We had two kinds of questions coming in over the last couple of days: "When will testing begin on Croydon?" and "Why can't I sign up with the game?". So we thought about how we could answer both of them and came to a conclusion: The new flight rating system will be the last big addition to 1.3 and we want it to be stable and balanced when it's rolled out. But at the same time we don't want our fans to be kept from playing because Nicosia is full. Consequently we decided that we will go ahead with the launch of Croydon based on a proven version of the game -- namely 1.3.21b --  that's already running on Nicosia. The recently announced test with real life data from Nicosia will be postponed until we are actually happy with the flight rating system and until we are confident that we can introduce it on existing servers without causing too many turbulences.

So now you're probably wondering about a launch date? Well, here it is: Monday, November 9th, 2009. The configuration will be more or less the same as on Nicosia, but will include some data patches concerning airport data and maybe some fixes to the aircraft database.