I see your point about the misuse of the term 'beta' if they are taking money and won't be wiping characters.
Still, it is what it is regardless.
Be it a regular launch with some bugs or the same launch called "beta" for a bit, it's the same thing to you and me.
We know it's just a marketing thing and a 'tag' to avoid reviews before they are ready.
It doesn't bother me because I figure they would have released it as is anyway even if someone hadn't decided to put it double secret beta.
This is probably the new way for F2P games given how some game launches have gone recently and the bad PR they have created.
Too bad the lesson learned for game companies from watching other games launch without being ready isn't to be better prepare for launch but rather to redefine the word "beta" to mean "not-quite-ready-but-launching-anyway".
Again, I'm not mad though because it is what it is by any name.
How can you have a live beta and a cash store? If there isn't going to be a character wipe, then the game is live. Adding beta just gives the developer a shltty excuse to release garbage and still have their cash store open. "Oh, it's in beta so there will be bugs." What a load of <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font>.
Personally I haven't felt that the quality is any different compared to any other MMO that I have tried right at launch, so at least Cryptic is more "honest" by calling it beta at this stage.
Now, I agree that the Cash Shop thing can be a bit dodgy and charging Real Money for Respects is just plain wrong for a Beta. But calling the first month of the "release" an Open Beta is not wrong. It is HONEST. Because, regardless of what MMO you are playing, that's what it IS. From Ultima Online to present this has always been the case. The game you play at launch bears little to no resemblance to the game you will see a month or two in. CrypticWorld games seem to be particularly prone to this. I remember Champs post launch. You never knew WHAT you were going to see whenever you logged in. And it very nearly killed the game. They STILL have not recovered from it more than four years latter.
What They SHOULD do is:
1) STOP CHARGING FOR RESPECTS! The purpose of a Beta is to get your players to try new things. Period. Once this thing is live? Maybe. But not in beta.
2) Give out Respec Tokens to anyone who purchased a Respec from the Zen Store, good for one Respec at any time.
3) Refund all Zen spent on Respects. You've still sold the Zen, so you loose little.
4) Offer players a full Zen refund at launch. Make it optional so that those of us who are pleased with our purchases do not need to do it all again. You loose your items, but get your Zen back. This would be a one time offer.
'Wen considered the nature of time and understood that the universe is, instant by instant, recreated anew. Therefore, he understood, there is in truth no past, only a memory of the past. Blink your eyes, and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them. Therefore, he said, the only appropriate state of the mind is surprise. The only appropriate state of the heart is joy. The sky you see now, you have never seen before. The perfect moment is now. Be glad of it.' Terry Pratchet The Thief Of Time
Which explains why the game is F2P. When you pay for something in the cash shop, you are doing just that, paying for the item, not the service. If the item is any less than advertised, then you have a reason to complain about it.
wait, did you just imply the reason the game is free to play is because the servers have known instability issues, and are not of a quality worthy of charging a subscription, or purchase fee?
Is there a law that says you can't offer beta for money ? To people crazy enough to buy virtual entertainment ? Beta status tells us something about the development of the product and has no direct relation with spending philosophies. In fact, there are so few release status elements in NWO that i would call it an "alpha". The whole thing with spending philosophies here is that when you value your money, you don't spend anything at all. There is always a workaround that involves playtime. But to have fun, you need to spend. It's p4f. pay-for-fun. To elaborate, it means that ftp gaming is no-fun-at-all unless you decide to spend. Which is perverse.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
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terradraconisMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users, Neverwinter Knight of the Feywild UsersPosts: 17Arc User
edited May 2013
A) Been done in other recent games. if you don't like it existing in beta don't play the game until it is officially "live" though that may take up to a year.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
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terradraconisMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users, Neverwinter Knight of the Feywild UsersPosts: 17Arc User
^This, No beta lasts more than a week. If it does, not beta.
/thread
No those types of beta's are a modern creation of marketing departments and aren't true beta's. It is fun to be in a game with a real active beta and see people who only know the marketing type screaming left and right about how the game isn't ready. They just are not used to real betas.
I have a crazy idea guys... Guy's this will blow your mind.... I hope your sitting down and haven't eaten or drank anything in the last 8 hours, cause this is a pretty revolutionary idea..
Don't spend money till it goes live if your so worried...:cool:
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terradraconisMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users, Neverwinter Knight of the Feywild UsersPosts: 17Arc User
While I disagree with how things are. This appears to be the new method. Open Beta's are now something with the cash store this is mostly to help pay for development <I hope> But it feels more like a cash grab. Anyways with the number of failing mmo's out there it not unlikely that its to help pay for development.
