Like a few others before me allready said. We did report bugs, we warned people this wasn't finished or the innovative thing they thought it would be. Heck I even let friends and guildmembers know, they left WoW. Only to come back in 2 weeks. Kinda funny when the first week they were praising it like hell. Once the novelty wore off and they realised about the "beta" state the game was in they were happy to be back.
For me AoC is once again a thing that had potential and then they screwed it. Seems most mmo's are like that lately. I had one SWG, but I'm fed up with "it will get better" attitude. Let's hope Warhammer will release in a finished way, not that it's my game. But this industry needs more stable releases and concurrents.
As an alpha and beta tester for the game, blaming us would be ridiclous.
We can only find the bugs, make the suggestions and hope they are fixed. They werent fixed, we have no control over that, and we never have control over things like that in any beta test. They made the choice, between a finished client and meeting their deadline and they chose their deadline.
They fucked up, just like the devs did in vanguard.
What he said. I was only in Beta, but to put the blame on testers instead of the corporation which has the final say and are well aware of the state of their product, is just 'ignorant'.
Why do I write, create, fantasize, dream and daydream about other worlds? Because I hate what humanity does with this one.
Well, its there job to test everything before release, why wasn't all this crap found, reported and fixed allready? Too many people wanting to play the game before anyone else instead of actaully testing the bloody thing? me thinks.
I highly doubt the alpha/beta testers are ever to blame for a game's flaws. Like some of the previous posters stated and just looking at the nature of mmorpgs gamers: Players ALWAYS point out problems.
I have a friend that test EA games and was asked face to face from EA representatives what his impressions were of a first person shooter he just played for an hour. He said point blank "The game needs a lot of work and I would not buy it in this state". Mmorpg testers are given the luxury of being behind a computer screen and conveying their thoughts more accurately through writing.
AoC is in the state it is most likely because of Funcom.
We tested, reported all bugs we encountered. We never saw most of the so called endgame, which includes sieges in beta. We were also constantly told that we are testing an old client, and that the internal QA has a new client where everything is fine and dandy (go figure).
There were lots of testers telling FC all the time that the game is nowhere near ready for release. UI functionality, invisible walls, limited zones, lack of content etc were subjects debated on a daily basis among the testers, but the communication with the developers severely deteriorated especialy in the last couple of months before launch. There were huge threads on the forums full of constructive posts, with either no dev response at all, or a quicky smirky remark from a dev going essentialy less bluntly saying "you dont know crap - we know better, and our internal QA has it all solved" Basicaly the root of dev communication you see now, started in beta - no comunication besides closing threads or giving quick halfass remarks.
I notified my circle of friends that they should be carreful about the game a couple of months before the launch. Where I failed is that I went and bought the game anyway, even though I knew the state of it, but I wanted to see if that internal QA build that was a couple of patches infront of the beta build was really so fine and dandy :P
From my point we did as much as we could in the given situation, so dont blame the beta testers, go blame that lying greedy company that released it inspite of teh fact that they knew the real state of the game and kept and still keep lying about it.
Why can't we just blame teh people who made the game?? Seems pretty obvious, and FunCom tries daily to prove to us all that they can't build or run an MMO to save their life.
Originally posted by celdridge And if anyone is still thinking of buying this game please just take $50 out of your wallet and wipe your ass with it. You will get the same result as you would have from Funcom.
I blame the a-holes, who reported NDA-breakers on these forums, and I blame the MMO-staff for deleting their posts.
I read the AOC-forum here the last weeks before release. But most texts praised this game to heaven, mostly written by viral freaks with a huge "Acolytes"-sig.
Open beta payable and broken? Nono, they have 3 betaversions, the other two work fine...
Only blame the testers if you are clueless. I am surprised as this is probably the fourth or fifth time I have seen this asked on various boards. Knowing what you know about how FC has done things how could you possibly blame the testers?
