A quick update to announce a couple of things. First of which:

** SCHEDULED MAINTENANCE DOWNTIME: 11pm-1am CST, Thurs 01/04 **

We're making progress on the hybrid Erlang back-end, and that's going well, but to help things in the immediate future, we're going to be swapping out the core game server this week (which sits in front of the sector server-cluster and routes packets). This upgrade will increase the available ram in the system, which will help Deliverator stability (the Lisp problems we've been having are related to garbage collection of the CL). With some luck, this will greatly improve everything related to Deliverator, but it's difficult to forsee the extent of improvement until we get things running in production.

The upgrade will also make it possible for us to pull other machines out of production, bringing them back for further upgrades and generally paving the way for a total-server-cluster rearchitecture intended to be more elegant and scalable (not that our scalability has really been tested, to date).

In other news, Faction design changes are coming along, and there'll be a post to Suggestions in the near future, requesting user feedback. So please feel free to follow up on that.

Progress is also being made on some new UI functionality, in-line with what debuted in the last release, buttons and things to make commonly needed gameplay functions easier and more intuitive to new players.