Folks,

I’m very sorry, but I have some bad news for you. After today’s two hours of testing, I have tell you that:

Tomorrow, live, from beautiful, downtown Fairfax, VA. It’s another all-day, CSE Live Streaming event!

Sorry (again), I couldn’t resist the SNL reference, it was just too good of a day here! Today’s tests went very, very well. We peaked at over 1K players and bots. No character creation problems, no log in problems, and no server crashes. Frame rate in the battles was well within expected range, and our networking code was also performing as expected. We had to apply a quick band-aid to our chat server, but once we did that, it worked fine. So, it is safe to say that today was successful, and we have definitely moved one Jötnar-sized step closer to opening the Alpha.

We want tomorrow to be another fun day for our Backers and team. We will begin the Live Stream on March, 3rd, 2015, at 10AM Eastern Time, 7AM Pacific Time, or 3PM UTC. During the day, we will once again call on our Alpha and IT folks to help break the build. If nothing major crops up during tomorrow’s tests, we will open Alpha testing at the end of the day, and we will leave the servers up all night for our Alpha folks to enjoy!
As we did on Saturday, we will have contests, chats, etc., and I will definitely be doing a Q&A session. It should be another fun day for our Twitch viewers, and potentially a very fun day for our Backers. No guarantees, of course, but today went even better than we expected it would. It really was a very, very good day.

As I promised, we will give be awarding extra stuff to all of our Backers for the delay in opening Alpha. We’ll discuss that after we make the decision to either open Alpha or wait a little longer. Fortunately for all of us, the delay may be even shorter than I hoped!

As always, I thank all of our Backers for everything. Speaking for the team, the support you have shown us over the last 48 hours has been over-the-top. I can’t express my gratitude for the way you accepted and supported our decision to delay Alpha. I’ve read all your emails. I’ve seen your posts on our Forums, on Massively OP, MMORPG, reddit, and elsewhere. I’m truly touched by what I’ve read…and you folks who have been following us since the Kickstarter know that when I say something like that, I mean it from the bottom of my heart. As usual with me, it is more than just words. Part of the proof for that will come in the little surprise that some of our IT folks have been testing for the last few weeks. We’ll talk about it more tomorrow, but it is just one of the ways that I and CSE can say thanks to our Backers. You folks have earned this surprise.

That’s it for today’s news. Have a great evening, and I’ll see you tomorrow on our Twitch channel (http://www.twitch.tv/citystategames). Or, if you’re an Alpha or IT Backer, I’ll see you in the build!

-Mark