Time for open beta?

IeptBarakat

Well the way the big multi million dollar budget studios handle it is they treat the 'open beta' they give to consumers as an early access demo or event to get players to look at their game. As open betas generally get a lot of exposure throughout the gaming communities. That is why they're generally only available for a week before the game is launched.

konata

That's because they already have their testers go through the phase on own built systems.

They will get a lot of information from their external betas about how the game works and a lot of people will feed that back and they will improve on it. For example, the SC2 beta was heavily influenced by community/external feedback.

Other games will get a lot of information that will help them. You can't say the NS2 community is better than any others as it is just not true. All of them serve the same purpose and help their respective development teams immensely.

EDIT: And don't forgot moons ago, WoW. Boy, that was an amazing load of feedback Blizzard built from.

Zeikko

Open betas also offer a lot of statistical feedback to the developers. In case of MMORPGs for example the game tracks every move that each player makes. Like how long he plays on each session, how the average playtime changes during the time he has access to the beta. How much time he spents on each quest. Which quests are most popular. Which areas are most popular. What skills, abilities, classes, races etc are popular etc. etc.

As statistical game design methology has become more and more prominent open betas make more sense and give more development value to the company too along with the marketing.

UWE does gather stats already but as far as I know they don't really base the balance fixes on the stats but more on feedback and overall feeling of the game. I'm not sure if UWE is ever going to move more to the statistical approach like Blizzard and other big boys (and smaller ones too nowadays) but if they are planning to do that they should definately do that before any kind of open beta.

SilverAx

Having an open beta now I think would be bad for UWE. The game is playable but people are used to AAA+ titles like WoW/TOR/BF3 and their 'betas'.

BF3's open beta generated a lot of criticism for them and that was very polished already.

NS2 would need to be just about ready to be pushed out to retail before I think they'd want to have an open 'beta' to test the waters and see what bugs/exploits will be found in the open world plus it's also a good marketing campaign to try before you buy type tool as I originally heard about NS1 by word of mouth from my friends.

IronHorse

<!--quoteo(post=1890815:date=Dec 18 2011, 07:04 PM:name=SilverAx)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (SilverAx @ Dec 18 2011, 07:04 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1890815"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->BF3's open beta generated a lot of criticism for them and that was very polished already.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->

exxacctttlyyy..
but also because they actually omitted quite a few trademark and very necessary features such as in game squad mics, squad systems, and a slew of other bad signs of gameplay direction and not necessarily "bugs" etc

tobias3

Typically in software engineering the last 10% of the work take 50% of the time. I'd say if they have onos and exosuit in they have completed the "easy" 90% and are then going to have to start working on the hard 10%. Mainly fixing a lot of bugs and making it playable on most computers.

They started developement with Spark at the end of 2008 - three years ago. So I'd say there is a real beta in another two years. That's when you can start wishing for a public beta :)

cmcpasserby

a open beta wont provide any value to UWE, it will just give hype at a point where they don't need it, people who payed to be in beta are more likely to contribute and make bug reports than people who got it for free, and aren't as invested in the game.


and someone mentioned it about testing it's requirements in a open beta, well that isnt needed either, the devs know what is needed to run this game at a good fps, and steam can tell them what the market has to play on.

konata

<!--quoteo(post=1890703:date=Dec 18 2011, 07:48 AM:name=aCId_rAIn)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (aCId_rAIn @ Dec 18 2011, 07:48 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1890703"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Oddly enough, I didn't read anything in the wikipedia that backed those opinions against what I was saying. Anyway, I love you guys, and I'm not here to argue.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->

I didn't see anyone mention wikipedia?

vizioNz

<!--quoteo(post=1890523:date=Dec 16 2011, 01:39 PM:name=Koruyo)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Koruyo @ Dec 16 2011, 01:39 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1890523"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Client performance is the smallest problem here...

UWE would need to rent lots of servers, you cant just make an open beta an have 100% user driven servers - i mean right now there are 2(1 is not 24/7 online) EU servers, 1 AUS, ~4 US Servers with good enough hardware. (all the other servers are crap, and make ns2 look bad)

So at best, thats place for 112 players worldwide.(if 16 slots, which is already too much for the 4,5ghz servers)


First we need to optimized server clients, so regular gameserver hosters can be used.

E.g. you can get a 64players bf3 server for 60-70€ per month but with stable tickrates.
You cant get that for ns2 atm, im pretty sure the hardware used for such a bf3 server would only give us ~14 slots and not stable tickrates but at the same pricepoint...
Nobody would rent that.


