We made it to the Beta test!... but you probably know that already .

It was greatly satisfying for us to be able to launch the Beta test on time. The end of January meant constant overtime for all of us. Kroll has seized the opportunity to order everybody back to standard work hours for now - in order for us to be able to work around the clock again as April come closer, I guess .

Nevertheless, the Beta opened February 1st 12:00 CET. Our uptime was a tremendous 13 minutes, before the first crash occurred – that was about 12 minutes more than expected. We pretty soon accomplished uptimes of 30-60 minutes, and thanks to our should-be-patented Sys-op-in-a-box servers were restarted automatically and up again within a few minutes.

Thanks to all the feedback we received, we were able to pinpoint the major factors for the server crashes, and this week the servers have run continuously for up to 12 hours. Of course we are working on making these numbers even better, but we are pretty satisfied with our progress so far .

We have upped the allowed number of simultaneous players to 75, and provided this does not lead to greater problems, we hope to let in more testers next week. When and how many is yet to be decided, but we will post an announcement on the forums as soon as we know.

Staff wise, we have sort of expanded again. This time with three graduate students, who will help us out over the next months as junior staff members. Tom and Peter are writing a master’s thesis about in-game mechanics, and will provide us with analysis and recommendations. Søren is here to gain on-the-job experience as part of his IT engineer studies and will work as assistant programmer.

Oh, and welcome to all the new readers. Last time I sent out a newsletter, there were about 300 subscribers - now the number is over 4.000! Likewise our forum has grown to over 11.000 members. We greatly appreciate the support you are showing us.

Kind regards,

Morten