A list of Positive suggestions for Improving the QA Server for Volunteer Testers

POSITIVE CHANGES that could be made to the QA testing server or procedures to help us volunteer QA testers who are trying to help make a better game.

1.) Please add a Forum post for "QA Patch Notes" so QA Testers know if certain feature have been added to the QA test server to save on wasted time testing features which are NOT YET patched into the QA server. We have a patch page for the live server and we need a patch forum post for the QA test server. Lock the patch forum page so the comments don't push the actual QA Patch notes deep into the forum pages. Have a separate forum post for any comments on the QA Patch notes.

2.) Give all QA testers who login on the QA Server:

a.) 100,000 cotos
b.) 20 million Gold.
c.) 500 million adventure and crafting XP.
d.) One Potion of Guidance with a 10,000X percent learn rate on all skills that lasts 30 days.
e.) Give new game items (ie: up coming stretch rewards, dungeon rooms, items) that need testing to the rewards accounts of Testers on QA.
f.) 20 Scolls of unlearning.

Since testing characters often do not have the resources or game tools (scrolls of unlearning) to follow through on testing items or procedures which their live characters do not already own since character accounts are just copied from the live server.

Reasons:
I.) Testers can't test the store without the cotos (a.) to actually buy items and test store transactions or the item itself. For example, new housing, dungeons or lot changes require many cotos to buy in order to test. There is no way to add cotos to a test account so how can people test lot upgrades requiring hundreds of cotos? A rare few testers may have a large number of cotos.

II.) Testers often need gold to buy items for crafting or purchase items to test from other players. A tester may need to buy (b.) thousands of ore, ingots, cloth or other material to test new crafting items.

III.) Testers need to quickly unlearn(f) or learn new skills so a large pool of XP (c) and a Super fast potion of Guidance (d) will save testers hours! For example fishing required way too many hours to learn four new skills. Testers may have to learn a completely new skill tree to test elemental pets or some other new skill. As it is now on the QA server, it might take 5 hours to level a lich pet to GM to test damage. This should only take a few minutes with the suggested changes.

IV.) It is a TEST SERVER so it is all WIPED after the release goes live so why not just give QA Testers EVERY TOOL they need to help test. Having the needed resources to carry out complete testing would lead to fewer bugs making it to release and a happier player base in general. Having these resources will also entice some new QA testers to help with testing.

I think the QA lottery system, in place now, means that the DEV team sees the need to give testers extra resources to test but lets follow this line of logic to it natural conclusion which is to give testers EVERYTHING they might possibly need to test all changes. These "free test resources" cost nothing to give to testers who volunteer their time. No one wants to "grind" resources on a test server to get these resources just to test. New features are just not going to get tested if resources are not available to the tester.

As an added marketing benefit, I am sure a few people would buy things on the test server with their free cotos/gold and then decide they wanted to buy the real item on the LIVE server which is a win - win situation for the game.

Thanks for reading to the end... this post took some time write.
John Striker
GM Justice Guards

Note: This is a partial repost and rework of a previous post in another thread.