Lately the devs have been asking for higher attendances for the dev server on their dev streams but don’t really tackle the reasons why there is such a low attendance. One of the main issues of why there is such a low attendance is that people don’t have access to the new vehicles while yes if you GE research vehicles it won’t get saved or you can grind with 5X the power it will still take a while for you to get the new vehicles, players would rather grind on the main server for this instead of almost “wasting” their time on the dev server as this progress isn’t saved or rewarded in any way.
The (possible) solutions
First solution:
my first idea for fixing this is by or making it so that the Dev server is a complete sandbox (probably least plausible idea) the main issue with this would be that people would now use the dev server to test vehicles that are not related to the update.
Second solution:
Making it so any new vehicles (aka ones with a yellow border on the top left of their statcard) are immediately unlocked on the dev server for the players of the dev server which would eliminate the need of grinding them and instead being immediately able to test the vehicles instead. This would kind of work like the first option but eliminate the issue of “people will test non update related vehicles instead”
Third solution:
Another option is making it so that the Research points that got gained in the dev server are transferred over at an 80% efficiency (pre 5X mult) so what would get you 1k rp in the main server would get you 5k in dev but only gets 800 rp given to your main account post dev. This has some downsides about it being unintuitive as nothing else gets transferred over between them but it could be given like a pop up message of “Here is your Research points that you gained in the Dev server as a thank you for testing” or something along those lines
Fourth Solution
The last option for higher attendances would be to give rewards for participating in the dev server in a way of for X score you would get Y rewards like boosters, prem account etc this option can of course be added even with a different option. This would work like how events work where you get the booster crate on some tiers.
Which option do you prefer
Complete sandbox
All new vehicles given
Research points conversion
0voters
Do you want to see rewards as an incentive (as seen in option 4)
Yes
No
0voters
Please give feedback and of course be respectable this is a place to discuss ideas for an official suggestion later on
Personally i believe the best course of action would be to just receive the vehicles that are to be added, fully spaded since the goal is to test new additions and find bugs. The more people have access to the new vehicles the more likely it is to find and fix bugs before they make it to live. I believe this already is the case for content creators, I see little to no reason why it wouldn’t be possible to roll out those changes to the entire playerbase on the dev server.
I think the easiest and most probable choice for gaijin would be to give everyone the new vehicles to test out, including the premiums, as this could entice players to buying them for the real server. Or yeah as you said, giving everyone a test drive coupon thing / just giving them the vehicles to play around and test
All new vehicles given sounds like a good measure to make everyone happy. It would reward those that want to test the new vehicles without having to grind them, but still keep the ones they’ve not unlocked on the main server from being played, therefore rewarding those that have been active. This makes sense as live server vehicles can happen to change or encounter bugs, which means they’ll need them unlocked to test them.
IMHO some additional rewards such as titles or gimmicks that could give more incentives to the players to join in the devserver could further boost the attendances. Some bug reporting themed decals or new update ones could do the trick.
How about give the new vehicles spaded but only to players that have the previous vehicle in line purchased?
If we give everyone everything people will flood the dev server because they want to try top tier stuff they never played. Also those players probably can’t help much in bug fixing and stuff since bug report system is going to get flooded by people that don’t know how to operate radars saying that radar missiles are not working (they just don’t know how to use them)
True, that is a possibility but I think that it would still be better to just give everyone all new vehicles if you for example wanted to test vehicles in a new subtt or a vehicle that you want to test in a different tech tree. Also most newer players don’t know the existence of the dev server as it isn’t really in the open that much except for the dev stream (for which you would also need to be an avid follower of warthunder)
Why don’t gaijin just assign you to test that specific vehicle until it gets released to the live server… or just release the update to the live server immediately? People will find bugs faster over there.
I mean most vehicles that get added to the dev server get added there so that people can bug report on stuff like inaccuracies also most of the time the vehicles don’t have internal modules yet so idk why they would just immediately push to live as that could also break some stuff
I nelieve they should be given free but there have been instances of modifications completely changing a vehicle in a differnent way than intended with some recently as m1 kvt, or the prem jap boat that changes fire rate the oppostie way with mod installed to stats