Act 7.2 Beta for players who haven’t beaten Act 5 but not for players who beat Act 7.1?
Superman_Blue
Member Posts: 121 ★
How are players who haven’t even beat act 5 in the Act 7.2 Beta and players like myself who have beaten 7.1 100% not? I think it’s random when they pick people but for Beta”s like this it should really be more player specific. It doesn’t help Kabam with feedback when you have players who are nowhere near 7.2 in the Beta and not players who are up to act 7 or book 2 whatever you choose to call it. Just really curious on why this beta is like this. I can understand a beta for a champ buff but not when it comes to a progression based situation like this.
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They obviously aren’t going to take every person who has beaten 7.1 and having beaten 7.1 doesn’t put you at the top of the list you are erroneously making. It’s categorical RNG. Collecting data is more accurate and helpful if you get a broad range of responses.
You always want a set of testers who the content is currently geared for, and the test pool certainly includes those. But you also often want some "outside eyes" looking at the content that aren't in a position to do it yet. If you only gather feedback from the people who can do the content right now, in this case that's only the highest tier players in the game. But Act 7.2 isn't just for them, it is technically for everyone; the people at the top of the vanguard who will tackle it on day one, and also the people who are not as strong and will do it later. If you don't get any feedback at all from those players, you'd be tailoring content meant for everyone to do based solely on a tiny subset of the playerbase.
Of course, people assume that those people have nothing of value to contribute, or they'll just complain the content is "too hard" or whatever. But that's not the case. Feedback is for the devs to read and then make of it what they want. If a player that isn't ready for the content yet only complains the content is too hard, that feedback won't be taken seriously. For that matter, if a player that is ready for the content only complains the content is too hard, that feedback will also probably not be taken seriously. But what do they think about the bosses, what they think about the nodes, what they think about the structure of the content itself, those are things that is valuable to know, even from players who won't be doing the content on day one.
Put it this way: when 6.1 first released, a lot of people complained about the 5* gate. Was that complaint only valid from the people who were ready to do the content? If someone who was recently UC and still working through 5.3 complained that they felt that gate was not something they were going to enjoy, would that feedback be completely invalid coming from them?
The people ready to do 7.2 on day one can offer their feedback on how the content plays, how difficult it is relative to a top progress player. The players not ready to do the content yet can offer their feedback on how 7.2 compares to what they are doing now, and whether they are looking forward to doing it; whether they are more optimistic about the future content direction compared to Act 6.
Because players are chosen (in part) randomly, of course you'll get people chosen for the beta who might not be well suited for beta testing. That's just part of the price to pay to try to get a reasonable random cross section of players to represent the playerbase. But there is a logic to picking players both from among the pool of players likely to tackle the content immediately and also from outside that pool. And sometimes the pool might be wider than it should be, but that's all part of learning what works best. In terms of closed beta tests, Kabam is still very new to the idea, and still figuring out how they want to run them. Some experimentation is to be expected.
But what if you want to grow the base of players that are doing war at all? Who do you ask: the people playing it now, or the people *not* playing it now?
The devs were almost certainly seeing people "participate" in Act 6 at a lower level than Act 5 in terms of running it and exploring it, and they saw the backlash from the first 7.1 beta as an extension of that trend. The revamped 7.1 and now 7.2 isn't just about getting the difficulty correct, it is about making the content more enjoyable to play, to "increase participation" in it. And who do you talk to when you want to increase participation in game content: the people already doing it?
So having someone who only plays Master EQ beta test Uncollected EQ would similarly have limited usefulness. And someone who only got up to Act 4 might have only a very limited perspective on testing Act 5. But Act 7 is different, and Cavalier EQ is different, because those pieces of content are not just extrapolations of the prior content. Act 7 is not just Act 6 but harder, and Cavalier EQ is not just UC but harder. They are fundamentally different approaches to designing the content than what's come before, so outsider perspectives could be useful.
Consider Act 6 itself. Act 6 was judged primarily, if not exclusively, by the top players in the game. Relative to them the 5* gates were not problematic and the difficulty curve was not problematic. The difficulty curve was complained about, but the counter-argument was always that people were completing it, so what's the problem. The difficulty curve only caught up to the top players in the game in Act 7.1 in the original beta, and *even there* there were still players saying the difficulty was fine. I know: I was one of them. When you're only judging content relative to what you can do, and what other players like you can do, it is easy to lose track of who the content is actually for.
Maybe having more people that hadn't yet completely explored Act 5 in the 6.1 beta wouldn't have made a difference. Maybe having more Act 5 people in general for the 6.2 through 6.4 beta wouldn't have made a difference either, as maybe their comments would have been disregarded either way. But maybe their presence would have reminded us that Act 6 was not supposed to be end game content, it was supposed to be the thing after Act 5, and one day non-end game players would have to make their way through it.
If you're currently working on Act 5.3, you're probably not going to be able to get through 7.1. Probably. But maybe it isn't just a question of whether they fail or not that's important, but also how they fail that's important. We know they shouldn't succeed. What if they do? Does that tell you it is too easy? What if they can't even understand how the fights work at all? Does that say maybe the content is too complicated?
Or, like I said, maybe including Act 5 players is in fact too low. But I think casting a wide net, if nothing else, tells you where the boundaries even are. How low is too low to be useful? If you randomly select players well within what you think is too low, you'll probably exclude some players that would have been useful, because you aren't always going to be right. Maybe the good thing about including people too low is that their feedback quality will tell you where too low is. But you should always leave room to be surprised.
Having a range of feedback is best. Not only those who are ready to do it, but also those close. Act 5 may be a while away, but even that data gives a long-term trajectory. There's a general fear that they're taking the feedback of people much less advanced over the feedback of those done everything, and that's not really the case. Things are seen from their source. Meaning, they can tell where it's coming from.
As for people who didn't get in, not everyone who is done everything will always be invited. It entirely depends on what feedback they're looking for.
Any player who is too low or too unskilled to actually complete the content cannot offer any meaningful test results. Their feedback in this area is by definition not going to be inaccurate, because it will be absent. So there is no source of inaccuracy from these types of players.
those who haven't 100% Act 7.1 should not get the Beta at all
In Fact it should be from the fastest 5k or So that first did 100% if there are
i believe only noobs are getting the Beta .. i mean ... Come on
Marie Antoinette had similar ideals.
Pls Kabam. All I want to do is test the content and solo it with 6 star rank 3 Sentry.
For example, what if people in act 5 do exactly what you say? They quit and just complain they don't like it because it's too hard, but those with further progression seem to enjoy the content much more and think the difficulty is adequate. Well then they know far more certainly that those lower players were mainly having trouble with the skill gap of the content and will most likely no longer have issues once they reach the content authentically through their own increase of skill.
Or what if those who completed act 6 or 7.1 complain 7.2 is too easy. Kabam would learn from that feedback that they should increase the difficulty, but by how much should they increase it. Well what if it turns out, even the act 5 players consider the content to be decently easy. Now Kabam has much more data to gauge just how much to tweak the difficulty. If even the lesser skilled players with lower completion find the gameplay easy, then the difficulty likely needs a much larger increase to make it an adequate difficulty level to represent its place in the player's progression.
They have chosen players that reached the content, but adding players outside those parameters still provide evidence that helps Kabam evaluate the quality of the content. It's always better to collect more data than necessary than it is to collect the bare minimum you need. And you not getting chosen isn't a fault with the beta
Act 7 is not accessible before act 6 completion. One could assume content completion would give you some new resources, helping to develope your account and make following content doable. Like, imagine act 6 beta with people who only completed act 4 and don't have any 5* champs.