Posts made by GreatValdus

@Marshmello welcome to the forum!

@Jessikat yes, as @Ostaff also points out, a wipe is to be expected after every alpha phase, which is typical for alpha stage, while in beta you could have a more persistent situation.
Usually you have one final total wipe before the pre-launch beta, where some games use to have a headstart period for founders and stuff like that, with some people playing some days before official launch, this time keeping their progres when the game actually start.

@dj35 do you official lore or fan fiction?

@mythal welcome to the forum!
Games, like music, are submerged by a lot of competition, and often it's easier to give visibility to shitty products easier to make, since you spend less on making them and more on advertising, that's why gems like this one are easily unnoticed until someone with more visibility presents them to you...

@Glantor welcome to the forum!

@Zbummy welcome to the forum!

@KylarS welcome to the forum!
And in 16 days, welcome to the Spring Alpha!

@Alwarogam welcome to the forum!
The alpha has been renamed to "Spring Alpha", since winter will be gone when the alpha will start, but still, 16 days to go!

@Specter as @Logain it's understandable but can lead to an unbalance of output informations.
For example I found out that the video was about the go out because I found the message on Discord, and lots of people don't use Discord daily, and could have missed it.

@Bernu it's sure that not everybody logs always in the forum, but the news in the main page should be the most up to date place to see anyway, because it can be seen as lack of professionality to gather new information from side places like socials or chats or the likes, while the main blog news remains out of date.

That said, I'm not here to complain, I'm counting the days for the new alpha and trying to find a way to clone myself in the next two weeks, since on 30th March will also start New World alpha.

@Arachnids welcome to the forum!

@DovahF welcome to the forum!

@Jessikat welcome to the forum!

@Logain I agree on that, or at least elect someone to act as social manager and keep information updated.

@RetroPacman races other than humans are not yet implemented.
For PvP, I suppose it's already implemented, since it has been tested before.
Furthermore the update is about city sieges, which are kinda PvPish...

@Ostaff 31st just to say it will start in March...

@TerminusOverlord I think we all are!

For those of you not on Discord, I'm reporting last Jacopo's message here:

"@everyone the launch date of the Spring Alpha (formerly Winter Alpha ) is going to be revealed in the next spotlight video premiering in 5.30h from now - i.e. 10.30pm CET! See you soon, I'll be live in the chat! Link -->

@Faasnu welcome to the forum!

@drfate786 said in March Winter Alpha?:

The issue with players testing an alpha is that players are not programmers and they are not white-hat hackers. They don't have the fracking tools or programming tools required to crack the game and find bugs and exploits. This means that they're relying on a large quantity of players to just happen upon bugs which occur during regular play, there are certain bugs that occur from specific causations which can be exploited. I guarantee that when this game launches there will be a black market on Discord for illicit exploits, dupes and botting software as well as gold/currency selling due to the amount of exploits and bugs that will go unpatched.

I really don't understand how you can keep failing to see the nonsense in what you say.
The more people will test the alpha, the more chances that bug and exploits are discovered and reported.
Really, try to think about it for a second, you have two scenarios:

1. Only devs testing
2. Devs + users testing
   How in the world can you say that only devs is better than devs + users?
   As much as some people would not report an exploit it's sufficient for a single good person to find it for it to be fixed, so the more you have, the more chance that a single person reports it.
   Is't so clear that I really don't understand how you can miss it.

The other issue with relying on the community is that this also allows bad actors to pay for alpha/beta access and then use their own tools to find exploits which they will then use to manipulate the devs. IE, "This is a serious, bug you should patch this" only for the patching of that bug to then break ten other scripts which the exploiter will now abuse if it makes it past the beta. This happens often in Runescape and WoW where an exploiter will post a video of an exploit in the hopes that Blizzard patches it because it will actually break some other scripts which they will then proceed to exploit.

This probably makes even less sense than the previous point.
Reporting a bug in hope that fixing it breaks other things, total nonsense.
Bugs need to be fixed and fixes can cause other bugs, but it's irrelevant whether the report was made to trigger this mechanism or not, bugs need to be fixed anyway.
It would make sense if the bug was fixes by the user himself, injecting some malicious code, but that's clearly not the case.

Closed alphas and PAID full time testers are a MUST in the gaming industry, you have to pay a salary to a person who's sole job is to break the game and find as many bugs and glitches as possible whilst also highlighting the causations of it. Unpaid testers simply don't have the time, skills, tools or commitment to do this effectively. A programmer has to be delegated to doing this or things go south quickly.

Was a must, things change, people change, paying doesn't mean finding everything, a lot of paid workers are slackers that will not do their job properly.
Better relying on numbers of enthusiasts, because if you mass up enough enthusiasts testing your game, statistically speaking you will also have some experts among them, and some with a lot of time to invest in the testing itself.

I would go on to argue that games and MMO's back in the 2000s were actually much higher quality then what we get now since back then closed alphas were used to eliminate over 90% of the exploits and bugs found in-game. This was done simply because back then the average user wasn't an amateur programmer and the assumption was that they wouldn't understand why a bug occurs or if it even is a bug. The ones that made it past the alpha and beta phases of these games were actually usually added in later by accident, like the infamous "reck" bomb in classic WoW which was actually just dev oversight when the ability was added in after the alpha/beta phases as well as other blunders.

You don't need to be a developer to report a bug, you don't even need to know how it happens when reporting it, you just need to explain how to make the bug happen.
Finding out why, when and where in the code is devs work, not tester ones, that's why you can have a mass of non-experts producing good results by direct testing the product on the field.
I play Guild Wars 2 and they have a huge team, so I suppose they have a lot of paid testers, but every patch they release is so flooded of bugs I'm ashamed for them!
This alone proves your statement wrong, since Guild Wars 2 is probably the best MMORPG of the previous generation, and still is bugged as hell, with bugs dragged around for years, well known and never fixed!

Meanwhile, in a particular game there was a guild that had a moderator. This guild found a gold/silver exploit and kept it hidden from the devs during the alpha, beta and live phases and then proceeded to exploit it for over a year before it was finally patched three times. There's still a black market for duped gold on Albion Online to this day because of this.

It's really unlikely that an exploit remains unknown to the majority of the population, if you have enough people testing it.
Still this can happen, but it happens whether you had an open alpha or not, whether you had paid testers or not, issues happen, deal with it.
If a black market exists, even better, at worst devs can "buy" exploits and fix them, at best someone else will leak them anyway eventually.

@Marc525 welcome to the forum!