f13.net

http://www.warhammerherald.com/news/news.php?newsid=60

Also, 2000 "random" invites went out on Monday.

*pokes Bat Country*

Patience.

This should be entertaining.

WAUUUGHHHHH!

Just notifications that they're going to be invited, not actual invites unfortunately. They're also supposed to be sending out a bunch more invites in addition to the 2K that went out.

Was a poke of "heads up" for the crew rather than "OMGWHERETHEFUCKISMYINVITEIT'SBEEN30MINUTES!!!!"  I've learned you and Schild are more on top of things than you appear.   :-D

Or at least they give the illusion that they are more on top of things than they appear.  :evil:

Yes, please, patience.

Christ, some of you people are entitled bastards.  Just sit tight, the invites will get here when they get here.

Christ on a crutch but the edits are fast and furious.

Help, help, I'm being repressed!

Oh. Hey. Edits.

Yes, we were selected.

Yes, we are doing MANY waves of people.

Yes, I like you just as much as everyone else if you were not selected in the first wave.

Yes, I will knock you to the BOTTOM OF THE LIST if you ask if you were in the first wave or bug me to be bumped up after first wave invites go out.

Any other questions?

So... what are you wearing?

LOL.

Dammit, Signe, now I have to think of something else.

Um...Do we get knocked to the bottom if we make snarky guesses about who will or won't get included in the First Wave?

Also, do I get any geek points for remembering that used to be a tv show?

No guesses about Who is in. But there's a list, and EVENTUALLY all 300 people should get in.

Eventually.

Game is still a year away.

Ok, that's that. Any more questions can be directed at the 2nd moon of Jupiter.

~gives Signe hi-5~

Oh, forgot to answer signe.

I'm wearing pants.

I know. Disappointment. But Wednesday is one of my "pants days." Ask me next monday.

ONLY pants?

He didn't say where he was wearing them, either.

Like a scarf around his neck is my guess.

I was thinking on his head like a hat.

Somebody rang?

Epic win.

Where do "Pants Hats" lie on the Hats line that ends with "Money Hats?"  Someone should do a chart.

American or British "pants"?

Or maybe just under-pants.

(http://www.scq.ubc.ca/filter/wp-content/uploads/2006/11/venn-happynopants.jpg)

You spelled it wrong.

Always a minimum of 3 A's and no U's, oh and an exclamation point.

e.g. WAAAGH!

A game where I can create a character who is a human, elf, orc, or dwarf?  And then go around killing monsters to level up?  And fighting in player versus player battles?  I always hoped someone would make a game like this, but I never thought anyone actually would.  Please make sure I get an invite.  Thanks.

Since I have no interest in the WAR beta, I'll exercise the rare right and privilege I have received due to that!


Hey, am I in the first wave?  Can I be bumped up?


(Hm, I probably wasn't on the list to begin with, so I can't go to the bottom.  Drat)

I shake a little left...

I shake a little right.

I will name him...

Chad.

We got in as well, so hopefully we'll see some of you around. We'll be on the Destruction side.

I'm still active and interested.  If that makes any difference.

Who put the ram in the ramalamadingdong?

How are we being told that we're in? Email, PM, Forum thread, etc?

If you have to ask...

He needs to know which window he should be spamming the f5 key in.

This is art.

Moonfire?

This was just the notification that the guild would eventually get in, just like all those people that attended Gencon and game day and whatnot. They were told that they'd get into beta eventually, and most of them still aren't in, even though others were accepted that only had newsletter subs. So don't hold your breath, when it comes it comes. WAUGGGHHH is a fickle master.

That said, every time mythic lets in a new batch of testers I not only check my email but also login to the beta site to see if I was accepted, just in case the mail got lost. So far it hasn't.

Oh you cocksuckers better start spelling Waaagh right. How do you all keep fucking up a word that Orcs and 10 year olds can spell correctly?

Hm. I know I signed up in the old WAR-Beta thread that was stickified in this very forum.

Should I have applied for a beta spot on their website as well ? Or is that not neccesary ?

I just found my subscription to WAR-Europe (GOA!*shudder*)

Real greenskins are above spelling flames.

'Dat onle cuz day no no iz spelt wrong

FYI, I'll need quite a few beta accounts to sell on ebay thoroughly betatest WARs 56-boxing functionality  (http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums2/viewtopic.php?t=498)

Jumping Jesus on a pogo stick.....

Yeah, that was linked in another thread before.  They claim it's not for gold farming but uh.... right. 

Well it's more that the email I had listed when I posted in the signup thread is an email I no longer use so if schild just has a big list of names and emails and sends it out to those I'll not think to check it unless I know. Of course if it's going out via PM or what my email is now it's fine. Also I haven't done one of these beta thingies before because I haven't cared before so I don't know what to expect. :P

My spam filter eats half of them. Be sure to check that folder.

