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@Petri - SGG Community Manager @KiraSG - SGG Player Support/ Community

@KiraSG - SGG Player Support/ Community @Rook - Moderator

@Rook - Moderator @zephyr1 - Moderator

@zephyr1 - Moderator @littleKAF - Moderator

Is there a plan for another round of Beta applications soon?

[UPDATE: there has since been a new round of Beta applications, which has also since closed.]

We need to look into it. Maybe. Hopefully. I know that Season 3 is coming soon. I cannot make any promises yet. We want to keep it kind of small because we know it can be time consuming. And maybe it’s something we need to revamp. So we may take away inactive players and bring in new players instead of opening a huge list. We can think of new ways on how to include more, especially the active forum users.

And some of our content creators, who are not active on the forum, should be there.

One idea I have been toying with, it’s not a promise or anything, but maybe the Forum Regulars – if you have the Forum status of Regular – you would get free access. You would not have to prove that you are active and have been providing feedback on the Forum. If it works, we can make it very visible that this is how you get access. We can then change the settings for Regulars too if it’s not working at the moment. It’s currently at the Discourse [Forum software] default settings.

That premise is interesting as there are conspiracy theories about how to get into Beta. It will be clear that we are looking for people who are active and give feedback and meet the following very specific criteria. This is a way more straight forward response than saying ‘hey, every now and then they open applications. And in a very weird, Harry-Potter-sorting-hat kind of way, they decide who gets in.’

We have a very structured way of screening the applications. I sort of started the open application process thinking it’s democratic and everyone gets to apply. But the problem is we get tens of thousands of applications.

And it’s all done manually. We have to go through each one by hand.

Because we want to really check their engagement as well as what they are doing in the game, like are they misbehaving.

We have to check moderation history. How active are they are playing the game? And we have to consider that time you are playing in Beta is taking away from playing in the real game. That’s a consideration as well.

And maybe we can find a new way to brainstorm. But it may be changing so it’s not always the same people.

We can be public about our criteria.

Yes. Definitely. And it’s basically decided by us, not the developers. While they don’t select the applicants, if they have someone they think should be added, we add them.

We had a Reddit user who started doing hero feedback. @mhalttu saw it and said ‘this is really good feedback and he’s someone that could be really good to have in Beta.’ So I reached out to them to see if they were interested.

And that’s a good point. Maybe we need to be more active in communicating that this is the way that you get into Beta. Because the main intention of Beta isn’t to be like a QA testing. We have added more QA here. We needed more and we have a QA team here now. It is more about adding early feedback. Even though designers are doing all the automation and using tools to predict battles, it’s still desired to get actual player feedback. And also feedback about how new features look. That is the most important part of the program. So that’s why we cannot add tons of people that would never really share any feedback.

They are not Guinea pigs. They are not out finding bugs. That’s never been the intention.

Even though sometimes it’s very helpful.

Yes, it’s helpful to see if there are bugs in the game but that was never the main purpose.

That was the first that I’ve ever heard that. When I got into Beta, the first time my question was ‘what am I supposed to do?’ So I tried this and this and went in with the mentality of ‘can I break the game’ because if I can break the game now, then a million other people are going to totally break the game and we’re trying to catch it. If that’s not the intent, which is what I just heard, it’s more so – just play it. Give us your comments. If you catch a bug, great.

This is good feedback as players often ask “what is the point of Beta?” Just play it! Play it like you would the normal game. We don’t need you to be hyper focused on every little detail like bug hunting. Just play the game and give active feedback.

That’s good feedback. I haven’t heard that before and I think I have been doing more bug hunting. And I’ve been doing stuff that I would never do in the game, and stuff that I think others wouldn’t do because it just doesn’t make sense, but I was trying to say ‘hey, has anyone thought of this. Would this break it.’ I was thinking that was the role and I guess I was wrong is what I’m now hearing.

Well I wouldn’t say that’s wrong. That is one way of doing it. We keep getting feedback that we should give very clear instructions on what to test but we want people to go freely into Beta. Because we want feedback like “hey, I couldn’t even find these Hero Costumes,” – that would be a problem with that feature.

