narexa wrote:
This pretty much sums it up - updates are tested by the Community Team, and sometimes a few select people in high up positions in the community when we're lacking in Community Team members, when we're ready to release them, and once they're ready to be released on the server, we want to get them out for people to play on our live servers.

There was a brief period of time where I trialled allowing some more people onto my test server to help out with testing. Unfortunately, this led to a lot of update features being leaked, and allowed specific people to "prepare" for aspects of the update on the live server (specifically with this one, I believe it was the addition of the craftable suits) which ruined the surprise for a lot of people and gave some people an unfair advantage over others, which forced me to make some last-minute changes to prevent this from happening.

[quote="narexa" post=1317639]I don't really think everyone having access to the upcoming update contents is a good idea, perhaps a select few of the community that are trusted? otherwise it's just going to make the updates less surprising and fun because you've already tried all the new stuff beforehand. :minussp:[/quote] This pretty much sums it up - updates are tested by the Community Team, and sometimes a few select people in high up positions in the community when we're lacking in Community Team members, when we're ready to release them, and once they're ready to be released on the server, we want to get them out for people to play on our live servers. There was a brief period of time where I trialled allowing some more people onto my test server to help out with testing. Unfortunately, this led to a lot of update features being leaked, and allowed specific people to "prepare" for aspects of the update on the live server (specifically with this one, I believe it was the addition of the craftable suits) which ruined the surprise for a lot of people and gave some people an unfair advantage over others, which forced me to make some last-minute changes to prevent this from happening.