Greetings Citizen.
Today, we’re releasing an updated production schedule outlining our goals for the 2.6.1 patch. The features in this patch will not only improve the game’s performance and deliver some of the features that were originally planned for 2.6 like the in-game leader boards, message ordering and our new serialized variable system, but also address some of the balance issues now that 2.6 has been in your hands for almost a month.
We are also planning on one more small incremental patch, 2.6.2 that will include the MegaMap feature, which allows Players to seamlessly connect to different multiplayer matches or jump into a single player game mode without having to load a level every time. As well as introduce multi region game servers. This was one of our stretch goals and with the move to Amazon’s AWS we are now able to move forward with it which I know will make people in Europe and Australasia happy as 200ms+ pings aren’t fun!
On the project management side, department heads from all four studios were in LA this week to continue high level meetings on a number of topics, including the 2.6.2, 3.0 production schedules, which we’ll provide more specifics on 3.0 as soon as they are set. It’s easy to rough in a schedule for what we want to accomplish, but fleshing out the details and getting revised bids from all our leads around the world takes time and an immense amount of coordination.
This week, we premiered a tweaked version of Around the Verse. While we’ve still maintained most of our features like the Studio Update and Behind the Scenes Featurettes, we’ve broken out the community section to be its own show and afford it the time to really cover the exciting things happening in the community. Our main goal with ATV going forward is to focus on upcoming game features and content, rather than retrospective ones (this week’s ATV was an exception due to the short turnaround after returning from holiday). The plan is to dive a little deeper than we did last year, pulling interviews from all the studios to help show the challenges and advances of development.
Meanwhile, the roll out of new Community shows is already underway. Last Friday, we premiered Happy Hour which featured a livestream of Star Marine alongside insider information from Design Director Todd Papy and Senior Producer Alexander Marshal. Today’s show focused on Pirate Swarm with Sean Tracy as a guest.
Finally, if you’ve received a PTU invite to join the testing of Spectrum, I highly encourage you to do so. We’re hoping to roll it out with the release of 2.6.1, so the more people putting it through its paces now the better. We’re excited by the initial feedback, and can’t wait until Spectrum is the main hub for the community and devs to discuss and share their experiences with the game.
– Chris Roberts
Good news for non-North Americans.
Should be good news for North Americans too, as our instances are less likely to be bogged down as well. 
Bad news is that this may not apply to the PU, only Electronic Access, at least according to difference semi credible sources. So guess we will see.
Look, even if it only applies to the EA stuff, at least I’ll finally be able to play Star Marine without my targets teleporting, and lag spikes locking the server up for 30sec 
.
One of the things that causes lag spikes is a bug that was covered on bugsmashers and is fixed in 2.6.1. It had to do with a character’s player model needing to be re-loaded into memory each time a player dies and is respawned.
So both bug fixes and regional servers should help a lot.