Hi everyone <3 Thanks for sticking with us for that very exciting event start! Now that the site is more stable, I'd like to go over what's been happening, and take the time to address some concerns you guys have brought up.

First off: the new wardrobe! This version of the wardrobe is designed with several improvements to the old wardrobe. Most notably:

1. It is significantly faster and more efficient. The new wardrobe has been coded to load quicker and put less strain on the site. (I will explain why it's still been lagging lately in a bit!)

2. You can toggle avatar limbs! No more need to use whiteout items to hide your limbs! You can now simply turn off the limbs you want to hide. This is a feature you guys have been asking for, and we are happy to finally release this. We really look forward to seeing the creativity this can inspire!

You can read about these changes in more detail on Keith's thread here: Testers Needed: "New" Wardrobe!

Our original plan was to release the new wardrobe before Masquerade, for two reasons: 1) we wanted people to be able to use body mods on the dance floor, without having a whiteout item outline behind it, and 2) we anticipated that the holiday would lag, and wanted to release these efficiency updates beforehand to prevent that.

After pushing Masquerade back 2 days from when we had intended to start it, we realized the wardrobe still wasn't in the state we wanted, and we decided not to delay Masquerade further. We did not intend to release the wardrobe at that time; we wanted it to stay in testing a bit longer.

But when Masquerade started, the site began to experience lag issues that were much more severe than we anticipated, making parts of the site unusable. We were able to trace these issues to the current wardrobe, and we made the decision to resolve the lag by releasing the new wardrobe early and encouraging people to switch over. This worked; as more people switched over to the new wardrobe, the lag gradually improved and the site became more stable.

(You may have noticed the new wardrobe also lagged and had loading issues during this time; this is because the lag was caused by a database overload, which affected everything - since everything uses the same database. But this overload was caused by the old wardrobe, which is why we asked people to switch over.)

I have seen concerns raised about our timing, and I totally get that; it's generally not a great idea to release major new features at the same time as holidays. I hope my explanation here clarifies the reasoning behind our decision.

We are still working hard to smooth over the remaining issues (and make other improvements) within the new wardrobe, and will continue to keep you updated. Thank you SO MUCH for sticking with us during all of this!

Finally, a few other things to note:

1. There was an issue with dance floor avatar images being outdated. This has now been fixed AND given an efficiency improvement so that dance floor images will put less strain on the site. <3

2. If you have any bug reports or other feedback on the new wardrobe, please leave them on Keith's topic here: Testers Needed: "New" Wardrobe!