Beta or not Beta ?

[leZourite]

I don't know for you guys, but too many games go live with a beta tag.

I sure understand that being author of a game, before it goes really gold, it should sport a "beta" tag for the test period, but to be fair, the complexity of a BB Game is far less than the counter part in 3D (or even 2D) most of the time.

If it's Beta because of bugs, well no game out there is "perfect" for whatever reasons there will be bugs, so i don't really see the point of the tag, when there are some games being beta for "years" one wonders what the hell the authors are frigging doing with their games !

Or is it a trick ? endless beta so the game never goes gold, and so players can still "invest" in the game (support that are actually really paid services ;p) with donations and avoid taxes ?

What do you guys think about that ?

[codestryke]

Personally I think youre dead wrong, hell you couldn't be any more wrong in your assumptions if you tried.

First of all the complexities of a BB game vs a FPS are is like comparing apples to oranges. Hell even a 2d game is still apples and oranges. In those types of games (which I've made) you have a defined set of circumstances. The world you give them is pre-defined. The bots / npc's are pre-defined you have a game arc that has a start middle and end. They are complex games only in the way they are programmed. The complexity comes in the form of a physics engine, graphics engine etc, but actual game play is almost trivial for those types of games thats why they can run closed betas and release a game without the beta tag.

Now BB games as you call them have a much much greater complexity to them and thats the MMO tag that is missing. When you added different player's into a world, then and only then does the complexity go from simple to extremely complex. The "openness" of the game itself then adds even more complexity. Look at any graphical MMO that has come out since Ultima Online. They all had betas and some of those betas lasted quite a long time. Why? Because of the massive amounts of balance that need to be placed in the game as you get 100s, 1000s, 10000s of players all playing a "different" way. Its that balance that is almost impossible to achive and thats why a lot of Browser Based MMO's (mine included) don't ever say it's in a release state because balancing takes a LONG time, especially when your just one or two guys.

The beta tag is also a way to tell players what to expect. Games like WoW, EQ2 etc etc should carry the beta tag. They release "patches" that sometimes add big sweeping changes to the game and it's underlying economy. They don't use the beta tag because no one is going to go to there local store and plop down $40 for a boxed game that says beta on it, nor are they going to pay $11 a month for something called beta.

I put beta and keep beta because people, like the example above, expect a certain level of quality / balance when the game is in it's "released" state. When it's released players don't like when halfway though the round something comes up that upsets the economy or metrics of the game and you have to change it. I found that with my first game, thats why I keep most of my games in beta for a long time. Cypher's been in beta for 5 years and still huge balance issues come into play because player's are still just discovering new aspects of the game that were developed years ago yet when unused till now.

Finally the money thing.. Umm do you run a business? I can tell you for a fact it doesn't matter what state your game is in, it doesn't matter if you say "donation" on the game. You receive money (well here in the states) for a service or good you have to pay taxes, period. Hell if I could say they were all alpha to get out of taxes, guess what, all my games would be in alpha!!!

It's up to each individual BB game developer to decided what they feel is alpha, beta and release quality based on how they feel about there game. It's nothing sinister, it's not to avoid taxes (least I hope not), it's a personal preference as how they view there game. And as I stated I don't think any MMO ever is out of beta cuz if they were we wouldn't have the dreaded patch days.

[leZourite]

Looks like you took this personally ? It was not intended, (though maybe you thought so because i went to your site before posting this ? actually no i had this in mind for some time )

Don't get me wrong, there are bb games and bb games, from the simplest to the more complex, and speaking of complexity i know a bunch because i have been developing a game for some months now (from scratch), i wasn't speaking about FPS games btw, you assumed that. The money part was a joke, thus the smileys.

We can argue all day long but i am not sure it would be that interesting, your point is that MMOs like wow should be always in beta, but any commercial products that stay in beta forever wouldn't work that much in my opinion, people want "quality service" not "beta quality service". (And i didn't say that games with a "beta" tag would give less/worse service, it's the perception in the mind of the customer). As you said, it's up to the dev to say if his game is of beta quality, or if it's not, but say you've been working for some time on a game, and a lot of features are working very well will you still keep a beta tag, because "shits" happen ? as i said, every software has bugs, and will always has it's in no way a reason to be in perpetual beta.

As nearly all softwares out there needs at one time or another a patching, does it mean every software is beta ? i don't agree on that but it's very subjective.

