April Alpha

[TheOohChild]

The insurance perk really doesn't seem advantageous enough to bring about concerns over competitive imbalances. I've only had to dish out insurance money twice since the system was implemented.

One of the times, the port disappeared while I was docked, and I blew up when I tried to fly away. The second time, I was pursuing an NPC sidewinder, I started to experience network synch problems, and this resulted in me rear-ending the sidewinder and serious ship damage. Then another player swooped in out of no where and finished off what little hull I had left.

I've have been pretty protective of my ships since I started having to pay for them, and I don't plan on engaging in too much PvP in the full game. I don't think people are going to be blowing up enough for this to result in imbalances.

And while I'm not very sympathetic over the delays we've seen, I certainly can understand the frustration over alpha getting first crack at the beta builds. Hopefully that exclusivity period doesn't last very long.

 

[Smugallo]

Would like to see what the Fdev have to say about the matter.

 

[ZeeWolf]

Alpha or beta is the general stage of development. A beta update doesn't go through alpha testing... You might do some internal QA to make sure there are no serious gamebreaking bugs in a beta update and you can argue that's why the alpha players will get access to beta builds first but a lot of people clearly dislike that idea and think it's unnecessary. I've said it before and I can say it again, if they want to test new builds externally before having everyone get their hands on it then let people opt-in, see Minecraft's snapshots and Starbounds unstable beta channel.

As for new features having to go through alpha testing. You could do that and have development in two branches but that'd be pretty unusual. While a beta might be "feature complete" it is also very usual for features to be added throughout beta and it has become a lot more common recently.

I would say that everywhere I have worked over the past 14 years of development including in the games industry that a first round of testing is drawn up on new functionality. When the core functionality is complete a second round of testing or even a third and regression testing is performed. It isn't often referred to Alpha/Beta internally but everywhere with professional testing will draw up new tests on new features, not just throw them into the mix and test together.

This doesn't matter anyway because the testing is really being done in-house. We are just two layers of additional real world testing outside of Frontier, but my understanding of the Beta was that it was always going to be a build of the game that had fixes already applied from the alpha testing of that functionality.

 

[Amorelia]

Would like to see what the Fdev have to say about the matter.

You'll have a long wait.... Which is a big part of the problem.

 

[Luniticisi]

I would say that everywhere I have worked over the past 14 years of development including in the games industry that a first round of testing is drawn up on new functionality. When the core functionality is complete a second round of testing or even a third and regression testing is performed. It isn't often referred to Alpha/Beta internally but everywhere with professional testing will draw up new tests on new features, not just throw them into the mix and test together.

This doesn't matter anyway because the testing is really being done in-house. We are just two layers of additional real world testing outside of Frontier, but my understanding of the Beta was that it was always going to be a build of the game that had fixes already applied from the alpha testing of that functionality.

Sorry ZeeWolf, (and this isn't a dig BTW .. just a question) you worked in development (including the Games industry) for 14 years and you thought that ED Alpha would be (nearly) feature complete ?

 

[Amorelia]

The insurance perk really doesn't seem advantageous enough to bring about concerns over competitive imbalances.

2 cargo ships undock from their moorings inside a Lave orbital station. Each has a cargo capacity of 500t. Each commander had 6,000cr remaining, and decided to buy insurance. Insurance for ship 1 cost 2,500cr, for ship 2 it cost 5,000cr. They're both on a trading run whereby each t of cargo costs 50cr and sells for 75.

After 11 trading runs, neither ship has made any insurance claim. Ship 1 has amassed over 100,000cr. Ship 2 has under 64,000cr.

 

[ZeeWolf]

Sorry ZeeWolf, (and this isn't a dig BTW .. just a question) you worked in development (including the Games industry) for 14 years and you thought that ED Alpha would be (nearly) feature complete ?

nope I thought it would be core complete and I thought it wouldn't start for another year at least ;-)

 

[HoshiQaVam]

Taken from the store also, this strongly suggests to me that phase is being used to mean "build", and that "round"="phase".

I think that's just a poor choice of words on FD's part.

The alpha phases were all focus testing very specific things, so the build number conveniently reflected the alpha phase. In premium beta, that will be very different as there will probably be a new build every week as more and more of the game is switched on.

 

[Luniticisi]

nope I thought it would be core complete and I thought it wouldn't start for another year at least ;-)

I'm no games tester, Elite Dangerous is the first game I signed up to test (I brought Godus on steam .. Bad move that one ) but what do you mean by Core complete and why did you think it would take another year?

