There are not enough people to test Pendragon in stress, so Mythic announced they are going to allow for "copy cat characters" to be made from other servers. I understand how the current Pendragon people feel. Many people chose to play the test server for the small, tightly knit community that formed there. Even more than the size is the situation, which on a test server is certainly "trial by fire" in nature. But here's the deal: Problem: There are not enough people playing there to find the really bizarre, server crashing bugs that only occur when a zone has X number of people. Problem: There are not enough high level players to fully test changes as they affect the high level characters, epic zones, and future high level content (which I'm sure we'll all agree has not been tested enough in the past). Problem: There are not enough people to quickly give us statistically significant feedback. Problem: There are not enough people doing RVR on a regular basis to fully test changes as they affect RVR (another area we have historically been weak in). Solutions? Many have been suggested. One suggestion was artificially buffing existing characters to create the high level pool of characters. The problem here is that we've learned the hard way - artificially buffed characters often do not have the same qualities as organically grown characters. Another solution put forth was to make the server more desirable by making the experience gain ten times faster. But if we were to do this, without adjusting drop rates, death penalties, trade skills, or any other factor considered along with experience, we would immediately find ourselves with a testing environment that in NO way resembles the live servers. Some have said that the method we have chosen (allowing players to copy a character to the test server) will result in "tourists" on patch day, and an empty server on all other days. This is exactly what we need. High numbers of people, finding those crash bugs, checking out the effect of a change on all levels of characters, all at once. Some have said that doing it this way will result in large groups of high level players coming in on patch day and attempt all the high level content. This is EXACTLY what we need to happen. We simply cannot test some aspects of the game internally. Attracting patch day "tourists" is precisely the goal. We still very much need the regular Pendragon people, and did not intend to "slap them in the face" - as a rule, they are very thorough, thoughtful testers who have been doing a terrific job. There just aren't enough of them to stress test our patches. The Pendragon board will remain closed, by the way - simply copying a character over to Pendragon will not result in instant board access, although we will continue to take applications. We're also still working out the details of the copying procedure, and how we'll get information from the new-to-Pendragon players, but when we have those details they will be announced.