As mentioned in recent updates the new alien playfield is now on the test dimension... however this time out we want to try something a little different.
One thing that the last alien playfields showed was that no amount of closed testing was a good substitute for seeing what happened when we let people loose on the playfields on the live dimensions. We simply find issues that closed testing just isn't always suited to picking up.
Likewise we understand that players dont always feel like levelling a character on test and dedicating the time to the systems we have on test (thats not a complaint, we fully understand why people just want to actually play!), and as much as we love our test community, and cannot give them enough credit for the job they do, we know that these scale of playfields will really benefit from having hundreds of players test them rather then dozens.
So this time round we thought that we would do things a little differently to allow us to get an even better picture of any possible issues.
With this in mind we are going to be doings some public stress testing on the live dimensions. The content itself will be patched to the live dimensions next week (we will be patching the pet issues fixes so it will go in the same patch), but the playfield will remain closed. Next weekend (I'll announce the exact details next week) the playfield will be opened for the public with a character of the relevant level to enter the playfield and participate in the testing for a certain period of time (probably for six to eight hours or so), and we will be watching to observe and see what happens.
Characters will get to keep any axp / exp they earn during the testing, but we may restrict item drops, the exact details will be announced next week, but you will be able to bring your favourite high level character and dive right in!
The playfield will then be closed again pending any tweaks and corrrections the testing shows is needed, and we might do another round of testing depending on what we see before we open the playfield permanently.
We thought about this very carefully and considered the feedback from the last set of alien playfields, when we had to 'hotfix' a couple of issues after the content went live, and feel that using this method for final testing will give you guys a great feedback opportunity without the frustration of knowing your efforts may be frustrated by unforseen issues when the content is 'live'.
I'll post the full details and times next week but wanted to give you all a heads up
Originally Posted by acardia
