Closed Alpha: Our plans going forwards.

Hey there everyone, it's me, TRH!



So, there have been a billion questions about the Closed Alpha, and it sucks when we're not communicating well, so we spent a little time today, sat down, and compiled some information for you guys so that you know what's actually going on. Definitive plans, and all of that.



So, here's what's happening!



This weekend:



We've been testing a ton on internal/LAN builds, as well as doing scaling testing off of Steam's servers. This is why, obviously, it hasn't shown up on steam stats! Huzzah!



Monday: At around 11:00 am EST we will be opening the doors to the first 50-100 people who we invited for the early early alpha. This is under NDA and will hopefully not be discussed a whole lot. If you were contacted about Alpha thus far, this is where you get in. From here, until the following Monday, we will be bringing in small numbers of additional players as needed.



The purpose of these tests are to seek out potential networking or load related issues, as well as seek out things which are explicitly bugs/performance hitches/machines which do not work well with us/etc. This is NOT just a free ride to play the game early. We'll be expecting people to be active and give us feedback, which is why we've been so carefully hand-picking folks who understand this expectation of them.



Next Monday (June 1): We will be sending out ~500 keys to people around 11:00 am EST to have as many people as we can just hammer the hell out of the servers we'll have set up. This will also be an opportunity for people to give us additional feedback, report bugs, etc, the whole day before we go live. As of yet, we have not decided what the limit of outbound information on these will be. We're hoping that these will not even need an NDA, but that will be information given to people who are chosen as testers once we know what state the game is in.



The purpose of this test is to see if there are any leftover networking or load related issues, that all of our servers are reachable, to get information on overall network load when heavily stressed, and fine-tune the servers before launch to make sure that we've got enough horsepower prepared for the EA release. This will give us a better idea of what our current number of servers can handle, as well as good data on if everything is going to explode violently in our face. (We have scalability to about 5-6x our initial load within hours if it is needed, so hopefully everything goes alright there.)



Initially, we planned on having slightly more people involved, but the manpower we thought we'd have available for handling and attending to testers has instead been co-opted for doing additional work on the game itself, so we're keeping numbers low and manageable for the duration of the alpha testing period.



Hope this helps to clear up the roadmap for you guys and as I've said before, you WILL get the opportunity to see the game before June 2nd, just keep your eyes open and ears to the ground.



- The Right Hand