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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TerraDave" data-source="post: 4069062" data-attributes="member: 22260">Randy "B" <a href="http://www.gleemax.com/Comms/Pages/Communities/BlogPost.aspx?blogpostid=44510&pagemode=2&blogid=2158" target="_blank">talks about the future of Gleemax</a>. After the next patch he says it will go "dark" (which seems to mean running but unsupported) and then launch officially in the Summer with DDI (confirming that is also in some kind of alpha stage). I’ll give you guys the same big picture overview that I was using there: Gleemax is launching this summer in conjunction with Dungeons and Dragons insider. What we have up on the site right now is just an alpha test. We chose to run our alpha in public, which has both pro’s and con’s. I think I would do it the same way if we had it to do over again because we’ve gotten a lot of good feedback, we’ve laid the foundation for a really good community culture, and we’ve learned a ton about our processes and procedures on the technology side. That said, the site is definitely rough around the edges, not to mention incomplete. I know that we’ve lost some folks who have heard about our vision, come by to check things out, and then left disappointed. However, I think we can get them all to check us out again once we’ve actually launched, have more content (esp. games) up on the site, and put a marketing push behind that launch. Anyway, the plan from here is to do one more patch and then go dark until we’re ready to go to “Beta.” The one last alpha patch will be of a similar size and impact to the one we did last month, with a lot of clean-up on the back end and some new functionality for users, but nothing earth-shattering. I’m sure Solice will have all the details for you once the patch clears QA and we find a good window of time for pushing it live. After that patch you shouldn’t expect to see any changes for several months. We will be doing a ton of work on the site, and on the interactions between the site and D&Di, but we’re going to unveil those changes all at once rather than rolling them out piecemeal. This summer will be super-exciting as we launch Dungeons and Dragons Insider in conjunction with 4th Edition. There will be a lot more details revealed next week at D&D Experience so I won’t talk about it all that much here. As I understand it they’ll be playtesting 4E rules in public for the first time and they will also be showing off the latest versions of the D&D Game Table plus the Character Visualizer as well. I think the tools look spectacular and I’ve heard lots of good things about 4E as well. I ran into a couple of NDA’ed 4E playtesters at GDC and they seemed almost embarrassed at how much they sounded like fan-boys when they admitted how much they liked the new rules.</blockquote>

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