" Chris

In addition to a very productive day working on the alpha11 update (which will probably be deployed tomorrow), we finalised an exact timeline of when we can deploy 0.9.3 to Beta. That day will be Monday, November 14 (New Zealand time).



It's important to understand that although we expect the patch to be ready within three workdays of today, it's necessary to schedule time for Quality Assurance and last minute fixes as testers find important issues.



Our planned schedule is as follows (all in New Zealand time):

Friday Nov 4: Continued development

Weekend of Nov 5-6: All balance finished

Monday Nov 7: Stable copy tagged for Quality Assurance

Tuesday Nov 8 - Friday Nov 11: Quality Assurance/continued Alpha testing (high level content) with small fixes merged.

Weekend of Nov 12-13: Time for last minute emergency fixes as required.

Monday Nov 14: Deploy to Beta, wipe all characters

Tuesday Nov 15: First patch to fix any Beta issues found



This may seem like a lot of polishing prior to a Beta release, but this is necessary to get major crashes and other easily fixable issues out of the way. The purpose of Beta is to get actual gameplay/economic feedback from a large group of players, which is impossible if we deployed rough Alpha-quality versions of the game. We want to avoid wasting time dealing with stability problems when ten thousand players have access, so that's why we fix those with less than a hundred Alpha testers.



Once Beta is deployed, we'll be iterating rapidly to take feedback into account. I expect we'll deploy balance patches very frequently in response to player feedback. New features (better vendors, finally?) will be added as soon as they are ready. There is no further need for super long patch development cycles after this one.



We will also substantially ramp up the rate at which people are added to the Beta. I'd like to see a concurrent player count of 500+ at this stage of the Beta, if we can!

In addition to a very productive day working on the alpha11 update (which will probably be deployed tomorrow), we finalised an exact timeline of when we can deploy 0.9.3 to Beta. That day will be Monday, November 14 (New Zealand time).It's important to understand that although we expect the patch to be ready within three workdays of today, it's necessary to schedule time for Quality Assurance and last minute fixes as testers find important issues.Our planned schedule is as follows (all in New Zealand time):Friday Nov 4: Continued developmentWeekend of Nov 5-6: All balance finishedMonday Nov 7: Stable copy tagged for Quality AssuranceTuesday Nov 8 - Friday Nov 11: Quality Assurance/continued Alpha testing (high level content) with small fixes merged.Weekend of Nov 12-13: Time for last minute emergency fixes as required.Monday Nov 14: Deploy to Beta, wipe all charactersTuesday Nov 15: First patch to fix any Beta issues foundThis may seem like a lot of polishing prior to a Beta release, but this is necessary to get major crashes and other easily fixable issues out of the way. The purpose of Beta is to get actual gameplay/economic feedback from a large group of players, which is impossible if we deployed rough Alpha-quality versions of the game. We want to avoid wasting time dealing with stability problems when ten thousand players have access, so that's why we fix those with less than a hundred Alpha testers.Once Beta is deployed, we'll be iterating rapidly to take feedback into account. I expect we'll deploy balance patches very frequently in response to player feedback. New features (better vendors, finally?) will be added as soon as they are ready. There is no further need for super long patch development cycles after this one.We will also substantially ramp up the rate at which people are added to the Beta. I'd like to see a concurrent player count of 500+ at this stage of the Beta, if we can! YouTube |

Lead Developer. Follow us on: Twitter Facebook | Contact Support if you need help! Last edited by Chris on Oct 31, 2012, 10:46:01 AM

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