Topic: Why wait for activisions blessing....release the patch as another BETA

[Alexander1701]

  Oh? Sorry, my mistake. I thought you legally qualified as 'employees' even though you aren't paid. Very well then, the rest is true (the tax concerns being as taldren's employee population booming, so that no longer applies). We'd all have to sign non-disclosure documents (essentially shutting down these forums, really), and it WOULD be seen as rather underhanded to hire a beta tester for each person who owns the game just to circumvent activision. Certainly, if I was an executive at a company like interplay or microsoft's gaming section (coughcoughblack9cough), I'd look down on something like that.

I think our eager beta testers missed that part. He's implying that we declare 'everyone' as beta testers to get around activision.    

[TalonClaw]

Couldn't Taldren have an open beta?  
 

[Pestalence]

Quote:
Couldn't Taldren have an open beta?  
 

Again, Taldren tried that last Feb and the Open Beta was ordered by Activision to come down due to Right and Copyright and Liscense infringement which could possibly lead to lawsuits against anyone hosting a mirror and further legal action against Taldren for releasing any sort of patch, Beta, Open Beta or otherwise without thier (Activision's) explicit written permission..

so sorry, Open Beta is not an option unless Activision decides to give Taldren authorization to do so, and as of yet to my understanding, Activision has not, nor do they intend to do so.. they want to keep any and all rights to their games under lock and key...

My appologies to everyone waiting for the SFC 3 patch... I myself think it is long overdue, but like i keep stating.. Taldren's hands are tied and the entire ball of wax is in Activisions court.. Until they decide to get to work on it, SFC 3 patch release is on hold, even though we keep working to improve the patch when it does get released...

No, we are not Taldren Employees, but some of us are in contact with Taldren Employees quite often, when they are available. We are the next closest thing to being Taldren Employees. and probably the one's being benifitted the most where we are by getting to do nothing but playing the game looking for ways to break it so that fixes can be made.. some things do get by us.. but at least we try quite hard to find as much as possible...

 

[Sartonius]

I don't want to be too negative here, and I know it's old hat, but this really is putting the wagon before the horse.

This mess wouldn't even be here if the game had been properly beta tested before being sold in stores.

Or the two prior games for that matter.  Good grief.

 

[EmeraldEdge]

The game could very well have been "properly beta tested", that doesn't mean that the bugs that were found were ever fixed though.  It could have been tested to hell and back, but the issues found still have to be fixed.  That is an issue for the developers and the producers to work out, as far as time to fix vs. acceptable bug levels and need to release project due to overruns, etc.    

[Alexander1701]

 I'm going to try to remain calm about the above.

I wasn't involved in the testing, so that wasn't actually an insult aimed at me, but the overwhelming level of stupidity shown by the above post leaves me near-speechless.

Look, on the one hand, the vast majority of these problems arose as a result of an extremely wide variety of machines simultaneously running the program. These issues could not have been known prior to full release.

Secondly, in order to have fully repaired and tested all of the problems prior to release, even assuming they knew them, would have taken likely as long as it has now. But wait! Activision is sueing paramount! Had they held SFC3 it would never have been released. I'm more than happy to wait on a patch that may never come out when compared with a GAME that may never come out.

Now then, I think I've managed to explain fully why they could not and were right not to hold SFC3. At least I hope so.

Alexander    

[CpnDonald]

I don't see why you guys want the patch so badly, Korah and pelican have produced a game for free thats alot more fun then the game I paid 40 dollars for.

As for the whole activision legal [censored], if activision wins, I guarantee more games, and alot of work will be done on the games, however if they lose, I doubt we'll have a server to play on at all.  

[EmeraldEdge]

They probably want the patch because it will fix some issues with the games core, and thus making Pelican's and Korah's efforts even better after they are updated to accomodate the fixes to the games core.  Maybe?  

[FPF_TraceyG]

Time, Quality, Price. You can only ever have 2 out of 3. Something produced quickly and high quality, will have a high price tag. Something cheap and high quality, will get done only when other higher paying projects are complete. Something done quickly and cheaply, is usually low quality.
A completely bug free piece of software means you either wait forever for it to be released, or pay an exorbatantly high price for it. No one is going to pay 1000 dollars for a computer game though, or buy a computer thats bug free but 2 years out of date on release.

[Alexander1701]

  Guys, the quality isn't that low. You should really play some OTHER massively multiplayer games.

Yes, the dynaverse is massively multiplayer. It may not be an RPG, but it runs into all of the same problems of having large numbers of people constantly connecting and disconnecting. Shadowbane? Please, on release it was SIGNIFICANTLY worse than SFC3, and while I appreciate the steady flow of patches, its still relatively buggy, as is SFC3, because of the enormous challenges of this genre.

It's pretty well impossible to code a program that won't have ANY bugs on release, guys. Taldren's done a bang-up job and produced a game a large number of people are still playing a year after release. Yes, I realise that that part is due largely to the modders, but why mod a game unless its good to begin with?

Let up. There;s nothing else they could realistically have done.

Alexander