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Forest Fires, Monster Slaying, and Testing Crash Fixes, How Stars Reach Used Discord for Three Playtests in Days

Christina Gonzalez Posted:
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Playable Worlds continues holding playtests for Stars Reach, and the latest dev update dives into three recent tests made possible by their Discord community.

The first test, a world exploration test, was done on a pre-alpha build without difficulty tuning, and advising that there's a lot of placeholder art and other things that are very unfinished. They sort of just let testers loose to explore, gave out some new tools with no instructions or guidance on using them and that was that. Some set out to explore the world, some decided to try out the new ranger skills and exploration skills that they had revealed last week.

Some went exploring, equipped a weapon and tried to hunt creatures they found. A few players even managed to map the whole planet, got a special trophy in their inventories for doing so, and then most lost it upon their next death. Some of the testers just wanted to watch the world burn and set some trees on fire. 

In Stars Reach, “every tree is the equivalent of a mob in a traditional MMO. They can each run individual behavior scripts, they grow and die and burn and can be chopped”. Here, the team describes, they burned. Devs got some feedback that the forest fires didn't burn fast enough, so they’ll  work to make forest fires feel more dangerous.

The second test taught the team a lot about having to handle crash issues. Player groups near each other were being disconnected and many crashed when trying to log in (even some devs).In working and testing a fix, they needed more players than they could pull together in-house. So a notice on Discord got 30 people to log in ASAP for 30 minutes of monster slaying. Just like the forest fires didn't spread fast enough, the monsters weren't deadly enough. 

The third test in three days was another spontaneous Discord test, and was another source of good data and learning experiences. Ultimately, there will be more of these, and if you want to help the team, the Stars Reach Discord is a good place to be.

“We’ll keep leaning on our community for these unscheduled playtests, and though we can’t promise instant fixes every time, the progress we’re making feels great—and sometimes even faster than expected!”


Seshat

Christina Gonzalez

Christina is MMORPG.COM’s News Editor and a contributor since 2011. Always a fan of great community and wondering if the same sort of magic that was her first guild exists anymore.