It's a Wedding!

It's already been hinted at from the previous announcements. But Lotor's getting hitched and IWG wants you to be there.

GM Wintergreen posted in Lotors Wedding Saturday 6/9/07:

Join us at the wedding area of Lotor's Summer Palace Saturday 6/9/07 for King Lotor's Wedding.

Server Times:
Heroes - 1:00pm CDT (20:00 GMT)
Legends - 3:00pm CDT (22:00 GMT)

Rumblings are that they wanted to do this with the update (see previous entries), but with OneEye going out of town they decided to do the bits that didn't require code changes. At the very least, it's an official event. And that's something we haven't had in a long time.

Update postponed indefinitely...

Well, I get home looking forward to an announcement about how the update's going. Instead, I get a bit of a downer...it seems that technical issues are really hurting the update going in.

GM Wintergreen posted in Update postponed - sorry folks - wedding is on:

Due to scheduling and some other background technical issues, the update that was promised for June 4th has been postponed. The new date will not be announced until we are 100% sure that it can go in without a hitch, but we are pretty sure we are looking at another month. We’re very sorry to push this back especially since you all have been so excited to see the new content. Please bear with us.

The wedding of King Lotor and Lady Anne will go forward this Saturday. Expect some really cool serverwide events in early July as well. We will announce server times for the wedding later today.

Naturally, I think we can expect some backlash from the community (there always seems to be someone(s) who think delays in an update are right sinful).

Luckily, though, OneEye did have a response to why this delay was happening:

OneEye posted in The postponed update:

It's pretty simple. I've added tons of new content for this update and next Monday I am going out of town for a few weeks for a planned vacation. It wouldn't be fair (to the rest of IWG) for us to throw an update up and me not be here if bad stuff hits the fan. So we are delaying until I get back. We tried to hit the date of 6/4, but due to several factors we missed it. You can blame that on me. I tried to add too much new stuff.

We are still moving ahead with the Lotor wedding and the storyline that will follow it.

So, long story short, they don't want to push the update while the main Designer is out of town. This is actually a pretty good thing, since OneEye's the guy in charge of new quests and items. If he's out of town doing his own thing, and it turns out that a new quest or item has a major bug about it, we wouldn't see anything until he got back. Could you live a week with a major bug in the NEW stuff?

Why the delay, holmes?

So why is the update being pushed back (and back again)? OneEye let us in on a little family secret:

OneEye posted in Update delayed:

in case anyone wants the story, the update was delayed because my wife threw me a surprise birthday party on Saturday. About 40 people showed up including my dad and brother from Florida. I had planned to finish up the update over the weekend, but this surprise threw me off schedule.

June 4th becomes June 5th 6th

Keeping in classic AE history, the scheduled update lives on a special "Dev Time". But the good news about the delay? Now we know what those "Book quests" are. And we even see that wishes for first aid and leadership becoming epool skills have been granted. Yay Devs!

OneEye posted in 6/4 update delayed till 6/5.:

The servers will be coming down at ~9am CST tomorrow morning for an update.

The update will include:

-several new creatures
-a new large dungeon
-new quests
-new book quests (like the rock troll quest)
-New store item - masks that allow you to change into creatures
-bug fixes
-first aid and leadership will be epoolable.
-further server updates to help alleviate the lag issue.

I know, my post a little late (i.e. this post was made 2 hrs before the servers are scheduled to go down). But more will follow as I have time to read the forums.

Edit: Wintergreen made a correction to the original post:

UPDATE: 6/5/07 - We had to push this until tomorrow. Sorry for the churn folks.

-WG

Just a little more of a wait. After all, the last "update" was tokens, and that was back in March. No, hotfixes don't count. :P