Hey everyone! Sorry for the delay in posting this. Literally as soon as the Closed Beta ended, my basement started flooding due to the massive amounts of rain we've been getting where I live, so I had to deal with that little mini-disaster first. Luckily all is fine now so we can get back to what's really important: the beta recap!

We had more than 334 people participate in this first Closed Beta test, which was great. I believe we peaked at around 60 concurrent players right after the test began. Unfortunately due to the way the reset happened this time I don't have stats on total time played or who played the most (sorry!) We should have those next time, though.

Overall, I was really pleased with how the test went. We had solid participation from the community, and we had a smattering of players doing everything from enjoying their first visit into the world, to grinding as fast as possible to reach the current max level. There were even some attempts at the new World Boss, which (once the bugs were fixed) pretty much went how I expected.

Really this test was just about getting a lot of nice quality of life changes and bug fixes in based on lessons learned from the Open Alpha test, and I think we accomplished that nicely. The client is still crashing more often than I'd like, but we have some things we'll be doing before the next test to hopefully address those remaining issues.

For the Next Test

The next test will begin Friday, September 15th at 12 PM (Noon) US Central Time (Coundown Clock) and run until September 19th.

We have an incredibly (probably over) ambitious internal schedule for that test, but here's what I'm willing to commit to publicly right now:

The much-anticipated combat balance patch will be in. That doesn't mean combat will be totally finalized, but it does mean that we're going to take a pass at bringing things into the alignment we'd like to see. You can also anticipate a few new abilities/features for some classes, as well as new combat mechanics overall.

There will be a lot of new quests to do. Some of them may have placeholder dialogue in at this point, but our goal is to get as many in mechanics-wise as we can.

The new Desert Dungeon will be available for play.

In-game messaging and Fellowships will be added

Potion aging and the first prototype of Artificing will be available

There may be even more than that depending on how things go, but we'll see. We'll be doing a series of preview posts (hopefully weekly beginning next week) to preview these features as we're working on them, so stay tuned.

Until next time, see you in-game!