An Art of Balance

posted on November 24th, 2011, 9:08 pm

I agree completely.

I was under the impression that you guys do it that way because of things the devs had told me and because of the distinct lack of discussion about play-testing.

I never said it was a good idea to go strictly by the numbers.  That wouldn't make any sense.

posted on November 25th, 2011, 1:53 pm

From our experience, the community actually hates to play buggy, unbalanced, and problematic things  ^-^ . In 3.0.0 there was also a series of more open betas - but they were quite some work to maintain community-involvement wise. However, there are of course a number of different issues:

Thats why you should create a beta group and ask for volunteers, how can a volunteer complain he/she doesn't like buggy unbalanced things 

I see this as being more helpful than a problem, the beta testers can find the unbalanced things and report them and save ALOT of time for the devs, the only negative side i see from this is how long it takes to organize the files for release and upload but i think only a dev could tell us that.

posted on November 25th, 2011, 7:47 pm

I think we should have semi-open betas. Only open to players who play a lot. Players who break rules about the beta get kikked. Plus a member limit of 10 or 20, whichever is better for making sure most of the community isn't playing the beta.

posted on November 26th, 2011, 4:30 am

I think that is a decisively bad idea. Splitting the community up will only promote elitism and divide players into "good enough for beta" and not. Please don't do this.

posted on November 26th, 2011, 2:15 pm

I think that is a decisively bad idea. Splitting the community up will only promote elitism and divide players into "good enough for beta" and not. Please don't do this.

WTF are you kidding me.... the beta group would have nothing to do with people with more skill its about whos got more time to help, what a stupid thing to say.

Do the mods go around thinking they are better than everyone.

posted on November 26th, 2011, 3:23 pm

I would like to play beta. And excluding abusers would be good as well imo.

[Tryptic]

posted on November 26th, 2011, 4:42 pm

Last edited by Tryptic on November 26th, 2011, 4:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.

that's an interesting problem.  While I do agree that a limited beta would promote elitism, it's not like you can go ahead without any beta testers at all.  There are already beta testers, and this conversation is starting to make me understand why they don't show themselves to us.

The fact of the matter is, some players ARE good enough for playtesting and some AREN'T.  At the same time, some players just have enough time and some don't.  If people in the community aren't mature enough to accept the fact that some of us are better than others, that's not the devs' fault.  You just have to move forward with what you've got and encourage people to be nice about it.  And I believe the next step forward is to have a larger pool of testers.

MrXT, when you say something that makes sense but then you insult the person you're responding to, all it does is weaken your position and annoy people.  If you're not going to clean up your language, you need to shut up because in the end, being rude is worse than being wrong.

posted on November 26th, 2011, 5:08 pm

Honestly, not everyone has the interest in beta testing. Hundreds of people can fail to report a bug/flaw.

I think being presented fully working patches is more in the spirit of growing the community. The smaller you make the current "active" patch's player base the less people there are online to skirmish against. Which is another consideration.

posted on November 26th, 2011, 9:56 pm

I think being presented fully working patches is more in the spirit of growing the community. The smaller you make the current "active" patch's player base the less people there are online to skirmish against. Which is another consideration.

That's actually a very good point that I hadn't thought about.  I was thinking that hopefully with a larger base of testers they would be able to keep their interest up by switching back and forth between testing and regular play and thus the testers would actually play more than they do now and make up for the time drain from testing.  But there's also the simple fact that their time is limited to think about.

Of course, the problem you mentioned already exists.  The current beta testers never play regular games with the rest of us, so despite their important contribution they do represent a part of the community that doesn't "participate."

I would like to see a beta-tester tournament, one with an actual reward for winning which is that the top 1 or 2 players get to be beta testers for at least a little while.  The last tournament we had was very entertaining but we had the problem of people taking forever to play their games, maybe if there was a tangible reward you could get more people involved for longer and get people to take pride in improving their skills.  Too much elitism is of course a bad thing, but on the flip-side if you don't let your players show off every once in a while the game isn't fun.


