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Open Betas
Xira
Member Posts: 437
I think that there are 3 things one must consider when hearing "IT's in BETA don't judge it!".
1) What stage of BETA it is in.
2) Estimated time to release date.
3) How far the fanboy has his head up the dev's ass.
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1) Early alpha, early beta - 6+ months from release. It's ok for there to be major game-stopping bugs at this point. This is a "True" beta, you are there to find and report bugs so they can be fixed. Balance and graphics can come later.
2) 6 months the bugs need to be mostly ironed out. No show-stoppers. 4 months they need to have the graphics in place. 3 months they need to start balanceing hardcore.
3) Even if you aren't playing it, haveing followed a game for 3 years represents a 'significant time investment' especially for a young immature personage. Just as the (handful) of adults will hold onto a stock as it sinks into penny-stock land, there are quite a few young men who follow these games for 3+ years hearing from the devs about how it's going to be the perfect MMORPG....When it comes up smelling like feces they just refuse to belive it. To ackonaldage that their game sucks would be to 'throw away' those 3+ years of time investment and to admit that they were wrong and made a huge mistake. Many young immature people are not emotionally capable of doing this.
Thus they will hype the game, make excuses for the devs, ectera ectera. There is an endless supply of young idiots in the world, plenty for every game to have it's fair share.(See the thread on the 1st page about Ryzom. All the good stuff is 'comeing soon' and that comment about the quests being on-par with other MMORPGs is laughable.)
Myth 1: During an Open Beta you are there to TEST the game.
You are _NOT_ there to test the game. An open beta is a marketing ploy exactly the same way a free trial is. The open beta IS your free trial. You are there to play the game and decide weather you want to buy it or not.
In some limited circumstances a devloper may not be able to get enough people to sign up for a closed beta test so they have an open beta test well before release to find the bugs. This usually indicated a piss-poor marketing effort, which in turn indicated a piss-poor management, which will probaly lead to a piss-poor game.
Comments
Only a few comments...firstly being about Open Beta. Your right that you aren't there to test the game. However, the devs are testing the game themselves during this time. They are making numerous small changes to the network code, the server architechure, the hardware, etc. So complaining about lag or performance issues in Open Beta isn't justified. Not sure if you intended to show this or not but I thought I would point that out.
As far as OB being a marketing ploy and using it to show off the game...this is somewhat true and I don't trust games that don't have an OB because I think they have something to hide but at the same time it isn't just for your amusement as there is a lot being done during OB.
I haven't heard of a game not getting enough people to do a proper closed beta and thus doing OB early...maybe there are those out there but even the really bad games usually have enough people who are willing to try it during closed.
"Feel free to hate me, but hate me for the right reasons."
"Your still ignorant if you believe the first thing you see when the blindfold is removed."
"Be smart enough to know I'm smarter than you."
Don't ascribe this to just the young or only a handful of adults. Sports provides you the best possible analogy of this, in that people will stick by their teams year after losing year out of loyalty and devotion. There is a primal element in human nature that leads us down this path. Equally true is the sense of belief that, given time, the game (team) will finally perform in a winning way...just ask Red Sox fans how they feel, and the same can be said for many of the elder-generation of MMOGs.
Fanatics are fanatics, regardless of their age. Mind you, I think youth haven't yet learned to be skeptical, and thus are more often than not prey to their own gullibility in light of the promises developers make. So you will find more youth willing to deny fact and rely upon belief. But plenty of adults are extremely capable of refuting empirical facts...often with creative and unique justificiations.
[b]
Don't ascribe this to just the young or only a handful of adults. Sports provides you the best possible analogy of this, in that people will stick by their teams year after losing year out of loyalty and devotion. There is a primal element in human nature that leads us down this path. Equally true is the sense of belief that, given time, the game (team) will finally perform in a winning way...just ask Red Sox fans how they feel, and the same can be said for many of the elder-generation of MMOGs.
Fanatics are fanatics, regardless of their age. Mind you, I think youth haven't yet learned to be skeptical, and thus are more often than not prey to their own gullibility in light of the promises developers make. So you will find more youth willing to deny fact and rely upon belief. But plenty of adults are extremely capable of refuting empirical facts...often with creative and unique justificiations.[/b]
True, but I would argue that the adults doing it are sometimes even aware that they are doing it...And aren't quite so grateing to the nerves about it:) There are also more young men doing it than adults.
Furthermore, I would state that sports team devotion is more true devotion than fanatascism. You KNOW they are going to lose, it's the chance of them winning that keeps you 'going'. Same with gambleing. In the fanboi's case they are truely deludeing themself and liveing in their own reality in order to preserve their ego.
I'm not gonna quote so bear with me. lol. I said in OB they are testing server side issues and lag and hardware. Having worked in QA I would have to say that there should be heavy testing up until the end of OB. On internal servers only. Here is what I mean...we are playing OB, most of us aren't going to find any show stopping problems. However, internal QA should be taking the game apart still to see if they can cook up any problems. This would allow them to patch it to us and make sure we don't see it. Many times things are being patched for problems we have no knowledge of.
Again OB as far as the consumer is concerned is to test the hardware and network code which don't effect the user. (Meaning no patches for the user). 2 weeks before release is the perfect time to do it so that they can have fresh clean servers to release on and they still have time to know how best to set up the servers.
"Feel free to hate me, but hate me for the right reasons."
"Your still ignorant if you believe the first thing you see when the blindfold is removed."
"Be smart enough to know I'm smarter than you."