Relic Oct 2016 Playtest Recruitment

Gamers from Vancouver, Relic needs your help to playtest their strategy games! On-site refreshments and a free code for any Relic game or DLC on Steam will be provided at the end of the session. If you are interested in helping us make our games even better, please fill out this survey and we’ll be in touch: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/RelicPlaytest


https://community.companyofheroes.com/discussion/243152/local-help-wanted-come-playtest-some-games-at-relic

For Vancouver area.


And dont forget guys:


#boycottdow3

#FreeKatitof

#MakeRelicGreatAgain

i've completed survey, i'm in

dood this is actually really cool.

New CoH2 content perhaps? Or DoW3?

New CoH2 content perhaps? Or DoW3?

Dow3. If it was for coh2, i think they would have put it on the player test version of coh2

Am I the only one in Vancouver aside from Dusty? D:

#boycottdow3

Am I the only one in Vancouver aside from Dusty? D:

I say RIP CoH2 if that's true

In a parallel universe;

BartonPL
Am I the only one in Vancouver aside from Captain Price? D:

I say RIP CoH2 if that's true

I live in Vancouver but I don't think I'll be coming out. Maybe I'm a bit salty after being in the work force for so long but to be honest the offer, as is, kind of sucks.

I'm not suggesting that you would need to pay me $$'s to help you out, but I think you need to tell me a bit more about what I would be working on and make this more of a win-win deal. For example:

"Come on out to the Relic office and play some games of <insert product name here> with us! Meet the team! We'll stuff you full of pizza and beer. Not a fan of <insert product name here>? Well because you'll be signing an NDA, we can talk about all your favorite Relic products. You can ask and get answers to such questions as: What are you doing about <insert biased balance issue here>?. Wait there's more! If we get 20 volunteers for both days, Relic will hotfix everything on the balance survey on October 31st!"

Volunteers are motivated by passion, not pizza and trades need to be of relative equal value.*** The information you "give away" costs nothing. A patch (I know, its a pipe dream) is something you should be doing anyways and benefits you in the long run.

***Just to make numbers up: 20(people)*2(days)*8(hours)*$15/hour)= $4800 of free labor.

Signed up, not sure if I'll get in (seems like its a DOW playtest from the question, I'm not super familiar with the lore and I haven't played too much DOW).

Ducati I see what you mean with incentives beyond monetary value. Its funny though cause EA in Burnaby does playtests all the time, I've done a few over the past two years, and considering you get multiple EA games for free depending on the length of the playtest, they have no shortage of people willing to go all the way there since they basically dangle free money in front of you for a short amount of "work."

Signed up but unfortunately am out of town that one specific bloody weekend. Every time.

I may live in the Vancouver area but boy do they know how to pick the times I'm most unavailable.

#boycottfuckinglelic

Fuck playtesting, I'm late anyway but that's just straight A bullshit if you ask me.

Plus, why can't we just playtest it from our homes miles away from Vancouver?

What's so top secret and what are they trying to hide with all these NDAs and stuff, information is going to leak, they'll have to spit it out at some point in time, not sharing anything is actually HURTING THEM.

I really did have faith in Relic before, but that was a long time ago, before all of the secrecy, all of the dead hype, before CoH 2.

I took pride in calling myself a Relic fanboy. But not anymore.

I wish THQ never went bankrupt and made CoH2. The balance is a mess for years. The problem with Relic is they are located in Vancouver. The average house costs over a million dollars (in Canadian dollars). No exaggeration. Paying a living wage to a developer is nearly impossible. The average person struggles massively each day. Damn Relic should have moved to a cheaper location.

#boycottfuckinglelic

Fuck playtesting, I'm late anyway but that's just straight A bullshit if you ask me.

Then don't do it. It's a part of the development process and most studios do it. Don't take part if you don't want to.

Plus, why can't we just playtest it from our homes miles away from Vancouver?

So they should just release unpublished code out into the wild to be pirated months before a game's release if it's DoW? There's also an advantage to being able to sit in the room and talk with people and get their views and see how they react. Relic has done remote testing especially around CoH 2 balance and things like that. It has it's advantages but so does in person testing.

What's so top secret and what are they trying to hide with all these NDAs and stuff, information is going to leak, they'll have to spit it out at some point in time, not sharing anything is actually HURTING THEM.

Whether they're more secretive than they need to be is a fair subject for debate. But if this is for DoW it's unreasonable to expect them to send code out to people over the internet for an unfinished and unreleased game. If it's for CoH 2 then they must want feedback they haven't been able to get from years of remote tests with the community. If it's for something that's neither then they'll be even more secretive and rightly so.

I don't know what it's for, but I think it's unfair to get angry at them for an opt-in test that you don't need to participate in.

I took pride in calling myself a Relic fanboy. But not anymore.

I'm sorry to hear that. I know the people at Relic take pride in working hard to deliver what they think will please the fans but it's impossible to please everyone all the time. Ultimately I'm sure you reasons are justified to you and there's no point in arguing about it. People like what they like and if you feel badly treated that's too bad. If it happened even partially on my watch I'm sorry.

