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Perception is strong and sight weak. In strategy it is important to see distant things as if they were close and to take a distanced view of close things.
- Miyamoto Musashi

  Welcome to the Beta-test
Every once in a while some of the other beta-testers and I start strolling down memory lane, and when we get to the section of that well-trodden road where it crosses Slamfest street we sit down at the crossroads, we have a little picnic and we talk about the fun we had with a few less maps, a few more game options and a lot less players. We reminisce about the good times when Imperial Crowns were more impressive and less gaudy, when Dire Marsh was more marsh and less dire, when there were more bungie backgrounds and less rooms, when there were more personalities and less collections of illegible ascii characters.

But it wasn't any of these things that made the beta-test fun. It was the people, it was the game and it was the bugs. First of all, it was the people. There weren't very many chosen for the slamfest, and there we even fewer that played regularly. Those were the hardcore Myth fanatics that would sit and play till dawn on a week night because that next game held so much promise. These were the guys that would play with max journeymen just in case there was an undiscovered winning strategy the just happened to need three journeyman to work. These were the guys that were doing troop mixing and archer fades before they had names. But these were also the guys that would spend more time debating the value of pus packets than they did using them in battle. These were the guys that managed to play an entire game without saying anything that wasn't a Princess Bride quote. These were the guys that made chatting the best part of Myth.

It was also the game. Beautiful terrain that spun and whirled crazily as you leaned on your orbit key desperately looking for that wight that you could hear approaching. Crazy game options like Last Man on the Hill which was nothing like anything we had ever seen before. (True story, my first game of last man ended five minutes into it because we all met in the middle and got eliminated. This was before camping was invented and we were as confused as a thrall stuck on a tree) There were left-handed warriors and exploding corpses and something called the fire-breathing ghol that nobody but the veterans knew about. We knew this game had depth and we could see that it was going to last a long time. Long enough to get good at, long enough to establish a history of patterns and trends, long enough to set up a webpage about...

What really made the beta-test fun, however, was the bugs. Every time Myth locked up and Macbugs rattled off a string of gibberish, I dutifully wrote down every symbol and filed an extensive bug report. Every time a random Ghol started moonwalking on the top of a lake, I'd triangulate his position and inform my programming buddies at Bungie who were on the other side of a one-way form. Of course they already knew about them all, the slamfesters were mostly to test the server load, but it was still fun to be a contributor. Believe it or not, I took the special thanks to the Beta-testers in the Myth Manual as a personal pat on the back...being part of the beta-test was a great experience and I wish that all of you could have shared it, but the Slamfest is over and Myth has been released...

Unfortunately, bungie.net has changed quite a bit since then. I'm not talking about the abundance of cheaters, I had more games wrecked by faulty networking than I have had ruined by droppers and lamers. It isn't the fact that ranks are meaningless, during the beta-test, if you were from beta-3 you were an Emp and if you were from beta-4 you were flatware. It isn't the general atmosphere, the few creeps can't disrupt the general politeness and civility of bungie.net, especially when you compare the level of maturity on bungie.net to that of any chatroom, channel or other public gathering on the web. It's not even the problems with the scoring system, since bugs were a major part of the beta-test.

The change between the slamfest and now is not the people. If anything there are more interesting and fun people now than there were then. When any group gets larger the amount of smurfs in it will increase, but I still find plenty of people worth talking to and playing with. It isn't the game. Myth has actually gotten more complex and interesting as people develop new tactics and counter-tactics. Instead of coming up with a standard pattern to win, Myth actually gets more varied as we play. No, the one essential change between the beta-test and today's bungie.net is the sense that we are part of Myth's future. We no longer feel that we are contributing to the game, we are customers and not co-developers, we are along for the ride and not pulling the wagon or scouting the path ahead. That one deficiency makes all the difference.

Fortunately, this is easy to change! If the game were lame or the people worthless, all would be lost, but recapturing the beta-test excitement is as easy as regaining the feeling that we are contributing. This is as simple as making a small shift in attitude, and once you have made that shift, your outlook will change dramatically. Think of it in this light. Jason Jones, the project leader for Myth and one of their main programmers has one thought in his head every morning when he wakes up. "Today," he thinks, "I will get one step closer to making the perfect game." People complain that he doesn't answer email...he doesn't even check his email. He is too busy pursuing that one goal. Jason Jones has decided that online gaming is an essential feature of the perfect game, and so he wants to perfect that to.

Online gaming is in its infancy. Those systems that haven't been destroyed by hackers, crushed by the internet's limitations or fumbled by their administrators have been broken by the overload. Diablo, Quake, Ultima, Warcraft2, Kali, The Zone, and a host of other games have been plagued by cheaters and lamers and bugs. Compared to the competition, bungie.net is incredibly stable and reliable. Folks, the _only_ thing we have managed to find to complain about is a flaw in the ranking system! And it is being addressed! When you are on bungie.net, you are on the cutting edge of online gaming, done right and done well. Not only is bungie committed to making bungie.net as good as it can possibly be for today's players, but they are already working on the next step, the next game, the next level that will be closer to perfection.

Bungie has not abandoned us, and they are listening to us, but they have a one-man PR department, a new network programmer and a budget that is being funneled into a huge expansion in employees and resources. They are committed to using what they have learned this time to make a better system next time and they are watching bungie.net very closely. Myth was an experiment in a new genre, bungie.net was an experiment with a new type of service and we are experiencing a new way of playing. And what we are seeing is the beginning, not the end, the start of a new way of thinking about games, not the isolated quirks of an abandoned customer base.

It's easy for me, I have seen the horizon, I know some of what is coming, I have guessed more and I fully expect bungie to exceed what I have imagined. It won't happen overnight, but you will get to watch it happen, you will see each step unfold and, best of all, you get to contribute.

So, welcome to the beta-test, people. You'll have to excuse the mess, pardon the bugs and keep in mind that things may change at any moment. Bungie doesn't just make a game and engrave it in plastic, they are constantly trying to improve things. I mean, look at Marathon, 2 games, an expansion back, a huge map archive, and several third party conversions and a half-dozen liscensed clones later, it is still being improved, so be pateint while bungie takes the time to get things perfect. Bungie is in for the long haul on Myth. The bungie employees are kinda swamped at the moment, so serious bugs may be reported to any dazed admins you can corner. If you have any ideas, talk to one of the many webmasters you'll find hanging around, or go mention them in a forum or two. If you just want to enjoy watching the construction, I'd suggest you get a bunch of friends together and try testing the ranking system, or maybe look for holes in the mesh. Make sure you look everywhere for potential problems, so that they can be fixed eventually, but don't sweat the small stuff, there's always a reset just around the corner...

-Case


 
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