January Development Update

Hi guys!

There has been a lot going on since the release of Talisman in December, so I wanted to take some time to update you on a few things we're working on.

Ascendancy
We're planning to release the Ascendancy expansion (2.2.0) in early March. The Talisman challenge leagues end on the 3rd (US time), and the deployment of Ascendancy will likely occur in time for the weekend.

We're currently in the final stages of creating/polishing content and internally testing the Labyrinth. We will probably run a short test on our Alpha servers (with existing testers at this stage - please don't message us about it. We'll let you know in the news if we're seeking more testers).

We will start announcing more Ascendancy classes in a few days. There's one each for the Marauder, Ranger and Templar coming up this week. We also have some new skills and other bits and pieces to announce in the coming weeks.

Trade System
As I write this, I can see Jonathan working on trade improvements. They'll be deployed in several stages this year. The first stage, substantially improved APIs, is expected around the release of Ascendancy in March. Other stages later this year include things like cross-instance trading and some other heavily-requested trade features (not an Auction House).

Company Expansion
A few weeks ago, I wrote in the news that we had expanded to 60 staff. Assuming that a few people accept pending job offers, we'll be at 69 staff within a couple of weeks. This expansion of the company significantly improves our resources in many areas.

Performance
We will soon have two full-time programmers working on client and server performance. One is a dedicated graphics engine programmer. In addition, we have engaged an external company to help with some improvements to our graphics engine.

Custom Uniques
We have added an additional full-time developer to the custom unique design process. This will be enough capacity that we can have very fast turnaround on discussion of these unique items.

We're also working on plenty of other things that we're excited to share in the future, of course :)