, I want to store my Novikov environment suit, I want to have this particular armor or these particular weapons, and this is the loadout that I want to choose. And this is something that we've talked about as that core gameplay, that core loop of experience. It's not just you pulling the trigger, shooting the guy. It covers the preparation of: what do I need to go? What do I need to take? What food do I take? What drinks do I take? What outfit am I going to use? The grenade launcher is a good example. The grenade launcher right now, you can just buy 500 clips for the grenade launcher and you just keep giving yourself infinite. But in the future, if you can fit five P4-AR mags on your suit, you're not going to be able to fit five grenade mags, because they physically won't fit. It'll have to be that you'll only be able to take a certain amount of ammo. And that will dictate: okay, maybe I want to take an Animus for ground-to-air combat. Well then, that's a lot of space. Then what other gun are you taking? How many magazines are you going to be wanting to take? And that's why, I've touched on this before in terms of the different archetypes with the armors, they should have real benefit, real differences across the board. And right now, they're not where we want them to be, both from a damage mitigation and an archetype in terms of their role. But the magazine issue itself is a symptom, and we want to fix the root cause, within reason. Obviously, if it's really bad, then we need to spend time fixing it, and absolutely we will do that. But in this case, we have to weigh up. It's a non-trivial fix due to persistency and all the other issues, so we have to weigh that up against everything else. Fundamentally, we make those decisions to make the game that we all want to play.

Small addition to that: we fixed a bug for 3.11b. Basically, people that had previously bought a ton of magazines weren't able to access them, and so we fixed that bug.

Is that in the live 3.11 now, or is that coming in an updated patch?

That's coming in 3.11b.