Staff/Developer Related Question

As I'm trying to figure out what to do with my future, I've played torn for quite a while now. (New account, few years played)

I thought about waiting for the applications for helper to come out, but then I also thought about the developer idea since I have some coding experience and enjoy it; I have a free education opportunity I can take and could dive more into the needed knowledge for to be a developer.

I then noticed... developers cannot be attacked.

The question is I guess... How does this work with one's account?

Do some developers have personal accounts that they genuinely play the game with?

The requirements for staff are a year in the game; though they say they may entertain accounts under that age, I think there's only ever been one person who was accepted under a year (in recent memory, old staff from 15-20 years ago was a hell scape of unprofessionalism) and they're fedded now. So that didn't work out well.

I would doubt devs have personal accounts because admins and devs are paid employees; staff are volunteers. Paid employees playing is a conflict of interest, especially when they have dev tools. Outside of CMs which are technically required to "play" to some extent to actively and effectively be able to do their job which directly relates to interacting with the community.

Staff and dev are massively different things. Some devs seem to have play accounts, some play on their admin accounts.

As far as actual development, Torn development team isn't really a place you can go to learn and staff isn't a place for developers.

You'd be better off getting started building mods in Torn as a player and using that as a way to learn stuff.

I'm not worried about the age thingy. I got a while to go before I could even submit a worthy application.

I could see the conflict of interest. That's what clicked to me when developers aren't even playing the game. But personal accounts to play if someone landed the job and then gained interested in playing?

I like the mod idea.

And not a place I can go learn, but they have what's required as per knowledge & experience in work wise.  It would be a journey for sure.

As for devs seem to have play accounts, why do you say *seem* to have play accounts and I didn't think they'd also have admin account, but thats cool of em.

If you have a personal account and dev tools on your work account, it's heavily exploitable just being able to, some of which being employed to ie handling bug reports and having reason to look into other people's accounts. That would have to be up to ched I suppose and his discretion on his employees integrity.

Varies based on person. I think a lot of devs don't play, and some might be considered admins rather than devs depending on your take. In the gaming industry a lot of companies consider anyone at the company "devs" and try to be inclusive. Outside, it means someone that writes code.

Example is one dev has a clear dev and play account. Another example would be bogie or PrincessJulie who clearly play and work on the same account.

When I've worked on games it's varied on if my play/work account is the same, usually depends on the company. At one I was the only person that did prod testing (live game) and it was honestly a miracle my account wasn't somehow permanently damaged with all the weird shit I did to it on back and front-end, but an end-game live account also made a perfect way to test how player accounts would react as I manipulated them a lot.

It's generally a good idea to separate play and work accounts though. Live testing is generally a bad idea and dangerous. Someone I worked with at another company tested something and broke the account of everyone online at the time in a game. Had to go into maintenance and fix all of them by hand running account data through a spreadsheet I made to fix data issues.

You'll usually have test environments running but sometimes you just need to test live. Torn definitely has a test environment but I'm sure some still needs testing here, and what accounts they use for it? Who knows. Maybe they clone player accounts and use those. It's also browser based so probably a lot less or at least different potential issues for live testing.

I know they got to have some rules in place--have to in order to safeguard some integrity. I wouldn't be surprised if developers couldn't actually do that even if they wanted to play, but idk how much of a relaxed man Ched is according to that. Just an intriguing idea :)

Thank you for the input!

I laughed at "all the weird shit" you did -- i can only imagine lmfao.

And just by looks if any dev were to actually play, they would have to have a separate account to keep things fair. I imagine most devs get the job not even thinking about playing.

And I don't know too much with Torn's admins, do they do much w coding or is that something we'd even know?

Would have to ask them. In my experience you take as much work off others plates as you can so sometimes other roles accidentally or even intentionally learn stuff in the back-end or build their own tools to modify/read it. So there's probably mostly coding roles, non coding roles, and a few that ended up kinda in the middle.