If we want to test a feature, for instance the Costume Chamber. If we helped you open the Chamber, then we wouldn’t get average player experience feedback. We can’t help you open the Costume Chamber or use the Keys to get the Costume. We want to see you naturally open it and say “oh, here’s the chamber” and “oh, this is how you do the mechanics” like an average player would.

But definitely there is improvement here. Like how to provide feedback and, in general, what are our intentions.

And I will say that there has been feedback that has been overlooked, not read, bugs reported that got missed. And that’s completely on us. It’s human error.

And we have made some improvements there. For example, we created the Beta Bugs category.

And we are learning from it. We took that as a learning opportunity here in house. And I can’t say it will never happen again but we’ve improved.

One thing I’ve noticed is that whether it’s you guys or somebody else, almost every single Beta bug gets some sort of response back to it.

This is the new way. Even though it was always done this way, it may not have been visible enough for the Beta players.

It’s always been read, but now it’s more visible, and that is one of the QA team members that is responding.

Related to Beta, a frequent reality is that content gets shared despite the prohibitions. I think there is often a sense in the community that the rule-abiding players are sort of punished, and have to go through all this extra effort of transcribing information to share since you don’t get to share screenshots. Meanwhile the people who are breaking the rules see everything like 5 minutes after it’s posted in Beta. Why bother having these rules enforced on the Forum when it’s like the Wild West everywhere else, with content being shared on Facebook and on Line?

It’s a good discussion regarding what are the rules that we need. We cannot moderate what’s going on in Facebook and such.

That’s the thing. Our own channels (such as the game itself, the forum, our official Facebook page) are the only platforms that we can control. We cannot moderate what’s being shared on Facebook (fan groups etc.) and on Line or other fan groups. And we don’t know who that information is coming from. We don’t know the source. And we’re not going to do a witch hunt on our players and try to investigate.

And in a way it’s good to have some sneak peaks from the players. So maybe in the future, you would be able to share. We could add a watermark or something. The problem with sharing the screenshots isn’t about the copyright, it’s more about players being confused because with the hero cards, the stats might change. So, if you have screenshots floating around and it’s different than the release version, it creates confusion.

Everything in beta can change. If we share one thing and the value changes, it causes miscommunication and some confusion.

You just answered my question. I was always pondering in my head ‘what is the information they don’t want shared?” At first I thought there was a desire for a small group of people because things can change. But @zephyr1 puts everything on the Beta Beat threads so that can’t be right. Then somebody else mentioned it’s copyright of the card which you just addressed. So no, it’s more to avoid confusion if changes occur. In the back of my mind, I’m wondering what exactly is it that we are trying to protect. And I don’t think the community knows that either, and that’s why there are so many people trying to police it.

We appreciate the players that are trying to police it. It means they care about the community.

And sometimes we have taken action on it. For now, the rule is there. Especially for videos because so many things can change.

And beta is not meant for players to get exclusive sneak peek knowledge prior to anyone else.

And that’s one thing we should communicate – beta comes fairly soon before the actual release. It’s not like they are very early versions as those are the ones we are testing here. It’s like a stage where they are really playable and just before the launch. But the bigger features, such as Alliance Wars, they are tested longer because we want to get that early player feedback.

I’ve pointed it out to players that if their impression is that beta is about us as players serving a role in game design, that they are mistaken, as really a lot of the game design has already happened by the time we see something in beta. There is some fine-tuning and feedback, but it’s not like we’re having early conversations where Tim is saying ‘I’m thinking about adding something to the game. Let’s talk about ideas.’ It’s not like that. It’s more of a feedback very close to when things go live. But sometimes there is a gap.

Those are the bigger features. They are introduced earlier. We have sometimes made drastic changes because something wasn’t working. But I understand that sometimes we just have to launch a feature as it is even though some players are disappointed or they don’t like some of the features. Sometimes it’s better to just release the feature if it’s working and then work on something new instead of staying with one thing. For example, matchmaking. It’s a never ending project. It’s not perfect but it’s working fine.

From our experience, as I would say that perfect is the enemy of good. We can spend so much time perfecting something and it can be a lot of time wasted when we could just accept it is working fine and move on to something else.