I highly doubt that Bioware will change anything significant in 8-10 months it has left before the game launches. Maybe graphics and animations will be tweeked but definitely not any of the defining features like the holy trinity set up or the combat. There isn't enough time for that at this point.
Remember the game has to go through extensive internal and external testing before it can launch. Depending on the state of the game, it will probably take 4-6 months of closed beta. Give it one month for the transition between beta and live--open beta, head start etc.--and you'll see that time is running out fast.
Having been in a few beta for MMORPGs, I lot changes more quickly than you're estimating.
However, even given that, we know so little about the classes, class advancement, class synergy, combat abilities, combat time/pacing, etc, that there is no rational basis for criticism unless you're just broadly opposed to a class based system, period. In which case, fine, KOTOR isn't for you. However, saying it's a "bad" game or "sucks" because it chose to implement a broad design you don't personally care for is somewhere beyond pointless. We don't know, yet, how well or poorly these systems will be implemented.
Things like rate of combat, rate of advancement, power levels of classes, specific class abilities and features... these absolutely do change constantly all the way to launch, and beyond. Without a lot of people testing and the data you don't begin to see until fairly late in beta, it's impossible to really refine these abilities. A whole hell of a lot more is going to change than "graphics and animation". Many things are left for the end because they can't be developed until other pieces are more solid -- monster AI, for example, needs to be developed in response to character abilities and the expected difficulty level of combat. "Aggro range", the topic of whining du jour, needs to be set based on the range of weapons and the range of perception, and possibly on the relationship between the PCs and the monsters. (Many games shrink the aggro range when high-level characters go through low level regions, such as EQ2, where "grey" monsters won't aggro at all unless you attack them, or Vanguard, where monsters higher level than you aggro from a long way away.)
At this point, based on what we know, a sane critic is pretty much limited to criticizing their design choices, such as class-based over freeform, and not how well they've implemented those choices. Unfortunately, such criticisms are pretty pointless, since you're correct -- they won't change things on that level and griping about them is just a form of marking your territory, pissing on digital trees to establish yourself as one of the "cool" kids who hate things because hating things means you're ever so smart and not a mind controlled puppet of the corporations like everyone else.
WoW succeeded by being, basically, a better EQ than EQ. It seems like KOTOR aims to be a better WoW than WoW. It will be interesting to see if they succeed; better than they have tried and failed.
the game is pretty much wat it has been seen only some graphics will be changed but not much, might not be worth a subbing but ill try the free month.
I believe the game is in Alpha now. What's coming next is Beta. If this is a real Beta that will be a six months' test - if it's just a beta to spread word of mouth, it might be just a few weeks. In any case, they seem, pretty set on a March 2011 launch. Both LA and EA are pretty strict about getting products out on a long-preset launch calendar since it affects their quarterly revenues.
the game is pretty much wat it has been seen only some graphics will be changed but not much, might not be worth a subbing but ill try the free month.
I believe the game is in Alpha now. What's coming next is Beta. If this is a real Beta that will be a six months' test - if it's just a beta to spread word of mouth, it might be just a few weeks. In any case, they seem, pretty set on a March 2011 launch. Both LA and EA are pretty strict about getting products out on a long-preset launch calendar since it affects their quarterly revenues.
Yes, the Beta will not be used to playtest all the features, every quest, etc. There was an article stating specifically that the majority of those things will be done before the game goes into beta. The beta will be used for playtesting, what mechanics people like, what people are having a hard time grasping, or what isn't enjoyable.
I feel in the scope of things this game would be too big to have players test the content for bugs. By testing the gameplay, UI features, and the like, (which is what they are planning on) you can easily set something up to test at different level intervals where gameplay may change and see how the public reacts to those things. Content-wise 200+ hours of gameplay per class plus exploration, beta testing for players would've had to start months ago with a completed / semi complete build if they were relying on us players to test the entirety of the content.
Yes, the Beta will not be used to playtest all the features, every quest, etc. There was an article stating specifically that the majority of those things will be done before the game goes into beta. The beta will be used for playtesting, what mechanics people like, what people are having a hard time grasping, or what isn't enjoyable.
I feel in the scope of things this game would be too big to have players test the content for bugs. By testing the gameplay, UI features, and the like, (which is what they are planning on) you can easily set something up to test at different level intervals where gameplay may change and see how the public reacts to those things. Content-wise 200+ hours of gameplay per class plus exploration, beta testing for players would've had to start months ago with a completed / semi complete build if they were relying on us players to test the entirety of the content.
