And the type 2 is which we do NOT want. They're noise. And irrelevant. Almost as obnoxious as the waawaas who lost their max-cargo but otherwise gimped junk.
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Do you think Premium Beta access should end?
- Thread starter Brimstone
- Start date
And the type 2 is which we do NOT want. They're noise. And irrelevant. Almost as obnoxious as the waawaas who lost their max-cargo but otherwise gimped junk.
whilst I get what you are saying, I disagree, FD still get a lot of data from just watching what the players who just "Play" even if they never post a bug report, every tester provides at least some info for FD to analyze.
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In your opinion it has failed.
Servers cost money, dev time costs money, running a business costs money. The beta access fees generate funds to support Frontier. A damned good company (in MY opinion) who deserves such support. Again, no one is forced to pay it.
You sound like a guy sitting in economy looking up past the curtain into First Class saying, "airlines should give us all First Class service for free.". That's not how life works. You want it, you pay for it.
Your definition of greed and mine is diametrically opposed.
I think beta access should be by INVITATION only and based on a persons in game achievements and also positive community contributions.
Most people just think of beta as early access and play it as a preview rather than stress testing. Then the forum fills with garbage complaints.
I'd like to see a beta team of individuals who are really interested in making the game better as a whole, no just for themselves.
Most people just think of beta as early access and play it as a preview rather than stress testing. Then the forum fills with garbage complaints.
I'd like to see a beta team of individuals who are really interested in making the game better as a whole, no just for themselves.
I think its fine as is but i would like to see a short gamma cycle added before release to live, If FD were crafty and made it available to everyone who has bought the game instead of just Horizons owners it could even serve to boost revenue as testers become buyers when it goes live.
Whether or not you agree or disagree with the complaints is irrelevant. Even if you feel the complaint is petty or misguided. Once you analyse all of it, you get a much greater understanding of where the commonality lays.
Should the beta build be opened up to the great unwashed masses, the volume of information would become impossible to analyse meaningfully and essentially be wasted.
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Please ditch the butthurt insults, I'm way past puberty. I see you like making observations and assumptions based on very little evidence, maybe you should look at going into politics as you say a lot but at the same time, very little.I stand by my post, making people PAY to test your product is lame and can only harm the dev process in the long term.
Then don't pay it. If you don't like the way a business conducts business, don't support that business.
Feedback is not only active one, i.e. bug reports and noise on the forums
I believe that they are looking at server stats during the beta testing: how does the average player fare against new NPCs, when and why did he die, how many NPCs have been killed and in what way, what kind of activities people are doing to open up engineers, mining yield, loot drops, game crashes, etc etc there are lot of variables to take into consideration; you name it, they probably have raw numbers. Plus, there is also a server stress testing. All this is sort of passive feedback which might be even more important than active.
With greater statistical sample (more players in beta tests), results are usually becoming more reliable. Hence, as you said - less surprises and less needs for emergent hotfixes after the patch went live.
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Yup. This.
I don't get how people don't realise how considerably small FD is, and how easy they give it to the players on pricing. £20 for a year of content covering several updates? Updates that require genuine innovation and work rather than repackaging the usual FPS crap?
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If FD paid *me* $15 I might beta test their software for them.
In a nutshell:
The current model catches plenty of bugs, there are lots of people testing things and getting their opinion on design aspects of new features for Frontier to take on board such as what's frustrating, what's enjoyable, what doesn't work as intended, what doesn't really mesh well with it's associated parts of the game.
Some things in 2.1 weren't able to be given Feedback on because Frontier never exposed beta testers to it, Frontier made a conscious decision to mask the live state of engineer recipes and access unlocking requirements for example, and had everything just require 1 unit of Fish and then added a commodity market to all engineer stations that sold Fish. Until Beta 6 they also had Engineer modifications that supported enhancements have a 95% chance of getting a enhancement as well as ramping up other aspects of modifications only tuning down closer to what they intended for live in the final beta build... and that was Frontiers decisions based on what they wanted focus put toward.
There was even mention in Beta of problematic acquisition of Meta-Alloys long before 2.1 went live, but as Frontier had made a point of saying they had disabled various things in Beta to hide some secrets that would be reveal themselves across 2.1 live, it was impossible to tell if the Meta-Alloy acquisition was a bug or intended pending changes that Beta testers weren't given access to, and Frontier to my knowledge made no effort to chime in or clarify if it was a bug or not... so the whole thing ended up getting ignored and then 2.1 went live, Farseer needed Meta-Alloys and none were to be found.