 

[TheOohChild]

2 cargo ships undock from their moorings inside a Lave orbital station. Each has a cargo capacity of 500t. Each commander had 6,000cr remaining, and decided to buy insurance. Insurance for ship 1 cost 2,500cr, for ship 2 it cost 5,000cr. They're both on a trading run whereby each t of cargo costs 50cr and sells for 75.

After 11 trading runs, neither ship has made any insurance claim. Ship 1 has amassed over 100,000cr. Ship 2 has under 64,000cr.

That isn't how the insurance system works. It isn't something you opt in to with variable rates. If your ship is destroyed, you have the option of paying a percentage of the value of the load out you were using (insurance) or downgrading to the bare bones sidewinder for free.

 

[ZeeWolf]

I'm no games tester, Elite Dangerous is the first game I signed up to test (I brought Godus on steam .. Bad move that one ) but what do you mean by Core complete and why did you think it would take another year?

Elite took 2 years, Frontier took 5 years, I have no experience of anything on this scale (a modern game) being delivered in just months by a middle size studio.

I thought it would have most of the mission critical elements in. It wasn't until the end of last year that we found out it was going to be split into components such as combat, docking, outfitting, travel & trade. I thought if your going to put an alpha out it would allow you to do most of the stuff you expect in an Elite game but that it would take years to build and test internally to the level where you can put it out in front of players. So I thought we wouldn't see it until maybe the end of this year or 2015.

There is no precedence for crowd sourcing and early access, all of this stuff is done in-house normally. There would be a build that grows over time and eventually becomes a release candidate. None of us have much insight into how this works, releasing it into the wild. We can quote all of our experiences of software development endlessly but we know nothing about how this really works because this isn't internal testing.

When I backed the Kickstarter I thought the 'estimated dates' were hilarious.

I like Frontier's approach in breaking it down into functional modules.

 

[Smugallo]

Bad move that one )

My mate gave me a beta key for Godus...All I done was click lol not good.

 

[HoshiQaVam]

Elite took 2 years, Frontier took 5 years, I have no experience of anything on this scale (a modern game) being delivered in just months by a middle size studio.

Chunks of ED has been in development for a good 10 years or so, so it's definitely not something they're making in just a matter of months.

 

[ZeeWolf]

Chunks of ED has been in development for a good 10 years or so, so it's definitely not something they're making in just a matter of months.

Yes but I saw the Kickstarter videos and I made an educated guess on where they were. I don't need to impose my opinion of that on you, like I said I worked in the games industry so yeah my quote for your game goes out into the next year or so...see? That's how you know I was once a games programmer. "how long will it take?" "hmm...a couple of years"

 

[Patrick_68000]

When I backed the Kickstarter I thought the 'estimated dates' were hilarious.

I also had this impression. It seemed unrealistic. Even though many work had been done for a few years

 

[Luniticisi]

When I backed the Kickstarter I thought the 'estimated dates' were hilarious.

to be honest I think it was a blatant lie to get money to fund the game... the game got funded, fair play ..it worked ...

*Edit - Funny i said that on my 666 post

 

[Komemiute]

Whatever the frak we´re just running in circles...

I personally feel unhappy BUT I´ve been waiting for an Elite sequel I´ll not let this petty behavior ruin it.

So be it, twenty years or twenty years plus one will not change much.

What will suffer though it´s the way I´ll be advertising Elite.
I definitely have a different perception of a lot of things now.

Outta here...

 

[blibbka]

to be honest I think it was a blatant lie to get money to fund the game... the game got funded, fair play ..it worked ...

Does that make sense really though?

After all, I'd imagine 99% of KS backers would have been just as happy to back a new Elite had the estimated delivery dates been 6 months later.

If FD wanted to cynically get more cash they'd be more likely to over-promise in terms of Features. E.g. "Landing on planets will definitely be in the first release .... [1 year later] ... did we say first release? C'mon that was just pillow talk baby"

They haven't done that so I don't see the logic behind your supposition.

 

[Patrick_68000]

to be honest I think it was a blatant lie to get money to fund the game... the game got funded, fair play ..it worked ...

I do not think that it was a lie. A development of this scale, which has a few months of delay, is insignificant, in fact. I think also, that Frontier has took into account the high requirements of backers and increased the quality of the game. More than what was originally planned.

 

[Luniticisi]

Somehow, there are people that think Frontier Developments are incredibly stupid and believed that they could go from Alpha to release in 4 months ... this from a game company that has been around since 1994, making games for every platform available ... Really? .. they must have known!