Why not make an exact copy of the mud, and put it into another window on the website. Use this new clone exclusively for testing, and allow select poll players to upload their chars into it.
This way you can tinker to your hearts content and have players you trust test it for you. This way you can test it, see what bugs and crashes result from it, and fix them before implementing the new patch into the real mud. Would save you a headache of people, (like me
) from bitching after every new patch. You can put a limit of time that players spend on the copy mud, so they dont go living their lives in the alternate mud.Think about it, this way you can see your new patches in practice before officially implementing them, and getting respectable player feedback on it.
The players that you let into it could be given a password that only works a few times, and their chars could be uploaded for a few hours at a time, as i said, to keep players from abuseing this branch. And of course, any advancements a player makes in this alternate mud do not get sent back to the real mud.
Every time you do upload a new patch for real into the main mud, you can restart the test mud to be an exact copy of it to avoid accidental mistakes that could not be seen during testing due to an old test mud.
I would imagine it cant be that hard to make an extra window of the mud for this, just sort of copy and paste the one we have now into another window so you dont have to recreate the mud.