But if it's this particular thing that pushes you over the edge then I'd give them another chance. Playtests are very typical in game development and they almost always happen either on location at the studio or in a second location if an outside contractor is hired to run the tests. Remote testing is not completely unheard of but it's very rare for non-indie studios.

Then don't do it. It's a part of the development process and most studios do it. Don't take part if you don't want to.



So they should just release unpublished code out into the wild to be pirated months before a game's release if it's DoW? There's also an advantage to being able to sit in the room and talk with people and get their views and see how they react. Relic has done remote testing especially around CoH 2 balance and things like that. It has it's advantages but so does in person testing.



Whether they're more secretive than they need to be is a fair subject for debate. But if this is for DoW it's unreasonable to expect them to send code out to people over the internet for an unfinished and unreleased game. If it's for CoH 2 then they must want feedback they haven't been able to get from years of remote tests with the community. If it's for something that's neither then they'll be even more secretive and rightly so.

I don't know what it's for, but I think it's unfair to get angry at them for an opt-in test that you don't need to participate in.



I'm sorry to hear that. I know the people at Relic take pride in working hard to deliver what they think will please the fans but it's impossible to please everyone all the time. Ultimately I'm sure you reasons are justified to you and there's no point in arguing about it. People like what they like and if you feel badly treated that's too bad. If it happened even partially on my watch I'm sorry.

But if it's this particular thing that pushes you over the edge then I'd give them another chance. Playtests are very typical in game development and they almost always happen either on location at the studio or in a second location if an outside contractor is hired to run the tests. Remote testing is not completely unheard of but it's very rare for non-indie studios.

Listen Noun, as a former Relic employee and CoH community manager I have massive respect for you and understand that you're defending your former employer but I don't think they had any good reason to kick you out or for you to leave, sure there was the community hate for some things but you were mostly loved, as was Relic, back then.

And I was referring to CoH 2, I agree that DoW III is still an unfinished product and many things can change until it's released, my problem is that looking at CoH 2 in it's broken state, I'm doubting they can finish it.

As far as the testing goes, there was a similar case not long ago with Cossacks 3's release, it's made by a Ukrainian development team called GSC Game World, they made the old Cossacks, American Conquest series of RTS games as well as Stalker, around CoH's time. But for their latest game they decided to scrap the closed beta for an in-house one, which was a bad decision on their part to be honest, lots of bugs and stuff that needed to be fixed post launch left a bad taste and many bad reviews on the storepage to many people, things that MOSTLY could have been worked out before release, but due to limited testing...

I as a modder, and not yet game or software developer, would much rather have a bigger testing audience on the internet rather than a few games in my house, pretending to be giving me feedback, for all we know they could even ruin the testing since they have a limited opinion scope, hell how do we know that they've even heard of Warhammer 40,000 or Dawn of War before?

So yeah, in general maybe I'm just pissed at Relic because of CoH 2 and just don't want that to happen to DoW III as well, but looking at how they're making it, I think I'll save my money until some actual proof that it's not shit, or, pirate it, since before we had demos of games, now we don't, I'm not justifying pirating but I don't wanna waste my money, and Steam's refund policy of 2 hours is complete bullshit.

And the game is going to be pirated sooner or later, one way or another, those Russian hacker boys don't have any other real jobs anyhow, why do you think they're software prices are around 30% of ours? Question is, if it's that good to reel in potential customers, I for example haven't pirated many games, but the few I have and I've liked, I've bought.

Relic has, in the past, done remote testing. They ran a fairly large open beta at CoH2's launch and there were other betas along the way afterwards.

There is value in having people in the office where they can be interacted with in person and immediately. There's value in seeing how someone uses the mouse when playing or how their eyes track across the screen and what they keep clicking on to implement a unit ability. Almost all developers do some form of in-person testing.

The difference between a playtest and a beta is this (in broad strokes)...

Playtest:
- helps to figure out how players interact with a game
- helps to answer specific questions / does this menu make sense, are players getting stuck somewhere / is it fun

Beta:
- helps to find bugs
- helps to test server load
- throws a lot of people at the game code all at once to stress test it
- helps to test balance at a large scale (hundreds of games to thousands of games)

A playtest is typically not for finding bugs, it's for design choices whether on a unit, menus or other parts of the game. Are people getting that they're supposed to capture this point to gain Munitions?

Here's a specific example not from a playtest but from watching non-developers play an unreleased game.

I went to and Gamescom on the game that I'm working on now. We had designers with us and we ran the booth. Seeing hundreds of people over the course of the first day in Germany made the designers realize a few things that needed to be improved and changed. Nothing big, but it was just not clear that players needed to hit 'X' to pickup weapons and open doors.

The game changed for the better because the devs got to see fans playing in person.

I'm not saying betas should never happen, just that there's value in doing in-person stuff. I don't think you can conclude from this announcement that there won't be a beta for DoW, or that this is even for DoW.

Edit: Also I think you make my leaving Relic sound more exciting than it was. I was there for 4 years, I wanted to do something different and I had confidence that Cynthia could step into my boots and be fantastic at it.

not old enough