I plan to stop in at some point tomorrow and share some numbers -- numbers of votes cast, and what that's done for items (auto-rejections, moved into pending approval, panic votes, etc.).

Keep the votes and submissions coming!

Yep, for this part of the test that's true.

We'll also be inviting some of the best Lab Rats to be leveled up to 20, but they'll be hearing from me separately ;-)

As many of you know, we are introducing a new pirate career called Buccaneer in the 1.4 patch.

Now that 1.4 is on Testbed, we would love to hear your feedback on the Buccaneer career missions.

You can access the Buccaneer career missions by talking to the Buccaneer skill trainer in Marsh Harbor.

The first mission in the career story line is called Free Enterprise
After that, you'll see these missions:
Asleep at Dawn
The Governor's Surprise
This Cannot Stand
Governor Who?
Know Thy Enemy
Pardon Me!

Are these missions fun? Is the story compelling? Did you spot any bugs? Let us know here!

Sorry, I meant to say the first AWESOME ship upgrade.


Joe

Either is fine, though I assume people are talking about 1.3 unless they mention other wise.

I would encourage everyone to give testbed (1.4) a try, however! Watch for an announcement saying as much very soon

This playtest will take place on: TESTBED
This playtest will be begin on: Monday, May 12
...and end on: Monday, May 19

To participate in this test, you must: have a level 50 character on one of the live game servers and a character on testbed.

-----------------------------------
Details:
We're hoping to see how the new and revised skills hold up in high-level PvP combat. If you are among the first 100 eligible players to volunteer for this test, your testbed character will be leveled to 50 and given ships and outfitting appropriate for PvP.

Players should gather in the area around Cabo Raphael and try PvP battles of different sizes and nation configurations.

Volunteer!
Send an email to usabilitylab@flyinglab.com with your level 50 character name and server. Also include the name of the character on testbed you want to play with. GMs will distribute ships and other goodies to the first 100 qualified volunteers on Monday between 12:00 and 3:00pm.

Nope. Nothing so clever. The only thing it does is to ensure that you're voting flag vs. flag or sail vs. sail. It picks two of the appropriate type at random.

I've seen a few of these as well, and each time, opening them in Preview, Pixelmator, and Photoshop has confirmed that the original image is at fault. Not much we can do about that; there's no automated way to tell whether it was intentional or no.

Unlike the old system, the new system does auto-reject items at certain thresholds, and in typical use, we expect it to weed out the bottom-most N% of items before they even reach us.

Second, the new system's admin tools let us filter through the items much faster than we were able to before, so approvals will happen significantly faster than they would have been in the old system.

Third, because the system allows users to post an item into "reviewing" (rather than "voting"), and post an image of the submission via BBCode tags on the forum, gather feedback, and replace the old submission with the new, that should lessen again the number of items that have to be reviewed.

Finally, the voting system is designed in such a way that it gives us the ability to find "almost, but not quite good enough" items, so that the 2D Steering Committee can work with those folks to improve their submissions in the future. Approvals take us much less time to go through than rejections, so anything we can do to improve the number of approvable items is good for all of us.

If you're thinking about how many submissions are in the system, and how long it's taking for you to get yours approved, the system is flawed -- as the old one clearly was. With this new system, you should get your items approved in a fairly consistent amount of time.

We don't yet know how long that'll be (I know what my many spreadsheets say based on previous behavior, but we're not sure how much stock to take in them, given that this system is completely different) but you should know dramatically improving the often-months long process of the old system is one of the core reasons we went to this new style.

We want rejections back in your hands for revision as quickly as possible, not after months, and we want good items to go into the game in time measurable in days, not multiple weeks, and certainly not months.

It seemed to work reasonably well in the beta, but as noted, beta play has been very different in terms of how NvN has progressed. We've thought that the issue was more of education as to how people should play, and eventually people would "get it" and start playing in a way that brings out the best in the system. And maybe that will happen, but in the meantime, there's a lot of pain along the way (especially for noobs) and an uncertain destination.

As I've been thinking about this, I think that the discussions about various tweaks (such as shallows) got in the way of thinking about this more holistically, which is how the reward structure works. I had two ideas today that, for once, Taelorn seemed to think was a good idea. (I'm kind of a brainstormy guy - He's kind of a nuts and bolts guys. Sing along "but they're cousins...").

Of course, ideas that sound good often wind up sucking when we really think it through ("As god is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.") so I don't want to talk about this until (or if) it passes muster with the rest of DesignCo and Joe.

Got a suggestion for a Playability Lab thread? Post 'em here!

Thanks for finding this one. It's not related to trial accounts, but to the skill changes. The fix for the underlying problem should be in Monday's testbed refresh as well as a change to give you back the skills you lost.


Joe