How is Theatres of War now? And what's next?

It did go quite well, the first test was a little rough for performance, and it got a little worse than we expected, which mostly comes down to the size of the team we have to test. Just from the first test, we spent a whole sprint fixing the roughly 180 items we got from reports. With all of these things benefitting the PU, which players may see.One of the things we say that server performance was actually pretty good, but when we scaled it up to about 5x our previous smaller tests, we saw we had some issues with the matchmaker which was down to some of the logic in there. Another thing we spent some time adding in were analytics so that when we did do these tests it was just a matter of getting feedback, but let us see solid data from the game. Allowing us to see that someone managed to kill someone else with a fire-extinguisher, something that had us all curious. And to add to the mystery, the Valk chair managed to get 2 kills.

If you look at ToW as a breakdown of the PU gameplay, we got some incredible feedback from the evo testers about certain issues that spread across both game modes such as ship handling and character feeling. We broke down that feedback and got some real gold-dust, and we've created a plan for the next ToW test, so let's just say when we do the next test for ToW expect the game to play much differently. It will feel more Star Citizen, in the best of way, which I think when we first added ToW, much like SM and AC, it's a very distilled experience. With all the feedback we've gotten from both external and internal sources, I do feel that the next test will have that more Star Citizen feel.