Debate on testing of deltas

[Velea]

What LO said is correct for any game where I've been on the QA team, and that's been quite a few. (Officially on the team as a paid member.) My job wasn't to find the bugs. It was to replicate them. Sometimes it included following up to test the bug when it was fixed, but even that didnt always happen.

[LOVWYRM]

you all lead, devs, volunteers, management
you do an incredible good job!
Never give us out of your hands^^

we love you

[Amerelium]

Bugs are for helians...

[StalePopcorn]

Bugs are for helians...

Chocolate-coated? Could this be a new confectioner resource? "Bamf munches on a Chocolate-Coated Bug"

It seems this thread has been derailed a bit... to the point that it ended up on the Rant forum! Pity. But perhaps I can summarise:

1. You don't have to look for bugs/find bugs. If you want to, great. If you don't, no problem.
2. Blight is a pre-production environment. Stuff gets put there so that people who want to can help test the game before it gets to live. As far as I am aware, no other game does this as publicly as Virtrium do. And noone has to use Blight if they don't want to. See (1) above.
3. We love this game. If we didn't, we wouldn't be concerned about it's future, and I say "thankyou" to everyone that's participated on this thread - it shows you care enough to have an opinioon! But you don't have to put in "the hard yards" to help out - if you find a problem, regardless of which server you are on, let someone know - if you want to. See (1) above.
4. The *original* purpose of this thread was to find out if there is any other way those that want to, can help out further. Hence the idea for a more public listing of what issues are outstanding, and what issues have been fixed, and how. For example, plot resizes - is there a list of dimensions for each plot now? Would be a big list I imagine, so I won't be surprised/disappointed if this can't be provided, but it could be useful if people who live in those areas can check them. But players don't have to if you don't want - see (1) above.

One of the ideas was to perhaps have the equivalent of "bugzilla" or something that could be used to help communication between players and the dev team. The Support ticket system could remain in place as that is working well, but the problem with the ticket system is that only the player who submitted the ticket can see the status. This means that the same ticket could be submitted multiple times by different players, which makes more work for the Virtrium team (because they have to look at all the tickets and decide what to do about them). Again, however, Virtrium isn't a company of 1,000 people - doing this stuff takes time and effort, so this could be all pie-in-the-sky stuff. But hey - if you don't ask, you don't get!

Again, thankyou to everyone that has responded to this thread. It's nice to know that people are passionate about Istaria, and once again is a wonderful reflection on the Istarian community. I would have stopped playing a long time ago if not for the people in-game.

Yours in Istaria,

Bamf Manfric / WearTheFoxHat