Hellgate London
I mentioned in my last dev diary that we had added SanGawku to the development team--he has since made some great contributions and continues to be an asset to the team. Additionally, the venerable NiteHawk, steward of hellgateaus.info himself, has lent his skilled hand and mind to the development team and achieved great things! We are lucky to have such a dedicated, passionate, and funny team, and I am grateful to be surrounded by smart people while we bust our butts getting Hellgate multiplayer back to where it deserves to be.
Hellgate London
One of SanGawku's fantastic contributions since the last dev diary has been to write a tool for us to easily select and invite alpha testers--it generates the invitations, accounts, passwords, emails, etc. As I mentioned in the last dev diary, we are working on a dedicated london2038.com website. This is still the plan, and now we plan to migrate the features of the account management tools into the new website, so going forward testers (and eventually all players) can apply, be accepted, and manage their accounts in one place online (including changing their passwords; yes, I have heard your cries about long auto-generated passwords ;)). In addition to some account management tools, the new website will feature an up-to-date skill tree/skill calculator which will accurately reflect the state of skills in 2038 so players can experiment with builds. Furthermore, we will be launching a wiki so that testers (and all future players) can collect knowledge and tips about the game in one place.
We are hot on the trail of an open alpha. We need to address some of the biggest known issues, and nail down some existing issues in the recently-released Abyss expansion, as well as continue to improve our tools, but overall the server is extremely stable (very, very high uptime and generally good ping/latency for players in both Europe and the Americas). We expect playability to accelerate, as well as our overall insight into the mechanics of the game to improve due to our ability to decrypt the game data and assets completely. Please keep your eyes peeled both here on hellgateaus and especially on Discord to keep up with the latest developments. Thank you all for your support! 041b061a72