It's less about skill and ability than it is about having the dev team's trust. They don't have time to waste. They need people they can consistently depend on and people that they know will be honest about tuning and other feedback. They can likely get some good metrics from watching other guilds do the content, but for working directly with people, familiarity and trust go a long way.
While a short beta of 3.5 weeks was one of the issue. Another issue was that the first week last year, there was hardly anything to test, because so little content was implemented, it wasn't even in alpha stage per se, only zone art/zones existed. On top of that there was no developer interaction or very little, just forum titles created but nothing from the developer side on what their goal was and what they wanted players to do. That was all the first week of their 3.5 week "beta". I could be totally off as I didn't have beta access (Not going to be one of those goober that pays this company to test their products, that's just stupid imo). Beta forum access was fully public last year, with no NDA iirr, at least I was able to see the beta forums somehow and I never pre-ordered the expansion and laughed at all the goobers who bought into that cash grab. Which is another issue in itself, when you close the doors of to a portion of the player base who didn't pre-order to test the expansion, or the previous year before that when it was only for All-Access members to test. How are you going to get a substantial amount of your player base to give you feedback otherwise? But at least, that is the gist I got from the beta forums, with people asking "hello? what are we supposed to test" repeatedly.
I prefer launching with fewer zones where quests/raids work correctly with a couple more promised in quarterly drops than getting everything on day 1 and having everything poorly tested/implemented.
I think making $$$$ is the only point of beta now. They don't want people to know how terrible it is so they force people to pay just to see how bad it is. I think the expansion will be worse than TBM just like presidential candidates continue to get worse each election year.
It's worth noting that during TBM beta the beta forums were view-able by anyone and there was no NDA, which was not true for past expansions. I dislike the whole paying for beta thing, but if they were trying to trick people they likely would've kept the NDA. I'm cautiously optimistic that this expansion will improve on TBM in a few areas. TBM saw a lot of the devs in new roles, with some handling those better than others (*cough* Aristo *cough*). I think it's less likely that things like itemization will be quite the mess they were in TBM on launch*. They also have at least one or two more devs, which should help. I'd be kidding myself if I thought that they'd actually have the expansion ready when it launches, but I do think it'll be in a slightly better state than TBM. I'm also hoping there will actually be at least a couple new and interesting zones (from an artistic standpoint). For all of its short comings, TDS did an excellent job with this, and it's a huge part of what made the expansion tolerable for me. I'm happy to see revamps as well, but getting more than one actually new zone would be pretty cool. A small part of me worries that they'll release two Kunark expansions and not release all the zones now, but I'm crossing my fingers that that won't happen. The big question, though, is content. TBM actually did decently in this regard. The quantity of its raids and quality of its missions were much better than TDS. Personally I don't think the quests were anything special, but they were an improvement over the "kill 12 high HP NPCs and hail 13 times" that we had in TDS. I'm specifically interested to see if they can get enough progression raids to vary the difficulty of them a bit more than in TDS/TBM. If there were some actually difficult final raids, that would be very cool. There's also the curveball that there likely will be a level increase. I don't have any problem with level increases, but they do require extra work, especially on the part of Aristo. Considering how badly he handled spells in TDS and itemization in TBM, I really have no idea what will happen when he has to do both. The thing that's been bothering the most is why the Temple of Droga collection achievements were there during the Ragefire beta. My guess is that it is somehow related to the whole Campaign vs Expansion thing, but it's difficult to say. I'm hoping against my better judgement that they had actually started working on the zone content back then, but that falls pretty squarely into the realm of wishful thinking. *Edit: I had forgotten that there likely would be a level increase; in that case it's entirely possible that itemization could be worse than in TBM.
Easy with type 9 augs. Simply make a 103, 107 and 110 set differing by a set AC/HME. Then add in cut and paste bugs that will never be fixed (nor acknowledged) to be consistent with TBM. It should be hard to do itemization worse than TBM (at least for group gear). Equivalency is a very real possibility though.
During the web announcement for the release of TBM more time was spent introducing Cats in the Bag then TBS. My experience in beta, was that from it went down hill, with lack of trade skill for the expansion, gear not ready to be evaluated, lack of developer interaction. My first experience once the TBM was released was killing a named, and that named dropped a hand to hand weapon that was usable by monks, beast lords and BESERKERS. It till about the Feb 2017 patch to get the expansion to a state that it should of been on the release date with the "stupidly obvious" bugs cleaned out, gear properly itemized, and expansion playable. I understand that EoK should be released in November 2017 for business reasons, primarily to get the expansion out the door prior to Thanksgiving / Christmas / New year holidays. I am not ok if the release lacks quality. If the expansion is debugged enough to be released in November, then hold it over until December or January. As a customer, I do not want to see stupid stuff such as augs not going into gear they should, or hand to hand weapons that are berserker usable in EoK.
I am having problems transferring my user data from Everquest to Beta. I am in a guild Circle of Legends there but when I open the guild window it asks me if I want to create a guild, its not recognizing that I am in an officer in the guild and its not letting me transfer my hotkey settings, my hot bars are there but not the way I have it set up on Everquest
I watched the stream ... They said that the new combine city is where the old teleport spires were in the Dreadlands. My first question is ... Did they make sure that the existing quests and quest drops in the revamped zones are still avaliable?
TBM Beta started and quests and named wasnt even created yet while everything was in place ready for the player to test on EoK launch. im confident that it will be less buggy then TBM but not bug free.
I'd definitely agree with this. EoK Beta is in a much better state than TBM was. It's also worth noting that the time between now and EoK's release is actually slightly longer than the entirety of TBM's beta. I've been generally impressed by the responsiveness of Absor/Prathun/Augur with regards to quests; they definitely seem to be taking feedback seriously. Items are also arguably in a better state than current TBM items, and Ngreth has done a decent job at at least responding to feedback. I am a little bit disappointed in the lack of communication on spells and AAs (though Aristo is actually posting, so that's positive), but I suppose changes with regards to class balance are more difficult than bug fixes. Regardless, I'm pretty certain the launch state of EoK will be notably better than TBM was at launch.
