Hey there,

after the stresstest - weekend and the following survey i made up my mind a little.

Wouldnt it be more effetive, to transfer this game into open beta asap, but with the following tools.

Everyone participating gets some kind of survey every hour or so. behind this survey there has to be a mechanic, that tracks all the stuff that you were doing putting together a unique survey for every player that you have to complete before being able to go on testing.

I think i have had this kind of stuf back in the days, but i dont know which game that was.

They'll go to open beta when ready.

Open betas are rarely useful for testing anyway, most people just see it as a demo.

Guess it has couple reasons, one is server status, they might not have the server park they need for an open beta yet, it might also be an cost issue so they prefer to wait.

Second is that they want to polish the game more before an public beta and all the talk this generates, lots of people has problem understanding that beta is an unfinished game.

Yeah i get the points of you both.

But with having to complete those surveys, it more and more gets the character of an actual beta-TEST.

In the survey I missed the lack of opportunity to talk about topics like design and such :-/. But I agree a open Beta is required though it will be harder for them to read all the feedback

I mean, thesy could just do it over the comning weekends. Then they have to week tu sum up the surveys and to correct stuff.

You would be surprised how many people just would ignore them. Even in a closed Beta (of whatever game) you have a lot of folks who simply don't get that they should test and report Bugs. They complain about every minor Bug and openly admit that they don't care for the Surveys (if any are made) or bugreporting.

Open Beta, as they said, are the thing that forms the opinion of the public about that game. Many Companys, sadly, used them as Demo - and players got used to it. No i would prefer closed Beta-Tests, actually not inviting People in the next stage who did not participate in the Surveys or Bugreports. Open Beta ... March, for 2 weeks and then close the whole thing, fixing Bugs until Release.

Well I would love an open Beta so I can play with my friends who didn′t get a key.

On the other hand it′s true, people will just see it as Demo. The problems with (forced) surverys IG is that they aren′t very accurate nor helpfull. You will have tons of people that will just klick through the survey so they can play on. And therefor the feedback you get will be pretty worthless cuz you can′t seperate people that take the surveys serious and those who don′t.

I like it better the way it is now, people that want to can give feedback on the game and the beta forums and in the survey they get after they played the Beta. That leaves enough opportunity to leave feedback for everyone and you will only get serious feedback from people that really are intrested in improving the game (well most of the time at least).