Why does everyone feel like beta is ok to defend?

[Yunru]

You should see the wow beta . But yeah. The big bosses are limiting time for a game to be finished.
By a financial status its better to realise a buggy game and fix it later so the $$$$ is the highest. If you keep delaying you either:
*Risk losing costumers to another mmo
*Hype goes down---and you need to waste more money on comercials
*Too much bad info gets realised

If Ceos were smart, they would hide the game devlopment like a military secret. Like blizzard is doing with the latest product.


In other words---Dont blame beta game, blame the Ceo of the company who is making the game.

[Sinndra]

If I was running beta I would value negative response 100x more than positive one. But people on these forums think that kissing Blizz butts will actually gonna make them release a better game. "Oh stop whining it's not finished", you better whine now than when it's released and it's too late to change anything.

complain about things that are currently broken.. not what might be broken in the future. many people complain about what they perceive MIGHT happen later down the road. such as this thread "the game MIGHT not be bug free at launch.. i dont know for sure.. so i better complain early".

[sarecho]

what i hate worse though is when someone doesn't buy a game (like ESO) and goes by what they heard someone else say (who didn't buy ESO) who goes by what someone else said (who didn't buy it) to make their final determination of what is good or bad

also, good doesn't mean good anymore, it means "i like it". bad doesn't mean bad, it means "i know someone who knows someone who doesn't like it"

the whole community surrounding gaming is useless for the most part. it's emotionally undeveloped idiots that nobody, not you or anyone else, wants to hang out with irl. those are the loud people who basically start most of the threads on a forum, or reply to most of them, or basically just do everything they can (since they have no jobs, social life or anything else to take them away from their computers) to be heard

in reality, NOTHING in this industry is as good or bad as it's said to be. NOTHING. it's always in the middle. every single AAA MMORPG release has been less buggy than it would have been 10 years ago. every AAA MMORPG release has been blasted because every AAA MMORPG release has stepped on the toes of some other AAA MMORPG that has loudmouthed fanbois who bash everything else to protect "their" favorite game (that they bash on the forums all day)

it's just a mess. in reality betas are advertising, testing, etc.

i played eq at launch, i played wow at launch, if they came out today they'd be bashed so hard that they'd never see a year two. standards have changed because people really have no gauge as to what is good or bad when it comes to these things. but the internet gives them a place to say whatever they want anyway, no competence required

[Deleted]

complain about things that are currently broken.. not what might be broken in the future. many people complain about what they perceive MIGHT happen later down the road. such as this thread "the game MIGHT not be bug free at launch.. i dont know for sure.. so i better complain early".

And it's still better than "they will fix it so shut up" because they might aswell not and beta is pretty much your only time to voice such opinion.

[Sinndra]

And it's still better than "they will fix it so shut up" because they might aswell not and beta is pretty much your only time to voice such opinion.

get access to beta >> mess around, test a few things, find a bug/issue >> report and wait for next patch >> recheck bug/issue to see if fixed. if not then repost.

thats how it should go.

reality is: people get access >> mess around, test a few things, find bug/issue >> report and assume that since you didnt see an immediate hotfix within a few hours of report that it will never get fixed >> rush to forums to complain about future bugs that havent happened yet.

[Bigbazz]

If I was running beta I would value negative response 100x more than positive one. But people on these forums think that kissing Blizz butts will actually gonna make them release a better game. "Oh stop whining it's not finished", you better whine now than when it's released and it's too late to change anything.

Well there comes a point when whining is not constructive and what a development team of human beings with real feelings need is encouragement. Both feedback is needed, how do you progress with only negative feedback?

It must be pretty tough being a games developer and dealing with this.

[Djuntas]

In-house testing just can't be done as good as releasing the game as a beta or stress test. Oh and its largely free work force for the dev's.

[Vespian]

Vote with your wallet if you think a product is not ready, especially since most games let people try the game out for free before release. Most of the issues are things that developers don't catch during beta especially server stress induced lag, hacks, gold sellers, dupes and bugs of that nature. Even in MMOs that have been around for years you will still have those major issues. WoW has and still has issues like hacks, gold seller issues, bots and dupes.

Look at D3, look at Sim City, look at GTA 5 as examples that are not in the MMO genre. Online games especially MMOs are never ready, if you don't want to be in for a bumpy ride especially during the first few weeks, don't buy the product. It is as simple as that.

I would just like to chime in and mention that D3 might have had launch issues, but if you don't count those, the problem with the game was which development decisions made it live, not how unfinished decisions made it live. D3 was a complete game, it just didn't deliver the expectation.

