Kyle over at Massively reports that Jumpgate: Evolution has passed 150,000 beta signups.
Wow. That’s impressive.
With 150,000 testers going through every inch of the game, looking for bugs and reporting them, stress testing everything, seeing that the economy is functional, that all the art assets are working correctly, this game is guaranteed to rock.
Seriously, though, when are companies going to drop the fiction that ‘testers’ actually test and just call it ‘free playable preview’. And let’s be honest here, people were spending hundreds of dollars to get into the Wrath of the Lich King ‘beta’. So I don’t think it will be too long before they just drop the idea of a free playable preview/beta test entirely, and just charge a premium for ‘early access’, which may include bugs and unplayable elements, but dropping the idea that these gamers get to try the game for free.
Charge early access/beta players a buck when they sign up for beta. Or auction off beta slots.
Right now, signing up for beta just means, “Hey, free game.” Nothing more.
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/agree about the “when are companies going to drop the fiction that ‘testers’ actually test and just call it ‘free playable preview” portion. The number of people who go into a beta to actually test things rather then to play with all the new toys and shiny is considerably smaller then the huge amount of people they let in through the doors.
If you really want people to beta test your game, you need to be paying them / giving rewards for every successful bug report filed and issue that comes up.
Vanguard actually used this method, they had a ‘contest’ for players to submit the biggest ‘bug’ they could find in the game. The winner got a custom title for their character (a title of their choice as long as it wasn’t obscene). The bug they found was in regards to the brotherhood system, it let people outside of other brotherhoods leech experience while in other zones. A nice list of bugs was complied from everything that was submitted so they could fix and work on them.
Funcom made a load on that deal. They had to have had some agreement with Fileplanet when they did the pay for beta.
And then when they released the “buddy” codes, the “buddy” had to pay to download.
At least if people pay for the beta, Devs may at least know people want to try the game…
Yet, you may get the backlash like AoC as well…
And to add insult to injury, the client given to the FilePlanet “testers” wasn’t the one they were planning on shipping. So the “testers” couldn’t have really tested it if any of them had actually desired to, since they didn’t even have the latest client.
If they actually want testers, then they need to put in some actual requirements, e.g. require people to file a minimum number of _meaningful_ bug/status/enhancements each week.
Of course this also means that the game companies need to provide enough information so that people can fill in relevant information. E.g. if a person uses a /bug command, what information do they collect automatically and what information do they want to be written in the reports. I cannot say that I have seen any beta where they have been clear on that.
Of the MMOs I have been betatesting, only Gods&Heroes and Tabula Rasa had automatic dialogs triggered when some quest or activity was completed where one could rate the activity and provide some comments.
But Gods & Heroes completely ignored when I was trying to report game client crashes – the interface that was provided did not support providing the necessary information and when asking about how to submit this info, the reports where just marked as resolved without even providing answers.
And Tabula Rasa had not much space to actually include so much meaningful information when submitting bug reports – again some of it may not have been necessary if they collected it automatically, but that was not clear.
If game companies set some requirements on the testers and also provide some solid info to help the testers do the testing, then they could very well provide some nice rewards for those that actually do the job (and it is a job) properly.
If neither game companies nor players have some minimum obligations and requirements to fulfill, then it is just an early access marketing plot and should be handled as such up front.
My we took our cynic pills today, didn’t we?
There is a very real form of testing that is derived from hundreds or thousands of people playing your game and not filing bug reports. I’d call it load testing. How do the servers handle the load of lots of people all trying to collect sparklies in Castle Ruins, and so on. And it provides an environment where those few people (devs mostly) who do test out things methodically can do so in a “stressed” environment.
Not to mention, free or not, if something important doesn’t seem to be working, the devs WILL hear about it.
Now the beta period has also become the “preview for the press”- and “create buzz”- and “let the secondary market and fan websites get stuff ready for their databases”-period, too. On the other hand, some of those secondary market people will actually notice if something isn’t working and file bugs, since they have a vested interest in success.
Well, just because 150,000 people have signed up doesn’t mean 150,000 people get to play . . . I mean test. Right, test. Yeah.
Anyway, WAR had over 750,000 beta signups, but only a small portion of them ever got into the beta test. We have no idea how many beta testers Netdevil will accept. Considering the beta signup doesn’t involve any sort of application they won’t be awarding beta slots based on merit — which suggests they already have what they need for true testing, and people signing up now will just be randomly chosen to participate in load testing.
That said, every person that logs into an MMO and plays contributes to the development of the game whether they report bugs or not. They put load on the system, they trigger scripts, they activate mob AI, etc. Debugging software runs in the background of most beta clients, such that many errors can be detected and reported automatically whether the the player actively reports bugs or not. Beyond a certain point, developers don’t WANT players submitting bug reports — if 10% of your players find 95% of your bugs, having the other 90% find all those same bugs would just increase the workload of the QA people assigned to sift through bug reports without adding any value to the process. Also, testers who truly test provide a valuable service, but they tend to not ‘play’ the game. You need people just playing to find out whether the game is actually fun — hardcore testers generally don’t know if a game is fun, they’re testing, not playing.
You are right in that there is certainly a value in numbers and that people just do stuff in the game rather just trying to find bugs and file bug reports. You will still need a somewhat effective way to capture what people consider to be fun, if they want to know about that.
This is still a matter of communication and setting expectations between the players and the game companies. Playing a game “for free” for a limited time where whatever you do and create will be gone and wiped out most likely will set a quite different setting to a game situation where you know you could be in it for longer and whatever character you create will still be around.