The latest update posted to the Shroud of the Avatar website contains links to three separate postmortems for the recently-concluded Release 1 pre-alpha test of Shroud of the Avatar. The first one, from Starr Long, is fairly short and to the point, and looks ahead to some additional features that will be coming in Release 2:

• Shadow Jitters: We initially thought some of these issues were due to another issue with quality settings not working properly but it really was a time of day issue with the constantly moving sun.
• Controls/Movement: Almost everyone, even those who were against it initially, felt that jumping was a critical missing feature. We all felt it too and we were ecstatic that the community were so united on this. We are now testing jumping and are working on including it in Release 2.
• Conversations: We were so focused on using our conversations as information transfers that we totally omitted responses to the simplest exchanges like greetings. Hello? Look forward to NPCs being able to respond to standard pleasantries and therefore feel more “real”
• Moon’s Orbital path: some of you noted how the debris ring should follow the orbital path, not be perpendicular. Look for this fix in R2
• Item Density: We initially had our item limits much too low but even when we raised them we still had issues with super dense areas with 1000s of items. This is forcing us to do a better job at how we save and transmit this data.

Overall, 921 bug reports were submitted. And yes, you did just read above that the ability to jump will be added to the next pre-alpha release.

Richard Garriott’s thoughts on Release 1 were similarly short and sweet; Lord British expresses his gratitude to all who helped test this first look at the game.

Portalarium technical director Chris Spears’ postmortem of Release 1 is significantly longer, and includes some charty goodness demonstrating the server loads and user login totals for the opening hours of the test:

The following data is from our log server and metrics server I mentioned above. This first chart shows the login rate over the first 15 minutes. We had 75 people login during the first 10 seconds after we opened the servers and then about 25 per 10 seconds for the next 5 minutes. Even with that type of surge and a single server, the server was never at more than about 5% load. The only bottleneck in the login was pulling account data from the MySQL database and we’ll be scaling that up for the next release.

Here is a chart showing concurrency for the first hour the game was up.

Again, even with 700 concurrent users on a single box, the server never showed significant load and that was with only a single server box sitting behind the load balancer.

On release 1 there were 9670 characters created by 8080 total unique players. The average number of times people logged into the game was just under 3 times with the average play session length running at 23 minutes and 31 seconds per session. Of the 8080 unique players, 1912 had a single session that lasted more than an hour.

As well, the preference for male Avatars seems to outweight the preference for female Avatars by roughly 2:1:

Hopefully this trend won’t continue but 6322 Male characters were created vs 3348 women!

The United States contributed the largest number of logins, of course, but many other countries were also well-represented.

Overall, it would seem that the Release 1 test was a success, and provided Portalarium with a wealth of valuable information.