The Town Council just made a decision to designate the current environment in cryptokingdom.me TEST. This means that the changes in item balances, including money, will be erased and data in this table rolled back to the situation right after migration (it is essentially the same as still shown in GoogleDBF_OWN, but changing that will nevertheless no more change the balance as it is a separate source).
I think this sounds very reasonable, although it does make testing a bit less motivating as it's not permanent. But I just got myself a brand new, fancy red suit now then
It was not a light decision, for the reason of communication: There is no way to get the word out to people. Going back from having the Items masterdata displayed, does not of course really cause the testing to go up, but more likely causes a collapse in testing, in organization, general interest, etc.
After dedicated the last 2 weeks of my life to be 24/7 CK camp, this time slot is now ending. I will be able to allocate only about 2 hours daily. That is not much considering how many things I am involved with in game. I have distributed the work to others, then later on will again be time slots with full steam. The already contracted Ultima project is <50% done, and the game is just one year old, cf. 25 years of Civilization.
The decision to do the migration when important components were not functioning perfectly, was mine. The goal was to get more actual playing activity to the game, and those could iron out both the bugs and the UI, and get several important features out that could relieve the communication bottleneck (me).
I don't usually fall victim to democracy, this game is kind of designed to avoid it
Now you all (including Syksy, PJ, and the councillors) have your chance to prove that the designation of "testing environment" causes the testing and development to retain their high levels, and all the various kinds of players retain their rekindled interest. I had predicted collapse in many of the above, this did not prevent the vote going against me in the Town Council. (The alternative I had proposed to retain player interest, keep the game playable, have the markets going on, detect (and repair) bugs quicker, not lose confidence which would happen if rollback, would have been to fix the results of erroneous trades, and fix the algorithms that produce them.)
My communication goes offline now. If I write something, they are long and far-reaching plans about the future, or very short announcements that you have to be able to understand.