Star Citizen update fixes "rubber banding," adds 50,000 more players to Arena Commander

Star Citizen's Arena Commander is just the first part of a massive and ambitious space combat sim. It's also early code, which means there have been some issues, specifically with rubber banding. The Star Citizen Arena Commander 12.5 patch that went live last week appears to fix the rubber banding, however, and the module is in good enough shape that developer Cloud Imperium Games announced over the weekend that another 50,000 people now have access to the multiplayer module.

"We are now at a point where we feel like we have made such a significant improvement to the rubber banding (position/rotation/velocity divergence) that we want to get it into player's hands. We've significantly reduced the occurrence of the divergence and also implemented systems to correct it much more quickly and seamlessly," Cloud Imperium wrote in last week's announcement of the 12.5 patch. Rubber-banding—a multiplayer phenomenon in which other players appear to snap back and forth between locations, like the end of a rubber band—should now be "unnoticeable" for most people, it added.

And it all seems to be going quite well, the studio revealed today. "For the past two days, we've been monitoring our servers, reviewing feedback and observing players around the world," it wrote in a follow-up . "And it's all looking good! In addition to eliminating rubber-banding, it looks like the 12.5 fixes have dramatically increased the Arena Commander experience. Today, we made some additional fixes to our server from that data. We're now comfortable beginning to expand the multiplayer rollout again!"

To that end, another 50,000 people have been added to the multiplayer base, in a perfectly orderly fashion: If your "Citizen Number" is 250,000 or lower, you may now take your place in the Arena Commander action. If all goes well, a larger expansion could be announced soon.