Tabula Rasa: Too Many Testers

Gamasutra offers some reflections from Richard (Lord/General British) Garriott at the 2007 Independent Game Conference after the Destination Games/NCsoft designer was asked about the marketing of Tabula Rasa. While he feels the marketing (which he describes as a "black art") was "fine," he reserves some criticism for himself and the development team, saying something that hurt the game was the invitation of too many beta testers before the game was fun enough to be worth playing. Garriott commends the Guild Wars team for how well they handled their own testing, but has this to say about testing Tabula Rasa:
“We burned out some quantity of our beta-testers when the game wasn’t yet fun," he said, adding, "As we’ve begun to sell the game, the people who hadn’t participated in the beta became our fast early-adopters.”

He continued, “And the people who did participate in the beta, we’ve had to go back to and say ‘look, look, we promise: we know it wasn’t fun two months ago, but we fixed all that. Really, come try it again.’ We’ve had to go out and develop free programs to invite those people back for free before they go buy it. So the beta process, which we used to think of as a QA process, is really a marketing process.”
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Dec 5, 2007, 11:29
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No subject Dec 5, 2007, 11:29
Dec 5, 2007, 11:29
 
I got a free account and gave it a try, it still sucks. It's more complete than it was at the end of beta, but it's still shit. I agree with the below people who say it was good around June or so. It was much different than regular MMORPGs, if they had listened to the early testers, they may have had a chance.

I only made it to around level 12 or so with my free account. Right after I met up with a mob that was immune to my weapon damage, blocking my way past a bridge in an instance, I uninstalled it. It used to be that you'd get plenty of different damage types dropped that you could use, but they even managed to ruin that. I didn't get a single weapon I could use that entire time that did anything other than physical.

This comment was edited on Dec 5, 11:30.
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