Hi John, Rather than come out and vote specifically for one type of beta testing or another allow me to give you a bit of thoughts on this subject based on my personal experience. Then, you will be able to decide based on the answers I give to each question.
To start with beta testing is vitally essential for any type of product you plan to release to the public for commercial or non-profit. The reason is even if a game or some other software product works perfectly fine on your home PC there is always a lot of room for error and it may crash on a different platform, perhaps someone playing it does something different to crash the game, or maybe your end users flat out don't like something and want or need something changed. Its better to catch these issues as early as possible so as to fix them long before any sort of final release. As for public beta testing it definitely has its pros and cons. On one hand you will have a lot of testers eager to play and test your game, will get a lot of bug reports to deal with rather quickly, and it is well suited for someone wanting to find out if a game works well on a wide range of computers with completely different configurations. On the down side people being people will bitch and complain if things don't work correctly, everyone who is anyone will make all kinds of suggestions you may or may not want to implement, and be prepared to get bombarded with questions about when the next patch will be out or when you plan to release the full version etc. So while public testing can be helpful also keep in mind that you need a thick skin to put up with people who aren't civil to you. Private testing is often times the best of both worlds. You can hand pick your testers, usually people you know, and they can do the majority of early alpha and beta testing. It helps to have a smaller group of testers because it is easier to focus on fixing specific problems and getting everyone on the same page instead of testing various different things at once. On the downside remember if you have a small team you may not be able to test against a wide range of computers, operating systems, and other configurations so you may not catch some bugs until said product goes public. As far as things a developer should not do I'd say is change your mind to much. Back during the early tests of Mysteries of the Ancients I changed my mind quite a bit on game designs,programming languages, etc and as a result the public is a bit fed up with me right now. I don't blame them. They just wanted a more or less complete game and I basically continued to revert back to early beta status by the number of rewrites. My advice from personal experience is don't do that. Also before you go into beta status have a good idea of the game you personally want. The reason I say that is once it goes public everyone in the community will want to lend their suggestions. Some may be good ones, but others will not be. The problem is if you begin adding this, that, and the other thing you may end up disliking and even hating the game because of all the extra mods that maybe you personally didn't have any interest in but were requests from the game's players. I have had that happen to me and it is a hard lesson to realize that I spent x amount of hours adding or changing a game's concepts to discover I personally hated the changes and had to rip them out to the moans and groans of the community at large. So just have a good idea of what you want before adding any suggestions, mods, or changes that may effect your own personal enjoyment of the game. Cheers! --- Gamers mailing list __ [email protected] If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to [email protected]. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to [email protected].
