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mornelithe said:
Torillian said:

Yeah, so while they get to play around with all the MP options, they usually won't get to use the same environment.  Hard to get rid of that problem though because there are never going to be enough review copies to load up servers like a full release.  As far as I know it's usually the same network but under far less stress than it will be at actual launch.  

This is just my experience the few times I got an early review copy though, and is likely not always the case.  

Well, that speaks of some issues right there.  First, you have devs utilizing reviewers as a pathetic means of stress testing?  Awful.  Blizzard uses this bullshit line when they horrifically screw up a launch in WoW (Met a guy on one of their QA teams at Blizzcon, said they usually stress test w/ 30-50 people...what the hell??).  The problem I have with that is devs and publishers (at this point), have laundry lists of people who play their titles (uplay, steam, origin, battle-net etc...), to claim they weren't able to stress test properly, is blatantly false and kind of tells be they're cutting corners.

Actually asked Bashiok (Blizzard/WoW), why they don't simply send out a worldwide communique to all active WoW players and say, we need you to log in on the PTR, and go to this area to fight this boss for X amount of time.  Framing it as a stress test.  You can't tell me several hundred thousand bored individuals wouldn't do it, just for shits and giggles.

Now, for a company like Evolution, they could simply rely on Sony's most avid group of users (going by gamer time/score etc...), and see if they can get people to log in en-masse to do stress testing for a new/upcoming game.  Make them all sign NDA's (or tie it into PSN EULA for those specifics services etc...), and ban accounts if people are posting video (if the company feels that strongly about it).

And reviewers then, at this point, should also know better.  If they know that they're on a sterilize network, that hardly reflects reality...shouldn't they simply scrap all MP facets of the review process until post-launch?  I hate to keep bringing up Driveclub, but, that was a huge failure on Evolutions part, but quite a big failure on reviewers part as well.  Granted, a reviewer will never know that a launch will have issues to the extent that DC did, but the picture they painted was clearly not reality.  And that would push me (if I wrote) to be cautious about MP reviews, pre-launch. 

 

Don't worry, my man. I am certain that BloodBorne won't suffer the same fate DriveClub did. Miyazaki-San has had too much success for him to just create a dud.



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