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    TwinStar team

Beta test for old players

Aieris

Authorized
Joined
Jan 15, 2009
I know that this suggestion will appear selfish but still.

When server will be nearly ready for release, what about making closed beta test for former players. You still have our chars so we can use them for testing all things that tester team missed. It also can help with trying server under higher load. After all, the server was in closed development for nearly a year and i'm not naive to think that all scripts were flawless and so all things that worked before are still working.

And why i suggest to invite only old players instead of making open beta? Because if it reveals any major and gamebreaking bugs, it will not destroy hype that was already maded. I'm convinced, that all old players that want to return will be tolerant and will not denigrate the server, because they know, that it was good year ago and so when these potential bugs are fixed, it will be good once again.
 
I would actually be very ok with that... testing is always needed and the old players know best which things used to work/bug out...
 
There is no reason to limit a beta test to just a part of the community.
You lack condifence my friend.
 
Well, what i can tell, on K1 flyght masters worked well and as intended. When K2 launched after few months of closed development, they didn't. The whole flyght master system was broken so you ended up in textures or were unable to move until relog. It got fixed in few hours, but it's nice example how things can get screwed up (and nobody noticed this during testing, because testers used .tele command instad of flyght masters).

If you are fixing quests (like drop chances, waypoints for escorts, etc.) you will most probably not break anything, but if you are doing something more complex in the core mechanics, then there is a chance, that something else, that have been working with previous state of the core will not work with new and so you must adjust it to the new version. And not all things can be catched just by looking at them. You need test them to see if it works properly. Also, some mistakes in the code may appear only when server is under heavy load.

Edit: To Lharts, i think, that first test should be done like this to catch the major bugs and if it will apear well or these bugs get fixed, then there can be another, this time open beta.
 
That is the reason why Chero took care of core mechanics before PvE.
He is done with major refactoring and implementations that tend to have massive side effects.
That is what the testers have been testing for about 2 months. Some parts even longer.

What is left are some minor bugs with spells which usually don't have any side effects (you can never be 100% sure ofc) and PvE scripts. Mostly Quests, spawns, events, emotes etc, boss scripts (if necessary). Alot cosmetic stuff.

Its almost 5 months now that I tried to help Chero as a tester and I only encountered game breaking bugs at an early stage of this period or when the elemental damage or mob scaling system was introduced. Even then he managed to fix it in about 2 days each.

Chill out man :)

EDIT: Just read the new reply from Nelsha.
What happened to another realm should never be of concern for us.
Imo the server is ready for a beta test, but I am not the one to decide that.
 
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I am not one of old Kronos players and I still wouldn't mind this. We could see what happens when the test is open to public - people will try to show the worst of the server and even leak it to competition.

And the notion of 'Why would there be bugs if it worked before" and "You lack confidence" are wrong. I am almost sure there will be bugs in the first test and it's really naive to think otherwise. Every piece of software needs testing and there almost always are things you never though of before/couldn't test in smaller scale.

Proper user testing is very vital part of development and is not to be underestimated. That said, I will be much happier if the testing has one more phase before completely open beta testing and before launch.

I don't know how many testers are there at the moment, but in the server's interest, I don't think it's a good idea to show big parts of the game as battlegrounds or raid instances to the public without testing with the expected number of players (40) behaving unpredictably. There can always be some stupid little mistake, requiring 5 minutes to fix, but in players eyes it could mean "wtf Kronos, promised working instances, now even first boss doesn't work" and they don't care if it's just a test (as again, we could see in the other server's case).

It doesn't have to be just old Kronos players, but any larger group of trusted players.
 
Well, this was just suggestion to avoid possible "shitstorm". I'm only worried about bugs and crashes that will show up only when server is loaded with higher amount of players.

To Nelsha: They lost credit mostly because they claimed that "It's 100% ready" and then revealed something, that is not. That showed the community, that they are not honest with them and i think that many players already lost patience with that from feenix.
 
I must side with Lharts as I, too, fail to see the benefit of the test only being accessible to older players.
If a public test is a good step(and I'm not here to decide that), then wouldn't it be better if there were more people around to test stuff?
 
Well, as i have stated above, the iterative idea will, in my opinion, be the best. For example, 2 days with "old players" and if everything is good, then invite wider audience to reveal more bugs.
 
While we currently have no plans to give "beta" access to veteran players we do have something planned to grant limited access to the test server to a few lucky people. We will most likely announce more this Sunday.
 
While we currently have no plans to give "beta" access to veteran players we do have something planned to grant limited access to the test server to a few lucky people. We will most likely announce more this Sunday.

Nice! can people make videos or stream if you're lucky enough to be chosen?
 
Few lucky? Yeah, nah. Makes it sound like you're afraid of the server being unable to handle the amount of players, really.

It's not actually like that, right?
 
I will once again, repeat myself - it's nearly a year of closed development, nobody knows how stability changed during this period. It will most likely be unstable at the begining, also, there can be serious bugs, so opening the server for masses from the begining would be bad decision.

I don't know any developer, that will be able to write flawless and 100% bug free code on first attempt.
 
Few lucky? Yeah, nah. Makes it sound like you're afraid of the server being unable to handle the amount of players, really.

It's not actually like that, right?

A test with too many people is unreasonable. The test team already did a great job at finding major things.
You know what beta testers usually do if given GM rights? Excatly, they fool arround.
Its natural, trust me. Log in, teleport arround, add T3 etc. You get the idea.
Giving beta to alot players won't increase the amount of found bugs as much as one might think.

There is nothing to hide, otherwise it would be really stupid to hand out beta accounts to even just a few.
 
Few lucky? Yeah, nah. Makes it sound like you're afraid of the server being unable to handle the amount of players, really.

It's not actually like that, right?

Right now the biggest concern is that someone will start messing up with the worldspawn. Imho the core (software) would crash long time before the Twinstar servers (hardware) would even break a sweat. That info however comes from 2010, when the WotLK core was set to 3000 players limit. I haven't heard about any limitations ever since.
 
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