...now I have an interesting idea.  It's completely unrelated to everything else we're talking about here.  What if we added game cameos as tournament rewards?  For example, the winner of a tournament gets their name added to the list of ship names (for example, there could be a chance for a diamond to be called "Old_Time_Pro's Command Nexus" since he won the last tournament)  Or the prize could be a map-object ship on the map the tournament was played on, like a non-interactive ship in the corner of Duel II.  Heck, given enough time I could make a new map and offer to name it after the next tournament winner.  Would you guys play in a tournament if that was the prize?

Stuff like this can make small-community games a ton of fun.  The developers of Mechwarrior 4 used the names of their beta testers as bot names in multiplayer, and the Mektek team borrowed the practice.  Since I played on Sunder for a few months before the free release, my name is on the list so whenever I get on people are like "hey you stole the bot name Tryptic" and I'm like "Guess again" 

posted on November 26th, 2011, 10:16 pm

i'm not a fan of rewards for tourneys, i like the laid back tourney style. i guess i'd be ok if we could give away the prize to another member.

posted on November 26th, 2011, 10:33 pm

that's an interesting problem.  While I do agree that a limited beta would promote elitism, it's not like you can go ahead without any beta testers at all.  There are already beta testers, and this conversation is starting to make me understand why they don't show themselves to us.

The fact of the matter is, some players ARE good enough for playtesting and some AREN'T.  At the same time, some players just have enough time and some don't.  If people in the community aren't mature enough to accept the fact that some of us are better than others, that's not the devs' fault.  You just have to move forward with what you've got and encourage people to be nice about it.  And I believe the next step forward is to have a larger pool of testers.

MrXT, when you say something that makes sense but then you insult the person you're responding to, all it does is weaken your position and annoy people.  If you're not going to clean up your language, you need to shut up because in the end, being rude is worse than being wrong.

So is being a hypocrite and a drama queen. In fact those 2 kinds of people make me sick, you just jumped into that category.

posted on November 26th, 2011, 10:47 pm

Stuff like this can make small-community games a ton of fun.  The developers of Mechwarrior 4 used the names of their beta testers as bot names in multiplayer, and the Mektek team borrowed the practice.  Since I played on Sunder for a few months before the free release, my name is on the list so whenever I get on people are like "hey you stole the bot name Tryptic" and I'm like "Guess again" 

So THAT is where I remember your name from! Awesome to see a MW veteran around here, greetings to you!

posted on November 27th, 2011, 12:48 am

Greetings, fellow Mechwarrior   I really need to play that game again, I've just been so busy with college and other games.

The last time I got on MW I think I made the bot look bad, I played so terribly.  The problem is, my computer is just fast enough to run all these older games, but it's AMD and it tends to slow down just a tiny bit during the most busy moments (which are the most important) and mess up my micro.  Unfortunately I'm also very competitive, and no matter how patient I am I always end up slowly getting more and more frustrated as time goes on.  It doesn't help that I prefer micro-intensive factions and strategies in most games I play.  ...wait, that doesn't that make me a masochist...does it?

I do want to clarify, up above when I was talking about players good enough for testing, I don't actually consider myself one of the good players.  I'm not even a very nice guy , I just analyze other peoples' game skills and forum posts and provide constructive criticism, something I'm very good at.  As a result, I really can be a hypocrite sometimes and I apologize for that.

My angle in this whole conversation isn't that I'll be allowed to TEST the work in progress.  I just thought if I could get the devs to open up the process a little I could record and commentate people testing the new versions, that way I can offer more effective advice without getting by butt kicked in a game, AND I can post clear evidence of the ongoing development of Fleet Ops which could serve to keep the community interested.

posted on November 27th, 2011, 12:46 pm

So is being a hypocrite and a drama queen. In fact those 2 kinds of people make me sick, you just jumped into that category.

Now you are just being abusive. Tryptic was neither of those, he was making a valid point that insulting someone because of their ideas only discredits yourself and weakens your own argument which is true.

I agree with above posters and what I said, a limited beta would divide the community, especially if it was the players who played most often. Can you think about how that would affect the already small online community? I think it's a very valid concern, but if you have a counter concern I'd be very happy to listen and discuss.

posted on November 27th, 2011, 1:36 pm

closed