Is it acceptable that PoN testers spend time on other things?

[NY Rangers]

I'm on vacation right now, school starts next week. So I have some time free to do a variety of things. I'm playing a game of World in Flames on VASSAL and I'm involved in the VASL League. I also went camping with my kids and took my wife for a weekend at the coast. I'm a busy guy.

My role in the PoN Beta was principally to work on the regions database. I developed the Latin American regions in the early testing process. Later, I developed the events that create rail lines in AI-controlled countries worldwide at more or less their historical times. I am currently thinking about recommending that roads be put in some areas that don't have them. I made some recommendations about gameplay, some of which were adopted and some not. I played in the beta AAR game. Over the summer, I was teaching at a university in Baltimore and I only had my rather slow laptop with me, so I couldn't play much. But I think I made some important contributions to PoN, certainly enough to allow myself the ego-gratification of identifying myself as a PoN Beta Tester.

But, as several people have said in this thread already, I am a volunteer, not an employee of AGEOD/Paradox. I work my own schedule and I don't invite other people to criticize how I choose to spend my time.

On the other topic: I enjoy the Athens/Clovis mods, both SVF and this one. I think he is a gifted designer of AIs, and a lot of people seem to share my appreciation. I think that I am pretty good at writing AARs, and I hope that my AAR will help the designer figure out how to improve his work. Nobody told me to do this AAR, except the people who responded to my last AAR and said they thought it was useful and interesting.

Many thanks for your reply! I think this issue is now sorted.

...unless Rafiki wants to continue it, of course.

[Sir Garnet]

Yes, those 8 min breaks during processing are plenty of time to write an AAR, or novel, or work on an online degree - or wash dishes and do laundry. If a tester agrees to do something and delivers, what's the problem?

This thread has in any event been useful since, looking at the AAR and then the FY mod, it seems, from the detailed documentation, to be a very well thought through mod and an interesting underlying game (the more interesting as I think it is hard to make a good Russian Revolution game).

[Baris]

Welcome back Rafiki ! Glad you back. Hopefully you will be also back on form as the current title did created "The battle of Volunteers vs players" that created havoc including PON community that jumped to thread ! But I guess the topic was mainly related to Rus and fatal years mod.

What I think is either Betas deserting in the ranks excluding BOA,ACW that only seasonal betas are doing the job and correcting bugs or Betas doesn't bother to post bugs that only players correcting/adressing bugs (including ROP) . I guess the titles(Such as captain, which is easily given to any players in the football teams nowadays), is easily given to volunteers that they hardly do the job adequately testing and new idea-wise. (Not related to this topic)

[Rafiki]

What I think is either Betas deserting in the ranks excluding BOA,ACW that only seasonal betas are doing the job and correcting bugs or Betas doesn't bother to post bugs that only players correcting/adressing bugs (including ROP) . I guess the titles(Such as captain, which is easily given to any players in the football teams nowadays), is easily given to volunteers that they hardly do the job adequately testing and new idea-wise. (Not related to this topic)

To be frank, this is something that people outside the beta teams can only speculate about, and I see no reason to invite that speculation here.

Since DoctorKing has answered NY_Ranger (even though he was under no obligation to do so), we'll end the discussion here.

[color="Blue"]Thread closed[/color]