you test what you can test when you can test it - everything needs testing but everything doesn’t need testing in the first week
I’m sure the developers are super happy with the marketing people who decided to advertise that beta access was some kind of “perk” with prepurchase instead of offering people the ability to opt-in to controlled waves of unpaid volunteerism out of a curiosity and genuine desire to actually try and provide testing and feedback. If it was me, I’d be furious.
But I’m not a developer, so my only emotional involvement to not being able to get in to be an unpaid volunteer is, “ah well, I’ll try it later”. I try to not get infuriated on other people’s behalf, it’s not good for my blood pressure.
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I don’t really think greed should be an excuse, even if we know it’s beta, it’s still included in the box price.
So, you can almost make an argument that it should meet industry standards for similar software in beta.
In fact, people in the EU can prolly get refunds and more since they have better consumer protection.
Yeah, I have no doubt in my mind that there were probably some Devs on the backend infrastructure who were like “plz no” and someone in Marketing/Exec level told them to just pull the trigger anyways.
I’ve worked for a few startups doing DevOps, and it’s not uncommon at all to have different departments stepping on toes of the people actually doing the work.
Understandably a lot of people are really excited to try out new systems and legitimately want to provide good feedback.
That’s kinda why I feel like it’s important to call Blizzard out for this kinda stuff.
It just protects the good will that the developers deserve. Most people are only mad about stuff not working because deep down they are just excited to help make something they love better.
You act like this beta is just this week and then it’s done. There will be plenty of time to give feedback, just doesn’t need to be everyone all at once.
To be fair the last time they opened BETA so freely class balance issues still seeped through alpha, beta, and into launch so…
Yeah.
And tons of MoP quests were bugged and you had to relog to get them to function so like…
We have seen this not work before lol
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All I’m saying is that having players/testers/users that are this ambitious to help test stuff is a good thing, and the people who are upset aren’t totally in the wrong.
It’s coming from a good place. They wanna test now, they wanna help now.
That’s how I see it anyways. Can’t be too mad at someone when their frustration is kinda justified and it’s coming from a desire to do good.
In a week or two we’ll all be too busy testing stuff so it won’t matter much in the long run – but if I were in Blizzards shoes I would be prioritizing a good user experience more. Good launches mean more useful feedback.
Less negative stuff that isn’t helpful to filter through… Also way less stress on their engineers/developers who are probably burning themselves out right now to fix the issues. Issues they could have taken their time to resolve had they done all this last week, or set the Epic Edition Beta Access to some time next week.
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I don’t think anyone is saying being upset is a bad thing, I think the main point here is to temper expectations.
Some people have this weird delusion that alpha and beta means “The product is basically done and should not have issues” which is fundamentally wrong.
There is also not really a good way to preemptively handle heavy server load. Most companies work retroactively, not proactively, in order to avoid heavy resource loads on purpose.
Years of working on servers and various development projects and I have yet to see methods to accurately gauge and handle this type of thing preemptively. At least not as easily as people seem to think.
If say they waited a week to let the epic edition testers in, the servers would have had the exact same issues due to the sheer load of people trying to get in more than likely.
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The servers run new code, so yes… it will be part oft he beta to debug that code which will help do what…
Stabalize servers
Yeah, I am looking forward to the servers being more stable to be able to test the things I am more excited about (from all accounts it sounds like they are) but y’all have to remember this is a beta test. Performance/stability is absolutely one of the things they’re testing. Which is a very good thing.
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Generally if you have decent resource monitoring you can get a pretty solid understanding of how many users your system can support.
Blizzard in theory should have an absolutely ridiculous amount of this kind of data. If you know how many accounts are going to have beta access, you can plan accordingly to make sure you have enough instances / your infrastructure can handle it.
Any decently scalable infrastructure should also be designed to automatically scale depending on load… and even if they are using baremetal equipment a multibillion dollar company should have hybrid cloud autoscaling.
I dunno what their backend looks like – but my guess is that it’s missing the budget of at least one yacht. Personally I don’t think there are any valid excuses for a company with the resources that Blizzard /SHOULD/ have…
Either way – Mistakes were made, they’re gonna fix them. We just gotta wait for them to implement whatever solution they’re going to implement. Not much point in speculating at this point.
