Slashdot Mirror
Overcomplicated MMO Betas
Heartless writes "On the heels of Vanguard's beta 1 announcement, Heartless Gamer blog has an article looking into why MMO beta processes are overly involved and detracting from the game they are meant to improve. From the article: 'But why even have such a process in the first place? If they honestly think they are going to get any sort of actual *testing* (I use the term loosely) from an over-hyped MMORPG community... they obviously failed basic MMORPG sociology. I could link hundreds of beta leaks and broken NDA contracts, but what would be the point? What you need to know is the fact that betas are infiltrated by those that want sneak peaks at the game. Definitely not by those that truly wish to test the product. Internal testers and paid testers have proved for years to be able to produce very finished products in the single player market.'"
In that order. You don't get many useful bug reports from the large betas (you do from the smaller stages), but you don't know how it will handle release type number of users until release, unless you beta it.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
It's like giving out free maryjo samples.....a dealer is bound to get some instant new business. Heck, they could get a commercial on every TV show for free and it wouldn't be near the value of 1000 potential customers getting a taste. And not a taste with 1 million others but a very tight availability taste.
Also, as a programmer, I can say you can unit test till you are blue in the face, but it only takes a user 5 minutes to find a bug you'd have never tested for.
If only one major bug is caught that's huge icing on the marketting and catching customers angles.
But I think there is one factor we overlooked...ego. If you'd spent years developing a new toy, you didn't do it to keep it locked up for yourself. You did it for someone to play with. I'm betting the rush of first players digging into the new toys you rolled out is huge! and heck, if it sucks, at least you only had to deal with the a small amount of laughs the first day. Ha!
Be swell
As someone who has worked QA on a variety of SOE games and have had to read through player-submitted bug reports, there are FAR fewer than 1% of the player base submitting bugs in the first place, and the ones who bother cannot be considered "decent QA testers." Someone else mentioned it earlier... the beta phase is merely to hype the game. It's incredibly rare that players, even those with legitimate bugs, submit reports that are useful for QA purposes.