-snip!-
Nintendo should have honestly given a lot more time for players to mess around with this than what they gave, because with how little they got feedback’s probs not gonna be all that great.
>Nintendo should have honestly given a lot more time for players to mess around with this than what they gave, because with how little they got feedback’s probs not gonna be all that great.
The GTF wasn’t really meant to be akin to an Open Beta where they would measure out balances and work on those as their priority. Of course they would if they noticed something huge, but there was literally no variation of the equipment or stat boosters that gear would provide. It wasn’t meant to be a metric to balance, it very clearly was designed to test the servers under intense load at various times of the day. Primetime, Early Early Morning and Afternoon.
Condensing play to 1 hour increments would force people to play during those time if they were interested, stressing the servers even more. That was the primary purpose for the GTF, not balancing. They aren’t looking for balancing feedback, at least not presently or primarily. They’re trying to make sure that the game doesn’t crash and burn day one.
HELL YEAH!
Well even then they should have realized they could have used this to kill two birds with one stone and get a bunch of data for any last minute fixes out there. Even more than that this beta was an excellent opportunity for free advertisement of the game that would have surely increased their fanbase immensely if they’d allowed more time. It’s just another showing of Nintendo being kinda behind the times as this really was a good opportunity to really push this game’s fanbase to the extremest of amounts that they kinda failed to jump on with how little time they gave.
Let us say that there is 100,000 people that are interested in playing this game’s demo and they would be willing to go to any length to play it. Just a rough estimate, love. If they had a weeklong open-beta, that would be 24 x 7 hours, or 168 hours of play time.
Let us assume an even distribution of playtime. We can go more complex and write about population densities and hourly active records and all that good statistic stuff, but we don’t have to for this exercise.
If 100,000 people would play around 1 hour total across 168 hours, the servers would average about 595.2381 players at one time. Cool.
Maybe this would be good for -balancing- but this is very very clearly not what they intended.
Now, let’s force the players to play three 1 hour increments. 3 hours to simplify. If those same 100,000 people would play 1 hour of this no matter what, that would average about 33,333.33 players at one time.
Of course you’ll have those that’ll play for 3 hours and those that’ll play one match, but for our control there is a solid 5,499.9993% more stress on the server than the “Open Beta” version of this exercise.
There is no option to kill two birds with one testfire here. That would completely invalidate the point of the Server Stress Test.
There’s a good reason that major companies like Nintendo, EA and plenty of other publishers have a Closed or Open Beta to get data for the express purpose of balancing. This was not an open beta, love.
And knowing Nintendo, they probably had a closed beta of Splatoon running for a long time now. I wouldn’t put it past them…