Beta-testing on the agenda or not ?

General discussions about X Rebirth.

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VincentTH
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Post by VincentTH » Mon, 10. Oct 11, 19:54

Alien Tech Inc. wrote:
TSM wrote:
softweir wrote:
Skid wrote:
softweir wrote:Keeping your mouth closed is hard. I very nearly lost my level 5 status quite early on in testing X3. :(
Its worth mentioning the fact that since you have to physical sign the NDA makes it a binding contract. So they can literally take you to court for breach of contract if you break the NDA.
Indeed they could, if you handed code to a pirate or competitor!
or if you spoke about testing in an open forum ;)
If you reveal anything specific.
Talking about testing without talking about WHAT you are testing should be ok.

but I could be wrong :roll:
Now that Black Prophecy is opened, I can say that just mere talking to the forum that you are a Beta tester is a violation of the Closed Beta testing NDA. I know that as fact, as I was one (until I quit because it keep crashing with CRT0005 and the devs unable to fix it)

Mightysword
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Post by Mightysword » Mon, 10. Oct 11, 20:01

Ketraar wrote:So yes testing is a PITA and nowhere even near fun.
Depend on what mind set people going into testing. To a lot if not most people doing open BETA I think it's just a "ohhh I get to play the game early". The better part is that some might even go into rage mode and completely forget that they're betaing like "OMG BUGS!! WTF!?!?". Oh yes and there is even that epilogue where you see the mistakes spot in Beta still exist in the final release because the developers "doesn't want to listen" :P

Great fun, but if you don't want to walk the walk, it's paid to be ignorance :wink:

Dantrithor
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Post by Dantrithor » Mon, 10. Oct 11, 22:44

LTerSlash wrote:Here we go...

ive participated on several closed beta tests in my life, and a lot of open betas tests, and i can say, no one test anything, and when someone do generally devs dont listen to the feedback because they dont even bother about, since almost no one is testing.

People wanting for beta, they just want and early access to the game, thats all. and "open betas" are a joke at best, they are just a demo, only usefull to stress test servers for multiplayer gameplay or heavy load (if its a MMO).
And that is the reason why closed betas usually go through several stages of "contacting" people to take part on it: So through numbers they get people actually worried about testing.

I have also taken part in early beta's of games (closed with NDA, and open) and it was rather easy to see who was collaborating, and who was raging (and sometimes you could also see people trying to help, but without knowing how to do it properly). And I have not seen a bug go ignored when properly documented yet, at least you would always get a developer/representative response, and a number indicating the reference for the bug; in some betas the tester who reported a bug could actually follow that bug until it was fixed, to add or correct information, or ideas.

Another matter are the "game shut down, fix it!" messages during betas. Those are ignored for obvious reasons. My guess it's because the developers don't get enough budget for crystal balls.

Virtualaughing
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Post by Virtualaughing » Tue, 11. Oct 11, 01:21

Alien Tech Inc. wrote:
TSM wrote:
softweir wrote:
Skid wrote:
softweir wrote:Keeping your mouth closed is hard. I very nearly lost my level 5 status quite early on in testing X3. :(
Its worth mentioning the fact that since you have to physical sign the NDA makes it a binding contract. So they can literally take you to court for breach of contract if you break the NDA.
Indeed they could, if you handed code to a pirate or competitor!
or if you spoke about testing in an open forum ;)
If you reveal anything specific.
Talking about testing without talking about WHAT you are testing should be ok.

but I could be wrong :roll:
The only way to keep a secret if you told noone you have one

"I had to quote the whole text because we all so stupid including me we can not follow such a simple convo"
"So lets quote every post in one to beta test how this forum will response to such nonsense"
X to X3 is MENU SUPERIOR!
I think Egosoft has already worked out our doom, because Xenon AI will reach the stars! :D

LTerSlash
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Post by LTerSlash » Wed, 12. Oct 11, 06:10

Ketraar wrote:No idea where you did all that testing, but in the TC testing phase a lot of people made a huge effort and so did the devs. Sure there are always the ones that only are there for curiosity, but you can spot those quite fast. So yes testing is a PITA and nowhere even near fun.

As for Rebirth...#connection failure&%...@#data corruption detected/8%..

:-P

MFG

Ketraar
I going to give you one example, ive been in the Darkfall closed beta since the game come out of alpha stage, that was the early stage of a game test i ever been, at first it was ok, small group of testers, handpicked, the testing was going fine, but slow, so as the release date was coming near and near, they decided to add more people, from the forums, old ones, everything started going downhill from that point, because most of the new ones where not doing a beta test, they where playing for fun, beta testing is not fun at all, and they where just making things worse for actual testers and devs that they have to deal with a lot of "this dont work fix it", "this is unbalanced, fix it", and a lonnnng etc.

Players cant be testers, thats a fact.

Now in a singleplayer game, testing is not the same, still players cant be testers.

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BigBANGtheory
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Post by BigBANGtheory » Wed, 12. Oct 11, 10:03

I think people have different understandings of beta testing, in the pure sense it is to drive out bugs relating to functional and non-functional requirements of software.

Games are a special type of software centered around entertainment so its understandable that beta testers have a desire to change things as opposed to simply flag problems.

So what you have is a blur of terms like demo, pre-purchase beta, open beta, closed beta with different expectations from everyone.

If you just cut to the chase what most people want is to experience X Rebirth as soon as possible in some form or other so that they can feedback their experience to Egosoft in the hope they agree and change things accordingly.

I think ED got it right with DCS-A10C where they allowed people to pre-purchase the game allowed them to play the beta at various stages and set no dates for the final release. So they got:
1. money coming in at full whack retail price
2. a community of players & testers
3. a high degree of slack in not having to produce community updates screenshots comments etc
4. a community selling the game for them and building up momentum
5. smooth day 1 release
6. very happy fan base
7. a final release when they were ready

I don't know if that arrangement would work for Egosoft, but its worth considering it seemed to work well all round for ED and they aren't a big developer by any means.

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