Well, its there job to test everything before release, why wasn't all this crap found, reported and fixed allready? Too many people wanting to play the game before anyone else instead of actaully testing the bloody thing? me thinks.
Man, I hope you're kidding, otherwise I hope you're sterile.
Beta testers are another source of information for the dev team, but they are never the reason that a game belly flops or ships with bugs. Internal testers are paid to find the bugs, the associate producer and various leads are required to sort through the bugs, prioritize them and distribute them for fixing, and any bugs submitted by beta testers are considered an added bonus. Mostly the flood of beta testers are there for testing server load. Blaming beta testers for a dev shipping a broken game is just inane.
I make spreadsheets at work - I don't want to make them for the games I play.
As an alpha and beta tester for the game, blaming us would be ridiclous.
We can only find the bugs, make the suggestions and hope they are fixed. They werent fixed, we have no control over that, and we never have control over things like that in any beta test. They made the choice, between a finished client and meeting their deadline and they chose their deadline.
They fucked up, just like the devs did in vanguard.
I applaud people like you, the ones that actually want to test a game and make it better. unfortunatly I wonder how many of the total testers allowing to the game actually did this.
I never played AoC beta but I knew several people in my TF2 clan that did and they just played it, they never tested anything but where enjoying the fact that they were playing it. I don't believe this was an isolated incedent, I reckon several hundered were doing the same.
What I'm wondering is maybe if there was a combind effort where all testers actually tested then maybe things would be different.
I do beta test games, last one I did was Everquest 2. They has thier fair share of muppets too.
Blaming beta testers was giving me the best laugh of today, thank you, i needed it.
Blame Funcom and blame the investors. There you have the scumbags. The ones that took the final decision publishing this piece of crap game before it was ready for it. There you have the scammers.
Funcom just doesn't care about it's customers they will not listen to bug reports and will not listen to critique they are closed minded and deserve to sink in my opinion
Well, its there job to test everything before release, why wasn't all this crap found, reported and fixed allready? Too many people wanting to play the game before anyone else instead of actaully testing the bloody thing? me thinks.
Well it really isn't our fault, I mean they should have atleast started us off after level 20 and let us run wild. I played Tortage 10 times with different characters, but lost interest after level 10 on all of them.
It isn't our fault, look at Tortage, that place is the best area in the game. Just everything else sucks. They don't know how to focus test like Mythic.
I seriously wish I could give you guys my log in and PW to the beta forums.
You would see that in the six months I was around I put in 120 journal entries only two of which were ever commented back to, most dealt with bugs, glitches, invisible walls, odd animations, stick points, horrible chat interface and how to fix it. Basically every comment I made back in december through May went unanswered. I put in 50 in game petitions during beta ... canned response of "we already know about that and are working to fix it"
That said the game went from a completely unplayable pile of crap to an okay game that I wasn't going to bother paying for at the end of beta (as many others did not either) because funcom in general failed to listen to any of us. I often wondered why they even bothered with beta when they did what they wanted and seldom communicated beyond very uninformative posts. If enough people cried for instance when they reduced Sieges (which we never got to test) form 200 to 40vs40 ... well they just pretended those complaints didn't exist.
At any rate, this beta was not indicative of how beta's normally run, it was pretty much a joke in the end comprised mostly of probobly 80% of the people testing the game in effort to make a better game to play later on 20% jerkoffs who were just playing and 100% of the devs doing whatever the felt like and pretty much ignoring our input.
Blame beta testers? I think not, blame half baked development teams using hype machines to take your money. Demand more ... quit paying for tripe. Oh and MMORPG can I have my original account back now that everything I said on here in beta turned out to be true?
Well, its there job to test everything before release, why wasn't all this crap found, reported and fixed allready? Too many people wanting to play the game before anyone else instead of actaully testing the bloody thing? me thinks.
I have had the chance to beta test other MMOs, starting with SWG's JTL pack, but I haven't done AoC.
