Our feelings about Beta Invite complaints

I've read several posts that have some pretty negative comments about how we're handling the Closed Beta invite process.

We have more than doubled the number of keys that we intended to give out in this timeframe and this is causing a massive strain on our time as we try to scale up to deal with the amount of feedback we're getting from the testers. Our initial estimate was that we'd give out 100 keys per day. So far, after five days, 1250 people have access.

Please note that we're not running into server scaling issues. The technology can support hundreds of thousands of users. With this stage of Closed Beta, we listen to each person's opinions individually. We put developers in the Closed Beta discussion threads who ask many questions about the problems and try to resolve each issue. The game is not complete, but we're using this feedback to mould it to what the community wants.

If we invited ten times as many people, we'd merely get times as much support nightmare and massive duplication of the number of issues that are reported. We'll scale it up once the initial issues are solved and most players are having a streamlined play experience.

So given that we have a limited number of keys to give out, we had to work out the best way to distribute them. We initially intended to just distribute them entirely with the timer, but you've seen what type of response there was to that. Even after fixing the timer to also invite veteran users, we received feedback that it wasn't fair.

People probably don't appreciate this, but we've hand invited dozens (if not a hundred) users based on great posts on the forum in the last week. Although there's a degree of arbitrariness to it, so many people have been rewarded for helping others out and explaining the game. Obviously this has missed many valuable community members, but we just can't invite everyone yet.

We've put keys all over the internet in an attempt to distribute them fairly to each group that has wanted them. So many forums, social networks, livestreams and fansites have been given keys to help spread to their users so that those people have a slightly better chance than the timer.

Regardless of all the external keys given out though, the users on our forums stand BY FAR the best chance of getting access.

The reason we prefer slightly random approaches for our public giveaways (for example, asking for comments about why you want a key, and then picking randomly from the best) is that it's trying to avoid the complaints about why we picked one person over another.

We have been criticised by a few users for using our keys as a publicity opportunity (giving them away to fansites and such). Please understand publicity is absolutely mandatory for Path of Exile to succeed. The game is free, and hence relies on exposure to a large userbase to be successful. If we keep it an elite club with only 10,000 people, we won't be able to recoup our investment and won't be able to support the game in the long run. We're very keen to make it successful and to deliver the game you've all been waiting for.

I do really like the idea of running an actual contest based on knowledge of the game. I'm going to talk to the guys about this and see what we can do. We could even turn the timer off for a day and give out all those keys to people who are the first to answer specific hard questions about Path of Exile.

At the end of the day, there will be people (58,000 of them?) who have not been invited yet. Those 58,000 people will probably be upset regardless of what decisions we make to hand out keys.

Please be patient and your turn will come as we scale up over the coming months!

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Crusx wrote:

I'm fine with the idea of the random timer, but is there a way to exclude accounts that have been inactive for an extended period of time? Some of the accounts being given keys have been inactive for 8 or more months, which is more than likely the main reason for so much negative feedback toward your method.

Seriously, most of those people are still active according to our analytics. They just don't log in to their site accounts.