Speak of the devil, and he shall appear 
First off, I do realize that I kind of ninja’ed in a response in a post that had nothing to do with addressing skill delay. The reasoning behind that was simply that I wanted to make it clear of why I wasn’t spending much time on the issue that I was addressing there. I’d like to say that I pride myself in keeping things as transparent as possible with you guys.
That being said, I know that seems contradicting since I haven’t really said anything on the matter since. I’m doing my best to lurk in the shadows here in the forums more often and chime in where appropriate. Frankly, I just don’t always have something to update you guys on 
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But! I do have a small update for you today.
Over the past several months (boy time can really fly by), we formed a small team (myself, with the help of a couple others at times) around addressing the issue of skill delay in large groups of players. It’s actually a part of our Skills and Combat team that are responsible for balancing and, in the near future, introducing new skills, traits and other combat improvements. When tackling such a large project, you don’t just dive in and start shooting from the hip. It takes a lot of research, data and planning to really start addressing the issue at hand. The past few months have mostly consisted of these things (referring to data gathering).
As of recently, really as of just a couple days ago, we’ve gotten to a point where we have the data we need to take the bull by the horns and get down to business. Meaning that I hope that the results start speaking for themselves in the coming months. Don’t get me wrong, that doesn’t mean we haven’t already made several improvements, just sadly that they weren’t really noticeable from a players standpoint (but have made a significant difference).
It’s not just skill lag that we hope to start resolving in a more noticeable way, and even eliminating one day, but getting PvE culling disabled game-wide. These two projects are beasts that really go hand-in-hand, which is why we’re working on them simultaneously.
Now this brings me to another seemingly tight-lipped change; PvE culling. You may have noticed that we temporarily disabled it in Frostgorge Sound for a short duration. That was us, lurking in the shadows, gathering extremely vital data. We’re making great strides in getting that removed, and hoping that happens really soon.
That’s all I have for today, but hope to have some great news in the near future. Ideally moving forward I won’t need to update you all, as the results should start speaking for themselves.
<3 Bill
