AI War Beta 5.076 "Clusters Of Pain" Released!

[keith.lamothe]

Being the QA team for a small company is great, isnt it :p

I'm thinking it beats getting 1/20th as much stuff in each patch

[Lancefighter]

well, seeing as we still dont have starship bonus ships.. it makes me wonder as to what you guys are actually doing 

[keith.lamothe]

well, seeing as we still dont have starship bonus ships.. it makes me wonder as to what you guys are actually doing 

Cruising for a bruising, I see

[LaughingThesaurus]

So we pay ArcenGames to QA test their expansions.
Pretty sweet deal all around I'd say.

[Lancefighter]

well, seeing as we still dont have starship bonus ships.. it makes me wonder as to what you guys are actually doing 

Cruising for a bruising, I see

Hey man, just telling it how I see it..

[Faulty Logic]

So we pay ArcenGames to QA test their expansions.
Pretty sweet deal all around I'd say.

Yes it is. And we get a massive one-dollar discount.

I think they are are working on SH, balancing around new constant fleet caps, buffing 10/10 and the homeworlds, getting Pablo Vega to produce more awesome songs, and just generally being awesome.

[Hearteater]

I personally find the Q&A process at Arcen the best and most enjoyable of any game company.  Or any other software company actually.  I like the beta process here.  I distinctly remember being in the WoW TBC beta and providing tons of feedback.  How much was ignored?  All of it.  And a year later, they start fixing problems I specifically addressed with solutions that were pretty close to what I or others in those threads suggested.  Yup, don't miss that at all.

[TechSY730]

Paying to be part of a beta cycle (for a discount) is great so long as you enjoy the game, you enjoy the community, and you enjoy the process (which includes average quality of releases, and responsiveness to feedback by the developers, even if they can't communicate to the players directly).
Arcen has got all of these three things to near perfection.

Too many other companies/organizatins fall between the "fail" and "not all that good" mark on 2 or more of those things. Personally, I only even begin to consider paying to be part of a beta process if all three of those things are at least decent and at least two out of the three are at least good.

[chemical_art]

arcen is the only company I'd dare dream of being part of the beta, and that started  because to keep up with all the awesome expansions you are thrust into being into beta to begin with. Now I eager pay to be beta, but having 1/3 of beta time being free is pretty key to get new ppl.

[Lancefighter]

even CoN was an instant buy for me, and I certainly havent regret that at all.

Somewhat related: On the subject of actually being the entire QA department for a small company.. Can I list that on, say, a resume as something I did? It seems like it probably could be something I could mention, but I am not really sure if its meaningful at all.. Or if its even a good idea to list it "yeah, I played this one game and bugreported a thing or two"..

edit; just looked at changelog:

All fleet ship caps have been adjusted to be multiples of 8 (generally by rounding down, unless something was 1 away from the next higher multiple, in some cases), except for those fleet ships which don't change caps at different unit cap scales.

    This involved about 5 metric tons of relatively minor changes to health, attack power, metal cost, crystal cost and energy cost. Mostly health and damage didn't change by more than 1% in either direction; m,c,e costs vary a bit more but nothing earthshaking. The numbers are internally arranged in a much better fashion now which should help with other changes going forward.
    The main immediate benefit of this is that the ultra-low-caps setting no longer impacts the balance of fleet ship types whose caps are not multiples of 8, because, well, they are now.
    Turrets still need to be done, of course, but I've had enough swimming-in-numbers for one day.
    Thanks to Hearteater and others for the suggestion.

Wow. Looks like you have actually been busy :p

[TechSY730]

    Turrets still need to be done, of course, but I've had enough swimming-in-numbers for one day.

  I can imagine. There are what, 100 or so bonus ship types currently? That would be quite a bit of stat calculation and fiddling work.
When I suggested the multiple of 8 thing in my mantis post, I explicitly said that the per ship numbers didn't have to change much (due to how little the cap strength will change for most ships even with +-7 ships, +-3 if you went with the closest multiple of , but it seems you went the extra mile (or five) and preserved cap stats anyways.
Once again, 

[Lancefighter]

If I'm not mistaken, most of them are ~5% at most away from a multiple of 8, if we assume the 8 happens on high caps (i think thats what was meant at least)

A few border cases of spireships I think though... Hey, anyone up for a game right now?
edit Thats ridiculous, its past midnight on a monday. how would anyone be able to commit to a game right now..

[Faulty Logic]

Some of us are in different timezones. I would be happy to try multiplayer, though I don't have voice chat. I also have no idea how I would join you.

Edit: your edit is quite amusing in context.

[Lancefighter]

do you know how to irc?
arcengames.com/irc/aiwar_irc.php

show up there, do a "/nick thisiswhereyouputyourname", type "lancefighter"

[Lancefighter]

This faulty logic guy has no respect for my disregard of aip