[AC] Frelorn's Weekly Update

[Ziv]

[turbine]

Weekly Update 2/23/06

Hi there everyone.

I wanted to start off this week’s update with a heart felt thank you. We know that this week has been one that a lot of us would like to just forget, and that many of you feel very strongly that we are not handling the recent downtimes in a correct manner. All I can say is that we are doing all that we can to keep the downtimes to a minimum. When dealing with billing systems that contain as much valuable information as ours does, you need to be extremely careful. If that means having to bring things down several times to make sure things are kept safe, then it is something we will not hesitate to do. We would rather be sure that all the information is safe, than taking a risk just to keep things up a bit longer. I know that some people are asking for the exact details of what has been done that would require us to have things up and down like this, and to be totally honest, most of it is way over my head. What I do know is that everything that was and is being done is to improve not only the performance of the billing and authentication system, but to also make things easier for you, our customers and our own billing staff. So once again thank you for being patient with us while we work through these changes to the billing system.

Moving forward we have some exciting things going in for the March event. I won’t give out too much information right now, but what I will say is that the world of PvP is in for some rather interesting changes. While not getting into the numbers on the changes, I will say that not only are there going to be some damage increases on Weeping Weapons, there will be more improvements on Phantom and Hollow weapons. Not to mention the continued changes that will be made to help loot weapons become more viable in PvP. All the changes we are making are based on the feedback we got from you, the PvP community. The feedback that we have gotten so far has been great, and we hope to be able to continue that dialog going forward. As we get closer to the March event, we will post more on these changes.

This week is implementation and testing for March. This is when the team gets all of the quests into the game and begin the testing process. We will play through the quests, looking for any errors or oddities that nay cause a problem. This is also the time we look at the balance of these quests to make sure they are in line with our goals.

Thank you all very much and have a great day.

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Andy "Frelorn" Cataldo
AC Community Relations
Turbine, Inc