Thank you for helping us test and develop this service. If/When this service launches, it will be thanks to you for helping us find and fix issues! And besides, it’s not like we can defeat Manaya all by ourself now is it? 😀
If you are, or are wanting to become a play-tester, here is some important information you should know.
Limited Capacity, Bandwidth & Availability
Our test and development service is operating on a small home network with a limited (and varying) network connection. This is simply because we have not paid for a server yet since we are still in the development and testing phase (not to mention how expensive the servers can be).
As such, there are some key points play-testers should know:
- The ping and available bandwidth will be variable
- The server availability will vary (but we will try to keep it up as much as possible)
- At this time, VPN access will be required to access the service (we hope to change this later, but the games ‘SLS’ server list does not support DNS, and we have a dynamic IP address).
Hopefully during the later stages of development we can setup a dedicated test server if we are able to scrape together enough funding.
The server will undergo rapid changes
As we continue to develop and make changes to both fix issues, and the shape the game to our vision, we will be making (sometimes large) changes to the service. A good example of this is when we disabled ‘avatar weapons’, players will have noticed that UI panel was removed and that relic pieces no longer drop, and alkahest became less plentiful.
Our server currently supports patch 31.04, which includes newer content we are not yet going for. As such, another major upcoming change will be the addition of a level cap, and removal of content post level 60 (this will be reverted in the future when we roll the next major update).
The server will sometimes be restarted often
Often when testing a change, we will need to reboot the server many times to see the effect. There will be times when the server will rapidly go up and down as we are working on a feature or fixing and issue. Sadly this is unavoidable as this is our test server, and we do not have the capacity or money yet for a second test server.
We will do our best to notify all players via the in-game announcements and/or via Discord when we plan to restart the server.
You will keep all of your progress
If/When we get the service into such a state that we are happy to go live, all of your hard-earned in-game progress will be transferred to the live server so you can continue playing for realzies! Also, as a thank you for helping us test, all play-testers who helped us test will be given the status of ‘Founder’, which grants you 8 character slots, 4 bank tabs, a unique mount, lower trade broker fee’s and other additional perks. Once we go live, it will never again be possible to gain this status.
Inactive accounts will be disabled
While we appreciate everybody has real life to deal with (as do we), play-testers who are inactive for more than 2 weeks will have their network access suspended. This is for no other reason than the fact that our very limited connection can only handle so many players, and so we maintain a limited number of dedicated slots for play-testers. An inactive play-tester occupies a slot that somebody else might wish to use.
If you need an extended break, let us know and we can make arrangements to get you joined back in on your return.