Sim City, was pushed out with poor testing, but was mainly constructed to fake the user into believing that it was actually an online-only experience, while it was in fact only a semi-online only experience, since it required updating only on interval. SC was more of a calculated cheat, than an unfinished product, since even the "bugs" like clogged roads were by design.

[antelope591]

I think it depends entirely on the issue.....ESO for example had core gameplay issues that were obviously not going to be fixed without a complete game overhaul which kept me from buying the game. My issues with Wildstar so far are mostly UI/interface related which are still fixable. The core of the game is solid however, which is the most important thing.

[Sj]

Beta tests used to be way more selective about who was let in, and much less "demo-y" than they are now. The Dilbert comic was actually pretty accurate, too.

[Waaldo]

I don't consider beta a beta unless there are limited slots that can't be bought into. When any amount of people can buy in then it is no longer beta, it is just an unfinished release.

[Fencers]

You can only really critique a product when it is launched though.

If there is an issue during beta test, fine.

If there is an issue after release, not fine.

That is properly how criticism is applied. No one reviews the draft. Even if the draft is mere days away from publication. You review the published work.

[Vespian]

You can only really critique a product when it is launched though.

If there is an issue during beta test, fine.

If there is an issue after release, not fine.

That is properly how criticism is applied. No one reviews the draft. Even if the draft is mere days away from publication. You review the published work.

Well, that would be a first in any development process then, Fencers. In a normal business situation, you have fixed points (they vary, can be time based, 'milestone' based if I'm using that correctly, etc) where you review points of your original plans.

It's no different with reviewing the product. You can't actually review it early, but any player, anyone with a shred of objectivity, should preview the game based on the product they are playing at that time. And then make a calculated guess how much the game is still going to improve, once launch is close.

It's the same when we post in a random Megathread. The state of the game is how it currently is. BETA is not an excuse, as long as everything is factual and not built by emotion. If the models and animations look shit during Closed BETA of a Western MMO, odds are they will be changed. If the models and animations look shit during Closed BETA of an Eastern MMO, they probably won't change. That's how it works.

Always this bullshit about it being BETA, somehow preventing you from judging it. You can always criticize the current state of anything in development and especially the past 5 years, something being in BETA is no longer a guarantee that the finished product will deliver.

[apepi]

Don't be rude to a game, make creative criticism and always give a solution to the problem that you want to be fixed.

Nothing is wrong when giving criticism, but it is wrong if you don't do it the right way.

[Fencers]

Well, that would be a first in any development process then, Fencers. In a normal business situation, you have fixed points (they vary, can be time based, 'milestone' based if I'm using that correctly, etc) where you review points of your original plans.

Those are internal reviews. External reviews are all done post release or when pressed.

[Airlick]

Games that are merely a few weeks away from launching that have consistent issues, I call them out, ESO for example, was no where near ready I was actually surprised after all the feedback they still did it. And it still has HUGE and CONSISTENT issues.

Wildstar is going down the same road. While more polished, is not ready.

Wildstar has no "HUGE and CONSISTENT" issues, unless we played a different game. It has some bugs and minor flaws, most of which will certainly be ironed out before the release.

Now as for ESO... Yeah, well.

[bbr]

You can only really critique a product when it is launched though.

If there is an issue during beta test, fine.

If there is an issue after release, not fine.

That is properly how criticism is applied. No one reviews the draft. Even if the draft is mere days away from publication. You review the published work.

Bug-free software does not exist.

How bugs are handled make all the difference though,.
bugs in release should be hotfixed - blizzard is notoriously bad at that.
e.g. "oh that can wait until the next major content patch"

[Bryntrollian]

Remember when companies actually payed for QA personnel to beta test their games ?

[jacob1805]

Remember when companies actually payed for QA personnel to beta test their games ?

I've been involved with several betas over the past 12 years, and have developed software for near as long. Beta has always been allowing customers to test the product. QA testing is in-house, and never catches as many issues as thousands of beta testers can. Specifically with MMOs and other online games/software, you're also testing the stability of the servers with that large of a group. You would never get the same results with an in house QA group. Most companies that I've worked for employ anywhere from 5-20 QA personnel per project, it's simply not feasible to expect them to catch as much as a beta test can. What you're describing isn't even alpha testing.

[HAcoreRD]

I agree with OP. It seems gamers will defend betas to the death. Hell I seen game in Aplha phases that are better than most betas or live launches (Starbound & DayZ for example).

I played this "Beta" free to play game for Xbox 360 last night... "Warface". It was made by Crysis and Farcry, so sounds good on paper, yes?

Let's just say, it was far from stable, graphics looked like something from Call of Duty 2, and the gameplay was lacking. But don't worry, they were still willing to take your $$$$ for guns/items in game.