Greetings Kronos!

We know that many players have been seeking updates on our next steps as a project. We’re pretty excited for the future with Naxxramas around the corner and our (player optional) progression to The Burning Crusade! However, before we get to those long term plans, we wanted to bring our community up to date on the steps leading up to our long term plan. We gave a basic outline in our most recent news article titled The Next Steps, and after our recent Kronos Management meeting we have some news to share to help flesh out our plans moving forward.

Kronos II was opened on the 27th of April 2016, as a result of a massive influx of players to our project. Prior to this influx, Kronos had twenty active raiding guilds. Today, the population on Kronos as a whole in comparison to earlier has more than doubled, going from twenty to more than fifty active raiding guilds. It has therefore taken some imagination to understand the argument parts of certain members of the community who have expressed that Kronos as a whole is somehow is ‘dying’.

We do however recognize that a few months ago the population was even higher than it currently is today (more so on Kronos I). Seeing how the Kronos community is split up between two servers, the question became: “Why not merge the servers into one?”

While this is an excellent question, given that Kronos now have the hardware required to support this, we must remember that many players on Kronos II had yet to experience the opening of Ahn’Qiraj. The War Effort and the opening of Ahn’Qiraj is a marquee event in Vanilla. Taking away this experience would be not only disheartening for those who have dedicated their time and effort to enjoy these events, but would also be unfair as a whole.

As we have mentioned, we have numerous options in which we could proceed moving forward. After our most recent meeting in which we reviewed every option available to us, we are happy to announce that we have decided to merge Kronos I and Kronos II together into one server in 2017. This will be done once the War Effort has concluded and guilds have closed the eye of the Old God who awaits them at the end of Ahn’Qiraj Temple. We know players will have questions on how exactly the merge will take place and affect them (names), we are still ironing out the details and we will announce all of the nitty-gritty well before the actual merge takes place. The merge taking place after Temple of Ahn’Qiraj has been cleared by a few guilds will allow all players on a unified Kronos to be able to start preparing for the prelude event leading up to the release of Naxxramas.

Speaking of Naxxramas – it is well under development and is getting closer to begin public testing as mentioned in our last news article. The first steps will be our official launch of the public test realm. The PTR will officially open on Monday, 19th of December. However, our first wing release in the PTR will be in early January. All characters on Kronos I have been cloned onto the PTR. The aim of this Public Test Realm is to discover whether there are any issues we haven’t been able to produce throughout our internal tests.

In the meantime, we ask that those that wish to participate brush up on their knowledge of the encounters and the relevant mechanics. You are welcome to login there and try out the commands that may help you throughout the Spider Wing, the first wing to be released in early January. The other wings will be tested one by one throughout 2017, with a final release of Naxxramas instance also scheduled for 2017. One of the most asked about questions regarding our release of Naxxramas is how we plan to release it. We’re happy to announce that we will be releasing the full Naxxramas all at once. With Kronos set on patch 1.12.1, we’re looking forward to bringing the difficulty of Naxxramas back to our community. Naxxramas was an unforgiving and challenging environment, and we understand that this is what our community is most looking forward to. Working together with our players in PTR, we are confident that players will enjoy all the hard work that is being put into it.

Another frequent and long requested ability from our community is the option to change race and faction. We have noticed how the population is not equally distributed amongst the two factions on neither Kronos I nor Kronos II. To combat this problem, which has effects (especially in the PvP scene), we have spent a lot of time and money investing in a new Account Manager setup which will allow players to change the race of their character(s). With race changes comes the ability to faction change. This would obviously mean the character as a whole from then on would belong to the opposite faction. Factions will be heavily monitored by our team, and when an imbalance is present, faction changes will be limited to help build up the fledgling faction in order to keep a healthy ratio. This ability has been in the works for some time, and while we’re not yet ready to introduce this; this ability is expected to be ready around Q2 2017. What this means is that it will be ready after Kronos has been unified.

As always, we are thankful for all the support from our community, we really do have the best community out of all projects. We are excited to continue this journey with you and watch your characters grow. Until next time, safe travels.

The Kronos Team