[bf1942] A plea to Andreas

[Andrew Iain Burnes]

Indeed. Epic Games often releases near-finished versions of their patches
and server installs to a list similar to this in the hope of (not) finding
any potential issues.

-----Original Message-----
From: Mikael Bååth [mailto:mikaelbaath at gmail.com] 
Sent: 08 July 2005 10:58
To: bf1942 at icculus.org
Subject: Re: [bf1942] A plea to Andreas

Simon Garner wrote: {
I agree in principle but I expect the problem would be that the server
updates often require a client update, and while they might be happy to have
Dice release a beta server patch EA would not contemplate releasing beta
client software to the masses.
}

This is not true. If the server has an issue (like a mem leak), it can
always be resolved by patching the server. However, if the server gets a new
version number, maybe the client would be stupid enough to not even try to
connect to it. Simply done by not even making a new version number, since
it's just a fix. If Dice and/or EA has some business rule to their versions
that states that they may not release two different versions of the server
under the same version number, that's an administrative problem, not a
software problem.

Besides, beta, alpha, pre-alpha, whatever it is to be called, is never
released to the masses, it's at best released quietly to the community (like
the good people of this list).

I for one would work as a beta tester for Dice/EA for free. I'm not sure I
can always do better than EAs QA department, but in this case, I'd say I
could.

--
Mikael "FireLynx" Bååth
European Battlefield 2 League founder.
http://www.eb2l.com