You want Playtesters? I need some Developers.

[rpghost]

Greetings,

I'm contacting you cause you are listed as a game developer... As you know it's very hard to find quality play testers for your games. I am on the final stages of setting up a new site to help game developers find people to play test as well as handle the scheduling and feedback processing for these games.

I would like to go live with this site once it has a few games listed in its database. No point in sending players there without any for them to look into playing. So, I'm contacting you directly to point you to the site in hopes that you'll list your game with us.

To add your game go here:  http://www.playtesters.net/addgametype.php

We do not host any images or files so you'll need to point to your site or your BoardGameGeek.com or BGDF.com page. PlayTesters.Net site is for board games, computer games, and pen & paper role-playing games.

Just so you know who I am, you may checkout my bio page at http://www.jamesmathe.com - but in short I'm pretty well connected in the gaming community and run several large websites with lots of potential play testers. I will also be spending some time and money promoting this new site in the next few weeks so your game would get additional exposure.

Thanks for your time.
James
http://www.playtesters.net

[Valamir]

Tell me more.

This is a networking site where you're making resources available to connect game designers with people who want to be beta testers for new games?

[Lance D. Allen]

Ralph,

That's basically what it appears to be, from my first looksie.

James,

I think this is a great idea. With that in mind, I've a couple comments.

First, I think the scope may be a little too big for one site. You're a bit more experienced with this whole community management thing than I am, so it may be that I'm wrong, but that's my impression.

Related to the previous comment, your "list your experience" menu was a real hassle. I decided to limit my scope to RPGs, and even then, it was annoying. It's especially confusing in that you seem to have mixed video games in with RPGs and Board Games (which is what I assume BG stands for) It seems to me that it would be a lot easier for the user to list their experience (and hence make it more likely for them to do so) if you had a smaller dropdown menu to select your category (Board Games, Video Games, MMOs and RPGs) then a longer one to select the specific game.

While I didn't mess with it specifically, the fact that you have the ability to add games directly to the above mentioned list is a good thing. I *assume* that if I added a game to that list, it would automatically populate so that it would be available for every other user? I hope this is the case, because almost none of the games that have come out of the indie and small press communities are represented in that list.

Now for a few questions:

How specifically is the site going to highlight the games available for playtest? I'm going to guess that published, no-longer-in-development games will not be allowed to be added to the site? I see potential for people to begin using this just as a way to organize games of whatever, and I'm curious what measures, if any, will be used to prevent that.

What are you using to encourage people to playtest a game, and give feedback? Is the motivation purely the "beta test" phenomenon, where people will playtest so as to get a pre-release peek at a game? Are you thinking more that people will playtest to be a part of something? Aside from such things, is there any explicit reward offered to playtesters, either via your site (in the form of privileges or status among the related communities, or what have you) or are developers expected to offer some sort of enticement?

I want to pull a question out of my above comments to make it more clear: What needs to happen to add the myriad published indie and small press games to your list of games for experience? Will adding a game to our personal experience list make it available for everyone to choose, or does someone need to prepare an appropriate list and submit it to you or your webmaster?

Thanks for your time.

[rpghost]

Yes, it's a sort of networking site for Designers and people who enjoy playtesting. It's not overly interactive (we don't have blogs, maybe I should add that?)... its really a database of playtesters.

Lance, you're right and I agree with much of your comments... the scope may be to grand - it was originally taken from our RPGRegistry.com site code and maybe i need to trim the data to only be general categories, not specific games. That would help a lot with what types of games you're experienced in and make it MUCH easier to find people who like those kind of games. I'll address that today.

Yes if you add your own game it goes on the list of games people can host sessions for.  So I think I'll allow people to add their own game yet to the list as something they want playtested, but change all the other games to just general types of games. That should cover both grounds.

When you add your own game, there is a flag wether it allows playtesters. If that's on, it shows up in the games wiating for playtest lists and if it's off it does not, though it continues to show elsewhere on the site.

RPGRegistry.com is really meant for organizing any games... this site has that ability but I've been torn as to wether to alllow it as an added feature or remove it. Since RPGRegistry.com mainly caters to RPGs and this new site will cater to a larger crowd of board gamers and computer gamers.

As for rewards, well I was going to add points that are awarded and can be spent on stuff... what stuff or what would be of interest I'm not sure yet. There are though a lot of people who just enjoy helping playtest things that are new. I think just providing early rules entices people to check them out too.

As for your last question, I think it's moot as I plan to reduce that list. Though if i wasn't I'd just need a list of game names in a text file.

Thanks for the input.
James