I’ve been a part of multiple betas across different genres by developers from AAA developers (of which Blizzard are) to small indie companies
All of these betas have been for games I’ve really been excited to try and keen to get to play a little earlier than official launch and hopefully contribute to testing the games somewhat.
And somehow, despite KNOWING the interest and sheer quantity of people that would be attempting to access this beta for MONTHS before it launched, Blizzard still can’t get it right, with all the $$ they have to throw at things, the massive team, the pre-knowledge of almost exactly how many people would be trying to access this specific weekend, there are issues here that cannot be summed up with “It’s BETA, deal with it”
This isn’t a BETA problem, it’s far beyond that now, it’s pure negligence from Blizzard and sheer disappointment from the fans.
TL;DR- This is the worst beta experience I’ve ever had in the last 20 years by far, congrats on the achievement Blizzard!
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This is more a Beta Stress test far as i can tell, sorry you had such a bad time.
I dont think its that far of a stretch to imagine they did not expect this many people, i was totally wait and see on this after immortal and just blizzard lately in general not really being focused on actually making great games first.
I had no intention of playing or even buying the game before launch and reviews and knowing the monitization.
Coulda just been alot more like me that were bored on a friday and said F it.
Have you considered this is actually going according to plan?
That the beta isn’t for players, but for their engineers?
Like if you got an opportunity to test a soon to be released sports car before it launches, you drive it a little bit, the techs tell you they need to make some tweaks, you going to be all butt hurt that you can’t keep driving it?
You going to raise hell and say I paid for this!!! I demand hours of driving?
No one likes people like that.
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I logged in at 3 minutes after launch and played all day, just got disconnected now. Hows that!
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you’re lucky, i got in relatively smoothly for approximately 10mins at launch, then disconnected and character disappeared and havent been able to get back in since
People not being able to play sucks, period.
People who got to play and enjoy it cool.
We dont have to be enemies on this ya’ll
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…lucky…
I got on right after release and got disconnected in 10 minutes, only to be greeted by a 36 minute queue.
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it’s not a stretch to imagine said sports car should have all the basic engineering completed BEFORE said test correct? You want people testing it to be able to turn it on, get it running and put it through its paces.
Not be stuck trying to get it to turn on or getting part way through turning it on and then having it randomly turn off for no reason.
Or having been told from thousands of different sources the codes that are happening and 13 hours afterwards still not having a fix in place despite having a massive engineering team to work on it
Your analogy is flawed, almost as flawed as this beta
I’ve had worse.
Fallout 76, New World being the most recent AAA titles.
Sorry you’re having a tough time, but Malcolm said it right, Beta isn’t for us, it’s for them, You’re not paying for the beta, you’re paying for the final product, and this by no means is a representation of the final product. You being here today, playing in beta, and experiencing these errors and such goes towards making sure the release is that much better. Instead of acting entitled and butt-hurt over queues, think rationally and understand this isn’t for you. It’s not about you, it’s not about your play time, it’s about valuable data that is needed to make sure final release is that much better, and yes, your queue times and the server instabilities, is all apart of it.
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Betas are used to test the game engine, not the connectivity engine
Blizzard has run MMO’s and online services for a decade, there’s no excuse for this
I would said it’s the worst experience if I get to experience it at all. So far, D4 is nothing but a queuing simulation.
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Fallout 76 is a prime example of exactly what I’m talking about.
their first beta test, went beautifully, it was intentionally to stress test stability of their servers, and openly encouraged their playerbase to do their best to completely destroy them, and make the game fail, that’s what it was all about, thats what it was meant to be.
The 2nd beta test however? their goal was to actively gather feedback and make changes and fixes to outstanding bugs and errors, but they didn’t utilize the data they gathered from their first stress test, and just opened the flood gates, this ended up making the game completely and totally unplayable for literally the entire duration of the beta, servers were completely down, and absolutely no one could play because of it.
If Bethesda was more precautious on how many players they intended to have, and made more of an effort to control the influx of players trying to play, then it would have gone better, and valuable data could have been obtained, how ever they were stuck with trying to resolve a server memory leak caused by the repeated disconnects and forced reconnect boot loops, and essentially ddossing themselves.
This is what blizzard is handling, and they are doing a much better job at it in my personal opinion, because people are at least able to get in and play, I myself have been able to play for atleast 2 hours, with my estimated queue times having been over 457 minutes compared to my play time. I expected this, and I understand why it’s done in such a way, this beta test isn’t for me, it’s for them.
They have to extend this a day considering how bad day 1 went right? Gotta be some announcement coming or something.