Why are counselors not publicly named/listed and should counselors be officially listed?

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Well, it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck. I've seen many situations where testers seem to benefit from their experience testing. Do I have two studies and a video of someone going "hehehehe I'm going to abuse all my testing experience"? No. I think the fact that testers seem to be generally successful suggests that there may be something to this, though.
I haven't done a study. It's not even an issue I care about. I just decided to pop in and say that BlackEye isn't completely off the mark here. These are things to think about.
It is often the case when issues such as these come up that people rush in going HYPE TRAIN UOR IS GREAT DON'T THINK ABOUT THIS HYPE TRAIN. There's nothing wrong with thinking about and discussing the way things are.

As for CTF, I think the people who designed the system were the first to realize that it was easy to team stack there so that statues/platinum could be farmed.

I don't care (other than to disdain those who do these things) but it's obvious that people will try to gain any advantage in this game they can. From complex razor scripts that pvp, mul edits, disallowed programs, inside info, making gheal wands, etc etc etc, people will cheat to gain an advantage (even if it's allowed, if you give yourself an advantage over other players by editing muls and the like, it's still cheating because they will need to do the same to remain competitive)

I agree with Napo, the testers gaining advantages over the halloween event is kinda messed up, but like I said, I don't really care, the top spot wouldn't have been mine anyhow. I also agree that counselors should have no real in game powers that can affect game play and should be kept anon, because people will harass them. Though looking at this thread, it's not hard to figure out who might be one.

It's a 20 year old game and to feel the need to be superior at it is pretty damn nerd sad. These things with the trammel style play content and patches just take the fun out of everything in the long run. I enjoy the instanced events just like everyone else, but content could be added to the dungeons and world that are unused and flesh out the actual play of things. The trammel stuff makes everyone safe and secure, but this wasn't what UO was about, and you end up coddling a bunch of whiny baby players who mass farm with tamers *cough* and etc.... If you want to attract a lot of players from this era fel must be nourished and expanded, not patched out. These events and everything people complain about are trammy problems. I hope my use of trammy is a trigger that causes people to be upset and is a spit in the eye of social justice warriors (gm whaaaa) But to close if a counselor or tester can use that position to get an advantage in the game, most of them will, history has never proven otherwise. Even OSI gms got caught abusing power.

Anyhow, Napo and Blackeye, you should know better than to argue with these folks, a few of them are the same ones that completely dogged me the first year for wanting stealing to be era accurate and accusing people of auto loot (we now have corpse crates, so hmmm hmmm) You wont get far with these folks, they'll die with 10 years+ of 15+ hour a day game play magic pixels satisfaction they pwnd UO as part of the trammy elite.


everyone else I encourage you to make a thief or similar char such as a stealth rt guy and just enjoy playing the game, it's easier than getting caught up in the bs

That was a year ago, right? And since like day 3, everyone else knew/knows, but if they're they only ones that still do it doesn't that mean it's a matter of effort and not inside knowledge?

There is an amusing irony in the fact that you and your friends spend all year talking about how you're successful at Factions because you try harder than everyone else and are better organized... and then when other people are successful at holiday events or CTF you immediately assume it's not because they try hard and are organized but because they have an insider information advantage.

I would be very very surprised if the spawning rares were a part of the testing of the new tmaps. I didn't test them at all but let's give Telamon the benefit of the doubt. Why would that need to be tested. Testing usually has to do more with mob strength and overall difficulty levels for various group sizes.

I can only speak for myself. It didn't dawn on me how easy and effective team stack was until after CTF was released. I didn't learn the details about the rewards until after CTF was released, either.
I didn't pay a lot of attention to it prior to its release, though. I imagine that there were people more informed than me as well as people who were less informed.

I didn't really say it's a bad thing. People who try hard should be rewarded for their effort, particularly if they have to overcome challenges to do it.
Like I said two posts ago, I don't think it's a bad thing that people who volunteer to help test stuff have a small advantage over those who don't. Like I said earlier, being a tester is often only as hard as telling the staff that you want to help out.

I don't know enough about this to comment. I do know a few people who had plans for ironman and the instance based on their experience testing.

lol testing content is not some special thing only a few people get to do, you can log onto test days prior to any patch and test the patch content before it goes live, Telamon encourages this so there are minimal bugs once applied to the live server. Most of the time he publicly asks for everyone to test content on test center in irc prior to patches.

Yup, I've seen many times where Telamon has announced on irc that EVERYONE can jump in to help him test something.
Personally I'd love to see a schedule for it, but at the same time all these public tests prior to the event can allow less top notch shards early access viewing to try and 'borrow' his ideas to try and run the same thing as competition so a timetable of them, in my opinion, wouldn't be a good idea.

Server wide announcement, IRC announcement, maybe even a post on the forums an hour beforehand for those that don't use IRC (GET ON IRC ALREADY!!!!), even the town criers talking of the test is all we really need.
Donators should be the only people to get advance notice of upcoming tests if ya ask me, or people who know how the code/spawning system works.

As for counselors, we don't need a list of them...it could be handy for noobies to get help quick, but again, get on IRC. Ask and you'll get an answer quick enough.
Old technology that still works, and uses minimal resources. Good idea to setup an irc client rather than using the in browser one, as you can set it to open all your rooms on sign in, and you avoid that random error of it not loading the client that happens all the time.

A top notch player run shard that aggressively competes with other top notch player run shards isn't a top notch player run shard.


Sadly though, I have to nod in agreeance that it happens.

T3h D4ve, couple things, players who donate here get zero, zero in game perks for their donations, this includes advanced noticed of testing.

bandwidth can be a problem for some players having irc, we have a great many players from other countries. That said, I agree, if you can, get irc .

Yeah, I know, that's why I said maybe have donators getting advance notice, since currently all they get is a heads up on what tela's working on/status reports from what I read on the donation page

Reality
"Telamon put me in jail and touched me in my private pixel parts!"

fixed...