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We need longer "beta" durations


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Just wanted to remind a-net not everyone is free during weekends.
Some of us have work, others savage real life asuran girlfriends that haul you off into an isolated lab of their choosing for some... experimentation.
Escape pre-Monday is not easy to say the least...

So maybe next time make it a week long beta event, so those of use with bit less time/freedom on our hands can also get a proper dip into it!

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If you've worked in the industry, you understand how smooth brained some deadlines can be, especially with people who think they can just pressure people into physically infeasible productivity, doubly so when it comes to programming, and infinitely so when it comes to esoteric things such as balance.

TBH it should've probably been a month long event to get all the bugs ironed and issues ironed out by die-hards. A bad product makes people either want to wait or not spend their money at all.

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Honestly you don't need an entire weekend to try out a weapon. You will get all you need out of it in about an hour of active playtime for the game mode you play most, regardless of whether it's pve, pvp, or wvw. 30 minutes of active play is enough time to know that the weapon is a go or no-go for you. Additional time after that is for trying out odd little circumstances or to try to 'break' it.

Besides, you really didn't miss out on much. If you look at the feedback threads everyone has pretty much reached a consensus for all the professions in terms of what's good/bad about the weapon. I guarantee that whatever feedback you would have given, someone else has already said it.

Just read the feedback and watch videos by others. You'll very easily come to understand what's good/bad about the spears and what to expect for the professions you do play.

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16 hours ago, StraightPath.3972 said:

Just wanted to remind a-net not everyone is free during weekends.
Some of us have work, others savage real life asuran girlfriends that haul you off into an isolated lab of their choosing for some... experimentation.
Escape pre-Monday is not easy to say the least...

So maybe next time make it a week long beta event, so those of use with bit less time/freedom on our hands can also get a proper dip into it!

Not to be rude but most people do have time during the weekend and Anet just needs data on how players in general will use it and get feedback from players. The goal is not to give everybody and their dog to have a go at it, but rather a large enough data/feedback set. It's just a reality and they don't want to make these betas too long either because then people will really start nitpicking.

 In the end you can't please everybody and you'll get plenty of time next month when JaWi comes out. Yep, next month.

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A beta event such as this one isn't there for every player to get to sample the new whatever, it is for the company to get enough samples to act upon (or not as the case may be). If a weekend is sufficient for the beta to achieve its intended goals then extending beyond that time frame is wasteful and has a potentially negative impact.

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On 7/3/2024 at 9:42 PM, Ashen.2907 said:

A beta event such as this one isn't there for every player to get to sample the new whatever, it is for the company to get enough samples to act upon (or not as the case may be). If a weekend is sufficient for the beta to achieve its intended goals then extending beyond that time frame is wasteful and has a potentially negative impact.

This.

These events are hold for different reasons and different goals have different time frames:

1. generate hype. There is no need for this to be a 1 week or 1 month long event. On the contrary, the worst thing the company can do is over extend the availability and remove the novel aspect of the weapons before they even release

2. balance aspects. No Q&A can achieve the same results as these beta tests. Then again these betas reach their usefulness limit rather quickly given there are no live updates or changes. It is better to instead do a followup beta event if need be instead of extending the first one

3. bug finding. Similar to balance bug in regards to (un)intended behavior, bugs, etc. Same issue as with balance, unless things are fixed, there is no point in keeping this longer than needed (though unlike balance, sometimes running more complex in intertwined system for longer can help in locating rare bugs)

So while I can see why player who missed out on the beta weekend might be disappointed, the actual reasons to extend the betas are low and in fact might be counter intuitive/productive to the actual intent behind offering them.

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I have always wondered why it was not at least 1 full week - to cover each day (for people that prefer certain days of the week). I can understand that they do not want to let it run endlessly - so they can get feedback and act on it without people finding more and more stuff after some weeks (if it ran for several weeks).

But ... do not worry: We will all get the "permanent beta" in august. 😛 (Usually you get a lot of hotfixes and patches after new stuff gets released. So I call the release a beta, haha.) I mean ... afaik they even did huger changes to stuff like scrapper (never played it at release but I heard the gyros worked totally different) - so it is not like the stuff with the spears is fixed ... if too many people are unhappy with certain things they might even make bigger changes after release and some small changes will happyen anyways with the usual regular balance patches.

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