An Update on Alpha One Schedule

Glorious Ashes community,

Over the past few months of testing, we have made significant progress with our Alpha One features and performance. The preview tests in December and February provided valuable data that my team has been working diligently to iterate upon in order to improve our performance and diagnostic capabilities. In our February testing, we hit some challenges and have spent the last few weeks addressing those issues. Of course, at the onset of our Alpha One schedule we acknowledged that we may see some changes as we move through the different phases and undiscovered work becomes visible. As we have been addressing these challenges, my team has determined that additional polish is needed in order to guarantee a smoother Alpha One testing phase, and yesterday I approved this NDA extension. I know that is not what you want to hear, but my team and I are committed to excellence for Ashes of Creation, and honestly, this is the purpose of these Alphas and Betas - to discover issues and address them as early as possible. I am committed to bringing you along on that journey, regardless of the good, bad, or ugly.

As a result, I wanted to let you know that our Alpha One playtest schedule has shifted accordingly. We will be prolonging the NDA testing based on data collected during our February Alpha One Preview. This means that our non-NDA Alpha One Preview is now scheduled to occur from May 14 to May 21, 2021, and our Alpha One test is scheduled from June 1 to June 30, 2021. Intermittent downtimes may occur during weekends for updates and as we patch in new bug fixes and content changes. As eager as our team is to open the gateways to Verra for you, we ultimately feel this is the right decision in order to make sure everyone can test the features we’d like to focus on during Alpha One, and the performance is reflective of the insights we have gained through these preview tests.

In the meantime, we will continue with our periodic spot testing under NDA with our Glorious Alpha One testers, as we work to deploy updates between now and May's testing. We, of course, will continue to show footage of testing in our March and April live stream updates, so please make sure to tune in there and on our socials for more updates! It’s been a thrill to see the world of Verra take shape with each update - this would not be possible without the help of our glorious community and hard work of our incredible Alpha One testers. Thank you all for your continued support, patience, and feedback as we march forward towards our major Alpha One milestone.

Wishing you the best with much love and appreciation,

Steven Sharif

Creative Director