[Markus Heinsohn]

OK guys, on Friday we will release the Gold Master Beta of OOTP 17 to the friendly folks who have pre-ordered. In order for things to go smoothly, please read on.

1) Locate your serial number, you will need it on Friday. You can find it in the confirmation email of your purchase, below the line that says "REGISTRATION INFORMATION". The serial number looks like this: OOTP17-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX.

If you cannot find the confirmation email, no problem. eSellerate has an after-purchase-support page, where you can find all your orders and receipts online. Please open the after-sales-support page here. Next to "Finding your order number", in the second section on that page, enter the email address that you used when you made the purchase.

2) We will send you an email to the email account you used for ordering once the game is ready to go on Friday (probably in the afternood ET). The email will include the link to the setup files (one each for PC, Mac or Linux). Sending all the emails does take us some time, so don't worry if others receive it half an hour earlier than you do! ... You should, to be sure, check your spam folders too when looking for the email. Also, if you unsubscribed our newsletter in the past couple of years, you will not receive an email because you are blocked from our list. If that is the case, please email gary.breckenridge@ootpdevelopments.com or andreas@ootpdevelopments.com on Friday with your order receipt, he will review it and reply with an email containing the links.

3) After you have downloaded and installed the game, the main screen will have the buttons "Purchase" and "Enter License Key" enabled. Click on the latter button, and then enter your license key into the box which comes up. You can use copy & paste, pasting on the PC works by hitting CTRL + V, on the Mac it's Cmd(Apple) + V. Again, the serial looks like this: OOTP17-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX ... the complete string is needed, including the "OOTP17"! Make sure you have no white spaces at the beginning or end.

4) It may take a few tries to activate the game, the servers will probably be rather busy. Unfortunately, this is out of our control, so you may have to be a bit patient.

5) If you still have problems activating the game, please read the following article in our knowledge base: Activation Problems - Help Desk

6) For general technical support, please do not post bugs on this general forum! We'll open the support forum with a bug report subforum on Friday.

7) The free Steam key will be made available once the game is live on Steam, probably on Tuesday afternoon. There will be an online tool which lets you retrieve the key with your order ID. More info to follow.

Alright, that's it I guess. We will monitor the forums over the weekend and fix all bugs that get properly reported to our support team. Then on Tuesday we will release the game (including bug fixes) to the masses.

We are very excited, OOTP 17 is certainly a big step forward for the series, and we can't wait to show it to you and hear your feedback.

Cheers!
Markus