The term ‘beta’ has grown to mean less and less in the modern games industry. To developers the label is still an all important benchmark which indicates when a build is feature complete but still laden with bugs requiring further testing and optimisation, however for gamers the word ‘beta’ has become interchangeable with the term ‘demo’, ‘taster’, or ‘preview’. That isn’t a problem if a game is in a good state when it’s opened up to the public prior to launch, but if there are problems public perception can turn from excitement to pessimism in a matter of hours.

This is the problem SimCity currently finds itself in. Reddit currently has a screen capture of the city management sim’s beta build which shows that players are currently experiencing a 20 minute wait before they can log onto the game’s servers and thus begin a 1-hour only taster of the game’s single-player gameplay. Why this has wannabe testers so incensed is that for seemingly no benefit players are being forced to wait to log onto servers, even when they just want to play on their own without multiplayer intervention, with no option to play SimCity offline.

Don’t let this screen capture put you off.

Is this mandatory multiplayer functionality necessary or is it really just another form of restrictive online DRM? Frankly that isn’t really the point, the point is that SimCity’s beta is exactly that, a beta. An opportunity for Maxis to test their online servers in the real world with thousands of players trying to log-in at any one time, record the results and implement improvement to make SimCity’s launch better in March.

Why people are complaining about this in an increasingly self-entitled Reddit comment thread is beyond me as being part of public test initiative is a privilege, not an entitlement. Maxis aren’t charging players to be involved, they’ve opened up servers in order to improve their game and currently very loud detractors are criticising them for that. Those complaints are absolutely absurd and run counter to what the term beta is all about.

The log-in wait is a bit concerning, but Maxis still has enough time to rectify those issues. The data they collect from this beta will prove valuable in discovering those solutions, so everybody really just needs to take a chill pill.

Really the negative perceptions newly associated with SimCity after that screenshot made its way online, are more to do with the public perception of the term ‘beta’ then they are problems with the game itself.

Publishers are increasingly using the term ‘beta’  to get gamers to sample a product for free rather than using the opportunity to gather data which can impact a game’s development. That’s why when there’s actually a beta process where real data needs to be collected to improve a product, it’s inevitable that that product’s reputation takes a substantial hit as testers have become used to a super polished experience.

Publishers have only got themselves to blame for this really, but the gaming masses should be knowledgeable enough to recognise the point of a beta process and give any niggles they come across during sampling the benefit of the doubt. It’s only fair to the developers who have charitably let them in early.

There is an additional dimension to this weekend’s event however, as there are reports of EA admins allegedly banning anyone who complains about SimCity’s online-all-the-time structure on the game’s official forums. This is troubling, as the whole point of a beta is that testers are actively encouraged to offer up feedback on their experiences, albeit in a restricted private forum, so banning them for this act is also again the nature of what a beta is about, but then that user did post his complaints onto a public form so the response isn’t entirely surprising.

There’s lots of negativity currently swirling around SimCity and its ongoing public beta, so one has to wonder whether it was worth putting together in the first place.

Ask any developer whether online betas are important and they will tell you definitively yes, it’s only the relative immaturity of both publishers and gamers that can cause negative feelings to sully the reputation of a product that is still in development.

Betas are a good opportunity for players to help a game which they care about get better and progress, but if we spit in the face of that access privilege by posting our opinions on public forums like Reddit, 4Chan, or whatever than those opportunities will inevitably start to go away and that would be a bad thing for everyone involved.