RSK_Asherz wrote:
It kind of is in beta already... an open beta. Making a separate open beta would just lower the amount of people playing it and increase the time between now and release?
I agree
Beta Testing
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Oct 12, 2017
0
#4
@RSK_Asher (and others) - thanks for the feedback, I hear you loud and clear. For the record, I am definitely not trying to undercut the current disclaimer:
Note: This is a prototype game made for fun and testing. There is a lot of missing features! We are experimenting. We hope you will share your feedback with us.
Perhaps "stable" vs "beta" was a misnomer. I suppose I should have stuck with "primary" vs "experimental" release, and limited the scope of "experimental" to changes in rules/scoring that affect game play (i.e. not bug-fixes or GUI enhancements, which should go direct to "primary" release).
Say the application designers had reason to believe that opening play would become more diverse (and overall play strategically richer) if the cost:benefit ratio of pawn promotion was a bit higher. Perhaps pawns can only promote to rooks. Or just bishops. Or choice of rook/bishop/knight. Or promoted queens have capture-value of +2 points to opponents. Or pawns need to reach 10th rank to promote. Etc.
Independently, the designers also suspect end-game behavior might be cleaner and more elegant if check/checkmate/stalemate behavior was replaced with live-king-capture rules.
In the current environment (using the solitary "4-player-chess" environment), trying to figure out which, if any, of these changes really benefits the game would be a logistical nightmare. I suspect that if the fundamental behavior/rules were repeatedly changed, from one day to the next, the bulk of the end-users would become frustrated enough to stop testing entirely.
I guess what I'm really reaching out for is a means where
1) many such variations can be explored/refined/evaluated independent from (and simultaneous with) the currently-established "baseline" rules.
2) each variation can be made available for a long enough period of time that many users have a chance to give it a whirl
3) minor refinements can be made based on user feedback; for instance, maybe the king-capture rule is improved by setting the value of king to +25 instead of the +20 of standard play.
4) only those experimental changes that get consistent and overwhelmingly positive feedback would be incorporated into baseline "4-player-chess" version for all users to try... bearing in mind that how the change does *there* will be the true determination of whether it's included in the final release
Oct 12, 2017
0
#5
What we need is to get the developers vision of this game. What do they want to achieve? What is the strategic aim (direction)? Some list of their wishes. Then we can help to improve the game in those directions. Now it is just random.
Also it would be good to have some voting for the new features and rules changes. And some announcement of the upcoming changes of the rules.
A recent thread, https://www.chess.com/clubs/forum/view/new-checkmate-dead-king-rule, was capped off with following comment:
We are reverting this back to requiring the king to be captured. We agreed the new rule made positional luck a bigger factor and eliminated some of the risk often involved with capturing a dead king. Thanks for the feedback, guys!
This brought to mind a deeper question. Has the development team considered a voluntary "beta-testing" strategy?
1) Treat the base URL "chess.com/4-player-chess/" as the "stable release". Though it'd still have the same "this is experimental" disclaimer, the stable release should be a version of the code that's been widely vetted as providing great game-play with minimal bugginess.
2) Release experimental/beta variants to side URLs, e.g. "chess.com/4-player-chess/beta1/". For these beta releases:
I think it'd be a mutually-beneficial setup.
For dev team, you'd no longer be limited to the current monolithic architecture that forces the rollout & testing of one combination of code & configuration changes at a time. You could whip up rule variants that drastically change fundamental aspects of the current version*, just to get a feel for how they impact play, without risk of suddenly upsetting entire user base with something that proves to be a bad/unworkable change.
For end-user community, it allows for a clean separation of two types of end users: beta-testers (the kind of person who'd find inexplicable joy in the opportunity to play a variant that, say, rewards points at random, promotes pawns to pieces of the opponents army, and crashes if any knight captures any queen; just for the opportunity to write up bug reports / feedback after said game), and normal people :-). Based on what I've seen in this forum, I'm sure you'd find a small army of 4PC users who'd be thrilled to take on some beta-testing (especially if the "stable" version remained accessible for taking a break from test mode). Conversely, most end users would be happiest to use a stable variant (rarely buggy and where changes of behavior are infrequent and broadly considered "improvements") exclusively.
* In the thread that inspired this, one such proposal that I'd endorsed was an idea of doing away with checks/checkmates/stalemate entirely... definitely the kind of drastic change that you'd want ample feedback on before unleashing it on the community as a whole.