My sentiments exactly. The mounted combat really intrigues me. Visually screenshots are stunning. Hopefully the final game in motion does justice to the screenshots.
Are there any screen shots of the mammoth and rhino? Do they actually do anything in a seige battle, if so what are the difference between the two?"
Intertia is taken into consideration in mounted combat, as is size.
A horse can run circles around a mammoth, but a mammoth can withstand more damage. Charging into battle on a mammoth, you better account for the size of the beast and your stopping distance, because the game takes the laws of physics into consideration. All mounts have different characteristics.
However, a much better indicator of "issues" with the game will be the NDA. When will they drop the NDA... if they do it like SW:G, 2 days before release, you know its a steaming pile of poo. The sooner they drop the NDA, the less worried about a flop at release I'll be. WoW went a long LONG time without an NDA, but they knew they had a good game that worked fairly well, so there was nothing to 'hide'. Other games.... they use the NDA to hide the problems.... that sounds reasonable, EXCEPT they hide the problems that they don't intend to fix prior to release as well (if ever).
Excellent point! Dropping the NDA is a good indicator of a game's quality.
With the release date coming up in a couple of months, we should expect Funcom to drop the NDA very soon and let the beta-testers reveal what they think. If they have a good game, they'll have nothing to fear and it will add to the hype.
These aren't only my words but those of the current AO game director.
No open beta is a good thing, since when did people -test- in there? right never( to the but i did! congrats you're one in a million again proving that open beta is useless and testing should be limited to a small group)
People are so used to being able to play an unfinished game during open beta and call it a trial or demo which is both false, it's time that trend ends and testing becomes testing and demo's are demo's, if they need more members after release they can always give trials atleast then people can get create a finished game experienced rather then a half finished i want to be unique so i must be in earlier and must let the whole world know how special i am opinion. yes i can hear some people cry that they didn't got a beta invite and i couldn't be happier today.
scougre, there's different kinds of beta testing. Bug reports shouldn't have to be filled out in the later stages, most bugs should have been squashed by that point. Later stages of beta testing are to stress the servers and to test the game itself. 5 people playing a MMO aren't going to reflect what the MMO is going to be like with 2000 people playing together. Can't simulate the PvP aspects, the economy aspects, the crowding issues, the lag issues.
Then there's testing the gameplay itself: Is it fun? What could be improved? How long/hard/tedious is the level climb? Too fast? Too slow? Too boring? What kinds of abuses/cheats can people find? 100,000 people testing a game will find that out a lot faster than 500 (if funcom has 15,000 testers, I'd bet they get concurrency numbers around that mark at max pop, PotBS did).
If I'm invited to a beta early in the process, I submit my bug reports (so I'm one in a million? heh don't think so), if I'm invited to a stress test or open beta, I'm there to test the game itself and stress the servers. I shouldn't HAVE to submit bug reports. Construvtive feedback responses, perhaps, if I find something I think could be improved or something that should be removed to increase fun.
And those testings can only happen during open beta?
Yes they were that selective with beta invites due to them only wanting to have people to fill in bug complaints and not give feedback. OPEN BETA does NOT aid the game at all it is MARKETING tool nothing more. From my range of experiences all good feedback gets lost when? during 'open beta', ridculous to suggest that closed beta is only for bugs. The best combination is to throw in people you know for sure of what they are throw in some griefers, gankers, carebears, explorers, PvPers, PvPers, achievers and harvest in the feedback don't not big numbers for that.
'Stimulate economy?' my friend the only good game economy that is player run is EVE and that's because they took the time to hire someone with a high degree in economics to do so, it's pen and paper work mixed with some real life economy knowledge and gaming experience that truelly is a 5 man job of all things.
100.000 people in beta to be honest is one big mess, why? majority is there to game(play not test) and due to the big mess on the forums you'll rarely see any developer or coder or content designer clarify themself, also more feedback to go thru which of 90% is rehashed a previous persons opinion, also more players means higher workload on GM's means longer queues means real bad bugs with priority are ignored more often as noone wants to wait several hours on support.
Servers are intended to have 6 to 8k people 15K to stress test zones, instances, servers not enough for you?
Knowing that those servers are split up by region so they will rarely reach their maximum peak of 8k.
