Uh yeah… Basically. Sorry if I’m being way too verbose with my responses.
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In my work I have thousands of people coming at me, literally, (though less so since I moved on from handling customer support) letting me know how I or we are DOING IT WRONG. So I’m pretty skeptical of yet another suggestion/request.
There’s no upside for the company to addressing your issue, except in making you, personally, happier. And maybe in doing so you will now sign up for even fewer betas because you’ll be better able to distinguish which of our games you don’t like or want to help with, and we’ll be giving away more content for free. If other people also feel this way, then they too will sign up for fewer betas.
So in fact, there’s only downside. I mean, we have enough beta testers AFAIK, and I’m not inclined to decrease those numbers.
But by opening this discussion you put me in the public position of being the person who is not accommodating you, assuming that nothing about our beta process does change, so even more downside.
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Theory: this is only coming up because we have a lot of betas up right now.
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It wasn’t my intention to put you in any sort of compromising position. I was just expressing my opinion on a subject. One I’ve held for a while. I’ve been on this site for seven years, albeit with some absences from time to time. I’m not trying to make trouble.
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I know, I didn’t think you were. But this is my side of things. And it was frustrating to me for whatever reason that we were having this discussion on an actual author’s beta thread.
Mhnn… to give an example concerning the descriptions:
I betaed Open Season, the beta post back then saying it’d be about fighting the embodiment of Mother Nature herself.
Expectation was, even keeping in mind what RS was like, that the game would build on the main thread, that we’d have to actively resolce the issues brought up in RS to work together to stand a chance.
YMMV but nothing of that happened. Sure, in the end everyone of the ‘good guys’ bands together, but the conflict from the description felt like an afterthought. The game focuses on everything but this or the other plotthreads left hanging from RS.
And (granted, I don’t know who writes the descriptions that appear in the shop, announcement thread and video) the final description is equally misguiding.
Similar with (to me) Rent-a-Vice, but i won’t go into details here, due to it not yet being released.
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Me, in some form or another.
Ahh. Am I right to assume you write them based on author’s input?
Although I agree it can be irritating to play a game that doesn’t live up to your expectations, I still think good advice can be given, as mentioned in the first posts, about why you didn’t like it and what could be added.
If it’s more “I think the way beta’'s are done should be changed as I want to contribute but due to the game bein worse/ not what I thought’d it’d be I can’t” CoG’'s attitude is more that then beta testing is not for you.
Which is fair considering they have a surplus of beta testers and little incentive to change the system when another, more enthusiastic tester could be used instead.
In fact, even if the current system was terrible and strongly dissuaded testing, as long as they had a surplus of enthusiastic testers I doubt (economically) they’d have a problem.
There’s a couple different things. The description of the game on the Upcoming thread is usually written by the editor of the game or by Jason (who might not be the lead editor of the game.) Jason creates and manages beta threads so he uses that or writes something up himself, I imagine.
While the game is in copyedit or the tail end of beta, I work on the marketing descriptions which get turned into our trailers and what you see as the game’s description on various platforms. So that is written by me. Authors do a draft of descriptions first. Sometimes I can use what they wrote, in which case sure, they wrote them and I edited them, sometimes I can’t use them and I start from scratch. I don’t expect authors to be good at marketing copy as well as writing fiction. What I write then goes through an editing process with other team members for us to finalize. So if you visit choiceofgames.com/rent-a-vice you’ll see what the final descriptions for the game are.
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If I may put my two cents in (one for each game I’ve beta-tested, I suppose), there could be a possible upside: there’d be higher quality feedback. I don’t know what shoeslip had in mind, but if a short demo, even just the first two choices or whatever, were posted, potential beta-testers would get a feel for the overall style of the writing and the game. Those who would’ve otherwise been hesitant about the time commitment to a game they might not like (with all due respect, isn’t two hours an underestimate? Personally I felt that I owe an author a lot more effort than that, so I’ve put in 15+ hours for each) might realise that it’s compatible with their impressions of it and provide meaningful feedback. Testers who end up not liking it might, like fairlyfairfighter said, end up providing low-level feedback, whereas those who are actually enthusiastic about it can provide the same low-level issues and high-level engagement on top of it. So it saves the author’s time and effort, and allows them to interact more with this second kind of feedback, but these testers might have avoided taking the plunge because they weren’t sure the game would meet their expectations.
