EA Brings Back its Harsh Beta EULA
- Thread starter The Wooster
- Start date
Well I see the stick, now where's the carrot?
I understand that since beta testers aren't being paid you need an incentive to get them to do the work, but I think they should be told 'you catch more flies with honey than vinegar'. So instead of threats for failing to report bugs, why not rewards for reporting them?
I understand that since beta testers aren't being paid you need an incentive to get them to do the work, but I think they should be told 'you catch more flies with honey than vinegar'. So instead of threats for failing to report bugs, why not rewards for reporting them?
EA just love shooting themselves in the foot don't they?
I've pretty much avoided EA where I can and I've avoided Origin altogether. But SimCty had me wanting it despite these things and I was willing to have a go at the beta and see what I could find... not anymore...
I've pretty much avoided EA where I can and I've avoided Origin altogether. But SimCty had me wanting it despite these things and I was willing to have a go at the beta and see what I could find... not anymore...
The way I see it, I always win! Either game developers do a good job and I get good games, or game developers create comedy gold.Valok said:
Oh EA, you never ceases to amuse me.
In an odd coincidence[footnote]OR IS IT[/footnote] I was playing D&D with some friends of mine yesterday and a bugs life came up.Vault101 said:
Life's funny that way sometimes.
*shudder*ritchards said:
OT: So EA basically get you to do it's job for it - even though you're paying them to do it - and then hit you with heavy sanctions if you carry out this unpaid work to a less than exact standard, even though you've had no formal training?
Sounds like Self-Assessment tax law to me.
It's been almost exactly 2 years since the last time I bought an EA game. They never stop demonstrating that they don't deserve my money.
Well, the ironic thing is that it's an increasingly common practice with online games (which is almost everything nowadays) to limit the testing to very specific times. It's been this way for years, but I *DO* remember when things were done a bit differantly since I've done a lot of Alpha and Beta tests.Carnagath said:
Being disabled I have a lot of time on my hands, and can in theory play almost any time, but it also means I get tapped to do a lot of things IRL by friends and family since I'm not working or anything. Nowadays you typically get a notification, the same day as the test (or at an awkward time the day before) notifying you when they are turning the servers on, typically a time that cooresponds to the late afternoon or evening which are prime hours when people are going to have responsibilities (but to be fair would also likely be home from school or work). As a result it seems testing tends to be at a relative trickle, and to be fair it DOES seem like those who are dedicated to showing up during those times are those who are so dedicated to the game that they want to do beta to learn exploits. In many cases it seems like the motivation for beta is to get a leg up in learning how to exploit the system for the purposes of making RL money. Remember reports from ToR about people jumping ahead to higher level planets and looting chests to make huge gobs of money and doing it non-stop (combined with Chinese Credit Farmers being there from like day #1).
At any rate I don't blame EA for being increasingly paranoid about this, however I think the best solution is a combination of making alphas and betas more accessible to testers which will probably amount to more of them putting in more hours, and leading to more reports. That and I think they need to be more assertive about who they let into the game, and perhaps have some of their coders and GMs actually observe the player base.
I've also kind of felt that a policy for online games running servers should probably be that Alpha and Beta testers are limited to playing live on specific servers, at least for the first six months to a year of a game's release, whether it's an MMO, or something that merely has online components. The reason being is that it would serve to help prevent not only beta-learned exploits from spreading to the entire game, but also end some of the problems with bullying where more experienced players from Beta basically take over the game and server economies from day #1, and pre-formed guilds start padding up their PVP ratings on defenseless newbs, oftentimes demoralizing and slanting PVP in favor of one faction or another on a server from the beginning. A problem with Betas that seems to have hurt more than a few games is basically turning a bunch of wolves loose on the sheep (including chinese farmers), especially during critical moments of launch when the GMs are focused on other things, by the time the GMs can look at the community in many cases it's already too late to do the damage. Penning up beta testers (and this comes from someone who is one) is probably a good idea. To be honest I'll also say that as "unfair" and "punishing" as this sounds, the companies might be able to soften it a bit by letting people keep beta characters on the beta player servers. This both means that stress testers and such won't get lethargic once the serious "testing" is done and it's all about lag-torture (figuring nothing they do matters anyway) since they will get to keep their effort at least on a specific server, and also keeps the wolves in with the other predators until the rest of the community catches up and can defend themselves/compete.
At any rate, the point here is that beta testing as it works now is a mess and causes a lot of problems (I'm just presenting a hypothetical solution to some of it with the QQing), it's actually good that EA is trying to address one aspect of the issues, though truthfully it's kind of irrelevent until they act on the policy.
Except, you know, they do pull this kind of shit. Their "accept our new ToU that prevents certain lawsuits or you lose all your games forever," or back when people lost their minds over EA's ToU that covered things that Steam already did....TheSniperFan said:
Yeah. The point being...Hold on....
The point being, people are very very quick to scream bloody murder when EA does it, even if someone else does it. The same people seem to be very quick to apologise for Valve, even if Valve is doing the exact same thing.Sylveria said:
There's no perhaps about it. We've seen it in action.
Okay, I liked the Extended Cut, but that made me laugh. Bravo. XDVault101 said:haha I like that XDValok said:
Oh EA, you never ceases to amuse me.
say...anyone remember a bugs life? no one seems too
OT: Yeah, I can't take this seriously at all. EA can't really communicate well with customers with regards to anything at all, so I have to ask what's the point of this EULA. Even worse: This is coming from its legal department. God only knows how this will show up through their fucked up PR channels.
When is a bug a bug, and when is it just a bizarre or misguided balance issue? "Hmmm... this seems oddly over-powered. They may have intended this, but I better report it as a bug or risk losing access to all my EA games. If I use the best weapon in the game am I exploiting?"
Or is that their goal? They want to be buried in so many spurious "nerf this" bug reports that they have plausible deniability for not fixing actual defects.
Or is that their goal? They want to be buried in so many spurious "nerf this" bug reports that they have plausible deniability for not fixing actual defects.
