To respond to this unexpected surge in players, our resident server czar Stephen ’malarky’ Gaffney immediately got in touch with our GSP partners in the US and Europe and we were able to ramp up the numbers of servers significantly. Currently, each of our partners is running more than twice the number of servers initially planned for the public beta and at the moment we've got nearly 300 servers available. QuakeWarsTracker has a handy (though still somewhat incomplete) server tracker that allows you to keep tabs on how many people are playing right now.

On Sunday, we had nearly 30,000 players active and playing on the servers - that's half of all the keys we distributed last week, while Sunday's keys weren't actually given out until later in the day. Something we're particularly pleased about is that the average play time per day per player is over 2 hours. It’s safe to say that you guys are a pretty dedicated lot. That's a lot of time to invest in testing our game, and we deeply appreciate the hours people are putting in.

Another interesting statistic is that out of 30,552 rounds played as of yesterday morning, the GDF managed to free the sewer system 18,259 times - though we expect that ratio to even out as players get used to the different gameplay mechanics offered by the Strogg side and the game has more balance and polish applied based on your feedback.

Since ETQW is a work in progress, whenever we want to release a new version of the beta client or something to show to press, we have to create a “fixed” build of the game for that purpose. Builds are essentially treated like a proper game release. Everything is locked down and additional changes or additions cannot be made. In the case of something like the ETQW Public Beta client, a new build is produced every single day here at Splash Damage, and those that we think will make a good release candidate go on to id and Activision for more feedback and testing. The testing process is quite extensive to ensure that the build is as stable and bug-free as it can be.

The Public Beta client build was made several weeks ago and since then, there have been over 1000 changes made to the game in source code and art assets, with significant improvements to game mechanics, maps, user interface, hit prediction and detection, and audio, just to name a few areas. Some of these aren’t quite ready for prime time yet, but we’re hoping to bring you a major update later in the Public Beta process.

Bots, Bots, Bots
The most significant addition is that the bots are now activated. Server administrators will be able to populate their servers with computer-controlled bots to fill up empty player slots. id Software’s John “Maleficus” Dean has been working on these for quite some time and we’re very excited to be able to roll them out now for our beta testers to see them in action. There’s actually a great interview with John on IGN talking in-depth about the bots, so check that out if you want to learn more about them.

Improved Prediction
One of the most talked about items on the beta forums is that aiming is quite difficult at times due to the way player and latency prediction are handled in this particular revision of the beta. You’re seeing this because our antilag features haven’t been added to the public beta yet, but our latency wonder twins Tristan “FeaRog” Williams and Gordon “digibob” Biggans have been working tirelessly on them in recent weeks and several improvements are forthcoming there. The first is going into this update and you should find it a bit easier to hit targets now. We continue to toil away on antilag and we’ll have a bit more information on what’s going on here in a future blog update.

Server Browser Fixes
We’ve got two pretty significant server browser fixes in this update, courtesy of our resident user interface commando Jared “jRAD” Hefty. The first fixes the pesky “Server is full.” bug that sometimes occurs when multiple server instances are run on the same box. Essentially, the information sent back from the server would sometimes get confused about which instance was being queried and send the wrong information back to the browser.

The second fix concerns our all-seeing ETQW master server, which happily dropped full servers off the list sent back to the in-game browser. These servers would reappear once they were no longer full, but only if the New List button was being pressed. With this fix, they won’t disappear in the first place, so you will always have the full server roster available for client-side filtering.

Server Memory Leaks
We’ve plugged a number of memory leaks in the server code, much to the delight of our GSP partners. You should see improved server performance now and we will continue to optimize the ETQW server code in order to make this thing as stable and efficient as possible.