Your logic looks nice on paper but reality is one differnt story.
scougre, you're saying that open beta doesn't help the games at all? That's bizarre thinking. I'm sure PotBS got good feedback from its open beta regarding things like Avatar Combat, the newbie mission setup, etc. They wouldn't have gotten this information without it.
Heck, in my own software development, with far few clients (300ish) to work with, we still have 'beta's. Any place (town/city/county government usually) that wants to (and is willing to take the risk) is welcome to test our betas. Betas aren't just about marketing, though that is a factor. WoW had an extremely long open beta and it helped that game through marketing AND making the game better. Other games like TB had a beta that went too big too early, and turned a lot of people off to it prematurely.
Eve's economy isn't good because they hired an economist (they added that guy only recently). Other games, heck, even single player games, have had "good economies" built into them (Railroad tycoon type games spring to mind). But in an MMO, you need thousands of players trying everything under the sun to see how the economy works out. PotBS had a problem with having a tiny beta population for a long time, and the economy worked "okay" for that small of number, but when they started adding beta testers, the problems with the economy became more apparent.
I've been in many closed beta's, and the developers had no idea of what type of player I was. Its the same as open beta for the most part. Just fewer people. The key part for the developer is alpha, get the game working right, mostly bug free, and then start inviting people outside of the core group of known testers.
I know you have to invite people who do weird things and do unusual things even in my business apps. When we deliver up a new app to our support/QC staff who aren't very tech savvy, they find issues that the programmers would never have thought to check for. And even then, we send the app out to the users in a beta so THEY can find the stuff that the support staff couldn't think of.
PotBS had 10,000+ people in the beta towards the end of its closed beta (prior to adding the fileplanet peeps or the stress test 2 peeps). Do you know how many people played the beta any given night? Max pops were about 150 brits, 150 pirates, 80 french, 80 spanish. Out of 10,000+. So if AOC has 15,000, you can bet they're getting 500ish playing. That's not stressing the servers. PotBS had 2 seperate stress tests to get more people to play and to try to crash the servers (both times successfully). Sure people play Open Beta to play. That's what you hope they'd be doing. If they were busy submitting bug reports, you opened your beta too soon.
AmazingAveryAge of Conan AdvocateMemberUncommonPosts: 7,188
Server stress I guess would be just like it was with LotRO, certain days each month on going, except by invite only.
PotBS had that kinda stuff too, but it wasn't anywhere near "real" population levels (hence the two fileplanet stress tests).
While I'm sure PotBS learned from their in-beta stress tests, they only discovered several (many) server problems/crashes when they turned on the faucet of outside testers. It comes down to statistics really, 15,000 sounds like a lot of people, except its no where near that many playing at any one time, even if you do schedule events to try to clump them up. Look at Eve, 200K accounts, and they hit 30Kish max pop. 15% or so, and that's a live game people are paying to play. Many of those 15,000 don't even play, and then there's a large chunk that barely play, etc... Its kinda like mass marketing, for every hundred ads you put out, you get 2-3 responses.
No open beta? Only time will tell if they are not having an open beta because the game is like Vanguard or it is so good already that they don't need one. Open beta is really a free trial. If the word is that the game sucks I feel not many will buy the game just to try it.
AmazingAveryAge of Conan AdvocateMemberUncommonPosts: 7,188
Originally posted by U-Turn
No open beta? Only time will tell if they are not having an open beta because the game is like Vanguard or it is so good already that they don't need one. Open beta is really a free trial. If the word is that the game sucks I feel not many will buy the game just to try it.
Well its had 6 months of Non public beta and then it will be nearly a year after that of Beta Testing at various stages. Maybe its pretty decent which is why there have only been a handfull of beta leaks, would be more if the 'word' sucks.
There isn't a need to be so skeptical or cynical in my opinion.
Tens of thousands of people will actually play/ test the game before release.
No open beta? Only time will tell if they are not having an open beta because the game is like Vanguard or it is so good already that they don't need one. Open beta is really a free trial. If the word is that the game sucks I feel not many will buy the game just to try it.
Why should it have a open beta ? , wait till the game gets released and then wait for a 7 / 14 / buddy pass trial thing if your not willing to buy it and absolutely have to "touch" everything before buying something.