Just lol bro Open beta's have had a very specific meaning for the better part of 15 years nothings changeing except one outlier company fudgeing what it means. When companies like Sony,Blizzard,EA, Microsoft, etc etc.. start doing the same then I'll go along with it. Hate to break it to you bro, but your wrong. This would be like a company coming along and trying to reinvent the wheel except they make it round again and call it Vulcanizing. The only thing not set in stone here is the younger crowd not understanding that there has been a long standing tradition as to what a Open Beta actualy is educated yourself before posting take a few mins step up your google fu then get back to me.
So because it's tradition means it's correct and should be kept, right?
Man, the United States never should have abolished slavery. That was quite the long-standing tradition.
This is a launch, it is not beta nor is it soft. It is a launch where the developer, to cover their backs, admits that it isn't really ready for launch. It would be naive to believe anything else. The only thing that distinguishes this from a traditional launch is the title of "beta", everything else is exactly the same. When you have a fully functional cash shop in the game you are talking about a released commercial product.
But on the positive side, despite the misuse of the term "beta", they do at least openly admit that the game was not ready for release. That is better than calling it ready when it clearly is not.
Is there a law that says you can't offer beta for money ? To people crazy enough to buy virtual entertainment ? Beta status tells us something about the development of the product and has no direct relation with spending philosophies. In fact, there are so few release status elements in NWO that i would call it an "alpha". The whole thing with spending philosophies here is that when you value your money, you don't spend anything at all. There is always a workaround that involves playtime. But to have fun, you need to spend. It's p4f. pay-for-fun. To elaborate, it means that ftp gaming is no-fun-at-all unless you decide to spend. Which is perverse.
You express an opinion, it's been expressed thousand of time already and a thousand of time people expressed an opposite opinion, your mileage may vary about the game. I can only warn you that the f2p argument thread will be closed quickly. Since everyone with a minimum intelligence would understand that "pay", "fun" and "win" are 3 mmo concept and no ones defines them exactly the same way. Feel free to express an opinion, but it's not necessary or constructive to judge and convince people, it leads to ego and e-peen war.
Their model is different than any other mmo on many aspects, especially regarding monetary transaction Zen to AD or AD to Zen and involvement required for the players to get rewarded . You can dislike it, but many enjoy it and have been able to earn the "necessary" needed without paying to fully enjoy the game or did by throwing what "they" considered a reasonable amount of money for the satisfaction they wanted. Let's make it clear, you are not forced to spend real money. EVERYTHING is unlocked or can be acquired without paying. So far, they limited the piracy that ruined many game, think about that, it's normal that it's not intuitive and you might feel limited but there's space for improvement. It's too early to judge of the effectiveness of their monetary system when you consider every aspect of it as a whole and not only as a restraining part of it.
For the OP, I prefer they do their testing on community for a live beta (and it's not hidden they have bugs and the game is not at his final stage, we have been warned) than do a pointless closed beta like other rushed game that were down for several days consecutively after official launch (Hi EA!).
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
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sormirMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Hero UsersPosts: 13Arc User
Which explains why the game is F2P. When you pay for something in the cash shop, you are doing just that, paying for the item, not the service. If the item is any less than advertised, then you have a reason to complain about it.
True, we are paying for the item, however the money from that item is going or should be going to pay for the maintenance of the service. So if the money from the cash shop items are not funding the service, could you please explain where your revenue stream for maintenance is coming from?
OPEN BETA in today times mean that:
We are rushing our game so there will be tons of bugs, unbalance issues and other problems, but we want to already earn money from unfinished product. Lets call it open beta test, people will think its test so its alright to have all the problems it have while we can start earning money. If something goes wrong we can always wipe them because its still open beta. If something goes really wrong and the game go off, we already made the money from people rushing as much as we do.
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rdykattenMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian UsersPosts: 7Arc User
True, we are paying for the item, however the money from that item is going or should be going to pay for the maintenance of the service. So if the money from the cash shop items are not funding the service, could you please explain where your revenue stream for maintenance is coming from?
But they are working on maintenance. It's not like they know each and every issue that will occur before it happens nor exactly what they need to support their playerbase. However, it has been improving. The day of release, there was so much lag for me I couldn't even do skirmishes without having a 1 minute delay on what was actually happening. Now, it rarely lags for me.
The game just came out, regardless of if it's beta or if it's release, regardless of what term we use to define it. It was just released. Issues should be expected - but quick resolutions of these issues should also be expected.
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bubbabinskyMember, Moonstars, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian UsersPosts: 161Community Moderator
wait, did you just imply the reason the game is free to play is because the servers have known instability issues, and are not of a quality worthy of charging a subscription, or purchase fee?
In a sense, yes. However, if Perfect World wanted to charge a subscription fee to run Neverwinter, they would. I'm not the only one that realizes that there is a difference between games that charge to play and games that don't.
