What about a "Pre-Beta" we can opt-in to?

I see that your making a joke but I honestly don't understand it?....

 

Not going to happen.

They already have testers, Tiy does not want to put anything out until it is ready to be showed off. It's his game, and as much as I want to play starbound tonight I respect his wishes. It'll be out soon my friend.

 

Define soon.. 2013, 2014, this decade?

 

Soon.

 

2013, there you go.

 

No offense, I really don't think that there is an answer that will satisfy you. Fact is, there is no such thing as a pre-beta. The devs do in-house testing during the pre-alpha (yes there is a pre-alpha) and alpha stages. People involved with the alpha are usually trusted friends and maybe family. No amount of forum posts attempting to convince the devs to release it to backers early is going to work. It is now July 17th. They have 5 months, 13 days, and I don't know how many hours to do what they need to do to get to a place where they feel that they can release the beta in confidence. Now, if you were going to argue for a closed beta of StarBound for early backers followed by an open beta for the others after a certain amount of time, there would be more agreement with your post.

Either way, we ain't gettin it till they're ready.

 

I'd say yes to pre-beta. I mean, it saves the devs time from testing and gives them more time to either put more features in or get an earlier release date. It would be optional, it will have a disclaimer and it is not representing the full game. It's a win-win for the devs and the players. And I also think *but I could very easily be wrong* that people who say "just wait" are people who don't care, not people who genuinely don't want a pre-beta at all. And I don't see why there should be a no if that's the case. I mean it gives an earlier date for beta and the full game, even if you don't participate.

The only reason as to I see why this hasn't been done and probably won't be either, is that the devs haven't been spending time into looking into this. And they will probably not just change their minds just because they see a thread like this. Although I think they should really think this through, I don't think they will. It's just a shame

 

I don't really care when it releases. I don't think we need a pre-beta.
I just care about whether or not it's good, and I think that with all the time they're taking on the beta, I don't think anyone will be disappointed. After all, first impressions are everything.

 

... Can't you understand that setting up a "pre-beta access" would only delay the game at this point? Seriously, what makes you think that it would be any faster if they are already at a comfortable developing speed?

Edit:

I say this because the game is not yet in a beta version, meaning it's not ready for the public, it's not ready for all the feedback yet. I seriously don't understand how you can think that having a pre-beta right now would speed up development, when what they really need is a beta at this point before releasing it to the public. And yes, that would help the developers to find bugs which have been overlooked in the game (when the beta is ready and released). Which could speed up development by maybe two weeks if there are not many bugs to be found up until full release is ready.

 

The game is already being tested by people the Devs trust, they clearly don't need anymore testers at this time, so all anyone can do is wait.

 

Because they don't have to test (that much) themselves. If it is done well it could be a great way to receive feedback and find bugs faster. 20K people find bugs faster than a team of devs. And by speeding the development up, I didn't mean by a lot, just a little bit, just the time they had to use to test.
And of course they should only set it up if beta is somewhat far away, it would be a waste of time if it only was for a couple of weeks

 

Early things never make Justice to the final game. People must understand that if they released something early, potentially buggy and crashy as some other studios did before with other games, it would be rage here and there because there are gamebreaking issues making it unplayable.

That's why these days most games AVOID Alphas and if Beta, only release it the most complete and stable possible, since many people see Betas as the final game and don't care about that fact before judge it.

 

Could not be bothered reading everyone elses replies, but im sure you would've heard this before. BETA is for testing games and finding out bugs before a game is released! Why would you want a Beta for a Beta? That is ridiculous. =.=

 

It would delay the game more so than speed up development. Making "pre-beta access" a ridiculous idea to begin with. Right now they should be focusing on getting the game to a beta version, not to make a pre-beta access because that would be a waste of time.

 

Non-disclosure agreements only mean anything if Chucklefish had the budget to hire lawyers and IP rights managers to deal with people who break the NDA. And as you yourself said, leaks are pretty much inevitable, and Chucklefish probably doesn't have the resources to deal with that. No releasing early builds that require NDAs = not needing to deal with all the BS that entails when someone leaks something.

The dev team have made it perfectly and explicitly clear that there is to be no public release whatsoever until they feel its up to their standards. Not your standards. Not my standards. Theirs. We should appreciate and respect the fact that they're committed to making it feature-complete and as polished as possible for the beta.

Since you said what you don't lack is patience, i'll address the reasons you made to justify a "pre-beta".

How exactly, is the hype going to waste? How do you measure hype, and what method to you use to assess whether its wasted or not?
Hype to my understanding is an intangible, and therefore un-quantifiable thing. The only way I can think of it being 'wasted', is if Chucklefish decided to cancel the development of Starbound.

​

The devs do have internal testing, you can hardly say they're building the entirety of a game mechanic before testing it.​

Sorry OP, but IMO the reasons you give for them to make publicly available builds are not strong ones.​

 

I agree with the OP, honestly I'm already seeing people starting to get bored. It resparked a lot of interest when the daily updates came but it didn't last long. Also the devs are working as hard as they can I'm sure BUT seeing that they seem to believe that beta has to be 'perfect' when in reality that should be final release means I doubt we'll end up getting beta before December and at this point, while I realize they have lots of time left I'm starting to doubt a beta in 2013. The uproar if that happened would be massive and I would probably be part of it. I've read every post in this thread and half of them are 'Wait' when that's not what the topic is about. The rest are intelligent people though and I'm talking to them: People aren't excited anymore. You can see it on the forum, and ask your friends who you spent weeks convincing to buy Starbound and you'll see people going: Why does beta have to be perfect? If people don't want to play beta, fine! But to those who want to help: I say that's what a beta is for!

 

Yeah, and the beta version of the game is not ready yet, it's still in alpha. There is no such thing as perfect, but I believe the developers want the game to be as sparkling awesome as it can be. I really believe that a beta version will be ready in September, and if not September then the last months of 2013 (October, November, December).

I don't see the beta being "pushed" to 2014, because that would create a storm of refunds, it would be a bad thing. So all we can really do is wait for this beta version to be ready. That's the best we can do for the developers at this moment, not asking for pre-beta access, because that's a waste of time.

 

...weren't these threads supposed to be taken care of as decreed by the almighty Tiy?
I mean, I get it, "it's not an asking for beta thread", but you can say that all you want. At its core, it's still you wanting the devs to do things your way.
This should close.

 

I can see how you'd think it speeds them up, but it actually doesn't. If they needed to find bugs faster, hopefully they'd hire some professional QA testers. Bug reports from the public typically lack sufficient information to reproduce the bug, and every time a developer has to attempt to reproduce it themself, it wastes time. Couple that with all of the repeats they'll get (meaning they'll spend hours and hours just filtering through the reports), and you end up with very little time for actual development. I know we're all excited to play the game, but from everything we've seen, it's not yet ready for a beta, and they would not be doing themselves or us any favors by opening the game up for beta now.

 

The matter of the fact is, is that threads like these in the end have no real value. Nothing's going to change. Beta's not coming until it does.

Whether or not people think there should be a more extensive beta not requiring more features, or a pre-beta testing phase, is their opinion. I just don't see the point in 'discussing' something that honestly people find as the most controversial and provoking topics on the forums. Chucklefish has every right how to run their game development program, and if discussing it doesn't cause the kind of intelligent conversation that you, the OP said earlier, then why bother?

People are still going to play this game by the time beta comes out. Hype's not gonna be lost. They are already testing a lot of the bugs anyway. They aren't even done. Just let the developers run their game, not because you shouldn't give criticism towards it, but because you should know it won't change anything.