There is a new EVE Dev blog online, this time by Mephisto, explaining the status of Tranquillity, the resourced used since now to put the Chinese cluster online and running and, more important than everything else, when can we expect a new patch. Here is it!

It is just  a copy and paste of the Dev Blog since those who do not have an active EVE Online account cannot access this section of the web site. 

Ok, so QA has been locked in the dungeon and whipped half to death to get the Serenity code (China code) up to scratch and relatively bugfree in the last couple of weeks (we worked a total of 23 hours over last weekend). In our 'free' time, i.e. the 5 minutes while the test servers are having their 23rd patch of the day, we're busy keeping our characters going on tq (come on, solo-mining in a 0.4 system? Its wrong NOT to pod you...).

Of course, some of our TQ players have come to believe we are ignoring them and concentrating on Serenity, something that is both true and false. Most of the coding going into Serenity will also apply to TQ and will have several beneficial effects, but more on that at a later date. Singularity is almost back online with a potential patch. We're still having some hardware problems with it. Kali is under way, and most importantly, we are preparing for the 3rd birthday of Eve.

Knowing you probably want something more specific, a typical generic day in the QA dungeon goes thusly:

• around 9am- stagger into the office, grab a mug of tea (coffee for those non-English heathens around here...), and skim over the forums for latest issues, rumours and conspiracy theories.
• around 9:30am- get a second mug of tea, and check through the defects submitted overnight by the bughunters.
• around 10am- grab a 3rd mug of tea now that the brain has started working, start testing on whichever of the 6 test servers is currently running and also happens to be up to date. This can last anything from 5 minutes to an hour or so depending on how soon a problem is found.
• around 11:30- start investigating some strange bug (overview settings and the overview not displaying any text today).
• 12:15- much annoyance for missing the first round of lunch, back to working on the bug while waiting for the next round of food.
• break for lunch.
• 1pm- start testing on the next patch/server combo until it breaks. When it does break, switch to tq.
• somewhere between 2 and 3pm: stable build of the day, start running a sanity check on it (yes, those things I mentioned last time that take up to 6 hours).
• 5-7pm- decide I cant take anymore today, login briefly for skill training changes, go home and drink a beer or 3.

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