One big feature yes : the game is being cleaned. To really answer your question, yes, there will be small features introduced during the spring clean (the major work currently in progress). Features such as mail notification or the death penalty removal service on Altars, presented in last week's glimpse of production, are typical of the kind of features you will get during the spring clean. They are small things, but make a lot of difference regarding gameplay and user friendliness. It's pretty much the same as with a real-life spring clean : when you clean a room, adding some flowers to it finishes the job. :-)

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• /chatLog : Switch log of chat
• /follow : Follow the target
• /guild <message> : Send a message to your guild
• /ignore <playername> : Add a player fo the ignore list
• /region <message> : Speak in the region chat channel
• /say <message> : Say something to players around you
• /shout <message> : Shout over the whole region (the message appears in the "Around You" and "User chat" windows)
• /team <message> : Send a message to your current team
• /tell <playername> <message> : Send a private message to another player
• /who : Display all players currently in the same region
• /who GM : Display all gamemasters currently in game
• /where : Ask information on the current position

• /afk : Set the player as 'away from keyboard' (currently desactivated)

And you can also use all the emotes via a slash-command (for example, /agree). The list is available in-game : right clic, and select emotes.

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The RAID engine is usually described as an invasion system. Actually, it is a bit more than that : it's the whole architecture responsible for the control of NPC creatures in-game. Of course, it is behind the kitins invasions during events : one of its major features is its ability to control a large number of entities without performance issues; it allows groups to behave strategically during battles, to kill and replace the usual fauna on a given place, and to organize battles on a continental scale. You will see more of its features as the outposts are opened as the RAID engine is used to allow battles involving large number of players and NPCs. As it happens, it is also used by the event managers, through their tools, to control some of the events (that's the ones I was refering to two weeks ago).

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Bjørn Arve Lagim and David Cohen Corval are still hard at work producing new musics for the game, so your answer is definitely yes. Right now, there are music assigned to places such as cities entrances; it is already giving some athmosphere, but we plan to extend the concept to other lands.

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That's of course something we would like to see in game, since it would really help people who, like you, are dedicating some of their time to help or create things for others. It's not a small feature, so it is not planned for the spring clean, but it could increase the game experience for everyone; so this is still something which is in discussion, even if there is no definitive answer on this subject yet.

Also, when you start to think about this kind of feature, get into the broader subject of player-generated content. And that's a subject on which I can speak with the heart, since allowing players to influence online worlds is the very reason why I am working for an MMO game company. I learnt computing within the open source world, where the idea of allowing everyone to contribute is common sense, even if we still have to see how it could be well adapted to the gameplay of an MMO game.

The general issue here lies with the obligation to maintain consistency within the universe. That's not something to be underestimated : if you do it the wrong way, the universe can clearly lose its interest. Miriads of contributions won't help a universe to become more rich if they are all moving toward different and contradictory directions : what matters is not really to which extent you open yourself to contributions, but how you integrate these contributions. You have to define mecanisms to validate (or refuse) contributions before they can be integrated - pretty much like the open-source software projects deal with external code contributions.

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Yes, there are issues that in-house and ATS testers do not detect; I won't details the reasons for that again, as I have already discussed it lengthily in news from the devs. This said, it can also happen that we release a patch containing bugs that we have known about, but only if we consider that the improvements that patch provides are sufficient.

For old bugs, most of the time it's not a matter of not being able to find them : either through internal tests or through your bug reports, we know most of them. As I explained in the article Patch release process, fixing a problem of any sort takes time. Our development team is small and they can only do a limited number of things at any one time, so bug fixes, system improvements and other issues each have to await their turn. One of the goals of the spring clean is clearly to give the guys time to go back through the bug report database and fix issues that have been about for too long.

For new bugs, the same reasons can sometimes be relevant. For example, let's consider a fix to a given problem which is in tests; if the fix introduces a new issue which is less critical than the fixed problem, it's always better to patch the fix to the live servers than to wait for it to be perfect : even if a new bug is introduced, you get a better game in the meantime.

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I already provide big texts. You get more than three pages every week, and I can assure you that's a lot of work on my side. The problem here is that some people do not like to read big texts; a lot of players didn't read them, or at least not entirely, for that reason, and complained about it. So, for the periodical 'glimpse of production' article, I try to be a little more shiny, having pictures and smaller texts, since I already publish a lot of lengthy texts on other subjects. But now you are the one to be disappointed. So I get the impression that I will never be able to please everyone here... But of course, I will continue to adapt my articles to your feedback.

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We put the entire patch on the ATS. But test versions are a lot more active than the live ones : they are constantly modified and tuned to make them more stable; as previously said, even small changes in MMORPGs can have repercussions which are apparently unrelated, so it can happen that some of the changes performed at the end of the testing timeframe have unpredicted consequences. There is nothing anyone can do about this - apart from delaying patches for months - since it is a never-ending iterative process.

But it doesn't mean that the ATS testing is meaningless : on the contrary, the more people that test on it, the quicker we are able to spot bugs, so that less changes are introduced in the later stages of testing and the sooner we can get the new content out and released.

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We have already copied characters from the live shards to the ATS in the past, and we may do it again in the future. However, there are a few technical issues today with the character copy that prevent us to do it systematically.

First, a number of things are managed on a per-shard basis including character names, guilds and the merchant systems. These all suffer to differing degrees when one merges characters from different shards onto the ATS. Second, timers are not synchronized between different shards, so it causes issues with things like temporary effects on your character, active missions, etc.

But, as previously said, we have already done it, and we could do it again to test specific aspects of the game.

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Xavier.

Edit 22/03: Since the /who <playername> does not functions correctly, I have erased it from the commands list.