Asherons Call: srand Appeals to Us All to Help Stress-Test the New Hardware

I know you've all seen the press release listed below from Ken Karl, but srand sent a letter to WCoD, personally asking for our help:

Come help us test new hardware!

AC1 is getting some lovin', folks. There is new hardware to test for compatibility with the game, machines which we believe will give a bit better performance to the worlds and allow us to replace the current hardware, some of which is getting pretty long in the tooth.

We need to know if the new machines can really handle the load you put on it, as well as what configurations of the hardware and software work best for AC1. We can better make that determination with more players helping us with some pretty stiff simultaneous player loads pounding on the content. That's where we need your help: Starting Friday afternoon PST , there will be a special test server available over the weekend and all Asheron's Call players are invited to help us try to break it. We've copied over a recent version of the Solclaim player database, so if you already play on that world, your character should be available for you. If you don't have a character on Solclaim, you can still start a new one and relive your character's younger days, hunting areas such as the Mosswart Fortress.

Members of the Live Team from both Microsoft and Turbine will be on Solclaim 2.0 off and on all weekend long, so come talk to us in game, hunt with us, hang out and kill some olthoi. There have also been rumors that other, more dangerous people will be making an appearance as this server is not going to remain consistent with current storyline angles ; but these are only rumors. Really. Just rumors. Honest.

We want you! We need your help to stress the boundaries of these machines and bring them screaming and pleading to their collective knees , <g>. Hope to see you there!

You can join us by going to http://zone.msn.com/asheronshadow/default.asp and clicking on the Shadowclaim link. Please remember that we are testing this configuration, so it may be a tad unstable at times. And anything you do this weekend on Shadowclaim will not persist past this test -- this is just a short, temporary shadow existence. So have fun!