Alpha - Insider Information

I've been seeing a lot of what you could describe as accusations about alpha testers getting inside information and using that to get ahead in the production game. I'm going to try to demystify what actually goes on without giving away too much.

Alpha software is what you would call "unfinished". It has bugs, it's an alpha tester's job to find and report those. GGG has placed a lot more emphasis on internal QA recently, but alpha testers still find a lot of small bugs and issues with what reaches Alpha.

Chris and GGG have given me permission to show you some examples of what we see in Alpha.




Sometimes Alpha has new and untested content which crashes, lucky testers get to experience that before anyone else does. :)

A lot of things are different in production than in Alpha. Sometimes Alpha testers get new skills handed to them, they aren't added to the game the same way that you see in the patch notes. Sometimes balance changes are tested internally, skipping the Alpha stage and put directly into production. This happens all the time with item nerfs and other economy shifting changes. Alpha testers do not have the chance to do insider trading. We know basically as much as anyone who reads the patch notes after the patch. There are tilesets and sometimes unique enemies which we get to see first, but we help tune them, we don't master their final forms until well after they hit production. Builds on Alpha are entirely different after the developers polish them a bit with our help. Passives are in constant fluctuation, and the balance of new skill gems are rarely final even after they're released.

Sometimes we get incomplete patch notes to help us test the changes, but that's a sometimes. I'm pretty sure Chris takes a whole day to make those, in between surfing reddit and playing MTG with the other devs. That doesn't become a huge advantage, since at that stage things will probably still be changing, and of what importance in the production realm is knowing of a few small things when major things may also change what those changes mean?

We see more patches and more issues than a lot of people imagine. I guess since we also see and hear the art before anyone else, people ignore that we also find the kinks. Most of the hardcore Alpha players, those who actually invest a lot of time into their characters, those that get to the end-game maps are not going to be playing on the production servers much at all. It's an investment of time and effort, and a lot of alpha players don't even care about their characters on the other servers, and would rather help fix unpleasant things before they see release.

If we did find some change which would give us advantage in production, you better believe we would get in trouble for exploiting it. We are trusted to have good judgment with our access, and a few days or hours of practice with a new and changing skill does not count as exploitation in my book.

To my fellow Alpha Members, thanks for helping make this game awesome.

yep this is exactly what i tought, been alpha member in other games ;)


godjob mate with this

Dw, most people dont think theres anything wrong with what happens with you guys.

Of course you need to get SOME information, someone needs to test the game. Thanks for taking the time to talk about it though, was interesting.

I think the biggest thing people seem to have misunderstood is that the version we test on Alpha is almost never what ends up going into Beta (or in this case, full release) anyway. Like the OP stated, we are mostly just there for the bugs. Balance stuff mostly seems to be an internal process, and it usually changes substantially going from Alpha to Beta.

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ionface wrote:

Sometimes we get incomplete patch notes to help us test the changes, but that's a sometimes.

I just wanted to highlight this - as that sometimes is usually never. Usually, we read the patch notes when everyone else does. Then again the player wouldn't make a good tester if they couldn't tell what's been changed to begin with.

Just wanna say my favourite example of Alpha being different.


MELEE SPLASH!

This worked with viper strike in Alpha, but when it reached beta, this was disabled.

SO yeah, just because it works in alpha, doesn't mean shit

MTG? Neerrrrrrds!

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justinloase wrote:

MTG? Neerrrrrrds!

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[–]chris_wilson 6 points 2 days ago

Magic: the Gathering. The best card game.

Crossposting from the other "alpha insider information" thread:

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pneuma wrote:

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DalaiLama wrote:

From what I have seen the devs post, I believe that if they seriously believed an Alpha was capitalizing on their "insider info" that GGG would boot them from the alpha group.

Bingo.
This has happened before.

Alpha is fairly well vetted, and almost all of us have been playing for long enough that it doesn't make sense to trash our reputation and GGG's respect for short term gains.

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Good write-up ion. :)

It's this reason that I applied for alpha testing. I want to help make it the best game possible.

And get some QA experience while I'm at it.