Pearlescent paint bug patch today, and introducing the TMC.

Alert: Emergency patch v.91 today. Estimated to be released at 1:00pm PST / 21:00 BST / 22:00 CEST. In patch 90 a bug was introduced when customized items with Pearlescent paint appears in very crowded areas, causing a GPF crash. We are patching to fix this asap.

More specifically it's the type of bug that can only be tracked down with 100 live players (a crowd) and a full district where people have a great variety of different items (given the trillions of combinations of items players create). Even a static load test has a hard time catching this particular issue (and required some creative load testing for the development team just to reproduce the issue).

But - to catch these issues more reliably in the future, the next step is the launch of our public test world and the TMC (our Test Monkey Crew).

We will start taking applications for how to participate in the TMC after the E3 show is over on Monday the 13th of June, and Neume will send out more details on how it will work (and how you apply). Some of you will literally be asked to participate (since we can "see" what you have been doing in the game), and for some slots we will simply take applications.

(I am also working on a bigger blog post right now about our upcoming roadmap, so stay tuned)

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update: June 6 - Scratch the additional blog post with info. Instead we'll convert (and condense) our formal "Roadmap" page instead and make it public for everyone to read. That way you will get far more details about what's going on in the game for both the next few weeks, as well as for the next several months than what you'd get from the blog posts (and commentary).

Also - it's still Beta. For 80% of players it's in fact very close to production quality and an amazingly great game to play. For some however it is not at that level for various reasons (hardware compatibility, latency to their ISP or routing issues, queues, SLI comparability etc.). And - yes - it's a commercialized beta, since part of this open beta is to test what items actually sell and for how much. Wouldn't be much of a test if we didn't do it "for reals." So - please hold any additional commentary until we release the roadmap.