You cannot blame the beta testers. From my experience, from seeing the beta test forums, we have done our share of ticket submissions, forum posting pointing out and crosschecking flaws in the game.
Now, with that information in mind, it's up to the devs to do something with it. Whether they actually push back going live or not is all on them.
My experience with one company was that despite the numerous flaws we pointed out with the beta version, they went ahead with it.
Don't try dumping the fiasco of AoC on the Beta Testers. I'm very sure they did their job. It's just Funcom didn't do theirs.
"I have only two out of my company and 20 out of some other company. We need support, but it is almost suicide to try to get it here as we are swept by machine gun fire and a constant barrage is on us. I have no one on my left and only a few on my right. I will hold." (First Lieutenant Clifton B. Cates, US Marine Corps, Soissons, 19 July 1918)
Well, its there job to test everything before release, why wasn't all this crap found, reported and fixed allready? Too many people wanting to play the game before anyone else instead of actaully testing the bloody thing? me thinks.
If you tried to apply that logic to WoW's Public Test Realms, then yeah. People don't do PTR's to really test! Even those who do it when Blizzard doesn't offer premades just want to see the new content before others. Now, to those who DO test, that's good, maybe you're the reason why most of the patches are pretty bug-free. But there's two sides to a beta test...the players, and the company. If the players do their job but the company doesn't, what's the point? It's like talking to a brick wall. A brick wall that has really good PR skills.
-------------------------------------- A human and an Elf get captured by Skaven. The rat-men are getting ready to shoot the first hostage with Dwarf-made guns when he yells, "Earthquake!" The naturally nervous Skaven run and hide from the imaginary threat. He escapes. The Skaven regroup and bring out the Elf. Being very smart, the Elf has figured out what to do. When the Skaven get ready to shoot, the Elf, in order to scare them, yells, "Fire!"
I wouldn't blame the testers per se -- it's on the shoulders of the developers to organize testing and then act on the results.
I think there has to be a superior screening process to the randomly generated emails sent out. There has to be a way of funnelling testers into various areas throughout the game. And there has to be an effective way to cull through all of the bug reports (using an intelligent system like IBM content management system that can pick off new, unique issues and discard the duplicates) otherwise reduce the number of people testing so that someone can collate the bug reports efficiently to pass back to the coders. Finally, the developers need to act upon the issues raised.
Going from Alpha to Beta should mean that all large scale brekage has been addressed. Beta should be balance tweaking and finding the nuanced bugs (map holes, spelling errors, power combination issues, quest not giving out a reward, wrong models popping up) as well as severe load testing.
From the amount of issues that seem to be reported and the gameplay designs being discussed, Funcom clearly was not in polish mode when they went to beta and wasn't in a position to effectively assess the feedback of the testers.
I wouldn't blame the testers per se -- it's on the shoulders of the developers to organize testing and then act on the results. I think there has to be a superior screening process to the randomly generated emails sent out. There has to be a way of funnelling testers into various areas throughout the game. And there has to be an effective way to cull through all of the bug reports (using an intelligent system like IBM content management system that can pick off new, unique issues and discard the duplicates) otherwise reduce the number of people testing so that someone can collate the bug reports efficiently to pass back to the coders. Finally, the developers need to act upon the issues raised. Going from Alpha to Beta should mean that all large scale brekage has been addressed. Beta should be balance tweaking and finding the nuanced bugs (map holes, spelling errors, power combination issues, quest not giving out a reward, wrong models popping up) as well as severe load testing. From the amount of issues that seem to be reported and the gameplay designs being discussed, Funcom clearly was not in polish mode when they went to beta and wasn't in a position to effectively assess the feedback of the testers.
Why not, we wouldn't want anyone to feel left out. Beside blaming people makes us feel superior and distracts from people focusing oon our own flaws. Personally I blame the guy who always sits next to the rear exit on the bus. He obviously knew all but said nothing. Otherwise, why whould he sit so close to the exit?
