New content - Slow and balanced or fast and reckless?

[boolean]

My browser game has just semi-launched and I have some people testing it finding bugs. I think it's coming along ok and most of the major bugs have been worked out.

The tricky part now is having players retain interest in the game to keep testing. At the moment there's about 10 items, 3 ships (it's a one-on-one ship fighting game) and one location. I can convince people to register and test for a day or two, but the lack of progress seems to be clashing against peoples willingness to help.

So, I was thinking, my goal was to slowly add items one by one, test and test and test and test, then once I know the item is balanced, add a new item. While I'm doing this though it might be hard to find people to keep playing the game.

So as an alternative, I was thinking, maybe I should add a TON of items, all the ships I can think of, basically get enough content to keep players busy for a few months and worry about balancing later. Once the players have enough to keep them busy for a while, then start trying to balance everything a bit better.

Does that sound crazy? Should I take it slow and balanced and drag out the 'not much to do' phase for a long period, or go nuts adding items and give the players more to do now?

I can think of pros and cons for both =/

[arai]

Do you want to do a world reset or not?

If you're game with calling this a beta and telling them there will be a reset, go to town.

[Nox]

I'd probably do it in bulk, since every addition will disbalance the rest anyway, so a lot of the balancing will be in vain

You can do some intermediate testing yourself, but then I'd do for the bulk changes

And keeping the testers sounds pretty important anyway

[Chris]

Are you developing a game or running a game? These are two different things. When you are developing you don't care about current players, you care about finishing the game as fast as possible. Testers are to test and provide feedback.
Also, most testers will quit when you launch the real game (it's about psychology, a portion of people just go around and test new games and then quit when these are reasonably done, they don't play games For example almost everyone who would regiuster to your game from this forum would be that type of person).

[boolean]

If you're game with calling this a beta and telling them there will be a reset, go to town.

Yep it's a alpha/beta at the moment. I thought I had a line in my post explaining that but I must have deleted it =/

Mmmm, interesting responses! I think I'll give it a shot then and create bulk batches of items then. Hopefully it all goes ok 

Puts on sunglasses and logs into MySQL "Boys, I'm going in..."