GlobalChrys Registered User
Posts: 167
(4/22/04 12:09 am)
beta testing expansions
This is an old topic. Players have been griping about it at least since Velious, and its effects have been felt i am sure ever since the first player had a quest piece eaten while doing their veeshan's peak key.
Its about beta testing raid content. Sony has over the years perfected the art of neglect as a means of extending the shelf life of their expansions.
With each new expansion it seems the level of acceptable bugs in upper teir encounters expands. And the length of time they go unfixed increases.
I'm sure this makes Sony executives who don't play the game look at numbers and say, "oh wow, our programmers are doing a great job, look they put out an expansion that took players 8 months to complete". Never mind that 5 of those months were spent by the players beating their heads against artificial walls put up either by sloppy grade school calibre coding mistakes, or a purposely thought out staged glass ceiling. Bugs designed into the game on purpose to buy developers at Sony more time to either finish the current expansion or get further ahead on the next. While we pay our 13 bucks a month..
Luclin - VT key cockblock, for several months it wasn't possible to finish the key.
Planes of Power - Rallos Zek, rediculous adds/agro for a few months till tweaked. Then Rathe Council.. how hard was it for sony to see what needed fixing? Their programmers perfect the art of being dumb, blind and deaf to /feedback.
Gates of Discord - here we are again, uqua. And if Sony holds true to form, there will be another majorly bugged hurdle that will take 2 more months to fix after players get past this.
Watching #1 guilds lose members out of frustration with each new expansion is getting old. I can see a bug being /feedback'd taking a week to fix. But how does sony justify a month? or two months? or longer sometimes? What no-armed, no-legged, tongueless tree sloth do they have typing in code?
Would it be so hard to beta test high end raid content all the way up to and including the last mob in an expansion? Would it be so bad if 40-72 players server wide knew these encounters before the expansion shipped? As opposed to 4000 - 8000 players serverwide going through months of frustration tackling broken encounters/quests?
Make beta testing high end raid content a prize. Which ever guild beats a previous expansion's top mob first gets X number of players put into the beta for high end raid content testing. Have designers walk them through the beta, make sure things work, then release the expansion and change a few minor details: the shape of the room, the resists used, the delay of the AE, the mob's location in a zone, its appearance. Just enough to throw em a curve. If they were the #1 guild in the last expansion, odds are they would have mowed through this crap regardless since its bug free.
That kind of beta testing prize does 2 things: one, brings back serverwide competition to be #1 by providing a real reward. And two, provides the thousands of the rest of us slobs with non bugged content before we get there and add our /feedbacks to the thousands of other /feedbacks that are being ignored.
I know, old topic, but was on my mind all day.
Belzipy Registered User
Posts: 3
(4/22/04 1:06 am)
Re: beta testing expansions
I was in GoD beta, and i remember actually beta testing Uqua. You gotta pity SoE, they asked for high class time lvl characters to test the zone, they got 25 nagafen raiders. It was piss poor and sickening, you just cant have an open beta and test it properly - they need a team of raiders just to test their crap and play on some obscure server getting paid to do it - but they arent gonna waste money and resources on that.
Re: beta testing expansions
Part of the issue is they make it very hard for people to see any value in spending the time to beta test. They recruit from the main server population.
What they should do is allow everyone that plays on TEST, the ability to automatically access the beta content as a part of TEST.
Make it so that any player with a character with more than 40 hours played time on TEST can access the new beta content as it's rolled out on TEST. Use TEST for what it was originally desinged for. Live testing of the content and code ideas!
I know. It's too logical. All I can say is it makes Sony as a Japanese firm look like @#%$, and India as an IT resource look like a @#%$ pool. Frankly I get twitchy when ever any one suggests I buys a Sony product anymore. Even blank cassettes I'd rather buy JVC now.
