Given the feedback from 3.2 and 3.3 I emplore you to please please do a beta test of all future content. The troops in 3.3 are great, the new modes I think could be great but need some tweaking.
Having beta testers help they can make each release better.
They can’t be bothered to fix display issues that are a year or more old, what makes you think they want to waste time testing when they have a loyal testing group called players…
It was stated pretty clearly that 3.3 was “rigorously tested” and that it is too expensive and time-consuming to use the beta testers.
I think we can expect, going forward, it is more important for Gems of War to release new content on a schedule come Hell or high water than it is for said content to work. I also think we can expect that if a bug is not fixed the week it is released, it’s going to be in the game forever to serve this devotion to the schedule.
If you’re not OK with that, there is a very rich collection of video games that have released over the past 20 years, and almost every $30 you spend on them is worth more than the legendary for sale this week.
@Slypenslyde This response is as bad as saying we do not need to test cars for functionality. We can just roll with it. Yes maybe an extreme but still has a point. When you do anything as a business you must still actively engage in the things that develop worthwhile products. The negation of such is not a relevant excuse or a reason. Sure testers can not discover everything, even in normal games things are missed. That’s a given. However, when new releases come out even though they say its been tested. That response has more flaws in it than a sunk Titanic. As a huge list of things is missed, from visual, to code, and so on. So the more likely thing that has occurred is limited or no testing before its pushed out. Subsequently enabling the playerbase to be the free testers of everything. Doing this also can be a bad thing. As eventually players can get tired of doing it over and over, and numbers can thin. I say this as I have played many F2P games and this wouldn’t be the first time a game has done this that I’ve played. Now maybe it will fair better than those game in the end, who knows. All of them went under after a point, but people can argue it was more than just the lack of fixing and testing things.
I disagree and my view on the situation is heartlessly cynical.
The key point your Economics 101 analysis misses is:
Players pay money even for games that are a
sandwich.
There is some money lost if quality slips, to be sure. But there is also some money gained if new, excited players join the game because of new content. There’s also a problem with endgamers: they’ve already spent money, and don’t have a lot of things left to spend money on. That makes endgamers worth less potential money than new gamers.
Thus, we see that Economics has more than one level. In F2P economics, attrition is expected: a person joins, spends what they think the game is worth, burns out, and leaves. Hopefully by then, there’s enough new content to entice a new person to start the cycle. Whales exist, but are far and few between. The trick is getting the average player to feel like your game’s worth some $X, with a core of enthusiastic players appraising it at some $Y > $X, and so on.
Bug fixes represent work to satisfy players later in the cycle, who are worth less money. Bugs represent frustrations that cost some amount of money due to attrition. New content represents enticement that can bring in new gamers with more money. So if the equation balances:
$bugFixes < ($newContent - $attrition)
That’s bad news for bug fixes. It’s not “friendly” business, but the Invisible Hand isn’t required to have a heart. It’s not about maximizing customer satisfaction, but viewing revenue as a function of customer satisfaction and choosing to stay at the bar, rather than above it.
The game’s publisher has the data that tells them how the equation balances. The developers have stated intent to continue adding new game modes and content rather than focus on stabilization. Now, what does that tell us we can deduce about the goals of the ship’s captain?
All of this is less complex for up-front games, like Super Mario Bros. 3, that didn’t have the capability of post-release tweaks and content. They had to make sure you felt their game was worth $50 or upwards before you bought it, and had no way to fix it if they screwed up. People are still playing it decades later, and still value it at near or above its original price. They didn’t have the option of hovering just beneath the bar.
F2P games, and Gems of War is not an exception, operate on the constant assertion that the game may not be worth $50 to you TODAY, but if you go ahead and pay the $50 then the content it gets you might make it so, and it will certainly probably be worth $50 tomorrow, ESPECIALLY with the content you got for $50.
We ARE the testers. If something unbalances the game, people will rant about it on this forum.
I’ve been saying this since they brought out the beta testers and I think we do a damn good job at it too!
The community always has a lot of feedback, even though 70% of these threads seem made by peasants who can’t get their point across in a civil manner.
From another thread a week ago, this update wasn’t tested by the public beta testers.
There is also a minor, but important, point that you didn’t addressed. The F2P model still offers a free experience to the players, allowing them to evaluate the content/mechanics before they decide if they’ll put some money for the experience.
Some players want to value their time/money invested, which is not wrong to a certain degree, but when they want to overvalue the said investiments we see some of the recent disatisfaction directly related to the newest patch.
Those players exist, but in the most cynical assessment of F2P they are “bad users”.
Users who don’t spend money are using server resources that cost money without paying in. The Invisible Hand wants one of two things to happen with these users:
A slightly less cynical model adds a third possible choice:
I think GoW has a lot of encouragement for the first, and not a lot of encouragement for the last. The 2nd can be very subtle. Sometimes all one has to do to encourage a player to leave is simply “not try to talk them into staying”. I’ve seen this in the business world, where a company didn’t want to lay employees off so they encouraged managers to make some undesirable moves. It was noted many employees would be upset, and specific instructions were given, “Maybe you shouldn’t try hard to talk them out of leaving.”
The Invisible Hand cares not if it is wrapped around your neck or your erogenous zones. All it cares is if it’s going to get its money.
This is why I wish I knew more good places to throw $10 in GoW. I like spending $10. It’s a good amount. But the game’s good deals start at $20. I don’t like spending $20. There are some cool $5 deals in the game, but I only get to buy 1/week. Strange. There are very few "micro"transactions. It gives me the sense that if I’m not a big spender, I don’t really count.
The cumulative vip points sort of says otherwise. You can make small and valuable purchases at your leisure and still gain something for it in the long run.
I think GoW have some of the “better stuff” from F2P models out there, but on the other hand it can’t be too generous as it can potentially undermine the future of the game.
The next mini-update has been sent out to the community for beta testing. The devs even added a few testers.
Alas, Apple continues to be Apple, and an iOS beta test is not likely to happen any time soon. :sigh:
What? There is literally an app… for testing apps. Has no one on the dev team ever heard of TestFlight?
Hot diggity dog. @GoldPhoenix0, does TestFlight make it easier to offer us poor iOS users a beta to test? Or were you already including it when you mentioned additional hoops Apple requires you/us to jump through for a beta?
I’m not going to complain, since at least some of the clients will be beta tested. Test Flight looks cool, but still means maintaining some dev-side logistics and I can see how that extra bit of friction could be enough to make it worth just testing on PC/Android or whatever platforms don’t put a speed bump in the way.
It makes me happy in my heart that at least some aspects of an upcoming update will be touched by players first.
I’m in the process of getting our community beta testers up and running again. I have explained in the past that it does take a lot of time on our side to co-ordinate them and run the beta program smoothly. That being said, I am doing my best to have these testers more active moving forward.
So did they or did they NOT test the 3.3 update RIGOROUSLY as previously stated?
I am purely talking our community beta testers, not our QA team. The 3.3 update was tested by our QA team and publishers.
Devs did “Beta tests” for several previous fixes and updates. The players on the test server did not catch many of the bugs. Devs decided not to have Beta testers for new content as they did not want spoilers released prior to the content going live. Not sure Devs are keen to have players test as is/was not working well in the past.
NowayJoe2Go