This week has been all about getting the new tools platform up and running for the developers. As we have mentioned in the monthly community letters the next update series contains a lot of back-end infrastructure updates, and this was the week that we started getting the new toolset up and running. That always makes for a slightly frustrating time as the usual teething issues with new tools meant a slightly slower than normal week for the production team. Most of the new systems are up and running now and the teams are now able to start to work with some of the new options that will be available for them moving forward, and get a little irritated at the parts that don't quite work yet! Our ever-dedicated tools coders though have done a great job of getting everything done and of trouble shooting the early issues. It isn't often we get to mention the efforts of that part of the team so this is an over-due thanks to them for all the work involved in getting things up and running with the new platform.

The new tools will make sure that Age of Conan can continue to benefit from the engine upgrades being worked on for The Secret World and our other games, so it is worth that extra little bit of effort to make sure we keep up to date.

The last of the planned updates for the 2.0.x series is now slated to go live in around ten days time. We have had to wait on a couple of builds due to the issues with the tools this week. On the plus side the internal testing for the integration parts of the 2.1 series is going very well, and the build is starting to look reasonably stable. We will make a decision on when we will push the series to the test servers at the end of the month. We aren't getting quite the pace we would have liked due to the tools bedding in, but we are still working towards the testing starting then.