Beta tests aren't better when many people play them out of the reach of the developer. The effects of a beta test vary.
It's highly inefficient to only let a bunch of people have a go at things. For beta tests to be productive they need to be controlled upto a certain extend. People need to play in different areas to cover as much of the game as possible and should play in different style also, use different avatars. Try things an 'average' player never does, use silly (but acceptable) combinations etc. etc.
All in all testing is a skill and from experience I know that real good testers are hard to find, as such I think it would be wiser to test in-house, atleast in that case you have some control over the testing to make sure most of the stuff is covered in the tests.
With your permission dear Myrthos, as an old customer of Microsoft’s multitudes of products and due to having programming languages installed with debug symbols, I found myself forced to join MSDN for six years, during which you could call me “Mr. Beta-Crash.” As a member, I did receive all the beta versions as a privilege from Microsoft and at first we had to fill out bug reports when a problem happens, which was later automated and communicated too. For some weird reason I found myself crashing every beta software I ever used and that is because of a habit to use the edge of technology hardware that is not expected in a standard machine, add to that a fast learning curve after which I tend to take software to its limits.
After hundreds of bug reports I was surprised to receive a card with official beta tester on it. It did not make me happy but perhaps it was a change in their policy to identify serious beta testers through the amount of feedback which was a very hard task.
In the case of games, a beta tester is not a “like/ hate” tester, but an almost insane player who knows how to take a game to its limits. To give you some examples:- opening all windows possible at the same time at the highest resolution and manipulating them alternatively without closing any; investing in agility and running very fast in an open enemy field generating thousands of NPCs who seek to kill you and demanding a coordinate update from the AI module and the graphics engine within the hidden and the visible fields respectively; bouncing the head of your avatar at the edge of the screen in an insane attempt to take him into your word processor that runs in the background; Leaving the game idle for a long time until the screen saver timer hits in; doing almost every illogical operation that makes no sense including dragging boots into a charm slot.
It is this type of user behaviour that exposes “UNHANDLED errors” which is the heart of beta testing prior to release. A more advanced testing trio would be also needed to test the difficulty levels where a non-veteran should be able to handle the easy level while a known veteran should be able to handle the most difficult level.
Beta testers are preferable to be in-house testers and they have badges written on them “Bug Night Mare”.
It is a job when done properly.
Field testing is a completely different thing, which I participated in with Microsoft even if they call it Beta.
Field testing concerns unavailable combinations of hardware not available at the developer’s headquarters.
Those field machines should qualify with the minimal requirements set by the software developer.
Field testing results may lead to attenuating parameter-limits and tweaking some constants to make the game available to the maximum number of machines possible.
I think that field testing volunteers should submit the hardware configurations of their machines to allow the developer to make a list of the needed configurations for such tests.
Kind regards.
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