Now that the Update is out it is time to retire this status thread and lock it up so that we can go on ahead and enjoy the Operation - but not without giving you guys a proper closing post.
As I’ve been reading your replies, it's clear that the wait felt longer this time around. This pertains mostly to the new Status Thread operations, and the growing pains that have come with the change away from "In Cert" news. An assumption I make as you are already very well aware of how Holiday breaks and closures affected work on the update, but there are also other elements at play that I’d like to go over.
We posted this status thread unusually early in the update’s development so that you knew as soon as we returned from the Holidays that we were getting the build sorted. Meaning that as we were grabbing PC Hotfixes in the first weeks of 2021, the wait to launch was already in full effect. To be frank, it would have been unacceptable to launch the Operation with the issues that were resolved in these Hotfixes (crashes, host migration issues, Affinity loss bugs, etc.). Seeing as we do not have the luxury to Hotfix on the fly as PC, having you wait another full development cycle to get them resolved was not a reasonable option. So here we found ourselves in the third week of January sans Orphix Venom (until today!), but for the sake of having a much more robust version of the Operation at launch.
We still are shifting and adjusting with this new way of approaching Status Threads. (Paraphrasing an earlier response I made in this thread) With 5 platforms things come at us hard and fast at all angles, which made Cert news difficult to manage and communicate clearly with the varying processing times across platforms. It'll take some time for us to find the perfect rhythm with these things. A midpoint check in at launch day is not a midpoint check in at all, that I will not deny. But work continues at making this work better for all!
All this to say that it’s evident the Operation was highly anticipated for our console players, and for good reason! It brings Necramech gameplay to the forefront and brings back access to rewards that are highly sought out - I say this as I am eyeing my own Arcane collection longingly and the Lavos shaped hole in my Arsenal that I am currently now in the process of filling.
Enjoy the Operation and be sure to take advantage of the 3 weeks consoles have with Double Affinity! You deserve it.
I’ll see you out there stomping around, Tenno!