Today, 12:49 PM

This week’s an exciting week for us for many reasons, but it also comes with some heavy caveats. Originally our plan was for Winter Patch 3 to hit next week, but for various reasons, we’ve decided to give it to you at the end of this week instead (we are aiming for Thursday right now), without completing all of our internal testing. Those of you who were here for the week of Winter Patch 2 will remember some pretty bad server instability for about a week, and the risk manager in me is afraid that we could see another week like that when this patch goes live.

Why would we do this to you? Well, we’ve got a number of big events coming up in the near future (Stress Tests of various shapes and sizes, not all of which are “it burns so good” tests), and while we want to fix bugs and test the all of new content as much as possible internally before it gets to you, we have to balance that against having another weekend of Beta testing where you guys find the things our internal team cannot. We need the thousands of players out there hammering on the servers finding those odd crashes so we can fix them. With the events that are coming up, a single weekend of beta testing actually matters in the grand scheme of things. It gives us more time to prevent as much burning as possible in upcoming weekend Stress tests.

We’re not going to lie: This patch could be pretty sucky for the first week or so. But we believe the benefits outweigh the frustrations, and the silver lining in this is that we’re opening up the rest of the game. Getting that out early is almost worth it in and of itself. The level cap will finally be where it belongs at level 50, you’ll be able to play the remaining launch zones for the game, along with Veteran Dungeons and Adventures, Warplots, and (most of) the 20-man raid. Because we’re pushing the patch early, we might not have a full set of patch notes for you (although we are scrambling to finish this in time), but we’ll make sure you know what and where the content can be found, as well as any Class changes. Anything else we get we’ll publish as soon as we can, but it’s possible that we’ll have missed some notes this time around.

As we approach launch, we are going to be changing up how Beta works. The current structure of Beta will be changing in mid-March, and we wanted to give you as much heads up as we could (once everything was finalized). Why do you need this heads up? We will only be guaranteeing continued access to Beta for any player who has at least one character at level 32 or higher. We’ll explain in more detail why we’re doing this in March, but I hope you’ll agree that we need some heavy elder game testing in the coming months, and this is a really good incentive to get testing on the areas of the game we need it the most! It’s likely there will be other ways to continue playing in Beta, but we’ll reveal those details around the March timeframe.

So to summarize:

This week’s patch could very well cause lots of server crashing (we are rolling the dice a bit). We’ll fix those as fast as we can over the next week, and apologize in advance for the crappy experience.

Level 50 is here! Who will be the first to hit the level cap?!

You have a bit over one month to hit at least level 32 if you want guaranteed access to the next beta phase in mid-March.

Patch Notes might be fairly barebones; we’ll try to get the most important stuff posted ASAP with the rest posted as we get it.