Cougar727: I assume you are talking about this pond: Hyper Mega Pond
If you notice, the person who dropped out this past round was a pawn. Once a member turns back into a pawn, they cannot play the ponds. So, their last bid as a member, is the forced bid, until they drop out as the lowest bid. People just looked for that, and knew that anything over 487 would be safe. So, many bid 488.
Kunoichi: Fixing some I can understand, but some of them are things that we members have asked for for a long time now, including having ponds smaller than 16 people!
oh, that was me actually. I didn't know whether or not a chess type pond would actually effect people's chess ratings, and I didn't want to be responsible for you losing a bunch of points in chess since you were way higher rated than everyone else. How I did that is irrelevant now since that appears to be fixed.
It would a nice feature though if ponds could be unrated though. If I could have, I would have made all ponds for finding and reporting bugs unrated so we wouldn't have to worry about that to begin with.
Well, anyway, I tried all the bugs I found before, and it looks like all pond bugs are fixed now, as I can't find any more.
Well, we have been asking fencer for the ability to make ponds with fewer players and some with faster time limits, so maybe he gave us the ability by not blocking them?
I would like to try one with 1 minute limits, lets say a quick 8 person pond?
I've found a bunch of stuff already that needs safegaurds and it's all reported in the bug tracker thing. Editting bounds for ponds and making ponds for other game types like Chess included.
Vikings: no special testing ability - just some interesting URL hacks and such which Fencer did not put safe guards in.
There use to be other similar bugs awhile back that allowed people to read private fellowships, pawn to get more then their allowed games, allowing tournaments created in other fellowships, plus other things which I helped track down a long time ago for Fencer to put a block on.... but I never spent much time to see what game hacks I could do - since most are obvious when done - except for possible a few new ones they found, which hopefully they sent the details to Fencer so they can block those.
rabbitoid: If you would have accepted your invite to the ponds plus fellowship, you would have already known all about the chess pond, including the fact that your chess rating would take a beating too