(Don't go running around saying that I give a bad name to PWE. If I didn't like them, I wouldn't be modding for them).
True, we are paying for the item, however the money from that item is going or should be going to pay for the maintenance of the service. So if the money from the cash shop items are not funding the service, could you please explain where your revenue stream for maintenance is coming from?
I never said that the money didn't or doesn't pay for the service. But when you buy the item, you cannot expect anything but the item. What PWE prioritizes with that revenue is not in my knowledge, nor my discretion to state.
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lollieMember, Neverwinter Beta UsersPosts: 0Arc User
I never said that the money didn't or doesn't pay for the service. But when you buy the item, you cannot expect anything but the item. What PWE prioritizes with that revenue is not in my knowledge, nor my discretion to state.
Of course, but I'd think everyone would agree that making sure servers run well should be what they first do with the money we give them, over and above giving the CEO another bonus.
In a f2p game it's implied that the money we give them covers more than just the generation and cost of that one item.
Which explains why the game is F2P. When you pay for something in the cash shop, you are doing just that, paying for the item, not the service. If the item is any less than advertised, then you have a reason to complain about it.
Actually you have every right to complain if the environment required to enjoy the product sold is inoperable. Otherwise that would be like selling the rights to use a particular service in a gym but simultaneously shutting the gym itself down rendering the sold service unusable. That is obviously wrong and very much so cause for complaint. However everything has to be within reason, and I don't personally think the downtime of Neverwinter has been unreasonable at all.
Just lol bro Open beta's have had a very specific meaning for the better part of 15 years nothings changeing except one outlier company fudgeing what it means. When companies like Sony,Blizzard,EA, Microsoft, etc etc.. start doing the same then I'll go along with it. Hate to break it to you bro, but your wrong. This would be like a company coming along and trying to reinvent the wheel except they make it round again and call it Vulcanizing. The only thing not set in stone here is the younger crowd not understanding that there has been a long standing tradition as to what a Open Beta actualy is educated yourself before posting take a few mins step up your google fu then get back to me.
Your spelling, grammar and use of language are so abysmally bad, I'm having a hard time deciphering your post — let alone taking it seriously.
Anyway, as someone already pointed out, it's Google's trademark strategy to keep products in beta for insane amounts of time, way past the point where any of its users would still consider it anything but a launched and stable product.
Kinda funny how you just owned yourself, no?
Makes me smile
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lollieMember, Neverwinter Beta UsersPosts: 0Arc User
Your spelling, grammar and use of language are so abysmally bad, I'm having a hard time deciphering your post — let alone taking it seriously.
Anyway, as someone already pointed out, it's Google's trademark strategy to keep products in beta for insane amounts of time, way past the point where any of its users would still consider it anything but a launched and stable product.
Comments
^This, No beta lasts more than a week. If it does, not beta.
/thread
Smoke@stonedbill - Mindflayer - 60 Rogue
But it's not a beta. They're only using the "open beta" tag to excuse themselves from releasing a half-baked product.
Ergo, premature live game.
no there will not be
I see your point about the misuse of the term 'beta' if they are taking money and won't be wiping characters.
Still, it is what it is regardless.
Be it a regular launch with some bugs or the same launch called "beta" for a bit, it's the same thing to you and me.
We know it's just a marketing thing and a 'tag' to avoid reviews before they are ready.
It doesn't bother me because I figure they would have released it as is anyway even if someone hadn't decided to put it double secret beta.
This is probably the new way for F2P games given how some game launches have gone recently and the bad PR they have created.
Too bad the lesson learned for game companies from watching other games launch without being ready isn't to be better prepare for launch but rather to redefine the word "beta" to mean "not-quite-ready-but-launching-anyway".
Again, I'm not mad though because it is what it is by any name.
Probably also to avoid potentially damaging reviews, since games in beta don't generally get reviewed until official release.
CS issue? Check this thread first! | Reporting exploits: Done Right
Not much worry there since most of the major news outlets are already gushing over it.
What They SHOULD do is:
1) STOP CHARGING FOR RESPECTS! The purpose of a Beta is to get your players to try new things. Period. Once this thing is live? Maybe. But not in beta.
2) Give out Respec Tokens to anyone who purchased a Respec from the Zen Store, good for one Respec at any time.
3) Refund all Zen spent on Respects. You've still sold the Zen, so you loose little.
4) Offer players a full Zen refund at launch. Make it optional so that those of us who are pleased with our purchases do not need to do it all again. You loose your items, but get your Zen back. This would be a one time offer.
