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Mass of Beta invites going out in the form of a Survey (And people are mad)
Tiller
Member LegendaryPosts: 11,486
People thought it was a survey scam, it's confirmed it's not. Sounds like even people in UK are getting them as well now.
http://darthhater.com/2010/11/25/swtor-survey-emails-circulating/
SWG Bloodfin vet
Elder Jedi/Elder Bounty Hunter
Comments
Doh... with the tons of spam, scam and phishing, they send beta invites from same nameless third party company with the topic of some survey? Good riddance.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
They must have presumed that desirable testers are likely to be practiced critical thinkers.
Happy Birthday?
Lucky for me I did not delete that one when I saw it. It seemed legit so I kept it until someone confirmed one way or the other. Come Monday I will have a beta key.
Dang, I'd give anything to have gotten an invite......
='(
scary time
how a company handles its beta says a thing or two about the company
how are they testing their product?
Just when you think you have all the answers, I change the questions.
I'm honestly rather disappointed with the lack of information on how this was handled.
Not only was the format weird, but these mails and invites seem to have only been send to US and UK community members.
I can live with euros having to wait for a bit on infrastructure, but I can honestly see no reason to exclude continental europeans and play the island game.
I most likely won't get into beta anyway, because my system is getting pretty old, but it still does not feel very pleasant to be treated as a third grade community member because of location.
Feel free to use my referral link for SW:TOR if you want to test out the game. You'll get some special unlocks!
They are doing focused testing of specific content with limited test groups whom they replace constantly and they apparently have a lot of tracking software to monitor the results and convert them into statistical data.
Which is a sound way to do it.
Feel free to use my referral link for SW:TOR if you want to test out the game. You'll get some special unlocks!
So basically you're fine with the US getting beta invites. How is this any different from the UK getting beta keys? You have some grudge against the UK ? :P
No keys for me. Hopefully I will get one soon. Have they stopped sending them ?
Not at all, if you read what I wrote; there were specific reasons that all of Europe wasn't getting keys up to this point.
Namely: the server infrastructure wasn't up yet.
As UK community members are getting keys, obviously the necessary infrastructure is now available; however, there is no reason to give *just* the UK a chance to test, that's absurd and I don't understand the reasoning behind it.
Feel free to use my referral link for SW:TOR if you want to test out the game. You'll get some special unlocks!
I don't think anyone has anything against the UK, per se, but rolling out game testing in Europe and confining it (as it appears) to a single country is a mite cheeky. No-one I know of outside the UK got an invite.
I'm assuming (or rather hoping) that they're (the "they're "being the outsourced company rather than BW) rolling it out on a country by country basis, but if that's the case, it'd be pretty simple for BW to put everyone's mind at rest.
Essentially, Europe is more than the UK, confining (as it appears) game testing to a single country in a big continent is a bit....lame? It'd be like US testing being confined to California only (to pick a random high-pop state). Would that make sense to anyone?
I feel the same.
Although I could see country by country happening for the languages this game is being localised in (French / German), I don't really see why they would do that for those other regions where people will play the English version of the game by default (Netherlands, Belgium, Scandinavian countries, Spain, ... to name a few).
Feel free to use my referral link for SW:TOR if you want to test out the game. You'll get some special unlocks!
Friend of mine in Belgium claims ot have gotten an invite,
I cant confirm it but he isnt the sort to lie so make of that what you will.
Send an invite to a UK user and there's probably a 75% chance that they'll speak and write English to a fair standard.
Send an invite anywhere else in the EU and that chance drops, sometimes significantly.
If you are doing very focused testing (and they are) you want to actually be able to understand what your testers are saying to you.
I doubt they have non-English support staff in place yet. We have no idea how much of the game text has been translated yet.
Sure they could send out emails to anyone and everyone but that runs a very real risk of slowing down the testing process as more than the usual amount of 'testers' become pointless for the task.
People need to stop taking personal offence at what is almost certainly a purely business decision.
What Nibbs said + sometimes businesses target a very specific market - this can be a continent, a country, a city, a specific demogrpahic etc.
This is not about you getting a key and having fun and checking out it earlier. Its only purpose is to collect information and help with the developing of the game.I doubt they picked these two countries because of the language.
