February 16, 2016

All-Player PTR Test Begins THURSDAY

Last Chance for Member-only Server Rewrite PTR Badge!

The server rewrite is making excellent progress! If you read last week's update post, you know that Yorumi is hunting down the last BIG bug, while M finishes building some functionality and they both crush the smaller bugs. But to get as many of the bugs fixed before we release the server rewrite, we need MORE TESTERS! And that means... opening up a free-player server so more people can run around on the new server and find issues.

So starting this Thursday, the current member-only PTR badge will go rare and the new server code will be added onto J6 server (which will temporarily be renamed Testing Server 2). Logging on to either Testing Server or Testing Server 2 will unlock the new PTR badge!

What We Need PTR Testers to Do

This one is REALLY simple - just play the game like normal! We need to make sure that all the code we've ported over and changes we've made are working as intended, and that the re-balancing we've done holds up until more stress and load.

Why We Need the Server Rewrite

We have a good deal of control over the game, but the current version of AQWorlds uses server software whose base we did not build ourselves (though we created all of our server-based game functionality)... and that means there are some things we cannot change.

This is one of the main causes of the random bugs some of you are reporting. It's also one of the reasons some bugs (like desynced friends/guild lists) have not been fixed and why some features (like the better botting detection, all-new class skills, and finished Guild cities) have not been released.