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Article Synopsis
Baranor shares a few of his experiences as an early Alpha Tester for Guild Wars including discussion of fridge models, head gear, and the resolution of exploits. | |
How It Really Was
So, we had our alpha test, and our beta test, and the game went live, and now we’re having factions. But did I ever tell you how life was during that Alpha test? We were under a non-disclosure agreement, so I could not tell you a lot, but now I can. Life as an Alpha Tester was really varied and amusing for the most part. We worked areas, smacked monsters, traveled over the maps and tested whatever we were supposed to be testing. We leveled our characters, and had a hugely amusing time.
Originally we had only one profession to choose from. At that time (I shall not indulge into writing down the timelines for this. Even though they are quite interesting, they’re none of your business.) we chose a primary profession and leveled in it. Leveling was bound to certain criteria and limits, and we could not access most of the game. In fact, leveling was quite tedious at first. There was not much in the ways of content. It didn’t help for me personally that I was one of the first European testers, and all-call times were at 3 in the night for me. Had to study, so I missed every single all-call. Still, the guys and gals at Arena.net never were bothered by that…. They’re a friendly bunch really, and I felt like part of a game-creating community for a while. Really nice.
But they added a few nice areas to solo in for us European chums, and soon we were on our way. I progressed from level to level, and eventually dressed myself up in nice looking armor, dyed my warrior red and went for it. Since the game was only in its starting phase, there were a lot of loop-holes to exploit. We reported all of them, but instant fixes never exist, so we happily abused until we dropped ^_^. Every so often a message would pop up “A new build of GW is available. Please re-login.”… whether you logged on or not was up to you. Sometimes you never saw anything, but once I woke up in candy-cane land (literally, too bad I don’t have any screenies of that ^_^), and the same went for Halloween and pumpkins everywhere. And then there was the "fridge-incident" in which pretty much everything looked like a fridge. That is, a cubic shape, all white. Didn't have handles though. But it was really odd to kill a fridge and see it drop gold... wish mine did that at home. Did I mention that for a while a paper bag was our most poplar headgear? A paper bag with two holes in them no less. Yes, we could use that for headgear, it set us back 1 gold. I had several dyed ones for amusement value.
The day we got our first emotes was the day everyone went wild. Especially /pickme was hugely popular, as your character humped up and down rather like a puppy, full of enthusiasm, and we used a lot of emotes for the fun of it. As more and more stuff was integrated into the game, we had to keep track and had to update the drivers for our graphic cards pretty much on a daily basis. Routine check: Check for driver updates! If you didn’t, you could enter the game finding that everything looked like a fridge. Literally. Amusement galore as we posted screenshots on the private Arena.net forums. On one particular evening, I had fridges, updated my driver and then for the first time saw the wonderful Guild Wars metallic. My jaw literally dropped, partly because I had never seen that effect before, and partly because it ran smoothly on my PC. I am still amazed today at the programming of Guild Wars. It runs smoothly on my crappy Athlon 850. Like a train, really, rarely dropping below 25 fps.
And all the while, our suggestions were taken serious. Monsters sucky? Monsters were edited. Monster placement off? Placement was edited. Character movement jerky? Movement was adjusted. Bumping issues? Bumping was adjusted, time and again. Clipping? No more clipping! Mission impossible? Mission edited. Towards the end it was hard to keep track of all the changes. And then, one day, I woke up to find my characters had changed completely. Their looks were no longer the same. Gone were the original looks, and the new, current GW look had arrived. Stunningly perfect too, that. We fought interesting new monsters in our new looks, entered new areas and saw some stunning graphics before anyone ever saw them. All in all, it was an amazing time, and I’m glad I got the chance to participate in an Alpha Test for such a good game.
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