Future betas

I think a lot of people are disappointed with today's news post regarding the 5 day race.

A lot are aggreived at not getting a key. I would love a key but alternatively I would have accepted something to do. I dont particularly think something you can do on your own on standard or hardcore but in a race format is nearly exciting enough.

I just want to make a suggestion for future big releases like this one for consideration as I think it would make a lot of people happier.

Why not run them for 2 months in the future allowing plenty of feedback time. But you run 2 lots of 1 month. Then side by side you run a 1 month event hc or sc for the ones who dont get a key. I would make it 50:50 that you either get into the beta or you get into the event. Then 1 month later transfer peoples chars to corresponding leagues and delete the beta testers chars and swap them over such that beta testers are playing the league and league players now have access to beta.

You will get plenty of feedback in 2 months and you will give the rest of people something to do ...

So.............bored................right................now

you dont have to invent new league mods or anything. All you have to do is use a combination of old ones. Hell right now all mods sounds insanely good fun. Or a 1 month cut-throat.

The more time they spend keeping the people not in the beta entertained, the less time they have to work on the beta. and then people will complain about how long the beta's taking.

GGG seems to have a pretty good system in place regarding the beta. It's possible that your method might work, but they seem to want to have very fine-tuned control over how many new players join the beta at any given point in time. I imagine that they'd also prefer to keep people around through the whole process.

Your suggestion provides neither of these. They'd get half the players in one big dump, keep them for a month, then push them out and get the other half in one big dump. All the while, having to support the league (and having had to spend time making it, delaying the start of the beta itself).

Is playing in standard really that bad of an experience? Personally (as I've said in another post in another thread), I'd love to have an all-mod armageddon league. Heck, they could even leave it open ended and just say "till the beta's over". But I also trust that they know what the playerbase wants, has weighed the options, and decided that they're better off running fewer, shorter, simpler events so that they can concentrate on the beta.

From the news post, it sounds like they're pretty overwhelmed just keeping up with bugs and on-the-fly balance patches.

They should have exclusively given beta keys to people recovering from an apendectomy, who are programmers, and who are male, middle class, and white, and who have veggimite in their fridge. Because that is the only way in hell I'd ever buy veggimite

There would be next to no time making something thats already coded mate ...

And the second poster, you add nothing to this discussion, as if i'm whining i dont have a beta key... i'm just annoyed that there is NOTHING TO DO!

well, you assume that. and maybe it's true. but i have to believe that if it were really that easy, GGG would put something up. granted, they often don't announce these things very far ahead in time, so maybe a big thing is coming after the 5 day race.

granted, even if arranging events for non-beta people would be prohibitively time-consuming for GGG, one could make the case that they might want to invest some time in developing a system which makes it easy for them to do it. but that would be after the beta. and I still would assume that if such a thing were feasible they would have done it already.

basically, we don't really KNOW very much, and in cases like that, I tend to give GGG the benefit of the doubt.

sorry you're bored, though.