Purpose of Beta?

[DeletedUser]

I cannot play normal for over a week. First the issue of military training that doesn't work.
this week we had the about total vanishing of our cities. Support reply:
If you don't like we suggest you go to the country worlds.

I tried to post their advice, but they closed that thread for further comments. Well, I am totally sick of this world. I follow the advice. I will check in a week or two if they made any progress on hiring a better team.

If all follow we will see how long they like to keep it all the same. yeah , yeah, it is a testworld, you have to accept this. NO WAY.
I play this for fun. Not to accept B. sh.
bye bye, enjoy the break out.

 

[DeletedUser1095]

Posts like these have got me pondering the question of how much beta testing can be done without "regular" players. I know there are other ways to run beta testing (for example wiping all or part of the testers' cities regularly to test specific new code from scratch) but Innogames favours having "regular" players populate their beta servers and try to play the game the same way as it's played on the "regular" servers.

Obviously only some of the beta players get actively involved in or successful at bug-hunting. How necessary are the other players to the beta-testing process? It probably depends on the game - maybe in FoE more "other players" are needed by the "real" bug hunters, to test things like plundering, GvG etc. But in Elvenar? Could the "real" bug hunters carry on effectively if the "other players" leave the beta server en masse?

I'd love to hear the opinion of both the QA staff and the active bug hunting players on this.

 

[DeletedUser]

I would think that having the regular players has to be an essential part of the testing due to there are such a small minority of bug reporting players. The efficiency of the testing would suffer dramatically with just that minority of bug reporters, how would test the trading aspect of the game as an example?
Plus the servers will more than likely need to test the stress load on the server with multiple peeps doing the same or different things at the same time , or even just being all logged on at the same time.

 

[DeletedUser1095]

All of those are good points, Rinaer. I sure hope this thread gets moved to the "discussion" section instead of being closed or deleted (I thought we *were* in the Discussion section when I added my post to Samira's).

Does anyone have a sense of how many active (or at least semi-active) bug-hunters there are as opposed to people trying to play the beta server as if it were a regular game? I suppose the staff must have some idea?

 

[Marindor]

I have indeed moved the thread to "General Discussions" now as it's a good discussion on itself. I have however removed the link to the screenshot of the support ticket since it's still against the forum rules to post screen shots of support tickets. For the question about the number of active testers: Some of them are of course quite active on the forum as well but not nearly all of our Beta testers are. To give you a little bit of an idea: Since last game update we received about 400+ bug reports in our support tickets, not counting the ones on the forum

 

[DeletedUser1095]

Thanks. How does that compare with the total number of players on the beta server?

 

[DeletedUser]

... but Innogames favours having "regular" players populate their beta servers and try to play the game the same way as it's played on the "regular" servers.

This is called PFB ... pay for bugs: you should pay some real $ and u'll receive some bugs, and complaing some worthless answers like 'will be forwarded', 'cannot be said' ...

 

[DeletedUser762]

u hear your pain man, same here

 

[DeletedUser]

It's more than expected than you will have to deal with a -solid- amount of bugs (and preferably, participate in bug-hunting) while playing on the beta server. You are expected to know that the game will potentially be a lot less stable than it will be on the country servers. While I understand your frustration, unless this is the first beta ever you sign up for, you knew what you were up against before registration.

With that being said, openly attacking the admin team will lead you nowhere; in fact, it's a good enough way to lead you to further infractions and warnings. Compaints about the administration are better done internally, via submitting a support ticket.

This is called PFB ... pay for bugs: you should pay some real $ and u'll receive some bugs, and complaing some worthless answers like 'will be forwarded', 'cannot be said' ...

That strictly depends on the way you choose to complain. You should also realize the team responsible is not in direct communication with the game developers (excluding the Community Manager), so basically answers like "It will be forwarded" are about the only answers they can give.

 

[DeletedUser762]

man they are off on day off, easter. we shoud see when the come back after the are off eating chochoate eggs... yukkk.....

 

[DeletedUser1095]

I know people are frustrated, but I'm really interested in the question of whether the beta server actually needs players who aren't active bug hunters. *Is* the number of active bug-hunters is sufficient to allow beta testing to be carried out efficiently without people who don't enjoy playing here? Only the staff can answer that, and I sincerely hope they will.

The rewards for successful bug hunter are the only potential advantage to playing on the beta server; there are no diamond handouts or even discounts on diamond purchases; there aren't even occasional "special offers" for diamonds at reduced prices. The "advantage" of getting new content earlier than the regular servers isn't actually an advantage; no competitive edge is needed in this game, so knowing what's coming doesn't help at all; and anyway not everyone plays on regular servers. So if regular players aren't really needed to provide context for the beta testing, maybe we really can all leave. Staff dear, what do you think?

