Quite a bit happening this week, huh? I'm sure you've all seen some of it, and I'll try cover it all to some extent.

Shadowlands gone gold
Yes, Shadowlands has gone gold. That means the software version which is going to be on the CD in the Shadowlands box is done, has been written on a set of CDs and sent to the manufacturers who'll make all the copies needed for the boxes.

This does not mean we're done with it all. There's still content to come, tweaking to be done, and bugs to be corrected. All this will be updated about a week before launch, with an own portion to be downloaded and updated when you have Shadowlands installed.

Bulletin Board changes
This bulletin board has been getting slower and slower over the last few months. To counter this, we've done some changes, mostly on the market forums.

They will no longer contain old posts - any thread with no replies for the last three months will be removed completely from the database. To prevent people's post counts fluctuating due to this, we've also turned off post counting in the market forums, which people will notice by a drop in their total post count.

The first batch of posts to be removed was bound to be large (370000 posts), and a complete rebuild of the search index was needed. This rebuild is still ongoing, but should be done in about 6-8 hours. The entire search option has been disabled, but will be reactivated when the index is done.

If this doesn't help enough on the speed of the bulletin board, we'll have to look at other options. We're already set on adding some more hardware to the servers, which should hopefully help quite a bit, but that's some time off still.

Pricing increase
Everybody should've gotten an e-mail now with the new pricing for Anarchy Online. Basically, the price for 1 and 3 months subscriptions increases, and the cost for 6 months subscription decreases. In addition we have a new 12 months subscription option, with a very good price, if I may state my own opinion.

The numbers:
Code:
€/$14.95 per month for 1-month
€/$11.95 per month for 3-month / €/$35.85 total
€/$ 9.95 per month for 6-month / €/$59.70 total
€/$ 7.95 per month for 1-year  / €/$95.40 total
Client update (14.9.1)
Yesterday we had a small client update, meaning a small download for everybody, and the removal of the "/start" command which could be used in the chat input to start Windows applications from inside the AO client. While I won't go into details (as that might put bad ideas in some people's heads) I can say this is because people might have used it for things it was not supposed to be used for.

Room lag and grid crashing
People have experienced that they get small spikes of lag when entering certain rooms in mission dungeons, and that their client disconnects when being moved to the grid by somebody. We've solved one issue related to this, and the fix will be in the 15.0.1 update in a few weeks. This only affects GeForce cards though, and only if you use T&L (Transform & Lighting - acceleration through the graphics card).

You can try out the fix yourself, actually, by just turning off the T&L in your graphics device settings in the launcher. Choose the option using only HAL instead, and see whether you notice any improvements. The lag and disconnected (caused by the lag, I guess) depend on other things too, so it might not have a noticeable effect.

I hope that didn't sound too cryptic, or was totally wrong. I'm not the tech guy here, after all.

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Ok, that was about it. I'll be checking into some of the sub-communities too now before the weekend. See you next week.