https://darkfallnewdawn.com/2016-09-28-the-indev-master-plan/

The InDev Master Plan

Greetings denizens of Agon.

We’ll start this news with a public service announcement:

Starting today characters that have been inactive for over a month will start getting placed in storage and clans with all characters getting stored will be disbanded. The content of their clan vaults will be lost and owned holdings will become neutral again. It will depend on when the character was last active, and it will happen progressively.

Starting Friday, accounts that had only one month of game time will start going inactive.
Some of you should already be inactive, but we chose to extend the first month a bit due to the technical issues we’ve had on the first day and this past week end.

You may already extend your game time by upgrading your bundle in the store. The longer bundles being cheaper per month.
After an account becomes expired, it will have 1 week to upgrade until it loses access to bundles and will only get access to a monthly subscription at 9.99€.

Remember that, either way, for each month of InDev purchased, you will get at least 1 extra week for Live launch.

With this out of the way, we would like to give players an updated estimate of what we are expecting for the rest of the InDev period.

In general we are happy with our velocity. We did a lot more than we expected to have done by now.
There are more gameplay issues than we remembered, so we’ve had to change our priorities based on player feedback and fix more issues than planned, however we have had some very positive surprises on the engine side which balances out.
In short, as of today we estimate that we’ll have an InDev that lasts the full 9 months, but with more features than planned.

As you’ve probably noticed by now, we operate in Patch Cycles, with each cycle having general goals and features fitting a theme.
Patch Cycles 1 and 2 were about foundational changes and we’ve spent quite a while working on improving the engine, fixing the player progression and the first iteration of behind the scene systems. Patch Cycle 3, the one we are in now, is very much about transitioning into expanding the game and switching to adding content.
We believe that after Patch Cycle 3, or during Patch Cycle 4, the game will be marketable to at least former Darkfall players.
This will mark the start of our active promotion of the game in preparation for the final showdown.

We will now describe in broad strokes the plan until the end of InDev:

Patch Cycle 3:
– Second wave of interface changes.
– Expanding mounts with active riding and inventories.
– Completing villages and sea tower revamps, including housing and ships tweaks.
– First balance pass and start of The great Magic Overhaul

Patch Cycle 4:
– Engagement system.
– Casual players aimed content.
– Free period and start of external marketing.
– Watchtowers.

Patch Cycle 5:
– Title system.
– Local markets.
– Harvesting and crafting revamp.

Patch Cycle 6:
– Spawn scaling.
– Local banking.

Free period showdown:
– A period where everyone gets a chance at seeing the game as it should be.
– Consolidation and polish patches, with final tweaks before the switch to the Live server.
– This is meant as a mirror to the stress test period, for players to see the before/after and get a taste of what is to come.

As you can see there is a narrative going throughout patch cycles, with each one mandatory for the next, preparing for the switch to the final world.
Of course these are only the large features each cycle will bring. With all patch we’ll continue to add tweaks, bugfixes, quality of life changes and interface improvements.
Now you know what the future holds, and we hope you are as excited as we are to see it come to fruition.

Link to discussion thread.