LFG

My Little Pony > Strawberry Shortcake > Hello Kitty.

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Kiara

Khalan

Sony needs to spend more time polishing their product and to stop treating their Beta's like a glorified PR tool.

Gallenite Promised they wouldn't be rushing this beta, but thats exactly what their doing.

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Kiara

LFG

Owned.

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Dystrax

First, I don't doubt that other game companies work the same way. It doesn't mean it's the way they HAVE to work to be profitable, though.

Beyond that, your argument by analogy here is flawed.

Lets think about the snack food company and the MRE company. Yes, two products that are both food, albeit two TOTALLY different kinds of foods. Therefore, your implied argument is that because the two end products are totally different, the process by which those end products are developed cannot - or should not - be compared.

Then you turn to gaming vs. corporate software. Yes, two products that are both software, albeit two TOTALLY different kinds of software. Therefore, your implied argument is that because the two end products are totally different, the process by which those end products are developed cannot - or should not - be compared.

This analogy only works to an extent. Should the snack food company's attention to tasty corn syrup based, obesity inducing, sugary goodness determine the best course of action for the MRE company that makes meals that are essentially nutritious cardboard? Of course not, and vice versa, because the market for each product is significantly different: fat kids like yummy stuff and Uncle Sam couldn't give a shit about their soldiers getting tasty cakes. Therefore, in this case the differences in the demand for the product dictate divergent end products.

However, if the MRE company has come up with a sanitation method that eliminates common, harmful bacteria in a way that the snack food company has not considered - but nonetheless has been having a bacteria problem - the snack food company should want to know what that method is and likely would seek it out. Why? Because, unlike the divergent demand for tasty cakes vs. cardboard, in this case the demand is united: santiary food that doesn't kill soldiers OR fat kids.

The same goes for software companies. Yes, the demand for corporate software dictates a different product than the demand for gaming software. However, whether the software is corporate or gaming, both markets demand a quality product.

Of course i see the counter argument: the market doesn't acutally demand it because companies like SOE and others do not employ such rigorous testing and, yet, people still buy their products.

I would argue that at this point you have a quasi anti-trust problem. As you said, "I think it's a product and based on the trends of other games it treats testing with the same seriousness." Precisely: SOE and these other companies are following the least common denominator and as a result their consumers suffer. The obvious exception, here, is WoW and the Blizzard Polish...and it's not like they are hurting for business.

EDIT: but, fuck WoW! (butt fuck WoW?)

Kiara

RadarX

You did read my implication semi-accurately. I wasn't focused on the products being different, because they aren't really. Both are food products. My point was, the seriousness of the testing of an MRE will exceed that of a snack cake. Bad snack cakes will make people sick, bad MRE's might kill a Marine.

You are making an assumption and not defining that "consumers are suffering." How much trouble did AOL get in years ago for poor customer service? Did they go out of business? Nope, because people keep on buying it. The only way that this trend is going to be broken, is when people stop buying the games, and I doubt seriously you, I, nor anyone else is going to do it.

Maybe it comes down to I'm not a dreamer, I'm a realist. I would love for 100% testing to be done, but looking at how other MMO's are tested, I know better.

Shaggis

There have been some interesting comparisons to other types of development projects.
At one point in my career I worked on recording software predominantly used to burn music on to CDs. Where is the criticality in this? None, pure entertainment value, in fact I'm pretty sure a large percentage of our users solely used it to copy CDs. However we took it seriously because we were charging people their hard earned money and took pride in our work. Sure we had competitors that zerged the market with buggy implementations to be the "first to market". But they were just zergs and over time many big customers preferred our reliability. I really can't see the logic in "We want to charge good money for this, but we won't take quality seriously."

A lot of people have come to expect this behavior of the gaming industry but I think when someone finally steps up and does it right, they will own the market. I've seen some stuff on the Vangaurd forums that really show some good quality communications and thought out process and in my great conjecture (IMGC) that is why SOE wanted a piece of the pie. Its always good to hedge your bets.

A serious bug in EQ2 (like um whole raid zones limited to single group entry) could cost them millions if there was a competitive choice that people would drop EQ2 for if they were unsatisfied with quality. They make A LOT of money each month on subscriptions.

And if you think OS's don't ship with serious data threatening bugs... look into it. I'm sure you will also find they have a much stronger quality process and that you really don't want to know how many known issues they ship with.

But this is turning into a derail and I will stop.

Back on topic... WTF why did I not get into beta? Guess I pissed off a dev with one of my comments at some point... I want to see the expansion NOW!

Myntal

They have access to this information already. With the data they collect on-going, they can easily ascertain these demographics through the use of decent BI tools. It's obviously not what they consider in determining their beta pool.