I'm gonna try and get one of those limited edition boxes with the rhino. But push come to shove, mammoth is good too.
I hope the game performs well. I have a 3.6 ghz p4, 3 gb ram, and a raptor drive, but my graphics card is an ati x1950 256mb card. If the game is good I'll upgrade the graphics card, otherwise it runs LOTRO just fine.
Nice job to the writer of the article by the way. Very informative.
AmazingAveryAge of Conan AdvocateMemberUncommonPosts: 7,188
Originally posted by Terranah
I'm gonna try and get one of those limited edition boxes with the rhino. But push come to shove, mammoth is good too.
I hope the game performs well. I have a 3.6 ghz p4, 3 gb ram, and a raptor drive, but my graphics card is an ati x1950 256mb card. If the game is good I'll upgrade the graphics card, otherwise it runs LOTRO just fine.
Nice job to the writer of the article by the way. Very informative.
Sounds like my system a bit. Im ready to buy another PC and relegate this one to the wife though.
I am with you on the Rhino though!
They say the game will be highly scalable, so if you have a high "high" end system you can get what you paid for, and equally at the other end of the scale I think will suprise ppl too.
As others have pointed out, no open beta usually means developers are hiding something. If they have a fantastic game, they are losing marketing momentum and potential subscribers by not having an open beta. If they have a train wreck of a game, they are misleading their trusting pre-order customers by selling them something that's not ready for release.
Keep in mind, Funcom is the same company that created Anarchy Online, a game with one of the worst MMO launches ever. It wasn't until nearly a year after release that AO became reasonably playable.
I'd shell out the $90 to pre-order a collector's edition if I had a chance to try the game before buying, but without even two weeks of open beta, I'll keep my money and wait for a trial. I'm sure I'm not the only potential subscriber who feels this way.
Originally posted by Fion There hasn't been any MMOG really that benefited from an open beta, besides the load testing. Even when WoW had it's open beta 'weekends' it got nothing but negative comments about how it wasn't finished, the talents system wasn't in, the game consisted of camping mob spawns (which, in the newbie areas, is totally accurate,) how the quests are generic and stupid. It didn't get good 'player reviews' during these open beta try-outs at all.
IMHO I'd rather see them take that last month to polish instead of trying to appease some spoiled open testers, and just offer a free trial out of the gate, or soon after.
Fortunately as a potential customer and not the developer, I couldn't care less about whether a studio has benefited from an open beta or not.
While I can forgive graphical glitches and minor bugs and will still probably purchase a MMO that has these issues after testing it in open beta, I definitely will not purchase one on release if I have not had the opportunity to test it. It is a waste of my resources and normally just a frustrating experience.
There is also the relativity of MMO performance across different hardware platforms. Minimum standards are becoming less and less reliable as developers constantly massage their definitions of acceptable performance so that they can lower the minimum standards to get more sales.
If I meet or exceed the minimum standards and have not had an opportunity to actually test the game against my hardware, that standard is meaningless to me until I have actually tested it and found out what the developer considers acceptable performance against their minimum standards.
So while poor open beta reviews may have an impact on initial sales, in my opinion, their initial sales will suffer more because experienced MMO players will hold off on their purchase until they've had a chance to get a broad range of actual player feedback.
That is what the open beta accomplishes.
Abbatoir / Abbatoir Cinq Adnihilo Beorn Judge's Edge Somnulus Perfect Black ---------------------- Asheron's Call / Asheron's Call 2 Everquest / Everquest 2 Anarchy Online Shadowbane Dark Age of Camelot Star Wars Galaxies Matrix Online World of Warcraft Guild Wars City of Heroes
Fortunately as a potential customer and not the developer, I couldn't care less about whether a studio has benefited from an open beta or not. While I can forgive graphical glitches and minor bugs and will still probably purchase a MMO that has these issues after testing it in open beta, I definitely will not purchase one on release if I have not had the opportunity to test it. It is a waste of my resources and normally just a frustrating experience. There is also the relativity of MMO performance across different hardware platforms. Minimum standards are becoming less and less reliable as developers constantly massage their definitions of acceptable performance so that they can lower the minimum standards to get more sales. If I meet or exceed the minimum standards and have not had an opportunity to actually test the game against my hardware, that standard is meaningless to me until I have actually tested it and found out what the developer considers acceptable performance against their minimum standards. So while poor open beta reviews may have an impact on initial sales, in my opinion, their initial sales will suffer more because experienced MMO players will hold off on their purchase until they've had a chance to get a broad range of actual player feedback. That is what the open beta accomplishes.
