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Check out the v.255 - The Dark Ride: Ride or DIe Patch Notes
here!
Important Notice in Regards to PTS Accessibility
Greeting Maplers,
For those who have registered for the PTS, we have urgent news to inform the community.
Please read here:
http://maplestory.nexon.net/news/24437/important-info-about-private-test-server-pts
- Luna & Reboot characters cannot be copied over to the play test server.
- Highest leveled non-Reboot & Luna character will copied over to the PTS.
We will continue to investigate the technical possibilities for future rounds of the PTS.
Comments
Just a moment ago the news came to me that the PTS was unavailable for players in Luna and Reboot. As a fellow Luna player this made me quite sad. We went through the effort of applying for the PTS, which at first was not even working properly, a bypass to this was to make a level 1 character in any NA server. Than today we got the news that a majority of the player base was excluded from the PTS.
I always thought that since the migration last year, it was the idea to make GMS one large big community/family. Therefore I hope for the players in Luna as well as Reboot that this issue can be resolved before the PTS gets opened for players to test. Cause to my understanding you only have to copy over characters and after that you can give everyone premade gear on the PTS to test any occuring bugs in the PTS of new patches. By leaving out your 2 biggest servers in GMS you exclude so many players, to possibly help you out testing as well as their knowledge of the game and knowing their specific classes to make it easier to test content on a new test server.
Sincere,
A saddened Luna Player
Says the reason is technical limitations. what those tech limitations are should be the question.
I can only assume the reason for Luna is because the server is physically in a different location and would take more time than they would want in transfering character data or the fact that the Luna server, when it was once EMS's 2 servers, still has items that have not been introduced or released into GMS (like flamed gear, certain medals, certain equipments), I dont really see either of those as a real problem though since in the main client, those items are still working properly (or there have just been no complaints about them) so Luna is still a little bit of a mystery to me.
either way, the rules for this transfer/copy over (when it comes to the character qualification) are more or less probably the same as rules for World Leap/ Server Transfers in the main client.
I concur with this theory doc
But seriously, this is bad news.
The further away PTS is from the live environment, the less effective it will be.
Think about this question:
Why do we need players testing upcoming content?
Answer: Because experience has shown that, no matter how thorough Nexon's QA are with their artificial characters in the internal testing environment, major issues are discovered within hours - sometimes mere minutes - of a patch going live. Real characters, going about their normal gameplay, run into stuff that systematic testing couldn't find. Or didn't even think of looking for.
So, in order to test for these issues before the patch goes live, we need to recreate the live environment as closely as possible, and let players play as naturally as they can in there. Copying over an entire account is a great way to do this, and I was very happy to hear that that was the plan. And disappointed, now, to read that the plan has changed.
Copying only one character means no bugs related to link skills or Legion could be found.
It also likely means that low-level content will be impossible to test "naturally". We could create more characters and level them up for testing, but since they won't have access to any stored "leveling gear" or to link skills and legion effects, they will behave differently than they would in the live servers.
And, unless Nexon selects especially for them, some classes might not be present in the test server at all: classes that very few players "main".
Now, you might say, "We're not currently implementing any changes to link skills or Legion, so those need not be tested." But experience has shown that everything in the game code is intertwined, and mechanisms that were supposedly unchanged can break down at random at any patch. That's why "testing" in the form of normal gameplay is so important: because testing that focuses on the new or changed content often misses those bugs.
Edit: Or is only one character being copied? Arwoo's bullet in the opening post is very clear on that, but the web notice he links to makes no mention of it. Which is correct?
Reboot is a different server and it needs specific testing. Zero jokes aside, all new content needs to be checked to make sure it works as it should in Reboot. It's very saddening to hear that the PTS will not include a Reboot server.
Luna runs the same game as the other non-Reboot servers, but its characters have different data - most notably additional options (flamed gear), but also Cash items never released in GMS, Supreme medals, old EMS-only event quests and their rewards, etc. Again, not testing how all these things interact with new or changed content, makes the PTS less effective than it could be.
PTS already has no NX and no Cash Shop, which, again, limits its ability to test everything naturally.
To summarize, ask yourselves this question:
Could the bugs and issues discovered on the live servers in the past few patches, have been found in the PTS, as it is currently designed?
I hope that, if not now, then future iterations of the PTS will be able to overcome the technical issues, and make it as close as possible to the real servers.
We've corrected the main post, but it should be all your characters.
Apologies for the confusion the initial post may have caused.
Thank you for clarifying that.
I hope you read the rest of my post, as well.
I check my email every day because of this...I really hope I can get into the Test server and do something to fix the game (even if just a little) although it is a bit of a downer I don't get my level 222 off of Reboot...but I do get my level 201 from Renegades.
Good thing for me my reboot and windia characters are the same levels. I couldnt give up my first character I ever made since the beginning. i have a notion the chosen ones will be notified next week.
That was added to http://maplestory.nexon.net/news//24406/ about 13 hours ago.
I've no idea how long the review process takes when the application consists of just clicking a button.
Hopefully they will let us know once all emails have been sent out.
They havent disclosed who the testers are, but I would say it's safe to assume that the testers have already been chosen. I dont think they will disclose who are the testers to keep as much info from being leaked from the test server.
Eliya was referring to the fact that some people in this thread, such as myself, have the title "Private Tester" under their avatar. Nexon has elected to make the testers known to the public in this manner. You're right that they haven't posted a list of everyone who was accepted.
Arwoo did promise that once all emails are out, there will be a notice on the website saying so. Since that notice hasn't materialized yet, I'm assuming the recruitment process is still ongoing.