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

[Feuerfalke]

Originally Posted by philip.ed

But what would make it pointless is if Oleg's previous comment was set in stone. IIRC, he made it quite clear there wouldn't be an open BETA.
But you can still discuss DCS. I personally can't see SoW having an open BETA and personally I don't think it matters. Even if Oleg wished it, he wouldn't have the time (I don't think) to put it together, as they are so busy working on getting the game out. He discounted the idea of a demo for similar reasons too as far as I can recall.
However, i'd be happy to be proved wrong, although I doubt my PC could handle the game on lowest details anyway.

A demo is a completely different thing than an open-beta.

A demo represents the full version of the game as an advertising. Therefore it has to work nearly perfect.

An OpenBeta is a beta-version of the game and as such by definition is incomplete and not representative of the final version.


Oleg is not God. He's not almighty and knowing everything and as such nothing he says is set in stone, ever. He's making announcements based on his experience, good reasoning and things he knows better than any of us.

If it was otherwise, we'd all be playing BoB already.

[philip.ed]

A good point about the demo
I think, though, that the point is Oleg doesn't have the time to work on either.

Dolphin, Oleg seemed to state that, since the beta isn't going to be open to the public, then maybe they are already testing it? As far as their internal testing process goes, the impression I have been under is that it kind of negates the need for a BETA as their platform (that is SoW) is continually being changed, developed, bug-tested, cleaned, changed, developed etc

[Flanker35M]

S!

Open beta would be a catastrophe. I dare to say over 90% of people would just play it, bitch about it and not methodically test anything. The whinery would go through the roof. If Oleg uses an internal team it is fully understandable as they can have schedules on what to test etc. More efficient IMO. There will for sure be bugs discovered after release everyone can report in.

[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!

[Feuerfalke]

Originally Posted by Flanker35M

S!

Open beta would be a catastrophe. I dare to say over 90% of people would just play it, bitch about it and not methodically test anything. The whinery would go through the roof. If Oleg uses an internal team it is fully understandable as they can have schedules on what to test etc. More efficient IMO. There will for sure be bugs discovered after release everyone can report in.

It's not ClosedBeta vs OpenBeta. That's nonsense.

It's an OpenBeta additional to a ClosedBeta.

[csThor]

So? Given how this community is it would just elevate whining to a totally new level. Or have you perhaps missed the b*tchfest of the last few Friday updates? Why on earth would Oleg take it upon himself to give this whiny bunch of yet another chance to demonstrate just how impolite and aggressive they are? An Open Beta requires a mature community but here we have something that makes a kindergarten look very mature.

[T}{OR]

I personally think it could be a good idea if the feedback that is coming back is checked by (for objective view) qualified people or even better, real pilots.

And to be clear on something - IIRC Oleg clearly stated that there won't be any demo nor any beta testing, at least not any beta testing in the way purposed here. 'In the house beta testing' - yes.

EDIT:

Originally Posted by csThor

Why on earth would Oleg take it upon himself to give this whiny bunch of yet another chance to demonstrate just how impolite and aggressive they are? An Open Beta requires a mature community but here we have something that makes a kindergarten look very mature.

I think you said it all with these two sentences.