March Winter Alpha?
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It all comes down to money (and for AAA's...greed). This is the reason why almost all the games coming out now days have paid "early access". The times of old that you speak of, are no more. Will they ever come back? maybe.. though doubtful they will comes back as they were originally. More than likely they will come back in some form of hybrid fashion.
Again, all we can do is to become "testers" of the games we like and do our best to make sure that it comes out with as little "exploitations" and "bugs" as possible. The business model will not be changing anytime time soon, its a part of the official software developing cycle now.
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@GreatValdus A player isn't a developer, I am not a coder I am not a hacker. If I test a game I will not know exactly what transpired and what might happen if they fix that particular glitch. A hacker or developer will, hence the reason alpha and beta testers used to be paid professions.
We as players are not testers, we are incapable of testing their product sufficiently. We'd only be able to find surface level bugs and exploits, nothing more.
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@Ostaff They have a good reason to allow regular players to test their game if we're talking budgetary reasons, the issue like I said previously is that player logs must be recorded and kept with every single game interaction being logged. If someone finds a glitch or exploit it needs to be reported regardless of the player being aware that his game logs are being sent directly to a dev or not.
Trust need not apply in this case, they shouldn't trust us to report bugs and exploits at all. I could easily be an exploiter and so could anyone on this thread.
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@drfate786 again you don't need to be a developer, a coder or a hacker to detect bugs.
Open alpha phases are great to find those bugs that emerge by extensive playing, because big numbers are what matter in the end.
That said is not that you don't need professional testers, but the devs are themselves professionals testers, so they can do that side, or they can pay external ones, but this doesn't remove the benefit of a big player base to test further and find out something a smaller group could have missed.
What I'm trying to say is not that professional testers should lose their jobs, but that common user testing is also highly beneficial, because it brings in more numbers, more potential interactions that you can miss with a reduced and more specific testing team hunting for bugs on purpose.
A lot of bugs come up by accident, and accident are more easily reproduced when a lot of people is randomly using the product.
Not only that, open alpha means that players can get the feeling of the game and report unbalances, quality of life lackings, suggestions for improvements, totally better than finishing up a product just to find out that the end user is not happy because noone asked his opinion.
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@drfate786 said in March Winter Alpha?:
(...)If I test a game I will not know exactly what transpired and what might happen if they fix that particular glitch(...)
I guess you have a wrong perception on QA testing. Paid QA testers aren't programmers and they are certainly not hackers, game developers couldn't afford that. Paid QA testers actually require no specific skill set (other than mental resistance to very boring repetitive tasks), which is why they don't end up with a good salary. A paid QA tester does nothing different from a normal 'player', they play the game. If they find something that's looking odd, they issue a report. The difference to a 'normal player' is simply that they are 'forced' to issue a very detailed report and that they spend the required time to figure out how to reproduce a certain outcome. That and that they have to repeat the same thing over and over again in a game.
As for figuring out what might happen if a bug is fixed, nobody can do that. You can take an educated guess, but, depending on the issue, there isn't just 'one way' to 'fix' something. Programming is a little like writing a story in that regards, the 'main story line' might be the same, but the details and especially words used can and will drastically differ. I'm going to give you a concrete example. Ask ten programmers to sort a list of numbers, I'm willing to bet you're going to get 10 different code snippets back, some vastly different, yet all of them are going to sort a list of numbers. Even the algorithm used is going to differ, one might use Bubblesort, another could go with Heapsort and the next one could argue for Radixsort.
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@drfate786 I think you have a major misconception about what Alpha and Beta testing is about. Developers are the ones that go through and test the way you seem to think Alpha testers should be doing.
Alpha testers, followed by Betas are there to give a smaller than full release sample audience testing environment. A small, usually invited group of testers who play the game as if it were in full release, knowing it's an Alpha/Beta so they don't necessarily complain about what would be finished product issues, but rather, go through the mechanics over and over en masse in order to reproduce common bugs that the end users will thus not have to deal with, as well as ironing out mechanical interaction issues that a controlled tester might NEVER find because of their more controlled, systematic method of playing the game. Often bugs and exploits of said bugs are discovered because the 'player' did something not expected by the development team and thus triggered an unforeseen outcome that they might be able to use to their advantage, or conversely, might ruin their account and make them start over completely.
Also, as Logain said, QA testers aren't developers, they are paid in-house testers who are just sometimes given specific assigned tasks to go over for bugs, and the only real required skill isn't being an expert coder or even gamer, but rather the ability to write a detailed bug report. They are underpaid, and frankly, if these guys were to find an actual Exploit in-game, if they thought they could get away with it, just like any other player, they might keep it to themselves to exploit when the game goes live for their own benefit anyway.
The fact of the matter is, by running an open Alpha/Beta test cycle, the developers save money on paid testers, AND open themselves up to a much more rigorous testing process, as these 'un-paid' testers are going to run the game through a much harder workout than a 9-5er playing the game for a paycheck.
