Steam is launching shortly and everyone is excited! Today we have opened the doors to our “Welcome Back Soldiers,” and we’re also doing some last minute fixes on our game server in preparation for that big launch. Meanwhile we are here to announce some important Free Play subscription improvements that we think will improve the experience for new players joining our game beyond their initial trial period. I also have an update regarding our server infrastructure (cell hosts)… So buckle up, here we go!

RANK THRESHOLDS INCREASED (NOW LIVE)

For a long time Free Play and Starter subscription users have been quickly hitting a wall in terms of progression. After some careful review the team at CRS has found a way to fix this, and allow Free Play and Starter subscribers to go from Rank 1 (Recruit) to Rank 13 (Lt. Colonel), while continuing to maintain the value and access behind each subscription type. 

This is a major development because progression for users is very critical. People want things to work towards and it will also incentivize these users to go to a Premium account at a later time once they earn more rank, likely increasing the probability to bigger levels than previous.

FREE PLAYERS CAN POST MISSIONS (LIVE)

Missions are the gateway to accessing everything inside of the game, and since we want maximum flexibility for our users to rally up with their friends, this is another major development. It also means that these users won’t get bottlenecked or cut off from the game at anytime. 

RESERVE SMG IS GOING TO STAY WITH FREE PLAY

After very careful consideration we want our Free Play subscribers to be able to access the limited submachine gun. There was talk about them having a Rifle only, and while we agree that this is the most important soldier on the battlefield, we also wanted to actively work to give them a taste towards an automatic weapon. For our non-free play subscribers, consider retention of the users. We want people to keep coming back and playing the game, because a populated battlefield is the most important aspect of our massively multiplayer online game. That said, we may tweak the load out a little more and reserve the right to do so.

30 DAY TRIAL FOR STEAM USERS – DURING SEPTEMBER

Because of our staggered roll out we are going to up the ante and create a maximum opportunity for our Steam users to get engaged and invested into WWII Online. Consider this an investment into these players. You will be able to keep all the rank you can earn and we’ve literally doubled the amount of free time you can get for everyone who signs up in September.

Possible option (decision to be made later): If this goes amazingly well, we may make the 30 day trial a default for Steam users. We’re actually going to be testing quite a bit to see how this goes and we’re happy with the decision for all of September. We want players in-game and having a good time to start a fantastic Steam launch, what better a way to welcome thousands of new community members?

So in a nut shell, these changes are all tailored to ensuring the best possible release and retention of users. We still feel confident that our other subscriptions maintain substantial value and hope users will learn to love our game and back up our small studio so we can expand our development capabilities, and more rapidly deploy new content and fixes.

CELL HOST(S) UPDATE

Reminder: Cell Hosts manage the total amount of concurrent users we can have via load balancing.

So we’ve had to do quite a few server restarts this week, sorry about that. It is crunch time and we have to make quick changes to prepare for. The good news is our development team found a major memory leak issue between cell hosts and clamped it. So while your HITS might be showing up as 0, even if you have a Kill (1), don’t worry about it we’re still counting all of those.

There may be some more server restarts so brace yourself, and understand that this is super important to iron out a couple last issues. We really appreciate your patience on all of this. 

STEAM RELEASE SCHEDULE

WWII Online will be released between September 5th – September 22nd 2017. This is to ensure best game experiences and ramp up our player numbers. These dates are subject to change based on outcomes of unlocking each region.

• September 5th: Canada, Mexico and South America
• September 8th: United States of America
• September 12th: All of Europe
• September 15th: All of Asia
• September 19th: Oceania
• September 22nd: The rest of the world

SPREAD THE WORD ABOUT STEAM LAUNCH!

On a final note, please make sure to mention on any relevant site or platform or network of friends that WWII Online is coming to Steam, and can be easily found if you navigate to www.wwiionline.com/steam. Your help in raising awareness will undoubtedly work towards improving the amount of traffic that shows up and will amplify our success.

Thanks for your support all, it’s getting nuts around here!

– Back to work S!

Original post: http://wwiionline.com/game-news/development-notes/free-play-improvements-steam-launch