If this is true and not a misstatement/misunderstanding, then... wow. I think we can safely say KOTOR is going to explode on impact, and not in a good way.
I program for a living. It is ***impossible*** for programmers/develpers to find all, or even most, bugs . This impossibility increases (yes, there are degrees of impossible) as complexity increases. IF it is true that Bioware thinks the only purpose of beta will be to find out if users like blue buttons or green buttons, and that's the only work they'll have to do between start of beta and release, then, stick a fork in it, it's done. Beta is where the bugs are REALLY found. Look at the beta update notes for any game with an extensive public beta -- pages and pages of bug fixes. Little things, like quest givers not responding to quest turn-ins, big things, like spawning inside the geometry or unkillable mobs (who kill you). This is what beta testers find, because they do the "wrong" thing, by the thousands, and find all the things no developer or in house tester ever did or ever could. Given the emphasis on branching storylines and everyone having their own story and plot, the scope for errors in that sub system alone is immense. What happens when Characters 'A' and 'B' are grouped and intereact with a story element which might be different for each of them? Wtih multiple branching elements and options, the combinatrics are insane, and the odds of there being no data entry errors which could lead to unpredictable results are slim.
Players stress systems in ways internal testing will not. Players will gather 32,679 wookie hides, just in time for you to discover that the 2-byte integer you used to track inventory doesn't work. (In Ultima Online, the Karma score was originally handled as a ***signed*** single byte integer. Players quickly found they could become good by being evil -- get the score to -128, do one more "evil" deed, and it rolled around to +127. This was a common exploit.)
I'm very reluctant to believe a company with as much experience as BioWare would claim beta was just to "test the interface". Do you have a source for this?
Quick PS, on release dates: If they release in March no matter the state of the game, they're dead, and this will go down in history as one of the most expensive fiascos ever. If you've got stock in EA and you hear they're releasing this in March, period, whatever's on the HD, we burn it and ship it.... sell short. Or buy short. Or something short, I don't know from stocks. You release an MMORPG when it's READY, which is usualyl 6-9 months after when you planned to release it, or you end up selling a million boxes in March and having 50K subscribers in July. Please note, I'm not saying "The game sucks!" or "Bioware sucks!" or "EA sucks!" or any other such twaddle. I cannot make any comments about the game's quality given the information available to me. I can say, based on 22 years as a professional programmer and 30 years playing computer games (Ultima I, Apple II, 1980), that releasing to meet a deadline or assuming all bugs can be caught "in house" is a guarantee of failure, no matter how good the game design or the programmers behind it. I also STRONGLY believe, based on inference from experience, not any particular evidence, that the game won't actually be ready in March; the history of MMORPG development weighs heavily against the first release date being met with a truly ready game.
Yes, the Beta will not be used to playtest all the features, every quest, etc. There was an article stating specifically that the majority of those things will be done before the game goes into beta. The beta will be used for playtesting, what mechanics people like, what people are having a hard time grasping, or what isn't enjoyable.
I feel in the scope of things this game would be too big to have players test the content for bugs. By testing the gameplay, UI features, and the like, (which is what they are planning on) you can easily set something up to test at different level intervals where gameplay may change and see how the public reacts to those things. Content-wise 200+ hours of gameplay per class plus exploration, beta testing for players would've had to start months ago with a completed / semi complete build if they were relying on us players to test the entirety of the content.
If this is true and not a misstatement/misunderstanding, then... wow. I think we can safely say KOTOR is going to explode on impact, and not in a good way.
I program for a living. It is ***impossible*** for programmers/develpers to find all, or even most, bugs . This impossibility increases (yes, there are degrees of impossible) as complexity increases. IF it is true that Bioware thinks the only purpose of beta will be to find out if users like blue buttons or green buttons, and that's the only work they'll have to do between start of beta and release, then, stick a fork in it, it's done. Beta is where the bugs are REALLY found. Look at the beta update notes for any game with an extensive public beta -- pages and pages of bug fixes. Little things, like quest givers not responding to quest turn-ins, big things, like spawning inside the geometry or unkillable mobs (who kill you). This is what beta testers find, because they do the "wrong" thing, by the thousands, and find all the things no developer or in house tester ever did or ever could. Given the emphasis on branching storylines and everyone having their own story and plot, the scope for errors in that sub system alone is immense. What happens when Characters 'A' and 'B' are grouped and intereact with a story element which might be different for each of them? Wtih multiple branching elements and options, the combinatrics are insane, and the odds of there being no data entry errors which could lead to unpredictable results are slim.