Elemer Vec Nessar you don't remember me but i remember you
i lie awake and try so hard not to think of you
but who can decide what they dream?
and dream i do...- Evanescence
Quote:All I can say is it makes Sony as a Japanese firm look like @#%$
EQ is run by Sony online entertainment (America), I'm willing to bet that not too many of the people who call the shots in corporate EQ terms are Japanese, oddly enough.
Gurgeh Registered User
Posts: 101
(4/22/04 3:19 am)
re
PoP beta testing was over hum... september 2003 or so, when Coirnav event was finaly fixed, then PoP balance, and content were mostly working 'as intended'.
Beta testing is more like 'pre alpha testing'. As you said in beta they get 25 casual raiders for beta test. Ok fine. But at the moment I bet they could find a guild raiding Uqua every day, and maybe even every day an euro raiding guild, raiding the top end content during their work hour.
They should just get rid of the beta testing, let everyone play for free the new expansion for 45 - 60 days on the live server, and then once it has been properly 'beta tested' ship the expansion.
Re: re
I wonder if it would have made ANY difference by shipping GoD 2 months later for the playerbase.
For some VP somewhere in SoE, yes. But for the players, I think not.
Regardless they really seem to need a core of paid pros to do the whole testing and ship POLISHED content.
And the information minister said:
"Classes are not that out of balance --AbsorEQ"
myriick Registered User
Posts: 239
(4/22/04 4:06 am)
Re: re
agreed open beta is actually open alpha testing the entire population of ever quest beta tests the content when they pay for the expansion
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Zymurg Registered User
Posts: 67
(4/22/04 9:10 am)
Re: re
LOL, ahh the benefits of being a year behind in content.
GlobalChrys Registered User
Posts: 168
(4/22/04 10:11 am)
Re: re
my complaint is, i think they do it on purpose.
If expansions shipped bug free, players would beat expansions in 3 - 4 months every time. Perhaps faster.
Instead Sony puts in artificial bugs in the high end and takes their sweat time fixing these bugs. Thus expansions take 8 months to beat and Sony isn't under the gun so much to put out new content faster. Thus extending the overal life of their game and how long players continue to pay 13 dollars a month.
If every expansion shipped were bug free, and a new expansion shipped within 2 - 3 months of the previous one being beat, after 5 years Sony would be on its 9th expansion by now. Instead its on its 7th (5th if you don't include those glorified add on packs: LDON and LoY).
re:
A few months? who you trying to kid? dont expect WoW to go public anytime before December, even then. Blizzard still has several classes to test, plus all the 30+ content which doesnt really exist yet, not to mention the fact everything will have to be balanced to near perfection before they put the stamp of approval on it.
The question you need to ask yourself is this, Blizzard and Sony have two completely different methods with games, say there both going to release the same product, they start beta testing it at the same time say January, come March, Sony releases the product which has been tested by beta buffed noobs who dont know what high end raiding is, while Blizzard is still beta testing, go 3-4 months later, guilds which have been blocked on broken content are finally making progression, even tho they've lost 20% of there players from anger, while Blizzard is still beta testing. The sad fact of the matter is, the top guilds on each server that keep head butting against the bugged encounters would amount to about 1-5% of the server populations, players they lose can quickly be recruited from the rest of the player base, and by the time the content has been tested and tuned by the high end guilds, the second tier of guilds are gonna be reaching a tuned event, its a screwed up way of doing things, but financially, its sound. And while all of this is happening, Blizzard will still be beta testing there product, I mean come on, how long after Blizzard first announced a estimated shipping date did they actually ship WC3?. If Blizzard had shipped GoD, Guilds would just about be entering the final zone from the Sony production. Its just a matter of which is the lesser evil. Im not condoning what Sony is doing, its pretty much killed my play time on EQ, Ive gone from raiding 5-6 days a week, to 1-2 days raiding which is a struggle as it is, but you need to be realistic about these things, and saying that everyone will be playing WoW when it comes out is a little short sighted, the majority of players will stay with EQ, the majority of those leaving will be the frustrated top 5%, the rest pretty much never run into the broken content like the uber guilds do.
fronn99 Registered User lvl1
Posts: 28
(4/24/04 9:49 am)
Re: re:
blame the management, not the devs
management tells them when the game will ship, devs just dont have enough time to do everything.. game ships early.. bugs are there.. management doesnt care.. devs get stuck with a shitstorm of hate
in most cases the problems with games are caused by management in one way or another..
