It snowed last week.
The first snow of the season always makes me happy. I love Fall and Winter. It’s my time of year, and always makes for some great photography.
It does make moving about a bit harder, though. We’re looking to move to a new home, and my wife really wants to get in before it gets cold and really snowy outside, which would make things more troublesome. Still, I’m really loving the colder temperatures.
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At the same time, EA/Bioware is giving me the cold shoulder, much as the Gatheryn people did. See, they opened up the floodgates for applications to beta test Star Wars: The Old Republic. I like the sound of the game, and would happily beta test it a bit, but according to the Beta Application terms, I’m disqualified because I work in the game industry.
I’m not out to steal their ideas. If anything, I’d give them a few. No, what I’d want out of tinkering with their beta is a chance to take a look, to offer some opinions, and to find some bugs. I’ve done my share of testing games at my job, and I know what to look for and how to fix it. I like fixing things, and offering ways to make a product better. (Which gets me into trouble sometimes, actually. Not everyone wants things fixed.)
I’m one of those weird souls who plays on a test server and actually tests things, though. I know, the trend is to use betas as promotional tools (and the response to the SWTOR one, which crashed the application server, is a good indicator of the interest in the game). I’ll admit, a beta is a good place for me to check out a game. (I got into the DDO Unlimited beta and loved it, even as I found things to submit bug reports on… they only cared that I wasn’t working on another MMO.) Still, I consider it my fair bit of the bargain to actually do some testing and help find problems with the game. Strange, I know.
So, alas, I won’t be beta testing SWTOR. I wish the game well, though. I’m not bitter, just a bit… chilly.
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In the meantime, though, I’ll be playing Puzzle Pirates a lot more. One of the Ocean Masters over there (PP’s Game Master position, since servers are called Oceans) bestowed a very kind gift on my unworthy piratey soul. (Quick plug: there’s a link up there in the upper right to show you my pirate, and if you join the game via that link, there *should* be some in-game currency in the offering by way of the referral system.)
Demeter, the Greek goddess hailed by Homer as “bringer of seasons“, has kindly granted my PP account a year’s subscription. She sent me an email explaining this, and that she knows that I like to play on the PP test ocean (effectively their Public Test Realm), the Ice Ocean. It’s a wild frontier sort of place, where bug hunts are more important than hunting gold, and new species of game design are wont to rear their puzzling heads.
More than once, I’ve noted on the PP forums that I’d make Ice my home and play there almost exclusively. (The trouble being that only subscribers or those who have purchased doubloons recently can go there. The gift of a subscription unlocks the realm for me.) Yes, it’s potentially subject to a complete wipe, but I don’t mind. Playing on Ice is all about experimentation, exploration and taming the sometimes wild bugs that inevitably come up in game development. That, to me, is far more interesting than playing on a “normal” server scrabbling around in the water for pieces of eight. Ice, as a test server, is more about *playing* the game than accumulating more piratey *stuff*. I can’t help but appreciate that.
(Which means yes, I’d likely do the same thing in WoW, if that were my game of choice. Test realms are about the last “frontier” of MMO gaming, and that I get to help the devs that I like is icing on the cake.)
Plus, well, Three Rings does excellent work. I’ve often held them up as an example in the game dev field, and I welcome the chance to spend a bit more time with their work. I’m still busy and not really an online gaming fanatic, but if I’m going to play online, I’m going to play somewhere that I’m happy to do so. The Ice Ocean is one of those places that just feels like going home.
So, even as my little family is finding a new home in this crazy “real life” thing, I feel like I’m going home to one of my sanctuaries in the online gaming world. It’s a gift that I can’t thank Demeter enough for. These Three Rings people are some of the best devs that I’ve had the chance to converse with. (Special mention of Apollo, another OM, and the great fun that he’s offered as a forum admin and event runner.)
To be sure, it’s a relatively small thing in the grand scheme of Life and All That’s In It, but to me, it’s a very kind welcome mat and a magnanimous gesture that makes my heart warm, even as I go play in the snow. Thank you, Demeter!
I’ve never quite understood the restrictions on game developers. As you point out, we would tend to be the ones more likely to know how things would break and know how to write a proper bug report; something beyond “Uh, this didn’t work and it sucks.”
Erin Hoffman wrote an article for the Escapist recently about “Why Your Game Idea Sucks“. The main point that I think applies here is that all game designers have their pet idea they want to implement. Playing SWTOR’s beta won’t make the rest of us go out and make a competing Star Wars game (if we could even get the license), or put lightsabers in our games to copy their combat, etc. Given that testing is a way to get free work from players, you’d figure getting free work from an actual professional would be the best.
Since when has game development been logical, I guess.
Wow, that’s pretty early for snow. Where do you live? Winter must be freezing!
I’m in Utah, USA. We often have snow in the local mountains year-round, but in the valleys, it can range from September through May. Of course, it doesn’t really stick around in the warmer months, but that it can snow at all that early or late makes for the awesome skiing around here. I’ve heard of people skiing for the July 4th weekend.
The deep months of winter, December and January, do tend to be a bit on the chilly side. That’s what happens when you live nearly a mile above sea level in a place that’s technically a desert. Low humidity means bitter cold at times. Still, I much prefer it over a high humidity lowland sweat trap. *shrug* To each their own.
Oh, and yes, Brian? Indeed, logic isn’t really something that we get to use all that often. I really am befuddled by the trend… but hey, I’m also befuddled by many business practices that I see. I can’t get riled up about it since it’s really not hurting me, it just doesn’t make sense. I like things to make sense… for better or worse.
I’m with you. I want to actually test a game when I get into beta. Sure, there are times when I log on and don’t want to be bothered with reporting things and give half-quality answers, but generally, I let the developers know what’s going on so they can make the game I pay for worth, well, paying for.
And I envy the cold. It’s still 70-80 here in TN, and I hope it gets cooler before Halloween. I was hoping for a chilly honeymoon in the mountains.
You can always come to our mountains. Bridal Veil Falls is still a gorgeous sight.
Sure, it’s half the country away, but that’s a minor issue, right? Better than trying to get to Hawaii, anywho…
I’ve got to wonder if open betas are even meant to fix anything. I’ve never worked in the gaming industry, but I will speculate that any dev team has it’s own group of internal testers working on bugs from the beginning to the end of the process, not to mention a closed beta of select users with some technical skill. Open betas, to me, have always seemed like nothing more than a way to create hype for a game before launch day; too bad the reverse often ends up happening. It’s sad that having dev experience isn’t considered a prerequisite for beta applications. Maybe they don’t want you finding/fixing something that proved difficult for their own team
Aye, I suspect that open betas are more about stress testing and PR than anything else. That just makes my industry insider position *less* threatening, though, if they are already 99% done with the game. *shrug*