Players stress systems in ways internal testing will not. Players will gather 32,679 wookie hides, just in time for you to discover that the 2-byte integer you used to track inventory doesn't work. (In Ultima Online, the Karma score was originally handled as a ***signed*** single byte integer. Players quickly found they could become good by being evil -- get the score to -128, do one more "evil" deed, and it rolled around to +127. This was a common exploit.)
I'm very reluctant to believe a company with as much experience as BioWare would claim beta was just to "test the interface". Do you have a source for this?
Perhaps I misunderstood what he meant. I have no idea of the scope at which they plan on testing.
"The game suffered a minor delay recently. Do you foresee further ones?
We're on track for spring next year. It's about getting those alpha dates, getting all the content in and getting everything tested. Again, BioWare has an advantage here, even though it's our first MMOG, because we make content games. Our games are huge. It's what we do. We know how to scale an 80-hour RPG already. Scaling it up so it's exponentially bigger was a huge challenge, but we knew what we were getting into. As we see the content pour into the game, the main challenge is tracing and testing the world's biggest BioWare game – actually checking, "Hey, does this work right if I made this decision 140 hours ago?"
"Are you relying on the beta for a lot of that testing?
Open beta should not be finding those problems. Beta will happen when we think we're done – when we think it's good. That's when we open it up to people to say 'Nope, you're game's crap – all of these things are bad'. If you try to use your beta testers as bug QA, you miss your beta window and the ability to improve the quality. Your people should not be out there telling you things that you already know. You should have fixed those things first."
Perhaps I should have specified Open Beta, as thats what he refers to here.
Bioware has plenty of in house testers and also invites select people who have participated in previous closed betas into their alphas. It's actually easier to test the basic mechanics in a structured environment than to just turn loose a few hundred random people to run wild in the game. I think your faith in the efficacy of the general public as testers is unfounded.
A few hundred random people running wild... sorry, a few hundred THOUSAND random people running wild... is what's going to happen on release day.
If you don't let that happen in beta, ideally starting 2-3 months prior to release, you're toast.
Especially when you begin considering issues of synchronization, lag, rubber banding, etc, that tend to only show up with larger populations. You also begin to see community patterns you may not have anticipated, especially in formal testing when people test what you tell them to test. If people hate class "X" and don't play it, but you balanced content on the assumption someone from class "X" would be in most groups? Or that you tested class "Y" and found it was balanced, but disocvered a party of four class "Y" could sweep over most content in a way you didn't anticipate? Without knowing the real mechanical details, I can't give specific examples, but balance issues due to unexpected synergies are a common problem with MMORPGs.
People who actually know what they're doing are good for alpha testing. The great unwashed masses of mouth breathing morons, and scouts for Asian gold farmers trying to find all the exploits for when they open shop on launch day, are what you need to make sure your game can ship.
"The game suffered a minor delay recently. Do you foresee further ones?
We're on track for spring next year. It's about getting those alpha dates, getting all the content in and getting everything tested. Again, BioWare has an advantage here, even though it's our first MMOG, because we make content games. Our games are huge. It's what we do. We know how to scale an 80-hour RPG already. Scaling it up so it's exponentially bigger was a huge challenge, but we knew what we were getting into. As we see the content pour into the game, the main challenge is tracing and testing the world's biggest BioWare game – actually checking, "Hey, does this work right if I made this decision 140 hours ago?"
Facepalm.
Well, frak.
An MMORPG is not a single player RPG, just "bigger". It's a totally different beast, requiring a totally different design mindset and appealing to a different, and basically sociopathic, player base. If you don't tet your game based on the assumption "This game is going to be played by sociopaths whose sole and only joy in their miserable existences is the knowledge they have made a complete stranger miserable", your game will fail.
There's very little point to cheating in a single player game. There's much less need to find and fix every exploit, loophole, and cheesy maneuver -- the player is only robbing himself of the fun of completing the game "properly", after all. This is utterly not the case in an MMORPG, and until you throw a critical mass of scum and villainy at the game, you will not find the hundreds of things which are broken.
My expectation of a quality game on ship just took a nose dive.
"The game suffered a minor delay recently. Do you foresee further ones?
