Cits and Civs, Captains and Commanders, you’re tuned to episode 524 of Guard Frequency — the best damn space game podcast ever! This episode was recorded on Friday, July 25 and released for streaming and download on Tuesday, July 29, 2025 at GuardFrequency.com
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This Week’s Schedule
- Flight Deck
- Elite: Dangerous
- Star Citizen
- Dune: Awakening
- Guard Frequency Exiles, where the best laid schemes of mice and men typically go wrong in the first five minutes.
- Feedback Loop
Links & The Like
Elite: Dangerous
Elite Dangerous released its Trailblazers 3.4 Update, making more changes to the Powerplay 2.0 system. They’re tweaking more numbers and have also shut down another gameplay loop that was being exploited. The on-foot transfer power data no longer works, however, “The team is actively working on a general solution to prevent future exploitation of mechanics such as this to the state of Powerplay.” Maybe someday they’ll let Tony offload his 200 escape pods. Also, the Distant Worlds 3 expedition has opened its registration website and over 2100 CMDRs have signed up. The website is chock full of things for CMDRs to do out in the deep black, including getting yourself killed in a Sidewinder. And finally, the Panther Clipper Mk 2 has been released into early access, with the next ship already being teased on social media.
Star Citizen
Star Citizen released Early Access Pre-Alpha Release Candidate Prototype Experimental Test Build 4.2.1 LIVE 9958723 to all backers on the Live server. Tony continues to be passively correct regarding the unsmooth state of the 4.2 series of patches. The live server went down for “very critical hotfixes”, and it’s possible that these very critical hotfixes were related to a very critical cheating epidemic. Everyone from Chinese hacktivists to butt-fedora cheaters are stealing players’ gear and insta-killing them. And CIG is continuing the Year of Stability and Content by deploying new content that has revealed how unstable the game is. We have an in-depth, first-person analysis from a trusted research badger, who will tell us exactly how much fun CIG’s community resource drive can be. Spoiler alert: it was not fun. But all is not doom and gloom, because poor design choices and bad mechanics are resulting in emergent gameplay. Like queueing up at freight elevators! And being a volunteer longshoreman!
Dune: Awakening
Dune: Awakening sailed through its release period and ran straight into a wall of exploiting and cheating along with a bout of disappearing inventory… hey this sounds familiar! They’re fixing things and announced that they’re going to make it right… as best as they can, anyway. But one of the reasons they’re having so much trouble is that they were trying to respond to their community’s desires for a better Deep Desert Experience. They’ve fixed the whole “snatching your ornithopter from the sky” thing, but the loot timers just aren’t good at all. Maybe they’ll have it figured out in time for the first DLC.
Community Questions
- Is the Star Citizen Resource Drive a short-term community goal or a full-fledged reputation system? Does the FOMO factor need to be emphasized in this kind of event?
- Is it better to leave an exploitable system turned off forever rather than turning it back on and risking new cheating?
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