Today my Gmail decided to put one of my Google alerts in the spam folder...

Ho Lee Krap.

I didn't bother with the thread. Are they claiming they can actually manage an entire raid force like that? I can't imagine how you could cognitively manage that many independent actions, unless it was like some easy-mode raid zone.

As far as I understood that, there are not that many independant activities, just a clever setup of hotkeys and hardware solutions to send the keybord input from one keyboard to several PC's.

I wonder if this is something Blizzard allows, can't be that hard to track users like this down.

So long as he's not hacking the client (other than add-on mods) why wouldn't they allow it?  Nothing says you have to be 40 individuals playing at once.

One of the folks there PvP'd with a similar setup.  He has a team of 5 or 10 High Warlord undead all with the same name, except for a single letter... one of the screenshots shows 'em.

And yeah, it's all KVM switches and /tell macros that execture macros on the other clients, if I remember right.

L2Walker is still the most efficient setup for multi-boxing.  I still chuckle every time I think about PvPing with a group of bots running behind me healing/buffing/etc.

Can you bump me down the list if I'm not already there?  I'm going away until the end of September, so there's little point in me getting a spot before others.

Ahh, trying to curry favour using a selfless/nice person angle eh?  That's cunning and ruthless, I like it! :wink:

 :-P

I laughed though.

Give me Miasma's invite, no sense in it getting wasted.

/evil cackle

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=10627.msg331828#msg331828

That must be really expensive to run. I wish I had enough disposable income to be able to run a set up like that. Although I think I would find other ways to spend my money.

Just an update to be nice:

I have sent a list in to EA. I have not heard back from them. They asked for ridiculous shit to be given by me that you all already provided when you filled out their forms. The type of stuff you don't want to just be passing around, real names, directx information etc. I sent them exactly what I was asked for by someone at Mythic. EA changed it up on me. Or rather, everyone I suppose. I sent the sheet in for the first group of people the day after I got confirmation Bat Country had been accepted.

That's to say, EA still has some problems.

Thanks for the update.

EA.  It's exactly like that :P

I try to hate them fully, but my love for Sims 2 gets in the way.

schild,  i may have done something to your desk yesterday.
when you find it, please, don't be alarmed or scream.  just have the janitors take care of it.


i live a shameful disgusting life.  :oops:

Tard, I will make your life a living hell if that wasn't a joke. I'm a vindictive cunt when it comes to that sort of shit.

hahaha of course i was joking...  but i bet you still looked and "sniffed" around for a few seconds.

I found 6 slinkies.

It was worth it.

MarkJacobs, why hast thou forsaken thy beloved 'folks'?

If he showed favoritism to one particular forum, all the others would explode.  It would have to be done quietly...

I've kept secrets that would curl your toes, most of them sufficiently epic to professionally frame and hang on your wall. Some involving mormons, Martin Landau, mangy marmots, mangos, McDonalds, Mandy Moore's mooseknuckle, smoked mozzarella, and midgets in oversized novelty hats and that's only the Ms! Mark, get me into beta and I'll tell all! Wait, that doesn't work. I mean, I can keep secrets, I'll never tell!

Worth a shot.

NO... Keeping secrets does not make you a more likely beta candidate.

Developers should want people who will beta TEST.

Only problem is they'll get a bunch of peen waving monkeys wanting to preview the game, find out all the ins/outs classes/races and ways to min/max, or to get their guild the first ooh shiny hard to reach raid exclusive zone.

If anyone ever wonders why MMOs release in such craptacular fashion, this here is exactly why.

They don't really expect players to individually beta test. Mythic has too much experience to be that naive.

They expect an aggregate of users to play the game exactly as they would on release, trying to exploit the hell out of it, grind for hours on end stockpiling penguin sphincters because it's 2.7% faster than playing through their cool dynamic world quests, generate truly representative load profiles, and bitch like tween girls fighting with their mothers on the internal forums. Then they mine all that data and tune away. Traditional "beta" testing is archaic; EA has internal QA teams for that.

Indeed.  I wish people would get this through their head so I could see less of the self-righteous "testing" rants every time someone uses the word "play" or "game" in a beta.

Which is not to say that reporting bugs you find (or even going out of your way to look for them) isn't helpful, it's just not the primary function of a beta.

What is this War that you speak of?

Dunno but I know you're not going to find war in 12v12 sport pvp

I agree with you about the "aggregate" population, and that devs want players to play how they would normally, but I disagree where it comes to the "data mining". Load testing, finding/removing exploits, and grinding to uncover potential problems is not what I disagree with, I believe the problems arise where it comes to these things not being reported because people use the "preview meh-min-max-leet" method when betas should be persons who at least contribute (with devs encouraging their input).

