source taken from UO Ideas Den

Comment

Why can’t the houses on the test shard be wiped out every server up? People that want to test plot placing cant because whenever a test center is running because whatever backup if using one all the homes are there forever. It’s really annoying it is a test center after all.

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Good idea. The Test Shard is supposed to be for testing, not living and full time playing.

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The problem is that to test various things, people's home supplies are often needed. That's why the test centre is often a clone of a production shard.

However I do agree that some means to place houses and test such things should be possible.

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CatHat UO Character/Environments Artist

I think she meant that people test building homes and so forth, item placement, etc, things that actually need a 'house' to try out. Not for item storage.





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What about wiping them in just one facet? That way you would have copies of legacy housing for testing and space for new house testing.

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Ando Lead UO QA Tester

Generally we will load a Test Center with an existing backup because we want to replicate what might happen when we go to publish a new server build to a live production shard. Our hope is that a lot of players will log in to the Test Center with older characters that have a wide variety of items. Sometimes this will allow us identify an issue that we did not see during earlier phase of testing. Also when we do publishes that have a lot of combat changes, players seem to prefer us leaving an existing backup on the shard so that they don't have to setup their character each time.

Since Pub43 will contain a lot of new housing related content, we will probably be using a clean shard for a majority of the publish. This will make it easier for most players to get started testing right away, since they won't have to hunt as long for a housing spot.

So in summary, sometimes this is a good thing to do, other times it's not. It just depends on what needs to be tested.

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