I so don't care. The review looks great, good to know the female avatars are coming along as well.
Case to case basis, if that game you mentioned benefited so greatly from open beta then it was infested with un-experienced mmo gamers. Pulling random numbers out of your arse isn't really going to prove anyhthing either, i know more then you do and i know enough and therefor open beta is pointless from my opinion. You can keep on stating as if it's a fact that only good and ground breaking feedback is given during open beta, AoC beta works in waves to get the same effect. It has nothing to do with open beta it has everything to do with letting in some fresh air now and then...but please continue with your indirect begging for more free games oh sorry i ment beta's...it is really amusing.
Everywhere you look and see beta's are being handed out thru what? special deals it's all marketing, open beta is nothing but marketing. If they need more members they can always hand out trials at a later date you can't undo the damage done by a open beta.
I don't know if this is sarcasm or genuine questions, but it so touches upon the problem there is with AOC. We have so little information. The devs are putting up smokescreens and their friday updates are hilarious. Text updates rather than videos, screenshots at best.
Though plenty of videos are out, a lot of gameplay issues are not answered, many basic questions like yours. Questions that seem unresolved in the game (they aren't keeping it back to peek our curiousity).
Not having an open Beta is a BAAAAD thing. I doubt highly that Funcom will hire thousands of people to internally test Conan. If you dont pay someone to do it and you dont make it open for anyone to do it, then its not gonna be properly tested. how can you test if Funcom servers can handle 1000 people in one place unless those 1000 people will actually physically login into that area?
Even those only few people actually DO fill bug reports, some actually do. Even if 1 person out of 10 reports a bug, then out of 10000 free testers, a 1000 will report bugs, and thats a huge benefit. And dont forget about passive testing like once u finish a quest, a small window pops up and u choose options whether that quest was too hard or too easy, fun or not, reward is good or bad. It takes several clicks and isnt really intrusive or distracting but it gives developers a general idea on their questing content.
So yes, open beta helps a LOT, whether beta testers actually fill up reports or not. It helps even if players just login. As a software developer, I stay away from ANY software (game or not) that doesnt have some kind of trial after release, or open beta/test before the release. If they dont, chances are, theres a catch. If the game has nothing to worry about (good content, little bugs) then theres nothing to lose and lots to gain if they do have an open beta.
I dont see why people say not having an open beta means the game sucks.. now im not following AOC but im interested in WAR and that is also not having an open beta.
Closed betas in some ways are better they are more focused and the devs have more control over what they want tested, I tried the LOTRO open beta and im sure many people wre only in there for a free game, closed betas have people who are generally more dedicated to finding bugs and hence closed ebtas are more usefull.
sure open betas could be used for massive stress tests but when were looking at the number of applicants for beta AOC and WAR have they dont need an open beta they have more than enough willing people who want to find as many bugs as they can.
AmazingAveryAge of Conan AdvocateMemberUncommonPosts: 7,188
Originally posted by bobtheblob
I dont see why people say not having an open beta means the game sucks.. now im not following AOC but im interested in WAR and that is also not having an open beta. Closed betas in some ways are better they are more focused and the devs have more control over what they want tested, I tried the LOTRO open beta and im sure many people wre only in there for a free game, closed betas have people who are generally more dedicated to finding bugs and hence closed ebtas are more usefull. sure open betas could be used for massive stress tests but when were looking at the number of applicants for beta AOC and WAR have they dont need an open beta they have more than enough willing people who want to find as many bugs as they can.
Comments
My sentiments exactly. The mounted combat really intrigues me. Visually screenshots are stunning. Hopefully the final game in motion does justice to the screenshots.
"VENGER:
Are there any screen shots of the mammoth and rhino? Do they actually do anything in a seige battle, if so what are the difference between the two?"
Intertia is taken into consideration in mounted combat, as is size.
A horse can run circles around a mammoth, but a mammoth can withstand more damage. Charging into battle on a mammoth, you better account for the size of the beast and your stopping distance, because the game takes the laws of physics into consideration. All mounts have different characteristics.
