Latest news about beta-test period

2000-01-09
As a Diablo-fan, the wait for Diablo II has been pretty long. I seems that we will have to wait some more months, but meanwhile I have found a thread in a forum where Mike Huang from Blizzard North give his view of the delays and answer the question why the betatests has not started yet. In short he says that they never will give any space for bugs and that the qulity of the project is the most important factor. Blizzard will never release a "unfinished" product, no matter how long time it will take. 

Below you can read the thread in whole. 

Even though it's a beta and not a demo, we at Blizzard feel that

in order to have a meaningful beta period, we should eliminate as

many known bugs as we can, so that during the beta test, we can

focus our resources on the problems discovered during the beta

test.

Yes, in theory we could release the build that we are working on

this very moment as a "beta version", but we are already

aware of many of the bugs that currently exist, and are in the

various stages of remedying the problems. Releasing the "beta

version" now would no doubt lead to our testers reporting

problems that we are already aware of, and in the process of

fixing, which is not entirely the point of the beta test.

There are a few main things that a beta test helps us find that

we can't do easily in-house:

* Server load issues. We could get all of Blizzard on and that

would give us some idea of what our servers can handle, but in

order to get a more realistic number, as well as an actual

performance assessment of the servers, we have to do real-world

testing.

* Bugs / Hardware Compatibility problems. Even when we go through

our process of cleaning up all our known bugs, there are going to

be some that slip through. Through the beta, it is our hope that

we locate and correct as many of these as we can.

Hardware/Software compatibility will always be an issue, as it is

an unbelievably difficult task to test all possible combinations

of hardware/software in conjuction with Diablo II, but a beta

test certainly helps in that regard.

* Player Feedback. As a developer working on a project, it is

very easy for us to fall into the trap of "This is intuitive

for me, since this is the way it's always been." This is why

player feedback is important, as players can sometimes see

problems and issues that developers overlook, or are just simply

"used to".

So, to put a long story short, we are holding the beta back

because of bugs. It's not because we want to be cruel and 

torturing to our loyal fans, but because our fans deserve better

than to be given a bug-laden product.

We've spent the last 3 years working on Diablo II, and if we were

not Blizzard, it might be an easy thing to say, "ok, put

Diablo II in a box and ship it". You guys have waited for

this title for a long time. Just wait a little longer. I promise

you that when you sit down and play it for the first time, you

will see that the time that we have spent polishing and refining

this game has not been wasted.

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