It's also been proven that player forums are not aggregate populations which is why I italicized your portion about forums. Beta forums are influential in game development, but when your beta isn't comprised of people wanting a community but a "free trial" it's couter-productive to say the least.


I didn't say anywhere about people not playing or gaming, it's just there should be people doing so because they want to find occasional bugs, when instead they're there to see if the guild can PL/raid, if there's a class they like or whether it will run like ass on their machine.  I would say that 80-90% of beta (heck even alpha) "testers" are in a sense only load testers, because they don't actively stress the game, submit feedback, or participate other than them actually being there using bandwidth through a client.

If I were an MMO developer I'd require submitting one bug or suspected bug, or a suggestion, per login session as a requirement in alpha, and at least once weekly until the game reached beta2/preview/Gold to keep the login active. In order to reactivate a login, players would need to suggest something that would've made them play/game/test/bug-submit more. Rewards for active forum users and testers would be items, NPCs or quests bearing their names (and especially for "bug-squashing"). That type of data is waay more valuable to an MMO than any mined data (although it's more difficult to mine), and it's not being present results in making devs more out of touch with the people who should be their community.

Internal testing can only get a game so far, and the beta that's a preview is more common now, but it's not a sign of evolution but regression that the actual players aren't more involved. Betas were once about the testing, or people who at least maybe cared. Check the Tabula Rasa thread(s) and tell me how many people there actually "tested" or maybe can say they even sent a single bug report.

I don't think I want to play a game that's been beta'd like that.  I'm not sure why, but it seems likely that a lot of earnest testers could tweak the game into something really unfun for a casual like me.

The best way to get the sort of input you're talking about from people is to hire them and pay them.  Since you're making a job out of it.

Obviously reporting bugs should be encouraged, and players that do so are more valuable. When I sign up for MMO betas, I always put "I will actually report bugs!" in the "why should we pick you" section. And if picked, I do report bugs when I find them. But that's not what they really expect me to do.

MMO forums are bloodthirsty frenzied mobs of nasty spoiled children. Mobs are by definition aggregate populations.

and fans are fanatics. You're point is?

You claimed that forums aren't aggregates even though they act like one. I exposed the lack of sophistication in that statement. Shall we continue arguing semantics, or would you like to get back on point?

Edit: I'm stupid and can't see the third page.

I said "player forums" (not just referring to betas) aren't aggergates, and they aren't, because they certainly aren't representative of every (supposed) player or tester. It was you citing dictionary definitions (saying my statement lacked sophistication) where I certainly know unruly mobs certainly aren't "considered taking all units as a whole" although could certainly be considered "a cluster", and that an "aggregate population" doesn't actually make all fans fanatics.

PS  I was already arguing semantics and the point was to beg for a preview of Warhammer, which this thread sort of proves isn't a beta or aggregate.

Like others have hinted, if you limited your beta to only people who submit regular feedback and bug reports, and made large design decisions based on that feedback, you'd be designing a game based on what a small segment of the population (people who enjoy submitting feedback on games for free) believes that they want.

There's two problems with this.  The first is obvious:  This is only a segment of the population, and is probably significantly more "hardcore" (if you'll forgive the term) than your average player.

The second, less obvious, problem, is that someone believing that they enjoy/hate something doesn't mean they will actually enjoy/hate it.  For instance, you might get a bunch of people saying that there should be more emphasis on grouping in a game and less solo support to encourage community.  Then, when the game is released, you find out people don't actually end up wanting that and tons of people, including those who gave feedback about wanting more grouping and less soloing, go to another game.

This is not to say feedback is useless, it's just not 'hard' data.  You can't trust people to know what they want.  If you could, we'd all be a lot happier, because we wouldn't do all the stupid shit that ends up making us unhappy.

Now, bug reports, sure, those are entirely useful, but generally the bottleneck is going to be managing to fix the bugs, not finding them.  I submit bugs all the time when I beta test things, because I enjoy the illusion of feeling like I did something useful in any given day, but in reality I'm guessing I've never submitted a bug that wasn't already found or known about.  Is it helpful?  Sure.  Is it the important part of beta testing (in the MMO sense)?  Not really.

They WANT min-maxers.  They want every type of player in their beta.  You can't go and "pretend" to be a type of player because you're a Noble Beta Tester and want to help them make a better game... you'll never do as good a job of it as a real player.

All a beta is is a bunch of mostly randomly selected people invited to play a game early for mutually beneficial reasons.  Nothing noble, nothing to write home about.  You get something, and they get something.  Everyone's happy.