Re: re:
Also didn't help the GoD beta when people were constantly getting stuck and dying in POK.
Or the dread i got objects, trees, and doors but no walls, ground, sky, water bug.
I got that one and it was never fixed.
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Card Carrying Member of The Safehouse.
Classes are not that out of balance -AbsorEQ
An EverQuest Rogue Scowls at a Sony Dev, ready to leave for World of Warcraft!
What would you like your patch message to say? Dazzlers Shtuff
Re: re:
One of the things they actually used to do (they = Verant) was to test new mobs / encounters on established guilds. A few times pre kunark the guild I was with was invited to try new things by the devs and lead gm's, and I know that it happened fairly often to others and on other servers too.
Perhaps I'm out of the loop utterly, but I havent heard of anything like that happening since after Velious was released.
God knows PoP and GoD couldve used some real testing like that... if they actually wanted them tuned properly that is.
Re: re:
Beta testing is a joke. I did it once and never again. In the world of software, development goes something like this:
- Alpha: very buggy code typically tested only by the developers and a small group of team or in-house testers. Alpha testing is the process of getting out major and obvious bugs;
- Beta: reasonably stable code. Beta testing is all about fine-tuning, finding less obvious bugs and letting a wider group of people test things because they might come across things you might not have thought of;
- (optional) RC (release candidate): this is code that is essentially production code but it goes through final approval and stress testing to make sure it works as intended under load. Major revisions are possible at this point. When they happen the code base will revert to a beta (or even alpha) stage for in-house testing until such a time as the next RC is out; and
- Production: final code. Not immune to bug fixes, fine tuning and future enhancements but the code should be in a polished and relatively finished state.
Expansion "betas" aren't really betas at all: they're alphas. Some of the things not working or buggy in them are truly shocking. Zones continually going down and the like. Things like that shouldn't be released to beta testers. If a dev can't run through Ferubi (for example) without crashing the zone then why are people "beta" testing it? Ist ridiculous.
The real beta testing of expansions comes after release when the first-tier guilds go through the content. Whats worse is that expansions are released in an unfinished state to the point where SoE cockblocks guilds because the later content isn't done yet. This has happened every expansion since Luclin. Everyone knows it yet SoE maintains the facade of plausible deniability by talking about "fine-tuning" and "balancing" of encounters when its entirely obvious to anyone things need to drastically change.
SoE's release scheduling, if it were to be used in almost any of the places I've worked, would get someone rapidly fired. Its fine to release an expansion before the end-zone is ready but that end-zone should be on track for release at about the time guilds get to it. The GoD "beta" should've occurred 1+ month later when it was ready for real testing.
Re: re:
pre-alpha ... This is where the Beta Testers are...
Quote:- Alpha: very buggy code typically tested only by the developers and a small group of team or in-house testers. Alpha testing is the process of getting out major and obvious bugs;
This is where the high end guilds are
Quote:- Beta: reasonably stable code. Beta testing is all about fine-tuning, finding less obvious bugs and letting a wider group of people test things because they might come across things you might not have thought of;
This is somewhat where mid-end guilds are.
Quote:- (optional) RC (release candidate): this is code that is essentially production code but it goes through final approval and stress testing to make sure it works as intended under load. Major revisions are possible at this point. When they happen the code base will revert to a beta (or even alpha) stage for in-house testing until such a time as the next RC is out; and
I don't think SoE knows a stage such as this one even exist in their world, none the less if they are reading it now, i bet they would be laughting at it right this moment.
Kittenpeeler Registered User
Posts: 5
(4/25/04 11:19 pm)
Re: re:
Don't go blaming those of us who beta tested.
