Wednesday, September 7, 2011

BioWare Beta Bomb

A large group of players are still looking in....

The mood of the SWTOR community just want BOOM.  While a few might have seen this coming due the recent delay for Europe the majority did not.  Stephen Reid dropped the beta bombshell on the fans of TOR tonight.  

Hello all,

There is no Beta Testing Weekend scheduled for this weekend. There may be further Beta Testing Weekends during September, but we're not going to guarantee it. The weekend that just finished was really our first dry run of Beta Testing Weekends as a whole, and we have plenty of data to crunch, and decisions to make before we start things up again.

Further to that, as Chris Collins explained in another thread, we are about to roll out a major new build for The Old Republic. That build won't be ready for this weekend. Just as we did not feel it was a good decision to ask potential EU testers to download our client only to have to download it again, the same applies for this weekend.

That does not mean, however, that as soon as our new build is available we'll be rolling out a Beta Testing Weekend immediately. As with any new build of the game, we need to get feedback from internal testing and our ongoing Game Testing program before rolling it out to a massive audience. That process takes a while, and that time varies depending on how testing goes.

We rolled out this previous weekend as a relatively small scale event; from now we will do bigger and bigger events, but that doesn't mean it happens every weekend. When we do resume, we'll be inviting many more people in.

While many of you are excited and anxious to know what's happening regarding Testing Weekends, I want to point out that a lot of posts on the subject with a lack of corresponding posts from us does not mean that we're not listening, or not aware of your interest. It shows your interest in the topic, which is understandably high, but we will not always be able to react instantaneously.

In the past couple of days we've been preparing a comprehensive FAQ regarding Game Testing Weekends as a whole, along with some details about the weekend that just happened. We'll post that tomorrow - in all languages, as we know the subject is of interest to everyone.

It's a challenging situation BioWare find themselves in right now.  The community was running under the assumption that beta weekends would continue through the month of September.  And those signed up had a great chance at playing the game.  But BioWare looking at the results of their first weekend and knew they where just not ready to continue the beta.  Mostly due to the changes related their new build which now requires additional internal testing.    

The end result could be devastating for BioWare.  The backlash of hate posts has already begun along with the rallying support from some of the fans.  And in the middle of it all is Stephen Reid the community manager.  Who tonight has take all the heat as the public spokes person for TOR.  Reid if you read this - go drink a beer buddy and sleep in tomorrow.  

For us and many other fans the wait continues.  But we should still hold out hope that BioWare can still release the game before the end of the year.  A new build is always one step closer to release.  

Good luck BioWare.