Who should beta test Guild Wars 2?

I'm going to have to disagree with this one as I include being able to design good builds a player skill. During beta, every skill bar that is imba needs to be found and corrected ASAP.

Does Lulu and Sno still play?

me of course...i mean look at my name wtf

Part of the problem with making such a list as this is that you really only get a few people out of the larger comunity posting. Believe it or not there are a vast number of players that do not even know Guru exists.

Add to that fact people will sugest those that they have never played with, but they happen to agree with what they have posted in one or more threads.

Lastly you get friends nominating other friends, no real surprise there.

I would suggest the only fair and balanced aproach might be a random lottery, where the entry requirements were based on the game itself rather than posts on a Fan Forum. Say completion of all 3 chapters for PvE testers. Be a competitive member of a top 100 guild for GvG testing, Gladiator title for general PvP testing. Just some ideas off the top of my head, but they make more sense than just who has the Signature on Guru

Beta isn't supposed to be fair, it's for testing the game.

True, but it's the only workable approach. Fansites have been created for "attracting" fans (more like helping them), and GWG is part of the 9 Elite fansites that Anet chose (there are rules). Sure, a lot of people don't know about guru, but I believe that a significant number do. And if you were Anet, you could not just at the gamelogs and select someone, you have to use some kind of filter. As I said before, the first one is the "link of trust", deal only with people you've interacted with (they'll be less likely to break NDAs during early betas). After a few rounds, you can open up a bit with "interesting posters", and you don't need to have the "perfect" beta team, just enough to spot problems, give valid criticisms, hint at improvements and give a good feel of their GW2 experience. I'm actually not sure that you need to be eloquent or very chatty, as long as you can be understood well.

This is a GWG thread and in no way it's something Anet requested (I even highly doubt they'd be looking here for beta-testers). So it works like any other GWG thread, people naturally group by affinities and preferences, nothing wrong here as long as you're not fighting to be in the top10 by manipulating people.

Non-sense, Anet wouldn't risk going random on that, you need quality beta team to get a robust, nice and shiny game. Randomness will work very well when they need a few thousand debuggers (pablo!), plus there's a good chance to get lots of different hardware platform to test the game. But before that stage, you'd rather select to be able to control the "level of feedback" you'll get, e.g. with no relative unbalance PvE-PvP or casual-hardcore. Random only works with big numbers.

I'm not sure, a guy who spends a few bucks on a GW fansite such as GWG show some dedication, sure it's not hours to get to Glad ranks and it's real-money after all, but still if you were Anet, you wouldn't just discard them because you want to reach to the players that will want to go in depth into beta-testing. After all, these elite GWGers are the ones investing into the community and without them we wouldn't have GWG (not on vBulletin and with this hosting). And I agree that it'd be great to have a few beta-testers who are retired players and people rather "against GW", in an intellectual sense of course (but then they'd get tougher NDAs :P ).

So who's the GW Idol?

No one who is nominated or asks for it.

I suggest a limited number - whatever the reasonable minimum would be - based on things like:

How much free time they have to test it
How much they have played the original GW
What they know about GW - maybe a test to be answered in real time via chat or something (little time to try to look up answers)

To be honest I'm not sure on reqs, but basically I would hope for a relatively small team of dedicated gamers who know what they liked and disliked about the original GW series, have the time and energy to beta test and will think carefully about what they do.

I don't think it should be an open beta available to anyone, or indeed the first X thousand who buy a subscription with a website or whatever.

Ensign
JR
Malice
Sab
Rachasafunnyname
Avarre
holymasamune
Witte Was
Defiant Elements(if hes still playing)


and me of course

Who should?
Who will, you better say.
If the GW F.A.Q. is not wrong, the beta will be open.

I don't know If I would be a good beta tester. When I joined Granado Espada beta, while everyone was going to farm and get higer levels, I was messing with areas and walking around to see if I could reach weird places an get out of the maps, and checking if I could mess controlls, UI, dialogues, quests and things like those.

I didn't play much the game, I was more like trying to crash it.

But people who play GW regularly and debate (debate might be a bit strong) about it on the forums are more often than not going to:

A. Have a wider understanding of Anet, Gw and the general community
B. Give more consrtuctive advice

If people don't know GW has fansites, they have no right being in a beta for it's successor.

