What you could do, is every patch day, during maintenance, you could copy everyone's
crew over to the test server.

Turn off exp, vet death/gain, expert death/gain (unless you are testing them)

Then, you can pre-release patches there 1 week in advance, people can playtest for free
to see if they are working and if there are bugs. You can then put a poll on the website to
see if everyone likes the patch.

If you want to check the balance by tweaking ships, you can pre-release a patch there,
and I can get members of the Public ONF website to help test (for example, you fix the
H44 shell weight issue).

Job Done.

http://opennavyfield.com/forums/index.php?topic=170.msg2802;topicseen#new


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Update after recent changes;

We now have the test forum. Changes can be discussed there.

All that is needed is for one of the old servers (Yamato or Nelson) to be converted to the
test server, and accounts copied with the new Server Account Copy tool they made for
the server merge.

On other thing; A Poll section for the test server forum.