Brad Shoemaker Associate Editor

Now Playing: World of Warcraft (PC), Doom 3 (PC), Counter-Strike: Source (PC) On the WOW Forums, I Am: Always the thankful tester. Sometimes the apologist. Never the whiner, no sir.

It Takes All Kinds

For whatever reason, this seems to be the season for public beta tests. Not open ones, mind you, but some lucky individuals are at this very moment playing highly anticipated, unfinished games in the comfort of their homes, looking for flaws and evaluating game balance. Of course, World of Warcraft is the big one; I myself have played an unconscionable 360 hours of that infernal beta since it started in March (I am not even kidding). The Counter-Strike: Source beta also opened last week to select ATI and Condition Zero owners, and I think a few people have heard of Counter-Strike before, so that one's pretty hot. There's apparently even a Tribes: Vengeance beta coming soon. In any event, there's a lot of free beta action to be had. Good gaming if you can get it.

I know him better than I know my own brother. (Fun Fact: I don't have a brother.)

But if you're really invested in a particular beta test, to the point that you participate in forum discussions of the game, of new changes, of bugs, and so on, you're going to encounter a fringe aspect of humanity, a freak social order in microcosm by which you will be perplexed, enraged, scared, and saddened. Beta-testing communities are, in a word, insane. At least in my experience. The World of Warcraft beta forums are particularly intense at the moment, as countless people argue, flame, complain, and generally act like children about nearly every aspect of the ongoing test—so it goes when you hand the keys to the kingdom over to a passionate assemblage of souls like hardcore MMO players. I don't know how the Blizzard guys deal with it. I also have no doubt that other MMO beta tests have dealt with similarly strong, conflicting personalities in the past, nor that similar things are happening on Counter-Strike forums all over the place. Unless you're looking for a pseudointellectual fracas over character balancing, bug priorities, or theoretical feature improvements, your best bet is to steer clear of these forums entirely. But if you have to visit, here are grossly generalized examples of just a few personalities you'll encounter.

The Whiner

Soulless Dragon demands to knoooooow!

This insufferable lout is the bane of all beta forums, he who makes community managers quail in their boots and fellow forumgoers tear out their hair in clumps. The whiner thinks--sorry, knows--that it's his divine right to play the game, even though he's not paying for it and very likely isn't contributing any bug reports or constructive commentary. The whiner creates useless, clumsy, and poorly written and punctuated forum spam that makes every other reader's time on the board more annoying. Argh.

The whiner was even immortalized in a fairly amusing Penny Arcade strip from a while back. You can't make this crap up, folks.

Whiners come out of the woodwork when a new version of the beta is rolled out, decrying every "nerf" to their favorite class/weapon/etc. and complaining that some other such aspect is now too powerful. Perhaps not coincidentally, these guys also seem to be the ones who have no life responsibilities and thus play the game for greater than 16 hours each day. If only that kind of commitment could be harnessed for the powers of good.

The Apologist

This noble soul is of the purest intent--he or she just wants everybody to shut the hell up and remember that we're all playing a beta, for free, and bugs, balance problems, and unfinished content are a fact of life.

Sometimes, the apologist keeps an even keel amid hordes of whiners, calmly reminding everybody to submit bugs in the game rather than scream about them on the forums. Occasionally, though, the apologist becomes a self-righteous ass who effectively tells the other testers to keep their heads down and get back to work, as if beta testing is their job. Well, no, it's not your job--you're not getting paid for it. If you don't want to play the game, you don't have to. But if you do keep playing, then kick in a bug report or suggestion every once in a while.

The Armchair Designer

Valve is doing a good job of updating CS: Source to fix problems--a patch was out the second day of wide release, addressing the first most-reported issues.

This guy has way too much time on his hands and really wishes he were Will Wright/Shigeru Miyamoto/Rob Pardo/insert famous game guru here. The armchair designer will type up a 5,000-word treatise on the uses of pyroblast without batting an eye, constantly attempting to rewrite the rules of the game as he or she sees fit.

I'm sure I don't speak for everybody here, but I usually can't be bothered to plow through the endless litany of minutiae these guys crank out. I like playing the game and all, but I don't really care to know about lengthy damage formulas or anything like that. Maybe the game's designers read everything; maybe they're even deriving good ideas from this stuff. Fortunately, the intensity of the material means that the armchair designer's post output is relatively low, so it doesn't consume too much of your mental bandwidth.

The Thankful, Industrious Beta Tester

Perpetually on the endangered species list. This is the ideal tester, the person who submits bugs and feedback through the proper channels, posts thoughtful comments on the forums, and never complains. You likely won't find many of these, if any at all. Some say they exist only in legend...

Theoretically, the World of Warcraft and Counter-Strike: Source betas will be ending in a matter of months or weeks, respectively, as the products reach final status and head off to retail. So you may not have a chance to experience such riffraff in relation to these particular games, but there will assuredly be plenty of beta tests you may acquire access to in the future. And the best part of all this? Keep an eye on the games' forums after release; these people aren't going away anytime soon.