2017-07-22, 07:47 AM
hadriel Wrote:I suspect this is to catch the more minor bugs such as typos, mistranslations, glitched codes, bugged events etc.
No, they would not go to all this trouble for non gamebreaking bugs.
You might not be aware, but the past few patches have been horrible.
The latest one, this week, was postponed "until further notice" (first time in my memory of playing the game, that a patch maintenance was postponed) due to "technical issues". It was finally started 9 hours late. And then it was extended for a total of 9 hours (beyond the 7 scheduled hours), and then it still had bugs necessitating immediate unscheduled maintenances (yes, plural).
One of the most ridiculous bugs they had was that Zero characters could be created in Reboot. They were not supposed to be. The patch before this one, they were accidentally available, and had to be deleted. And yet the same thing happened again.
Nexon's policy, ever since the public GMS Tespia closed, has been to do internal testing, then do some sanity checks on the live servers after patching, and then open the servers and let the users find all the bugs. They keep their programmers on alert, and fully expect to go into unscheduled maintenance within a few hours of any patch going live.
However, this process has become untenable both for Nexon and for the players. So they are now trying to let the players, who know how to play and have "normal" characters (they're going to be copying accounts from live to test server, so we have all our characters, gear, mules, etc), find the game-breaking bugs before the patch goes live.
The mention of an NDA leads me to hope that this time they won't let in thousands of random players, but rather hand-pick people who are most likely to actually try to find bugs and report them to Nexon (rather than figure out a way to abuse them on the live servers).
On the other hand, the "application" process (just registration, really) doesn't even include a "why do you want to be a tester?" question. So I can't tell as of yet whether they're going to botch the selection process in true Nexon fashion, or not.