It has been a bit since my last producer note so I wanted to catch people up a bit on where things are at these days. The team has been banging away on Chapter 7 for awhile now and things are looking fantastic at this point. I actually believe the collection system will be the sleeper hit of this chapter. Just looking at the badge collection alone was very cool, not to mention the scads of other new collections we have added. I am sure that folks are going to love the new rewards from the collections as well...There are definitely a number of cool ones. I also tested the Heroic IG-88 encounter and that was pretty smokin'...He's a pretty big guy " border="0" />. We have about three more weeks of implementation before the chapter will hit the TC's.
Today we also announced the new Warden program. I am pretty jazzed about this, as it is the most direct approach to combating credit spammers ever attempted. Please be sure to read the Announcement about this to get all the details. it will take a little while to scale up, but I think that it will put a major dent in the spammers on live once it hits its stride. DevH did his typical thorough job on this feature and I am very confident in its functionality.
We moved the Imperial Themepark revamp out to test yesterday and folks have been hammering away at it. So far it seems to be testing well, although we have spotted a few glitches here and there. Those have been addressed pretty quickly and I feel confident that we should be able to move this live by the end of next week. We also added some fixes and refinements to mines based in large part on a very lively discussion of the subject at Fan Faire. I really like it when we can react quickly to this type of direct feedback from the players and Blix really got down into that system and made it a lot tighter and more fair.
Thats it for now...I hope everyone has a great long weekend (for those folks overseas, we celebrate Labor Day on Monday here in the States). Hope folks find time to hit the Test Center and help us make sure the new features and fixes are solid before going live.