I should qualify that if you aren't giving feedback, it's not like we send goon squads to your house or something.
Really when people sign up with the intent to help us out with testing, that's not really an issue if they wind up not having time -- I mean, life happens, and this isn't your job or something. That goes mainly for people that we already know in some capacity, through the forums or prior bug reports or testing or whatever else. For someone new, if they sign up, take the game, and then give no feedback, that's kind of suspicious because it can seem like they just wanted a free game. But even there -- I mean, I'm not exactly paranoid about that, and if you are new and you wind up not having time, I'm not going to be thinking bad thoughts about you or something.
I should also note that when it comes to giving feedback, it's not something where we expect 100 mantis tickets from everyone or something. Honestly if we had that, we'd go nuts. Having really long narratives of your play experience are also something that is really time consuming for you and us, and doesn't tend to be that useful. Basically, just making a quick note when something jumps out at you negatively, or when you happen to see something positive that you think could be cross-applied somewhere else, or when you have an idea for whatever else. That's all there is to it.
Obviously when you find an outright bug, that's slightly more involved since we need enough information (usually a savegame, or other info) to replicate it.
But in general, it's more of a low pressure thing. Just play, and see what jumps out at you. If something rubs you the wrong way but you can't tell why, THEN doing some more soul-searching and detailed analysis to see why is a good thing.
As opposed to kind of approaching the game clinically from the start, with your rubber gloves on, which gives a different sort of experience than if you were just trying to play the game. I think a lot of people think we expect them to do that, but actually we don't. That changes how the player is approaching the game from the get-go, not always positively. It can make someone really get focused into minutiae and miss larger things that are actually bugging them, for instance. Or it can lead us down ratholes that are something minor that actually causes more problems when we try to solve it, rather than just leaving it alone. Etc.
Granted, it's our job to sort through whatever feedback does come in in order to decide what to act on and when. And we'd always rather have too much than too little (within reason). But I think a lot of folks view the alpha/beta testing like we expect a ten page report from them at the end of each week, and that's really not what we're ever expecting or wanting.
Just some thoughts from my point of view on the other side of this, anyhow. I'm not trying to convince anyone to join the alpha who doesn't have time, but for anyone reading this in general, I thought it might be useful to know our thought process on what we actually are looking for. Later I'll have to clean this up and make it into an actual blog post.