Alpha/Beta Testers can be blamed for intentionally protecting the misinformation spread by funcom on the state of the game and its features (by adhering to an unjust lie-protecting nda), however responsibility for the state of the game itself lies squarely with funcom.
Waiting for: A skill-based MMO with Freedom and Consequence. Woe to thee, the pierce-ed.
I wouldn't blame the testers per se -- it's on the shoulders of the developers to organize testing and then act on the results. I think there has to be a superior screening process to the randomly generated emails sent out. There has to be a way of funnelling testers into various areas throughout the game. And there has to be an effective way to cull through all of the bug reports (using an intelligent system like IBM content management system that can pick off new, unique issues and discard the duplicates) otherwise reduce the number of people testing so that someone can collate the bug reports efficiently to pass back to the coders. Finally, the developers need to act upon the issues raised. Going from Alpha to Beta should mean that all large scale brekage has been addressed. Beta should be balance tweaking and finding the nuanced bugs (map holes, spelling errors, power combination issues, quest not giving out a reward, wrong models popping up) as well as severe load testing. From the amount of issues that seem to be reported and the gameplay designs being discussed, Funcom clearly was not in polish mode when they went to beta and wasn't in a position to effectively assess the feedback of the testers.
"per se" -- how about per not f***ing at all ?
No - there most certainly are people who join betas to play for free and then move on. Those people contribute next to nothing if there isn't a debugger in the beta client. Still, I think the onus of selecting quality testers falls upon the shoulders of the devs.
Well, its there job to test everything before release, why wasn't all this crap found, reported and fixed allready? Too many people wanting to play the game before anyone else instead of actaully testing the bloody thing? me thinks.
Unless you were in the beta it would be easy to say, oh it's the tester's fault. That is exactly what Brad McQuaid tried to do concerning the issues with vanguard.
As far as AoC is concerned though, here is the truth and you can take from it what you will. The game was pounded on and pounded on for a very long time. And you know what? ALL of these issues that are in game WERE found and reported in beta. From the class balance issues, to the invisible walls and terrain issues, to the infamous female avatar attack speed. Instead of fixing those issues Funcom PUSHED the game out way too early.
Hell, Mr. Game Director himself, said they were keeping things from the beta testers because Funcom wanted to "surprise people" with different things at release. Kepp seiges, Directx10, and more. Plus the word coming from Funcom with ALL of the reported issues was that they were known and fixed internally. Things like missing content etc, those were harder to find because at the last minute Funcom nerfed the hell out of XP, not once, but twice. There simply was not enough time left to go through all of the content for the umpteenth time to find out that hey, there are huge gaps. That is something that Funcom SHOULD have been able to figure out by doing some simple addition and multiplication.
The simple fact of the matter is that the testers tested the hell out of the game and EVERY single one, that I know of, told Funcom that the game was not ready for release. We reported the issues and it was up to Funcom to fix what was found. Instead Funcom outright lied to the testers promising a miracle patch at live, and outright lied to the community saying things were looking fantastic. Many of us did our best to share this information with the community without breaking the NDA, warning the community about what they were getting into. Know what we were called? Haters, Flamers, and Trolls.
Alpha/Beta Testers can be blamed for intentionally protecting the misinformation spread by funcom on the state of the game and its features (by adhering to an unjust lie-protecting nda), however responsibility for the state of the game itself lies squarely with funcom.
there is something called an NDA. and yet as the release date got closer and closer, we did started to spill the beans in a way. But few wanted to listen. At release date most of us didnt spill the beans, we throw them in the air so anyone could see...result... we were the bad guys, game was great, the best MMORPG ever blablablba....
Not a big surprise tho, there are thousand that today, playing the game, still say all is well...
Comments
Like a few others before me allready said. We did report bugs, we warned people this wasn't finished or the innovative thing they thought it would be. Heck I even let friends and guildmembers know, they left WoW. Only to come back in 2 weeks. Kinda funny when the first week they were praising it like hell. Once the novelty wore off and they realised about the "beta" state the game was in they were happy to be back.
