Why I think groups with non-PS experience would be useful in the beta

[Trafalgar]

Or, I played Shores of Hazeron with a bunch of other people and our motto was "For Science!" (Some of them may be interested in PS2 as well. One apparently already promised himself to a particular outfit.)

People Who TL;DR OMGWTFBBQPOSTLENLIMIT: Your two sentence summary was above.

Side note: I wonder if my reading 20+ page threads here is excessive.

Not sure I'm seriously expecting anyone to actually read this, but who knows. It took a few hours to write, rewrite, etc. I read it myself 4+ times, but I read pretty fast.

I'll start with a quote - I think this would be better as a new thread than in that post, especially considering the length.

Originally Posted by DerFurst

Those people "more qualified" to test the game don't make you any less qualified at all. If SOE wanted only the most qualified people testing, they would bring in a spec ops team of elite planetside players and leave everyone else out completely. They need opinions from everyone, not just a select few. Taking information from one biased control group is terrible science and the making of a very counterproductive beta.

There are things you wouldn't be as likely to think to test that people who haven't played Planetside, but who have experience with other games, or with finding bugs and exploits, would be more likely to think of.

My premise is this: People who have played other games than Planetside will bring different perspectives to the beta test and the game which will enable them to more readily notice things which Planetside 1 players may miss entirely. The point of this thead is to point out some bugs or exploits that we've found in Hazeron, and creative things we've done, to give an idea of the kind of perspective that could be brought by outside groups who haven't necessarily played Planetside before. (And I didn't generally go into tactics because they differ so much)

Some of my friends and I (who I would chiefly call friends as a result of SoH having existed) played Shores of Hazeron for several years (2-3 depending on who, I think - it has existed since 2009ish?), finding and reporting bugs and exploits as we did so (it's in a perpetual alphaish stage), which were often (especially the exploits) ignored by the developer(s) (mainly Haxus) the majority of the time. Almost none of us play it anymore, but the experience remains, along with the fact that we are all good at finding bugs and exploits, and take a "For Science!" attitude to experimenting to see if we can do anything clever, unexpected, or exploity, or useful.

As such I am going to repeatedly mention Hazeron. I'm not actually recommending you go and play it, because it's nowhere near as good as it used to be IMHO, and Haxus seems to have a strange understanding of people's desires along the lines of "people like grinding, I'll add pirates which invade player systems and blow up player fleets which aren't landed on planets," or "people don't like having to send officers in ships to keep their systems from decaying, so I'll make it so only players can do that and then make it players have to set their homes in different sectors because that will keep them from decaying, unless they want to fly around themselves frequently," or "Gee, there are an awful lot of ships landed on planets, I think I'll make them decay if nobody keeps officers in them." (number of NPC officers being limited to one per habitable zone, so you need to spam colonies on habitable worlds everywhere to get more to have large enough fleets to hold off "pirates" in your vital systems)

That last paragraph was a bit of a tangent, but that's much of why I'm not recommending it despite how good it was once, and how much promise it had. (That and Haxus seems to have posted no updates since April and ignores most bug and exploit reports)

Hazeron is/was an ambitious space "MMO," in which players designed their species(es) (don't expect Spore's creature creator :V, but it has actual stats), formed empires, built colonies from the ground up on planets, advanced their technology via research over time, constructed spaceships (designing them themselves or using designs made by other people in their empire), loaded them up with resources, NPC crew, officers, and troops, and set out to colonize new worlds and harvest more resources of higher quality, or conquer other empires' colonies, and so on. It involved space warfare with spaceships, attacking enemy-controlled planets, capturing enemy defense bases in order to take over their planets, and shipping resources around your empire to ensure you can manufacture the products you need to make your ships, and your troops (and your) armor, weapons, medical supplies, food (normally produced locally), etc. Nowadays there's a bullion-minting system which allows infinitely printing money because Haxus has implemented something like RonPaulonomics into the game without considering the consequences of infinite availability of resources (oops! :V). Moving on.

Hazeron has scalability issues that Planetside 2 hopefully won't have. Framerates drop for every spaceship that isn't directly behind the player's camera, precipitously so for some spaceship designs (more triangles = worse, e.g. you have to make cube ships if you want to be GPU efficient) (no occlusion culling of any kind, no view frustrum culling, only back face and behind camera checks, from what I could tell). Blowing up a ship lagged a system up, and one system in which epic space war occurred ended up a permanent lagageddon (effectively, time ran slower there) as a result. Perhaps that lagageddon is fixed now, as Haxus at some point semi-recently made stuff ejected from destroyed ships not float around forever. Not sure how much of this may or may not have been fixed because Haxus cleared the changelog in April and doesn't keep old ones, although they may be on archive.org... I think I'll refrain from hunting for it, it's getting late/early. I never saw any improvements to the framerate issues, in any case, but I think he did something to reduce GPU memory usage after I quit (it was ludicrous, I was actually able to use up the 1 GB of video memory on my GTX 460 and crash the game as a result, and crash everyone else in the system as well, just by building identical spaceships (at which I can only facepalm)).