So it could be a ‘screen’ of sorts that selects for testers who would be more invested, so the author gets on average higher quality feedback from each one, and someone who could’ve been a great tester for a game they liked wouldn’t be black-marked. Now I’m obviously not an author, but it seems like that could be an upside.
It’s not like much free content is being given, and a demo is usually longer than the first few choices anyway. Just as a potential buyer would get a feel for whether or not they’d sink in their hard-earned money, so too I think there should be a way for testers to self-screen so they don’t spend their time on it out of a sense of obligation.
For example, I tested a game whose style turned out to be quite different from the style the synopsis would suggest. I ended up getting used to it, even liking it, but there were times when I’d be up at 2 a.m. grinding through my fifth playthrough report (no one’s asking me to spend so much time on it, I know, but at the end of the day, I care enough about the company and what they’re doing to spend that much effort, and I’m likely not the only one) and thinking, “This isn’t what I signed up for.”
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Correct. Hence two hours and one report if you don’t like the game.
But…it is? This is the unwillingness to risk thing/tradeoff that I see the original complaint is about. And here’s how I view it.
We offer betas to people willing to give feedback on the game. They get to play a game first, for free, and get a credit on the game for contributing to the beta. That’s it.
Now the story is:
“We do this, but we don’t like it X percent of the time because we don’t have enough information on whether we’ll enjoy doing this thing for free and did I mention we’re doing it for free?”
“You don’t describe the games accurately. You said it was about Y but it was really about X, imo.”
Also weighing against this discussion in my mind, the endless complaints about how much money our games cost, but again, an unwillingness to get to play them if you contribute to a beta.
Or, you know, those who thought they would beta test it but now won’t because they don’t like it as much as they thought they would.
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Fine. I will discuss this, off-forum with the team and we’ll see what we can do.
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Ah, thank you.
(on a note: RaV isn’t bad, just very not why I expected at first)
Slightly off topic, but it’s never been clear on the minimum quantity of feedback demanded of a beta tester.
?
I think that previews for betas would serve not to turn people away, but would draw more testers in. Providing a demo for published games is highly effective; you gain readers who like what they see and want to continue. This could work much the same way for betas. If someone is really excited by a preview, they’ll be highly motivated to apply to continue. I know when I was starting out on the forum, I wouldn’t really find official betas to grab my interest, because all I’d have to go off of was a premise. Seeing what the writing is like has a much bigger impact. I made a similar suggestion close to a year ago. I’ve talked to other people on the forum who’ve felt similarly reluctant. These people are excellent testers, and have shown so in WiPs throughout the forum, but it feels like a big commitment to apply to a beta when you have no clear idea at all whether you’ll actually be suited to it. This doesn’t mean that beta testing isn’t for them. They may have a lot to offer, but without getting a glimpse of what a game might look like, they may never even notice a beta that they would really be able to help.
Closed betas are certainly useful, but it’s worth noting that many of the most successful betas on the forum started out open before becoming closed. They were able to attract a variety of highly interested testers by showing them a sneak peek.
This could work just by showing a beta link in the post recruiting testers, and having the opening of the beta be visible, while everything past the preview is password-protected.
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Again, not making a distinction between Choice of Games and Hosted Games. Choice of Games are written very differently from Hosted Games, and AFAIK we’ve only ever had one ? openish beta for a CoG, which was @Havenstone’s? I can’t recall exactly how that worked.
As I said, I’ll talk to the team about it. If we did do this for a few games now and it didn’t result in any appreciable increase in the number of testers, we’d likely discontinue it in the future. You’re all arguing how it’ll draw in more people, so that is how I would evaluate it.
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They are drawing from the same pool of testers, though, whose skills would be equally applicable for either, so when these testers are drawn more easily to forum betas than official ones, their experiences are relevant.
That’s fair. Thank you for engaging with our perspectives and taking this into consideration 
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It’s also hard to countenance doing this when Jason is staggering admissions to 2/3 of our betas right now, meaning more people want to test than we can deal with at once.
This discussion didn’t open because we’re hurting for beta testers, but because an erstwhile beta tester doesn’t like how we’re doing things.
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hides behind couch If it’d help if I stop posting the links with announcement on the discord, I’ll gladly do.