I did betas for LdoN and GoD. LDoN was easy to test... And if you think it's a simpleton drool-fest now, you should have tried it back in Beta when you could sneeze and win the adventure on a hard 65.
GoD, though, Well, there were all kinds of problems. Every critter I came across saw invis and SoS and ignored FD and FM - It was difficult to get past them, to say the least, particularly since the porter to Natimbi put you on the stairs near the Qinimi zone. Toss in the frequent crashes of poK and other travel zones, and the massively buggy zone problems (objects would dissappear at random, you could catapult by going up a hill, and the plain ol' graphical glitches caused by BIG zones, high textures and bad code)
The real losers of the GoD beta were the Berserkers, though. You couldn't /Betabuff them. Most of the game's hunting zones were unavailable. There was a bug where you could join a raid and gain a few levels of exp. People scavenged betabuffs for Berserker gear. You simply couldn't DO ANYTHING to test them, much less iron out the high end stuff, or see what was missing. There should have been two beta servers. One for the expansion, the other for the class with full beta status. Let the raiders and such be recruited for the expansion beta, and let the norms pop into the Berserker beta.
edit - sigx0r t00 bigx0r! Please keep your sig under 15k as per our forum rules Thanks - LTEdited by: Llabak Tharr at: 4/26/04 12:10 pm
Shamroc1 Registered User
Posts: 737
(4/26/04 12:51 pm)
Re: re:
And the devs said in. . .
SoL - Lets add more cha advancement, new models, new meningful factions, and a SOOPER ZONE.
PoP - EQ2 will be here soon. Lets make the players kill all the lore of the game and captian planet.
LoY - Oh Noz we fogotZ the PoP n00b content. Toss that shists in for like 20 Dollezrs. Ugh. . . lets make CHARMS YEA hahahah that way its a Boni Fide Xpan with somethng new. HARZZ.
LDoN - Ug. . . since intell is behind . . .and the P5 10Gz cpus arent ready . . .IXNAY ON THE EQ2FAY. The players will PAY 29usd for ANYTHING with EQ on it . . case and point LOY RoFOLOflolZ. Instancing yea . . instanceing.. . Its really only 5 new zones but we can call it 40 HARZ.
Gates - HAHAH we can make them PAY 29usd for ANYTHING. Heres yer "Lost raid content of LDoN" hahahhahaha RoflOLrOFOFOLZ. Toss in a monster quest and like 4 new mobs. HAHAHAHA Playerbase PWNTZ!~
And thats the way it happend, True story.
Montecrizto Registered User
Posts: 16
(4/27/04 1:17 am)
Re: re:
Betabuffed zerkers were avail at the end of beta for at least a week or two.
There were plenty of high end raiders around beta originally; somebody just made a HUGE mistake in trying to test the DX9 engine along with GoD... Beta was pretty unplayable for most people for well over a week, so people just stopped trying to log in altogether even after they took the DX9 engine out. So when most of the raid testing should have been done.. thats when they had to settle for a lot of betabuffed chars and it was generally just hard to get a well-balanced raid force together. Clerics were damned near nonexistant in GoD beta.
Even so, I agree they intentionally put in these blocks every expansion to slow things down. Especially in one like GoD, where there are no level/ aa limitations initially that players will need to work on in order to raid successfully. The only things holding guilds back from progressing are gear upgrades and experience with each raid encounter. Take out the block, and the top guilds would finish the expansion in a matter of 3 months or so. Now, you have a much larger portion of the guild quitting after this time because the next expansion isn't even in sight yet with no new content to look forward to.
As it is now, a lot of high end players are quitting/ hardly logging in, but they are still stringing a large number along with the new content/uber loot that they know lies ahead.
Re: re:
GlobalChrys has it right. SoE puts in fake bugs and all sorts of BS so they can finish the high end content.
When PoP was released there were a few people ported to PoTime during the first week of release and the zone was not finished. SoE swore that everything was complete, but they were proven wrong by a select few people.
What better way is there to give the devs more time to get everything set than to add bugs and impossible content?
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