Open Beta Day 2: Electric Boogaloo

Yesterday was my first day in. I must say I had a great first impression. No crashes. Maybe a few bugs here and there but nothing that stopped me from having a fantastic time.

 

I think I must be deficient to still have hope for a perfect launch. But I do.

I mean, it's really been hard to sit and watch what's gone on. It's been more demoralising to read people's reactions to it. And dangerously easy to get whipped into a frenzy about.

Today, I'm just keeping my fingers crossed and hoping that tonight it'll be revealed that the storm is over and people just missed 24h of a beta. Albeit one they were promised, etc etc etc.

 

Actually Syp, people are not pissed because the WAR servers are down. they expect to test the game servers and the game itself. testing a web server was never the part of the deal.
Beta testing does not mean delivering a non functional product. beta testing is done by the customer so the software isn't supposed to contain any functional/ui bugs at all. beta testing is supposed to uncover on site data and real life usage as well as customer DSRs.

stress testing a game server by letting in a thousand people is necessary and needed as there is no other way to really test out the breaking load. However, for testing a web server there are several softwares available which simulate the connections to the DB. clearly, GOA didn't do a proper testing of their account page.
so in essense, "ITS BETA NUB" arguement doesn't holds good because what we currently are facing is not really what beta is supposed to uncover. on beta you are actually handling your software to your client and it is supposed to be complete and reasonably bug free.
that at least is the norm in my industry, i guess in game developing, the rules are different.

But you know what, all would have been fine. people would have accepted all these faults if they were kept in the loop. if we would have gotten hourly updates on what the issues are, what the resolution is going to be and what is the rollout plan. none of that was done. none of that has still been done.
so people couldn't get in the beta. there was noone there to explain them why or when it will be fixed. so people start grumbling. anger fed on anger and soon we had a lynch mob. all because there was no communication.
now the vitriol is in a positive feedback circuit. there is only one way people will be appeased.
and no its not to fire everyone at GOA>
some from mythic who is well known and trusted like Paul or MJ should make updates every few hours letting people know what is going on. Suddenly people will see a face on the "enemy" but it will be a face they can't lash againt. all this chos will stop.
all it needs is some effort from the Mythic guys. thats all.

 

Sorry Syp, I have been reading your blog for a while and you are usually on the mark more often than not, but this time I think you miss a vital point.

Particularly when you say....."this isn’t “Free Demo Week”, it’s “Open Beta”.

This was WAR's European premier to both its paying public and some potential customers.

As a Collectors Edition purchaser I bought this edition primarily for the 'Open Beta' and Early start. I don't care so much for the other extras in the CE good as they are; I bought a game to play (not comics models etc). I PAID for this privilege (and a premium price too) and while I do think it is a privilege, remember that money exchanged hand for it so I was not looking for anything 'free'. When I pay premium, I want premium treatment too. I am very angry today like much of the net traffic, and while I don't hold with some of the more rabid comments, things do not bode well after 414.

Maybe if you had been through the same scenario you would not be so generous. Try to put yourself in most of the European 'potential' customers shoes..... I went to bed the night before excited about the opportunity for a 'hands on' for my new game of choice. While I felt a little worried that more people were invited in over the last few days, and a bit concerned that GOA would not let me register my beta key till the same day as the open beta, I hoped that GOA's positive messages were to be trusted.

I got up at 07:45 in the morning excited and watched this excitement evaporate over the whole of a Sunday (a whole day off from work wasted) till I eventually gave up at 00:30 Monday Morning. Only trying to register my Open Beta key without success and getting little or no information/help from the people I am supposed to be entrusting a large portion of my free time with.

'Nerd Rage' you don't know the half of it mate!!

As for....."there’s a lot of positive to take away from yesterday"

I didn't see any to be honest, not having had the privilege of Closed Beta, nothing at all was positive from a customer services point of view.

I only hope that GOA can learn that putting a positive spin on a 'catastrophe' is a good way to alienate their paying customers. So while 'the devs weren’t pleased with the nastiness out there', I do feel sorry for them having their work supported off by poor naive decisions from the people entrusted to manage it and know for a cert they have lost customers for their launch.

I saw a highly publicised MMO 'Open Beta' fail spectacularly and don’t think much can offset this particularly because there was absolutely no sign of apology from anyone ...Mythic included. MJB's comment seemed to say 'I've been on it from 08:30 and I hate getting up early'. Rather an unfortunate way to placate people who had also wasted a day trying to see his teams work.

What worries me most is Funcom did a far better job of this stage than Mythic/GOA. And they are heading into mediocrity with their flagship MMO.

WAR online is not entering a competition from a level playing field, and anything that alienates its customers from the off is a disaster, and you can't go back in time. The damage has been done.

As a spin off, I personally had the embarrassment of a lot of 'told you sos' from my Blizzard fanboy friends who gave up a lot earlier than I did, with the good reputation of Mythic soiled in their minds by poor communication poor customer services and the implications of poor IT handling by their partners.

 

So far the kick in the buttocks worked, as GOA has been giving us updates and communications regularly.

 

And it's good to get your perspective on this, so thanks for commenting.

Just a few points to consider:

(1) Any Blizzard fanboy friends of yours must have serious long-term memory loss surrounding the launch (and post-launch) of their product. While the GOA thing seems huge right now, this is but a small ripple to the indignation that lit up when Blizzard dropped the ball at the WoW launch, which basically rendered the game unplayable for days to people on various servers.

(2) I'll disagree that this is worse than how Funcom handled the AoC beta and launch -- that was an incredible disaster and mishandling all around that went on far beyond just one day.

(3) The fact that I took time to write two articles about this situation means that I'm not unsympathetic to this fiasco; on the contrary, I know I'd be upset if it was me. But I'm standing by what I said -- beta is beta, whether you paid for it or not. On the whole, Mythic has had a spectacular beta process, one which is up near the top of the pack in terms of length, focus, number of invitations and stability. They got just one chance with you and others to make a good impression yesterday, and they blew it, but to write it all off as a failure is to discount everything that's happened before, and to ignore whatever might happen next week. It's silly.

 

I stand by Syp on these posts of his. They're on the $.

 

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Syp there hasn't been any "before" in Europe, we have had closed beta and then Sunday's open beta and when we asked the GOA community manager why we were not getting preview weekends when we had been promised equal service with Mythic's customers we were told "equal is not the same as identical"

In my opionion and I belive this shared by games companies, open beta is now a marketing tool, it is used to sell the game. Any real bug tracking and fixing is done under NDA by properly picked beta testers.

 

I am waiting for access to the EU beta (and simultaneously downloading the US client, albeit a slow and painful process being a non-paying fileplanet reject) And I just want to say that if I had logged in Sunday morning, patched up my client, gotten a character or two created, goofed around a bit, and then found myself with a downed server for the night, or a day, or even two days, I wouldn't find myself with the same annoyed and angry mentality that I have now. Because I would have the understanding that YES, this is a beta, and we are TESTING the beta. But what we find now is a struggle with a system that has nothing to do with the actual game! Due to incompetent inaction a huge percentage of the open beta testers are unable to register their accounts yet alone activate a beta key. So we're basically testing a service that happens ONCE... A service that doesn't need "beta" testing. You set up account activation beforehand (aka NA open beta) so any problems can be sorted out before we get to the actual testing of the client. The game that we will be playing on launch day. Not some mangled database software.

 

You understand, of course, that an MMO is - at its core - one giant, mangled database. With a pretty cover. And, in the case of WAR, free cupcakes.