Our offline test for 1.31 has recently concluded and we want to thank all of you for participating. For the first time we used our new polling software to allow you to give us performance feedback and the results were great. Hundreds of you gave us direct feedback which we were then able to chart and trend to give us a much better picture of where we are than we have been able to do previously. Most of you have systems very similar to what we use in-house comprising of Win7 64 bit or Win XP 32 bit. All but a few of you are running multi-core processors with 4 gigs of ram and the most common video cards you have are in the nVidia 9800 series. This mirrors exactly what we use at Rat Central.

Further, 75% of you felt that performance was good or better. We still need to see some gains in performance but those are promising numbers. As a side note the latest ATI drivers (10.1 beta) are showing a solid 30% increase in performance. All of us tells us that we are right on track with our internal focus on performance.

The next stage for us will be to continue work on the last of the online features like no-fire and capture. Once we have the basics of capture done we'll start to play test through some rule variations and about the time we have that nailed down we should have some performance improvements coming in. That will signal the next phase of testing which will be to conduct Open Testing on our Beta Server. You'll all be invited back in to participate in Focus Testing of specific gameplay scenarios as well as give us Feedback in threads. I also think that we'll re-do some of the polling that made this first round so beneficial.

If you're itching to continue testing, we still have the offline client available and we have several feedback threads going in the Testing Forum. We're also still collecting information there on any bugs you find so feel free to continue participating as we await the next round of testing to begin.

Here at Playnet, we use the more aggressive managerial style favored by dictators the world over.