For me AoC is once again a thing that had potential and then they screwed it. Seems most mmo's are like that lately. I had one SWG, but I'm fed up with "it will get better" attitude. Let's hope Warhammer will release in a finished way, not that it's my game. But this industry needs more stable releases and concurrents.
What he said. I was only in Beta, but to put the blame on testers instead of the corporation which has the final say and are well aware of the state of their product, is just 'ignorant'.
BOYCOTTING EA / ORIGIN going forward.
I highly doubt the alpha/beta testers are ever to blame for a game's flaws. Like some of the previous posters stated and just looking at the nature of mmorpgs gamers: Players ALWAYS point out problems.
I have a friend that test EA games and was asked face to face from EA representatives what his impressions were of a first person shooter he just played for an hour. He said point blank "The game needs a lot of work and I would not buy it in this state". Mmorpg testers are given the luxury of being behind a computer screen and conveying their thoughts more accurately through writing.
AoC is in the state it is most likely because of Funcom.
Blaming it on testers is ridiculous.
We tested, reported all bugs we encountered. We never saw most of the so called endgame, which includes sieges in beta. We were also constantly told that we are testing an old client, and that the internal QA has a new client where everything is fine and dandy (go figure).
There were lots of testers telling FC all the time that the game is nowhere near ready for release. UI functionality, invisible walls, limited zones, lack of content etc were subjects debated on a daily basis among the testers, but the communication with the developers severely deteriorated especialy in the last couple of months before launch. There were huge threads on the forums full of constructive posts, with either no dev response at all, or a quicky smirky remark from a dev going essentialy less bluntly saying "you dont know crap - we know better, and our internal QA has it all solved" Basicaly the root of dev communication you see now, started in beta - no comunication besides closing threads or giving quick halfass remarks.
I notified my circle of friends that they should be carreful about the game a couple of months before the launch. Where I failed is that I went and bought the game anyway, even though I knew the state of it, but I wanted to see if that internal QA build that was a couple of patches infront of the beta build was really so fine and dandy :P
From my point we did as much as we could in the given situation, so dont blame the beta testers, go blame that lying greedy company that released it inspite of teh fact that they knew the real state of the game and kept and still keep lying about it.
Why can't we just blame teh people who made the game?? Seems pretty obvious, and FunCom tries daily to prove to us all that they can't build or run an MMO to save their life.
As a Beta Tester I haven't bought the game...
They never heard our suggestions and advices, the rest is history!
A total classic post. This made me lol irl.
I blame the a-holes, who reported NDA-breakers on these forums, and I blame the MMO-staff for deleting their posts.
I read the AOC-forum here the last weeks before release. But most texts praised this game to heaven, mostly written by viral freaks with a huge "Acolytes"-sig.
Open beta payable and broken? Nono, they have 3 betaversions, the other two work fine...
Only blame the testers if you are clueless. I am surprised as this is probably the fourth or fifth time I have seen this asked on various boards. Knowing what you know about how FC has done things how could you possibly blame the testers?
Man, I hope you're kidding, otherwise I hope you're sterile.
Beta testers are another source of information for the dev team, but they are never the reason that a game belly flops or ships with bugs. Internal testers are paid to find the bugs, the associate producer and various leads are required to sort through the bugs, prioritize them and distribute them for fixing, and any bugs submitted by beta testers are considered an added bonus. Mostly the flood of beta testers are there for testing server load. Blaming beta testers for a dev shipping a broken game is just inane.
I make spreadsheets at work - I don't want to make them for the games I play.
I applaud people like you, the ones that actually want to test a game and make it better. unfortunatly I wonder how many of the total testers allowing to the game actually did this.
I never played AoC beta but I knew several people in my TF2 clan that did and they just played it, they never tested anything but where enjoying the fact that they were playing it. I don't believe this was an isolated incedent, I reckon several hundered were doing the same.
