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Garriott attacks Tabula Rasa beta

We invited too many testers when the MMO was still broken, says General British

Words: Stuart Bishop, CVG UK
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Dec 6, 2007

Richard Garriott has attacked the beta test of his sci-fi MMO Tabula Rasa, saying that game has been hurt by inviting too many testers.

Speaking about marketing in relation to the game, Garriott said, "I actually think the biggest mistake was made not by the marketing department, but by the development team. We invited too many people into the beta when the game was still too broken."

"We burned out some quantity of our beta-testers when the game wasn't yet fun," he added. "As we've begun to sell the game, the people who hadn't participated in the beta became our fast early-adopters."

Garriott went on to say that the team has had to go back to beta testers and attempt to convince them that the MMO is "fixed" now and they should come and try the game again.

"We've had to go out and develop free programs to invite those people back for free before they go buy it. So the beta process, which we used to think of as a QA process, is really a marketing process", he said.

Tabula Rasa hasn't reviewed too badly, GameRankings.com listing scores at an average of 79 percent. You can read a review here.

[Source: Gamasutra]

Courtesy of CVG

 
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The Knowledge
Tabula Rasa
Tabula Rasa

Genre: Role Playing
Release date: Nov 2, 2007
Published by: NCSoft
Developed by: Destination Games
Designer: Richard Garriott
Min system requirements: 2.5 GHz Pentium 4, 512MB RAM, ATI Radeon 9600/NVIDIA GeForce FX5700 w/128MB of VRAM, broadband
Recommended system: 3.5 GHz Pentium 4 or equivalent, 2GB RAM, ATI Radeon x1800 or NVIDIA GeForce 7800 series video card
Multiplayer Modes:
Online
MMO player MMO
1000s player MMO
8 GREAT
Read the review
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