The failure of the beta defense

Cryptic Studios added Bill Roper to it's team. Have you never heard of "gettting Flagshipped"? They sold Hellgate London with the Lifetime Subscription deal, and it died a very quick, painful death. It didn't even have much time to writhe, seeing as bugs and the inability for it's creators to listen to their community ended up eating it alive. It was a fun game, but no matter how good the game is, if you can't play it because of bugs and lag, it's crap.

I've held the same argument up of that "it's beta" with the more recent Global Agenda. Only because the company is coming out with several patches due to beta tester feedback changing weapons abilities and functions, stuff like that. Just recently armor that was labeled for Level 100s was changed to Level 50s, slow effects were removed from the medic's poison abilities (sadface on that one), and they swapped some of the Assault's Weapons around in terms of what unlocks when.

Some companies are really trying and deserve the benefit of the doubt. Hi-Rez is just starting out, but they seem to actually be trying, and their game runs really good and looks really good. Thus, I find myself defending them. Their AvA, in my mind, is a joke, and the fact map/mission types are tied to what level you are is going to hurt the game a lot, but they at least seem to be listening and trying their best.

Some do use open beta to actually test and tweak the game. Others generally use it to preview and stress test, and get feedback from the devoted. All is not doom and gloom, but there are truly some shocking idiotic developers out there that just don't seem to give a flip, and bank on bait and switch tactics.

Ayup, works for me.

Fine then, enlighten me. Because it seems to me that people here ARE griping about MMOs that ship with a few bugs. I can't really think of any MMOs that released recently that were so buggy that they were unplayable (Champions Online comes close, though it got a lot better in a very short time period. Too bad no one gave it the chance).

I honestly think that these "expectations" you're talking about are extremely unrealistic. Don't look at the big games that are dominating the market with rose-colored glasses, look at what they were like when they released and you'll see that things are getting better, but nothing is perfect. No game will ever be able to be released to the public with the amount of polish that a game gets from being live for 5 years. It just doesn't happen. Unless, magically, some company gets a QA department of 100,000 people.

Comparing software code with a musical score or a film is preposterous. A musical piece or an edited film can be finished. Code, especially in the terms of a piece of software as large in scope as an MMO, is never finished and is constantly changing.

Anyways, I'm going to go back to being realistic and watching the MMOs I play evolve and get better while you go back and play WoW or EVE for the billionth time. Have fun missing out on new experiences. See you in 6 months! :P

Looks like the author of this title doesn't understand the development cycle.