 

[DeletedUser118]

At least I know that last time we came up with an idea to give out diamonds to all the players on here and I asked what ppl are actually doing if they are not participating in bug hunting that deserves them to also being paid some, I was told that all players count. They are needed for the stress tests of the servers ( I think this has also been mentioned in here). So if we all leave, they might not have enough of us anymore for such tests.

 

[DeletedUser1095]

At least I know that last time we came up with an idea to give out diamonds to all the players on here and I asked what ppl are actually doing if they are not participating in bug hunting that deserves them to also being paid some, I was told that all players count. They are needed for the stress tests of the servers ( I think this has also been mentioned in here). So if we all leave, they might not have enough of us anymore for such tests.

Thanks, Katzenprinz - was it a staff member who said that? I'm really interested in hearing what the staff thinks about this.

 

[DeletedUser]

@Mink For people who play a lot, such argument is known. But in this game is a bit invalid. To have real stress test a lot of players have to be active in one moment. Elvenar is game which I may call as "few click per day" Owners probably have no idea how to do such tests. And this is easy. For example: "On day X at hour Y will be stress test. If server will break all players active will gain reward Z on live account." After such message they for sure will be having REAL stress test, hammering to accounts, server dying and so on

 

[DeletedUser118]

Thanks, Katzenprinz - was it a staff member who said that? I'm really interested in hearing what the staff thinks about this.

No, if I remember right it was a player who said so.

 

[DeletedUser]

Since the current policy is to maintain a world with active players that don't solely focus on bug-hunting, I'm sure you guys understand giving out free diamonds to every player on the server is not something that will most likely happen in the future.

 

[DeletedUser]

And because of that this server is "test" only by name. Not because real tests are here. I personally send more tickets on live servers than here. This is live "different way" server And in fact, as was mentioned in another thread, another source of money taken out from people :/ As a developer I see this as a serious problem, because instead of real test server we are getting something we cannot call nor beta, nor preprod, nor live. If server is not having clear objectives, results are also not very.

 

[DeletedUser1548]

@thekandor is right. What kind of server Beta1 is was explained here:
https://beta.forum.elvenar.com/inde...s-version-1-1-chapter-vii-fairies.4346/page-4

Elvenar beta is not a test server, but a server where players can play in the same way as any live server, with the difference of getting new updates earlier. This is of course done so we have time to hunt for bugs, report them, and kill them. We ask our beta community to assist us in finding them, and reward them if a bug can indeed be reproduced by the Elvenar team. This encourages players to actively search for bugs, and as a result, we have been getting more reports, and we have been able to reproduce many of them. In the end, this benefits the entire global community, because the live servers will get less bugs. We gladly hand out diamonds to players who spend their free time hunting for bugs to help us make this game better for all of us.

So... be happy you can 'experience' bugs earlier.
After I read @Goryn 's post I am not confused anymore about the nature of this server. Hope it will help you too.

 

[DeletedUser651]

I worry about the numbers of advanced players leaving beta. In the beginning it didn't matter much, but now it can take a year or more to get to the advanced stages. So, if advanced players are leaving, they won't be replaced that easily and then there won't be that many folks to test the latest advances. Does that matter? Do we have plenty of people to do the testing if more people quit?

 

[DeletedUser1095]

Since the current policy is to maintain a world with active players that don't solely focus on bug-hunting, I'm sure you guys understand giving out free diamonds to every player on the server is not something that will most likely happen in the future.

Actually that isn't clear at all, Neuralgia. The FoE beta server gives every player some diamonds just for being there, presumably because they realize they need numbers of players putting up with the bugs in order to test everything more or less properly. So they attempt to motivate players to stay on the server, unlike here where the staff sometimes tells people they ought to play elsewhere.

After I read @Goryn 's post I am not confused anymore about the nature of this server. Hope it will help you too.

Ag123, it would help me more if Marindor had not just stated above that they get more bug reports via in-game support tickets than they do via the forum. And yet they don't give diamond rewards for in-game bug-reporting tickets. So it's a mystery.

And all the above is actually a side issue to the main thing I'm trying to find out: Do the QA staff see any need for people to play on this server if we aren't actively hunting bugs? Do you have enough active bug-hunters to test everything you want to test? Would the active bug-hunters be able to play and advance efficiently without non-hunting players?