Well, despite their earlier pledge to post news in weekly updates, there have certainly been a number of updates posted to the Crowfall website over the last week or so. For example, several greybox images of the Castle Stronghold (available as an add-on to any pledge, it would seem, for $599 USD). There are also a bunch of new wallpapers featuring the Archetypes featured in the recent Hunger Dome combat testing on the media page of the Crowfall website.

Speaking of that Hunger Dome test, ArtCraft Entertainment have released some statistics from it, as part of a postmortem on that phase of testing:

Here are some general metrics from Sept 23 to Oct 4:

• Most used power? Sprint with 72,859
• How many total games tracked? 191
• How many character deaths? 2,804
• How many characters created? 1,245

They also document a few amusing bugs which were unearthed during the test:

Since we had a few days in between each test, the engineers were adding in a few new logs to each test and smoothing out the messages bouncing around. Some of the more amusing aspects they found:

• Matches starting and stopping were causing massive spikes to all other games in progress.
• There was a bottleneck in one of the message paths where the messages would just Netflix and Chill for 50ms. (Best 3 keystroke fix ever!)
• At one point the server was trying to handle more than a million messages at once.
• Both the physics servers and MMO server were multiplexing the same messages, which was causing millions of extra messages. (I heard you like messages in your messages, Dawg!)
• There was an issue with message throttling, so we were jamming thousands of extra messages into the pipe (like stats) and then we were multiplexing those messages. (Kaboom!)

As well, another of the goddesses of the Crowfall universe has been revealed: Zaleena, Daughter of Snakes:

A creature of the night rarely seen in the daylight hours, Zaleena cloaks herself in shadows and arranges her assignations after midnight. She commonly takes the form of a sensual woman with dark hair and hazel eyes. Her most notable mark is the serpent inked on her pale skin; a sorcerous tattoo which moves seductively around her alluring figure, winding hypnotically about her curves and scintillating like water under the light of the moon.

Beautiful and tantalizing, Zaleena relies heavily on her looks and her sorcery to influence the actions of gods and mortals. It is commonly said that her tongue is wicked and her kiss is poison – driving strong men mad and weak men to an early grave. Equal parts charming and cruel, Zaleena is known to lavish affection on those who do her bidding and to extract petty vengeance on those who displease her.

The October Q&A video was also released:

Questions that are answered in this episode:

• How will strongholds be protected against attacks when guilds that control them are offline?
• Regarding trajectories for spells, will each arrow and fireball have its own speed, and will you have to adjust for range?
• Where are the servers currently located, and what are the future plans for server locations?
• How will campaign landscapes be generated, and are there plans to add features such as terrain ranges into them?
• Is there a plan to incentivize no-import campaign world players who are not interested in the overall game economy to sell or export their campaign world rewards?
• Is it possible to design artifacts that have a time limit on how long they last for or that have conditions on how they can be removed?
• Will disciplines be restricted by archetype?
• What will be the next design focus after combat?

The latest Founder’s Update, meanwhile, discusses a few things, including a survey — I gather it pertains to PvP — that was sent out, the addition of the Collector’s Edition of the game to the Crowfall pledge package store, and some of ArtCraft’s strategies for promoting their game.

One of those promotional efforts is the launch of a cosplay contest, which began last week on the 7th, and which will run until the 28th of the month:

HOW TO ENTER

1. Create a Crowfall-inspired cosplay costume based on one of the gods or archetypes.
2. Tweet your photo tagging @crowfallgame with the hashtag #cawstume and a brief description of your cosplay character.
3. Entries will be added to the “2015 Crowfall Cosplay Cawstume Contest” photo album on theCrowfall Facebook page.
4. Winners will be determined by the highest number of “Likes” on their photo in the album. The top three winners will receive a Crowfall pledge package:
   – First place: Ruby pledge package
   – Second place: Sapphire pledge package
   – Third place: Amber pledge package
5. The contest begins at 1 pm Central on Wednesday, October 7, 2015 and will end at 1 pm Central on Wednesday, October 28, 2015. Winner will be announced at 5 pm Central on Wednesday, October 28, 2015.

There isn’t much happening on the #cawstume hashtag as yet; seems the field is still wide open for entrants.

Finally, if you’ve been jonesing some Crowfall-branded merchandise, ArtCraft can now ship physical items — shirts, for example — to the EU and Canada.