Are there plans to set up a separate test server solely for toxic play? Allow players to test ban-able behavior like bots, cheats, and currency duping. Encourage people to test every game breaking play style learned from decades of game play and players being jerks. By working with the devs to identify this in alpha and beta, release will go a lot smoother.
I always remember this story.
"In a recent Ars Technica interview, Garriott shared his war stories about the creation of Ultima Online
and the surprises that the community whipped up along the way. The
story he tells here focuses on the automated virtual ecology that was
made for the sandbox. This carefully fine-tuned system was destroyed
virtually overnight when player hordes came into the game and
slaughtered everything.
Out of this (failed) experiment came a funny story and some useful lessons that the team used to shape MMO sandboxes thereafter."
By doing this on a separate server the normal alpha test servers can have anti cheat and other rules in place. players can focus on testing combat, skills trees, quest lines, and normal game play mechanics with out somewell-intentioned player killing off the quest giver just to see if it would break the game.
What does every one think of this idea?
Honestly from what i've seen people are trying to do this off and on as the servers currently are in existence. I don't think a specific server tagged for this is so much necessary. You'll see people in the community in any game attempting these security checks. Hopefully, when they do they are reporting them, and if it reaches my ears I will report any and all exploits or bugs found.
I've played games by the book and exploited in others. For me the defining reason for one or the other simply came down to how much I respected the developers/handlers of a game.
For example in Archage, Trion (when they were in control) basicly gave the playerbase the finger so I had no qualm about exploiting in that game. I was part of a bunch of people who discovered In Serpentis that you could fall out of the first room and run strait to all the boss rooms for super fast runs.
I also discovered that it was possible to enter a Dahuta run that was already started by literally dropping out of the waiting room and using "back drop" just before hitting the invisible dome above the boss room. Further back drops were required to get down over to the outside to join the rest of the party outside the room walls in safe Dahuta attacks.
For ashes of Creation I have a lot of respect and towards Steven who was the leader of the guild i was in (TWO) so yes ill look for exploits still but unlike in Archage ill be reporting them to the devs.
I've tested many online games but i've never seen this type of request before. As Testers we are meant to find exploits and report them. Exploits are bugs and bugs need a fix. It would be pointless to have a separate server which allows exploits because all exploits should be reported to be fixed. That is the whole point of testers!
Bug = Find a problem, replicate it, report it, never use it again.
Exploit= Find a problem, replicate it again and again and again, never report it (except telling your friends), use it until you get caught, whine that you didn't know it was wrong.
Comments
For example in Archage, Trion (when they were in control) basicly gave the playerbase the finger so I had no qualm about exploiting in that game. I was part of a bunch of people who discovered In Serpentis that you could fall out of the first room and run strait to all the boss rooms for super fast runs.
I also discovered that it was possible to enter a Dahuta run that was already started by literally dropping out of the waiting room and using "back drop" just before hitting the invisible dome above the boss room. Further back drops were required to get down over to the outside to join the rest of the party outside the room walls in safe Dahuta attacks.
For ashes of Creation I have a lot of respect and towards Steven who was the leader of the guild i was in (TWO) so yes ill look for exploits still but unlike in Archage ill be reporting them to the devs.