We're on track for spring next year. It's about getting those alpha dates, getting all the content in and getting everything tested. Again, BioWare has an advantage here, even though it's our first MMOG, because we make content games. Our games are huge. It's what we do. We know how to scale an 80-hour RPG already. Scaling it up so it's exponentially bigger was a huge challenge, but we knew what we were getting into. As we see the content pour into the game, the main challenge is tracing and testing the world's biggest BioWare game – actually checking, "Hey, does this work right if I made this decision 140 hours ago?"
Facepalm.
Well, frak.
An MMORPG is not a single player RPG, just "bigger". It's a totally different beast, requiring a totally different design mindset and appealing to a different, and basically sociopathic, player base. If you don't tet your game based on the assumption "This game is going to be played by sociopaths whose sole and only joy in their miserable existences is the knowledge they have made a complete stranger miserable", your game will fail.
There's very little point to cheating in a single player game. There's much less need to find and fix every exploit, loophole, and cheesy maneuver -- the player is only robbing himself of the fun of completing the game "properly", after all. This is utterly not the case in an MMORPG, and until you throw a critical mass of scum and villainy at the game, you will not find the hundreds of things which are broken.
My expectation of a quality game on ship just took a nose dive.
As he stated, he felt OPEN beta should not be used for those things specifically. How this pertains to their closed beta focus I do not know. In all truth open beta should never have been used that way... it usually only runs a month, maybe two at the longest (for AAA titles) and even at the tail end there the developers often play grabass with the information testers provide for them.
The development team isn't just BioWare developers of course, I feel they have sufficient experience to know where a potential blunder could be. Ultimately, BETA in any form will be very telling for players as to what we can expect.
If this is true and not a misstatement/misunderstanding, then... wow. I think we can safely say KOTOR is going to explode on impact, and not in a good way.
I program for a living. It is ***impossible*** for programmers/develpers to find all, or even most, bugs . This impossibility increases (yes, there are degrees of impossible) as complexity increases. IF it is true that Bioware thinks the only purpose of beta will be to find out if users like blue buttons or green buttons, and that's the only work they'll have to do between start of beta and release, then, stick a fork in it, it's done. Beta is where the bugs are REALLY found. Look at the beta update notes for any game with an extensive public beta -- pages and pages of bug fixes. Little things, like quest givers not responding to quest turn-ins, big things, like spawning inside the geometry or unkillable mobs (who kill you). This is what beta testers find, because they do the "wrong" thing, by the thousands, and find all the things no developer or in house tester ever did or ever could. Given the emphasis on branching storylines and everyone having their own story and plot, the scope for errors in that sub system alone is immense. What happens when Characters 'A' and 'B' are grouped and intereact with a story element which might be different for each of them? Wtih multiple branching elements and options, the combinatrics are insane, and the odds of there being no data entry errors which could lead to unpredictable results are slim.
Players stress systems in ways internal testing will not. Players will gather 32,679 wookie hides, just in time for you to discover that the 2-byte integer you used to track inventory doesn't work. (In Ultima Online, the Karma score was originally handled as a ***signed*** single byte integer. Players quickly found they could become good by being evil -- get the score to -128, do one more "evil" deed, and it rolled around to +127. This was a common exploit.)
I'm very reluctant to believe a company with as much experience as BioWare would claim beta was just to "test the interface". Do you have a source for this?
Quick PS, on release dates: If they release in March no matter the state of the game, they're dead, and this will go down in history as one of the most expensive fiascos ever. If you've got stock in EA and you hear they're releasing this in March, period, whatever's on the HD, we burn it and ship it.... sell short. Or buy short. Or something short, I don't know from stocks. You release an MMORPG when it's READY, which is usualyl 6-9 months after when you planned to release it, or you end up selling a million boxes in March and having 50K subscribers in July. Please note, I'm not saying "The game sucks!" or "Bioware sucks!" or "EA sucks!" or any other such twaddle. I cannot make any comments about the game's quality given the information available to me. I can say, based on 22 years as a professional programmer and 30 years playing computer games (Ultima I, Apple II, 1980), that releasing to meet a deadline or assuming all bugs can be caught "in house" is a guarantee of failure, no matter how good the game design or the programmers behind it. I also STRONGLY believe, based on inference from experience, not any particular evidence, that the game won't actually be ready in March; the history of MMORPG development weighs heavily against the first release date being met with a truly ready game.
Comments
Having been in a few beta for MMORPGs, I lot changes more quickly than you're estimating.
