Is There any word on the end of the Beta for Colonisation?

Cmdr Travers

Cmdr Travers
Hi all,

Been slightly busy the last few weeks with RL stuff (you know, the sun being out and everything). Have Frontier dropped any hints yet when they're likely to end the Colonisation Beta?

I'm holding fire on pulling the trigger on a second colony until we get more information about how things might / will change.

Thanks all
 

Kzak

Kzak
Cmdr Travers said:
Hi all,

Been slightly busy the last few weeks with RL stuff (you know, the sun being out and everything). Have Frontier dropped any hints yet when they're likely to end the Colonisation Beta?

I'm holding fire on pulling the trigger on a second colony until we get more information about how things might / will change.

Thanks all
Click to expand...
No word on how long the beta period will last.

That said, you can claim new systems as before, but I'd wait with constructing buildings/orbital installations that give economic influence as that seems fairly broken at this time.
 

tomalus

T
Its feature complete. Its also broken since 2nd of April.
The "fix" this tuesday broke it completley.

You can build stuff, but it only produce biowaste.
 

PilotB

P
Lets go a week where things work as intended before we start looking for light at the end of the tunnel. Beyond increasing material availability from NPC markets they haven't even done any real rebalancing of the stuff they said the beta was to balance yet.
 

Kalizandra

Kalizandra
Powerplay 2.0 has essentially been abandoned, with some features just turned off because I guess its easier than coming up with a fix. Colonisation is in a right state, with pot luck if the BGS actually ticks over or not, and a cavalcade of issues with stations, ports and placement of outposts etc.
I'm guessing we wont see this all 'fixed' until the end of the year. New ships will have to suffice to keep us entertained in the meantime.
Hey Ho, the weather is lovely in the UK at the moment, time to head out and touch grass as they say. Might try to get out for a day hike on the South Downs this weekend. (Amberley or South Harting, fantastic countryside!) Silver linings and all that! x
 

Doctor Dread

Doctor Dread
Kzak said:
you can claim new systems as before, but I'd wait with constructing buildings/orbital installations that give economic influence as that seems fairly broken at this time.
Click to expand...

This is the only reasonable thing one can do right now.
Claim new systems, make a Civilian or Commercial Outpost, search for the new system... and wait autumn/winter.
 

klusik

klusik
My plan was to make multiple systems. I have one, 15 stations with 15 t of biowaste market. So I have just the one and waiting for the brighter future :) Which probably won't happen.
 

Hamset

H
Normally, in a beta, the devs present a new feature and explain how it works so that players can test it... but we know where we're going from the start.
Here, the devs just tell you “okay, you can build, but we'll let you do your round trip a hundred times for freight transport without explaining how it works”.
Why this persistent silence on how the economy works?
The number of people who continue to build without knowing the effects it will have overwhelms me a bit.
 

Greasetrap42

Greasetrap42
The Live-Beta concept might have screwed Frontier.

Releasing Trailblaizers as a Beta allowed Frontier to knowingly release it prematurely with bugs and issues with an easy excuse.... hey its just a Beta.

But now... unless Frontier fixes all the significant issues how can Frontier officially announce the end to the Beta period without looking pretty bad?

The only possible solution (pretty cheesy though) is to call an end to the Beta and claim there is a planned big update 8 weeks in the future[1] which actually ends up resolving only 50% of the issues but players are happy because 8 weeks later some fixes happen and players are more focused on other things anyway.

[1] Frontier makes an announcement:
"We thank all the players for their participation in the Trailblaizers Beta release. We are actively going through the feedback and working on updates scheduled for 8 weeks. In the meantime the Beta period is officially closed while our programmers work on the suggestions and information collected during the Live Beta. Thanks again to all the players that participated and provided valueble feedback"
 
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Mainsil

M
They called it a Beta, but that does not make it a Beta, especially given these two points:
  1. This was a feature released into live servers where it impacts all players, including those that did not choose to participate with no rollbacks or mitigation.
  2. There was no communication from the Devs regarding features to be tested. How can it be a Beta test if there nobody knows how it's supposed to work?
Conclusion: They knew it wasn't really finished but had to release due to internal schedules and are using the 'Beta' tag as a 'get of jail free' card.
 

project23

P
Yeah point 2 above is actually quite an issue really. I've no real problem with it being tested this way, but what exactly are we testing? We dont know - and what's worse is that we have no systematic way of reporting unexpected behaviour even if we did know!

(Except bug reports, which... if they were treating this like a beta would be categorised into the various new expected behaviours so they could collate very quickly where the big problems are. Not just "well we got 46,000 bug reports! Guess we'll start at... 1!")
 

PilotB

P
They told us exactly what they wanted tested. We just found out that a load of other things don't work in addition but those additions were not what they wanted to test.
 

project23

P
PilotB said:
They told us exactly what they wanted tested. We just found out that a load of other things don't work in addition but those additions were not what they wanted to test.
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I mean this in the nicest possible way - could you point me to the list of behaviours they want us to test? [I went and found this myself, see my post further down]

Right now, I cannot go fill out a bug report with fields/tickboxes like this:

Planet type: HMC
Pre-existing installations and their numbers: 1 refinery hub
Pre-existing orbital builds: 1 divvy outpost
Build in question: coriolis slot 0
Bug type: no market inheritance.

And my argument is that if we COULD do that (and had the expected behaviour explained to us first), then collating these bug reports, verifying them, and generating usable stats with them would be a lot easier and probably much more in line with traditional beta testing approaches.

I'm not an FDEV BAD guy, yeah? Im really not... and they have tried a lot more in recent years much to my satisfaction! But I dont think you can disagree much with the idea that this beta isnt really being run like a beta, but more like early access.
 
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project23

P
So I just had a quick look at the beta announcement and details thread.

Seems in that announcement they're pretty firmly of the view that colonisation is feature complete. So pilotB is right in a sense.

They say that the purpose of the 'beta' is purely to determine the values of commodities needed to complete builds. This is in line with how fleet carriers were pushed to live if I recall?

So... an MVP colonisation feature that had clearly not been tested in any real capacity was pushed to live in a "we just need quantity feedback!" way, only to immediately be contradicted by a "we are looking into the problem!" announcement.

[EDIT - Obviously it has been tested in some way, theres a lot of exaggeration to what I'm saying here, but consider this - for the lack of ANY market in any PRIMARY colony outpost/station to be a SURPRISE to the devs - well, it isnt exactly suggestive of thorough testing. I mean it's the very first thing a player will build.]

As others have said in this thread, it seems to me likely that because of internal deadlines an untested/unfinished feature was pushed to live. And again, that's fine! Just bloody communicate it!

We can even help to sort this out of we are given the information to do so.

And given the state it's in, you cannot blame players for confusing this 'quantities beta' with an actual, proper beta, in which we test the (currently very broken) mechanics.
 
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Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
project23 said:
But I dont think you can disagree much with the idea that this beta isnt really being run like a beta, but more like early access.
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Agreed there. Not the first time Frontier have picked a slightly "off" term for something when there was a clearer alternative available. We're not being asked to individually test things (beyond the usual "you can report bugs if you really want to" that always applies); it's the collective impact of all our actions - both in terms of load testing and how the actual pace of expansion proceeds - that seems more to be what they're looking at.

On the "load testing" side, we're very definitely still in the "it's not working yet" stage. I suspect almost all of the problems seen with it ultimately come back to the servers either not processing changes correctly, or not distributing changes across the entire set of servers correctly / quickly enough.

(Plus some early "it would have been good if there had been better documentation in the first two weeks, but now that players have figured it out that was a one-off problem" issues)
 
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