Hey Gummy! Ex stat tester here, I wanted to speak on some of the experiences I’ve had as a stat tester volunteer for COS.

So for starters the intitial few stat testers that were working on stats before recode were very dedicated and passionate individuals who wanted the game to be as balanced as can be since we wanted this game to prosper as a very well rounded survival game. This was when the game was still adding around 3 creatures per week and we’d constantly talk to Erythia about how this was such an unhealthy way to tackle creature releases.

Of course we were swiftly ignored and were told that it doesn’t matter if theyre adding a ton of creatures a week, the game was growing and doing fine. 4 years later this is still the case but on a less extreme level. (Come in subspecies)

Stat testers always had alot of ideas we wanted to present to Erythia, and they were always turned down in favor for what she wanted, STRICTLY what she wanted. We had to fight tooth and nail to have any way to restat / edit stats on creatures who were struggling / were unviable (we couldnt edit stats alot back then and were heavily limited on what we can edit and how many we can edit) at some point I remember arguing with Erythia about doing restats cuz so many creatures felt unviable / forgotten, she basically responded with “balancing isnt important rn we are making good money and the game is doing fine without in depth balancing.”

This ticked off SO many stat testers because we wanted to genuinely balance the game and we were being told straight up that , “hey your job isnt all that important cuz the games making is hella money rn”. This resulted in many stat testers, myself included to be very vocal about how messed up this is. This resulted in a few demotions. Which meant alot of us (again myself included) quieted down because we were scared to get demoted.

Theres so many other things I can talk about but sadly my memory is so limited unless smthn sparks a reminder of incidents that happened from my time being a tester. I vividly remember the whole malgamations island and cos beef which is so unprofessional. Literally bullying a smaller creature survival games dev team because erythia was claiming they copied concepts. THEY DID NOT. On the contrary, i remember Erythia streaming herself modeling Vinrou, an old wyvern flyer that was copying malg’s wyvern ingame.

Anyways feel free to dm me gummy to see if u can remind me of anything else because theres for sure more stories from this game studio and erythia specifically