As it stands, Beta is unstable. Almost too unstable to be able to test.
Everything seems to disconnect me, even bug reporting has kicked me out once.
I will try again later, maybe Blizzard underestimated the demand and the Servers are melting. who knows
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This isn’t just about infrastructure, it’s arguably not about infrastructure at all. (Infrastructure being server hardware and hypervisor, storage/storage network, network infrastructure). It’s about running new code and throwing a ton of people at it, all at the same time, and seeing how it reacts. And if you’re in that situation, you arguably want to throw a minimum at it (assign fewer resources to VMs, etc.) to test the limits of things. Which, you know… is what a test is for.
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I’m having no issues at all on server I’m on. Definitely make sure to give detailed bug report about your issues so they can figure out what is causing some of you to be unable to stay connected.
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The issues people are running into are connection/data loss. If these are software related issues there are literally tools you can use to simulate users.
Netflix actually wrote something called Chaos Monkey to test resilience/stability issues. There are a million ways to slice that problem.
Either way if they are testing the functionality of new systems – that isn’t what a Beta test is for. Beta tests are for testing functionality of established systems – not trying to figure out how to fix users getting disconnected whenever they connect to a new server/sync with a server.
I’m gonna drop the subject and stop responding in this thread now, cause we’re supposed to be providing feedback on talents / in game features – not making excuses for blizzard based on vague assumptions or trying to speculate the kinda issues their having. We’ll be here all day if I’m rebutting every excuse.
They’ll get it sorted and we’ll all move on.
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Absolutely also my fav bug from betas in WoW.
Unfortunately, they decided to trade some usefulness in the beta test away in order to use it as even more of a marketing/hype gimmick than usual. Personally I might just wait a couple weeks for the normies to get bored/frustrated before I try to do much, too many people that don’t know what they’re supposed to be here for right now.
And I am doing that. I’ve beta tested a whole lot of games, including most of the WoW expansions. The one bug that gives me the most trouble is DCing entirely when I try to port/zone somewhere new. I still get back in and submit the bug report, but while I recognize the need to continue to test and report, it is getting a little old and frustrating.
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I just take issue with portraying it as an “excuse”.
Maybe it is, internally, a matter of upset and controversy inside Blizzard, we don’t know. But in a beta test their only obligation is to themselves. They have no, none, zero obligation to us as volunteer testers to have things working so that we can get in and look at their stuff and poke it until it breaks again.
Saying that people are excusing them implies that there’s something to excuse in this case, and there’s not. Saying that there’s something to excuse implies that we’re being wronged, somehow, and we’re not.
The live game? Sure. WAY yes. They have an obligation and a responsibility to keep the live game up as much as they can and if stuff gets broken for lengthy amounts of time frustration is understandable.
But people getting so frustrated that they want to get in and try out the new stuff when they’re here to test, not to play the game for fun (although fun is just fine to have as a side-effect) that they’re at the point that they’re lashing out at Blizzard for being a “multi-dollar company” and angry that they didn’t do some kind of due diligence in pre-testing the beta test server load, and that’s a complete misunderstanding of why beta testers exist and what their role in the process is.
Which is, in part, the fault of the marketing team for advertising beta access as a “perk” and giving it out like a prize, an issue that has been going on for a long time now, that makes people put expectations on what they should “rightfully” get out of the beta testing process.
People are getting mad that they got offered a ticket to fly out to Hawaii so that they could volunteer to clean oil off ducks and when they get there they’re mad that they’re not able to go and lay out a towel and bask in the sun because there’s too much oil. Even if you’re genuinely mad that there’s not enough ducks to go around and you didn’t actually get to clean one, your frustration is misplaced. The point is that the duck is clean now, even if you didn’t get to do it due to a surplus of other volunteers.
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To a degree, this is part of the point too. If a quest, enemy, spec or class doesn’t feel fun, and the tester is able to provide feedback as to why, that’s a valid use of beta testing resources. God knows we could have used more of that kind of feedback for things like tallstrider sinew drop rates, MoP Remix quests having so many first come/first serve nodes complicating questing with a party, druid shape drop rates etc.