Torment of Velious beta is active?

Did I miss something?

http://www.eqmaps.info

shouldn it be 23th October....?

Some guilds get invited early.

So zones are (looking at the maps he posted)
Crystal caverns .. gags hate that zone
Easternwastes
Tower of frozen shadows
Great divide
Kael
Velks .. more gagging slipping is so 2001

They've let in a few known individuals and guilds come in a bit earlier to test out the pipes. This is a good idea because it's a smaller group, they have their own internal support system (where the guild can help eachother) and are generally more beta savvy. This allows them to clean things up a bit before the beta officially starts this week.

Pretty sure they got the expansion free. After all these are some of the big players that make the maps, collect item info and forage tables, kill the big guys etc.

They contribute a lot to the game and it would be logical of DBG to do that.

Although I am not among the chosen few I think DBG is missing a huge opportunity in not asking me to beta the forage portion. I can stand around for days just clicking that button - nothing automated!

Some of us are in there, and we are doing /bug reports on broken quests and raids (which aren't working correctly atm), fixing spelling/typos/whatever that slipped through the cracks.. think of us as early QA... Many more of us than the Devs. The collections items are not flagged correctly yet, we're figuring out keywords for quests, because they are not all set in [blue] yet, and yes, Brewall, Goodurden, and a few others are mapping like crazy. Which is good, as things do not line up with the old zones exactly. They changed zone sizes, gave partial zones, split CC into CC and Ry'Gorr Mines.

Nah, we don't get the expansion for free, we just get access to BETA early. We will still have to buy the expac to play on Live.

Thanks.
Oh man... old velious.. I would love new stuff instead of old outworn zones. Crystal caverns was interesting in classic but only to gather some gems and leave fast. In RoF it was again the same, only annoying with all the pathing issues. And now again?

Velks is the same. It was even cruel in classic. Luckily they didn't repeated that in RoF. I avoided that zone very fast. But now again the crappy pathing and the sliding issues? Only more deadly?

I am wondering how they would turn this one around with this expansion...I will visit the everchurch to bow beyond the gods of development and beg for mercy and less bugs which crawl through the brown code of eternity in hope for some crumbs of fun in the eyes of the gods of velious while I get tormented within the next 5 levels..... ...oh DGB-Domina, make my life again messy and torment me inside of old worlds, in hope that this time it has some more EoK flavour than the last two expansions...

Enough roleplaying, waiting for news...

I will share my maps on Wednesday once Beta become officially open.

I would give you all every credit for every work you all do. You all earn earlier BETA in that. I can wait. The small amount of time I would love to spend playing instead of searching bugs. Thumbs up for every bug you find and everything which gets better!

Very unlikely they were given, or would be given the expansion. At best they might get a fancy hat.

Only group DBG would give the game / beta to would be streamers that could increase their reach to other markets (see: Apex Legends), which would probably have catastrophic results.

We do not get anything more then any body else

No... no one gets the expansion for free. Where do you come up with these ideas?

The reason people get in early is because the raid testing schedule has been accelerated in the past 3 years. Raid testing has started on or before the day beta opened since RoS, and it's unrealistic to have 54 people all set up with their characters and UIs if they're raiding on the same day beta opens.

We can also report bugs or w/e and there are definitely some people in there testing content and producing useful feedback. That said, some (definitely not all) seem a little confused about the difference between something being bugged and unimplemented. I highly doubt they didn't notice the absence of every 111-115 spell, for example, but we're in before Beta is supposed to be ready for testing. For this reason I am personally not assuming anything is fully implemented/ready for testing until Beta is official, and I'm just making a list of things until then (to be clear - if you're in there testing content and reporting feedback that's also great, this is just what makes sense to me).

Beyond that, they are not particularly good about communicating the terms of being in Beta prior to its official start. In RoS after everyone had been in for a few days, they responded to a post asking us to treat Beta as if there was an NDA until it officially opened (the cat was out of the bag by then to some extent). They did not mention anything about an NDA for TBL or ToV, but I'd imagine they'd prefer we were quieter about it than some people are.

That said, a lot of the information (like the zones, spells, some other things) can be found by anyone by patching beta and looking at a handful of text files in one's EQ directory. I'd imagine they'd prefer we didn't look at that either, but I think that's unrealistic given how easy and universally available it is. C'est la vie.

put it out to the powers that be until prices are out ... not thinking much about anything ... just saying all I've seen so far is "more expensive" on the official word side of things

How long does it take to set up a UI? Go into the char files, copy the info and paste into the file beta. Done.

You would be surprised! There are people who have done this for many many years and yet it still takes a while for them to get setup.

There's more to it than copying UIs, and I think you're also underestimating the range of technical abilities that people playing EQ have.

First, /beta only runs once a day, and inevitably in a group of 54 people a handful of people won't have their characters because they forgot to /beta, they /beta'd too early, they /beta'd too late, or a bug (which has happened with /beta in the past). /betabuff is an option, but those characters take a decent amount of work to make raid ready.

Then, yes, there are people who have technical difficulties copying their UIs. Whether it be related to finding the files, not copying the right files, not renaming the files correctly, not grabbing eqclient.ini for their keybinds, or whatever else. A lot of people also insist on tinkering with their UIs manually rather than copying the files because they perceive it as more difficult than it really is.

Then there are a number of smaller things - getting GINA set up, getting in the guild, getting channels set up properly. None of that is particularly time consuming either, but across 54 people there's inevitably something that's gone wrong that takes a bit more time to get working.

You also have to consider that beta preorders start in the middle of the work day, and a lot of people get home from work shortly before raids. If they run into an issue with any of the above in the 15 minutes or w/e they have before raids starts (since testing raids are on the same day as beta opening), there's often not enough time to fix it.

Could I get beta preordered and everything set up within 15 minutes or w/e to raid the same day? Yeah probably. Could RoI get 54 people set up in that time period if it really really mattered? I'd guess so. But it's far easier for everyone involved to allow for a few days between getting set up and raiding. It's a benefit to the devs to have guilds as prepared as possible to help them test things.

Things get cumbersome when people (like me) use and depend on custom UIs. EQ's UI is so rigid that even minor changes the devs make to the UI make the game unable to load without resetting the UI. This isn't so bad but the time it takes to reload the UI and iterate to try to find what is broken is several minutes because everything is loaded from scratch. Because it can be difficult to find what is broken and how to repair it, it can take hours to figure it out.

Testers could just suck it up and use the default UI, but man is it disorienting to swap back. I had to do an easy mission yesterday with the default UI and just having the default (and tiny) cast bars made everything feel awkward. Granted I was six-boxing, but still. Any good raider will want to hit beta raids hard and perform their best on new mechanics and not be the guy who keeps dying to them, so they'll want time to get as much as they can in their UI to what they are used to so they are learning the new mechanics, not learning a new UI.

Um personnel experience? I have beta tested and was given it free - although I am sure things have changed since my last beta for DBG which was year before but was not EQ.

But the whole post was meant to be a favorable one about how much the players in beta help with the game mechanics. Hence the humorous last line.

With your comment inferring I "come up" with ideas is disparaging and not needed and adds nothing. Please don't be discouraging when someone has an opinion or an idea.

I've beta tested EQ many many times too... never been given the expansion for free. Misinformation is extremely annoying and people simply read the first thing and ignore the rest and the rumour lives on forever.

the only people i ever recall getting a new expansion for free are guides. if i remember right, they are usually granted 1 free expansion for the account they are an active guide on.