End of Closed Beta Week 3 - prepping for Open Beta

This will be a very short update.

Right now we have 25,000 testers in the game, and now also well over 250,000 people that have registered their interest in the game. We continue to see between 600 and 1,600 simultaneous players at different times of the day, which is great and a slightly better than expected number from the small population we have let in so far.

We are still performance testing and improving things during CB3 and working on some alternate configurations to further reduce server-frame-lag, but overall we now have a rather stable setup. We'll analyze this weekend's results on Monday, and then decide where we go from here.

The dev, design and art teams are still working on a few minor tweaks in CB, but are mostly now focused on the Open Beta build that's coming up.  Most importantly the OB build works out several core issues that we have to solve before going into OB, everything from how to recover previous character data, to how to test taking premium payments, to working on several progression issues.

The IT side is working hard to get the EU datacenter configured for the CB-3 build. Unfortunately we found out at the end of last week, that a pair of critical network components needed to finalize the build have gotten stuck in EU customs, so it's a little unclear when those will be cleared and delivered. The servers are all nearly set up, but now we need those additional Edge networking components before going live. We hope to get an update Monday from customs, and hopefully get our items back in the next few days. As soon as we do we will enable the EU location.

And yes, as soon as the EU launch is imminent, I will post here - and then we'll unleash at least 25,000 people on the EU datacenter as well (and anyone already playing CB in the US can then ALSO play on the EU location, just for the heck of it).

And NO, I know this waiting thing is KILLING you, and it's KILLING us too, so no point in repeating how much YOU deserve to be in the game. We agree. You DO deserve to be in the game.

And we WILL enable the game to everyone as soon as everything is ready. AND we still promise that all those who applied for the closed beta WILL get early access, ahead of Open Beta. And when the EU location goes live, that's when we will NEED all you additional testers to try it out.

Looking forward to seeing you in San Paro.

I will continue to post at least every 2-3 days to keep everyone updated, as well as daily on the message boards along with all the developers and the designers.

Cheers,