Very cool.
No open Beta
20 fps in populated areas ?!
Bad feeling
Excellent point! Dropping the NDA is a good indicator of a game's quality.
With the release date coming up in a couple of months, we should expect Funcom to drop the NDA very soon and let the beta-testers reveal what they think. If they have a good game, they'll have nothing to fear and it will add to the hype.
Funcom never dropped a NDA.
These aren't only my words but those of the current AO game director.
No open beta is a good thing, since when did people -test- in there? right never( to the but i did! congrats you're one in a million again proving that open beta is useless and testing should be limited to a small group)
People are so used to being able to play an unfinished game during open beta and call it a trial or demo which is both false, it's time that trend ends and testing becomes testing and demo's are demo's, if they need more members after release they can always give trials atleast then people can get create a finished game experienced rather then a half finished i want to be unique so i must be in earlier and must let the whole world know how special i am opinion. yes i can hear some people cry that they didn't got a beta invite and i couldn't be happier today.
scougre, there's different kinds of beta testing. Bug reports shouldn't have to be filled out in the later stages, most bugs should have been squashed by that point. Later stages of beta testing are to stress the servers and to test the game itself. 5 people playing a MMO aren't going to reflect what the MMO is going to be like with 2000 people playing together. Can't simulate the PvP aspects, the economy aspects, the crowding issues, the lag issues.
Then there's testing the gameplay itself: Is it fun? What could be improved? How long/hard/tedious is the level climb? Too fast? Too slow? Too boring? What kinds of abuses/cheats can people find? 100,000 people testing a game will find that out a lot faster than 500 (if funcom has 15,000 testers, I'd bet they get concurrency numbers around that mark at max pop, PotBS did).
If I'm invited to a beta early in the process, I submit my bug reports (so I'm one in a million? heh don't think so), if I'm invited to a stress test or open beta, I'm there to test the game itself and stress the servers. I shouldn't HAVE to submit bug reports. Construvtive feedback responses, perhaps, if I find something I think could be improved or something that should be removed to increase fun.
And those testings can only happen during open beta?
Yes they were that selective with beta invites due to them only wanting to have people to fill in bug complaints and not give feedback.
OPEN BETA does NOT aid the game at all it is MARKETING tool nothing more. From my range of experiences all good feedback gets lost when? during 'open beta', ridculous to suggest that closed beta is only for bugs. The best combination is to throw in people you know for sure of what they are throw in some griefers, gankers, carebears, explorers, PvPers, PvPers, achievers and harvest in the feedback don't not big numbers for that.
'Stimulate economy?' my friend the only good game economy that is player run is EVE and that's because they took the time to hire someone with a high degree in economics to do so, it's pen and paper work mixed with some real life economy knowledge and gaming experience that truelly is a 5 man job of all things.
100.000 people in beta to be honest is one big mess, why? majority is there to game(play not test) and due to the big mess on the forums you'll rarely see any developer or coder or content designer clarify themself, also more feedback to go thru which of 90% is rehashed a previous persons opinion, also more players means higher workload on GM's means longer queues means real bad bugs with priority are ignored more often as noone wants to wait several hours on support.
Servers are intended to have 6 to 8k people 15K to stress test zones, instances, servers not enough for you?
Knowing that those servers are split up by region so they will rarely reach their maximum peak of 8k.
Your logic looks nice on paper but reality is one differnt story.
scougre, you're saying that open beta doesn't help the games at all? That's bizarre thinking. I'm sure PotBS got good feedback from its open beta regarding things like Avatar Combat, the newbie mission setup, etc. They wouldn't have gotten this information without it.
Heck, in my own software development, with far few clients (300ish) to work with, we still have 'beta's. Any place (town/city/county government usually) that wants to (and is willing to take the risk) is welcome to test our betas. Betas aren't just about marketing, though that is a factor. WoW had an extremely long open beta and it helped that game through marketing AND making the game better. Other games like TB had a beta that went too big too early, and turned a lot of people off to it prematurely.
