Are they going to NDA the entire community? The Closed Testers would get access to it early under an NDA to help test it, yes, but what I meant was that if 0.9 releases to the general public & the multiplayer doesn’t work well then it will look bad for EHG, people will be turned off it & that bad press will spread.
Edit: Having properly read the second paragraph… How large would/should a larger MP testing pool be? The more people you have in that pool the more likely there are to be leaks (either deliberate or accidental). But yes, I agree that there will hopefully be an increasing size of MP testers as it goes along.
Is that really the case anymore though? I feel like there have been plenty of games that have turned around just terrible releases. No Mans Sky just kept plowing ahead and they’ve finally got it turned around.
Either way, if you want some critical feedback… Then pick me up. I’m a critical person by nature.
It is possible to turn around a horrifically bad launch, yes but it’s certainly not idea. Why risk the reputational damage if you don’t need to? Us soulless corporate types (I’m an accountant) worry about this kind of thing…
I don’t really feel like that is much of a thing anymore. All you have to do is pay a streamer to play it for a day once you have improved it and if it’s good people will flock.
I was feeling nostalgic so I looked back at an old guild forum when we - in 2003 - were lucky enough to be invited into the World of Warcraft Friends and Family Alpha test (under NDA). I don’t know how many people were in it, but it was definitely a pretty large group. Just my guild alone had around 20 people or something like that. I know EHG is not Blizzard, but I also think 17 years have passed, and there should be plenty of lessons learned and genre enhancements to look at. Anyway, that was the kind of test I envision would be helpful to really wring out not just bugs and problems, but real gameplay concerns and issues. Note we ended up in that phase for more than 3 months. On top of conventional technical issues, there were major discussions about things like death penalties and corpse runs, as well as leveling pace and loot. There wasn’t any form of endgame for us at the time, this was testing to really wring out a lot of conceptual things including the economy and how players interacted with each other (both in and out of game) - and of course making sure it all worked seamlessly in a persistent multiplayer environment.
Obviously, LE is a very different type of game, but I thought the general strategy Blizzard employed was very sound and very meticulous, yet even with all that time put in they still ran into problems. Note that even after Beta began (with no NDA), another eight months of testing went by before they felt ready for release. And even after all that testing, the release was filled with issues (queues, etc) logging in, etc.
I understand this is a difficult process but that’s exactly why I would test with as many of the hardest and least predictable variables in play as soon as possible.
TLDR: I would argue jumping from a small community test to a full blown public beta (with nothing in between) is actually more risky if the number one concern is reputation.
Just out of curiosity, do you actually know how many internal testers (QA and Community Testers) EHG has?
I also really think, that EHG did sound very mindfull about their situation. In the 0.9 MP Update Mox gave, they acknowledged, that they know they don’t have the ressources as other companies and they try to plan according to that.
I am 100% sure, they will do the best the possibly can to make it as smooth as possible. But i am pretty sure, they are aware, that there will be issues.
It’s just a matter of how grave those will be. And with enough time and preperation i am sure they can eliminate alot of the common issues.
Definitely agree with everything you’ve said here. I fully believe this game has the potential to match or exceed the bigger players and expand its audience tremendously if they achieve all they’ve said they want to, so that’s numbers like 50-100,000 concurrent players.
As for the first question, I really have no idea how many testers are out there currently - the recent interview released said they had about 50 employees. You would know much more about the community tester numbers, but I’ll guess 50? So maybe 100 people optimistically? But how many of those are actually testing multiplayer on a regular basis? And how does that number reflect a game that may have 1000 times that amount of people playing?
I hope starting soon (or after release of 0.8.1) moving into 0.9, the focus is squarely on multiplayer; I really believe it demands the attention as it influences other facets of the game. I also think they need to establish a bigger/better bridge to the full audience this game can attract, perhaps by greatly expanding the community tester pool, and hopefully with a bigger mix in player types. Invite more testers, and let established ones invite a pool of their friends to increase diversity and ensure there are always people playing/testing together in groups. Let a test economy and social population grow/develop and see what issues arise.
We’re not that may CTs currently. But I also think that EHG will open the gates for a wider access when MP comes near. They could invite people for MP tests independently from the current CT group. They may also have incomplete builds for specific testing purposes that you can download voluntary (like they did with the chat system).
My information / impression is that they are following a well structured plan. They want to bring other systems in line, maybe also are waiting for specific dev tools for MP to really dive into it. One big step was the backend changes with 0.8.
The reputation thing also is a big factor. Of course there will be bugs. And no test group can compete with the complete community in finding these bugs. The goal is to not have gamebreaking issues.
Many people state that they wait for multiplayer to buy into LE. So if MP launches in a terrible state they would defenitely feel scammed and some might be very vocal about it. With that, the very first thing people that aren’t aware of LE, yet, might hear is “There’s a new ARPG with a terrible MP start. People are ranting.”
0.8 with Rogue brought un many people. MP will attract even more.
Games redeem from bad reputation. But this isn’t a viable business plan.
There’s some really fucky logic going on.
