Project Polish isn't enough

[Dayde]

I hate to compare different games.. especially vastly different games, but oh well.. here it goes.

Before I started playing MO1, I spent way too much time playing EVE Online. EVE Online and MO are similar in being full loot, lose everything, player driven economy, etc. CCP (EVE developers at the time) was pushing out big patches quickly, and were hyper focused on keeping the game balanced. One thing they did, that I think SV should really look at, is provide players (any player) access to a test server. Every patch they were working on would be pushed to the test server long before it was added to the actual game, and any player could switch to the test server and provide feedback. When you logged into the test server, everything from the production server was copied over.. so you had the exact same player experience, but with access to yet-to-be-released features.

SV really needs to adopt something similar. Especially as a small shop with limited developers coding. This gives players that wish to check out the test server a chance to see how new features might work (since it is test, they will need to know that things may/will change before production release), and it gives SV potentially several testers that can provide real world feedback and help the polishing effort. Since everyone could log into the test server at any time, no one will have an unfair advantage by using the test server. The test server could be limited to a few hundred players, and should be wiped and re-copied from prod every day or so as code is developed.

In my experiences with EVE Online, you could find several other players in the test server, but no one was using it for regular game play. Sure.. PVP happened there/etc.. but you essentially got nothing from playing in it aside from experiencing what the developer was working on and preparing for what was coming (but with risks since everything could change during the test-development cycle). I strongly feel SV could make MO2 what it should be, but with their size (and in some cases inexperience), they really need to leverage the player base as much as possible for things like this. Since players would have something to gain by testing (knowledge/etc), there would be no reason to offer any other incentive for testing.

Not only would this help SV with a truly polished product before it hit production (and less players feeling like a guinea pig when a bug runs rampant), it would also foster even more transparency between developer and the player base.. something that the regular twitch streams also help with. To clarify, transparency like that doesn't mean giving away secrets to the game.

 

[Icegoten]

I don't know. I keep thinking about the benefits of a test server but then come up with ways that could give players an advantage with no risk of gaining knowledge.

For example if we play like we are now and they come out with craftable fishing rods then players are going to have to experiment in the live environment. Gather resources, try crafting in town, and eventually venture out to test the rods and how they affect catching fish. This could lead to other players interacting with them to eventually find out about crafting rods.

On a test server you would do all of that with no risk and pretty much everyone would be able to find out the same thing. At that point there won't be any discovery. It'd just be who logged on the test server when they were testing that to gather data and then when the patch goes live profit off of the knowledge.

On the other hand certain game systems wouldn't have secrets at least not in my eyes. It would be like tower shields are coming so just remove the crafting part of tower shields and let players get some default tower shields and try fighting with them to see how they interact with stamina drain and stuff like that. But then again I don't know because maybe you make a shield out of a certain material and it affects stamina drain.

Maybe siege weapons wouldn't have any secrets and it would be purely does this weapon work the way it's supposed to? Can the players use it for other purposes instead like maybe launching each other or fighting creatures? That kind of stuff I think would benefit from a test server.

 

[Dayde]

I am with you.. in MO knowledge is everything. In the beta, SV seemed to have a pretty good handle on what to release for testing vs. what components to hold back for prod. In EVE Online, there were no real secrets.. outside of locations/WH's/etc, so there was no risk to the game from that regard. If SV had an open test server, as well as whatever closed testing/qa environments they must have now, then they can pick and choose what needed to be held back vs. what could be released to the test environment. They are such a small team, they need to leverage the player base like this in some way to limit the bugs that make it into production. I am glad that the kind of bugs we are dealing with now are far better than MO1's early days (or even MO1 now for that matter).. but any bugs will turn away many players that are not personally invested into the game yet. Whether they open up a test server or not.. the bottom line is until they have several developers that can focus solely on bug fixes and polish, while another group works on content, then they will just keep chasing recurring bugs.