The Daily Grind: Should characters always be wiped from beta to launch?

@DarkWalker hows this for a reason: Big honkin' bugs in the beta.... ya know, the things you are supposed to be looking for?

Beta's are not demos, they are not "early access", they are not a head start. They are for testing the game to find the "if I stand here I can kill the boss without it ever being able to hit me" and the "I can jump outside the level from this crate".

@fallwind

Unless the bugs allow characters to achieve undeserved power, I don't see any problem in keeping Beta characters.

As the article itself said, Beta is being used, in increasing amounts, as another form of "early access", or even a way to generate hype. If it's an open beta, with a mostly done game - to the point there is no left-over content shortcut or power grant from earlier testing phases - for the most part it's not too different from an early access program.

@fallwind

In fairness most F2P games wipe everything up to Open Beta. Because in most cases that is where the general betatesting has actually stopped. Yes they have a few buggs left so squash so people will still be reporting this or that..... but the majority is taken care of.

In most cases Open Beta is for all intents and purposes their launch, with the appended caveat that you (the players) can't bitch if anything goes horribly horribly wrong......... and they will drag that carte blanche to hell and back before they give it up.

Open Beta has been turned, like it or not, into a marketing maneuver and early access to games.

@DarkWalker "Unless the bugs allow characters to achieve undeserved power, I don't see any problem in keeping Beta characters."

Problem is... if you know your char is getting the DEL key, you are more likely to report that power-giving bug early. If you can keep your toon then you will milk that bug day and night until they patch it out.

@fallwind

And then, if someone is exploiting Beta bugs, the developer has every right to delete all character data, in order to prevent undeserved power from being brought into the final game.

It's one of the usual caveats of "Beta" status: everything can change at any time, including characters being wiped out, should the devs feel the need. If some players found a power-giving bug and started using it with the intent of keeping the now illegitimate characters after the game launches, the best course of action is to either strip the undeserved gains from them - if it's actually possible and not too much work - or to delete those characters (or wipe all characters, if the exploitation was widespread).

BTW, for things that grant enough power to be unbalancing, the devs often don't even need a report. They can (and should) add "probes" to their servers during beta testing to capture anything suspicious, since the likelihood of it being a bug is high.

@DarkWalker "And then, if someone is exploiting Beta bugs, the developer has every right to delete all character data, in order to prevent undeserved power from being brought into the final game."

IF they know about it, and a player who wants to keep their beta toon for launch is far less likely to report an exploit then a player who knows that there is no point abusing that bug now because none of that ill-gotten progress will matter on launch day.

@fallwind

- If the devs are not completely incompetent, they are quite closely watching (or setting automated data collection and analysis on) the players in order to detect any abnormal behavior from the game - such as players being rewarded more than they should, players being able to beat enemies they are not supposed to beat, etc. If it's a bug whose exploitation can give enough power to be a concern, it's being triggered intentionally by players, and the devs are not able to detect it during Beta - a period where there are less players to be watched, and (supposedly) more developers to evaluate/debug the game - I'm not sure I would be confident, at all, about the devs ability to find and fix exploits after the game launches.

- Having a chance to not wipe the characters means a lot more players willing to beta-test - and, besides, each individual player is most likely willing to play more than if they knew the characters would be deleted for sure. Thus, a lot more date to be collected and analyzed about how the game (and players) behave. A development team that is able to tap on this data can potentially get much more out of their beta program. This extra amount of play test might not be needed, though - games like WoW and TOR already draw enough willing beta testers, even without any kind of extra incentive.

- There are other ways to provide incentives. I liked how STO handled it in the revamp before going F2P, for example: players testing each specific sub-system got rewards, depending on how much they advanced during the test. For example, getting a ship officer to a high level would grant them a rare and powerful officer as a reward.

@KorosAU
APB, most recently, and most F2P games

@KorosAU

Yeah it has been a F2P staple since they realized they could use "Open Beta" as a "get out of jail free" card.

@(Unverified)

You took the time to type that? When is it ever a level playing field in an MMO...answer: Never. (Chuckle, seriously?)