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News about the beta and the future
Written by Trishin on 6/29/2016
Dear players,

We thought it was time to give you a small update on what is going on with Uthgard, so here is a few notes.

Reporting issues and work distribution:
Since we opened the beta about 2 month ago, a lot of bugs have been reported in the tracker. For the most part these have been very helpful and you have been good at downvoting / invalidating reports that should not get our attention. We very much appreciate that, and hope you will be doing that some more. It is key that topics without evidence are not taking up developer time as their time is already very limited compared to GM time. This is why you might see a lot of item / mob / quest fixing compared to class ability changes, or code changes. So don't worry, fixing a quest, or an item does not slow down our progress towards a relaunch. If you are interested in work distribution the work queue might be of interest to you.

What are we working on right now:
Right now there are a few things on our radar, however our main focus is on fixing the missing piece of XP splitting (high level player, with a player outside their level clamps in a group). This is not an easy problem, we are however getting very close and hope we might have found a solution we can implement. Needless to say, we do not want to make a custom solution to this, as it could ruin the gaming experience if this is not done correctly. And in turn this could create imbalances between new and old players if we some day manage to find the right solution. As some of you know, we are not willing to mess up tomorrow, by creating an easy fix today. We hope you understand and agree with this decision. With that being said though, we feel we are getting very close and will therefore implement the next step in our plans. (Read more further below)

Along side this, the main world build focus has been on epic quests and implementing the dragons (If you want to know the status of epic quests, please have a look at the issue tracker).

DISCLAIMER: The following time periods are estimates and may change at any time! Please do not get angry with us if we do not meet these estimates, we will do our best to do so, but real life might happen.

What are we planning for the future:
We have decided to implement an instant level 30 NPC which also hands out free respecs in the capital cities. We hope this will encourage more people to test class abilities, and to test the BGs and RvR. By doing so we can hopefully get started on collecting data for the bugs that needs to be fixed when XP splitting is fixed. (A small note needs to be made here, we are aware that relic guard spawns are not complete at this point, and until we fix this in the future, there is little reason to report bugs about this. We will make another news post or announcement when all guard systems are fully working). This NPC will be available from the 1st of July and will give free respecs, and possibly some way of getting geared up (we are still trying to figure out a way to do this without breaking the economy completely as we still would like to gather data about this). This stage of the beta will last for about 1 month. A note is worth to be made here, that July is the month where most of the staff is on vacation in various time periods. So expect bugs / player support to be slowed down, we feel like the instant 30 test is a good testing phase for us to do this in, as most of the testing should be evolved around xp splitting in groups, and it might take time for everyone to get a good sense of whether that is working or not.

What will happen after instant 30:
After we have run the instant 30 setup, we will move onto the last major bug reporting step of our beta testing. This means we will introduce instant 50, and we will be focusing on RvR bugs and missing / bugged class functionality. This is also the state where we will be focusing on relic guards, dragons, etc.
This stage should hopefully take 1-2 months only (hopefully just 1 month), and after that we will move onto the final step.

What will happen after instant 50:
After instant 50 has been done, we will move onto the final stage of the beta testing. In this stage we will close down the server and prepare to relaunch (Wiping the servers, making sure all of our GM internal tools are working, etc). This stage should hopefully only take 1-2 weeks.

New GMs:
Some of you might have noticed we have recruited some new GMs. These are new additions to our team, and we hope you will welcome them to the team as we have. While they are still new to Uthgard, most of their tasks will be focused around world build issues (items, mobs, quests), but we hope they can eventually branch out and take on bigger roles. So with that being said, please help us welcome Decidon, Genjiro, Cirdan, and Alcyon to the team.

Happy testing,

Your Uthgard Team