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Alpha and beta testers ale house
What are the main things you want alpha and beta testing to focus on and why you think they are important?
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Amazing prizes for best suggestion!
IMPORTANT SAFETY INFORMATION:
Prizes will be in the form of better gameplay experience. Consult your guild physician if you experience symptoms of forum overuse. To prevent electric shock do not immerse your PC in ale. PC in this case could mean anything you think it means. Resemblance with fact or fantasy is purely coincidental. Terms and conditions apply.
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I just want spend a few hours in the game taking it all in before I do any bug testing
These bugs can include anything from quest chains that are broke, to walls you can walk through. Your head falls off when you side step by the lake holding a beer. Skills not calculating correctly.
Yes, agree, bugs and glitches first and foremost. A lot of the Alpha testers have gotten the privilege via their hard earned money spent on KS so in effect it's going to be their responsibility to play the devil's advocate as Ashes is created and told Intrepid to account on what they deliver. Intrepid have promised much and we've shown a great deal of faith in our pledges and support but this is the beginning of the journey not the end, and we need to make sure Intrepid remain faithful to their vision because that is what's going to define this game. It will change the genre or it will wither and die like {insertnumberhere} of MMOs over the last 5 to 10 years.
Intrepid need us not only to guide them along the path but also to let them know how dangerous it can be when they deviate from it.
Answer to question BALANCE!
In a game where everyone will need to have a chance to beat anyone (skill permitting) in open world pvp requires balance not yet achieved in other games. If you want players to play a variety of roles, ie the holy trinity+, a tank needs to be able to tank enough damage to compensate for lower dps to compete with what a pure dps can dish out. Support role what fun is it to play a cough bard cough if when you get in a one on one in the field you fold like the origami champion of the world.
Testing, reporting and fixing gamebreaking bugs.. Why? Because they suck.
I know I can't be alone on this, especially those of us who have tested games from foreign countries.
Modern alphas and betas are more about testing systems and balancing.
Reporting any bugs that are found is still important, though.
Might be that Intrepid is indie enough that bugs and glitches will be more prevalent than in AAA games. Lord knows, the forums here have had more bugs than I've ever experienced in a forums in the past 20 years.
Lots of systems to test though:
Nodes generating content.
Building and destructibility.
Religion and social progression.
Caravans and Sieges
Monster Coin Events
We might want to have a whole week devoted to everyone systematically working together to level a node to max - rather than playing competitively.
Just so we can construct and destroy every type of building for every node type.
It will be interesting to see how Intrepid directs us.
Minor typos in Landmark alpha and beta were like glaring supernovas to me.
In AAA games we're primarily testing systems and balance; not bugs and glitches.
All software has bugs and glitches, though... even released software.
Everything working properly can be more about overall design - is corruption actually deterring PKing as expected? Does the timing for node progression feel right?
Is the synergy of PvP and PvE working as expected?
AAA studios no longer rely very much on alpha testers and beta testers to find bugs. Their internal testing find the vast majority of bugs as part of their weekly and monthly Sprints.
We help them test network loads and overall systems and balance and "feel".
Rather than "Hey! I found a glitch."
I'm not quite sure why everyone on these forums love to play semantics. /shrug
UI glitches, crashes etc would fall into the bugs category. Balancing, stat changes, encounter flow, narrative changes etc would fall more into the tuning category.
I agree that alpha and beta (particularly beta) is more about helping the devs tune the game, but there will always be bugs creeping around in there too.
However, I still coin the term "glitch" and "bug" when I am testing my servers, OS's, security etc.
When something is not functioning properly, I do not say it is a system malfunction, or disproportionate balancing.
Generally, as a cyber security professional, I hunt for bugs and glitches daily.
Meh,
Tomato, tomáto
It's not semantics; it's scope/scale. But, we don't have to agree.
- Use preset test cases with predefined node configurations, then let gameplay evolve from that point for a certain time period, then rinse and repeat.
- Another thought would be to have scaling and/or time acceleration and just let the worlds evolve rapidly from scratch.
These may be more suited to pre-alpha or early alpha testing though.And their internal QA should have systematically run tests, including "real-time" speed runs.
If we want to test them, we just have to all focus on one node or a handful of nodes at a time. Depending on how many people we have in alpha and beta.
Build up a node, add a building, destroy the building, build a different building.
Giving us free resources would make testing that go faster.
You know, for testing purposes.
Heh. But if I do come across bugs or issues I'll definitely bring it up for discussion and/bug report it. So it's a win win.