However, even given that, we know so little about the classes, class advancement, class synergy, combat abilities, combat time/pacing, etc, that there is no rational basis for criticism unless you're just broadly opposed to a class based system, period. In which case, fine, KOTOR isn't for you. However, saying it's a "bad" game or "sucks" because it chose to implement a broad design you don't personally care for is somewhere beyond pointless. We don't know, yet, how well or poorly these systems will be implemented.
Things like rate of combat, rate of advancement, power levels of classes, specific class abilities and features... these absolutely do change constantly all the way to launch, and beyond. Without a lot of people testing and the data you don't begin to see until fairly late in beta, it's impossible to really refine these abilities. A whole hell of a lot more is going to change than "graphics and animation". Many things are left for the end because they can't be developed until other pieces are more solid -- monster AI, for example, needs to be developed in response to character abilities and the expected difficulty level of combat. "Aggro range", the topic of whining du jour, needs to be set based on the range of weapons and the range of perception, and possibly on the relationship between the PCs and the monsters. (Many games shrink the aggro range when high-level characters go through low level regions, such as EQ2, where "grey" monsters won't aggro at all unless you attack them, or Vanguard, where monsters higher level than you aggro from a long way away.)
At this point, based on what we know, a sane critic is pretty much limited to criticizing their design choices, such as class-based over freeform, and not how well they've implemented those choices. Unfortunately, such criticisms are pretty pointless, since you're correct -- they won't change things on that level and griping about them is just a form of marking your territory, pissing on digital trees to establish yourself as one of the "cool" kids who hate things because hating things means you're ever so smart and not a mind controlled puppet of the corporations like everyone else.
WoW succeeded by being, basically, a better EQ than EQ. It seems like KOTOR aims to be a better WoW than WoW. It will be interesting to see if they succeed; better than they have tried and failed.
I believe the game is in Alpha now. What's coming next is Beta. If this is a real Beta that will be a six months' test - if it's just a beta to spread word of mouth, it might be just a few weeks. In any case, they seem, pretty set on a March 2011 launch. Both LA and EA are pretty strict about getting products out on a long-preset launch calendar since it affects their quarterly revenues.
Yes, the Beta will not be used to playtest all the features, every quest, etc. There was an article stating specifically that the majority of those things will be done before the game goes into beta. The beta will be used for playtesting, what mechanics people like, what people are having a hard time grasping, or what isn't enjoyable.
I feel in the scope of things this game would be too big to have players test the content for bugs. By testing the gameplay, UI features, and the like, (which is what they are planning on) you can easily set something up to test at different level intervals where gameplay may change and see how the public reacts to those things. Content-wise 200+ hours of gameplay per class plus exploration, beta testing for players would've had to start months ago with a completed / semi complete build if they were relying on us players to test the entirety of the content.
If this is true and not a misstatement/misunderstanding, then... wow. I think we can safely say KOTOR is going to explode on impact, and not in a good way.
I program for a living. It is ***impossible*** for programmers/develpers to find all, or even most, bugs . This impossibility increases (yes, there are degrees of impossible) as complexity increases. IF it is true that Bioware thinks the only purpose of beta will be to find out if users like blue buttons or green buttons, and that's the only work they'll have to do between start of beta and release, then, stick a fork in it, it's done. Beta is where the bugs are REALLY found. Look at the beta update notes for any game with an extensive public beta -- pages and pages of bug fixes. Little things, like quest givers not responding to quest turn-ins, big things, like spawning inside the geometry or unkillable mobs (who kill you). This is what beta testers find, because they do the "wrong" thing, by the thousands, and find all the things no developer or in house tester ever did or ever could. Given the emphasis on branching storylines and everyone having their own story and plot, the scope for errors in that sub system alone is immense. What happens when Characters 'A' and 'B' are grouped and intereact with a story element which might be different for each of them? Wtih multiple branching elements and options, the combinatrics are insane, and the odds of there being no data entry errors which could lead to unpredictable results are slim.
Players stress systems in ways internal testing will not. Players will gather 32,679 wookie hides, just in time for you to discover that the 2-byte integer you used to track inventory doesn't work. (In Ultima Online, the Karma score was originally handled as a ***signed*** single byte integer. Players quickly found they could become good by being evil -- get the score to -128, do one more "evil" deed, and it rolled around to +127. This was a common exploit.)
I'm very reluctant to believe a company with as much experience as BioWare would claim beta was just to "test the interface". Do you have a source for this?
