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Warhammer Online Beta Shutdown
Garthilk writes "Most MMOs typically go through delays in release date; EA Mythic's Warhammer Online has already been pushed back to early next year. A recent announcement from the company on their beta boards has given fans pause, though. EA Mythic is shutting down their external beta test program, and possibly won't reopen it until December. Mythic says this pause in external testing will serve as an opportunity to refine and polish the games core mechanics. A public announcement is said to follow soon."
Feels like Vanguard all over again, only this the devs/publisher cut the beta-testers out of the loop. I'm not in the Warhammer Beta, but was in the Vanguard Beta. I read this and thought of how many times the Sigil crew said they were reworking the "core mechanics" and ended up releasing a product with no direction (and way too early.)
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Actually, seeing beta-test as "suply the beta testers with a free game for the next 6 weeks for no purpose" is arguably the worst attitude a company can have, and chances are the effects will be seen in the final game.
1. That's some people who put up with some major bugs and crap balance, to help you fix the game. For the price of a "free game." If you were to hire internal testers for that, even at minimum wage in Elbonia, it would cost you more than 10$-15$ a month. In fact, you'd have to give those a copy of the game too, so that evens out to meaning that the volunteers essentially work for you for 0$ a month.
If anyone actually sees it as doing them some royal favour by letting them beta-test your crap, it denotes a head-up-the-ass attitude that doesn't put much value on getting those bugs reported and fixed. It doesn't bode well.
But more importantly
2. If it had been beta-quality stage, never mind the stage where it would actually be offering a finished game for free, it makes no sense to abort it for 6 months. Either (A) you decide it's actually ready and proceed to the stress test and launch, or (B) that final stage is one of continuous tweaking-and-seeing-the-results and a rush to find as many bugs as you can. Both are things you don't do in short fits and bursts. Well, not if you actually care about delivering a finished and polished product.
Balance tweaks, for example, you can get sorta right on paper with lots of maths. (Though the average game designer seems unable and uninterested in taking a spreadsheet and nailing that maths in detail.) But to _really_ know if it works or not, you have to see what thousands of players come up with as ways to abuse it. And see what happens if you add 1% to this spell, or subtract 1% from that armour class. It's not something you can get right in 1-2 big sweeping changes tested briefly every 6 months.
Bugs too don't just mean the big obvious fuck-ups, which shouldn't have made it past the internal testing anyway. It means race conditions that happen to the average player maybe once a month, or stuff that involves the player being on the exact pixel between terrain tiles, or whatever. Because it's that kind of thing that will bite you in the arse at release. A bug that happens only once a month to 1 player, will happen 10,000 times a day when you have 300,000 subscribers.
So it makes no imaginable sense to abort a beta for 6 months, if the game was indeed at beta stage. It only makes sense if you decide that you fucked up so badly, that you need 6 months just to (hopefully) bring it to a _real_ beta stage.
It's not pessimism, it's just realism. That's how it works.
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