The Content Testing (Tespia) Clarification

NexonAm kinda set themselves up for this one by just getting anyone through a stupid lottery where everyone good and bad gets an "equal" chance of getting in.

I agree that they should have placed rigorious standards on getting into Tespia through asking people their length MapleStory experience as well as asking their beta testing experience on other MMOs. If NexonAm done that, they wouldn't get n00bs playing Tespia for just the rates and other nonsense.

Until now, every patch had at least one bug/glitch.

Let's say MORE than just one.

So yeah, it's almost impossible that NEXON adds something in the game without any bugs.

And yeah, I agree with the above poster.

Anyway, in the first term, you had to be over level 50, be legit (never banned before) and have an account X months old.

Well, I don't know why they didn't make it like that in the 2nd and 3rd term. Maybe they saw that it didn't work and they still got spam reports, so they opened it to everyone and increased the people limit, thinking that more users would have reported legit bugs, but it apparently didn't go like they thought.

That's pretty sad, seeing how immature kids ruin a perfect content testing oppertunity.

Also, Nexon should give others a chance, like an invite only kinda thing. That'll help them, since the people who are testing are actual testers, not idiots who brag about "OMFGGG I R HIGH LVL!!@!".

i become GM nows? really, youd think theyed have some kind of age requirement along with this, or at least an IQ test befoe finalizing the acceptance X_X

I wonder how KMST works out so well.

I bet someone would post a "Tespia IQ test guide" on lolbasil, Basil actually is probably a large part of people to blame for this. Their whole community says things like what Joe quoted.

More restrictions would resolve the problem, in my opinion. At least in part.

I guessed this was the reason why they closed it...some people ruin it.

That is the lamest excuse I ever heard.
"We couldn't be bothered checking people's maturity and/or literacy, so we recruited a bunch of morons and they flooded us with junk reports."
Duh. You know a large part of "the community" is idiots, that's why you don't allow a person to log more than one ticket at a time (even though one person can certainly detect more than one bug). So why use a lottery to select testers?

The second problem seems to be with the "superpowers" a player in Tespia gets. I think that is a mistake. The temptation to try out all 4th jobs and all skills, equips, and items, is far too high. When else would you have such access to a testing tool? Yes, you were given this testing tool to do a job - but it's natural to want to use it to test stuff for yourself, too.
We see that "the community" generally finds all bugs (certainly all major bugs) in a version within hours of a patch. So we should simply copy characters (or entire accounts) from the live servers to Tespia, and let people continue playing their own character(s) as they normally would. Without the distractions of superpowers, they will have nothing more interesting to do than play with the new content, and they will find the bugs and report them.

If the new content is very high level, such as a new major boss or an area like Neo Tokyo, then you need to make sure enough high level characters are present. If not enough volunteer, then you might have to give a high-level char to another volunteer to play. But, again, play normally. So after the first few hours this tester will be done messing around and start being useful.

Of course, Nexon also needs to FIX bugs reported in Tespia, or at least list them in the new patch Release Notes so people know what doesn't work yet. Otherwise, it really is a waste of resources.

I guessed this was the reason why they closed it...some people ruin it.

Seemed it was more of a majority that ruined it.

I personally think it's, at least in part, Nexon's fault for treating Tespia as a raffle. Seriously, what did they expect if they pick testers randomly from a population infested with immature people.

Secondly, it's their job to find bugs in the first place, not get players to do their work for them, so seriously, they decided to change their work from going around looking for bugs in-game, to reading tickets and taking their chances with bogus ones... so they should suck it up. I'm not saying the idiots pulling bogus reports out of their asses aren't at fault, but really... even i could've known it would happen before it did.

I had a great time in Tespia. It wasn't too difficult to take a couple minutes to report issues i came across while still enjoying myself and messing around. I had lots of fun with old friends, met great people, killed pap, zak and horntail, and still had time to report plenty of bugs.

In my opinion, Nexon took the easy/lazy way out as usual and just closed the thing altogether instead of learning from their mistakes and coming up with a better way of choosing/screening testers, or penalizing bogus reports.

they should have a system like in KMS, where if you report real bugs, you get flagged as a contributor, and keep getting invited for next testing waves. if you have useless tickets, you are banned from being invited to tespia ever again.
after a few waves, a solid base of useful players should build up.

I think it's partially Nexon's fault. If they didn't see this coming given the demographic of the game, I don't know what to say. What they should have done is restrict testers only to accounts created a certain amount of time ago and that haven't been banned before, then weed out abusers each testing period as they went along. As in remove them from the draw for the next testing period. Perhaps adding on a 3-day ban warning for bug report abuse might scare people. On top of that, they really should have completely restricted the game to only the things they wanted to test. For example, if they wanted to test cpq, players would spawn in Spiegelmann's office with the portal on the left closed off and Cody standing there to level people up to 40 or something and for appriopriate equipment. That way, there wouldn't have been level 160 players running around doing whatever they want.

this is GMS for ya...

instead of picking randoms, they should manually pick those who are actually WILLING to do proper tespia testing... or at least just have fun in tespia, and you're bound to find bugs... somewhere... instead of spamming the report system

Only hard part is actually picking out those people. Even if it were a resume of some sort, someone on basil will probably make a model for people to fill out.

