We have made great progress on 3.0, and are close to release. Many people thought that when we announced we were releasing "this holiday season", that mean before New Year’s Eve. We apologize if that was misleading. We take our release dates very seriously and don’t want to mislead people. It’s been changed to "this winter", to avoid any more confusion. We had a January release in mind, and we hope to be able to stick to that…
In order to facilitate communication with the community, we’ve set up a few NS mailing lists (no longer active). We have one for mappers to learn about late-breaking news and get their questions answered, one for file mirrors, and (soon) one to keep up to date with community events. These lists will soon be integrated more directly with the site and the forums, but they are functional now. Click the "mailing lists" link above to join. Of course, we will never ever spam you or give out your information to anyone. The lists are just getting going, but they’re functional, so go sign up for any you are interested in.
After many months of productive playtesting and balance work with around 2000 Constellation members and Veterans, we feel like we are ready for the next step. We just can’t get the kind of balance and compatibility testing we need by running all the playtest servers ourselves, and we want to give back to the ever-patient greater NS community. So instead of waiting until v3.0 is totally complete before release, we’re going to release the beta to the public. We don’t have the exact date yet, but we expect that the v3.0g beta is the build we’re going to release to everyone, just as soon as we get everything in order.
The NS dev team wants to personally thank everyone that helped test, and especially to the Constellation members that have donated to further NS development. If you see any Constellation members on a server, be sure to thank them for their contributions. Without their contributions, you probably wouldn’t even be playing v2.01 right now…