I have a suggestion, modeled on what folks do in the real world to address bugs (particularly security bugs) in commercial software. Offer a bounty for bugs discovered and reported in preview.
The large number of bugs and exploits (historically anyway) has led to a basically unrestricted cheating environment without consequences, which I believe contributes to an unhealthy culture for the player base in general. I think it is a problem when people that dont cheat are in a minority and have to have their own chat channel and dont generally interact with the rest of the players at all (and other than PvP I think this is the case). At the same time, I recognize that playtesting every possible combination in every dungeon is difficult and time consuming for the QA folks. And, to be fair, not enough people go onto preview to discover and report this type of bug either, including myself.
By offering a tangible reward in the production environment for replicable bugs reported in the preview evironment, you might be able to turn some of the ah.... enlightened self interest... of players into something productive. Perhaps give out some zen, or some non-rough AD, or something truly useful to people who report said bugs. That would help get them fixed before going to prod and lend to an overall higher-quality game.
That would help get them fixed before going to prod and lend to an overall higher-quality game.
And how would that help? Almost every bug and exploit released "live" to the production server was reported on preview server at least a week before patch went live.
I see the ability to preview the content and know what I need to do to prepare for the module on my live account as reward enough , besides that as Eldarth has correctly said , many of the bugs we reported last time were simply ignored and made it to live anyways.
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And how would that help? Almost every bug and exploit released "live" to the production server was reported on preview server at least a week before patch went live.
Encounter Matrix | Advanced Foundry Topics