Short story long, i think that beta should be reserved for "testing" purpose, be it open, closed is irrelevant, beta means not "finished", adding features (like addons) and content doesn't make the software less finished in my book it just means that the software will evolute and this is preferred to a solo game, when it's over.. well it's over. And so in the end making people pay for a game (oh yes i know the games are "free" to play, and that's true, but nobody is going to work for months on a game without compensations) tag as "unfinished" is a kind of felony imo.

PS crap click on post button before i finished to write, and changed my rant

[codestryke]

Naw it wasn't personal it's just something that seems to irk me quite a bit, and as you've seen I have a lot to say on the subject matter Didn't see that you came to my site, I'm guessing Cypher. That one though if I truely wanted to could always give the round numbers as "beta" cuz it fits the theme of the game. More hackerish if I put Round X Beta then just saying Round X.

I agree having a beta tag is nothing more then a perception in MOST cases (I've seen some pretty whacked out betas that I would of considered more alpha). When I mention places like WoW it's in the sence that those companies issue patches that change the character stats to balance them out more. IMHO if your changing base characteristics of character classes (be it any game) after a year to help balance your system then to me that's still beta. Beta is suppose to be the time when issues are balanced. That to is a personal opinion.

Course this is coming from myself where I owned a software consulting company and we had very definative mile markers for what was alpha, beta and release quality. Games, like always, seem to break the "normal" software rules.

[leZourite]

Course this is coming from myself where I owned a software consulting company and we had very definative mile markers for what was alpha, beta and release quality. Games, like always, seem to break the "normal" software rules.

Yes you are so right on that one, actually it goes even deeper than that, the beta tag has lost its meaning with Internet mostly look at google boasting a beta tag with gmail, when actually the app is working flawlessly for years now (well they did get some hiccups when gmail2 went live :p). As for cypher actually it didn't seem "beta" to me, as the rounds were tagged as beta i thought mostly that new/different things were tested from rounds to rounds so it didn't reflect the state of the game as a whole.

[danielOut]

One reason you see games wear a beta tag after they seem "finished" is because it devs like to see how things play out in the more long term. Sure, everything may functionally work within a game, but is skillX or unitY going to be overpowered after a month of play. Things like that can be calculated to an extend, but seeing what players do with them once put out in the wild is equally important.

As far as the gmail title goes, beta just means they don't think they've hit version1.0 yet. I'm sure when they started designing they had a list of features they wanted, and even though they've launched what they've got quite successfully so far, they still don't have all those features they wanted in there yet. So it is still a "beta" release, since they don't feel it is fully featured.

[Chris]

These are just words. For example I use this terminology:

Alpha - unplayable or partially playable, you can lost stuff because of a new feature, frequent resets when a new feature is released
Beta - playable, but not all bugs are being fixed, chaotic rules changes are OK
Normal - normal game, no bugs (except for newly introduced by brand new features, but these are fixed instantly)
Gold - polished, no big features planned, online for at least 1-2 years

The other problem is the nature of online games, these are not released but either in constant development or frozen state (which is quite rare). In other words, unless the owner is lazy, MMO are always "betish" in their nature

[robotix]

I think we should plan, get out the bugs, and place a 'golden' game, that may evolve a little but a game shouldn't be online from it's first ability to do something.. it's like making a video game that you never anticipated, and then dropping out in the beginning for it not being very good; I'd rather my players anticipate it's release and then like it and stay with it!

[avguste]

Personally I also believe in the "beta" tag.
For example,I just launched my game Armorica RPG at http://armoricarpg.novahost.org and I launched it as Open Beta.
Why?simply because everything is playable,no bugs that I could tell of,however where the problem lies is the game balance.
So instead of saying "not releasing till done",I prefered to open it as Open Beta and take advantage of the players signing up to get reports on bugs that I may have missed,get ideas for future features and get ideas on game balance.

[jannesiera]

Personally I also believe in the "beta" tag.
For example,I just launched my game Armorica RPG at http://armoricarpg.novahost.org and I launched it as Open Beta.
Why?simply because everything is playable,no bugs that I could tell of,however where the problem lies is the game balance.
So instead of saying "not releasing till done",I prefered to open it as Open Beta and take advantage of the players signing up to get reports on bugs that I may have missed,get ideas for future features and get ideas on game balance.

That's what it should be  . And how many good games became so good: they opened as soon as they had something and expanded the game as the beta players requested. (I've read an article o a very popular game where they did it like this a while ago... )