Just looking into how I protect my saves in a bit more detail.
First off: IF I don’t play the character, are they still at risk? I.e. can I be lazy and only play a new character without risking my others?
Second: Will their items changing be a game-breaking problem? Or is that just a problem for me and my build’s effectiveness? If it is game-breaking, will it later work on release without additional steps from me?
Finally is the backup/restore process.
My saves are cloud synced.
If I make a backup of my saves. Play in this playtest. Just turning off ‘participate in beta’ and copying back my old saves is enough?
can’t say for certain on the first one, usually if char isn’t loaded into game world the save format isn’t updated, whether that always holds true/applies this time i couldn’t say
not quite sure what this is supposed to mean
as in actually “breaks” the game? crash?
if it’s just a build concern you get what you see on the tin, if an item you’re using is changing in stats and that change is detrimental to your build that’s how it works (ex a conduit conversion change)
you can’t play on the playtest and avoid the changelog changes, then stick to Live,(but you’ll be affected anyway once patch goes official)
you can just make a copy somewhere else on your drive/a different drive, that’s what your own backup is.
If you think you might not want to stay on playtest and wants to roll back, disabling steam sync before entering playtest might be prudent, as otherwise steam cloud storage will be overwritten with PTR saves, and if new save format isn’t backwards compatible then overwrite live saves with cloud stored saves
You don’t have have to turn cloud saves off ingame just in steam sync should be fine. And it might not even actually be necessary, it’s just sometimes steam sync will overwrite/detect cloud saves being newer than your swapped copy from backup when you use those, and then still overwrite them with a downsync (if you don’t tell it to not when prompted)
Alternatively you go ingame and turn cloud off and play with local saves while on playtest, that way it might also potentially be simpler to switch back and forth should you wish to not keep being on the playtest for its full duration.
Thanks.
Apologies for the confusion in point 2. I was indirectly referring to the sticky post saying there would be changes that might cause issues - is SEEMED to imply it was mostly loot/skill changes as you would expect from any major patch/xpac, but it didn’t say if that was all it meant.
I also didn’t think they playtest would be available until launch, so assumed we would have to ‘revert’ back in the meantime. Or at the very least to update from Base to Xpac rather than from Beta to Xpac.
1.3 isn’t the expansion (atleast as far as i understand), it’s at most a pre-patch
so the line of events would be, playtest 1.3 → 1.3 live → FoA/2.0/Xx number version
point 2 is more an overarching thing, it’s also why you’re told to make backups.
Usually playtests/game changes doesn’t brick your saves, “but you never know”;
it’s not being bricked from changes to items/stats, that’s not how the game works, it’s because there are fundamental changes to the game/save format(accommodating new ui/stash etc), so it’s more a caveat that this time it’s slightly more cereal than previous
(most playtests does indeed only fiddle with items and not fundamentally alter game data/save files)
But every playtest there is still a "it’s prudent to make backups"caveat, this time it’s just for realsies, as “big stuff” happening under the hood (eg prior speculation 1.3 saves might not be backwards compatible to 1.2.1.6)