利用者:Ypacqdho

Also, our approach up to now pretty much limited the possible scope of adjustments to tweaking some details while the overall features remained more or less untouched. We spent a lot of time on developing features before allowing players to test them. At that time, though, major adjustments were hardly possible anymore without extensive efforts.

Naturally, we try to consider all different interest groups, possible loopholes and side-effects while creating a consistent concept and developing it into a feature. Nevertheless, what looks good and works well in theory does not necessarily apply in practice. Judgements about the value of an abstract concept can differ quite a lot from judgements based on first-hand experiences in tests which can also differ dramatically from judgements based on gameplay experience on live servers. The implementation of a promising feature to address an issue might still lead to more problems than it was supposed to solve, turn out different on live servers, or just fail to provide an engaging experience. The latter meaning: it is ingame but players do not enjoy, and thus, do not use it.

In order to remedy the shortcomings of private and public tests, we need something that fills in their gaps: A real game world, a live system with all the complexity, components and challenges just like regular game worlds. We need a world with a vibrant community that has grown there, and where players care about their characters just like on regular game worlds.

Such an environment would allow us to run longer tests prior to releases so that we can better assess long-term effects. At the same time, the community there could provide us with feedback about their experiences, what they like and dislike. We would be able to try out and tweak new features as well as different solutions more sufficiently and thoroughly before we release them for all game worlds. We could even implement features one way, let them run for a while before changing them to the other way, and see which way actually is better received by the community before making a final decision about whether or not to implement them for good, and if so in which way.

Our goal is to improve the quality of the design, development and testing of new features, especially those of controversial nature. We are convinced that such an environment would help us tremendously in the iterative development of Tibia. Therefore, we were looking for a way to achieve this, and came up with the idea to set up a new game world type with special conditions, called preview game worlds.