This might be a bit of a stretch, but I wanted to throw the idea out there, fully understanding the answer might be a hard "no," and if so, I totally get it. That said, I know the dev team puts a lot of effort into anticipating edge cases and preventing issues before patches go live. Still, every now and then, something small slips through, like some of the Von Leon interactions. Nothing major, but the kind of thing a few extra hands and eyes might be able to catch with more in-depth testing and potentially avoid a hotfix. To help ease that burden, I’d like to suggest considering a small, carefully vetted group of players, people with extensive Maple and Royals experience, and a degree of technical proficiency to assist with limited Tespia testing. These testers could provide early feedback on specific updates, especially bug fixes, and help spot minor issues that might otherwise get missed. This isn’t a suggestion to give players blanket access to Tespia. More like having controlled windows where a small group can jump in and verify specific changes. For example, something like, “Can a few people run Von Leon and confirm it’s behaving as expected?” or “Can someone double-check if we caught every 11 that should now be a 12?” Just structured, targeted asks that could bring quick feedback on the kinds of details that are easy to overlook when you’re deep in the backend. If it goes well, it might even open the door to early balance feedback in a responsible way. Obviously, this would need strong guardrails: NDAs, clear rules around insider trading (e.g., not using unreleased info to manipulate the economy, with strict consequences), and people capable of giving proper feedback, reproducing bugs, and following instructions. I assume Tespia might involve VPNs, whitelisted IPs, special clients, or VM setups, and this group would need to handle that kind of setup without support. This isn’t meant as any sort of critique. Quite the opposite. The game runs on basically no budget, yet still delivers new content and stable gameplay entirely through volunteer effort. That’s incredibly impressive. The idea here is simply to reduce some of the mental load on the staff and offer a way for the community to assist.
To me, the things you described are what the role of game balancers should do, but not sure if that's actually how it works
Not to completely shut down the idea, but there's already a role for this. More player involvement sounds nice, but this server evokes much drama for this idea to work. It's great in theory, but there's always that one guy who goes and f***s it up for everyone else. It's like a yearly if not more frequent occurrence, whether it's staff or a veteran player.
I fully agree. Giving specific players privileges is not necessarily a good thing. The attitude and overall IQ of megaphone chat tells me things like this should never be considered, unless the staff themselves know, and have vetted thoroughly, the individuals they believe could help. The ban appeals themselves are really something.
I do not intend this to be like 100 players or anything here, I'm talking like 5-8 players, people who are basically hand chosen by staff, have tech backgrounds in understanding how the server/code/wz would work, basically a 'not staff, but one step below staff' role no development skills, but enough to basically be a little QA team. IE the people who do the unofficial testing anyways to point out to the dev team, hey based on me doing this, and then using this skill I get this as a range, but it took 3 minutes to beat this mini-boss, but if this skill were working and gave 10% it'd be 2 minutes 50 seconds. I'm talking like Donn1e's VL feedback level of unofficial QA team, the people who did the data investigation about drop rates, people who are truly digging through the game to make sure it works and not just anyone who's been here a few years. (Bartle Test- Explorer/Spades) Significant vetting. Just an A-Team of QA that doesn't carry the weight of 'staff' around everywhere.
Honest question: why not give all players access, in controlled time periods? You'd have to sync up major things to test with server checks because economic/FM reasons but other than that, why not just let everyone access it to test planned changes? Would need some way to just let players spawn in gear/change their levels and such to test out high level content, but I assume test accounts already have that.
Likely because it is a low bandwidth server made specifically to house only a few people for testing purposes. Very common reality. Also, things like this tend to spoil the content, making the update obsolete as soon as it launches because everyone already knows what it's going to be. It also takes away from the mystique of builds and possibilities, which can immediately force changes on a market, making things more valuable before they even make the change. I could continue, but I think you get the point.
My argument would be that they'd probably want to keep it more isolated so players don't wind up 'wandering into Pink Bean' It'd probably require a more complex tech setup, etc, and if it's open to everyone, then why not just push it to production anyways since it's almost the same.
I have seen hand picked people by -a- staff, turn into complete monsters after gaining the access. You also have to understand that the staff has an orbit of players who may have the wrong intentions, but are playing a long-con for years, pretending to be helpful until the time is right. Unfortunately, we live in a cruel world where people will do anything to get on the inside, and most recently, this is more common than ever. I've left a server irrelevant to this game because I found out who the staff associates with, and it was disheartening for me. This game's history tells me bad apples are everywhere, which is why if I was on Staff, I would make it a rule not to give access to anyone who is being extremely chummy with me, because there is a reason why someone who doesn't know me, can suddenly say they love me and would do anything to help the server, and it's not because they really love me, but because there is an opportunity in loving me. I'm sorry if I'm being negative, but I'm a cautious person. I've been part of a team, and I've mingled around a team, and unfortunately, people like to talk, state opinions, and consider campaigns of friendship in order to achieve a position they may profit from. Regardless of the decision the staff decides to make on this, I hope they make the right one for the server, that's really all we can hope for.
