My impression is that after 10 years, CIG expects its backers to log in and test the game rather than log in and have fun playing the game.
Today my daily grind with my new alt was interrupted by news that the 3.20 PTU was available for wave 1 and wave 2 backers. So I do the drill, I go to my settings page and low and behold I cannot copy my account to the PTU despite being a Wing Commander concierge member.
“[M]any players only log in once per PTU phase to briefly inspect the latest features or new ships before waiting for the live release. This led to very high player loads in the first hours of each wave release, combined with comparatively high server costs and download provisioning, but not the sustained play testing we would have preferred. As a consequence, towards the end of a PTU phase, we sometimes lacked the necessary numbers of testers to put the servers under pressure once the most significant bugs had been fixed.”
You have to love today’s politicians. Most have failed to come to grips with the fact that anything they said yesterday was immortalized in a vid for all of time. Yet, despite that, they feel free to deny and lie about what they said, sometimes on the very next day.
Precisely, what was said.
So it is sad that it has come to this. Years of promoting Evocati status. Years of providing a ruse that folks should make use of the Issue Council. Years of moderating Spectrum so as to make it nothing more than a sounding board for white knights.
Bottom line, all CIG needs from us is our hard earned cash.
Sharpening the Tools? Seriously? CIG believes that their preferred group of testers are those that play the most or subscribe for $10/month. Most folks qualified for testing have lives a bit more complicated than playing SC 12 hrs/day. Thus they(CIG) have granted this group higher testing rank that those of us that have invested thousands of dollars over the years to back the game.
One should expect the track record over the the past decade of delay after delay to continue on, well into the future.
CIG could start to address its testing requirements(failures) by weeding out the rot in their Evocati group, these folks couldn’t test a wet noodle. Time after time I experienced problems in wave 1 that should have been resolved by the Evocati. It has been that way since Alpha 3.0. Or how about fixing all those known issues before asking anyone to test, dealing with that is a supreme waste of time which discourages many.
I am sure that you and I have lots of thoughts on how to improve things, but we now know that CIG has already thought of everything and anything that we could offer.
So, unless CIG wants to pay for my time I will continue to play the game and try my best to ignore CIGs efforts to grab more than my cash. If they can’t handle the load, too fricken bad.
And oh yeah, go buy another ship!
And don’t forget to join me and sign all your crash reports with ¯_(ツ)_/¯
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