If a game full of AI characters asks you to come and play, it is reasonable to wonder whether “test the server” really means “supply conversations for somebody’s AI.”
I want people here because a busy simulation is not enough to make a good place to spend an evening. Automated characters can complete tasks and still make a human feel ignored, rushed or surrounded by repetitive conversation. The reason to invite testers is to find that gap and make the game worth returning to.
Your play and feedback can help improve this game. Remembering an encounter, investigating a bug and training a model are different uses of data. They should not be hidden behind the same friendly word, “learning.”
What happens after a bad conversation?
Suppose you ask for help and receive an unrelated answer. You can tell me about it, or use !break while the problem is happening. That command saves a short recent trace of what nearby AI characters were doing and hearing, including relevant chat. The project’s stated retention for those traces is 30 days.
A useful investigation asks practical questions. Did the character hear you? Did it understand the request? Was it already busy? Did the reply fail, or was a game action impossible? The answer may be a code fix, clearer wording or a new test. It is not automatically a training example for a language model.
Our 27 October records contain 11 bug reports from two testers; about 55% concerned an inappropriate reply or an ignored request. That is a tiny sample, not a player satisfaction survey. It was enough to show that successful logins and busy towns were missing an important problem.
A saved trace can include nearby people’s lines too. Please read the privacy notice before using the reporting command. It is not a private recording of only the person who typed it.
Remembering you is still data use
A resident can remember that you shared a party or fought a boss together. That record can affect another encounter. The relationship memory uses selected game events, not a full chat transcript; conversation context and ordinary server logs are separate.
Calling this “just memory” would not make it disappear as a privacy question. It is information about a character’s interactions. The memory article explains its limits and expiry. The public map does not publish human locations, private conversations or relationship histories.
Some conversations leave the server
Messages an AI receives, together with relevant context, can be processed through OpenRouter by an external model provider to produce a reply. The game is not a fully local chat service. Whispers between two humans are not delivered to the AI clients, but server-side logging is a separate matter.
The current routing code is designed to keep player replies, requests and relationship summaries away from free-model routes that may train on inputs. For these calls it requests providers that do not collect data; if the permitted route cannot answer, it can fall back to a prepared response or code rather than relaxing that restriction. Bot-only generation has a different policy.
That is a routing control, not a claim that I have independently inspected a provider’s storage or training systems. OpenRouter explains its own provider data-policy filtering. Requesting that filter also does not mean no data leaves this server.
A limit the records do not let me gloss over
While preparing these articles, I checked the call records as well as the code. Earlier records include successful free-model calls for interpreting incoming requests, a category that can contain a person’s text. A metadata log does not establish whether a particular caller was human, whose words were sent, or whether a provider trained on them.
It does mean I cannot honestly say that player text has never been sent to a training-capable route.
The guard changes are recorded as released on 28 October. A two-hour metadata check at 12:59 UTC found no calls flagged by that rule, but it covered only two attempts to generate direct player replies. A quiet sample is a useful check, not proof about all earlier or future conversations. The broader privacy warning stays in place.
Is there actual model-training code?
Yes. The repository contains a separate workflow for reviewing gameplay decisions and preparing a possible training dataset. Pretending that capability does not exist would be misleading.
Its recorded audit found only two reviewed examples from one session family, with no independent evaluation set. That audit did not justify training or promote a new checkpoint. Recording a decision was not accepted as proof that it was a good decision, and repeatedly showing the model its own answers was not accepted as a teaching method.
That work concerns evaluated gameplay choices. It is not evidence that visitors’ conversations are being continuously fed into a project-owned conversational model. Nor does it justify a sweeping promise about every possible future use of game records. Any proposed use needs to be described for what it is.
Why your evening matters
You do not need to chat with every resident or manufacture conversations to be useful. A normal evening can reveal a party that waits too long, a market that is awkward to use, or a welcome that feels cold. A simple report of where the fun stopped is valuable.
I am asking you to help test a game I want to play too. That includes being clear about the data it processes and the things I cannot guarantee. If the external processing or logging is not comfortable for you, read the privacy page and ask questions before joining. You should not have to discover it after an evening in the world.
Questions or deletion requests: max@livingpw.com. See also how a dungeon failure becomes a tested change.