On the Subject of Granting Beta Access to Inactive Accounts...

I realize the first thing many of you will do (or none of you, given that this isn't a beta giveaway thread =P) is check my join date. Yes, I just joined recently. No, that doesn't render any of the below points invalid. I've recently gotten incredibly bored with World of Warcraft and have been searching and searching for a game to play, and this looks like one that will keep me hooked for quite a while, and I was excited to

Generally, developers will open a game to beta testing so as to have their games tested under a wide variety of conditions, as well as to make sure their game is well received by the target audience. This, of course, leaves plenty of room before release to make any modifications based on feedback from the beta players.

Given this, why is the random beta key generator granting closed beta access to accounts that haven't been active in over a year? Is this not counter-intuitive? Refusing access to players eager delve into this pearl of a game in favor of folks who have long forgotten the name of Path of Exile; it just seems silly, does it not?
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Mark_GGG wrote:
Quoting myself from another thread:
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Mark_GGG wrote:
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Keester wrote:
Mark_GGG - What I think/thought he/she was refering to is what we keep on seeing is these 2 things together:

Join date: Feb 1, 2012 00:00
Last Visited: Feb 1, 2012 00:01

For the people that are following things and not posting is not the issue that we are voicing - what we are saying is that these people only create an account then never come back which makes the people whom follow the game feel a bit aggravated when we see them invited.
Those people are the ones I was talking about. You have no evidence that those people aren't visiting the site regularly, and we have data from looking at ips viewing the site that suggests a lot of them are.
Visiting the site and logging in are NOT the same thing. You can't just look at an account, see that it hadn't logged in, and then say they haven't visited the site. The only thing you need to log in to do is post. People can, and do, come visit the site and read the forums without ever logging in.
All you know about accounts like that is that they haven't logged in, and therefore haven't posted. NOT that they haven't been visiting the site.
And we do get people who don't log in and post until they get in, and then start posting and giving useful feedback.

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Keester wrote:
I understand the words when you said "...unnecessary, detrimental to the beta, and unethical..." but I ponder as to why this would be.
It would be unnecessary because it would involve work on our end for no real gain (and some loss).
It would be detrimental to the beta because the point of the beta is to get feedback to help improve the game. To make the game as good as possible for everyone, we need feedback from as wide a variety of people as possible. Making the proposed change would severly skew the kinds of people who get in to give us feedback towards those with lots of free time or who enjoy posting on forums, meaning we wouldn't be getting feedback from other kinds of people which would be relevant to helping make the game good for them too.
It would be unethical because we explicitly told everyone that signing up means you have a chance at the beta and you don't need to do anything else. Changing that now would be going back on our word and showing extreme disrespect for fans who've been following the game for a very long time. We already get lots of threads like this one where people make unfounded assumptions about others and how often they visit the site because they feel more entitled than others to something they were never promised. Imagine how much worse that would be if people were complaining that the fair chance they were promised and to which they are therefore entitled had been taken away from them?
Plus, going back on our word like that would just plain be a dick move, and here at GGG, we try not be dicks.
Last edited by EmoObama on Apr 2, 2012, 2:39:53 AM
Woops double post
Last edited by EmoObama on Apr 2, 2012, 2:39:14 AM

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