[WS] Opening Up on a Closed Beta

The Wildstar is now in full-on closed beta. I am not part of this lucky/unlucky group who are seeing the upcoming MMO in true beta form. Hopefully I can sneak my way in to a more open beta with a rogue email or a pre-order pass.

To be honest, I guess I kind of exhausted my thoughts on the game coming from Arkship. I just now realized in writing this post that my Wildstar feed did not seem to make my transition away from Google Reader. I have Wildstar Radio… and that’s it. Weird, I wonder what else didn’t make the jump. Seems I have a lot to catch up on.

Two things have caught my eye, making their way beyond Wildstar’s central in the ‘sphere, and these two things directly relate to how open Carbine is about their closed beta.

First, beta patch notes were leaked. I don’t understand what street cred the contract-breaking fool could possibly get from doing this, but hey, it happened. It happened a lot in other big-MMO betas I was in too, and the usual course of action for honorable sites, like Kill Ten Rats, and the dev company was to ignore it. Sure, the fool was dealt with in the course of action, but that was just a give-in.

How does Carbine deal with this leak? Well they decided to release the patch notes themselves. They won’t pretend the cat is not out of the bag. I read the patch notes, and honestly – going back to the fool’s street cred – most of it seems gobbedly gook. I’m sure it’s meaningful to the beta testers and Carbine, but even ones I can visualize like “added new right click auto attacks” mean little when I don’t even know how that can feel in the latest build.

What I do hope is that Carbine continues to give us updates on beta changes, but does it in a way they don’t have to react to leaks. I would rather the CM team or a dev talk about what they feel are some important changes from the patch notes. I also hope that no more testers feel the need to copycat to see how Carbine deals with the next patch notes leak.

Oh, and hey, Carbine Master Gaffer, Jeremy Gaffney, preempts my wishes anyway. He gives us a true braindump of the first week from Wildstar’s beta. It is so raw and good. I can see his “head-of-the-ship” style break through in his post. It is far away from a PR release as is possible.

In his post we learn about their phases in beta, how they are handling feedback, and he even jokes about some of the bugs that have cropped up. I don’t know where they are at for creating content, but it appears that they are really using closed beta to polish with abandon. I really like, especially, how Gaffney talks about some of the best feedback talking about the “meh”. As a past tester to many games, it is easy to talk about rage-inducing moments and it is easy to talk about serotonin-spikes. It is not as easy to recognize where a lot of time has passed with little to talk about.

Updates from beta like these are great, in my opinion, for those not in beta. I really like Gaffney’s style at the helm of Carbine. That guy is a great, and I just hope he doesn’t embalm himself with diet soda before the game’s release. I hope for many more “braindumps” from him both before and after Wildstar’s release. Now to go fix my feeds.

–Ravious