0.9.3 will be deployed on November 14

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Chris wrote:

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argie wrote:

Regards and thanks for your hard work!

Even with several delays, I think this patch will be a blast!

Chris just a question.

About deployment.

1. Same as other patches. No server "shutdown".

2. Server will be down for some time until everything is ready for Client download?

3. Something third :D


Regards

We'll announce the details closer to the date, but it's likely that we'll be using the patch deployment time to do some maintenance on our servers (upgrading databases, etc). It may take an hour or so. I'm sure Jonathan will post details soon enough!

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Chris wrote:

Here's the quote from my progress update thread in the general discussion forum. Thanks for your patience and for being great testers!

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Chris wrote:

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!