What I'm wondering is maybe if there was a combind effort where all testers actually tested then maybe things would be different.
I do beta test games, last one I did was Everquest 2. They has thier fair share of muppets too.
Blaming beta testers was giving me the best laugh of today, thank you, i needed it.
Blame Funcom and blame the investors. There you have the scumbags. The ones that took the final decision publishing this piece of crap game before it was ready for it. There you have the scammers.
Funcom just doesn't care about it's customers they will not listen to bug reports and will not listen to critique they are closed minded and deserve to sink in my opinion
Well it really isn't our fault, I mean they should have atleast started us off after level 20 and let us run wild. I played Tortage 10 times with different characters, but lost interest after level 10 on all of them.
It isn't our fault, look at Tortage, that place is the best area in the game. Just everything else sucks. They don't know how to focus test like Mythic.
I seriously wish I could give you guys my log in and PW to the beta forums.
You would see that in the six months I was around I put in 120 journal entries only two of which were ever commented back to, most dealt with bugs, glitches, invisible walls, odd animations, stick points, horrible chat interface and how to fix it. Basically every comment I made back in december through May went unanswered. I put in 50 in game petitions during beta ... canned response of "we already know about that and are working to fix it"
That said the game went from a completely unplayable pile of crap to an okay game that I wasn't going to bother paying for at the end of beta (as many others did not either) because funcom in general failed to listen to any of us. I often wondered why they even bothered with beta when they did what they wanted and seldom communicated beyond very uninformative posts. If enough people cried for instance when they reduced Sieges (which we never got to test) form 200 to 40vs40 ... well they just pretended those complaints didn't exist.
At any rate, this beta was not indicative of how beta's normally run, it was pretty much a joke in the end comprised mostly of probobly 80% of the people testing the game in effort to make a better game to play later on 20% jerkoffs who were just playing and 100% of the devs doing whatever the felt like and pretty much ignoring our input.
Blame beta testers? I think not, blame half baked development teams using hype machines to take your money. Demand more ... quit paying for tripe. Oh and MMORPG can I have my original account back now that everything I said on here in beta turned out to be true?
I have had the chance to beta test other MMOs, starting with SWG's JTL pack, but I haven't done AoC.
You cannot blame the beta testers. From my experience, from seeing the beta test forums, we have done our share of ticket submissions, forum posting pointing out and crosschecking flaws in the game.
Now, with that information in mind, it's up to the devs to do something with it. Whether they actually push back going live or not is all on them.
My experience with one company was that despite the numerous flaws we pointed out with the beta version, they went ahead with it.
Don't try dumping the fiasco of AoC on the Beta Testers. I'm very sure they did their job. It's just Funcom didn't do theirs.
"I have only two out of my company and 20 out of some other company. We need support, but it is almost suicide to try to get it here as we are swept by machine gun fire and a constant barrage is on us. I have no one on my left and only a few on my right. I will hold." (First Lieutenant Clifton B. Cates, US Marine Corps, Soissons, 19 July 1918)
The bug report tool was broken...
If you tried to apply that logic to WoW's Public Test Realms, then yeah. People don't do PTR's to really test! Even those who do it when Blizzard doesn't offer premades just want to see the new content before others. Now, to those who DO test, that's good, maybe you're the reason why most of the patches are pretty bug-free. But there's two sides to a beta test...the players, and the company. If the players do their job but the company doesn't, what's the point? It's like talking to a brick wall. A brick wall that has really good PR skills.
--------------------------------------
A human and an Elf get captured by Skaven. The rat-men are getting ready to shoot the first hostage with Dwarf-made guns when he yells, "Earthquake!" The naturally nervous Skaven run and hide from the imaginary threat. He escapes. The Skaven regroup and bring out the Elf. Being very smart, the Elf has figured out what to do. When the Skaven get ready to shoot, the Elf, in order to scare them, yells, "Fire!"
