The time has come to reveal to you all what our exact plans for closed beta are. We’ve already told you the basic set up is with the weekends and slow roll-in of players. Now I’d like to talk about how we’ll be selecting players, the exact dates, bug reporting, and other measures that we’ll need to do in order to make this a successful beta test.
Of course, I’m going to miss some things but I’ll make more posts when we realize something was glossed over.
This information is subject to change, but at this point in time we don’t foresee any major issues coming up. However, our OSX issues still haven’t been resolved… hopefully we’ll see a resolution with Steam in the coming week.
Hit the jump.
So here are the exact dates and times we’ll he holding closed beta. All times are listed in US EST time.
- Closed Beta (60 hours starting Friday 12:00pm EST to Sunday 11:50pm EST)
- April 27-29
- May 11-13
- May 25-27
- June 22-24
- July 6-8
- Open Beta: July 18-22 (same hours as above)
- Head Start: August 10-14 (same hours as above)
As previously discussed, Weekends 1, 2, and 3 are reserved for Kickstarter Backers and PAX East closed beta giveaway winners. Again, we’ll be splitting that population into segments and putting y’all into separate weekends. So of the first 3 weekends, you will only get to play only 1 of them. We will be sending out surveys where you can opt out of 1 weekend (let’s say if you’re out of town). Choose wisely. We’ll do our best to accommodate your schedule but when push comes to shove, we can’t guarantee it. Again, we will do our best.
Here’s a review:
So Kickstarter backers will have first chance to access our closed-beta and will be fully integrated by week 3. One important clarification to make is that those from Weekend 1 are not in Weekend 2 or 3. And Weekend 2 people aren’t in Weekend 1 and 3. Weekend 3 people aren’t in Weekend 1 and 2. These are entirely different blocks of people being taken. For Weekends 1,2, and 3 entirely new players will be playing the game. Kickstarter backers will experience their 2nd weekend of closed-beta in Weekend 4.
For Weekend 4 and 5, all Kickstarter and PAX East people will be able to play them. At this point, Kickstarter/PAX will have been in 3 weekends. Also during 4 and 5, a random selection of people on our email lists will join in. 1/2 of the random selection will be in weekend 4, and then the next 1/2 will be in weekend 5. People who get in weekend 4 will also be able to play in weekend 5. So… some of you will get extra lucky and get 2 weekend of closed beta. Open beta is basically our Release Candidate.
We will then open beta up for anyone to play for a single weekend. Then we’ll close it back up and start “head-start” for Kickstarter/PAX people. Here, you will be playing the game for real. Any progression or achievements you earn during head-start will persist and you’ll have them when Skirmish is released. Hopefully we’ll be releasing shortly after head-start.
During each weekend, we will be scaling our servers up and testing more content. The first weekend, unfortunately, will have a limited amount of content. Some guns, some ships, basic equipment. This is to control the number of variables we’re looking at in order to give us specifics on tweaking the core component of the game. There are two weeks in between each beta weekend. This will give us sufficient time for internal testing in order to fix all the bugs you have reported.
As for bug reporting, this is the most important thing. We urge everyone to participate in bug reporting. Any kind of feedback, no matter how small, will improve the game. We’d like you to report any visual glitches, gameplay balance issues, and just plain weirdness that you may encounter. The more detail the report is, the more easily we’ll be able to find and address. Please take screenshots and describe the situation as clearly as possible. I will probably do another post about bug reporting once we get the system in place.
TL;DR
- Dates and hours posted above
- Everyone will be getting some kind of survey
- More content and bug fixes between each weekend
- Head-start for backers/pax
- REPORT YOUR BUGS.