The beta forums are also archived you can even go over and read them to see the bug reports and discussions there so there's no need for all this made up "Well it released bugged so the problem is the testers and testing environment! Cus I made connections and just ran with them as facts!".
Frontier have a looooong track record with Elite Dangerous of playing the "Least amount of development investment for acceptable return" when it comes to responding to issues and resolving things, half the time it seems driven by what they intend to do in 8 months time, seeing it as perfectly fine to have something horribly broken or partially functional live because in half a years time or more they'll be doing something that replaces that problematic content.
You only have to look at 1.x where we went multiple months live with any mission that involved being presented with an enforced counter-offer when running the mission would break the mission and make it impossible to complete either way, and practically all combat missions involved enforced counter-offers.
Or 2.0 with the mission system where any and all 'Mission Specific' items were being failed to be registered as acceptable items by the mission system so anything to do with collecting items for a mission was impossible to complete, and Frontier left it like that for almost half a year from 2.0 to 2.1. Only taking measure to remove said missions from live when they announced 2.1 was going to be delayed by around 2 months.
Or let's look at the "Death spiral" NPCs that would frequently stop stationary mid-fight and just spin on the spot... how long exactly did Frontier leave such behaviour in live as the recurring quality of AI behaviour?
And also with 2.1 there's the whole "Planets outside the bubble won't have POIs outside of a few cases" change. Yet flying outside the bubble I've come across quite a few POIs, what has changed changed however is that outside of the bubble your ship scanner no longer displays POI markers when over 2KM... not even element sources. But land and use your SRV scanner and you'll still stumble across the occasional find that if you take off in your ship your scanner will swear doesn't exist... this wasn't quite so possible to test in Beta as many people were reporting that trying to go out of the bubble into more distant system would just cause disconnects, myself included as my carried over save state was 2,000ly+ from Sol, and trying to leave the system I was in always caused a disconnect in Beta so I ended up resetting my save progress which was good overall as it meant I could touch on the 'fresh start' experience of 2.1.
So Frontier being selective about what they fix, what they consider a fix and what they just shrug at and let go into the live game should be no surprise to anyone, it should also be trend everyone is familiar with.
2.1 Beta participants caught lots of bugs and problematic aspects, Frontier weren't quite so bad as in previous betas and this time actually did quite a few bug fixes based on what was reported and reactively disabled some of the missions that were reported as bugged, where as before they would have just rolled them out live anyway without a care in the world..... but that isn't to say that everything that rolled out broken or has issues in 2.1 wasn't picked up and reported in Beta.... making that assumption is both short sighted and incredibly ignorant especially as the Beta forums are archived for anyone to check out as mentioned before.
The current model catches plenty of bugs, there are lots of people testing things and getting their opinion on design aspects of new features for Frontier to take on board such as what's frustrating, what's enjoyable, what doesn't work as intended, what doesn't really mesh well with it's associated parts of the game.
Some things in 2.1 weren't able to be given Feedback on because Frontier never exposed beta testers to it, Frontier made a conscious decision to mask the live state of engineer recipes and access unlocking requirements for example, and had everything just require 1 unit of Fish and then added a commodity market to all engineer stations that sold Fish. Until Beta 6 they also had Engineer modifications that supported enhancements have a 95% chance of getting a enhancement as well as ramping up other aspects of modifications only tuning down closer to what they intended for live in the final beta build... and that was Frontiers decisions based on what they wanted focus put toward.
There was even mention in Beta of problematic acquisition of Meta-Alloys long before 2.1 went live, but as Frontier had made a point of saying they had disabled various things in Beta to hide some secrets that would be reveal themselves across 2.1 live, it was impossible to tell if the Meta-Alloy acquisition was a bug or intended pending changes that Beta testers weren't given access to, and Frontier to my knowledge made no effort to chime in or clarify if it was a bug or not... so the whole thing ended up getting ignored and then 2.1 went live, Farseer needed Meta-Alloys and none were to be found.
The beta forums are also archived you can even go over and read them to see the bug reports and discussions there so there's no need for all this made up "Well it released bugged so the problem is the testers and testing environment! Cus I made connections and just ran with them as facts!".
Frontier have a looooong track record with Elite Dangerous of playing the "Least amount of development investment for acceptable return" when it comes to responding to issues and resolving things, half the time it seems driven by what they intend to do in 8 months time, seeing it as perfectly fine to have something horribly broken or partially functional live because in half a years time or more they'll be doing something that replaces that problematic content.
You only have to look at 1.x where we went multiple months live with any mission that involved being presented with an enforced counter-offer when running the mission would break the mission and make it impossible to complete either way, and practically all combat missions involved enforced counter-offers.
