I’m not asking for a hard date or duration from the CM’s but can we at least get confirmation that there will be a beta at some point before launch? I think it goes without saying that most of us won’t even think about handing Activision anymore money without experiencing the product first (as you have already said the demo was simply that and not an indication of what the final product will be).
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I say maybe in 4 months we will have beta
If they go with minimalistic changes is a beta even necessary?
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Yes. To confirm that no new unexpected bugs have slipped in.
Even without things like accidental changes (bugs from the backporting process), any new software requires testing, because it will have bugs. Either they will have a beta or they will release a buggy mess. There really isn’t any third option.
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All you have to pay is a one month subscription
They won’t receive a single penny more of my money until I know exactly what I’m getting. The end.
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I think there will be an Alpha and Beta for Classic, but I suspect what you are really asking is if will there be an open beta that anyone that join. That remains to be seen as the current trend nowadays with most game companies as well as Blizzard is that they give beta keys mainly to streamers/youtubers.
So your best bet if you really want a chance to take part in Classic beta is start streaming with some focus on WoW.
They may get the first keys but they aren’t the only ones. Plus, that wouldn’t be near enough people.
Question: what is the difference between a beta and releasing the game as is with patches/hotfixes as needed?
Given how little they actually do with betas recently they’re basically just doing the latter anyways.
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That’s where I was going with
that question.
I think there needs to be a beta release, just for addon makers sake. Since it’s a legacy data set being retrofitted to a modern client, it’s basically assured that current pserver 1.12 addons won’t function… Meanwhile modern addons are also quite unlikely to function with the numerous vanilla systems/data sets.
I mean technically the game (as it was at least, discounting classic) was always evolving with patches…
That being said, there is a marked difference in release product quality when the beta process is performed properly… I give Blizz a lot of guff over a number of issues that I’ve seen in the Betas I’ve participated in, then still making into live… but there have also been an enormous amount of issues that actually do get fixed as well… In my first couple of days on the Legion beta I managed to find no less than 5 different Battleground terrain exploits a Demon Hunter could do… and by the end of the beta I knew of about 15. To blizzard’s credit… MOST of those ended up being fixed in some way.
Retrofitting the 1.12 data set to the modern client as we saw with the demo caused a rather large amount of stupid bugs… Simple things like they explained in one of the dev videos, such as demo lamp lights in westfall being bright pink because they had an undefined texture value… which in OG defaulted to white, but in a modern client defaults into a hot pink color to better stand out as an untextured item.
There’s a ton of room for small but noticeable, problems like that to arise.
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Yes but do pink lights harm the launch?
If a beta delays the launch. Would it be better to launch and fix as we go?
Beta testing would allow enough testing of sharding/no sharding to really see if it’s a necessary or viable option. I think it’s a necessity for that alone, plus all of the unintended bugs and possible exploits that Blizz would prefer to fix befor launch.
I’d wager small things like unskinned textures where only the very tip of the iceberg, so to speak.
There’s a reason the demo was only 2 zones, after all.
The fact that Blizzard’s recent releases (most notably BFA) have done such an awful job of releasing in a buggy state is a demonstration of why a beta is necessary, not an argument that a beta wouldn’t help.
Obviously, Blizzard needs to do their part too, which they didn’t with BFA. I suppose that is the third option; they could have a beta, ignore all the feedback, and release a buggy mess anyway.
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No. The crowd desiring classic wow is among the most fickle I’ve ever seen in gaming: they’re gonna get one chance so it better be their best shot.
They’ll never please everyone: too many different opinions and one size never truly fits all. However, classic will run on top of the modern blizzard infrastructure: even the most hesitant people have accepted this as a matter of necessity. The difference between a good release and a bad one is the difference between Michael Keaton convincing me he’s Batman and the bug from Men in Black convincing me he’s Edgar.
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There probably isn’t much point. If people post about any bugs, the purist crowd will scream “No changes REEEEEE. Vanilla WoW had bugs!”
That’s unfair. Sort of.
There are some bugs that became integral parts of the game. Bugs that were left in place so long that “fixing them” amounted to a nerf because they were essentially accepted as part of the class.
Three examples that I can think of that directly effected me in vanilla/BC were
1> Automatically reentering combat within ~5 seconds of a res during boss fights. (This change meant that hunters could no longer FD+Jumper Cables, Shamans could no longer get a res off after reincarnating, and soulstoned healers could no longer get a res off.) This was changed in BWL era, and I would not be angry if this bug was removed.
2> Hunter pet attack speed normalization. In vanilla pets retained their wild attack speeds (which ranged between 1.0 and 3.0), in BC they were normalized to all be 2.0, with pet passive abilities that could reduce that (though, not anywhere close to 1.0) If this bug fix went through, it would bother me, because without the QoL pass on pet abilities that followed it, it would amount to a nerf. (Pet selection mattered a lot in vanilla)
3> Pet run speed normalization. This was changed around AQ. Pets used to have variable wild run speeds that they retained. This made the Frostwolf from Alterac Valley move at mach 0.5 or so, and made the bat from ZG the single greatest multipurpose pet (which annoyed the hell out of every melee on every raid). This is a “bug fix” I would not object to because it was done during vanilla.
Some of those “bug fixes” weren’t patched until later expansions, when other systems were put into place to compensate for them.
Obviously the examples I gave were all hunter related, because that’s what I mained during vanilla (and the sweeping hunter nerfs that BC had on launch are why I stopped playing a hunter)
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Except blizzard has already said they plan to fix the bugs…