Beta Testing and Gamer Hierarchy

There once was a time in the gaming industry wherein it was virtually impossible to play a game before it had been fully developed and released into the world by its parent company. Obviously, the games had testers - otherwise we'd have all been playing games with more bugs than an ant farm - but outside of them and those select few reporters that got early access interviews/reviews, nobody from the public had an inkling of what the game played like. Gamers really didn't care, either. It's not like they had any reason to complain about not getting a game early; few wanted to drudge through the mess of glitches that an early alpha or beta game would have.

Nobody needs to see this.

The introduction of MMORPGs as a more mainstream means of revenue in the video gaming industry changed this slightly. Creating a game that had to account for the interactions between thousands of players all competing with or against each other on the same server meant that the testing period would be excruciatingly prolonged. Mercifully, game developers took pity upon their poor, small team of testers and began to test beta versions of these MMOs by inviting a certain number of gamers. These choices were usually made after a bunch of people signed up to have the chance to beta test, along with sending out invites to prominent members of the gaming community, hoping that they'd enjoy the beta versions and give the game good publicity before it was even ready to go.

Beta for vanilla WoW. You can almost make out her weird armor thong.

After World of Warcraft's beta became the standard for pre-releases, the world of beta testing changed. Previously, the games had been still very much in their infancy. When WoW was beta tested, the game was pretty close to done (by this, I'd mean I guess it was about 85% of the way finished, much further than most beta tests). Furthermore, WoW was beta tested by a significantly larger amount of players than was the norm in 2003/2004. This did two things: it created an expectation for betas to have an enormously larger amount of polish than they used to, and it also created a hierarchy of gamers among the dedicated community.

It works kind of like this, only with more fourteen year olds screaming at you and making vague, offensive references about your various family members.

The beta hierarchy kind of works like this: there is a new game that has a lot of hype behind it. The community as a whole is generally quite excited by it. Then, game developers announce that they are going to release it to the world for beta testing, and they will do this in waves as they test server strength. Then comes the frantic rush to sign up for a chance at an invitation, the calm before the storm while everyone waits with bated breath, and then...the first invites are sent out.

Suddenly, there are gamers in the community who are simply more privileged than others. "Oh, you haven't gotten into the beta yet? You're really missing out. I was going to share this story with you but you wouldn't understand...I'll have to wait to talk to my other friends in beta."

If it sounds like a really bad high school movie that deals predominately with cliques and how that system is Very Wrong, then you're not missing the similarities; unfortunately, though, there's no Breakfast Club in the community to unite all the differing hierarchical members. 

Beta testing used to be a thing that the entire community loved, as excited members rushed back to forum boards to post their findings and share as much as possible with their friends. Now, it's become over-commercialized, as more finished games come packaged with a special deal that allows players who pre-order it to play a different game that's currently in beta. Companies have found another way to exploit over-eager video game fans, and once again we are simply letting it happen.