If that is true, these complaints are for naught of course. It would be cool for your friend himself to confirm that though, then we can all stop bickering.
As for knowledge of English, please... that's not a very good reason, proficiency levels are extremely high throughout Europe, especially the centre and the north; all of these people will need to play the game in English anyway and they are signed up for an English forum.
Besides, you hardly need to have a super advanced level of English (and most have that anyway) to write bug reports, qualitative feedback is something else but I never see a lot of testers give that kind of report anyway.
Feel free to use my referral link for SW:TOR if you want to test out the game. You'll get some special unlocks!
Maybe his friend had his account registered in the UK?
About the 'proficiency levels' across Europe, I am not so sure. But a lot of people all across Europe - north, south, east, west - do speak English to some extent. However, even a braindead monkey that watched cartoon network in English would be able to report a bug -_-
As pointed out, it has nothing to do with those countries speaking English. It's just the specific geographic areas they are targeting.
I could understand that, for reasons of unbiased polling, but then you assume that there are significant geographic differences between the UK and other countries in the EU when it comes to playing behaviour.
That seems like a strange hypothesis to start from and kind of pointless as we'll all be playing on the same servers (it would be another question if they were doing a market study on customer preferences toward buying certain games).
I would try to do just a randomized selection (as much as possible) of the whole population instead.
But again, we'll have to see, country by country or not, we'll see how it turns out.
Feel free to use my referral link for SW:TOR if you want to test out the game. You'll get some special unlocks!
It probably has a lot to do with the countries. With resepct to Education / Language and Targeted expectation smart move from Bioware.
________________________________________________________
Sorcery must persist, the future is the Citadel
This one line demonstrates that you don't have the slightest inkling of what you are talking about therefore making the rest of your post meaningless dribble. Only a 75% chance of UK users speaking English? What are you on man! Try 99.something%
Well, lots of people aren't happy about how they went about sending out testing invites, and confirming that it was legit it seems. Sounds like a bunch of folks missed it, deleted it, or it got blocked by spam blockers.
This is Standard Operating Procedure for BioWare. They use very narrow focus tests (specific areas, ranges, and abilities) for intense short bursts in their early closed betas. (Think of it as pre-beta with completely randomized player pools, targeting specific ranges of machines).
Speculation on my part! This next part is NOT confirmed):
Next they will move into selected large variance closed beta, in possibly 2-5 waves, then most likely to referral or promotion based beta for a weekend to a month. After that it's publish or perish. I Imagine large scale beta 3-6 months total, but I would'nt put money on it. The survey is just another example of the random tester pools based on 3rd party authorized marketing by a subcontracted company. It's not personal guys, it's just good business.
Remember, the more country pools these sub companies and more names they have to sort and send surveys to, costs more. It's not economically possible to advertise and promote everywhere in every language simultaniously, not to mention the issues the language barriers and connection ping, jitter, and overall stability will have on the test servers which will be undoubtedly located E/W us, Centralized euro hub. My money is on the UK. No reason for them to toss up worldwide servers at 4x the cost, when a focused small local test pool could give them what they are looking for at this stage. Only they know, but I do trust their QA and Dev pool to know whats best at this point.
Just my 2 cents i suppose.
The national office of made up statistics says that 25% of people in English do not speak English as a first or even second language.
They also say that 8 out of 10 cats prefer it.
Also it might be related but they are now hiring for SWTOR support staff to be based in Ireland.
Its just one disaster after the other with this game. Such unprofesionality speaks much about how the game will be handled (in europe) EA should get clue allready
This beta invite is the first thing that can be even thought of as bad. Not sure what other "disasters" your thinking of.
Only things i can recall, is EaLouse, which is a disgruntled employee that was more disgruntled with Mythic and just threw This game in there to hurt as many people he disliked as possible.
The interview comment (which some saw as funny others not, typical of a joke)
and the calling in a few members to help the game.
None of these i'd really call a disaster.
Now this beta invite might not be the best way to go about it. But I think the term disaster is too strong.
So unless i'm not seeing something, i think you might be a bit over dramitising a bit.
Help me Bioware, you're my only hope.
Is ToR going to be good? Dude it's Bioware making a freaking star wars game, all signs point to awesome. -G4tv MMo report.