Who turns on their computer more than once after your done putting it togeather/installing windows?

But what you are asking is similar to someone who is "investing" in the company since they have put forth a financial stake in a future outcome.  Which sounds all well and good, but you cannot get clear or affective results from such a skewed audience.  They already believe and want the outcome to be good as opposed to being fair and subjective.  I guess I see it as the goal should be to get good, well written and verbose or just dedicated testers.  People testing your game that have already purchased it are 1) already committed regardless of the turnout so "what do you have to lose by letting them test since they are already on board?" and 2) going want the game to be what *they* want out of it as opposed to what what might be balanced or effective in terms of giving the game a mass appeal.  Beta testers that have already purchased your game could be seen as fanboys and biased from the get go.  Is that really want the company wants out of a stress test, feedback, and a way to truly balance a game for release?

Now don't get me wrong, I think rewarding preorders with a beta key is great, but seeding your testers to be ONLY those people will leave you with yesmen and many patches and fixes post release when your player base evens out.

~hp

P.S.  I have to say, on a side note, that this with DS2 has really dropped the ball after the great start with DS1.

They believe in the gameplay concept. They may not believe in the current implementation. You have a group of people who aren't going to ask for radical rewrites, but instead are going to ask for minor changes to help polish the gameplay. You'll already notice people who have ideas that they want to have changed. Also, becuase they want the outcome to be good, they'll be much more likely to put in the work to make it good and to keep their suggestions in the realm of implementable changes rather than suggesting drastic changes.

Not something I noticed. Everybody wants something different from a game, so why is the group of people with preorders different? In the sins beta, rather unsurprisingly everybody wanted the game to be balanced, and the resulting game was relatively well balanced (discounting a cheap trick that wasn't as easy in beta and a few issues with the advent, who we'd never seen). It's not like people who buy all for some reason hate balance.

You should've seen the amount of unholy hell pathfinding in early versions of sins got. Nothing of the sort you talk about happened.

Showoff

Well, it's apparently worked so far. No real reason to think it won't now.

Is Entroplay a credit card?

If it's a temporary, single-use card number then it probably won't work for a preorder (outside the open window, that is), since it doesn't get charged immediately.

Which one? Running through my list of Stardock games I think had betas, I can't come up with one I wouldn't give significantly better than 85. Of course, you don't advertise hard enough to get the best scores, but still.

[deleted]  double post =/