It seems like this game can use a test server. I don’t know what’s involved but it seems like it wouldn’t be terribly hard to do since it’s a pretty industry standard. Here’s my idea:
You must have at least 1000 accumluated PvP or 50000 accumulated PvE event points to join. This ensures that you actually got someone who sort of plays the game.
All expenses besides boosts and shields costs nothing in this mode. HP is gained like normal, and iso doesn’t exist (or it could, if you want to see a number constantly going up).
Only AP+3 all boost is available because otherwise people would just buy the maximum number of normal boosts with the iso that they never need to spend, and while that may already be happening anyway on live, this isn’t something I think that’s useful to simulate in a test environment.
PvP/PvE tournaments awards HP and Deadpool points for progression/placement. The Deadpool points go to your live account, the HP do not. Deadpool points will also be awarded if there’s something in particular that requires testing. For example prior to R60 you can earn Deadpool points for using X Force/Magneto/Hawkeye. At the end of the a period of time you might get some token amount of HP or some other reward for your effort. This can be based on the number of Deadpool points you accumulated, since Deadpool points in this environment is a rough measure of how involved you are.
All cheaters will be sent to test server too where they may accidentally contribute something useful to the game, and it should play fairly the same as cheating since nothing costs anything besides shields. I kept the cost on shields because otherwise any test server PvP would have everyone permanently shielded if shields cost nothing, and it’s hard to imagine any useful data collected like that.
This server should only be open when something needs to be tested, because otherwise it might be possible people decide to just hang out on a server where cheating is essentially legal instead of the real one.