<u><b>The plan was to have up to 32 player servers if im not wrong? - we are very far away from this number.</b></u> (there is no hardware available that can do this atm)
But again even if server hardware wasnt the problem, you cant make an open beta without renting lots of servers for your customers to give them space to play(hey here is an open beta, but its your job too spent money for a place to play... Oo) - i dont think uwe has that much money to promote the game that way... (renting dozens of servers worldwide)
Open betas are advertising nothing more - cost lots of money for devs.


What i could see is after release a free weekend(after you have a few hundred servers from players), but nothing else...<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->

I think your a bit confused on the priorities there. There is hardware out there that can achieve this very easily, the problem is the server side code and client side code is not optimized enough to allow a server to successfully run with 32 active connections. The servers are not the issue, it's the code that the servers run off of that is the problem. Servers can now manage 24 players (high performance servers of course), I'm sure Max is working hard to support 32 players on sub-par and above server rigs.

All too often I see users complaining about servers "sucking" and "lagging" and just plain old being <u>slow</u>, when in reality, it's not the servers fault... It's the code (that is continuing to improve) that NS2 runs and performs on. NS2 is still in production and will continue to progress in performance and I have faith in Max that with the help of Dushan, the game will perform how we all desire in the long run.

Koruyo

The point wasnt that server hardware is not available or too slow, it was that the code is bad - so you need very top end servers to run it well at the current time of development
(the reason why there are only like 6 servers that are really playable atm)

I have no doubt that we will get to a point some time in the future so everybody can be happy, but currently "time for open beta?"(free access for everybody for a given timespan now) hell no.

PS: Atm i dont even find dedicated server hoster(eu) were i could put up a ns2 server with good performance(like my i5 4,5ghz pc) for 100€-150€ (so i/we (arc) would consider renting one togheter with duplex)...
Im just frusttrated that it has to be so expensive, and we cant just rent a gameserver from some crappy hoster like gameservers.com for like 20-30€ per month) since those cant handle ns2 fine yet. (or at least our only option atm is having me opening the server on my pc if we need it - but sadly it has not very good pings, and i got timeouts from time to time - so its not the best expirience, but at least pretty ok tickrate wise)

Kouji_San

Heh Koruyo, it IS the server code going between the client and the server. Along with physics and game code.

Those powerhouse servers can handle running the serverside fine (and yes that also needs more optimizations). However with the the communication between the clients and the servers being a big part of the issues, it is something not even the most powerful servers in the world can fix :)

Koruyo

:)

Oh its the server code going between server and client and not the "server code"

With my second post i tried to make it less specific because i was pretty sure/i realized its not just simple the server client, seems like in future i should stop saying anything from server clients or code and just say "there is a problem somewhere in ns2, so ppl cant enjoy playing on most servers but ~6) - no matter how i word it im not specific enough or not 100% correct enough for some ppl. (no offence, i know you only mean it good)

Fact is, you currently can enjoy games on 4.5ghz servers (~14-16players) and you cant on most weaker ones, and i wish this would change soonish.
=> Since there is no point renting a server that is not very playable => currently the only option... is very expensive.

=> open beta = bad idea
=> playerbase small, because lack of good servers. (and before it needs correction, its not the only reason why the playerbase* is relative small atm, there is other stuff like balance, fps etc. too)


*with that i mean the average number of players online each day


edit: and dunno, but i guess to optimize communication you have to change code => saying the code is "bad" on my part is not really wrong - is it?

player

<!--quoteo(post=1891788:date=Dec 27 2011, 01:37 AM:name=Kouji_San)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Kouji_San @ Dec 27 2011, 01:37 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1891788"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Heh Koruyo, it IS the server code going between the client and the server. Along with physics and game code.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Not sure what you're saying exactly, but both the client-side and server-side script is causing massive issues. It's all of the Lua-script in general. The netcode in and of itself cannot be faulted (though perhaps not perfect, it's hard to tell right now, with Lua being such a spoilsport). Servers have performance issues even without any clients connected.

endar

Not to generalize, but aren't some of the best domestic internet connections available in the EU?

player

NS2's bandwidth requirements are very modest, we're talking 20KB\s down and 5-10KB\s up. Packet-loss\corruption is probably the only real thing to worry about.

Kouji_San

Probably forcing client into prediction mode. And as far as I know even the combined might of Max and Dushan, has not been able to recreate the capabilities of doctor E. Browns' Flux Capacitor :P

--Besides would you really want to chase after your PC at 88Mph... Indoors...?