Early Access Announcement

Hello Everyone,

Thank you for your patience, we know that many of you have been eagerly awaiting an announcement from us after our alpha stress test. Since then we've been hard at work processing all the information and feedback we've received. A big thank you to those that participated in the stress test and to those that completed the alpha questionnaire. The stress test was a huge success for us but we couldn't have done it without our wonderful community! For those of you following on Ko-Fi we will have a more detailed post on the stress test soon. At a high level, we had a peak of 3.4k unique visitors to the site during the stress test weekend with a peak of 232 stress testers actively online at once and a sustained average of 100 active players the entire weekend. Those numbers actually exceeded our expectation for the stress test and signals to a bright future for ROSE Online!

The take away from the stress test is that we are not ready to do a traditional closed beta soon due to a number of outstanding issues in the game (code and gameplay). As most of you are well aware, there are issues with the game that have been here for more than a decade or two! As a team with limited resources, we're not in a position to create a "perfect" vision then implement it in the traditional alpha/beta/release model.

Therefore we have decided that we will not be having a closed beta!

Instead of pursuing a closed beta/open beta model we will be aiming for an "early access" release. What this means is that we will prioritize getting the game ready for players as much as we can and accept gameplay imperfections until we have a chance to improve them. We will focus on work that impacts the ability to play the game (such as crashing, exploits, etc.) and work on the gameplay over time with player feedback.

We've heard you loud and clear: you want to play ROSE again. So our priority is to get everyone playing and enjoying ROSE again while we iterate and improve the game during early access. However, there's one big twist: We will not be doing a full reset of the game after the early access release!

It's not motivating to play a game knowing your progress will be wiped. The MMORPG experience is an ongoing, evolutionary experience and the team will adapt to the ever changing nature of the world we release. A wipe is a nice cheat code for the developers but we have come to believe it's a punishment for players. Since we will be in early alpha there may be minor rollbacks or resets if anything truly game breaking occurs but we are committed to a release with no resets.

While this was not our initial plan we are excited for this new direction. Unfortunately, this means that we'll have to create new timelines as we have new requirements that were not there previously. At this stage it's likely that the early access release will be closer to November or December but we're hopeful we can achieve it sooner. For the next weeks these are the high priority items we will be focusing on:

• Service stability
• Administrative tools
• Major gameplay bugs
• Drop tables
• Kings
• Item mall

After early access release, and once we feel the game is ready, we will have an "official release" with a big marketing push to the wider gaming community and bring in a new wave of ROSE Online fans!

Of course we know that a delay is the last thing our players want to be reading right now as they eagerly await to play ROSE Online again. As such we're making plans to have players be able to play before the early access release in some capacity such as playing with a streamer, participating in a PVP event or more. We are open to all suggestions so please send them our way.

We hope you are as excited about or new plans as we are. As always, we are grateful to have such a wonderful community and are working hard to bring back this beloved game.

We will keep you updated of our progress as we go along!

Sincerely, Rednim Games