Update 2:
I'll try to keep this short and sweet, but there will be no alpha test this weekend. We were already on the fence the closer we got to the weekend after taking this week to get through the main game, work on additional updates, and start going over the new stuff added since the closed beta. However, if you've been following game news as of last night, this should come as no surprise. If you've not been following game news, you really should if you're interested in botting this game.
As I mentioned in the last post:
Anyways, that's it for now, we still expect some big game patches soon as well as some server stability fixes, but things are a lot better than expected. No ETA changes yet, but there's a good chance we'll be ready to go after this upcoming weekend.
Patches were on the light side (which is really helpful with our updates and testing), but GGG has confirmed the additional large patches with Thursday's update, as we expected. Unless an ETA is given for those patches, we know it's coming soon for sure, but we're not going to wait for it as it still might be a week or two away. We expect future bottimg time to be affected by this, but we add that disclaimer to all our bot release threads because that's always how the game has been. Sometimes GGG pushes out frequent small patches during the first week, other times they collect a bunch of stuff and do the patch around a week later. Basically, nothing new has happened that we didn't expect in regards to patches.
However, in light of the recent issues arising after Thursday's patch with the new server issues, and now their server sided anti-bot systems seemingly having bugs based on reddit posts and the forums, we're no longer comfortable doing any sorts of public testing yet.
Too many people fail to understand how GGG goes about banning bots, and are quick to blame EB and claim it's detected, QuestBot is at fault, town movements are at fault, or whatever random feature we don't offer is the reason why GGG can detect people using EB. None of that is actually accurate, and we have been around long enough to understand how GGG does things and we adjust accordingly.
Perception of the bot safety is really important, so there's no way we're doing any sort of public testing if there is a random ban issue (assuming it truly is a bug and the majority of the people reporting issues are not using 3rd party software) going on. We'll just have to wait and see what happens, but that issue alone was more than enough to force a change in our plans.
As I emphasized a week before the 3.0 release in the preparation thread:
[Downtime]
There's no set downtime, and updates will be done when they are done, but we won't do a beta test until the game is stable enough in regards to client patches being deployed. We expect about a solid week of patches and fixes based on previous expansions, and considering how many issues there have been in the past few months alone with getting new systems deployed and other issues that resulted in patch rollbacks, we're not going to rush out any builds (as has always been the case, but just to reiterate).
Each client update requires a new EB build. When the game patches a lot and the servers are unstable, it's a highly stressful time for everyone. As a result, things need to be settled down before we start pushing public builds. As mentioned before, this has always how we have operated, and this time won't be any different. Expect lengthy downtime for this update, as it is the largest update GGG has ever done for this game.
Every expansion we get people asking if we can release a version that might not be fully updated so they can start farming currency. This is not possible, and we'll only do a release when we're comfortable with the state of the project. We'll drop API support or have limited functionality as we need though. For example, if the API is fully updated, and we had support for Acts 1 - 4 done, we'd not delay a beta release just to finish 5 - 10. In the same example if the passive tree changes due to a new system being added, we'd temporarily drop support for it rather than delay the beta release if everything else was ready. Other than that though, the API needs to be fully updated for the bot to work.
I know this is disappointing to people who are anxious to get to botting with EB and start updating code for 3.0, but we're still within our internal estimated downtime range (1-2 weeks of best-case downtime) and anything relating to server-sided bans, is not something to take lightly. As a number of people found out at the end of the last league for a few months, when GGG wants to be persistent with bans for bot-like behavior, and throw a lot of time and effort into it, they will be and are usually pretty effective. It's all server sided metric detection, so it can be hard for people to adjust to changes in the game environment after getting away with it for most of the league already.
While no ETAs have been given still, we now hope to hold a test if things get sorted out and stable by the mid-end of next week. As talked about before in our preparation threads, we're on GGG's schedule, and the start of new expansions are always rough, so don't say we didn't warn you beforehand. Anyways, we still thank people for their patience, and when things get settled down again, we'll hope to be able to do some public testing. In the meantime, we'll be continuing our updates and hope to have a really solid initial testing launch when we do.
