my suggestion is to use the beta world to test new changes. this would give the population of highly involved users confidence in your changes. also, it would give a world of credibility (pun intended) to your commitment to putting out a quality product, by investing in the test cycle. and it would serve to make the community feel like you really cared about what they think, and are committed to working with the community to make the changes that are best for the game. you probably get more bang in a PR sense than you do from the testing standpoint, but both would be very significant. i would quickly run through like 5 recruitings to give people decent teams, and then just run 1 season with new engine changes with those users, and then reset the teams.

also, this would give you a chance to hash it out with beta users in the beta forum, keeping much complaining and questioning off the main forums. if you can convince the most highly involved users before the change goes live that its a solid change, well tested, then you will absolutely experience much less resistance and negativity when you release the change. if you've already won over the most vocal users, then instead of having the most vocal users questioning your change, you would have them supporting your change, and that would do wonders for the morale on the main board in response to new patches.

thanks for your time!

Seconded.

Seeing as how the last beta testing was such a fail, I don't think its a good idea.

I don't know how hard it would be to open up a beta test world again, but what about having a beta test world where we wouldn't have to pay and it could be like a "turbo world" where there would be like 4 to 6 games simmed per day. All these ideas could be tested and we could get results quickly (with the world being turbo). Seble could try out all the new fixes and get lots of data back right away so they could be implemented quickly or fixed quickly. The new engine is already out so it wouldn't be like those playing in the new world would have an unfair advantage in understanding the game. I know it'd probably be fairly hard to set up, but if it was run well and games simmed at regular intervals (maybe every 2 cycles, so every 6 hours, 4 games a day) so people payed attention wouldn't this be great for improving the game and working out kinks? So basically I just want to know if this could ever happen or is it too much work?
8/26/2010 4:22 PM	Customer Support
Tyler, It would be quite a bit of work to set something like that up because everything is geared to 1 or 2 games per day. I am able to quickly run through test seasons on my own to see results play out, but it would be tough to set it up for that kind of a daily schedule.
8/26/2010 4:38 PM	tkimble
Thanks for the response. It's something I'd like to see done, but obviously it would be a lot of work. Would it be possible to open a beta test world? Seems like a lot of people would be happy with a beta test world.
8/26/2010 4:50 PM	Customer Support
We generally only do that for significant game changes, such as the release in May. Organizing and managing a large scale test is actually a time-consuming and slow process, and a lot of users become frustrated at the pace of it.