Forums » General Pantheon Discussion

Can you explain please Kilsin?

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    • 1860 posts
    March 10, 2020 6:16 PM PDT

    Do you mind explaining this kils? 

    Kilsin said: Launching Alpha and Beta will not increase money, it will set development back much further.

     

    Many of us, myself included, think that launching alpha and/or beta will bring in a lot of new pledges when people see that the game is advancing to the next stage of development.  Why is that incorrect?  

    • 56 posts
    March 10, 2020 6:33 PM PDT

    Monitoring and running alpha and beta takes money and a lot of time. They have to pay for servers to run the alpha and beta which will take a lot of money. They will need staff member monitoring and read through reports and at the moment they want those people doing other things. 

    • 287 posts
    March 10, 2020 6:43 PM PDT

    For a small development team, pulling away resources from actual development is huge. PA5 will open when the team is ready to get some testers in there for needed feedback.

    • 17 posts
    March 10, 2020 6:49 PM PDT

    I think it would be a terrible decision to move to alpha or beta simply to bring in more people.  

    The smart decision is to move to alpha and beta when the game is ready for those.  

    • 9115 posts
    March 10, 2020 7:02 PM PDT

    I don't usually do this mate - calling out staff, even politely is against forum guidelines: https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/1595/pantheon-community-guidelines

    But in this instance, I want to explain it again, so people understand.

    Testing of any phase is a massive ordeal for any company. The "all hands on deck" to run testing phases take away from game development in a big way, not to mention all of the data we need to collect and decipher, then put to use in some meaningful way.

    Opening up Alpha and Beta before we are ready maybe a short term boost in revenue but it will be at the cost of long term delays and potential financial losses, devs are not performing their typical roles and developing content. In essence, they are instead fixing bugs, making changes to original work, contemplating feedback and adding to their already extensive list of things to do, blowing timelines out and forcing us to move internal milestones back further and further to accommodate the extra workload.

    There comes a point when we will pull the trigger and release PA5 and then Alpha but not until we are confident we have the game at a stage that we need it to be at to get what we need tested and adequately cope with the increase in workload and deal with the considerable amount of data that will flow through to us during and after a testing phase. We don't have entire departments dedicated to this as other companies do, we instead multitask and help each other out, taking us away from our primary roles and limiting much of our progress. Hence, we must launch testing phases when and only when we are ready.

    Hopefully, that helps clear it up a bit more for you guys but I will need to close the thread, we will release more information on testing as we get closer to the next phase.


    This post was edited by VR-Mod1 at March 10, 2020 7:04 PM PDT