ArtCraft is about to take a little piece of tape and put it down over Crowfall’s “on” button.
“We plan to transition the game servers to 24×7 uptime within a couple of months,” the studio announced last night. “When that happens, we’ll also bring up a new ‘Testing Environment’ that will be separate from the current game universe. The purpose of this Test Environment will be to give us a way to stage new changes for our testing audience (which is now over 15,000 invited players) without interrupting the 24×7 service.”
Basically, the stable “live” alpha servers will be up all the time, while the test servers will not. How do you get in?
“The Test Environment will follow the invite plan that we’ve had in place since our first Hunger Dome testing: Whenever significant new functionality comes online, we will wipe the environment and start by inviting our Pre-Alpha 1 test group, followed by the Pre-Alpha 2 test group, followed by the Alpha1 test group and so on. The goal will be to stage players into the functionality over time to ensure that it is playable and stable for an ever-increasing player load. Once the changes have been properly tested in the Test Environment, with an appropriate number of players, the changes will be migrated over to the ‘Live Environment’ for the larger test audience (i.e. Pre-Alpha 1 test group all the way through Beta 2 test group).”
Do note that Crowfall is also switching up its pledge packages, so if you’re antsy to get into the beta 2 test, you should probably buy in sooner rather than later.