A good friend of mine has had a guru account since '05 but doesn't post because he dislikes the quality of the majority of the posts and the attitudes of the posters. He isn't trying to make a statement by doing so, he's just intellectual enough not to participate or enagage in flame wars and lolcat nonsense. He does however post on Dutch forums.

He has played since summer 2005 and has achieved a lot more than most but he isn't so ostentacious that he flaunts what he has. He is perfectly capable of providing quality feedback should he want to participate in beta tests. I don't see why someone should have to earn status on fan forums to be considered a candidate and others' chances should be jeapordized because they keep themselves to themselves. The idea isn't great - hypothetical or otherwise.

Beta-testing is a _lot_ of work. Some of the work is fun, but some of it's incredibly boring.

I've beta-tested a few KotOR mods for different people. Some of the mods were well constructed and I couldn't find many (or sometimes any) things that needed to be fixed. One of the mods I beta-tested was a fairly large content mod, and it took a long time to test. It involved going through every single item listing, spawn point, and dialog option for things ranging from spelling/grammar errors to bugged dialog conversations to bugged creature spawns. I also worked at specific ways to try to get the mod to crash. It was fun seeing what the mod creator had done and being one of the first to try it out, but it also got tedious after awhile. The creator had some problems with spelling and grammar, and by the time I got done I had corrected about 95% of all the new dialog and descriptions for minor (or major) errors. I also had to go through every possible option in the dialog trees to make sure that the different options gave the correct outcomes (e.g. darkside dialog options gave darkside points, etc.) and test the appearance of the mod on different graphics settings. Then I had to write up all that stuff to send to the modder to get fixed--it ended up being pages of fixes and suggestions. It took a couple of weeks to get everything sorted out. I'd send him the problems, he'd fix them, I'd re-test and send him more feedback, he'd fix those things, and so on until we were satisfied that it was the best it could be.

It was a pretty large mod, but it was by no means anywhere near game-length. Anyone involved in beta-testing would see the game before anyone else and might well have input into its final incarnation. However, as noted above in another post, it would require good communication skills, honesty, and tact, but it would also require the meticulous attention needed to ferret out not only the big problems but also the little tiny annoyances that we tend to gloss over. It also would require someone to pay close attention to what really works well, looks great, and makes the game more fun. For something the scale of GW2, that would mean weeks of concerted effort, if not longer. There's a difference between playing the game and happening to notice a problem, and actively searching out all possible bugs and potential issues. Any beta-tester is going to have his/her hands full testing an entire game and providing useful feedback to the devs.

Agree fully there - I know of others that would be good candidates that are not on these forums. I have seen quite a few people pointing out themselves for the part on this also which honestly if you have to come on here and list your reasonings for being part of the beta do not think you should be part of it.

Honestly not real sure if this thread was supposed to be really serious or just a joke with some of the posts, many of which are still there while I post a joke and it gets deleted. Poor moderating there but ah well. This is all just speculation and a "what if" thread after all. Lots of ass kissing in here too imo.

closed alpha, then few months before launch start the preview beta weekends for the vast unwashed massed

I hope they stick with the original model they used; closed alphas with massive beta events. I'd be willing to bet 50,000+ people doing 50,000+ things every few weekends is a far more effective beta test then 10 people wandering around looking for faults for a few months.

:Edit:
Though for my list:

Rahja, to represent the general PvE crowd
FreekedOutFish, to represent the PvE crowd that likes a bit of grind
Kanyatta, to represent the hardcore PvP crowd
MithranArkanere, to represent the average gamer, poke around, and come up with innovative ideas and solutions

And that's it for people I can name for specific reasons. I can think of a few more, but only because I see them as community leaders.

Malice, Arkantos, Witte Was, Bryant Again, Zinger, Savio, most SMS peeps and me.

I think that way we will be able to cover different aspect of the game :P

this guy just pwned everybody

My thoughts exactly. Less than a 1/4 of the people mentioned in this entire thread would be good beta teaters.

Not even that many. Some have really bad skeletons in there closets.

Just my 2 cents:

a. How popular you are on forums is no indicator whatsoever on how good of a beta tester you would be. It isn't even a good indicator of how deserving you are for a first look at the game.

b. GW1's release was one of the most stable I've seen in an mmo. Anet would be fools to not follow the exact same plan for GW2.