Over the years, we've stopped giving hard dates for a lot of our holidays in case things aren't ready/emergencies on our end/etc. I don't want to post "oh hey we're doing Survival the 14th" and then not be able to deliver on that. We've had plenty of experiences like that, and we've moved away from that.

In the Subetapedia, we give estimations for when holidays will start/end. At the start of the holiday we give you all the information you need for that year's take on the holiday, because things change! We keep y'all updated throughout the holiday for when things will close (like forums, shops etc). We let you know when things have been extended. I think a little surprise as to when something starts is fine.

Also I commented in the news post this time that it wouldn't start today because when I do items for a holiday, I like to start early (my time, which is like 3 hours behind subeta). I like to have time to bring the shops down, add items without rush, test things, etc so we can get everything out during our "peak" time, usually 4-6pm. That's where are goal usually is when releasing holidays. Past that time and the holiday doesn't get a lot of time on the news post before it gets bumped down.

We don't give dates because we want to make sure that we're ready. Every major AAA studio does the same, Blizzard famously says "soon" for everything when asked on dates because they don't want to be tied down. Outside of yearly repeating holidays where there are no new features.

We pride ourselves on our communication with users, and I'd wager that we're one of the only games online that still has the level of frequency that we do. It's a double edged sword though, because then the expectation is to give everything away.

We are!

Nope we know the issue, there SHOULD be a thing on the top of the page saying that we're aware... but it's not setting :(

It should be fixed in a few minutes with a deploy!

PHEW. Avatars should be updating properly now, and the ones that are broken should be fixed on the site in ~10 minutes. We'll make a big post about this with the survival stuff but WOW and I essentially rewrote our entire avatar building code over this week with a focus on:

• Speed
• Caching, which has been a real problem with hexes (the system that powers infections and snowballs) in the past. Getting the various caches to work together and update when changes have happened has been painful, but we've basically rewritten the entirety of that code and should have a much smoother survival ?

There isn't a second wave. :) If we were doing multiple waves, we would let you know in the news post.