Hello there everyone, with Christmas presents getting ready to come out today I wanted to explain a couple changes that have been made to the present system this year and tell you all why we felt they needed to be made.

The first change is that present opening times will be staggered. Some people will be able to open presents as early as 6 AM EST on Christmas morning, some as late as 6 PM EST, everyone else will able to open their presents somewhere in between. Everyone will have their own time when they can open their presents, and once that time has passed, you're able to open all your presents without any limits. This time is shown in your inventory after you receive gifted presents. In previous years, so many people tried logging in to open presents at the same time on Christmas morning that the server struggled to keep up, we had serious lag, and we had lots of people who couldn't log in at all. By having everyone be able to open their presents at different times, we're hoping the stress on the server will be spread out throughout the day and not cause major issues.

The other change is to how the rare, limited loot in presents will go out. In the past, the rarest loot like Mysterious Keycards and Exotic Coins had a small chance to go out in each present opened, and also a cap on how many could go out in total. All of the limited items would usually be given out in the first half-hour after presents could be opened, so if you were not able to log on and open your presents right away you didn't have a real chance at getting those rare items. This isn't fair to quite a few people who live in time zones where presents are opened in the middle of the night. It also isn't fair to people who can't log in due to family gatherings, server issues, or simply because they want to sleep in on their vacation. This year we are changing the limited present loot system so that each present has an ID, and the rare loot will be put into presents based on randomly selected IDs chosen by the server on Christmas morning. That means even if you get a 6 PM opening time you still have a chance at getting a Mysterious Keycard. You can even wait several days before opening your presents and still have a chance at getting the rarest loot as long as the present was gifted to you before 6 AM EST on Christmas morning.

We've also done some optimization on how presents are stored on the server, allowing players to hold more presents this year. There is still a limit on how many presents of each color you can have. The limit varies slightly from player to player. I expect players to be able to hold between 400 and 600 presents of each color.