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[Russ Bullock]

April summary: A quick glance back shows us many great features such as the looking for group tool, a new CW map, the Urbanmech! and important CW fixes including one that biased the game mode in favor of the heavier population. Things culminated in our first lore based event in the battle of Tukayyid and Community Warfare entering Beta 2. This time around Community Warfare will have the following improvements in play from the outset to go along with the fresh Inner Sphere map reset:

- Pre-queue and strike team information.
- Greatly improved Call to Arms functionality.
- Population bias improvements such as the game mode bias fix and longer auto win timer.
- Counter Attack game mode.
- VOIP.
- Looking for group.
- Faction groups.
- Faction chat.
- Increase to 6 total maps by tomorrow's patch.

Work on incremental improvements to CW such as better spawn protection with the associated improvements to the maps will continue while work on CW phase 3 gets underway in the month of May.

Here is what we have in store for you in May with patches on the 5th and 19th.

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May 5

- Vitric Forge – new CW map - HPG themed map.
- Jagermech Champion - JM6-A(C)
- Faction camo fix for Ghost Bear
- Some 3D HUD fixes and improvements
- NARC indicator on the HUD
- Moved “Create Private Lobby” to the social screen - Play now properly goes straight to searching.
- Saved Dropdeck now properly carries over into gameplay when saving in the lobby before a full strike team is formed
- Clan Wave III month 2 and 3 rewards

May 19

- Faction and unit chat now available in the Queue lobby.
- VOIP (voice transmission quality improvements)
- BattleMaster BLR-2C and Cataphract CTF-0X variants - Gift Store first.
- New Mastery bundles.

Things do feel light on patch content for May 19th mostly because such a huge effort is going on in the background on the new Mechlab. This takes up resources in every department, but were happy to say it is getting very close and will likely get a public test very soon, perhaps even this week. The live release date for Mechlab is likely June 2nd. There is also a lot of effort going into the underlying bones of Mechlab to improve save time and to fix the Invalid bug, this work will likely be ongoing beyond the initial Mechlab release. Work has also been underway to support the upcoming MASC technology coming with Wave 3 mechs. So yes we are expecting fairly heavy patches in June with the new Mechlab and Wave3 content.

Thanks for playing and your support.