Hey all, just to let you know what is going on at the moment. Our plan for alpha is presently to get that into the hands of the first batch of players tomorrow morning, in a limited capacity. By limited capacity, what I mean is that they will have access to the "Combat Practice" portion of the game only, and not the wider game itself.
This will let them test out the combat portions of the game and give us feedback on balance and features and that sort of thing in that one area.
It may be as late as sometime Thursday before we let players into the wider game, but we'll just see how things go with my testing and tuning and integration work, Blue's new big batch of GUI work that I sent her this morning, and the current code sprint that Keith is about to start on. I think that "sometime Thursday" is a pretty good estimate of the back end of when that should all be done.
When we let people into the wider game for the first time, that will be officially when we start considering that "round 0" of the alpha. We'll probably only keep that up until mid next week, but I suppose we'll see. Then we'll move into round 1, and mostly go close to weekly by rounds from then on. The planned release date for the game remains unchanged -- sometime the week of Feb 24th, or else the day of Feb 27th.
All in all things are going well, it's just a very big game.