Eve's economy isn't good because they hired an economist (they added that guy only recently). Other games, heck, even single player games, have had "good economies" built into them (Railroad tycoon type games spring to mind). But in an MMO, you need thousands of players trying everything under the sun to see how the economy works out. PotBS had a problem with having a tiny beta population for a long time, and the economy worked "okay" for that small of number, but when they started adding beta testers, the problems with the economy became more apparent.
I've been in many closed beta's, and the developers had no idea of what type of player I was. Its the same as open beta for the most part. Just fewer people. The key part for the developer is alpha, get the game working right, mostly bug free, and then start inviting people outside of the core group of known testers.
I know you have to invite people who do weird things and do unusual things even in my business apps. When we deliver up a new app to our support/QC staff who aren't very tech savvy, they find issues that the programmers would never have thought to check for. And even then, we send the app out to the users in a beta so THEY can find the stuff that the support staff couldn't think of.
PotBS had 10,000+ people in the beta towards the end of its closed beta (prior to adding the fileplanet peeps or the stress test 2 peeps). Do you know how many people played the beta any given night? Max pops were about 150 brits, 150 pirates, 80 french, 80 spanish. Out of 10,000+. So if AOC has 15,000, you can bet they're getting 500ish playing. That's not stressing the servers. PotBS had 2 seperate stress tests to get more people to play and to try to crash the servers (both times successfully). Sure people play Open Beta to play. That's what you hope they'd be doing. If they were busy submitting bug reports, you opened your beta too soon.
Server stress I guess would be just like it was with LotRO, certain days each month on going, except by invite only.
PotBS had that kinda stuff too, but it wasn't anywhere near "real" population levels (hence the two fileplanet stress tests).
While I'm sure PotBS learned from their in-beta stress tests, they only discovered several (many) server problems/crashes when they turned on the faucet of outside testers. It comes down to statistics really, 15,000 sounds like a lot of people, except its no where near that many playing at any one time, even if you do schedule events to try to clump them up. Look at Eve, 200K accounts, and they hit 30Kish max pop. 15% or so, and that's a live game people are paying to play. Many of those 15,000 don't even play, and then there's a large chunk that barely play, etc... Its kinda like mass marketing, for every hundred ads you put out, you get 2-3 responses.
No open beta? Only time will tell if they are not having an open beta because the game is like Vanguard or it is so good already that they don't need one. Open beta is really a free trial. If the word is that the game sucks I feel not many will buy the game just to try it.
There isn't a need to be so skeptical or cynical in my opinion.
Tens of thousands of people will actually play/ test the game before release.
Why should it have a open beta ? , wait till the game gets released and then wait for a 7 / 14 / buddy pass trial thing if your not willing to buy it and absolutely have to "touch" everything before buying something.
List of SOE lies
5 of my friends won't have to worry about not be able to try before buy if I can get my hands on Collector's Edition, which features 5 buddy keys
NEW IDEAS that can refresh the STALE state of MMORPGs
I'm gonna try and get one of those limited edition boxes with the rhino. But push come to shove, mammoth is good too.
I hope the game performs well. I have a 3.6 ghz p4, 3 gb ram, and a raptor drive, but my graphics card is an ati x1950 256mb card. If the game is good I'll upgrade the graphics card, otherwise it runs LOTRO just fine.
Nice job to the writer of the article by the way. Very informative.
Sounds like my system a bit. Im ready to buy another PC and relegate this one to the wife though.
I am with you on the Rhino though!
They say the game will be highly scalable, so if you have a high "high" end system you can get what you paid for, and equally at the other end of the scale I think will suprise ppl too.
As others have pointed out, no open beta usually means developers are hiding something. If they have a fantastic game, they are losing marketing momentum and potential subscribers by not having an open beta. If they have a train wreck of a game, they are misleading their trusting pre-order customers by selling them something that's not ready for release.
Keep in mind, Funcom is the same company that created Anarchy Online, a game with one of the worst MMO launches ever. It wasn't until nearly a year after release that AO became reasonably playable.
I'd shell out the $90 to pre-order a collector's edition if I had a chance to try the game before buying, but without even two weeks of open beta, I'll keep my money and wait for a trial. I'm sure I'm not the only potential subscriber who feels this way.
Fortunately as a potential customer and not the developer, I couldn't care less about whether a studio has benefited from an open beta or not.
