barely fatal

I’ve been in a few beta’s, more then id like to admit actually, and I’ve seen developers do some pretty weird things but this one beats all those hands down.

The Game: Tabula Rasa

As some may know this game has recently dropped its NDA, a move that was due to happen and is in no way unexpected. But the sequence of events surrounding said move must be one of the dumbest moves I’ve ever seen.

Step one: Erase servers with little prior warning to the testers (its a beta so its to be expected)

Step two: Introduce a major patch that adds/changes a considerable amount of content, and restricts areas. (Focused testing is nothing new, adding content to test is also normal. So far so good)

Step Three: Issue out 20000 beta invites. (More people helps test the game, and the servers)

Step Four: Drop the NDA.

See the problem ?

First off they piss off the existing testers by wiping there characters (the fact that a wipe is to be expected doesn’t change the fact few people will like it when it hits, especially if very little warning is given). End result of this action is that said testers will have to start over and probably not be particularly happy with the game for at least a couple of weeks.

Secondly, and this is the nice bit, they allow a shed load of new testers into the servers. Servers which are now loaded with untested content. By its own this isn’t a bad thing, OK so the average IQ level drops by about 30 points… happens to all games during stress tests. This problem is compounded by an immediate drop of the NDA.

Congratulations you now have 20k+ testers that do not understand the game, have a short attention span, get to play with untested and buggy content… and to top it off they can talk about it!

As a bonus the older beta testers get to see new bugs while in noob toons, which doesn’t inspire much motivation to defend the games’ positive points on forums at large.

End result: The game is being slammed into the ground (and i mean Hard!) by people who’ve barely played it yet believe themselves to be experts. This happens to most games but generally the developers do there best (or should try ) to not actually provide said “experts” with the ammunition that will be used to shoot the product to pieces,

The person that came up with this interesting sequence of events, and thought the end result would be positive for the game, must have been smoking something interesting at the time

Totally out of nowhere and with no prior notification whatsoever I got a package from Amazon today. And guess what, it’s Battlestar Galactica Season 3. The divinity of sci-fi geeks must be fond of my doings. Rejoice!

I sold my old 19″ CRT on Ebay. For 1,50 Euros. That’s a 99,75% price drop on the sales price. It’s still a good deal, the buyer’s gonna pick it up and I’ll finally have enough room in my wardrobe. For all the other worthless old hardware.

I went to the eye doctor and he told me that besides me being extremely shortsighted (I already knew that) my eyes are really a-okay (I hoped for that) and that he’d suggest cutting my eyes open and stuffing in new lenses (I knew he was gonna suggest something). The risks are minimal, I might need more surgery should the clamps (I took a deep breath when he used that word) damage my eyes one day, my original all human-grown lenses might cloud and other stuff, but no, really, it’s perfectly safe. Not for my bank account maybe, but otherwise.

The thought of having artificial lenses in my eyes sounds tempting, you know, like Geordi LaForge, zooming in and out, x-ray vision and stuff, but the doctor said that extra functionality wasn’t covered by my cheap-ass health insurance (or my bank account – there we go again). So, d’oh. I don’t know, I’ll consider it, but as long as my eyes work that surprisingly well when I wear my glasses I can’t see me risking that with surgery.

The clinic was somewhat ultra-modern slash scary by the way, it looked just like the hospital in House, a Feng Shui dream world with a large aquarium, horribly uncomfortable seats and pillars of light with changing colors. They put something in my eyes to make the pupils go wide open so they could take a better look. Well that’s always fun because it takes about 3 to 4 hours until your eyes can adjust to the daylight again. So you’re basically walking around with blurry vision and all lights are really, really bright. It was a challenge to get to work and in the first hour I couldn’t see squat on the monitor, of course.

In other news, the release of Battlestar Galactica Season 3 on DVD was pushed back two months. TWO FRAKKING MONTHS! At first I thought it was because of a pay-TV deal, but apparently it was pushed back in the US as well. Frak frak frak.

Yesterday morning the police knocked at my door, continuously. I wasn’t exactly fully dressed and at first I thought it was just another donation collector, so I took my time before answering. Turns out it was the murder squad. They showed me a picture and asked me a few questions, me and all other people in my street. Seems they were after the mafia guys who killed six in Duisburg two weeks ago. I couldn’t help them. Should I buy a kevlar vest anyway?