Potential problem with this beta?

Not sure how many more betas are being planned but this is my concern ATM. The main reason for beta inviting is to stress test servers. Yeah it's also good to get a few thousand people for free to check for bugs, but the stress test is more important IMO. Not sure how long this beta is scheduled to go on for but at this rate I feel like you won't get enough people to properly test servers. I've seen it happen before, MANY companies overestimate their servers. I could probably count on my hand the number of times a game server held during a beta.

This is mainly directed at Chris. Why did GGG decide to do the beta like this? Are you planning on working out bugs first then worry about servers later? I'm worried that when Open Beta comes the servers are going to crash due to the huge influx of people. At this rate you won't be prepared for it. If they do go down you'll end up losing many potential players. Gamers don't care if it's beta, nothing has changed since the 90's. People will judge a beta just as harshly, if not worse, as the full release.

TL;DR Slow beta keys = no server stress testing = possible future crash & very bad start for game. Classic F2P mistake.

(Note this isn't a rage at not having a beta key, it's just a concern I have for the beta key process)

Chris replied to something along the lines of this, their view is that they could easily scale up servers, but the content is not their yet. Its more of lets polish and finish the game when work on the servers more. Perhaps some kind soul could paste what he wrote.

Alright as long as they aren't thinking they can set it aside. GGG can polish all they want but if servers go down even once because they neglected them, there will be a shitstorm of negative responses.

On a side note this beta is just weird. I get wanting to polish, but the content is only half in. Usually you want to fix a game with all the content implemented. Just send players to where you want tested. Fixing bugs in a game that doesn't have all the content seems odd. When you add more stuff it might cause new conflicts with things previously fixed. IDK it just seems a bit inefficient. This sounds more like alpha testing to me, well alpha-beta"ish" lol.

Take the polish comment with a grain of salt, its more of lack of content.

Also here is the comment i was referring to:

The point of having this many users at this stage of testing is that we listen to their feedback very closely and change the game based on it. Having ten times as many users just:
a) Costs us ten times as much
b) Creates ten times as much tech support overhead
c) Gives us ten times duplication on feedback

If we wanted to put a lot of money into servers we could easily scale up to tens of thousands of people playing online, but the game content itself is not ready yet.

We'll scale up substantially in the coming months.

Not really. That's how betas actually used to be. Only recently some companies started using Beta as an big marketing ploy and preview of the game rather than genuine testing.

Nowadays you expect betas to be pretty much fully functional games and all that is tested is whenever the login server can handle the initial rush.

Years ago, however, it was actually more of gradual content testing, little steps, zone by zone, slowly unlocking content as the beta stages progressed, with very little info going outside and people focusing on actually testing the technical issues and game play flow rather than just "trying out a new title" like it's since few years.
Even early WoW closed betas were much much different than what came later as an open beta event.

They ARE testing the servers, that's why the timer is slow. They want to be sure that the servers don't crash and no one will be able to test the game at all.

It's a small company, they can't afford as many amounts of servers as a larger corporate business can.

Plus they are planning on adding more people as they are more sure as to how many online users the severs can actually take, it's not just to have a few people bug test.

I do hate what betas have become. The method I always liked was testing unfinished parts during alpha then putting it all together for closed beta. Then testing everything over again individually. Ultimately I support low tester amount vs high. As you can see by current fan rage that most do not agree in this day & age :/. It bothers me that closed betas have become the new open beta. I may go against my original post but stress testing is best left to open beta IMO. Problem is the current industry mindset doesn't favor that. You can destroy a games chances to launch well if you do it that way.

I'll admit I'm conflicted since I prefer GGGs approach but think it may end up hurting PoE in the long run because of new standards. There is just really heavy competition for this game right now. Diablo 3, Grim Dawn and Torchlight 2... these are not easy foes to beat. Need to start wowing the players as soon as possible to keep em here. F2P won't matter either, the ARPG fanbase hasn't had a game to play in a long time. They're ready to dish out money for new stuff.

Anyways my concern is there because I see so many F2P companies with the "our servers can hold" attitude. I hope GGG doesn't have that confidence. If there's one thing I've learned from testing & making games it's that nothing is as perfect as you think. Seems like a lot of devs forget that.

upscaling servers is relativily waaay easier to do unlike before in the ninties...yea they might have some issues and if the worst happens the servers will only me down a day or two...i highly doubt that will cuase a ton of people to quit and to never play again...so i like thier idea of polishing the what they have so far and getting ideas on how to finsh the rest of the game, that way they dont have to go back later and delete things and redo alot of it.

From my experience closed beta has nothing to do with stress testing, it's main purpose is to fix bugs get input from the users.
Open betas are more targeted at stress testing and scale testing, and it does make sense if you think about it.

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AlcoholHappens wrote:

From my experience closed beta has nothing to do with stress testing, it's main purpose is to fix bugs get input from the users.
Open betas are more targeted at stress testing and scale testing, and it does make sense if you think about it.

Which is what I posted in my 3rd post :3.