1997-08-12: Letter From Richard Garriott

Letter From Richard Garriott

Greetings friends,

Progress on stabilizing the world is slow but steady. We can now get about 1500 people into the game simultaneously before we start to see the lag issues rear their ugly head. Today or tomorrow we will try a new modification which we hope will allow us to double that number. We have seen as many as 1850 people in the game, but are now going to be limiting the number of people in to be just more than it handles well, so that we can see the lag issues, but the game keeps running. Right now that number will be about 1500. So, you may get messages saying world is full try back later. When we cross the 2500 people online mark, Lord Blackthorn and I will announce a debate and hopefully even more of you will join us in Britannia for this event.

Over the last couple of days I as Lord British and Starr Long as Lord Blackthorn along with other team members in their roles such as the jester Chuckles, his nemesis Heckles and others have begun to join you all in the world in our proper personas. I must say, that I suspect I will be having as much fun as any of you as we play together in Britannia. What we are creating here really is the first ever completely virtual world. I again thank you for being a part of this very grand event in gaming history.

I know that the game still has many issues yet to be ironed out. As you may have guessed, the reason we could not find all these issues before you were all here to help us, is that many of these problems only show up when there are thousands of people online, and before you were here we could only reach about a hundred with our team and others from Origin. We hope to have the scaleability issues done soon, and move on to game balance. We'll try to keep you informed of what were up to as we go. Please look to the development web page at http://www.owo.com/pd for daily details. Though I know Blackthorn feels he is doing the right thing by supporting Chaos as the path to the future of Britannia, know that his suggestion, though attractive, will not lead our people to a stable future.

Until we meet online,

Richard Garriott

Lord British

Tuesday, August 12