I am waiting anxiously as an Alpha pledger to get in and start helping with testing and from Alpha to beta and final release, I am expecting a long amount of game play. This got me thinking about how strong the vision was of VR to create something that is going to be amazing and interesting to play with some old school visions mixed in. That got me thinking between the Devs, Pre Alpha, Alpha and Beta testers and the amount of gameplay we will have, at live launch all of us are going to be grouping and playing with a large amount of new players that will be experiencing the game for the 1st time and it is going to be hard to let them experience things and find out for themselves and not let our advanced game experience influence their experience because we will "know" the best places to level, areas to avoid and maybe hidden or quest areas that we found that we take groups to directly.
This will be an interesting social experiement for the Testers and Devs to keep the faith and stay within the vision of the game and keep the fog of war active for others and not spoil things when live and we are grouping with new people going through content.
That's an important point for sure. I agree that all of us testers should consider the long-term cost to the wellbeing of the game from giving spoilers to newbs who arrive at launch. For me personally, I have a couple of 'protocols' I've been defining for myself. First, while I hope to learn a great deal about how to play my chosen class effectively, I don't intend to make any efforts to learn/remember details of the world like where to find XX item, grind for the best xp/loot, etc. I also hope that VR has some plans to change those things around after all the testing is over.
And secondly, I plan to confine all my pre-release time on Terminus to only 1 continent, and if possible to much less than the whole continent. So the rest of the world will truly be unknown territory when Release Day comes.
Jothany said:That's an important point for sure. I agree that all of us testers should consider the long-term cost to the wellbeing of the game from giving spoilers to newbs who arrive at launch. For me personally, I have a couple of 'protocols' I've been defining for myself. First, while I hope to learn a great deal about how to play my chosen class effectively, I don't intend to make any efforts to learn/remember details of the world like where to find XX item, grind for the best xp/loot, etc. I also hope that VR has some plans to change those things around after all the testing is over.
And secondly, I plan to confine all my pre-release time on Terminus to only 1 continent, and if possible to much less than the whole continent. So the rest of the world will truly be unknown territory when Release Day comes.
Those are great protocols, I am going to try and adopt them too, thank you . I have never been a pre launch tester before Pantheon and those are some good self restraints to adopt to also make it fun when we go live.
I'm not currently a tester, but I was thinking about this recently. The Internet is what has allowed the development of these games, but also the reason it's hard to keep things spoiler free for very long.
I don't know if there's a way for developers to have wikis and the such taken down, but then the info would be moved to guild discord servers and other places. It'll come down to how popular the game is. Smaller games tend to have less fully fleshed out wikis.
Cohh had a great idea in his stream. Release certain content (named, drops, etc) in a staggered way. That'll create scenarios where a newbie will show a drop to a veteran player that they've never seen before. Would make creating alts even more enjoyable increasing replayability.
Feastycentral said:I'm not currently a tester, but I was thinking about this recently. The Internet is what has allowed the development of these games, but also the reason it's hard to keep things spoiler free for very long.
I don't know if there's a way for developers to have wikis and the such taken down, but then the info would be moved to guild discord servers and other places. It'll come down to how popular the game is. Smaller games tend to have less fully fleshed out wikis.
Cohh had a great idea in his stream. Release certain content (named, drops, etc) in a staggered way. That'll create scenarios where a newbie will show a drop to a veteran player that they've never seen before. Would make creating alts even more enjoyable increasing replayability.
Ya you are right, there are going to be data feeds to popular websites, Fan and Guild websites that will all try to become the "source" for all things Pantheon pretty quick that will reveal alot of content secrets and tips. I was even thinking that a seperate server could be launched at same time for everyone that has played Pantheon before live launch and then open it up at a later date for anyone else, to keep that population isolated and not lead peoples game experiences, but imagine it would not be cost effective for VR to do and only really would be effective and reducing the outlet of info for 1st 3-4 months.
Deathwish said: I was even thinking that a seperate server could be launched at same time for everyone that has played Pantheon before live launch and then open it up at a later date for anyone else, to keep that population isolated and not lead peoples game experiences, but imagine it would not be cost effective for VR to do and only really would be effective and reducing the outlet of info for 1st 3-4 months.
Something like this was mentioned in a previous thread. Some serious problems with it were pointed out. One is that those of us familiar with the game will be a help to VR with 'onboarding' of new players who truly knew nothing of Pantheon up until launch time. It's easy to get frustrated and quit early on, and an experienced player can be a huge help to overcome that situation.
More significantly, it would be extremely unfair to all of us 'veterans' to be denied the choice of server that all others get. It would also but a barrier between us and any of our friends that we expect to join the game at Release. We can't be on their server, they can't be on ours. (or else one of us has to start over from scratch once the time limit is up). The backlash would be extreme, particularly since we wern't informed of this downside when we paid big pledges to get into early testing.
Feastycentral said: I don't know if there's a way for developers to have wikis and the such taken down, but then the info would be moved to guild discord servers and other places. It'll come down to how popular the game is. Smaller games tend to have less fully fleshed out wikis.
I don't think there's any realistic way to stop wikis. Players who want all the 'shortcuts' they can get will make use of them no matter what. This issue raised by Deathwish is mostly one of concern for players who do not WANT to get spoilers, yet could wind up receiving them from another player they group with.
Which leads to another possible 'protocol' to my list, which is for VR to advise real newbs to just seek out players who do not have advanced knowledge of the game from before Release. Most simply by just asking when they join a group.