So, I joined around 2023. At that point, most of the F2p content was already written (with bugs) and most of the P2p content was unfinished or very buggy. Cheats were also enabled, so what many people that came by to help test in alpha would do was spawn in KBD to kill it with crazy stats and gear or PK with a friend or something simple like that. There were very, very few people willing to play like an actual player, which meant most of the testing was done by the devs as they pushed their code and tested it for a bit. I was one of the only people that was willing to play at a normal x1 xp rate without cheats or commands to skip through things and it let me find a lot of different issues that required significant engine work to fix. Some of them were:
Ability to disable the logout timer/random event timer by intentionally throttling your game client below 1 FPS
NPCs would rarely keep their path on death if they died in specific circumstances, sometimes causing them to be stuck behind empty tiles as obstacles (this only happened once every 3-4 hours of melzars’ maze zombies which is where I found the bug)
If you re-enter a zone on the exact tick that a fire would burn out, the fire becomes a ghost fire on the client, you cannot cook on it, it never burns out, and you can’t re-light a fire under it. (this was an every 2-3 hours of fishing at barb village issue)
Sometimes mining rocks would get “stuck” on the client, it would either be permanently up or permanently down, but you couldn’t mine it in either situation. This one I remember not even being believed at first because the devs couldn’t reproduce it and it finally got looked at when someone else encountered it 2-3 months later.
Alch stalling your run simply didn’t work, you wouldn’t move.
The Gas Rock mining random event would explode your pickaxe SUPER quickly, it would be on the very next time you’d hit it.
Among many others. I probably have close to 100 posts in game issues
The most infamous bug (that got turned into a joke because of how long it lasted) was what we called “Zone Bug”. It essentially boiled down to the fact that zones were replaying all the actions that had previously occurred in them when you re-entered one rather than just putting the character in an up-to-date area. This meant if you spent a couple hours training ranged at cows, you’d start seeing a 30 second delay when trying to enter the lumby cow pen zone because of all the arrows showing up briefly as ground drops during the rewind. Early-on, this would also delete things like the lumby mill (and I completed cook’s assistant by getting flour from an imp because of that).
I played F2p only all the way till 1000 total because that was where the game needed the most testing, beta was going to be an F2p only launch, so me going and attempting to play in the extremely buggy P2p content would have just slowed things down, this meant most of the bugs I was finding were engine related rather than simple content bugs and were helping to improve the game as a whole.