All the cool kids drink the beta Kool-Aid

There it is, the invitation you waited a lifetime for. It greets you:

Congratulations! (lucky summofabish) Welcome to the beta paradise, over at this link you will find our difficult to download client that will potentially crash your computer the second you launch the beta client. Currently, both starting areas with orcs and elves are playable but our orcs are a different shade of green. In the next week or so, we will be in the super delicious phase that will make you rock with your cock out or for the ladies give you a clit boner! In the meantime, feel free to sign up for the forums if you need to contact technical support or discuss the game with our wonderful beta community.

Something in your pants besides a hand just shifted and the angels in your head sing Hallelujah. You scramble to print it out; frame it next to the others; make plans to sleep with it under your pillow for the next month; forward your victory to a friend or a few guilds. “Haha, look at this, I’m in this fancy new beta and your not! It only took 50 different applications this time. IN YOUR FACE… ASS!” I do anyway, braggadocio!

After the potential heart-attack subsides, I heed the boss’s advice and sign up to the forums while the client downloads. 1 hour later… I’m drooling and missing brain cells. I just pooped in my socks and I’m trying to slit my wrist with the mouse. I’m eating cat dookie instead of Doritos. Wonderful… Oh, that community is far, far, from this wonderful enchanted community of unicorns and rainbows I was foretold. Once in the game, any sane person might die from mass scale retardation.

“STFU nubsaucers, omgz, WoW owns this is gay emo sharts, Chuck Norris kick to your mom’s face separated your twin at birth, lollypops.”

If you ever want to go to a Tourette’s convention, hang out in any general chat channel during a popular beta or immediately after the game goes live. Over and over, you will run into a Neanderthals debate squad, and any constructive criticism tends to be drowned out in all the garble. Sadly all it would take to filter out these morons is an IQ test. Even if the beta morons somehow managed snag the right answers, (some genius always sells the answer sheet) they would still input the wrong answers.

Are these the worst sorts of testers you could ask for? I think so, but sadly, it doesn’t matter if they log in and play, they are effective testers without even knowing it. Deep in the developer hive are super machines parsing all the important bytes flying to and fro’. Mining this gold mind is a valuable resource for the developers to tune spells and abilities, the leveling curve, whatever and adjust appropriately; this is their ultimate toolbox. The focus testing that is publicly announced tends to be the occasional mass e-mail, “LOG IN THIS WEEKEND AND STRESS TEST THE GAME! Win a shiny prize.” It’s a let down, because some of us really do want to play a bigger role in molding.

Beta is about development, most testers don’t treat it as such and a large fault lies with the developers and the marketing department. But what ticks me off more than those shitty testers are the developers who do not know how to develop during beta nor do they know how to run a beta test. I hate to admit it, out of all the betas I participated in WoW had the cleanest beta development, releasing one area at a time until it was ready to release the next. It wasn’t all happy fun times though, the devs rarely posted or whoever was responsible for keeping testers in the loop, communication was abysmal.

And to those testers who like to play armchair designer and get all huffy after writing a 100 tps report on pathing exploits and itemization imbalances. (I used to be one until a little gem called Vanguard changed my outlook on beta life!) Just stop now… You are a good tester, you provide sage feedback, subjective, but the developers won’t care. You are wasting your time, you won’t be able to make the game better with your opinions, a developer might read it, even thank you for the feedback, but it’s moot, so enhance your calm and enjoy the suck or wait for pay-to-play beta. If you can control the mob’s opinion, something might happen, but it’s rare and has to be a pretty obvious fuck up by the devs to bring about the change. Maybe some of you had better luck than me.

I’m still waiting on a Warhammer invite, I’ll drown myself in some beta kool-aid for that.

Hat Tip: Pvthudson