Zitat von shijng

Schade, dass man nicht mehrere Setups hochladen kann. Gibt bestimmt genug Leute mit mehr als einem Rechner.

Zitat von Georg Zoeller

You may have misread my post, time to clarify

What I meant to make clear, and obviously failed, is that we screen system specs in order to avoid inviting people with incompatible machines at the time.

That doesn't mean we're not inviting people with high end machines (or low end, for that matter).

What is compatible changes as we improve the game and work on it, and for each batch of invites, we recheck - so if, hypothetically, you needed more than 2 GB RAM to run the game at some point last year and therefore didn't make on any of the invites back then - that might have changed by now and you'd be in the pool for invites now.

Let's take another scenario: You have a rare notebook graphics card we didn't support at some point. We think we fixed the issue. At that point, your chances of getting in may temporarily improve significantly as we would probably look for users with that particular graphics card to invite and validate we have solved whatever the problem was we had at the time.

Why we are not publishing an exclusion list of what we're looking for at any given time? For one, it would inevitably be confused and end up as 'The Old Republic's system specs', which we want to avoid. Furthermore, it costs manpower to surface and maintain the public facing list with all the hardware identifiers translated into human form, it costs manpower to answer the inevitable string of 'why am I incompatible' questions, etc. There is just little benefit for us to do that - the current solution works just fine for our purposes - finding enough people to test the game and service.

Also, regarding the perception that regulars don't get in: There's a curious thing that happens once you become part of the test: Rule #1 of the test is that you don't talk about the test. Which essentially means you don't have a lot to talk about with people in General Discussion anymore. It's actually quite hard to separate your insider knowledge and what's common knowledge out there, so almost everyone who joins the test will stop participating in the General Forums to avoid breaking the testing agreement.

This leads to the perception that regulars don't get invited, because you see them posting all the time. It's just that the regulars that start testing often become regulars on the testing forums where they talk about the game specifics / facts and no longer are regulars on the General Forums where people mostly speculate and they have to hold their tongue.

For the 'You need to be a yes man to test' crowd:

No. Your infractions don't count you out of testing (you'd just create a split personality account and play Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with us). Being banned, however, obviously does - and that includes for alternate accounts.

To the 'I have a lot of experience in MMO testing but BioWare invites my lousy friend instead who doesn't care' crowd:

A) We don't have any way to validate such claims.

B) Tests have several axes: Player feedback, automated metrics, and bugs. They are all valuable. Even a player that just plays and never fills out their surveys or gives any feedback is valuable to us in some form because of the playtest metrics they generate. We see what they do, where they get stuck, what classes they play, how they use their abilities, etc. If you add enough random players, these metrics become very powerful feedback by themselves. If you want to answer questions like 'where will people likely quit' the hardcore fan tester often isn't cutting it, because their tolerance for bad things is almost endless.

C) Testers that give exceptional feedback are, of course, very useful. In those cases, we do take steps to retain them.

Ultimately: Random is the method that gives us a good selection of both hardcore and non hardcore people that can all give feedback and requires the least amount of resources.

Hope that clarifies some of it.