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Open Beta
darkgamerx
Member Posts: 311
What ever happend to Open beta in MMo's being "Open", most games now require you to preorder to get into open beta or to have followed the development of the MMO for a long time . Upcoming MMO's such as age of conan,Warhammer and the chronicles of spellborn all requiring you to meet a certain goal before you can enter open beta. What's more worrying is that upcoming large MMO's will follow this trend and also but up a certain criteria for you to gain a place in open beta.
Discuss/
Comments
Open betas have always been just ways to get you to fork over cash. You are not and never will be doing any actual beta testing in a "Open Beta" period. Get used to it and don't buy into the "Open Beta" option for a pre-order.
Games I've played/tried out:WAR, LOTRO, Tabula Rasa, AoC, EQ1, EQ2, WoW, Vangaurd, FFXI, D&DO, Lineage 2, Saga Of Ryzom, EvE Online, DAoC, Guild Wars,Star Wars Galaxies, Hell Gate London, Auto Assault, Grando Espada ( AKA SoTNW ), Archlord, CoV/H, Star Trek Online, APB, Champions Online, FFXIV, Rift Online, GW2.
Game(s) I Am Currently Playing:
GW2 (+LoL and BF3)
Open beta is really only useful as a stress test on the servers. From the players viewpoint it is just a great way to demo a game for free. So the game companies are getting smarter and making people pre-order to get in. That way they are at least getting the benefit of people pre-ordering. Then they can issue a press release about how many pre-orders they have.
Well it's the companies loss. MMO's need to put a lot of effort into selling their product nowadays. New games have less content under their belt than games running 3 or 4 years with constant expansions. Games like WoW and L2 have had major updates since they were released, so new games need to offer extensive content and graphic upgrades to convince player bases to shift.
Personally, I won't preorder crap, but I will play Open Beta's if they are offered without conditions. If I like the game, they succeed and I'll buy the game. But I won't act like a mindless ape and jump through their hoops to play an incomplete product. I have no obligation to volunteer in the testing of a game when there are plenty of working $15 a month games currently out there.
The players who preorder will buy the game anyway, these companies should give people a chance who are unsure about their willingness to buy the game. I still have confidence with WAR that they will offer a free open beta period to test the game. Although if they don't, I know why, because they don't need 500,000 people for stress testing.
I am programmer, and to me, the idea of having lots of people playing your game before the real release sounds like very usefull. But again, I am a programmer, and maybe is a bad idea from a bussiness perspective, because ...hell!.. most people don't really to look to the ugly face of a bug. So maybe studios are triing to give a better image to users. The problem here is that, I think a beta is usefull. I have been invited to a few betas, and in all betas I have use the "report" feature. I have reported tons of bugs on my open betas.
there are too many open beta games at this moment. however, almost of them need us to apply for the account or the activation code...too troubled...just for beta should let as many players as possible to test...is that not true...?
If you find it a trouble applying for the activation code, will you take the trouble to really test the game and report bugs/features?
Open beta is one stage of production work. Different production team have their own different idea on how to do things during this stage. Basically beta means testing, open beta broadly means opening up the beta to more people. But who are the more people? Would they be hired paid professional testers? Would they be the designers who want to see if the coded version comes close to their visions? Would they be coders from another team working on another product?
Opening up the game to Mr Nobody on the street is a business decision. As a project manager myself, I am not sure this is the best way for every programming work, sale promotion aside. The best tester are people with some ideas on what they want to do with the program (potential users). They will be the ones who have a focus in testing. Stress test can be done using a lot of other techniques than actually drafting every Mr Nobody on earth.
Mr Nobody surely can contribute. They have very different PC config, good for HW compatibility checking. They are totally random, and can help spot random bugs in odd segments of the code. They are totally unfocused, so they are good for new ideas and totally forgotten details. Many are heckers, they will help find weakness in the game security design. Using Mr Nobody is just like randomly combing the seabed, you may find a gem, or you may find the seabed.
The real issue I see, technically, is that most of the Mr Nobody are not keen about beta testing, not testing. They are keen about beta playing, playing free, playing first, and boasting talking NDA breaking first. That means, as far as testing goes, these Mr Nobody are not going to help. Would it be worth the cost of setting it up for these Mr Nobody?
Sales consideration is another aspect, I leave it to the big blue suits to decide on that issue.
Personally I think that they should just allow the first 5000 players who sign up to use it.
Well i'm thinking all these companies should'nt even call it open beta if you must meet some goal in order to get into it. They should just Alpha and Closed and i refuse to pre-order a game now w/o playing it because of what happened to Auto Assault.
Tbh i could care less if they let me on for only 2-3 hours a day to test the game i would be happy with that.
When MMORPGs first came out there was not that great of an interest in them and open betas were open to the public just to get the game tested. Over the last 10 years the MMORPG crowd has dramatically grown in size and it's not hard to find people to beta test your products.
It's totally up to the developer who they want to invite into open beta, there is nothing that says it has to be fair and that each person should have an equal chance to get in.
Open Beta has been used for marketing as well, to get people in to see how it works and get excited about it. Now with how marketing is ran and website/fansites for games they don't need to market their games nearly as much.
Open Beta is quickly becoming a thing of the past, Soon I think there will be closed beta to the select few fanbois and friends of the developers and to get into the game early you will have to preorder like a lot of games do now.
Do I agree with it? I don't really care. In fact, I would almost rather wait for the game be released in a stable condition so that I do not get a negative opinion about it because of bugs, lag and lack of content.. etc.. Vangaurd SOH comes to mind.
beta is good for learning how to play the game so when it comes out completely you will know what to do right away