Combine an Alpha test of a highly anticipated title with a $100 entry fee and what do you get?
What do you think you will get?
A lot of whiners. I am going to keep the cut and pastes to a zero because it is an internal alpha boards (even though there is no NDA there is still a forum confidentiality agreement) but as you would suspect, a lot of people are complaining that they paid $100Â and they can’t play.
I also paid to play alpha test but since I have done over 21 beta/alpha tests (I really need to update this list) and I didn’t have to pay for them, I know what to expect.
The other players testers should know that too. To SOE’s credit, they are gladly giving back refunds to get rid of the riff-raff. Kudos for them to recognize they have zero chances of making day one whiners and complainers happy during an alpha process that will have continual changes, bugs, and probably multiple wipes. Get rid of them now instead of later, the noise they make will drown out any significant contributions.
I am not even going to complain at that Queue – SOE has been great in communicating saying hey, we are throttling hard because we have been crashing. Seems there are 10s of thousands willing to pay to test. I have no problem with this considering how many millions are given to games and game creators that may never get past drawing board phase so take my money and relieve me of my boredom in the digitalverse.
All this being said, at least I have lots of new subject matter to cover on the blog. I have played two hours. It is nice to be excited about something again.
Nice to be excited about SOE again.
I thought the mood on the forums was extremely positive. The whiners are in a very small minority. Also that wait time is entirely inaccurate. I had 3500+ ahead of me in the queue and it only took 40 minutes to get in. Not to mention that the queues were a one-off to deal with log-in congestion following the 15 hour downtime.
That said, this is not an alpha in any meaningful sense. As soon as you start taking money you have customers not testers. I’d be curious to know the legal status of paid “alphas” under UK law, too. It’s a legal requirement that goods must be of “satisfactory quality” (formerly known as “merchantable quality”). Also if the seller advertises the goods as suitable for a specific purpose the goods must be “fit for that purpose”. The open offer to give a full refund on request pretty much relieves SOE of any further obligation or risk of legal action in this respect, which is probably why they are offering it.
Otherwise I’d say Landmark is clearly neither of “satisfactory quality” nor “fit for…purpose”. The promotional material heavily advertises the ability to claim land, something that has proved impossible for many, probably most, players so far. That can and will be fixed but until it is I don’t believe you could say that Landmark is sold as described.
If game companies are going to continue down this route they very definitely will not be able to go on using the fig-leaf of “it’s alpha/beta” for very much longer. Or rather the term will change its meaning to become something akin to what we used to call “soft launch”.
I found the forums QUICKLY became self policing – and it was great to see the community already coming to the defence of explanation.
However, you hit the nail on the head. If you charge for something, there probably needs to be clearer guidelines – I didn’t even think of it from a “law” angle, either.
I got a claim today. Oddly enough, on top of one of the highest mountains in a T2 zone. I was shocked. I just had to fiddle with the height of the claim. I’ll post a pic if I get to log back in – I started messing with the “select” tool (which is awesome) and I lost my “delete” tool. So I made a mess of my claim already =)
While i have not dropped any money there, i am still wondering about the next step. I personally am still getting paid to do software testing. Here people pay to be allowed to test, and it’s not a preview called “beta” but apparently really an early stage of the game.
Clearly the next step is, people pay money so they are allowed to code a game?
Hi Sylow!
Looks like it – as mentioned in the post people are willing to pay to fund games that may not see the light of day, so why not fund Alpha tests? I don’t necessarily agree with that – but I bet other dev studios follow suit =)
Your job is secure, there isn’t a lot of testing going on – trust me =)