What is Beta Testing? My personal pros and cons

[RedoLane]

So it's 1AM, and i'm bone tired, since instead of going to work or meeting up with friends, I devote myself to one productive activity: Testing. More specifically: Beta Testing.
While it is more known in companies as QA, in our wide gaming community, applying to beta testing can be either completely impossible, or High/Low chances based on connections and abilities.
I can tell from my years of experience as a volunteer, that 80% of the time I submitted an application form after seeing a developer looking for beta testers, were the times I was rejected and never had any opportunity to apply again.
However, sometimes I succeeded, and had a lot of fun while doing that sort of "job"!(which isn't technically a job, since I don't earn any profit from that).
While I speak about my experience with beta testing, let me clarify that i'll only talk about Closed Beta Testing, while not referring to any inside-company testing(that would be counted as a job for profit).

Now when it comes to you, fellow gamers, you probably had one time in your life when you thought "can I be a beta tester?" or something similar.
Yes, in a nutshell, you can! The problem is, it would not work to your expectations most of the time, since objectives differ between each developer and its own project.
If it's for the sole purpose of "playing games early than anyone else", then be prepared for a disappointment, because I wouldn't call some games "playable" in their beta stage.

Now when it comes to pros, it really depends on the project you're applying to:
Some projects(especially indie projects) may include your name in the credits as a beta tester, but it's not assuring for most of them.
If the manager who takes position over the beta testers is pretty strict, be prepared for some conditions which must be fulfilled until a deadline. Fortunately, it actually gives an opportunity to save up a connection to him, in case he wants to recruit people for another project.
However, some developers just post the deadline over the internet, which we refer to as "Closing Time". That way, no one really goes around your head and you can post your feedback whenever you want(until the deadline, of course).

Now about the cons....well, there is a lot:
First and foremost, you technically don't play the games you're testing. I mean, you do go around the game, but the sole purpose of that is checking anything wrong with the mechanics, stage/map designs, glitches and bugs, etc etc.
And because you aren't the only one who's testing the game, you're sharing a similar position like everyone else, which means you aren't specially important.
Now for the main point of my inner sins as a beta tester: In most cases, if you're applying to beta testing under special connections(For example, I knew Christian Whitehead personally way before he worked on Sonic Mania, so he recruited me for ideas and testing), You just can't talk about the stuff you're testing anywhere else!
Due to classifications which are bound to a contract, unless it has been posted officially in their associated media accounts, you really can't reveal anything.
And even if you can, people can't just believe so easily a random person on the internet who claims to be a beta tester, especially around nowadays' society.

So there you have it, the pros and cons of Beta Testing in its full glory.
While other people around here who beta tested stuff might give a different opinion, that's completely fine!
And speaking of that, what is your experience as Beta Testers? Do you enjoy it? hate it? both at once?
Do you suggest any tips for those who want to apply for beta testing?

Leave your thoughts and opinions here, and maybe, just maybe...people might take an interest in the whole beta testing business

 

[Taffy]

So....beta testing is specifically trying to find things that aren't right? like, see if you can clip into this floor or move this box to a place it shouldn't go?

And you have to know people if you want good chances of doing it?

That's what I'm getting from this.

 

[The Real Jdbye]

I've only beta tested stuff that was open to everyone, either having to sign up during a short period while registrations were open, or through beta keys given away on certain sites like tentonhammer and mmorpg.com.
Had a lot of fun with it though. There were no requirements to actually submit bug reports or anything like that, though I figure they automatically logged that kind of thing on the server side.

 

[Deleted User]

Games you truly beta test are console ports of 3rd party before they go to pc

 

[RedoLane]

So....beta testing is specifically trying to find things that aren't right? like, see if you can clip into this floor or move this box to a place it shouldn't go?

And you have to know people if you want good chances of doing it?

That's what I'm getting from this.

It goes the same in every business. The more people you get to know and stay in good terms with, the better these connections will be useful for job opportunities.
In my language, we call that sort of connection as "having a protection".
It's the same with the gaming industry, although it's a bit complicated when it comes to other jobs beside beta testing.

