I don’t mean the sub-forum itself, but I haven’t seen any pre-beta threads go up in a while. Are they still a thing?
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The last one was just two months ago, so I’d say yes, they’re still a thing even if there aren’t any active at the moment.
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I’m asking because I haven’t seen one for things like Spire. And yes, the discussion about the situation with the one RO there is what got me thinking about the ‘open pre-beta’.
This might sound strange, but I reckon a ‘no need to sign up’ beta might have helped (?) here? Sometimes people might look into stuff that sounds interesting but not interesting enough to ‘sign up’ (so to speak), so the pool of feedback might actually end up bigger? People are weird like that.
They should be visible in the “works in progress” category:
(ETA: which is to say I think they still exist but no longer are described as “pre-beta”)
(I did actually have a few people say the poly route needed “nuance” but I didn’t manage to get around to adding it, alas! And it for sure was not as clear to me what the issue was as it is now.)
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Spire, Surge, and Sea had an actual WIP thread posted over a year ago. Anyone on the forum could have submitted feedback. The only part of the game that was available only to registered beta testers was the last couple chapters.
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I’ll admit I didn’t see the thread, that one is on me. But these last chapters didn’t get a ‘early beta’ thread, which is what I meant.
Ah well.
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Beta Testers Extraordinaire still exists as a category, and is still used sometimes, but it’s always been a little uneven when we do and don’t post games there. It depends on a number of behind-the-scenes factors - for my part as an editor, I rarely have a game in a state where I’d want to post it for feedback there but wouldn’t just want to put it up as a fully public beta. Which isn’t to say that it wouldn’t be helpful to put games up there more often, but to be honest, participation for the games that do get posted there is not high.
I don’t know that everyone in this conversation has the permissions to know what we’re talking about, so to be clear, Beta Testers Extraordinaire is a subforum where we occasionally post betas for very frequent testers before the public threads go up. (If you’re a frequent tester and don’t have access, it’s not that you’ve done anything wrong, it’s that we don’t always add new people to the category very regularly either.)
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