[News] Tespia is coming!

SETTING: The Nexon Board room

Min Kim: This last patch didn't go so well.
Grunt #1: Yeah, lots of rollbacks that we had to do.
Grunt #2: If hackers weren't so prevalent, hopefully we wouldn't have this problem.
Kim: Well, it's a free game. The consequence of a free game and players with a lot of free time is hackers. That's inevitable.
Grunt #1: So, how can we prevent this from happening again?
Kim: Didn't we promise last year to release Tespia? How's that going?
Grunt #2: Still in the pipeworks. We've been too busy handling all of the errors after patches and taking care of new content. Not a whole lot of time for managing yet another server, bugs, and playerbase.
Kim: Well, we can't have constant rollbacks happening to real characters - that's how we lose money and players. Chances are we can save money by using Tespia. Plus, then we'll be fulfilling our promise that we made over fifteen months ago.
Grunt #1: But what about this Big Bang thing happening? We'll have to keep two separate codebases, and then we'll be revealing our quests and events. Things won't be a surprise anymore on patch night.
Kim: It's better that things not be a surprise than have any more rollbacks. Right now our playerbase believes that they shouldn't even play the game within 48 hours of a patch. Why, when they'll just get rollbacked and lose any progress?
Grunt #2: True.
Grunt #1: Yeah, yeah.
Kim: So, get Tespia going. End of meeting.

I lol'd at the over fifteen momths. So true.

Anyways, just because they're opening Tespia now, it doesn't mean it's going be a huge update. Your logic is flawed. Hime said that Tespia has been in the works for a while now, and they might just have taken all this time to open it because they had to find a good system to make it work right and to prevent abuse like the last time. This time, I'm confident they'll finally fix the reported bugs (or at least most of them) and people who don't report bugs will be out. Organizing all this isn't as easy as it seems, even if it's REALLY hard for me to believe that they've been working on it FOR THE PAST TWO YEARS.

Since they've also released Tespia for really minor things in the past, I don't think they're releasing it NOW because they gotta test something really big. My hope is that they'll keep opening it for (almost) every patch, therefore we should expect it just for the Hob King PQ, too.

Another possibility, as someone else has already stated, is that they're preparing for the Big Bang update and they'll start progressively adding content of the Big Bang path to Tespia as they translate it (it'd take at least 2 months to translate EVERYTHING, for a NORMAL team of translators).

But again, just because they're opening Tespia, it doesn't mean it has to be something big. It might just be that they finally found a good method to make things work and decided to open it now.