Alpha is not early access

[nairobiny]

This bug report suggests letting players mute game group chats to prevent them being used for spam. There's a popular game currently in alpha that has a lot of chatter on the game group chat from players seeking real-time opponents. The bug report suggests one way to reduce the spam for other testers of that game.

However, the suggestion only dabs at the symptoms, it doesn't address the root cause. The root cause is players treating alpha-testing like a kind of early access, rather than as an essential part of testing games to make sure they're ready to be issued in beta on BGA. I suspect we as a community are much too tolerant of people wanting to join the alpha because they really love the game and want to play it rather than because they are committing to test it and provide feedback on it.

With less well-known games, it's a good idea to admit non-reviewers into the alpha programme in order to boost the number of possible testers. With popular games? I'm not sure we need to go beyond the Reviewers group. And if non-Reviewers are going to spam those of us who are there to test, they should be removed and forced to wait until the game is in beta.

Rant over.

[Een]

Imagine me, an admin in all these groups. Sometimes my screen is a Christmas Tree

So, yes (I have explained several times in these forums myself that alpha should not be considered early access), but all the notions at play here are pretty subjective. What's a popular game? Who is testing or just enjoying early? Where should be the boundaries, and how can they be enforced by software rules?

Proposals are welcome, we are listening, but they must be actionable and straightforward. And ideally, quick to implement, or they'll just get on the list waiting for an adequately large timeslot that's hard to get by.

[msclark]

Speaking as someone who's developed games on another platform, it is of course fantastic if your testers come back to you with lots of useful feedback and bug reports. But don't underestimate the value of simply having the game played. It gives you data, it tests the platform under realistic load, and if nothing else simply seeing games finish tells you that there aren't any game-crashing bugs to worry about. Hundreds of testers silently playing your game without reporting anything makes, I would argue, a pretty happy developer.

[robinzig]

Speaking as someone who's developed games on another platform, it is of course fantastic if your testers come back to you with lots of useful feedback and bug reports. But don't underestimate the value of simply having the game played. It gives you data, it tests the platform under realistic load, and if nothing else simply seeing games finish tells you that there aren't any game-crashing bugs to worry about. Hundreds of testers silently playing your game without reporting anything makes, I would argue, a pretty happy developer.

This is my experience too. The more eyes on your work, the better, to give you more confidence there aren't serious issues you've overlooked.

[nairobiny]

Proposals are welcome, we are listening, but they must be actionable and straightforward. And ideally, quick to implement, or they'll just get on the list waiting for an adequately large timeslot that's hard to get by.

Hi Een, I do sympathise, and thank you for your patience.

One actionable, straightforward and quick to implement solution would be:
1. Only allow members of the Reviewer group to post to game group chats for games in alpha.
2. Revoke membership of the Reviewer group for anyone involved in persistent abuse of game group chat.

[Een]

Hi Een, I do sympathise, and thank you for your patience.

One actionable, straightforward and quick to implement solution would be:
1. Only allow members of the Reviewer group to post to game group chats for games in alpha.
2. Revoke membership of the Reviewer group for anyone involved in persistent abuse of game group chat.

Thanks for submitting ideas. Unfortunately:
1. The whole purpose of enabling group chat is to allow players to more easily organize games together. Limiting it to the reviewer group, in addition to not being easy at all, would hamper this purpose and be counter productive (also some players in the reviewer group might still have chatty personalities).
2. Persistent abuse is a pretty subjective notion, so this is not actionable in any way, sorry.

That being said, someone remarked that the alpha group for GWT is now almost 4000 people strong (which is clearly a sign of the popularity of the game). Indeed with so many people chat becomes a nuisance, and should not be necessary to launch games as there is enough people hanging around.

In a nutshell, it seems that chat becomes counterproductive at some point. So I have removed chat on alpha groups with more than 1000 players.

Please also note that the developer is an member and admin of the group, and can disable chat for members from the group configuration. So if you are in a group that you find has become too "messy" you can message the developer to request that they take this action.