We had fundamental successes during the event. FPS was surprising good given how many people came, and our changes to the animation budget for the enemies worked out well. Setting animation budgets is one of the trickiest parts of making an MMO with big battles. Finally, we are very pleased to see that we have the same kind of happy, positive playerbase as CoH had. That makes all of this testing much more fun!

This is the list of what we’re working on fixing so far:

1. There appears to be a server memory leak that was causing FPS to slowly decrease over time until we restarted the servers. It may also be the cause of what we’re calling “death lag”.

2. There were issues with the chat servers, causing conversational delays.

3. After feedback from all of you, we will experiment with having the Nagdellians fight in teams, just like players might. That will take some work, but we think it will make the fight less chaotic and more fun.

4. Our teaming UI needs to be improved to make sure messages no longer go awry. We also want to make it easier to heal and buff teammate through their picture icons on the screen.

5. We noticed that after going to the hospital and then running back to under the Arch, it was taking too long to reload enemies. Invisible Nagdellians are not the goal – at least, not in this particular event – so we will be looking into improving their spawn-in loading times.

We will return with the new and improved invasion Beta event 2.0, hopefully sometime in the next 4-6 weeks, so be on the lookout! In the meantime, we plan to explain some of the details of the SoH mission creation tools and processes’ we hope you will find that enjoyable.

Things are moving quickly, and we will be soliciting more and more of your opinions and preferences in the weeks and months to come. There are also some new polls up on the website. Let us know what you think about invasion, our planned mission content, and the game on the SoH forums!