Sick of it

[Sydokun]

There should be a table that tracks the last time the user logged in. By simply setting your query to bring up everyone that has not logged in for a specific amount of time you can easily remove older/unused accounts.

I totally support the original poster. At no point is a tester anywhere close to the level of a Dev. The Dev team must be able to do whatever they need to do to get the game to a state that they intend it to be. Testers have zero rights....you are donating your time. Further more if a "tester" is not testing, is not writing up bugs, or is causing issues with other testers (disseminating incorrect info, harassing players, violating the tos, etc) they can and should be removed. Games are not a democracy. At no point can a Dev be held responsible for testing new content and not alerting testers....that's the whole point.

As far as the "player" with incorrect rights that "may" have caused this...guess what? It's a valid test. It makes the Dev team aware that they need to either automate, regularly check, or simply remove old accounts. In fact it is good that it occurred. The bad part was all of the bitching and moaning. That doesn't help anyone. Let the Dev team know the issue, give them all your information, and then get on with testing the game. Getting killed 30 times outside of a star-base that you know has a very high level mob is testing.....for the first 10 kills....after that you are being a crappy tester.

And one last thing for those that think testers should have equal weight as a Dev. There are a ton of testers......you not testing the game will not stop it's progression. If a Dev leaves/doesn't do their work/is a pain in the ass it will effect the progression of the game. If you really need a good analogy it is like a sports fan yelling at a coach for making what they consider a bad call......your bitching doesn't help them do their job and in fact can harm it. How much time you spend "helping" the team matters not at all.

VERY WELL SAID.

[Kyp [LDEV]]

I would love a Game Players VS GM and Devs battle from time to time.

Sorry bout not grabbing your name, I just copied this when I read the text:

We were actually talking about doing something like this for a stress release sometime soon. If it's got enough interest, it'd probably be an FPS game, since those are generally the easiest to take out your frustrations in.

To those talking about the permissions, and an account wipe. The reason we discussed a full wipe like this for the next time we do it is because there are grandfathered accounts that do not match the current password hash system and we do have a time/date of last login, but we'll still probably do this anyway due to the nature and reason for that wipe to occur.

[Inverness]

The account wipe is not just for permissions, there are 8000+ accounts registered, including test accounts etc.

There are account names that are no longer used from previous stress tests etc.

These need to be cleared down.

There should be an easy way to tell if accounts are no longer used and if they're test accounts. Maintenance like this should not require a database wipe, if it does you are doing something wrong.

[Kyp [LDEV]]

There should be an easy way to tell if accounts are no longer used and if they're test accounts. Maintenance like this should not require a database wipe, if it does you are doing something wrong.

require is the wrong word, it doesn't require us to do it, we want to do it because that database has changed many many times and we want to force all data to be uniform. This is one way (albeit a ham-handed way) to ensure that it does so most directly.

[bondct]

I like the blackboard and chalk analogy (although some of the kids dont remember it)... back in the day before dry erase we used chalk and a blackboard in classrooms (wikipedia it if you must)...

every am the blackboard would start out dark black and it was easy to read off of...you would write stuff on it and all day long you would use an eraser on the board so you could write new stuff, but no matter how hard you tried, the eraser always left some residual chalk on the board, so that by the end of the day, it was getting progressively harder to read... but then at the end of the day there was always someone who got punished for something during the day and they would have to take a wet sponge and wipe down the entire blackboard, removing all chalk... and when it dried it was dark black again...

so the morale of the story is, that no matter how hard you try a database will never be as pretty as it was when it was new... and it takes significantly less time for the devs to "Delete Database" are you sure "Yes" (time 2 seconds) than to sort through 8k records and all that entails... only to leave residual chalk in the db

[Tienbau]

We were actually talking about doing something like this for a stress release sometime soon. If it's got enough interest, it'd probably be an FPS game, since those are generally the easiest to take out your frustrations in.

I'm crap at modern FPS games I kinda semi-rocked at Quake although that was over a decade ago. I tried deathmatching a friend on some PS2 game a while back and I sucked at it. It's these new-fangled console controls dagnammit!

[Kyp [LDEV]]

I'm crap at modern FPS games I kinda semi-rocked at Quake although that was over a decade ago. I tried deathmatching a friend on some PS2 game a while back and I sucked at it. It's these new-fangled console controls dagnammit!

Haha, well perhaps we could look at another option too!