Order of the White Border.
I wouldn't blame the testers per se -- it's on the shoulders of the developers to organize testing and then act on the results.
I think there has to be a superior screening process to the randomly generated emails sent out. There has to be a way of funnelling testers into various areas throughout the game. And there has to be an effective way to cull through all of the bug reports (using an intelligent system like IBM content management system that can pick off new, unique issues and discard the duplicates) otherwise reduce the number of people testing so that someone can collate the bug reports efficiently to pass back to the coders. Finally, the developers need to act upon the issues raised.
Going from Alpha to Beta should mean that all large scale brekage has been addressed. Beta should be balance tweaking and finding the nuanced bugs (map holes, spelling errors, power combination issues, quest not giving out a reward, wrong models popping up) as well as severe load testing.
From the amount of issues that seem to be reported and the gameplay designs being discussed, Funcom clearly was not in polish mode when they went to beta and wasn't in a position to effectively assess the feedback of the testers.
"per se" -- how about per not f***ing at all ?
____________________________
CASUAL CONFESSIONS - Draccan's blog
____________________________
Why not, we wouldn't want anyone to feel left out. Beside blaming people makes us feel superior and distracts from people focusing oon our own flaws. Personally I blame the guy who always sits next to the rear exit on the bus. He obviously knew all but said nothing. Otherwise, why whould he sit so close to the exit?
You see how well FC is listening about the issues today?
They listened even less throughout beta.
Alpha/Beta Testers can be blamed for intentionally protecting the misinformation spread by funcom on the state of the game and its features (by adhering to an unjust lie-protecting nda), however responsibility for the state of the game itself lies squarely with funcom.
Waiting for: A skill-based MMO with Freedom and Consequence.
Woe to thee, the pierce-ed.
"per se" -- how about per not f***ing at all ?
No - there most certainly are people who join betas to play for free and then move on. Those people contribute next to nothing if there isn't a debugger in the beta client. Still, I think the onus of selecting quality testers falls upon the shoulders of the devs.
Unless you were in the beta it would be easy to say, oh it's the tester's fault. That is exactly what Brad McQuaid tried to do concerning the issues with vanguard.
As far as AoC is concerned though, here is the truth and you can take from it what you will. The game was pounded on and pounded on for a very long time. And you know what? ALL of these issues that are in game WERE found and reported in beta. From the class balance issues, to the invisible walls and terrain issues, to the infamous female avatar attack speed. Instead of fixing those issues Funcom PUSHED the game out way too early.
Hell, Mr. Game Director himself, said they were keeping things from the beta testers because Funcom wanted to "surprise people" with different things at release. Kepp seiges, Directx10, and more. Plus the word coming from Funcom with ALL of the reported issues was that they were known and fixed internally. Things like missing content etc, those were harder to find because at the last minute Funcom nerfed the hell out of XP, not once, but twice. There simply was not enough time left to go through all of the content for the umpteenth time to find out that hey, there are huge gaps. That is something that Funcom SHOULD have been able to figure out by doing some simple addition and multiplication.
The simple fact of the matter is that the testers tested the hell out of the game and EVERY single one, that I know of, told Funcom that the game was not ready for release. We reported the issues and it was up to Funcom to fix what was found. Instead Funcom outright lied to the testers promising a miracle patch at live, and outright lied to the community saying things were looking fantastic. Many of us did our best to share this information with the community without breaking the NDA, warning the community about what they were getting into. Know what we were called? Haters, Flamers, and Trolls.
http://www.speedtest.net/result/7300033012
there is something called an NDA. and yet as the release date got closer and closer, we did started to spill the beans in a way. But few wanted to listen. At release date most of us didnt spill the beans, we throw them in the air so anyone could see...result... we were the bad guys, game was great, the best MMORPG ever blablablba....
Not a big surprise tho, there are thousand that today, playing the game, still say all is well...