 

[Taleweaver]

I was invited for the closed beta testing of Cook, Serve Delicious 2. This was mainly (if not only) because I liked the prequel so much.

It was certainly fun. It was good to aid the developer (who was a single developer, and as such didn't have the wide array of PC's as his testers had), but...well...a bit unprofessional. It was only about after a couple weeks (and at the second closed beta) that we had a discord channel, and at that point the most critical bugs were ironed out.
The game was a bit different than the original, but where I liked the changes, I could easily foresee the "missing" (or different) parts as being unwelcome. That sort of felt bad when the game was released and many steam reviewers said exactly that.

I also share the "it's not exactly playing". I never cared about release dates of games, so the chance of playing it before almost the entire rest of the world did nothing for me. It was pretty feature complete, and bugs were rather rare. That was a good thing: I played/tested the game co-op with my girlfriend, and she got annoyed that when a crash occurred, we couldn't just restart the game directly (I took screenshots and took precious note of as much as I could remember in the hope to replicate it). And in turn, it sort of annoyed me that she just said things like "I don't like this part" without being able to tell why. I mean...I understand liking or disliking doesn't always have a solid reasoning behind it, but how was I supposed to report something I couldn't elaborate on?

Other than that, I've played a bit of open beta's. But that's to be taken literally: I played them. If there was a crash, I send out a report, but hardly ever said more than that (and never gave suggestions).

Games you truly beta test are console ports of 3rd party before they go to pc

I...have honestly no idea what you're trying to say. Either you completely missed the opening post and all replies and said something that at best vaguely describes a part of the process, or it's something completely different. You, erm...wanna elaborate?

 

[Ryccardo]

So....beta testing is specifically trying to find things that aren't right? like, see if you can clip into this floor or move this box to a place it shouldn't go?

And you have to know people if you want good chances of doing it?

That's what I'm getting from this.

That's how it almost universally was until some years ago, yes the game is also tried in way(s) representative of the average player, but the individual elements deserve testing too (and that's usually, but not always, less fun)

If you are familiar with medium/large scale programming you may have heard of "unit tests", those are automated tests like "I'm developing this function that multiplies 2 numbers, every time it's edited run these sample datas through it and compare results/performance with preset expectations", but despite their usefulness those checks are limited by being checks against preset conditions - figuring out which extreme cases are of interest and actually programming them is hard and potentially misleading (well, for a more complex example at least )

Look at bugs that are relatively well known, and easy to accidentally activate (Glitch City in Pokemon gen 1 - literally saving and reloading while in the Safari Zone): it was allegedly discovered (soon but not too soon after release - it's in every version of those games, while other tricks like the classic "surf on the east coast of Cinnabar" were half-fixed in the Italian and Spanish versions), yet it took multiple years for hardcore and competent fans of those games (presumably more motivated than generally uncredited paid testers) to figure out exactly why and how it happens!
But without having known that saving in the Safari Zone is "dangerous", would YOU have guessed so? Admittedly, in retrospective, they should have tested better the behavior of the saving/loading code in an area with a gimmick (step limit in this example, cycling road for the "start new game > when you get the bike, game thinks you're already using it" bug) that's not used elsewhere... but the whole point of testing the whole system as well as its parts is to figure out this possibility!!

And with more rushed than ever Pacman for the 2600 games, ever less attention to quality control in the "cheaper to buy another one than return it to China" society, and ever more overconfidence on the effort of volunteer testing (Windows 10 was hardly first but is one of the historically significant symbols of this "revolution"), well, quality drops...
(All of the above issues are in turn caused by cost cutting - see the average long term reliability of $ony consoles -, often against the will of the actual developers and testers)

 

[Deleted User]

I...have honestly no idea what you're trying to say. Either you completely missed the opening post and all replies and said something that at best vaguely describes a part of the process, or it's something completely different. You, erm...wanna elaborate?

It was a joke