However, it was fun (Also Fun at times). Until fairly recently (the beginning of this year? Maybe a bit earlier? I can't recall. The several-month-long galactic plagues were the first warning. The NPC "pirates" were not so warning-ey.

What it did have in common with Planetside was dropping troops and players on enemy cities to take defense bases and conquer cities (and then planets), either for specific resources or as part of a larger war, along with air and space battles, and land battles (sometimes with exploiting because people sometimes got desperate or stupid - like deleting a base which was in the process of being captured, and building more elsewhere in the city, or spawn-tying on the city flag so that it was mostly uncapturable as long as you kept respawning immediately on death). We don't really condone that kind of thing, generally).

However, unlike Planetside, it had NPC troops, but they were terrible at their jobs and any player would take them out easily, although they had a fighting chance if they were manning a turret - more if it was placed strategically in a spaceship, instead of in a defense base a meter from the entrance where a player can basically skip past it before the NPC can react and fire (usually).

So, players were worth a lot more than NPCs. We (the empire I was in) made it common practice to look for bugs and exploits, report them (rarely had results, but sometimes did. There was no public bug tracker for bug reporting, no way to the status of a bug beyond "I think I fixed it and will ignore future reports on it"), and find ways to do crazy awesome things. Some of our allies did as well. This is in addition to designing and combat testing ships to determine what worked well in combat. Some examples of things we did:

1. We came up with a way to turn a moon into a "Death Moon" by covering it with small cities with laser bases whose negative morale modifier from the laser bases was offset by the maximum possible positive morale modifiers; building multiple cities with a certain number of bases each bypassed the negative morale per base which was intended to limit the number of bases on a planet or moon. (This was another person's idea in the faction, but I don't recall whose exactly - and instead of fixing the issue, Haxus nerfed weapon range (and damage, and shields, and recoded armor and damage types, inadvertently making it possible to OHK people through power armor with glue guns, which probably still isn't fixed - he seemed to ignore all bug reports about it))

2. Due to laser bases on planets, back when weapon ranges were high and armor was effective and APCs nigh-invulnerable (APCs could have used nerfing, but these were all later nerfed to hell, as I mentioned), in addition to the tactic of launching space transports holding players and troops and landing where bases couldn't target them (which held few troops, and were potentially destroyable by enemy turrets in laser bases, but not the powerful ship-killing lasers themselves), we came up with and tested the additional idea of performing deep space APC drops on planets targeted for conquest.

This was done by flying a ship towards the planet below the objects-burn-up-in-atmo speed cap, opening the bay doors, and driving the APCs out the front towards the planet, then stopping the ship. The APCs fly towards the planet due to their inherited velocity, enter the atmosphere, and land on the ground, where players drive them to enemy defense bases and unload their power-armored troops and go cap stuff. (It would be possible to miss a planet if it were moving sufficiently fast and the aim wasn't adjusted, as an APC cannot maneuver in space AFAIK) This is one that I and another person (Ikkir, I think?) came up with, IIRC.

3. I built an abductor array of over a thousand teleportation pads (numbered essentially spirally from center), capable of abducting groups of people off a planet (or just causing them massive graphics lag until they restarted their client if they were unlucky enough to see every transporter beam at once). (I only used it at the full number of pads a couple times; it caused the same graphics lag to the user unless they were facing 180° away from it)

4. We performed experiments to determine if it was possible to break the "light-speed" barrier using the gravity of a supergiant star to gain a velocity boost in multiple velocity vectors instead of just forward (the ships have strafe, it's just slower than using that supergiant's gravity was) (it was not). We had a second ship (Ikkir's) travelling in a straight direction at light speed, following the test ship (mine) which had maxed or near maxed velocity in all reported direction vectors to determine whether they were travelling at the same speed or not (they were - the actual velocity was separate from the directional velocity and still capped out at "light speed," which was a hard cap until warp drives were introduced). (I also attempted to launch a ship from inside a ship travelling at light speed to see what would happen, but the results were inconclusive due to glitches in the speed transfer upon exit of spaceships algorithm at large distances and/or speeds, which were never fixed, but since they're probably due to floating point inaccuracy, it might not be possible to fix them without massive code rewrites anyways)

