Beta: What it is, what it isnt

What is Beta?

Many many people seem to be under the impression that being in a Beta is an excuse to get 12 months worth of play time in for free before anyone else can play. Many seem to think that when they logon to Vanguard for the first time they will experience one of two things:

1. A finished game with only light polishing to complete it. These people become very upset with graphics bugs, disk transfer hitching, unfinished quests etc. Generally they will post one giant "fuck you all this game sucks, you bastards lied to me all along, another crappy SOE product!." in the beta forums. They then proceed to head on over to the Fires of Heaven Boards and break NDA left and right about how crap the game is and they know cause 'they are in beta'.

2. The other type of disappointed Beta player is the one who thought that being in beta was like the WoW public Beta, again a largely finished game. These players will generally whine on the Beta forums about how its not like WOW and how WOW "was a much better game at the same point". They will complain that this game will be a complete failure because its "not like WOW" and it wont get as many people as WOW". They miss the point co9mpletely that the game isn't and never wanted wanted to be WOW.

It is unfortunately very obvious that a lot of morons have applied to play the Beta. Sigil seems to be very adept at finding them out of the tens of thousands who are registered on the Vangaurd forums.

For those who do get into the beta with the right attitude they will find the early under-pinnings of a good game. The basic mechanics are in place but there is a long way to go. There are LOTS of bugs, everything from spelling mistakes in Quests and item descriptions out to crashes to desktop with programming errors. I have had 2 characters I have had to abandon completely as they were too buggy to logon to. I spent 3 weeks with an average fps of 5-10 until they found a graphics driver bug and squashed it.

The good Beta player submits every bug they can find, I would probably average 3 bugs submitted per play session, some days more, some days less.

However, despite the bugs, the falling through the world, the flawed game mechanics, the testing of some horrible game play there are definite benefits to being a beta tester. One thing Ive been told is a benefit is "getting a head start on other players". Honestly I don't believe that mainly because I have no idea what the game will look like live. So far the Dev's have moved around the racial starter towns, major cities, dungeons, Castles etc I have little idea what the final geography will look like, although it does feel like it will start to solidify now.

It has also been said that although we may be testing the mechanics of the Game a lot of it wont be put in till they go live. We will have tested the basics, but they wont put the polish in until the final master goes gold. So there will be content in the final version that I wont have seen.






To the left you will note an Ogre. He is big, ugly and hits like a Girl. Early level damage tweaking is going on right now. At the moment you can completely breeze through the early levels with no real danger of dieing. The Ogres are east of Martok (I wrote about them in my last Blog) and are a really fun quest line. As you can see from my tag Southern Armada is live and well in Vanguard Saga of Heroes Beta. I started playing in late Beta 1.5 and almost as soon as I logged into Beta 2.0 I got a tell.
Is that Ulaa from Prexus?
I replied it was and I found a fellow SA member, Alltear. We got to chatting and I found out from Allty there were another 2 SA in beta as well. We figured what the hell and started an SA chapter.

We quickly found our numbers around 10 fairly regular players and it stayed at that level well into beta 3.0. Around that point, suddenly we had a flood of SA getting into VG and we expanded rapidly. Its amazing what people remember, Alltear started getting requests to join the guild from people outside of SA who knew our reputation from either EQ or WOW. I started to get tells from people asking;

"Is that the original SA?, the Aussies from Prexus?"

When I replied that it was, mostly they were really happy to see us still in existence and still playing as a guild. They were largely people who had had good experiences with us in various other games and were glad to see solid, quality players coming online.






The entrance to Hathor Zhi