I’m sure it is, but they lost me almost a decade ago when I paid for “alpha access” made dozens of bug reports, put a hundred hours into a broken game, signed up at least ten other people, and then lost alpha access because I wasn’t enough of an influencer.
All I wanted to do was play a buggy fucking game and give them free (professional) QA and they instead decided to restrict access to a bunch of extra exclusive PTU alpha influencers. That’s the second I decided to not give them any more money or free labor.
How did you lose alpha access? I paid 45 bucks several years ago haven’t reported a single bug and have played on and off for years and I still have access.
After Arena Commander was released, while they were testing early stages of flyable ships, they implemented a tiered release process where a small group of hand picked players were given access to release candidate builds before these were pushed to “alpha subscribers.” In practice, this was supposed to help reduce server loads for testing purposes, but in practice it meant we would go months at a time between playable updates, while a select few stared to control outsized influence on the development meta. At times it meant that the game was actually completely broken and unplayable in the public universe for extended periods, while the special test group would go on about how “trust us, it’s not ready yet,” even though the newer build were clearly more stable.
Also, in those early days, it was already obnoxious enough going back and forth with forum power users over shit like accurate G force simulations, control scheme preferences and weapons balancing, and then suddenly most of us were completely cut out of that conversation.
To me, this was a departure for what I signed up for, which was to be an alpha tester. In my mind, the generous sums of money I spent on ships and weapons was supposed to buy me two things - access to real time development of a revolutionary gaming concept, and perhaps a small amount of influence on that development (even if that just meant reporting bugs focused on things I cared about). When they implemented the tiered release system, both of those things were negated. All of use who were not selected for the real alpha test were excluded from the meta, and the real access to the development process, and were instead walled off behind an increasingly tall “community management” fence.
Bug reports from random players aren’t that useful. The bottleneck is fixing the bugs not finding them. For any bug you report to a games studio, there is a good chance they already know.
I’m sure it is, but they lost me almost a decade ago when I paid for “alpha access” made dozens of bug reports, put a hundred hours into a broken game, signed up at least ten other people, and then lost alpha access because I wasn’t enough of an influencer.
All I wanted to do was play a buggy fucking game and give them free (professional) QA and they instead decided to restrict access to a bunch of extra exclusive PTU alpha influencers. That’s the second I decided to not give them any more money or free labor.
How did you lose alpha access? I paid 45 bucks several years ago haven’t reported a single bug and have played on and off for years and I still have access.
After Arena Commander was released, while they were testing early stages of flyable ships, they implemented a tiered release process where a small group of hand picked players were given access to release candidate builds before these were pushed to “alpha subscribers.” In practice, this was supposed to help reduce server loads for testing purposes, but in practice it meant we would go months at a time between playable updates, while a select few stared to control outsized influence on the development meta. At times it meant that the game was actually completely broken and unplayable in the public universe for extended periods, while the special test group would go on about how “trust us, it’s not ready yet,” even though the newer build were clearly more stable.
Also, in those early days, it was already obnoxious enough going back and forth with forum power users over shit like accurate G force simulations, control scheme preferences and weapons balancing, and then suddenly most of us were completely cut out of that conversation.
To me, this was a departure for what I signed up for, which was to be an alpha tester. In my mind, the generous sums of money I spent on ships and weapons was supposed to buy me two things - access to real time development of a revolutionary gaming concept, and perhaps a small amount of influence on that development (even if that just meant reporting bugs focused on things I cared about). When they implemented the tiered release system, both of those things were negated. All of use who were not selected for the real alpha test were excluded from the meta, and the real access to the development process, and were instead walled off behind an increasingly tall “community management” fence.
Bug reports from random players aren’t that useful. The bottleneck is fixing the bugs not finding them. For any bug you report to a games studio, there is a good chance they already know.