'Wen considered the nature of time and understood that the universe is, instant by instant, recreated anew. Therefore, he understood, there is in truth no past, only a memory of the past. Blink your eyes, and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them. Therefore, he said, the only appropriate state of the mind is surprise. The only appropriate state of the heart is joy. The sky you see now, you have never seen before. The perfect moment is now. Be glad of it.' Terry Pratchet The Thief Of Time
The server is performing worse and worse, and is making it difficult to play. The expected service is no longer being provided."
wait, did you just imply the reason the game is free to play is because the servers have known instability issues, and are not of a quality worthy of charging a subscription, or purchase fee?
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
No those types of beta's are a modern creation of marketing departments and aren't true beta's. It is fun to be in a game with a real active beta and see people who only know the marketing type screaming left and right about how the game isn't ready. They just are not used to real betas.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
Don't spend money till it goes live if your so worried...:cool:
don't have to spend money to respec. You can respec just spending in game currency directly for feats don't have to buy a token to do that.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
People who say otherwise are mostly ones who never touched a "F2P" MMORPG before and try to save themselves.
So because it's tradition means it's correct and should be kept, right?
Man, the United States never should have abolished slavery. That was quite the long-standing tradition.
But on the positive side, despite the misuse of the term "beta", they do at least openly admit that the game was not ready for release. That is better than calling it ready when it clearly is not.
You express an opinion, it's been expressed thousand of time already and a thousand of time people expressed an opposite opinion, your mileage may vary about the game. I can only warn you that the f2p argument thread will be closed quickly. Since everyone with a minimum intelligence would understand that "pay", "fun" and "win" are 3 mmo concept and no ones defines them exactly the same way. Feel free to express an opinion, but it's not necessary or constructive to judge and convince people, it leads to ego and e-peen war.
Their model is different than any other mmo on many aspects, especially regarding monetary transaction Zen to AD or AD to Zen and involvement required for the players to get rewarded . You can dislike it, but many enjoy it and have been able to earn the "necessary" needed without paying to fully enjoy the game or did by throwing what "they" considered a reasonable amount of money for the satisfaction they wanted. Let's make it clear, you are not forced to spend real money. EVERYTHING is unlocked or can be acquired without paying. So far, they limited the piracy that ruined many game, think about that, it's normal that it's not intuitive and you might feel limited but there's space for improvement. It's too early to judge of the effectiveness of their monetary system when you consider every aspect of it as a whole and not only as a restraining part of it.
For the OP, I prefer they do their testing on community for a live beta (and it's not hidden they have bugs and the game is not at his final stage, we have been warned) than do a pointless closed beta like other rushed game that were down for several days consecutively after official launch (Hi EA!).
True, we are paying for the item, however the money from that item is going or should be going to pay for the maintenance of the service. So if the money from the cash shop items are not funding the service, could you please explain where your revenue stream for maintenance is coming from?
We are rushing our game so there will be tons of bugs, unbalance issues and other problems, but we want to already earn money from unfinished product. Lets call it open beta test, people will think its test so its alright to have all the problems it have while we can start earning money. If something goes wrong we can always wipe them because its still open beta. If something goes really wrong and the game go off, we already made the money from people rushing as much as we do.
But they are working on maintenance. It's not like they know each and every issue that will occur before it happens nor exactly what they need to support their playerbase. However, it has been improving. The day of release, there was so much lag for me I couldn't even do skirmishes without having a 1 minute delay on what was actually happening. Now, it rarely lags for me.
The game just came out, regardless of if it's beta or if it's release, regardless of what term we use to define it. It was just released. Issues should be expected - but quick resolutions of these issues should also be expected.
In a sense, yes. However, if Perfect World wanted to charge a subscription fee to run Neverwinter, they would. I'm not the only one that realizes that there is a difference between games that charge to play and games that don't.
(Don't go running around saying that I give a bad name to PWE. If I didn't like them, I wouldn't be modding for them).
I never said that the money didn't or doesn't pay for the service. But when you buy the item, you cannot expect anything but the item. What PWE prioritizes with that revenue is not in my knowledge, nor my discretion to state.
Of course, but I'd think everyone would agree that making sure servers run well should be what they first do with the money we give them, over and above giving the CEO another bonus.
In a f2p game it's implied that the money we give them covers more than just the generation and cost of that one item.
Actually you have every right to complain if the environment required to enjoy the product sold is inoperable. Otherwise that would be like selling the rights to use a particular service in a gym but simultaneously shutting the gym itself down rendering the sold service unusable. That is obviously wrong and very much so cause for complaint. However everything has to be within reason, and I don't personally think the downtime of Neverwinter has been unreasonable at all.
Your spelling, grammar and use of language are so abysmally bad, I'm having a hard time deciphering your post — let alone taking it seriously.
Anyway, as someone already pointed out, it's Google's trademark strategy to keep products in beta for insane amounts of time, way past the point where any of its users would still consider it anything but a launched and stable product.
Kinda funny how you just owned yourself, no?
Makes me smile
Google doesn't have a cash shop.