Tabula Rasa's testing procedure needs a revamp

by Chris Chester on Apr 5th 2008 1:00PM

Sci-fi, Bugs, Patches, Opinion, Tabula Rasa

With the recent announcement that, once again, our favorite servers weren't going to be part of the testing process (no offense Centaurus) for Tabula Rasa's new patch 1.7, we're reminded of how horrible this system has proved to be over the last several months. For the uninitiated, the TR development team generally chooses only one of the game's four servers to copy over to the test server. If your server is picked for that patch, all of your characters are copied over and you can log in and test things out a couple weeks before the patch goes live. If yours doesn't get picked, you're stuck rolling a new character from scratch.

There are several problems with this. For one, the active hardcore fan base (that is, the kind of people who would actually log into a test server to report bugs and forgo any progression on their actual character) is precipitously small to begin with. So when they take this active player base and divide them by four to test new patches, everybody loses. Only a fraction of the community leaders get to contribute input to class changes, patches don't get as thoroughly tested as they might be if the full community was brought to bear, and poor writers like those at Massively only get to cover patch changes in earnest when their servers are chosen.

Is it really too much to ask to be able to copy a character to test on demand? Let your hardcore fans do your work for you!

Tags: community, destination-games, pts, public-test-server, tabula-rasa, tr, tr-patch-1.7

Reader Comments (1)

The patch issue is the very very least of the TR issues. They really need to get their crap together, and that is me being "nice" about TR. If this is what can be expected from Garriot, then he has certainly lost if creative steam and just needs to stay away from game for good.

I keep seeing more of the friends in-game and RL leave the game because it has gotten old already. Some of them as Maxed Out and they see no point anymore, and some have hit 30 and see no reason to go to 50. The entire server is like a ghost town, that is even during the times when it used to be packed.

I even went back to WOW so I would have a "fun" MMO to play. Sorry to say it but WOW is more casual friendly and I am having more fun there then when I log into TR. Is this all doom and gloom, yeah... I have played too many MMOs to really put up with this kinda crap anymore. It is not like the old days when you played UO or EQ. You have many many many choices, so it is in the best interest of MMO Makers to get their crap together, or you lose your shot and players leave.

I do think TR will be a good "small" MMO in about another year... maybe.