We just determined that a small but significant portion of beta applications and feedback emails have been getting caught in a spam filter and not reaching us. We’re not sure how long this has been an issue, but we’ve made a couple of updates so that it shouldn’t happen anymore in the future. So, a few points:
We were able to recover the missing emails for the games that are currently in beta, so no one needs to resend any emails.
There may be an unknown amount of emails we didn’t receive for games that were in beta before, and we can’t recover those. It’s too late to implement feedback or be admitted to test those games, so you don’t need to resend those either, but we’re very sorry if your email was missed! As I said, we’ve put things in place so that it shouldn’t happen again.
If at any point I mention to you in a beta email that we didn’t receive your feedback on a previous game, or that I can’t admit you to one beta because we still have you down as testing another one, but you did send in your comments for the other game, please let me know! You can resend the feedback email in that case - if it’s for a game that’s no longer in beta, we unfortunately won’t be able to make use of the feedback, but we can update our records so that you’re no longer listed as not sending comments for that game. (And you should feel free to tell me if I’m wrong about you not sending feedback on a game in general, regardless of any spam filter issues! We were able to figure out the problem this time because a couple of people did correct me, which I’m very grateful for.)
In conclusion: you mostly don’t need to do anything, but we’re sorry if we missed emails, and we should be good going forward.
No, not at all! We’re not going to ban you from testing without having a conversation with you about the reason first. Which would almost always be that we haven’t been receiving feedback from you, at which point you should definitely correct us if we’re wrong about that.
In general, I think it’s very unlikely that anyone would have actually gotten to the point of being potentially banned from beta testing over this, because you have to not send in feedback for multiple games for that to be a possibility. So we’d have to have been receiving all your application emails and admitting you, but never receiving any of your feedback emails (or any emails from you correcting us that you actually did send feedback when we pointed it out), and that’s a very specific pattern to have gone on for that long. But there might be people who are incorrectly marked down as not sending feedback for a game or two when they did, and those people should definitely feel free to let us know. (If you sent in feedback for a game but never got an email from us thanking you for it, we might have missed your email, and you’re more than welcome to reach out to the beta email address now to check.)
Thanks for letting us know. I, like many others it looks like, am waiting to hear about Vampire’s Kiss. Now I know to bide my time and be patient. Glad you figured out the spam filter problem!
ETA: Am I the only one who gets nervous that my beta response disappears into a void and never gets received? I’d love an automated “received your reply.” Also, this latest one made me wish for a temporary beta save. It would make it far easier to test certain parts of a game without replaying the entire thing.
Yeah, my anxiety went on full alert for weeks with the one I tried this year.
(The email having changed from last time didn’t help. More reason to think I’d made a mistake)
It was actually one of the main reasons I stopped doing the official Betas, years ago, and back then it didn’t even take so long to hear back.
We’ve had a lot of very popular betas recently, which is great, but also means the response times have tended to be longer. It’s probably better to expect that it might take a few weeks to receive an invite, and then be pleasantly surprised if it happens sooner.
I can see if some kind of automated response would be an option. There are several improvements that I’d like to see to the beta process that so far haven’t been possible for various reasons. For the moment, though, it’s just me, and if multiple games are in beta at once I might be fielding over a hundred application emails, in addition to the regular support emails that I also handle, so I do appreciate your patience!
Not sure if it’s the right thread but I always wanted to ask: Why is it necessary to give your real name in your beta test application?
It’s the main reason why I have never applied after doing it once years ago and feeling absolutely awful about it. Sure, I could always give a fake name but if this is an important company rule for whatever reason, I see no reason to break it.
I actually added that to the FAQ not long ago, because I agree it’s been unclear:
We use your real name for 1) the credits, if it’s the name you’d like to be credited under, and 2) our private tester records. Usernames and email addresses can change more frequently, so it’s easiest for us to keep track if we have another name as well. We don’t need your legal name if you prefer not to use it - a name you’re comfortable with is fine.
