Policy Change: QA Server and Release Instructions Early Drafts Open to All (starting with R45)

The raging is real, lol

I do like the suggestion of adding no change to the dev+ bug reporting and those bug reports have priority in screening.

Other than that not making this change to include everyone in the early information would be a major fail.

 

Can't see why there is such a big attachment to the QA being "exclusive".

It was Port's choice to limit the access and it's Port's choice to open that access. People still have to pay to have that access. It's not open to the public. There is no pledge tier reward that includes QA server access and it have been pretty bizarre for them to do so.

 

Positive points are:

Multiple times more bugs found before release
Multiple times more people able to follow up on reports and give deeper details
Multiple times more volunteers available to spot duplicate reports, known issues, etc
No change to "toxic environment" in bug forums (because i dont believe ive ever seen toxic posts in the live bug forum??) same with "debates" and "critisisms".
Actual bug reporters that didnt have QA access before will now have a fair shot at some bug rewards.

QA was not part of the Dev+ package we had. We still have the private forumt he devs discuss things in. There is literally no loss to the Dev+ pledge with this action.

And its not cool to make a list implying non-dev+ are a lower class citizen that are not as smart as Dev+, expecially with so many redundant bullet points.

 

COTO rewards are not a problem as far as I see it. If people want to spend 4 hours on each of their multiple accounts to earn the COTO rewards, more power to them. Thats 4 hours on each account not playing on live server, where they could earn more value in gold from playing, and buy more COTOs with that gold that they can earn on QA from testing. In fact, the fact that COTOs are limited to 4 hour play incentivizes me not to play more than 4 hours.

(You can't earn the COTOs by just logging in and idling btw)

 

At any rate, I support opening up QA since we're persistence now, and if the devs feel that gives people on QA an unfair economic advantage.

I'm skeptical that it'll improve bug testing, though. By the time the game would go on the live server, QA testers generally found all the major bugs and reported them. If there were huge bugs when it went live, that generally meant that there were new bugs between the QA build and the patched live build, because of changes the devs added in at the last minute... not because of any fault of the testers. Of course, there might be minor bugs, but these were ok to catch on live.

The fact that there were less bug posts probably did help devs though narrow it down to those major issues in the 1 week period of QA testing. Maybe it would help to extend the QA period to two weeks now?

As far as the potential economic advantages go, the devs could have always gone a more minimal route and just done a post in the general forms notifying players of upcoming economic changes, without opening the QA. So, at the time they posted the R44 draft post, they could have posted "Obsidian ingot recipe about to change" on the general forums. Though, either way is fine with me, since we are in persistence and I don't feel entitled to have special access to the QA server.

 

No not at all! It may have been moved to keep the thread on topic, which is about the policy change to QA access. If any posts are changed in any way, you receive a notification here in the forums.

 

@DarkStarr I appreciate you taking responsibility for the issue that it seems many have cried "ruined" the economy. I wish I had a record of every time people said the economy had been "ruined" by one thing or another, and the economy chugged along. But your statement has gone a long way to assure folks you are on top of what is posted.


To be sure, I do believe that some might have taken advantage of the information,but I am not one who is screaming "the sky is falling" because of it. What happened, it happened and is over. I am glad I refused to purchase said item from anyone at cheap prices where I could be blamed for insider trading. But hey,we all know in real life,someone has a advantage over others and someone is going to end up with the short straw.
No, it doesn't make it right,but for everyone who "thinks there should be a level playing field", life is not a level playing field. You can do your best to make the game that way,but if someone really wants to search for an advantage,they will find it somewhere. As far as the QA servers and bug reporting forums, doesn't matter one bit to me in the long run. I had very limited time to ever look for bugs and it's really not my thing.

What I do wonder about is those folks who earned rewards for finding bugs and received items that will become less special now that it has been opened up to the masses,but it doesn't affect me so someone else can address that.

 

You haven't wasted any money! In fact, your investment has paid off way more than was originally intended. Remember, you've had QA access as a bonus to Dev+ for years now, so it's only paid off multiple times now. If you hadn't helped, we wouldn't be this far. Inevitably changes like this were due to happen for the betterment of the game leading up to launch, it was just a bit sooner than expected.

 

What about those of us who have only been in the game for months, like myself, and have had QA access with their Dev+ upgrade for 2 months?

 

Our apologies for not making Dev+ details clear, a good point. Dev+ isn't going away or QA becoming inaccessible to Dev+, just the further opening up of QA to the wider community (which can get access at any time they wish anyway). Dev+ discussion forums and the dev blog posts, etc., will still be exclusive to Dev+ players.

 

I would have thought that the discussion of what value Dev+ access represents in the light of the policy change to QA access was entirely on topic here.

Er, no. I personally have only had Dev+ access for 8 months. Other avatars may have only had Dev+ access since the last telethon or even more recently than that.

Maybe so, but that has not been communicated by Portalarium at any point before yesterday. Repeated claims from Portalarium staff that we should have expected this to happen all along doesn't make it less surprising that it has happened for those that weren't expecting it.

And I repeat: before yesterday it wasn't expected at all. It wasn't on any roadmap, it's not mentioned on the bundle or pledge pages.

 

http://sotawiki.net/sota/Developer_(Benefactor)
https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/?page_id=35139

QA testing was never said to be part of the Dev+ pledge reward, which is what you paid for. The stuff listed for the actual pledge is all still intact from what i can see

 

Sorry to extend this, but I have always felt Dev+ should have more developer activity. After reading this I thought I may have been wrong if the dev blogs were there. But after checking, the dev blogs are in the Town Hall.

 

And yet, was something until the announcement yesterday, you could only get with a Dev+ account. As has been pointed out many, MANY times now.

 

"

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal that others.

What exactly was my original intent in investing, @Berek ? What did I intend to be the end of the return of my investment? You appear to know, I would love to have the knowledge shared with me.

Maybe I have received all my return on my accounts, too? Will they now be wiped for the good of the game?

Trust is earned by fidelity to promises made. Can backers trust the devs? How many promises have been broken? Keeping a promise when doing so is easy is not the test of a man's character. Keeping a promise when keeping it is hard is the measure of a man's character.

 

I agree! We try to put out at least one or two blog updates during the weekly Friday newsletters. We would love to hear more of what kind of posts you'd like us to write as well depending on what's coming up for that particular release.

Dev blog posts should be primarily posted in Dev+ for exclusive posts, at least initially, though many older posts have been moved out of Dev+ once they go live. I'll see if I can clean this up to ensure we're not posting in the public area too quickly...

 

Dev blog posts are currently in the Town Hall section, available to anyone. These are not Dev+ exclusive. It's why we have been asking you guys what exactly Dev+ forum access is really going to mean from here forward, since once the QA server sections are moved to public, it's literally cobwebs.

 

Even Chris' daily blog is in the Town Hall section of the forums, just below the announcements.

 

The problem that's been created here is that you're saying that the game will "always be in development, and will never be finished" while at the same time saying that no information in DEV+ can create an unfair advantage to those that don't have DEV+.

By this standard, there's almost nothing that can be in DEV+....ever.

I think it's time to start exploring a compensating reward for DEV+, because DEV+ is dead.