Availability of beta's after Friday...

Yes. But subsequent builds will be highly restricted.

But you'll be able to get the last public build until its release.

I don't get why you are restricting future builds. Usually companies have closed Alpha tests, then closed Beta tests, then open Beta tests. There's a natural progression from small and closed to big and open.

What game do you know had an open gamma test?

I don't know any game that had a gamma test. Open beta test is the last stage of development, then the game goes gold

Oh get real. Many games have open gamma tests, it just depends on your terminology. "Gamma test" is a _rarely_ used term. Most companies go direct from Beta to Final.

Take any game that's had an open beta test - their "final builds" are analagous to your gamma testing.

The question stands - why is Stardock going from a larger test group to a smaller one, when the larger one is the group that's going to find more issues to be fixed?

that's exactly my question, jpub

'Oh get real. Many games have open gamma tests, it just depends on your terminology. "Gamma test" is a _rarely_ used term. Most companies go direct from Beta to Final.'

And it shows. I haven't seen but one or two games (or most other products, for that matter) that didn't need several months (or years) of patches just to become playable since Master of Orion, nearly 10 years ago.

And alot more go through closed gamma cycles than you think.

give us some names Arturus Magi

Most company's gamma tests are what happens after we purchase the game. GalCiv's method of paid beta is brilliant.

Relax people - it's their game, and it has been stated repeatedly that this day would come

As for a select few, I can easily understand this, instead of focusing on 200 people all writing everywhere across the board, they focus on those who have shown the capability to adress the bugs they found with professionalism, precision and speed.

When going into final stages of software development, it's time to focus tightly on the problems at hand, and this is best done with a limited number of people.

/Flemming Madsen
VP Lidium
www.lidiumonline.com

it's obvious who those people will be, all you non-Citizen brats

Oh I get it now.

ADMIRAL Elrikk

PS. Pay no attention to the Sig line below!!!

Master Lame wrote:
"it's obvious who those people will be, all you non-Citizen brats "

LOL - thanks for the compliment, but I doubt that every Ensign will be elevated to Gamme tester status.
When they say a select few, I imagine 4-6 people all in all, to keep the number of exernal communication lines small and managable.

/Flemming

First off, those of you saying that most games don't have gamma tests are simply incorrect. ALL commercial software products that I'm aware of have a gamme (or regularly called "release candidate") phase.

I've been part of several such gamma tests where there's only been a handful of people in there.

Why not let "everyone" in the gamma? Let me count the ways:

1) Since time is of the essence, we can pick people who have a history to supplying solid reports without reading posts like "game crashed" with no other information.

2) Warez. We can secure the gammas by embedding into each copy who it's going to. There are many hundreds of people in the beta (maybe even more). If everyone got the gamma, then there becomes a distinct concern that a near final version of the game would end up on some wares news group. I'm sure no one here would do that but I think we've all seen this phenomenon before.

3) General security. There's a lot of additinal goodies we've been holding back, mainly multimedia stuff that we want to wait until the final version. We don't want the game to "feel" old when it comes out to the beta group.

The overall goal is to ensure a solid, fun game for everyone.

A few gammas I've been involved on (off the top of my head):
Starcraft
Warcraft III
Empire Earth
Diablo II
TA: Kingdoms

Games have gamma tests. You just don't hear about them because..well they're private.

Reguardless of whom SD decides to play their gamma, I have very few issues (recently posted) with lastest beta. The game is very addictive. SD did a terrific job porting (and improving) this game to Windows.

1 question: the shield overflow been around for a long time. Even though it affects only 1 planet, it looks awful. Will it be fixed before gamma? I'll try to post a bmp of it to the binary newsgroup.

I am hoping we can fix it before teh gamma. You're right though it is obnoxious.