It’s been long rumored that Alpha 4.0 will bring a full wipe to Star Citizen, and CIG eventually confirmed it recently, deeming it an essential step that is required to support all the upcoming changes to missions and economy.
According to CIG developer Nicou, the Reputation wipe is necessary to monitor all the new changes applied to the missions and quest givers in Alpha 4.0, as well as the guilds system and more advanced system that will arrive later.
Moreover, the aUEC reset is also required for evaluating the new economic changes in Star Citizen. The quest rewards and maintenance costs will increase significantly in Alpha 4.0, and developers do need to see how players can earn money from scratch to track the effects of the new changes.
Lastly, the items and ships that have been purchased using in-game currency will also be wiped in Alpha 4.0, as the team needs to dedicate a new database to the game with the arrival of Pyro. So, everybody will begin the game with their pledge ships in the next major patch.
Keep in mind that any item or ship that is bound to your account either as a pledge, a reward, or a gift will still remain accessible in-game, regardless of the wipe.
If there is one thing that we can already guess about Alpha 4.0, it’s the fact that a lot of players will begin to look for easy ways to get rich. The mission refactor has not been fully implemented in Alpha 4.0 yet, but we will have more details on the mission payouts and their difficulty level once it is out in the EPTU channel.
Some of the older ways of getting rich such as stealing cargo from ERT bounty haunting missions have already been patched in Alpha 4.0, as the drop rate for valuable cargo has been reduced drastically. Also, drug trading is no longer an option since a few patches earlier. This will probably lead players to find new methods for getting rich.
Alpha 4.0 will receive a new Wave 1 build later this week with tons of server fixes and improved performance. With Alpha 3.24.3 out of the way, CIG developers are now fully focused on 4.0 and we can expect the EPTU channel to open up to more waves in the upcoming weeks.