5. We figured out how to build rooms in ships out of negative space (see the art term), which were massless (but had to be surrounded by real rooms to have walls) as they were actually 'outer space' rather than rooms themselves. Since turrets could only be placed facing out into 'outer space', and it was possible to replace a room/space wall with an atmosphere-forcefield which turrets could shoot through and people could walk through, we were then able to design ships with internal turrets (manned by NPCs) aimed the bridge consoles and all the entrances, making it hell to hijack or sabotage one. (This did cause issues at high speed, because 'outer space' wasn't moving with the ship, so if you walked into a negative space room while the ship was flying at high speed you could get glitched right out of the ship. Oh, and you'd suffocate if you stood in one without an EVA suit or power armor (and helmet).)

6. I found a way to make spaceship hull walls (and doors in them, etc) invisible (but not intangible) by building a specific pattern of tiles in the ship designer (there were two patterns with different effects, both only affected the same deck and only rooms past the point of the pattern in one direction regardless, but one affected the pattern (and everything connected to it) as well and the other didn't). Reported it with demonstration ship files. Not sure if fixed yet. Not really a major exploit, so not high-priority. It was fairly cool, but no cloaking device, as the floors, ceilings, and any devices and internal walls all remained visible. (plus, sensors were still infallible unless you landed on something and powered down)

7. Voltron-type ships. Ships docked into other ships acting as parts of them, e.g. a central movement/armor/shield section, with multiple extremely deadly less-well-defended weapon arms. Ikkir came up with this one. Others of us experimented with it later as well. We noted that it was possible for fast ships to tow heavy things without their speed changing (exploit!), and I designed ridiculously fast low-mass ships with ship docking ports for towing other ships (upteched to high TL for accel bonuses - there would be no difference in accel between designing them at the mass which would give that TL, compared to low mass and upteching, but fuel usage is a tiny fraction of what it would have been at the high TL's standard mass), to abuse it until Haxus fixed it. (He may have actually fixed it by now. Can't trust changelogs, though. Stuff comes unfixed fairly often in Hazeron.)

9. Another in our empire (Panic) realized that it was possible to build a prison moon where citizens could be dropped off by spaceships but which they would be unable to leave - by not building an airport, IIRC, they'd be unable to leave. He didn't even bother to build housing for them. The city reached 100k population (all homeless) with 90% unemployment. (Haxus fixed this eventually, to much rejoicing as most of the players thought we were getting tons of taxes from the citizens (who were actually neither working nor buying anything, I expect, so no income or sales tax - this was before the new economic system).)

Moving on to things that are definitely exploits:

10. I reported one directly to Haxus and nobody else in which I had discovered a way to freeze an entire server for several minutes at a time with little effort in-game and no external tools, and which I reported with something like a 4-5 page email full of descriptions of detailed tests and results with a paragraph summary and a sentence summary (he liked to not read long emails) demonstrating that the issue was the character's movement code being run multiple times per cycle and listing what I was doing that was triggering it, and specifying specifically how to reproduce it (He still had to fix the root cause in the code rather than just that one avenue of course, and that's the only time I can remember him actually addressing an exploit anywhere near the time it was reported).

11. At one point he requested investigation into ways of breaking into spaceships, and we found numerous ways to glitch into spaceships. This doesn't just include the players in the empire I was in (which I might not have even been in at the time) - I PMed a number of players and we pooled our knowledge and included Haxus in our PMs so that he got a copy of everything we came up with. He fixed a bunch, but eventually apparently considered his work there done, and started ignoring further reports of ship break-in exploits. (Eventually he added a legitimate way to break into ships by blowing doors open (e.g. with C4), as well, so it became less of an issue, but it's still possible to use break-in exploits on ships which have no doors and thus cannot be broken into legitimately by blowing doors open)

We found even more afterwards, and he never fixed one of the original ones which I had personally found and reported, which was that it was possible to easily get into a ship by building a ship which could rotate, pivoting part of it through the other ship, with a helm or captain's chair in that section and hull doors to let you get right out into the other ship once you had rotated yours into its bridge or wherever you wanted to get out. His homemade sort-of-physics engine didn't check collisions during rotation (Not necessarily easy, I suppose, especially since it was just changing rotation and not using torque).

12. I had also reported (a very long time ago, and again a couple more times later) a way to max out every modifiable gameplay-affecting stat of a species when creating it (instead of being required to allocate them fairly; there was no server-side checking and he ignored reports about the problem despite how easy it would have been to add server-side counting of the total number of points spent). I could go on, but it's probably not necessary.

