I'm all for it if a suitable time slot is selected.
I'll probably stay in tonight and it's Saturday, so i have quite some free time to fly.
My timezone is GMT+3, which means current UK time +2 (we're normally GMT+2 but we're currently on daylight savings time and as i understand it, the UK is too, so the time difference stays at 2 hours).
So, i guess that anything from the evening up to 10:00pm UK time is a good enough starting time for me. Early enough to join, sufficient time ahead to fly and test things out.
Failing that, i'll just hop on the server and see what's going on
It might be a good idea to wait for initial feedback from the hotfix as well. I think it's 4:30 pm now in the UK and the status update post from B6 is coming within the next hour or so, which might contain a hotfix.
If it does get released, we could test it offline for a couple of hours until 6:00pm UK time or thereabouts, come back here and see the bug report thread and reach a decision.
If no game breaking behaviour occurs (provided correct installation procedures are followed) and you guys have one of your server administrators around, then you could patch the server and we all test the latest version of the patch.
CAUTION:
If the patch makes changes to only a few files, we will need to install on top of the previous alpha patch instead of rolling back to the latest official version (via Steam). Otherwise, we might get missing files and erratic behaviour.
Since we can't know which case it is, the safest procedure to follow that ensures both a clean installation and completeness of all files is the following:
1) Verify integrity of local files through Steam: This will roll you back to the latest official version, before the patch we are currently using.
2) Empty your documents\IL2 CoD\cache folder
3) Apply last week's patch (the one we just rolled back from) but don't run the sim yet: We don't want it to rebuild the cache yet. Just extract the files in your main installation folder.
4) Apply today's hotfix (if there is one) on top of it all: Same thing, just extract the file B6 gives us.
5) If you have installed on a hard disk and not an SSD, defrag your game files through Steam: SSD is fast enough and it has a limited amount of rewrites available, so don't strain it.
6) Run the sim: It will take a while to rebuild the cache and load into the main menu screen.
7) Run a quick mission and fly around for a few minutes: I just use the free flight missions and zip around for a couple of minutes. In the event that something is not loaded yet into the cache, flying over terrain, houses, etc will force the game to add it.
8 ) Exit the sim.
You should now be sitting on the final testing patch version with a correctly rebuilt cache. From this point on you can simply launch the sim and fly.