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[Russ Bullock]

By now you have learned that our "little hotfix" contained the release of the Community Warfare beta. I guess when you have been working until midnight for many nights in a row we saw some irony and humor in the notion that in the end Community Warfare was just a hotfix.

Essentially we have worked very hard this month to get all of the patches out early, the content patches we wanted to get out so that we had the ability to push CW live ASAP. This was mostly done because we have significant staffing resources that are going to be disappearing for well-deserved vacation time over the Christmas break and we wanted as much reaction time as possible to hotfix any game breaking issues that might present themselves.

This phase 2 release of CW is certainly not the absolute end game product that fulfills every desire of the hard core Battletech player, but I don't want to minimize it either, it's truly a game changer. MechWarrior players have never been able to experience anything like this before. That comment is not meant to take away from MPBT: 3025 that product has my full respect but it was around for a very short window and only playable by a small amount of players who were willing to pay by the hour. Within Community Warfare I anticipate we will see hundreds if not thousands of matches played every day within this concept of fighting for the great factions of the inner sphere with planets changing possession and the map reflecting that.

MPBT: 3025 also had many deeper logistical features that many have expressed interest in, with this main aspect of CW now in beta we will be free to consider all aspects of growing the depth of the combat and look forward to hearing your suggestions.

This is an enormous feature release that certainly has a decent sized list of known issues that we will work through as quickly as possible.

Although we had many dedicated players spend significant time testing with us I am sure balance between attackers and defenders is nowhere near perfect. In the end there is only so much you can do with a smaller subset of testers; we need the live populations to show us the untold number of strategies that will present themselves. We will be watching and listening to adjust the levels and game systems within CW to make it as competitive and fun as possible.

Other items like the Loyalty Point reward table will get immediate attention and added in the New Year as soon as possible. Which includes making the titles displayable in game to give them real value, and the entire loyalty point system can continue to grow from there.

It is with pleasure we release Community Warfare Phase two into Open Beta today, I hope you enjoy.