Genuine question. Subscription based MMOs are intentionally designed to require a significant time investment in order to pad-out subscription lengths. I can understand why players might want to beta test an FPS where they can dive straight into the cathartic, chaotic action. But any smart MMO dev keeps their content timegated behind lengthy grinds in order to keep players coming back for more. I’m not saying they’re not fun but they have a very different design philosophy which rewards long-term investment over short-term hedonism.
So why would anybody want to wilfully invest such a huge amount of time for free when all your progress will be for nought when the game launches? Where is the enjoyment in grinding reputation for a dozen hours and thinking “Boy, I can’t wait to grind all this reputation again on the same character in a few weeks!”.
Why do people want to play the beta? Simply put. FOMO.
People who have been invited are able to essentially log on to TBC classic and take it for a joyride months before the rest of us. People get jealous.
I must say there are definitely multiple reasons why one might want to play the beta. Whether it’s for data purposes to obtain information to prep for the actual launch, or maybe for reasons to test out possible new mains since expansions bring out a bunch of new and interesting mechanics to test out.
But most importantly, no matter the reason one might want to try out the beta. We might not get a good launch if we don’t test it out! last thing I would want to happen is to experience a bunch of glitches.
I’ll be honest. I have access to the beta and I’ve played it a little and reported some bugs (so the access wasn’t useless) but I haven’t played it too much. Not only do I remember almost all of the content but I had access to the original TBC Beta (where some mobs were present placeholders before the mob design was done). It just doesn’t feel all that exciting.
I dont really understand it either. Most players wanting beta won’t even be testing out things that might need testing. They just want to play the game early
I hardly touch games that are in “early development” (aka “beta testing for a price”) because I hate playing broken bugged out games in the first place.
I understand the theory of FOMO for this type of thing but I’d prefer to be excited when the Dark Portal opens, rather than having played TBC so much that I’m already jaded before the game has even launched.
Again, I could empathise with this if it was fun to play. But MMOs are intentionally a lot of work and time investment. I can get paid to perform User Acceptance Testing in real life if I want to sit at my computer and grind for 7.5 hours.
That’s what I imagined it would be like. I don’t understand people getting genuinely upset over missing out on what is probably a very mediocre experience.
I didn’t realise that, but that does make more sense to me. I can understand why somebody would want to be the first to try that.
Hah, exactly. Video game industry has done a clever job of outsourcing its UAT and BVT. Blizzard has apparently perfected that by making the customers pay to perform UAT.
I tried one Beta. The one I tried was not a playable game. It was not “play a completed game in advance”.
I couldn’t complete quests. I couldn’t get rewards. I couldn’t progress or advance. All I could do is try ordinary things, and report bugs when they didn’t work. There was a big uproar in the Beta forum, because none of thos bugs were fixed in Beta. In other words, Beta players expected priority bug-fixes to give them a playable game. That never happened.
So I think that anyone who desparately wants to play a Beta is misinformed, and thinks it is something it isn’t.
The downside was discovering new content before I could play it. Once I realized that, I stopped. Let me explore during the real game.
In the past, I was one of the people dying to join betas when a new expansion was coming out. When I got an invite for the BFA beta, I only played for a day and then stopped. Not only did I feel I wasn’t fulfilling my job as a tester, but I also felt like it was spoiling the game for me. I didn’t want to test everything and then be burnt out before it even went live. It also never felt “real” to me. It’s similar to why I never lasted long on private servers. It wasn’t official, so I wasn’t invested.
Because I was not being of service when given the opportunity to beta test, I’ve not opted in since.
Everything doesn’t have to be an investment in some future outcome… I’ve spent literally hundreds of hours playing video games with no save feature, or games that I beat and then never played again. I’ve leveled a ton of characters in POE, knowing that at the end of the season they’ll be thrown into the dumpster that is the standard server.
Well it depends on what kind of beta it was. Open Beta’s are generally understood to be in their final playable states more or less. If a company released an Open Beta while there were still game-breaking bugs thats a legitimate complaint, especially if they werent fixed, ESPECIALLY if they were “charging” for the OB like many companies do.