The character deletion process which happened during maintenance on EU and US servers this week went very smoothly and without major incidents. This was an important step in the preparations for the server merges. As announced earlier today, the US server merges will happen on Monday, 25th of January and the EU server merges will be done on Wednesday, 27th of January. Both downtimes are announced for a duration of 24 hours.

We want to mention again that when the merge process is complete we will be giving all active subscribers an appropriate amount of free game-time to compensate for the additional downtime required for the merges. The details of this will be communicated once the merge process is complete.



New articles

There were also some articles and previews released on various websites this week. Here's a short overview:

We also would like to point out that MMOSITE.com is currently holding their 'Reader's Choice Award 2009'. Age of Conan is nominated in the category "Best MMO", "Best Gameplay" and "Most Anticipated" (Rise of the Godslayer). Make sure you place your vote there too.

In addition, Yellow Gremlin (aoc.yg.com) is having a contest where players can win free game time for Age of Conan. All you have to do is becoming a follower on YG Facebook and/or YG Twitter. More details about this can be found on Yellow Gremlin.



Production Update

This week the team have been focusing on completing the remaining tasks on the 1.06 update and making sure that we can release the update to the live servers as soon as possible once the merge process is complete. The update is now in the final tweaking and bug-fixing phases.

We also brought a new PvP gameplay feature to the Testlive servers: the "Shrines of Bori". With this, players will experience a guild-based ongoing outdoor conflict with capturable objectives, which takes place in the Border Kingdoms: Cimmerian End. Together with this additional possibility to do PvP, there will also be a PvP token system and additional tiers of PvP gear made available. So far the feedback from the players about the 'Shrines of Bori' have been extraordinary good throughout the board.

It’s important to mention that the “Shrines of Bori” will most probably not make it to the live servers with Update 1.06. We are using the time taken for the merge process to allow us to get some early public testing of this feature. This is important so that the team can see how players approach the locations and the flow of the feature before it goes back for another iteration pass internally. With a feature that involves the interaction of many players in an open play-field this testing will be very helpful to the team. We usually wouldn't put a feature on the test servers that is further out in the schedule, but on this occasion we felt it would be beneficial to the process.

For detailed information about this new PvP gameplay feature, check out the extensive explanation from the systems team on the Testlive forums here.