Great Expectations, Part Ten: Better Betas

By Sanya Weathers

Closed betas, that is. At this point, everyone knows that open beta is about marketing, buzz, and soft launching the product to see if we can tell what the servers are going to do under pressure. But that makes closed beta all the more crucial to product development. There is simply no other chance in the schedule to find out the things you need to know about your product.

And even though closed beta is for your benefit as a developer (and you shouldn’t have your marketing hat on at any point during the process), you can still establish the foundations of proper community management. If you do it right, your closed beta participants will act as public proxies for you when open beta begins, and let new community members know “how it’s done around here.”

Here are  a few tips for maximizing community value during closed beta, and creating a set of expectations that will enhance your reputation for good communication and courtesy:

–    Tell them when you are online. “Just play the game, we’re watching,” is not believable. If you happen to draw a beta group that is exceptionally gullible, they might believe it for a brief period of time, until something happens when you aren’t watching. Your players will never trust you again. So schedule developer play sessions. Post that schedule. And when employees are online, they should be clearly identified as such. In open beta, you’ll want to anonymously observe your users, but in closed beta, they have an expectation of seeing you online. Manage those expectations with schedules.

–    Provide direction. People want to feel like they are contributing, so be sure to have a “daily task” posted, with an activity and a set of guidelines. Activities don’t need to be complex: Play in X zone. How long does it take to do ten quests? How long does it take to go from X level to X level? If you sell all your trash loot gained in two hours, how much money do you get? That task should change every day to prevent stagnation.

–    Treat open chat like a forum. Don’t allow racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, or other forms of hate speech. Crack down early and often – when open beta begins, your players will report and ignore these community cancers, thus maximizing your chances for mass appeal. Xenophobia is especially overlooked, which is pure insanity in today’s global market.

–    Be candid. Your speaking to your closed beta testers as comrades is the currency you are paying them in for their time and trouble.

–    Unleash your QA team. Don’t create a process for QA and beta testers to interact. Put them together in a forum. Allow your QA team to contact users for help duplicating bugs. Ask QA what problems they have that crowdsourcing might solve. And at the same time, make sure QA is as candid as you are. In the words of an expert QA Director, “beta is not a time to be coy.” Your employees and your testers have signed an NDA – trust them all.