Hi all,

Please click through to the link below to read this announcement in full.

We wanted to take a few minutes to write a bit of a 'state of the game' update. Firstly, thank you all so much for jumping on board with us. Seeing Britain Bank full of people, the streets of Minoc busy and ore flowing out of Minoc mines (when it doesn't get interrupted by a red-named individual!) and folks spelunking in our dungeons has been an amazing experience. We couldn't have done all this without you, so thank you!

Now for what the development team is up to right now:

1. Our #1 priority is performance and stability - they really go hand in hand, and that is what we are prioritising right now. While you may not necessarily see it as a player, we are still tackling some back end performance challenges which simply must be addressed before we can move onto anything else.

2. Critical bug fixes - I'm sure those of you that have sat through the multiple restarts with us already would be aware that we are beating down critical bugs left, right and centre. We know this is disruptive to your play time, and we thank you for your patience. It won't last forever, and we are making good headway here.

One of the most challenging bugs to date has been the trade window bug. Note that we are still working on the root cause for that one, and will advise just as soon as we're able to fix it.

3. Anything else - this includes any low priority bugs (not game breaking), adding content, tweaking balance, filling out the world, and everything else on our (quite frankly huge) to do list. All of this is prioritised lower until we get #1 sorted, and to a lesser degree, #2.

With all of that in mind, we are going to be a little more disruptive over the next day or two with additional restarts, as we work on #1. In most cases, we have to do this to enable other methods of logging and debugging, in an attempt to get to root causes of various issues. You may also see 'lag spikes' on occasion as we get the info we need. You may also wonder why we even need to do this, as the game is performing great for you all! We'll ask you to bear with us on all of that, and trust that it is necessary.

You're also going to see bugfixes potentially introduce new, unintended bugs on occasion. Sorry about that! Know that we are working on all of this as quickly as we can.

In addition, you will still see oddities like mobs in the water or up on mountains. You might end up in black space (send in a /page!) or encounter other 'cosmetic' issues that are annoying. We do know about most of these and will work to fix them, however as mentioned earlier, if it's not 'game breaking', it's taking a lower priority for now.

I'm sure we'll get 3 or 4 weeks down the track and look back at this phase and laugh. What I can share with you though is we are well prepared to deal with the issues that you only encounter once you actually 'go live' and we will work through them all.

We could have also delayed the launch to address some of these items, but we wanted to stick to our guns this time. I am hoping most of you agree that the game is generally in a decently playable state, and are having fun out there!

Sorry for the (slightly) bumpy road in the meantime. We look forward to continuing this journey with all of you!