The marketing machine for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars is starting to spin up - if you missed it, don't forget to check out the first round of previews. More are sure to come within the next few weeks along with a few other cool announcements related to the console versions. In more PC-centric news, there have been quite a few questions about the status of the ETQW 1.5 game update on the forums, so here's what's currently happening with it.

Good news: There's light at the end of the license tunnel! We've at last received the proper license files for both the Competition Mod and the 1.5 game update. With that in mind, we're now prepping them for release and hope to get them out as soon as possible (for real!).

Since we want to make sure that both releases are as solid as can be, we've decided to run public beta phases for them - this will allow us to iron out any remaining stability issues and also make sure that the backend infrastructure is working properly. Both of these are the most difficult things to test for and since we've had a few issues crop up in 1.4 that didn't surface during our testing, we feel that a public beta phase is in the best interest of the game and the players.

Read on for more information on the two upcoming Beta releases and for the preliminary 1.5 changelog.

We've been testing the ETQW Competition Mod Beta all week and the thing is in pretty good shape, though there are a few last minute issues that we're having to resolve before it can go out. Bizarrely enough, the main hold-up at the moment is that we're still waiting to get the correct license files for it – legal experts from around the globe are telling us that it can't go out without them, so there's unfortunately very little we can do there.

We do expect to get them within the next few working days, so hopefully it won't be too much longer until we're able to release the Competition Mod Beta.

The 1.4 update was all about making it easier for new players to find their way into Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars and we've seen some great feedback regarding the spanking new training mode in particular. If you haven't tried the new demo yet, now's the time!

With 1.4 out of the way, we are currently working on the next game update, and breaking with all known naming and moral conventions, we were thinking of code-naming it "1.5". This is going to be a smaller release and fix the remaining issues that cropped up in 1.4, such as ranks not being displayed correctly and Personal Bests being tracked on a per-campaign basis rather than globally (those two issues are actually related).

More immediately - and perhaps a bit more exciting - we are also wrapping up work on our competition mod. If you're not familiar with it, the main purpose of the mod is allow tournament organizers to easily implement and enforce specific rulesets. To that extent, we've stuffed quite a lot of cvar customization options in there and creating a new ruleset is as simple as putting the values you'd like to adjust in a config file on your server.

Now that 1.4 has been released, let me bring you up to speed on the issues we've found so far and what we're doing to address them.

Perhaps the most rampant problem was server crashing just a few minutes after going up. What happened there? Well, it turns out that the newly added Hot Servers feature is indirectly to blame: when more than 256 players queried the same server at the same time, it became unresponsive and disconnected everyone playing on it. The good news is that we've since isolated and fixed the underlying cause - a problem with server info requests - and have deployed a hotfix to our GSP partners. So far things are looking extremely good on that front and barring any further problems, the fix will very soon be released to the community at large.

We're also aware that ranks are not being displayed and are currently testing a fix for this. Both that as well as any other necessary fixes will make it into a smaller update that we're hoping to release in the coming weeks. We'll continue to monitor the forums closely, so if you come across any other issues, please let us know there.