ATHENA

Dear players,

as promised earlier today, we would like to announce a Stress Test event scheduled to start this upcoming Saturday at 18:00 server time, on the Cata PTR (which will be closed for six hours prior to the start to prepare for the testing). We would like to invite all of you to participate in this test, to get a taste of the mechanics and features that await you in Athena, while helping us ensuring that everything will be as smooth as possible for the live launch. The testing shall be divided into two phases, each lasting 24 hours:

1. The first phase will emulate the conditions of Athena’s launch, with the exception that you will be able to level up to level 85 (unlike the live pre-patch). The point of this phase is to get your characters to maximum level and test the whole experience up to it. To aid you in this process, the 3x experience rate (increased to 6x since it will be a bonus weekend) will be at your disposal. The raids will not be open during this phase.
2. The second phase is intended for max. level characters, to test the raids and another newly implemented feature: the solo queue. For this phase, a new NPC will appear, allowing you to boost instantly to level 80/85 (per your choice), and obtain gear to test the relevant features.

As a token of appreciation for your participation and support, each player who attends the event and is active for at least 5 hours of playtime during it will be rewarded with one free Racial Swap Service on their Athena account. Please be aware that we will be able to automatically determine whether you spent the time actually testing or not, or whether you were running multiple WoW instances on your computer simultaneously to farm the rewards, and you will not be rewarded in such cases.

To play on the Cata PTR, we recommend you to download the client from our website (which is the same client you can use to play on Apollo). Other unmodified clients may allow you to connect when using our realmlists and WoW.mfil, but we cannot guarantee their full functionality.

Don’t forget to let us know whether you will attend via the pre-launch survey, if you haven’t submitted it yet! We appreciate all your feedback and encourage you to report any issues you encounter via the bugtracker.

See you on the PTR!

Athena Team