Whenever the folks at Flying Lab Software wipe the Pirates of the Burning Sea beta, they hold a 25 players versus 25 developers Battle Royale. The games official site now has an interesting report up, detailing the developer's previous loss to the players and their plans for revenge.
When it comes time to wipe the beta for a major build, we hold a 25 players versus 25 developers Battle Royale. As you may know, we hosted our first Battle Royale a few months ago. The testers dealt a devastating defeat to the developers - we lost all 25 ships and only sank one. I personally sank twice due to bugs (fixed!), but I saw neither death because I was staring at my desktop. Most of the developers suffered a similar fate, as we completely overloaded our internal net connection and we all crashed. In all honesty, that had little impact on the fight - the testers were going to crush us regardless. We were scattered around the battlefield like ants after someone stepped on their hill, and the only tester we sank was probably link dead.
Now we're ready for another beta wipe, which means Battle Royale II took place on Saturday, June 23. In the first battle, we all picked our ships, setup our characters and just fell into the battle where ever we wanted. After suffering such a humiliating defeat, it was obvious we were outmatched and we needed to take a different approach for the second battle.
The people coordinating the battle drafted me to serve as our fleet's admiral. The fact that we had to draft an admiral says everything you need to know about our fleet's organization. So, I spent the next two weeks preparing for battle in addition to my usual design responsibilities.
;)
Read the full article here.
