Would you pre-purchase SOW now to be a part of the Beta team?

[Feuerfalke]

I think there is some basic misunderstanding here.

An OpenBeta is not a Beta is not a demo.

Based on general rules and my personal experience in a dozen open and closed betas:

A betatest is an internal test that is used to find and eliminate bug with a small but very well coordinated team under NDA. Most of the time this team is already involved with alpha-testing.

An OpenBeta offers a wide variety of testers, but largely for rather uncoordinated testing. It's mostly used to access a wider array of hardware to find possible incompatibility-problems or stress-testing servers.
In parallel a BetaTeam still continues testing and also listens to reports of the OpenBeta crowd additional to their own coordinated testing.

In most (Open-) Betas I participated in, OpenBeta-Testers and Betatesters had different versions of the same software.

I hope you see the differences and why some arguments posted in this thread lack some fundamental insight.

[Madfish]

[EDIT]Holy cow, this thread goes fast[/EDIT]

@Feuerfalke
It's nice how you try to define openbeta and beta. But I believe you're also incorrect. In fact there are so many approaches to this - beta is just a popular term for quality assurance and in fact the typical approach for QA can be applied here. In fact it's more related to SQA (software quality assurance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_quality_assurance )
However, every company does it differently. Modern open betas are usually almost always just plain release candidates for example.

Personally I would say that it wouldn't make a lot of sense to beta the game using a public method. It's a niche product and it has very specific requirements. They can't beta with people like us because only freaks will actually join up.

So the question is what could they want to be tested and what requirements do the people who could test it have to fulfil.

In other words: selecting individuals would be way too much trouble and people would just claim stuff to get into the beta. However if they would just give beta rights to everyone who pre-purchases the game they'll end up with a ton of people who are most likely just in for the fun anyways.



If people are so eager to play the game early they do not have any discipline and thus are not the greatest beta testers anyways. So it's probably best to test everything internal. Remember how long this game has been in production! I can hardly believe that they will have a lot of bug fixing left actually.

[Qpassa]

77% yes 22% no

[ElAurens]

OK, Aviar I respect you and your long participation in the IL2 community, but lets call this for what it really is.

An attempt to play the game early.

That's all it is.

As far as beta testing goes, I've done some, as have most of the "Pigs". It is really not that fun. It can be very repetitive, and really boring at times.

However it is necessary. The best scheme is to break up testing into small, dedicated groups that each have a different responsibility. As my squadmate Tailspin said early, you need real pilots to test FMs, and long time sim players to test the various parts of the game, and they have to be dedicated, observant, and have the ability to report in a concise and accurate way their findings.

It is not a wide open free for all so you can just fly around and blow stuff up.

S!

[Aviar]

I won't be surprised that within 24 hours after the release of SOW, we will see a number of verifiable bugs posted on the internet. Many of these will have players shaking their heads asking... "How could they have missed such an obvious bug?"

Believe me, I've seen this many times over the course of IL-2. Sometimes it simply comes down to a numbers game. 2000 eyes are better than 20 eyes. A large number of players can easily catch more issues than a small number of closed testers.

Personally, I'm not even that interested in SOW, as I am very happy with 4.09 and looking forward to 4.10. However, it would be nice to have SOW as bug-free as possible.

Listen, if you ask me, the chances of Oleg doing something like this are probably less than 1%, so I never thought it would actually come about.

The real reason I posted this poll was to let people know that there are some real innovative ideas happening in the flight sim industry, and that's it's ok to think out of the box. These are the companies that realize their 'communities' can be a real asset to their business.

In cases like this, everyone is a winner. The players get a better product and the company sells more games.

Aviar