The main topic this week was of course the upcoming server merges with the FAQ and list of servers. Some players agree on the planned merges and others do have a different opinion on which servers should merge with another. We are aware of that and given the topic at hand, it was to be expected. It's never possible to please everyone with something like a server merge and we had to view the issue from various different angles. We had to find what we think is the best solution to ensure a lively populated server while considering hardware restrictions, database possibilities and future aspects which might change the current situation of players on a server.

This being said, the preparations for the server merges are in full throttle. The first step will be the character deletion (described here) that will happen during the scheduled maintenance downtime announced for 19th of January. About one week after that, we plan to merge the servers. The exact date and time will be announced very soon on the usual channels.


Production Update

Our developers have received very good feedback from the players on Testlive about Update 1.06. It is coming along very good and if no major issues crop up, we expect the update to be ready for the live servers not too long after the server merges have finished. There are still a few issues that we need to resolve first and the player feedback is helping a great deal in finding and crushing them as they pop up.

The assassin revamp has continued to be tweaked as we proceed, and we have made some further adjustments to help with a few issues with rogue agro management that were identified through that feedback and testing, as well as some adjustments to help with some new variations of global locks on crowd control abilities in PVP that should further help mitigate against situations where players could be 'locked' for extended periods. We think these additional changes coupled with those already planned for 1.06 will improve the playability from a PVP standpoint. As always you can check out these changes on the test server and find more information over on the test server forums.