Secondly, it's their job to find bugs in the first place, not get players to do their work for them, so seriously, they decided to change their work from going around looking for bugs in-game, to reading tickets and taking their chances with bogus ones... so they should suck it up. I'm not saying the idiots pulling bogus reports out of their asses aren't at fault, but really... even i could've known it would happen before it did.

In a situation such as this, it is much faster and more efficient the more people that are testing. When you are programming and a glitch comes up, it could take forever to find out the source and fix it.

It's like, you're in a field looking for balls. It would be a lot more efficient to have 1000 people looking instead of <100

What this tells me is that they need to work on the Reporting system, both from the player and GM side.


There should be buttons for the GM to "immediate ban" any character based on their report, "block from next testing session", or "keep useful report".

It should probably also allow multiple tickets at once, but list them on a single page, so the GM can look them over quickly and make a faster decision.

If someone doesn't report any valid tickets (or annoying ones) don't let them back in for the next two rounds.

There was NO deselection, anyone who got in the first round kept getting in. That's not really going to reduce the number of idiots. Testing should be a privilege for people who demonstrate they can find bugs.

My brothers and I reported like 7 bugs in Tespia, but there was a lot more bugs than 7. I see why they closed it..

GG noobs... At least try and send something -__-

Not this BULLCRAP "I has GM NAO KK????"

Nexon should have kept the contributors and not the fools. Especially just randomly taking in 3000 people...

Well, as others have said, NEXON should have seen this coming. They act as if they expected a professional environment from the players, but if they had spent any length of time in the live servers, they would have known better.

I actually test games as a day job (9$ an hour btw, not 6.55$). I will admit that to an extent, they still treat us like throwing a bunch of monkeys on it to find everything via numbers (love-hate relationships between developers and testers); but even still, where I work we at least have a better system going.

To cut back on spam it is so very simple. 1. Do as someone else had mentioned and ban instantly over a stupid question. And 2. Have a database.

I mean, how else are you supposed to get past repetition unless testers have a place to check to see if bug reports are being duplicated? Not only that, but if testers get a sense of what bugs have already been found, and know their progress on being fixed, then it is more likely that they may find patterns on where else to look for bugs. Also, set the Tespia level to the level of the released content; that seems like common sense.


And yes, I did make it into Tespia session 3, however since the server didn't even work for most of the time, I only had time to tell them the obvious that the server isn't up. When they finally got it up, I didn't have time to log onto it.



One last thing. Playing and Testing games are not at all the same.

stupid people. when i was in Tespia, i reported bugs like crazy. for instance, the cake monster not having enough hp, it dcing people every few seconds, a bug in maple island where you couldnt apply SP if you kept your skill box open for a while...etc.

though, i do have to admit, i did it for fun a lot of the time, but my main goal was finding bugs because i thought it was so fun being a high lvl that i needed to get in next time. (yes, im a low lvl but im too lazy to lvl so...XD)

since I've come up already as a topic of discussion...

I reported about 40 bugs in the ariant patch, and that testing session was only 3 days where the server was up. Granted I had a substantial advantage in that I could see the errors in the .wz files from my extraction (Maps without names, glitched KBs, etc.), but there were numerous bugs that could have been spotted by anyone. A lot of them weren't fixed before the official, but they did get fixed. The botcatching monster spawning in El Nath without the destruction mechanism, for example, was a really bad glitch. It pretty much made those maps unusable. And these things did get fixed later... but not before they were officially released. And that kinda defeats the purpose of the test server really :/ I think by making the level requirement to get in so low it made the bad reports an inevitability. They should also have probably done like KMST and adjusted the level the NPC takes you to to fit the content. 160 for Showa? Ok. 160 for ariant? Overkill.

they should have a system like in KMS, where if you report real bugs, you get flagged as a contributor, and keep getting invited for next testing waves. if you have useless tickets, you are banned from being invited to tespia ever again.
after a few waves, a solid base of useful players should build up.

Absolutely agreed. Is that so hard?

Also, I think paying testers costs more to NEXON than the manwork used to open two servers for a few days every Tespia's wave. So yeah, it's better for us opening Tespia than just hire testers. They'd spend less money.

What is a Content Patch?



New content has to mesh well with our version, and since we have unique content, there?s always a possibility that it could affect another area of the game, so we have to test it. After we complete testing and everything is working, the game will be open to everyone.

HOW do they test it?? I really doubt they do, because if they did there wouldn't be so many bugs every patch. Example: chair bug.
If they had Tespia that bug would have been discovered in a few hours and reported by the users. I think they don't have good testers.

Just impliment an IQ test!
Anyone who disagrees is just scared to fail it.

Also, not only does Tespia save money from hiring more people to test it, it brings in money, because then people will like Nexon more for letting them test, so they have a higher chance of buying NX.