Testers ran the space sim's economy at an accelerated rate and so didn't catch the problems, and also didn't tend to occur early on but after a significant amount of play.
"It turned out that the issues many of you are seeing with trade ships not working correctly is not one bug but a whole series of connected problems," posted Egosoft.
"After resolving the first issue with 1.17, more problems became apparent. This is the reason we are now testing the next patch 1.18 a lot longer than the other patches. We can not afford a very indepth test at this time, because too many of you are waiting for this fix, but things are looking good and chances are that this update will be available before the weekend."
"I do not want to give silly excuses here," they continued.
"Of course you deserve a bug free game, but you may ask why these trade problems were not uncovered during testing: We had a group of testers dedicated to testing our economy over a long period of time. These guys used a special version of the game which allowed them to run the entire economy at a higher speed. It seems that most of these problems we now see did not happen with this time acceleration. Meanwhile these problems also do not happen early on in the game or if you (like most testers do) have to restart the game frequently."
Egosoft list other features coming up next:
• Fixed several causes of crashes in-game and when loading savegames.
• Fixed a specific problem resulting in periodic slow-downs.
• Improved general performance (first small improvement only, more to come).
• Fixed several problems with ship/drone docking/undocking behaviour.
• Fixed problem with player drone formations.
• Fixed several small localisation issues.
• Improved skill levels for new NPCs.
• Improved readability of entries in interaction menus.
• Improved GPU listing on laptops with multiple GPUs (still some driver-related issues on certain hardware).
An apology from Egosoft was issued to the fans of the X series after launching the game in so poor a state.