Quick PS, on release dates: If they release in March no matter the state of the game, they're dead, and this will go down in history as one of the most expensive fiascos ever. If you've got stock in EA and you hear they're releasing this in March, period, whatever's on the HD, we burn it and ship it.... sell short. Or buy short. Or something short, I don't know from stocks. You release an MMORPG when it's READY, which is usualyl 6-9 months after when you planned to release it, or you end up selling a million boxes in March and having 50K subscribers in July. Please note, I'm not saying "The game sucks!" or "Bioware sucks!" or "EA sucks!" or any other such twaddle. I cannot make any comments about the game's quality given the information available to me. I can say, based on 22 years as a professional programmer and 30 years playing computer games (Ultima I, Apple II, 1980), that releasing to meet a deadline or assuming all bugs can be caught "in house" is a guarantee of failure, no matter how good the game design or the programmers behind it. I also STRONGLY believe, based on inference from experience, not any particular evidence, that the game won't actually be ready in March; the history of MMORPG development weighs heavily against the first release date being met with a truly ready game.
Perhaps I misunderstood what he meant. I have no idea of the scope at which they plan on testing.
http://www.edge-online.com/features/interview-daniel-erickson?page=0,0
"The game suffered a minor delay recently. Do you foresee further ones?
We're on track for spring next year. It's about getting those alpha dates, getting all the content in and getting everything tested. Again, BioWare has an advantage here, even though it's our first MMOG, because we make content games. Our games are huge. It's what we do. We know how to scale an 80-hour RPG already. Scaling it up so it's exponentially bigger was a huge challenge, but we knew what we were getting into. As we see the content pour into the game, the main challenge is tracing and testing the world's biggest BioWare game – actually checking, "Hey, does this work right if I made this decision 140 hours ago?"
"Are you relying on the beta for a lot of that testing?
Open beta should not be finding those problems. Beta will happen when we think we're done – when we think it's good. That's when we open it up to people to say 'Nope, you're game's crap – all of these things are bad'. If you try to use your beta testers as bug QA, you miss your beta window and the ability to improve the quality. Your people should not be out there telling you things that you already know. You should have fixed those things first."
Perhaps I should have specified Open Beta, as thats what he refers to here.
A few hundred random people running wild... sorry, a few hundred THOUSAND random people running wild... is what's going to happen on release day.
If you don't let that happen in beta, ideally starting 2-3 months prior to release, you're toast.
Especially when you begin considering issues of synchronization, lag, rubber banding, etc, that tend to only show up with larger populations. You also begin to see community patterns you may not have anticipated, especially in formal testing when people test what you tell them to test. If people hate class "X" and don't play it, but you balanced content on the assumption someone from class "X" would be in most groups? Or that you tested class "Y" and found it was balanced, but disocvered a party of four class "Y" could sweep over most content in a way you didn't anticipate? Without knowing the real mechanical details, I can't give specific examples, but balance issues due to unexpected synergies are a common problem with MMORPGs.
People who actually know what they're doing are good for alpha testing. The great unwashed masses of mouth breathing morons, and scouts for Asian gold farmers trying to find all the exploits for when they open shop on launch day, are what you need to make sure your game can ship.
Facepalm.
Well, frak.
An MMORPG is not a single player RPG, just "bigger". It's a totally different beast, requiring a totally different design mindset and appealing to a different, and basically sociopathic, player base. If you don't tet your game based on the assumption "This game is going to be played by sociopaths whose sole and only joy in their miserable existences is the knowledge they have made a complete stranger miserable", your game will fail.
There's very little point to cheating in a single player game. There's much less need to find and fix every exploit, loophole, and cheesy maneuver -- the player is only robbing himself of the fun of completing the game "properly", after all. This is utterly not the case in an MMORPG, and until you throw a critical mass of scum and villainy at the game, you will not find the hundreds of things which are broken.
My expectation of a quality game on ship just took a nose dive.
As he stated, he felt OPEN beta should not be used for those things specifically. How this pertains to their closed beta focus I do not know. In all truth open beta should never have been used that way... it usually only runs a month, maybe two at the longest (for AAA titles) and even at the tail end there the developers often play grabass with the information testers provide for them.
The development team isn't just BioWare developers of course, I feel they have sufficient experience to know where a potential blunder could be. Ultimately, BETA in any form will be very telling for players as to what we can expect.
For the record, I prefer green buttons.