Quote:Original post by perroza
Do they really whant to hear my opinion?

Generally, no. Beta should be about polishing the game, ironing out the remaining bugs and making the game solid. It is not a good time to change designs or implement features (which stills happens, but is not desirable). IMHO, the best thing a tester can do during beta, is to provide a good repro for a bug.

What they are looking for really depends on the game. For instance, perhaps most of the Warcraft III beta was involved with the gameplay, to have lots of multiplayer games and sort out unit balancing (although they of course worked out most of the other bugs in the process).
Other beta tests are often just to iron out bugs, and AFAIK it is fairly rare to actually include much of the single-player story line in a beta (to avoid leaks).

I always prefer to send the game I made to my friend first (and maybe sometime in one forum to get more opinions) before post it in some forums or my blog.

Because they reference to game as a players and not developers their opinion is very important to me. Maybe feature I think is cool they can see it at annoying and if more that one people think that this feature is annoying so maybe I should rethink using this features.

The same I believe happen to big companies. Of course you don't need to refer to every negative opinion, like if somebody says that your Inventory management is not good, don't run to fix it, wait if a lot of people complain about it so you should rethink you Inventory management system.

I think this is very important to every game developer or a group of game developers to get opinion form the "other side", the game players. Because game developers when they play their game (or other game) they think how to do this and that better from the Code Side and not from the Game Play Side (I'm talking about my self maybe other game developers can refer to games as a gamers).

An important thing to remember is that BETA testing is supposed to test a product that is pretty much done, especially as far as gameplay dynamics. So as others have said, most of what will change will be bugs and balance issues. That could also be like where as you progress, you know a game is little by little supposed to be more difficult, but sometimes mistakes happen, so that is one thing that could get changed(also a form of balance issue). I DO agree though that testing possibly could be done DURING the coding cycle, as features are added. I'd say once a game has a playable form, but isn't that far done just yet is a good time. This gives a chance to make changes earlier to gameplay that would make a game more fun and also gives a chance to tweak features, such as powerups or whatever. But just as with BETA testing, it will be up to the programmers/design team/whatever to make the decisions about what to change and whether your opinion matters.

I personally think if I get an opinion that I disagree with, I check around and see what other people think, as in people that commented, but not on the specific idea in question, and I can see then if maybe my opinion isn't possibly the best way to go. If it is around 50/50, I usually go with my own, but if everyone is against me, especially noncoding gamers, I usually make the change/add the feature/take it away/whatever.

One important thing that doesn't seem to have been covered yet is the problem with hardware and software compatiblity. Even as a large company, it's quite hard to cover all the permutations of hardware, software and circumstances in your test labs.By letting people run the game on their machines, you can get a much better image of what kind of hardware people have and how well your game works on it.