Kaitheel (or other Dev's), Is the gear from CoV (Valor) vendors on the Test server for Window Shopping (Show) or is it ment to be usable? Currently the prices on the vendors are way out of line high for the Test Server economy. If the prices are actually meant to be usable, can we on Test get the prices to reflect the Test Server economy? Currently there is much I would love to get, but due to the cost being greater than all 15 of my alts on Test (let alone the entire treasury of all the Test Server players and alts combined), the gear is way out of reach on the Test server. Thanks Dye
Same thing can be said of Ethereal merchant. It's easy to get cash on live, but on a server with no economy, it's complicated.
While it is frustrating to see stuff and the newer Valor merchants, and the ethereal merchant, that we cannot hope to afford due to the Test economy (or lack thereof), there's a few things to consider. First, they really try to keep the Test-only code to a minimum. The more "special cases" there are to make Test different than live, the more chance of odd bugs making it in. Yes, we DO have exceptions to the rule (the bookworms, some guide quest NPCs, and the ethereal coins for solo missions). What you're asking, though, would be something else - a vendor having different prices on Test than it does on Live, which is special coding that could go wrong in so many ways, unfortunately. Second, the stuff that is so far out of our price range is stuff that we don't truly need unless Test gets a larger population, and we need to get ourselves geared for experts and raids. I'm not sure if we ever will return to being able to field a raid force. While it would be "good" to be able to access the stuff so that we could test it, it is gear that went live without testing, and the live servers are likely to find the issues with it all before we do. This isn't to say I'd be against some plat infusion into the Test economy. I just think that asking for vendors with different pricing schemes for Test and Live isn't something the devs are going to want to try to make happen. ~Mum, who is grateful for the drops in the bucket that come from the loyalty vendor and from Fowlumbra, even if it still falls wayyy short of what is needed for those vendors
Maybe some form of one-time-only cash grant to Test chars would be acceptable? I always advocated for the contrary, but seeing pricey stuff coming around makes me reconsider. And it's not always high-end gear. Pride Pakiat faction fluff pets are between 100 and 1000 plats each. There's house items at House Vahla between 50 and 100 plats each. House pets from House Yrzu go up to 3000 plats. Coliseum of Valor house items go up to 250 plats. If you want to make a "last house" themed house, you'll probably end up spending thousands of plats to manage it. There's all forms of grinders on live servers which makes possible to sell stuff for insane prices that will never happen on Test (for example, I made 3 million plats on Thurgadin selling rubicite at 50 000 each the first week of PoP, I can't understand how somebody would want to pay 50k for rubicite). Test population isn't really the grindy type. I don't know how to grind for plats anyway.
I was just coming here to make the same suggestion! I was thinking of a Test-only NPC that would gift a certain amount of plat. It would need to be up all the time for new characters, and should probably gift plat for each new xpac and GU. Or how about gifting a certain amount of plat to each character's bank, or to the account shared bank?
Oog...be really careful with how it's implemented and how much; we don't want to go from being "poor country cousins" to the Weimar Republic, where literally wheelbarrows full of Marks were needed to buy a loaf of bread, or so the stories had it. Inflation is a major drag on just about every "real" server, on the Brokers at least, though it does seem to be the worst on Antonia Bayle for whatever reason. I definitely think Mum had a point in that, if the prices on the vendors (and I really can't imagine finding any of this stuff on the Broker; that's just the way it goes here) are for raid-y things, primarily, there's not a lot of population to scare up raids above maybe 6->12 folks at a time, unless it's for a special event. Being on Test is almost like being at a job; ostensibly, we're here first and foremost to test things, and it's not necessarily just another server where we could create 7 new toons for "free" (Uwkete whistles innocently, looking anywhere but at his audience.) If it was brand new equipment that hadn't been tested yet, I'm sure the Powers would find a way to get it to us, like a Banker nearby that not only stored our stuff, but gave us a one-time, don't-worry-about-paying-it-back-ever loan (a Loan Officer NPC?). ;-> Or maybe a Token Distributor, and instead of having to pay plat, the price is the same amount in Test Tokens or something? Dunno, but I kind of wish that's how we'd done rent for our houses way back when in the beginning; the one "good" thing about inflation and the Small Bag of Plat going from 75 plat to 500 plat is I can now afford larger houses for my Hordelings. ;-> Uwk
I think the only way we could get a raid going , at least one , is to bring up the population of the test server I think to many people on live don't really know about us, or mistake us for the Beta server. I have tried to promote our community for as long as I knew about it , but people are just not willing to start all over for just testing. The powers should give us all those gimmicks of any special server out there plus the ones to come, like the free trade or the specialty on FG. You get the idea. Make this server as much interesting as it gets, and announce it as a big thing. I know of at least 2 games where the test server is the most active of all servers.
There have been times in the past when other folks have heard about us, or at least about us testing out the latest/greatest events, like the "kill everything in sight for the Mecho-Spider parts" thing for Tinkerfest; from what I heard, we got quite a few new folks to Test, and might've even kept a few. But yeah, one of the things that probably hurts us the most is that confusion, even though a) we've said it time and time and TIME and time again on all the various forums, in various ways: "No, we. Are. Not. Beta. There's Alpha, Beta, us, and you guys on Live in the sequence of development. You have a chance to get seven new toons, for free, and you're whining?! If you got all your 'real server' toons from 1 to 100 in less than a week, you can do it even faster on Test, with the XP bonuses and Advanced Recipe books." and b) the fact that when one goes to select a region, there's US English, EU English, Public Test, and Beta, which count up to four separate regions in anyone's number system, one would think. X-P On the other hand, maybe there's the grand majority of the folks out there who only have seven level 110 (115? I've lost track) toons and don't bother going anywhere else but US or EU, and so never change their Region. :-/ Still, the tools are there, and they'll not likely find out anything more about the game unless they go poking stuff in the login screen. Uwk
As one of the ORIGINAL testers that started when Test opened in December 2004 and after the fiasco of 2007, the idea of this really has me saying a big fat NO
Everything in test tokens would be the best bet because all they would have to do is not place the merchant that accepts test tokens onto live servers. We know they can place NPCs on test that do not go on live, specifically thinking of the guide NPCs, so it is doable. I log in to test when I can, for the last month or so that nasty thing called the real world has been trouncing on me so I have only gotten to test once a week.