Having multiplayer doesn’t mean that the game is finished nor that if it is terrible, then people will forget the game forever.
The only game that I play right now is a multiplayer early access game with 93% positive rating.
I don’t know what brought up the vivid imagination of “game ruined forever” if there’s possibly poor early access multiplayer but it’s distant from reality.
It’s not that people, that are disappointed with a EA game never ever check again.
It’s more about that as soon as theres something like a MP release that doesn’t work properly, people write bad reviews. All of a sudden the average rating is going down. The damage is permanent because very few people delete or change their reviews. And even if they do it’s not instantly after the devs fixed some issues.
This is no grey theory. This already happened a lot with other games.
Can you please explain what your example with the other game is about? You playing a game with 93% positive reviews proofs what exactly?
in my opinion i think that a lot of people (certainly not everyone!) just want MP to come because for them it then means the game is, in actual fact, launched. Again, my opinion, but the impression from in game chat, and to a lessor extent the forums is that players are not taking a huge amount of interest in the early access/beta feedback process. They just want to play the game and the beta bit is just something to be annoyed about when a bug is found.
I think that MP will come when its in a state deemed ready by EHG taking everything into account. Yes we all want it, yes we’re all looking forward to it, yes its a big part of the getting ready to launch etc etc etc but its also a massive risk in the development.
Taking time, getting it in a fit state before letting the masses go at it is completely understandable. The downsides for it being a mess (infrastructure that cant support it, bugs that were unknown, game breaking character interactions and the like) are too great and I really hope they dont do anything other than stick to the time line they clearly have.
We know its getting there, we’ve seen the videos. Its just going to be a while longer.
I also dont think we should underestimate the impact the pandemic has, it isnt business as usual for any company right now!
Yes, but most of those sales will come when multiplayer arrives anyway. So why not take the time to make sure multiplayer works (reasonably) properly and keep the positive reviews?
Have you been on the Wolcen reddit lately? Yeah, it’s definitely still a thing to screw up a launch had have everybody and their mother hate you even if you do start to turn things around.
SOAPBOX BEWARE
I don’t really have a dog in this fight. I’m not interested in MP in the slightest. Sure, I’ll occasionally will hop on with some folks if I get the urge, but I play almost exclusively solo Over 3000 hours in D3 and my MP time is probably about 100 of that, and that’s being generous.
But, as someone who works in the arts, I’m actually very, very appreciative of EHGs ‘well put it out when it’s ready’ mindset. That goes for every version of the launch (been here since early Alpha - it still makes me grumpy that I missed out on the kickstarter. :D) Why I like it is because in my industry ‘the vision’ is being delegate to ‘vision by committee’, because of how much money is being thrown into the big tent poles now. And those big tent poles are all starting to blur together and feel very, very generic and not remotely lasting or memorable.
MOST people don’t actually know how to give constructive criticism in the first place. So you have to devote resources to wading through it to rectify its relevance or lack thereof. Then when you add the committee getting to discuss it all as well it essentially serves to bring the ‘creation’ down to the least common denominator.
I can’t stand this.
EHG feels like the little guy who is going to say, 'you know, we’re going to make some money, we’ve got a great idea, but we’re going to take our time, make this as brilliant as we can and not cow-tow to masses to try to milk as much money as we can out of this. We DO want to make money, of course, but if we don’t make QUITE as much as we might have if we’d done 8 bazillion focus groups, we’re okay with that because we want our vision to still be in there.
SOAPBOX OFF
(I’m gonna go grab a glass of whisky now and bitch to the bartender.)
I am pretty sure that multiple devs already stated that they worked on MP since the very beginning.
We already have alot of backend changes within the game for MP if i am not mistaken.
EHG just underpromises and overdelivers with each and every major patch and until they don’t screw it up big time, i give them all the trust they deserve.
Regarding the reviews, I think there’s some chicken and egg syndrome. Part of the reason the reviews are so good right now is because the game has a fantastic single-player experience. But ultimately it has been touted and advertised as a full multi-player experience, so this is kind of misleading. It’s actually a smart way to play the Steam rating system.
On MP testing, I wonder what their internal targets/predictions and preparations are geared for. It seems like every “good” MP release ends up misjudging how popular they are and needs to scale up. Hopefully they will prepare for the best/worst case and can scale up really fast.
I get EHG’s perspective here. Think of all the overhyped and botched game releases last year. People are being hypercritical right now (for good reason) and are very wary of any sign of bugginess or poor quality. And while it is understandable for an EA title to have some issues with a feature like Multiplayer, all it takes is for there to be one major bug for the collective internet to jump down this game’s throat and toss it in the pile with the likes of Cyberpunk.
The environment around any anticipated game right now is kind of hostile. If it takes them a few more months to ensure that MP releases in the best possible state to get the best possible first impression, then more power to them.
what’s with all these new people coming in “concerned” for the game. Bro you just got here, let EHG do their thing. You have literally no idea what’s “baked” into their code or not. MP will come when MP comes, you have the power to forget about the game until then right now without an announcement. If the only reason you want to play the game is for MP it might not be for you anyways.
