The beta server needs more user support.

[Byrjun]

So I watched Sirken's stream recently and the discussion between him and Durubael pretty much echoed what Swish says in 90% of his posts - that the P99 playerbase is lazy and everyone wants Velious to be finished without putting any effort into testing it.

I feel that this is a gross misinterpretation of what's actually happening. The real problem is that there is absolutely no support for players to beta test. When software/games are in testing phases, they don't just shove an entire product on someone and say "go test everything." The result would be ineffectual testing and a bad product.

So, I'm asking the P99 developers to help us.

A) We need direction. On Sirken's stream it was stated that no one has done anything and everyone should be doing everything. Like I mentioned, this is the worst way to frame a beta test. For example, let's say I want to test the Circlet of Falinkan quest. That's quite a lot of time/effort that would be wasted since I know that quest has been completed.

So we need some sort of official post that says hey, this is Siren's Grotto week. Make people go group/test in Siren's Grotto for that week, and create a centralized thread for people to discuss their thoughts on the zone. I'd definitely schedule some time to go group with some people in that zone, but that stuff needs to be coordinated. Then after Siren's Grotto week we could have Coldain Ring week where everyone works on that quest, or a Skyshrine week where people hunt in that zone (with knowledge that faction would be reset afterwards). Very little developer overhead would produce great testing results.

B) Faction is a huge pain in the ass in Velious. And it's 10x worse on the beta server because there are no raid mobs up. In "real Velious" if you needed Tormax faction you'd go tag a Yelinak kill, etc. Our only option at the moment is endless grinding.

Recently I logged on to the server to try out the Coldain ring and realized I was still only Apprehensive in Thurgadin so I couldn't even start. I pretty much logged out right after that. I've done Kael arena with my guild a few different nights which didn't seem to move my faction, now there's even less people on the server so I'd be forced to solo for my faction, which could take weeks. This isn't really going to work for people.

So, two big requests. Targeted testing with discussion, and some sort of solution to get around the grind. Some additional support/commands like maybe #buff to get full raid buffs would be nice also.