You find yourself in a room with one thousand small tables, each table adorned with two objects; a button and a number from one to one thousand. A voice comes over the system and says “only one of these buttons will not electrocute you. Good luck.” You gaze upon the legion of buttons as the voice softly cackles.
You are now a Quality Assurance agent for a massively multiplayer online game. Now imagine this scenario: You are in the same room, same tables, same buttons, same numbers. This time, however, you have one hundred helpers at your side. Common sense says that you send each one down the line, starting with number one and moving up (or however you want to do it) shocking each one until you get to the right button.
These are your beta testers. They do what you don’t have the time to. In video games, this is looking for obscure bugs that a developer might miss. For example, there’s no way that a developer could look to see if the level 14 chains of glory will dismount a player, vaulting them two hundred feet into the air, that if positioned correctly could land the player in the skybox. But given the time, one of the hundreds of testers will figure it out.
This brings me back to a gripe I have with Champions Online developer Cryptic. Rather than utilize their public realm, which was added at launch for the exact reason of testing updates, they continually decide to ignore their players. Part of the Blood Moon event has players in Millennium City, moving from portal to portal, waiting for a boss fight to appear where they fight off a hoard of zombies, fight the undead hero, and go into the crypt to save their soul. Now, when the update initially launched, there was a two hour wait limit in between events. So if you got to Crusher just after another group finished him, you would see “1:59:07 until the event starts”. Going to different instances was a short fix, but normally required the player to move through multiple instances before finding an open spot.
The timer was lowered to 30 minutes that night, but it doesn’t change the fact that players were practically screaming at Cryptic since Blood Moon appeared on the test server, to fix the timer and decrease it. Cryptic needs to stop acting like this is their first MMO ever, and they’ve never heard of player feedback. They had City of Heroes, they know what players expect, and they have an OFFICIAL FORUM.
If you’re going to allow players to voice their concerns, at least act like you’re listening to them.
MMO Fallout 