Have a permanent test server to help collect feedback from features in development.

[thorny zealot]

While talking to some people in community discords and reading some of the information given by staff about the development of the market feature, it became clear that a big reason of the delay for some features is the necessity to be certain that there will be no major bugs on arrival to the live game. I think that is respectable and smart, and this proposal looks to increase community feedback from those features in development instead of relying only the small sample of testing from the staff itself every time something new launches.

** The idea: ** Have a new server be launched and take the place of the occasional test servers we have. Lets call it Testia just to make it easier. Everytime a feature in development needs some testing, it gets patched into Testia and a notification is shown on the game client upon starting it informing the players that such feature is available on Testia. Players can log in Testia and play as in a regular world with such feature to check how it works in the closest possible scenario to the live servers. Characters created on the server remain active until a reset is made, and at any time a player can clone a character from a live server to Testia.

** The benefits: ** Having a permanent test server means at any time something needs a bigger sample of testing, staff can promptly patch Testia and let people log in to generate data about it. If something is widely broken, rollbacking Testia brings no trouble whatsoever to anyone. To encourage people to test new features a bug bounty program can be implemented in which finding bugs and reporting them at the right place can reward Medivia Coins or any other sort of rewards to the players on live servers. Having a permanent test servers cuts down the noise in communication between staff and community, as people won't have to wonder if there is a test server or not, while having rewards for finding bugs will encourage people to spend a little time helping collect data about new features.

In order to avoid people abusing Testia to, for example, master a new hunt before risking their main characters on live servers, staff can just not patch new content into Testia for a while, or prevent certain creatures from spawning or some places to be reached in Testia, like they do in the current test servers we have.

Testia could have a dedicated forum section in which people debate about the current build being tested and it gets archived and wiped every time there is a new build patched to be tested.

I also believe the amount of feedback generated from testing and watching the progress on the development of new features (specially bigger and complex ones) can have a very positive impact on community perception about the staff work and progress on promissed features, while also promoting transparency about what is being taken as priority in the development sprints.

[thorny zealot]

Bump

[thorny zealot]

After today's patch, I feel like this becomes even more significant. Changing the economy for all servers without testing it properly and checking the impact it could make resulted in a terrible effect in the community. More transparency and more data can only help the game develop in the best way possible.

I am not sure if the patch as a whole was a bad decision, and I'm 100% sure inflation is an issue. But lack of testing and communication makes people hate the change, and with more data it could've been better tweaked and have a even more positive impact.

[thorny zealot]

Bump

[tardy holly]

they have it?

[thorny zealot]

Right now test server is not permanent, doesn't envolve a bug bounty program, and there is no incentive to logging in and testing stuff for the regular player. Also not every mechanic or balancing feature is put into the test server as proposed (for example, this week changes regarding gold inflation went live as a surprise for every player).

Having a test server is different from what I proposed, and I believe being more constant, comunicative and transparent is better for the game and will increase feedback quantity and quality as people will have more reasons to test and inform problems than it is now.