There seem to be a lot of people new to beta testing who are here under some mistaken impressions. Let’s clear up a few:
The beta is not Early Access. This is not the final game. Any progress, reputation, currency gain or leveling that you make will not be saved, even if you copy your characters into the beta. In fact, you’ll find out that they might just wipe out all the existing characters in a future build, for any reason.
The expectation is that things will be broken and incomplete. The expectation if you come across something broken is that you report it through the in-game bug reporting features. This early in the beta, show-stopping impassable problems will be common. That has been true for almost every other beta for this game at some point.
The primary reason for you being here in the beta isn’t for you to be entertained by the content. That will come later, with the complete, live game.
There is no obligation on Blizzard’s part to have any content in the beta be accessible at any given point. We’re here on their schedule, not ours.
That all isn’t to say that they’re not still looking for feedback on overall things like class design, balancing, the feel of the content, etc. This is a great time to try and get them to listen to things that super don’t work for you in terms of the goal of the content, like the way that people are unhappy with the dynamic/static flying toggle. Now is the best time to have an opinion on that.
But people seem to be getting mad that things are broken, when finding broken things is literally the point of a beta test. It’s like being offered a tour of an unfinished theme park because you prepurchased tickets for later in the year and getting mad that they don’t have churro vendors set up yet or that one of the rides is down due to technical issues. Or maybe even that they couldn’t get the gates opened so they need to reschedule you for a later tour.
If you do have fun playing the content once it’s in good working order, that’s cool. Your character is still going to get wiped and you’ll need to do it all over again after launch, though. We’re here as beta testers, living datapoints with eyes and ears, looking for problems.
If we’ve found problems, then we’ve done what we’re here to do. Huzzah!
Caveat: The things that are broken shouldn’t be the servers. We can’t give accurate bug reports if we don’t know if the problem is an actual bug or just the servers being junk. They’ll get a lot of false reports that way, that they’ll have to filter through, which could get some legitimate bug lost in the noise.
They really should shut them down for a few days to make sure the servers are stable, then perform stress tests, then open them up for actual bug testing. Like, not even enabling bug reporting until they’re satisfied the servers are stable.
I have been submitting bugs and data every time I run across something. But you cannot Beta test if you cannot actually get to the content. It requires I play the content to actually test the content.
First, stress-testing the load that a ton of people and the new content puts on the servers is absolutely part of a beta test.
Second, there were swaths of time in previous betas where the servers were down, where an early bug made progressing through the storylines was impossible, sometimes for multiple days.
They’ll get it working when they do. Like I said, we’re here on their schedule, not ours. Sure, it’s a bummer if we can’t get in and help them, but at the end of the day unlike in the live game we’re only here to help them, they’re not here to give us the content that we want.
I disagree I find beta very entertaining as an early access version of the game. Just by me playing the game I’m part of the masses helping test things just by being there.
I didn’t say it wasn’t. If I wasn’t clear, server stability should be the first thing that gets worked out before any bugs are reported.
Yes, and until you get a stable server, you can’t know for certain if you’re experiencing a bug or something else. You can report it all you want, but a lot of times with server problems, those bug reports don’t even go through. That’s not even counting just trying to access the game itself to even find bugs.
Well, apparently, there’s still stability issues. In some cases, worse than yesterday. Being booted from the game after turning in a quest isn’t a bug of the game code, that’s server stability issues, and they need addressing before we continue.
At least in my experience doing a larger server stress test is pretty common for a beta. Alphas are more limited and that is normally when they would be going over general functions, some mechanical aspect and networking functionality.
The servers having issues and the various bugs associated with that are something we are testing whether people want that to be the case or not.
you know you can just stop playing beta yourself until it gets fixed - there is no real reason for them to bring the servers down for days if some people can test just fine
I mean…I agree on this, I think it’s super interesting to get a behind-the-scenes peek at the way things get put together. I love the fourth wall breaks. That’s why I usually do the beta, I think it’s fun.
Sure. Let’s just keep trying to set a land speed record in this car, even though the engine is spitting and sputtering and catching on fire. Makes perfect sense.
Ironically, that is what PTR is typically for. The stress testing. That’s why its all willy nilly with the invites towards the end. So they are getting some bonus extremely early stress testing going on here.
Your post is spot on. Many dont know what a beta is, or just think it’s early access. It’s a bug hunt and server test.
Maybe they’re still getting good data from the situation?
Or maybe they’re still doing first-pass testing on the fixes. Or maybe they’re still figuring out what the problem is.
I’m sure they’re happy that people are so eager to help, but I don’t think any of us has enough perspective about what’s going on under the hood to say what should be happening instead.
I think my fav bug report I did was back in wrath beta, fell thru the world in Borean tundra got to write a nice report while i was falling for 5 mins lol. This is a beta, expect thing to be broken and report them. Try to break things and report when you do…back to wrath if the testing was done and reported there would not have had the little saronite incident in ICC
It’s a metaphor. Basically, you can’t see how your advance systems are working if your base systems that the advance systems run on are malfunctioning.
It’s less “No fun allowed” and more “You having fun is a side-effect and not something that you are owed”, though. Because people seem to be confused on that point, for some reason.
It’s a metaphor. Basically, you can’t see how your advance systems are working if your base systems that the advance systems run on are malfunctioning.