Or 2.0 with the mission system where any and all 'Mission Specific' items were being failed to be registered as acceptable items by the mission system so anything to do with collecting items for a mission was impossible to complete, and Frontier left it like that for almost half a year from 2.0 to 2.1. Only taking measure to remove said missions from live when they announced 2.1 was going to be delayed by around 2 months.
Or let's look at the "Death spiral" NPCs that would frequently stop stationary mid-fight and just spin on the spot... how long exactly did Frontier leave such behaviour in live as the recurring quality of AI behaviour?
And also with 2.1 there's the whole "Planets outside the bubble won't have POIs outside of a few cases" change. Yet flying outside the bubble I've come across quite a few POIs, what has changed changed however is that outside of the bubble your ship scanner no longer displays POI markers when over 2KM... not even element sources. But land and use your SRV scanner and you'll still stumble across the occasional find that if you take off in your ship your scanner will swear doesn't exist... this wasn't quite so possible to test in Beta as many people were reporting that trying to go out of the bubble into more distant system would just cause disconnects, myself included as my carried over save state was 2,000ly+ from Sol, and trying to leave the system I was in always caused a disconnect in Beta so I ended up resetting my save progress which was good overall as it meant I could touch on the 'fresh start' experience of 2.1.
So Frontier being selective about what they fix, what they consider a fix and what they just shrug at and let go into the live game should be no surprise to anyone, it should also be trend everyone is familiar with.
2.1 Beta participants caught lots of bugs and problematic aspects, Frontier weren't quite so bad as in previous betas and this time actually did quite a few bug fixes based on what was reported and reactively disabled some of the missions that were reported as bugged, where as before they would have just rolled them out live anyway without a care in the world..... but that isn't to say that everything that rolled out broken or has issues in 2.1 wasn't picked up and reported in Beta.... making that assumption is both short sighted and incredibly ignorant especially as the Beta forums are archived for anyone to check out as mentioned before.
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Look at the Beta bug report forum. Within a few days there were maybe 20 pages of bugs. There's no shortage or scarcity of bugs, Frontier just can't fix them all as fast as they're being reported. There are some bugs that have been around for months.
Yep. Technically I don't have to give Frontier another penny. And I have ED for its entire life cycle. But I do (cosmetics and second account) and will (upgrades for second account). They do a great job. I don't agree with every decision. But I've come to realise they do the best they can with what they've got and go pretty easy on us.
Please ditch the butthurt insults, I'm way past puberty. I see you like making observations and assumptions based on very little evidence, maybe you should look at going into politics as you say a lot but at the same time, very little.
what insults? your post was insulting... as a beta tester a lot of us do tend to do more than just look at the new content, a lot of us report problems we find with the content, a lot of us try new things to extremes to see what works and what breaks, a number of us also do more 'mundane' testing such as testing security responses, resetting to test what it might be like for new commanders, trying different things with known aspects that are being worked on to see if we find any problems and then a lot of us report those findings... discuss the aspects that are broken and the parts that are working great etc.
I paid for beta testing, when I first brought the game, and I was going to pay for it again at horizons pre release but instead spent even more money to buy a LEP. A lot of us who buy the beta are doing so because A) it gives more money to FDev to help offset the server costs for running the beta, B) it gives them more money for supporting the game and C) we get to be actively involved in the testing AND to a some extent the discussions on potential alternatives for fixing the problems.
Making the beta free for all would no doubt allow more people to test but will introduce significantly more noise (in my opinion) to the reporting and discussion aspect which will dilute the discourse to a degree...
If you want beta access, pay for it, support the developers and then you have the priviliage of being part of the testing process which does include discussions with the developers about potential fixes to problems.
No need for personal comments folks, let's keep it friendly and constructive please?
Thanks.
No one is forced to pay for Beta access and Frontier has put it on record that the pricing structure was set to discourage casual gamers from entering the beta process.
Thanks.
No one is forced to pay for Beta access and Frontier has put it on record that the pricing structure was set to discourage casual gamers from entering the beta process.
What the hell is this? If you want my Premium Beta (from late 2014), you'll have to prise it from my cold, dead hands!
I didn't buy a single fish in Beta. ZERO FISH.
Here's what I did do, once I was no longer stuck in an endless Beta hyperspace tunnel...
Newbie Kremmen, Beta 6 Clear Save
So no, I'm not voting myself off Beta Island.
I didn't buy a single fish in Beta. ZERO FISH.
Here's what I did do, once I was no longer stuck in an endless Beta hyperspace tunnel...
Newbie Kremmen, Beta 6 Clear Save
So no, I'm not voting myself off Beta Island.
