Why I Hate Beta Testing for MMOs

How Quickly You Forget

Hellgate: London. Age of Conan: Hyborean Adventures. Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. All three are great games that made amazing strides and grew into being solid games after release. Of these three, Hellgate: London is gone, Age of Conan dropped servers and contracted its aim from WoW for Grown-Ups to Niche Extravaganza, and Warhammer Online is consolidating servers as fast as it can force people onto others. These aren’t isolated incidents.  Why does this keep happening? Largely due to one terrible, terrible concept: the open beta test.

Now, let’s clarify. For the purpose of my rant, an open beta is any beta wherein members of the general public and not paid testers are utilized for large scale stress testing of content, areas, items, classes, races, balance, etc., and where (and this is where it gets important) a non-disclosure agreement is not harshly policed. In honesty, you would never be able to employ the public at large to test your game and have any hope of leaks not making it out to the gaming media. In fact, you rely on it.

Let’s take a look at why developers do this. It boils down to two major concepts, both of which having to do with money. First, it’s cheap labor. No one gets paid to do open beta testing. Gamers scrabble over one another’s backs to get into beta tests. Toss the intentionally misleading “closed” tag in front of it to give it the appeal of exclusivity, and you’re guaranteed to get players desperate to test your work for free. Hell, you can even get the poor bastards to pay you for the honor. Second, it’s cheap advertising. Your beta testers have been steadily pumping otherwise semi-privileged information into the main stream of public awareness. They’ve been blogging, screen shooting, arguing, ranting, raving, planning character builds, and anything else you can imagine, since day one. Your game hasn’t even been released and it’s already the hottest ticket in town. In theory, public betas, whether “open” or “closed,” seem great for business.

So what’s my problem?

Beta testers are not, by and large, labouring out of love. They are not passionate about the game and sincerely interested in improving it to make it the best game it can be. They are doing it for bragging rights, or simply, to get to play for free. The few that are genuinely interested in the game’s quality and longevity are inevitably ostracised as being fan-boys or apologists. In the end, with so many MMOs trying desperately to survive in a WoW-dominated market, developers find that those looking for a free break from auction-haunting in Dalaraan will wander away when the handout ends. The game is left with nothing but bad press and a player base embittered by the concessions made to loud angry posters that aren’t even around any more. Your target market, never interested in playing WoW in the first place, now has to shut up or give up on a game they wanted desperately to love. No one wins.

Current case in point: Star Trek Online. The game has been in open beta for a short time. Over on the forums, the debate is fierce as to its strengths, weaknesses, and buyability. People who are supposed to be play- and stress-testing are dissecting this game in the least flattering manner humanly possible. “This game won’t be viable until there’s PvP.” “Why can’t I explore the world more?” “My character doesn’t have enough options.” “If this game came free with my life time subscription to Champions Online, I’d play it, but I won’t pay for it.” Star Trek Online will make or break itself before it’s ever even released. It will be judged and criticized for having bugs in beta, never mind that testers are there for just that reason: to find and help fix the problems before release. Reviewers will shred it apart, based on a few hours spent in world, or worse, a few minutes spent perusing the forums, all before it ever hits a store shelf. In a year, it will be either dead or comfortable in its niche. I hope for the former; there can never be too many quality games competing for my money.

If you’re an avid MMO player, chances are, you’ve said or heard the following phrase: “[Insert Non WoW MMO here]? Man, I tried that in beta and it sucked so hard.” And it’s damned. It will never, ever make it past that stillbirth of “sucking in beta.” Hellgate: London had pre-release problems that reviewers never let it live down, even after a year of exponential improvement. Warhammer Online is still being lampooned for not having all the content in beta available for public play. Age of Conan had myriad problems in beta and on release and will probably never have the numbers a game of its caliber deserves, despite solid and consistent improvements and expansions in content.

It seems to be an industry standard to release your game for open beta, and I can’t figure out why.  I can’t think of a single game that has benefited from open beta testing in the long run, that hasn’t in fact taken negative press from it.  When will this bewildering practice end?

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Tagged as: bad ideas, forums, MMO, mmorpg, open beta, PC