Dungeons & Dragons Online Module 9 Hits Test Server

Having scrapped the Risia test server, Turbine has released their much anticipated Module 9 update for Dungeons & Dragons Online to the new Lamannia test server. Additionally, they've introduced us to the Turbine Download Manager:
Risia Retires, Lamannia Is Born!

The Risia server is being retired! If you currently have a Risia client installed, please uninstall it. We have an all new Preview Server for new content: Lamannia! Lamannia is taking Risia's place as the server for checking out upcoming game features and releases!

Mod 9 On Lamannia!

Next, some more exciting news: next week we will begin the first previews of Mod 9: The Plane of Battle on Lamannia! But that's not the only thing new coming to DDO.

A New Way To Get In Game!

Mod 9 and Lamannia come packaged with technology designed to streamline downloads for new players and make patching easier than ever for our current players!

The Turbine Download Manager makes it easier to get into our games and start playing, whether you're a new player or a current player ready for new content. The Turbine Download Manager offers new players the opportunity to start playing the game before they have completed the entire download and installation of the game. Future versions of the Turbine Download Manager will offer current players the ability to automatically download patches through a process called (forward patching,) enabling them to play as soon as the servers open with new content!

Beginning with Mod 9 on Lamannia, new players will experience a (tiered) download; meaning that after a relatively small initial download, they can jump right into character creation. While they're creating their characters, the new player (Beach / Grotto) tutorial instance will download in the background; while they're playing the tutorial instance, the public portion of Korthos Village will download, and while they're playing through those first few Village quests, the Korthos Wilderness will download in the background, and then the full game. There may be brief periods of waiting while the next tier is downloading, particularly for new players with slower internet connections, but the wait time has been significantly reduced from the days when the entire game had to be downloaded and installed before a new player ever reached character creation!

The Turbine Download Manager also offers the following features:

'¢ Peer-to-peer downloading, allowing you to download files even faster
'¢ More control over your download experience
'¢ Set overall capacity and speed limits
'¢ Schedule downloads by time of day and day of week
'¢ Set limits based on what other applications you are running
'¢ Pause and have the download automatically resume at a later time
'¢ UPnP support (if your router and firewall support it and are configured correctly).

We encourage everyone to try creating a new character to help provide feedback on the incremental download, so we can polish this experience for new players!

A few important things to note:

'¢ Lamannia will contain all recently played characters which existed on the DDO servers as of December 29, 2008.
'¢ While Turbine will remain the primary provider of bandwidth, the Download Manager will also use optional peer-to-peer file sharing to speed up the downloads. The peer-to-peer portion only acts as a subsidizer.

Ready to get started? Watch for the announcement for the Turbine Download Manager Beta, which will provide a link so you can get started on Lamannia! Release Notes for Lamannia will be available on Monday in the Compendium!
If you haven't been following the game recently, this is the module that will bump the level cap to 20 and allow entrance to the Plane of Battle.