Beta WAR Stories

So the latest milestone quickly approaching in development of Mythic Entertainment’s Warhammer Online is the dropping of the Non-Disclosure Agreement, or NDA. For years, WAR’s beta testers have been bound by a legal obligation, under threat of many spankings and a swift kick to the ass out of beta, to only reveal two things – that there is a beta, and that they are in the beta.

Let’s put aside the fact there there are sites which have posters who have either received spankings from Mythic or have avoided the paddle altogether to “leak” information about the WAR beta. Oh, you information troopers – bravely providing the information in the name of freedom, like some online version of Braveheart, only without the facepaint, the actual body of a warrior, or the respect that only millions can bring. I admire you for your need to create a geek revolution – even though it’s against a system that actually needs to stop people from making conclusions on an unfinished product. The nerve of them, wanting to be a good business! But I digress.

When the NDA drops, we’re going to hear all kinds of accounts, and the first thought that some of you WAR beta testers out there might want to do would be to softball it. You like beta, right? You like the fact that you can log in to play betas for MMOs with more bugs than a condemned crackhouse, and you put up with them because heck, it’s going to be a great game anyway. And of course, there’s always that need to push yourself above the unwashed geek masses and be a shining beacon of beta-nourished light. We can’t forget that the trivial things we accomplished online and in a video game are certainly more important than your real, boring life filled with uninteresting things such as paying the bills, having a successful career, and talking without a keyboard.

So there might be a tendency, when the NDA drops, to start talking up the game, to talk about how epic it was to siege a keep or to turn the tide for your team in one of their scenarios. To talk about how you fought off 2 or 3 players at once with your incredible and awesome skill. To speak about how the game is ready for prime-time and that those that play are going to have the time of their lives.

Hey, I like that stuff, and I bet the community is going to want to hear it, so feel free. But if I know one thing about gaming communities, they are starved for information on a game they are following like a thirsty refugee in a desert. They’ll drink anything and everything as long as it quenches their need for information, which means that even if you feed folks dirty water that probably came from a sewage pipe, they’ll lap it up like dogs.

The community wants to hear about how you found a bug that turned you upside down, changed you into another class, and dropped you into the enemy camp. They want to hear about how the only reason you were able to hold off 2 or 3 people was because of a mistake in the skills that gave you a 18000 point damage spell every 20 seconds. They want to hear about that night you went to the game, tried to play it, but couldn’t, because there was a gameplay “known issue” where the voice of a goblin was looped with the voice of a dark elf female screaming, and you felt funny in your pants after 15 minutes of hearing it.

You can only be helping people by “keepin’ it real”, yo. MMO betas have a nice face, but like any attractive person, they’ve got an ass, and it isn’t always pretty. WAR will probably be no different. Besides, if you talk about everything, you’ll be hailed as the paragon of information freedom and a community resource. Or you could be hung for hours, drawn, and quartered. Either way, it’ll be an exciting change, right?

Be loud and proud, beta testers. Your (in)famous time is coming!