This may feel like our usual PTU process, but there is one key difference: by running both builds on the Live environment, we can take steps to ensure that your progress on 4.0 will carry over. Our goal is for anything you do and earn in the 4.0 Preview to persist without any further wipes—unless something major happens, though we do not anticipate that.

this is nice, and very welcomed.

That said, it's important to note that progress made in Alpha 3.24.3 will remain tied to that version and will not transfer to 4.0. This allows us to maintain a clean slate for the new systems coming online in the 4.0 Preview, ensuring a consistent and stable environment as we look to deprecate 3.24.3 in the new year.

so many will choose to not play LIVE as their "progress" wont carry over to LIVE 4.0

decoupling feature development from content creation and general fixes

thats a nice approach, so new gameplay loops and other features (systemic economy, rastar, StarArchitect, Dynamic Server Meshing) will go through TECH PREVIEW while content and ships with existing loops will go through PTU.

I just hope that LIVE 4.0 will be a bit more civilised (it wont) perhaps the AATs at Outposts will shoot at hostile actors (they most certainly wont) but Stanton will be safe? Sometimes I hate being a Solo and too awkward to ask others for crewing up.

I've been playing the last few days. Stanton has been amazing with a 30FPS server tick rate in every server and performance has been better overall on my machine.

Pyro has been okay. Closer to a 15fps server tick rate at the stations/contested zones... It really depends on where you go, how many other players are there, and how much destruction has been left in their wake.

However, this has been my experience with almost daily wipes with the updates where all the clutter has been reset quickly. It will be interesting to see how 4.0 holds up once it has been up and running for a long time.

Jumped into Stanton to do some hauling contracts and my goodness the game has never been this smooth for me.

I definitely had some issues but so far it's been an amazing experience. I'll have to try out some FPS missions next to see how the AI performs but I think I'm going to have a lot of fun with this patch.

I was planning to wait until 4.1 or any other update that brings the missing 4.0 features and/or further flight mechanic changes but changed my mind to see whether my PC can still handle the game. It does though the experience itself was rather mixed.

• Seeing NPCs walking and talking around LZs was nice (even if they can sometimes be heard from dozens of meters and few walls between us).
• The back-end services lag was on the lower side during my attempts - inventory, stores, elevators etc. worked pretty well.
• Sometimes elevators wouldn't shut their door so I could see their magic pathways at work.
• There were almost no contracts (only 4) and the ones that were available wouldn't finish. As a bonus, when I tried playing today I didn't even have access to those limited contracts, just absolute void.
• MFDs reset almost every time I leave the pilot seat and two of the four in Aurora are misaligned with the screen models. At least I can use the cargo grid under the ship properly now.
• Didn't have the QT issues thankfully, everything worked surprisingly smooth despite tons of people in chat complaining about an opposite experience.
• Sometimes game didn't manage to sync player animations properly so I've seen one or two folks just sliding around.
• I could hear stuff going on in other people hangars a few times, however I couldn't see or interact with them (I've seen some comments saying they could).
• I had to fight the game to fix and refuel my ship (service screen would flicker the usable view then switch to the instructions one after a few frames).
• The game stole all of my money which was very cool.

Looks like I'm back to waiting. Maybe the non-preview release will be more usable.