As we head into the holiday season, here’s a quick update on where we stand plus a little bit of holiday cheer.

As the community knows, our engineering team has been focusing on a number of key issues that have been affecting WAR over the last few weeks. These issues include crashes-to-desktop (CTDs), fortress crashes, and lockup issues when exiting scenarios and at certain loading screens. I’ve got some great news to report on all of these fronts. Over the last few weeks, we’ve gone a bit overboard in the number of patches that we have been making to both the client and servers in order to resolve these issues quickly, especially before the end of the year. Sometimes we have announced these patches, but sometimes these patches were done quietly while we tested out some of them on individual servers. The results of these efforts by the team and these patches have been quite wonderful and I’m happy to be able to talk about them now.

Our client crashes (CTDs), are now at their lowest point at any time during development or since we’ve gone LIVE. Over the last couple of weeks, we cut the number of CTDs down by 75% across all players in North America. In terms of fortress takes and their affect on server stability, we have had only one server that has crashed due to a fortress take in North America since Monday (and that was on a server that had the older code). While this is not a guarantee that we have solved all the issues, the fact is that the fixes we have made have resulted in numerous fortress assaults and lots of exciting open RvR action. Finally, in terms of client lockups, we have fixed the problems that came about after the 1.1 patch and we will continue to work on this issue with additional patches today and tomorrow. While I know that this has resulted in a bit more patching during the week than is usual for us, the results have been well worth it. All of these improvements have and/or are being sent to our partner GOA for rapid deployment for our European players.