We hope everyone had a great holiday season this year. We’re back in the swing of things now and are trying to get through some very busy times. We’ve been pretty quiet lately so there are a lot of things to talk about.
SimHQ has named Aces High as Online Sim of the Year for the second straight year. Combatsim.com also selected Aces High for its MMOLG for 2001. We’re very happy to be recognized for these awards. 2001 was a great year for Aces High and 2002 looks to be even better. It’s hard to believe that a year ago, we were just coming out with aircraft carriers. So many other additions have transpired since then that it seems like that was years ago. We successfully implemented our price reduction and have seen a tremendous growth in our player base this past year. We’ve built a successful foundation through our proven strategy of continuous product enhancement and we’ll continue with that core philosophy. We’re now in the position to couple those ongoing efforts to an effective marketing campaign to build on our momentum. That we’ve done well without any marketing certainly makes us feel good about our product, but it’s also testament to the strength of the community that has formed here. We’re excited about new marketing initiatives that are being implemented including an advertising campaign.
Our highest priority is quality of service. To handle our growth, we had to bring up more servers and also required more bandwidth than what we had available at our original location. To accomplish that, we had to lease from a different company to augment our existing capability. Unfortunately, we have not been satisfied with the overall quality of this vendor’s connectivity. Although we continue to work with them in tracking down the problems, we are actively moving forward to upgrade bandwidth at our original location with Skuzzy and get all our servers moved back there as soon as possible.
On a related note, we are also expanding our team here and have a dedicated customer/technical support representative starting tomorrow. We haven’t had any changes to our personnel since this company opened its doors, so it’ll be a strange but welcome addition. It will be a great addition for you and us alike.
For version 1.09, we’ve already announced a Ki-67 as a plane addition. The other plane additions in 1.09 at this time are from the early war. There will be a Bf 110C, a 109E, a Spitfire I, a Hurricane I, and perhaps some other surprises. This will give us broad coverage of the war period; we just need to fill in the holes. This wide range of planes gives us a lot of options to expand our future plane set and the gameplay offerings we can provide. We should have some new aircraft screenshots out this coming week.
We have a new program going into effect soon. It is a mentor program that rewards people for helping out new players during their trial period. How it works is that you can offer to mentor a new player via a host command. If the player accepts your offer, you go on to help him learn the game. After he subscribes, he can select which mentor helped him the most and that mentor will receive a $10 credit to their account from HTC. If you like to help new players, you can probably cover your monthly subscription with no problem. I’ll post the details on this system when it launches.
We’ve had numerous requests in the past for Aces High on a CD. We finally went out and burned some CD’s. These CD’s have 1.08 Patch 6, the electronic manual, and about 11 different terrains. They come in a jewel case and inside the insert is a key command reference. It’s handy to have a CD around and it’s also a great way to get friends involved that never get around to downloading it. They’ll be selling for $4.99. I’ll be posting information tomorrow with instructions on how to order the CD.
We’ve also been working on a contract on the side with Red Baron Pizza and Accu-Flight. We’re taking AH and making them a version featuring the Red Baron Super Stearman. They’ll run this version in Accu-Flight’s motion simulators and take it on the airshow circuit with them, allowing the public a chance to virtually fly one of their planes after watching them in the airshow. We hope that proves popular and turns more of the public onto the joys of flight-sims in general and Aces High in particular.
As you can see, there are a lot of things going on around here to keep us really busy. Thankfully, it won’t be long until they come to fruition and that will be a lot of great improvements going forward. We've been having to burn a lot of energy lately, so we're really excited to get things like the servers moved back with upgraded bandwidth and additional support staff.
