Cz wrote today about what’s in the near future for the game and the community, here are some of the more interesting items:

Production of Shadowlands is the main task right now, and the dev team (designers, programmers, graphics and sound artists, world designers, the project manager and the game director) and our QA people are extremely busy. The beta test is about to start, and everything needs to be ready for it. That's priority #1 right now.

We're currently aiming for two updates before Shadowlands. The first one is 14.8.2, and is for fixing bugs, and some additional tweaks on changes in 14.8.0 (e.g. the ping-pong aggro). We hope to run this update the live dimensions next week (Wednesday).

The second update we're aiming for will be 14.9, which is a pure data update. That means no new code, though we have some "dormant" features in the game just waiting for this data, so you'll see some new stuff anyway. And some item data bugs are likely to be corrected here too. More stash, basically. And, of course, the long awaited Inner Sanctum dungeon.

For the entire tread and more on beta selection check out the AO official boards here.