My Own "Other Side"
With Andy K. out for a few weeks, I'm helping the team manage ongoing development of The Matrix Online. I am now thoroughly convinced that producers must have the mind of an octopus to keep track of so many things. Maybe I should've picked a better handle.

And it's never just ongoing work that needs tracking--it's all the unexpected issues that come up, as well. That includes everything from the increase in reported client crashes to one of the artists being out to have his first kid. (Congrats, Brian.) Nothing ever goes just right--especially not game development.

Recent Crashes
Speaking of crashes: The team is investigating the increased client crashes and will work as quickly as possible to fix the issue(s). If you are experiencing client crashes since last week, you can help us a great deal by describing what was going on when the crash occurred using the Crash Reporter. Your input gets appended to the logs our engineers receive, so your details may give us important information about the root cause.

LESIG News
I've finally completed reviewing the LESIG applications and have the initial list of invitees. I'd like to get folks into the LESIG forums as quickly as possible, so I will be looking for names on the forums and adding them to the LESIG group directly. If you suddenly see new forums appear in the coming week, that's why.

If you sent an application in to Aether back in the day and your forum name has changed, send me a private message on the forums and let me know what your new name is. If your name is in the list I now have, it will make it easier for me to track you down quickly.

Moderator Signature Winners
We have the winners of the Forum Moderator Sig Competition! CooliceT certainly showed off his skillz by getting 3 out of 5 signatures picked by the community. I'll be harassing Sync_Routine and Ryujin to pick their five and get mine up for voting as well as soon as I can.

Serenity by CooliceT

Steelrose by CooliceT

Mad_Hatter by Aquatium

Root7 by CooliceT

Penguin by RogueA

Thanks to everyone who took the time to deck out our new moderators!

Show Off MxO Movie Contest: Entries Closed
The deadline for the "Show Off MxO Movie Contest" ended on Thursday, December 1 (with a little extension for late entries). As mentioned on the thread, we'll be taking a look at what everyone has submitted and deciding exactly what we're going to do with them to show off the game to the rest of SOE. Stay tuned for more information in the next couple weeks.

Thanks to everyone for your hard work!

In Conclusion...
Normally, I'd put some links to threads on the forums in this section. However, I'm planning to split Other Side and an overview of community doings into two separate articles. Yes, this increases my article count, but it also means I can dedicate more space to interesting forum topics. I plan on beginning this in the next week or two (once Andy's holding the reins again).

But what would the Other Side be without a teaser? So, let's finish off with some talk about Combat Revision 2.0.

The first half of the dev journal will go up next week--and it's all about CR2.0. I'll also be bugging Archon for the second half, in the hopes of having it ready for publishing the week after.

Why? As someone is sure to point out, our target for the Test Server is December, which is suddenly this month. (My how time flies.) While we always would like progress to go faster, things are going well so far. At this time, we're working to reach a state where your participation and feedback will be useful.

What does "useful" mean? Any time you implement a complex system like this, there are a lot of issues. What we want is to take care of as many of the larger known issues as we can before you get your hands on it. That way your feedback can concentrate on issues that we aren't aware of or on how we could better polish the system.

Though the Test Server isn't ready for business yet, it is close. How close? Well...

Combat Revision 2.0 is currently slated for Update 40 (hence the numbering), which is dependant upon internal and community testing. I hope you're all as anxious to dig into it as we are to let you see it.

Until next week, I'll see you on the other side.

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