Bewitched, Bothered, Bewildered

With the new expansion for World of Warcraft sort-of-vaguely-possibly-maybe ramping up for Beta in the form of a competition for those with art skills (the prize being a replica of the Lich King’s Frostmourne sword and a guaranteed Beta spot) I’ve been delving in to the sad world of the World of Warcraft beta testers.

I’ve tested games in the past, including a good twelve months spent in Vanguard: Saga of Heroes prior to release which was sadly the most exciting twelve months of my whole time in the world of Telon. Every game community differs in it’s approach to Beta, some of them are well implemented, some communities consider it to be an elite club that only they should be a part of and some are for the most part free-for-alls. I’m used to the WoW community so had a fair idea of the stupidity to expect from it’s possible Beta testers yet my expectations were far exceeded.

Despite how the community may approach it, Beta testing is usually handled in a traditional and simple manner dictated by the standard procedures used to test any piece of software. It’s usually performed on just one server for the most part, potential testers then submit their details and computer specification in the style of a CV, these applications are added into a huge pool of potential testers and as time passes this pool is slowly brought in when needed. All testers are kept track of and given clear instructions on how to report feedback and bugs to the development team and they are all made aware of just how unstable the test program may be. These stages are not for playing, they are for testing, though granted you can’t test without playing you are still expected to try out the extremes, repeat events to judge just how often a problem occurs and try to cover as many features as possible.

In the final stages we then get the open beta known as the ’stress test’ to see just how many players a server can handle in the mad dash for entry, then the game is officially launched. This stage is mostly just about playing and getting an early look at the game, it’s a huge PR stunt for the most part but it does serve the purpose of seeing just how hard you can push your server-side hardware.

So far the WoW community has apparently expected something akin to Open Beta from day one, which really comes as no shock to me. However there have been some truly outrageous ideas posted which even I wasn’t expected.

Take for example the one guy who was just outraged at this latest competition, apparently labouring under the delusion that these two players who won would be the only players ever to test the game. Ever. Then yet another bloke (or kiddie, it’s very hard to tell) suggested we all be allowed to pay a subscription fee and run our own server that anyone who can pay the fee will have access to. This is so far removed from the standard practices of a beta as to be ridiculous yet he didn’t seem to be all that clear on why it was a stupid idea.

Yes, my expectations of just how stupid the community are capable of being have been well and truly surpassed.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 10th, 2008 at 2:10 pm and is filed under Gaming, Vanguard : Saga of Heroes, World of Warcraft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.