I'm hoping that SOE, or the devteam for PlanetSide 2 anyways, has a better sense of how to secure their games, but especially actually pays attention to bug and exploit reports, and has a good system in place (or is putting one in place) for reporting them, and verifying or reopening them when they're marked fixed. Also, does not punish discovering and testing them. If they want to punish exploiting them, that's their business, though opinions vary about whether exploiting them is good or bad (Some feel it is good for demonstrating that an exploit needs fixing, some feel it just pressures the devs to drop what they're working on to fix whatever is being exploited instead - or to ignore the problem). I think it's better to fix exploits than to punish people for exploiting them, if the exploits have been reported.

I also hope SOE's customer database is actually secure now, although I was able to avoid putting a name or zip code into my SOE account (which I originally made for DCUO, after I quit Hazeron, some time after SOE got hacked).

[indirect]

...

[exLupo]

I think you lost the point of your thread. You do look like you make a great tester, tho. To respond to the post title only, "Yes."

A variety of backgrounds provides necessary and different perspectives to make sure as many angles get tested and as much diversity in feedback is garnered. However, equally important is that the players simply be good testers. Having decades of FPS experience and zero testing ability is arguably less useful than someone who has never played a shooter but is a dedicated and serious analyst.

Imo, bringing in the elite form PS1 would probably be the worst of both worlds.

[Zenben]

If anyone reads this whole thing, please let me know what it's all about. Also, you deserve a hug if you do.

[exLupo]

Zen, it was his testing resume for SoH. If he can get his wall-of-text in control, I'd hire him to test for me.

[Zenben]

Originally Posted by exLupo

Zen, it was his testing resume for SoH. If he can get his wall-of-text in control, I'd hire him to test for me.

Is SoH a game? I didn't even pick up on that...

[SKYeXile]

Originally Posted by elfailo

Most cumbersome way to try to get into a beta ever.

Ill make sure Shock gives one of his 10 extra keys to you.

[indirect]

Originally Posted by elfailo

Most cumbersome way to try to get into a beta ever.

This was my first thought. I scrolled down and read point 7, I just don't understand your point. Voltron was a cartoon.

[Xyntech]

I agree with your thread title, so I didn't even bother reading the tl;dr.

Of course non Planetside players will be valuable to beta, and the devs have provided ways for them to get in. We'll all be in beta soon, don't worry about it.

And stop making new threads. Keep this stuff in the previously existing beta threads.

Originally Posted by elfailo

Most cumbersome way to try to get into a beta ever.

And he had to compete with all of the twitter whoring for that title.

[Trafalgar]

I have a twitter key already, actually (one of the publicly posted ones). But yes, the post is really long. Most of the people I know from SoH don't have keys, of course, since getting one of those is not what I would call easy (actually I'm not aware of any of them having keys, but they haven't mentioned it).

Originally Posted by indirect

This was my first thought. I scrolled down and read point 7, I just don't understand your point. Voltron was a cartoon.

"The team’s individual vehicles join together to form the giant super robot, with which they defend the galaxy from evil." - wikipedia

Basically it's multiple ships combining to make a mega-ship. It had other names on SoH's forums ("Fleetship" and "mothership," neither of which are as explanatory), and that was the most obvious one (for anyone familiar in any way with the cartoon, which I wasn't originally, but that's what wikipedia is for).

[Fanglord]

wheres the tl;dr bit? ( the two sentence summary, er doesn't really make much sense as it doesn't summarise your essay on why your the best )

[Pella]

If you CBA to read the entire Post. Hes talking about getting the minecraft players into the first platoon. Which most don't have FPS experience other than Golden eye on the N64. This resulting in feedback of a different nature, which SOE may miss out on.

Makes sense.

[Fanglord]

Originally Posted by Pella

If you CBA to read the entire Post. Hes talking about getting the minecraft players into the first platoon. Which most don't have FPS experience other than Golden eye on the N64. This resulting in feedback of a different nature, which SOE may miss out on.

Makes sense.

(y)


Whilst making sense in one aspect, its a tad redundant to making sure the FPS plays like a good fps; after all 'minecrafters' might not really understand initially the mechanics of an fps.

[Trafalgar]

Perhaps I should have linked to Shores of Hazeron in the first post after all.

Minecraft players are all good too, of course.

[Canaris]

lol I checked out SoH on youtube, mine craft sa space!

the part where it stated seamless combat had me roll off my chair in giggles, it's like the exact opposite of seamless combat.

Good luck tho