World of Warcraft at Ten Ton Hammer

There you have it folks. We started this article with the very beginnings of beta testing and concluded with your - the MMO gamer's - thoughts on the current crop of beta tests. So what conclusions can we draw from what we've learned?

First and foremost, beta testers and community members want to have at least a reasonable amount of honest communication with the development team for the game they are testing. However, it seems like gamers are reasonable about their expectations. They want ways to focus their attention, and they want to be able to outline the problems that they see within the game either through forum posts or feedback reports. Probably most important of all, they want to see progress on the game that they're playing that is coming as a result of their testing.

Another important concept that's become clear is the fact that beta testing is different than it was in the past. Developers should not expect a large amount of gamers to help them design and develop major pieces of content in their game, especially if that content is in any way "broken" or "not fun." Early alpha and friends-and-family builds can certainly help set some of the content ideas, but by the time the developers get into a more public closed beta, they should have a fairly solid client that players are running on. Changes should be small and merely help to balance the final game and/or polish the content that already exists.

On the other side of the fence, gamers shouldn't expect their later stages of beta testing to include a lot of actual testing. While developers may have a focus for gamers to put their attention towards, the "big issues" just simply shouldn't exist in the later phases of beta. Triple-A MMOs will continue to move towards a heavy marketing focus in their betas, but development studios will hopefully learn from previous beta experiences and provide content that is fairly finished before it is unleashed to the public.

Thankfully, gamers will never have to worry about beta phases disappearing. Almost all of the developers stated that betas are essential to a game's development and final polishing, so this practice will continue into the future. But as we discussed earlier in the article, beta testing will continue to change over the next few years as teams learn from mistakes and really begin to implement the experiences that they learned from other teams mistakes. Everyone should keep their eyes on Champions Online and Jumpgate Evolution as these two games near their more "public" phases of beta. Will they learn from mistakes of the past?

Let's hope so.