Asherons Call: This Week's ToD Status Update

Throne of Destiny Weekly Status Update 6/2
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Hey folks! This update is heavier on the "status" side than the "news" side, but sometimes you spend more time working on what you've got than starting new things, right?

The next major milestone in Throne of Destiny development is RC0 - "Release Candidate Zero". This is the stable build that we're proposing for our Gold Master, along with all other required GM package files, such as the launcher and installer. As of this writing, we've got an RC0 build and it is undergoing end-to-end testing by Quality Assurance to ensure that it meets our needs to go on the CD.

We're also working very hard on getting the Preview World ready for the launch of Preview later this month. Everyone is involved in this - development, QA, NetOps, etc - so in addition to the player feedback we expect to get from the Preview, launching it is a good dry run of the procedures we'll need for the full AC:TD launch on July 18. We should have all the planning for Preview nailed down within the next week or two, which will let me answer many of the questions you've been asking. For example, I said that we're going to provide a means to rapidly level your characters - the immediate question was, "How?" We've got the "How" nailed down from a tech point of view and we'll be releasing more details on that before Preview starts. Other aspects of Preview that we're working on are the different pipelines that you'll be able to use to send us your feedback - special Preview forums for discussion, feedback and bug reporting, and an email address for bug reporting that'll go straight to QA.

In other cool planning news, we've started planning for the August Event, the first Event after Throne of Destiny's launch. Because we know that Preview and launch are going to be our primary focus, we're starting August development a bit early. That way we can switch our focus back to Throne of Destiny for the Preview and Launch without cutting any development time from August. The Event is tentatively scheduled for early August. We'll be talking to you more about the August Event after the AC:TD launch.

While we're talking about the Live game: I wanted to make a quick note that we are very actively investigating the recent severe lag reports on Darktide. We know that many of you believe the lag to be connected to the Mausoleums, whether its people macroing there or the corpse piles inside the dungeons or at the punishment "landing zone". The Mausoleums are the primary focus of our investigation but we don't have proof yet that they are the cause. Our hardware monitoring shows us that there is definitely something unusual going on that matches the many player reports of severe lag on Darktide that we've received recently. We're gonna get to the bottom of this, and if it means turning the Mausoleums off in order to temporarily fix the lag issue, we're prepared to take that step. We just need to do more investigation first.

So that's the news - AC:TD launch and Preview work is humming along, and we're starting preparation for the transition to Live that follows. I hope you folks are as excited as I am!