Cool Kids Club

Anyone remember when it felt really exciting to get into a beta for an MMORPG? When you had to fill out all kinds of application forms and promise to be a good tester and then you waited and hoped you'd get picked but you knew you probably wouldn't?

I think the first one I ever signed up for must have been Anarchy Online. It was so long ago I had to apply by post. My application was accepted but there was no instant access to testing. They had to mail me the client on CD. I guess I must still have it lying around somewhere, although I haven't seen it for years. No, make that decades.

It was a thrill to make the cut but unfortunately the beta itself was all but unplayable. Then the game launched and I bought it and it was still unplayable. 

It was an infamously bad launch. For a long while, it was the benchmark for how not to launch an MMO but there have been some real stinkers since then so it's probably been forgotten now, if not forgiven.

I was thinking about all this for a couple of reasons. Ashes of Creation and Stars Reach both recently sent me questionnaires to fill out. Short ones mostly asking what I thought of the way the game was going and whether I'd recommend it to friends.

My answers to both were broadly similar, something along the lines of "I think your game is fine. It's just not for me."  The main difference between the two responses was mostly that I told Intrepid Ashes would definitely have been a game I would have played and enjoyed, had it come out seven or eight years ago, when it was supposed to, whereas I told Playable Worlds Stars Reach was most likely never going to be the kind of game I was likely to want to play, or at least not for long.

My motivations for signing up for the two testing programs were very different. I pledged AoC in the Kickstarter because I did want to play it and I picked beta as the earliest affordable entry point. It was going to be the next MMORPG Mrs Bhagpuss and I played together. 

It took so long to arrive, even in a half-finished form, that by the time they opened the doors, neither of us was interested any more. When I was given entry in Early Access, I played it a bit and quite enjoyed it but I couldn't see much point carrying on. So many other games suit my tastes better these days. I haven't really thought about it since.

For Stars Reach, on the other hand, I only applied to join the alpha because I wanted to write some blog posts about it. I got in. I wrote some posts. It was fun for a short while, as a novelty, but it quickly became repetitive to play and I ran out of things I wanted to say about it. If there was any disappointment involved, it was that I didn't find it as blogworthy as I'd expected.

In both cases I didn't - and don't - feel any motivation to keep logging in to see how things might be developing. I wasn't all that interested and neither, it seemed, were many people who follow this blog. It seemed a bit pointless to keep logging in just to write much the same posts that wouldn't be of any great interest to anybody.

Neither do I feel any obligation to keep on testing. In both cases I paid for access through a Kickstarter so there's not even a moral lien on my time. It's true that I did get into the Stars Reach alpha by application and subsequently got added to the Creator program but I did a reasonable amount of testing and reporting in the closed phase, so I feel like I've done my bit.

As for the cachet of getting into a testing phase for an MMORPG, that whole concept feels very dated now. True, there are hot new games in closed testing that a lot of people would love to have access to but anything really special always has an NDA so you can't - or shouldn't - tell anyone you're in, which makes it hard to bask in the reflected glory. 

Stars Reach had a whiff of that but only a whiff. The circle of people who cared was so small it would have been a very humble brag indeed to boast about getting in. 

The last testing program I remember getting into that felt like something genuinely special, something people would be envious of if they knew about it, was the first round of alpha testing for New World. Unfortunately there was a very strict NDA so I couldn't say anything, not even to let anyone know I was in. Technically, I probably still can't.

I found that exhilarating but also very frustrating. The game itself was like nothing I'd played before (And nothing like the game that eventually launched, for that matter.) and I would have loved to blog about it. By the time I was able to talk about it openly, everyone else was playing it too.

If the allure of testing unreleased games has faded, though, and gaining access has become almost trivial, there are exceptions. It's sod's law that when there's a test I'd really like to get into, for a game I'm very excited about, that's the one that won't have me.

I've applied to every round of testing for Neverness To Everness with no success so far. I strongly suspect the reason is my age. I've filled out each of the lengthy application forms with scrupulous accuracy but when I enter my age the form questions it. 

"You have entered your age as 67. Are you sure that's correct?"

The highest age on the drop-down menu is, if I remember correctly, forty. I am very clearly not the target market for the game and I imagine Hotta isn't all that interested in the opinions of pensioners on how their anime-influenced supernatural urban open-world RPG is coming along.

Ah, well. Never mind. They can't stop me playing it when it comes out. And I bet it'll be finished well before either Ashes of Creation or Stars Reach anyway.