As is the same route everyone goes down lol.
Closed BETA is useless on this small scale, will achieve nothing extra than an Open wouldn't achieve. If you're "maybe" doing an open, just do it from the get go. Nothing more annoying than 1 BETA that gets wiped, followed by another with a "possible" wipe if a major bug is found (Often the case as you would have only done a Closed beta with 15 players), then not being sure you want to put much effort in due to this possibility, which happens a lot around here....Not to mention the hype kill of beta's over and over and over....Yawn, lost interest after 2 lol
Just do 1, that definitely wipes, find all the crap wipe-able bugs. Then open it and let people play.
Spoke with the team and we decided to stick to the plan , we already have 20 applications for Closed Beta which is good enough . After that we will go straight into LIVE.
I see your concerns but we already bee through "alpha" aka close friends testing all our new systems and concepts (and i know thats not enough , thats why we run a closed aswell) but server is pretty stable and our purpouse for closed beta is to find (if there are any) killed bugs/exploits or something that threats server stability .
Balance will be done over time when live server and full of people ( We consider spells are already pretty balanced) but of course things like dmg multipliers , some cooldowns and some effects might change over time to offer the best experience to our players
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Meanwhile these days , coder been working on a full report system + investigation on players , so basically now server will allow us to follow each of their step and know exactly what they do , what they click , when and why . So with this system will be quite easy to catch anything that does look "suspicious"
+ and i was working on some new caves/quests/items + implementing some new AI's done by coder
, till now we have 6 complete new sets of AI's (about 50) , about 8 AI's only for bosses and 8 classic bosses tweaked and improved