Hi everyone,
Please allow us to explain how we see Beta, but first let me say that I don't think anyone has made "untrue" statements in this thread. Maybe some statements came across wrongly and/or may have been misinterpreted, but I believe the intention behind them was right. But this is of course always a risk on a forum, especially on one as international as this one.
At Elvenar we use the Beta as a test server, and that is how we normally advertise it too. Beta is used to test updates before they go to our Live worlds (all other Elvenar versions, e.g. the German or the French versions). In that sense it is indeed a test server. Is Beta the
only test server? No, it is not. We have multiple test servers that we only use internally - these are used by our developers to create the game versions which are then tested by our Quality Assurance (QA) department. On
those test servers, it is allowed for the testers to use every tool they can think of, including boosting accounts manually. On Beta we
cannot and will not allow that ever, which is part of the reason why our internal QA'ers are not actively testing on Beta, but on the internal servers.
This all of course gives two definitions of "test server":
- A server on which our development team creates and our QA department tests an update, and
- A server on which an update is tested before it is released on the Live worlds
Katwijk's description above of Beta being a sort of "dry run" or "full dress rehearsal" is quite a fitting one, I believe: Beta's version is normally the version that will go to the Live servers, although we do of course try to fix as many bugs that are found on Beta before the update goes to our Live servers (with the so-called "hotfixes" that we perform on Beta before the release of the version to Live). Since the beginning of 2016 we have two weeks to test our updates on Beta, compared to a single week before that, which is already a great improvement, and together with the Diamond rewards for bug reports, this has increased Beta's results hugely. Of course we are continuously trying to improve even further, and we'll always welcome ideas for that.
Both types of "test servers" mentioned above are very important, please don't underestimate that. The biggest benefit of Beta over the internal servers is that Beta has a few thousand more players, who are all helping tremendously in making Elvenar better. With the bigger player numbers, we can also test e.g. server performance ("How does a server that's very similar to a normal, Live server respond to this game version?"), as well as getting a lot of bug reports from a lot of players. Many bugs that are found are from (very) specific scenarios that are just impossible to think of, but just "happen" to some players who play regularly. This is one of the reasons why we're always asking for reproduction steps for issues: it can be quite a specific chain of events that leads to buggy behaviour.
It does not mean that we can or will just deploy any odd version to our Beta server. Any version released on Beta is an already heavily-tested version, which has passed intensive QA testing before it will see the light of the Beta server. If an update on Beta is deployed later than would normally be the case, you can be fairly sure that it is because the game version did not pass our internal QA tests, and had to be improved and re-tested until it did pass the tests. Unfortunately we cannot always bring perfect versions to Beta, which is why you will encounter bugs on this server, but that's also why we have Beta in the first place: ideally to filter out any remaining bugs. We take pride in the job that we have to do, because at Beta we have the chance to improve Elvenar for
everyone worldwide by finding bugs and preventing as many as possible within the timeframe available from even reaching our Live servers.
To sum up, Beta
is a test server, but Beta
is not being used
actively as a test server
by our development team and QA department. Updates to Beta have already been tested before reaching Beta on
internal test servers, which are not available for our player community. We will always try to improve the game version released on Beta as much as is possible
before the version is released to our Live versions.
We hope that this clears up any doubt there may be surrounding this topic. Should there still be questions, please never hesitate to let us know - we are always looking for feedback and will always try to answer your questions as well as we can.