While I can forgive graphical glitches and minor bugs and will still probably purchase a MMO that has these issues after testing it in open beta, I definitely will not purchase one on release if I have not had the opportunity to test it. It is a waste of my resources and normally just a frustrating experience.
There is also the relativity of MMO performance across different hardware platforms. Minimum standards are becoming less and less reliable as developers constantly massage their definitions of acceptable performance so that they can lower the minimum standards to get more sales.
If I meet or exceed the minimum standards and have not had an opportunity to actually test the game against my hardware, that standard is meaningless to me until I have actually tested it and found out what the developer considers acceptable performance against their minimum standards.
So while poor open beta reviews may have an impact on initial sales, in my opinion, their initial sales will suffer more because experienced MMO players will hold off on their purchase until they've had a chance to get a broad range of actual player feedback.
That is what the open beta accomplishes.
Abbatoir / Abbatoir Cinq
Adnihilo
Beorn Judge's Edge
Somnulus
Perfect Black
----------------------
Asheron's Call / Asheron's Call 2
Everquest / Everquest 2
Anarchy Online
Shadowbane
Dark Age of Camelot
Star Wars Galaxies
Matrix Online
World of Warcraft
Guild Wars
City of Heroes
I so don't care. The review looks great, good to know the female avatars are coming along as well.
Case to case basis, if that game you mentioned benefited so greatly from open beta then it was infested with un-experienced mmo gamers. Pulling random numbers out of your arse isn't really going to prove anyhthing either, i know more then you do and i know enough and therefor open beta is pointless from my opinion. You can keep on stating as if it's a fact that only good and ground breaking feedback is given during open beta, AoC beta works in waves to get the same effect. It has nothing to do with open beta it has everything to do with letting in some fresh air now and then...but please continue with your indirect begging for more free games oh sorry i ment beta's...it is really amusing.
Everywhere you look and see beta's are being handed out thru what? special deals it's all marketing, open beta is nothing but marketing. If they need more members they can always hand out trials at a later date you can't undo the damage done by a open beta.
I almost died laughing reading this..
I don't know if this is sarcasm or genuine questions, but it so touches upon the problem there is with AOC. We have so little information. The devs are putting up smokescreens and their friday updates are hilarious. Text updates rather than videos, screenshots at best.
Though plenty of videos are out, a lot of gameplay issues are not answered, many basic questions like yours. Questions that seem unresolved in the game (they aren't keeping it back to peek our curiousity).
Not having an open Beta is a BAAAAD thing. I doubt highly that Funcom will hire thousands of people to internally test Conan. If you dont pay someone to do it and you dont make it open for anyone to do it, then its not gonna be properly tested. how can you test if Funcom servers can handle 1000 people in one place unless those 1000 people will actually physically login into that area?
Even those only few people actually DO fill bug reports, some actually do. Even if 1 person out of 10 reports a bug, then out of 10000 free testers, a 1000 will report bugs, and thats a huge benefit. And dont forget about passive testing like once u finish a quest, a small window pops up and u choose options whether that quest was too hard or too easy, fun or not, reward is good or bad. It takes several clicks and isnt really intrusive or distracting but it gives developers a general idea on their questing content.
So yes, open beta helps a LOT, whether beta testers actually fill up reports or not. It helps even if players just login. As a software developer, I stay away from ANY software (game or not) that doesnt have some kind of trial after release, or open beta/test before the release. If they dont, chances are, theres a catch. If the game has nothing to worry about (good content, little bugs) then theres nothing to lose and lots to gain if they do have an open beta.
I am the type of player where I like to do everything and anything from time to time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor - pre-WW2 genocide.
I suspect they have invited 10 odd thousand testers thus far to their Technical beta specifically for load testing.
I dont see why people say not having an open beta means the game sucks.. now im not following AOC but im interested in WAR and that is also not having an open beta.
Closed betas in some ways are better they are more focused and the devs have more control over what they want tested, I tried the LOTRO open beta and im sure many people wre only in there for a free game, closed betas have people who are generally more dedicated to finding bugs and hence closed ebtas are more usefull.
sure open betas could be used for massive stress tests but when were looking at the number of applicants for beta AOC and WAR have they dont need an open beta they have more than enough willing people who want to find as many bugs as they can.
Warhammer is not having an Open Beta either!?