Don’t let them string you along
 

For those of you who have done beta testing for years hoping to be hired- STOP NOW. They’re just stringing you along- giving false promises every year so that you can continue doing free work for them.

Mods, I hope you don't lock these threads. Complaining is not against the rules.

Job? I'm still waiting to get my rose garden.

I'm not worried. I'm sure I wouldn't be accepted as a beta tester. Despite all the bugs I've identified in board posts. LOL.

Yea, I'm retired. I only do volunteer work where the reward is nice old ladies giving me a hug.

There are no "false promises". There are no "performance standards".

This is obvious trolling spam and probably another Brad K fake account.

Yes, of course. I joined the board under that ID in 2019, worked my way onto the beta test team, and laid in wait six years for this moment. LOL.

We're pretty sure they're not the same person so don't blame this on Brad K. This was all JudgeGio.

Thank you for your post. I'm quite sure I'm not him! LOL.

Question is, are you Kaiser Soze?

A man can convince anyone he's somebody else, but never himself

I'm in the same reward group as you

Glad to hear you are volunteering.

Where's the link to sign up for beta testing?

Personally, I'm pretty sure OOTP couldn't afford me so it's not an issue. I beta test because I have a mild passion for the game and do a little work on the side to try to make it better.

There's an argument for paying for beta testers / QA but it's not "oh no the volunteers are just getting screwed". It's the fact that when you have an all-volunteer team, they'll tend to concentrate on the things that they're passionate about. We've gotten a lot of work done on the development cycle and historical games, for example, because of the work of a couple of very passionate beta testers (hell, I'll call them out - RonCo and Garlon). I don't think we really have one of those people for transaction AI, for example (that also has the additional issue that it's hard to quantify the way you can by reviewing aging or era stats and so on) so you don't have the kind of "guys, there are 25% too few 33 year olds in my 30 year sim" you often get build after build after build. I think the dev team has still managed to do a lot of good work on that over the years, don't get me wrong, but they don't have that kind of "holding their feet to the fire virtually every build" flavor that a really passionate fan brings.

Also, the place I work at doesn't have a paid QA department (yeah I know) but where we've had them in the past, they generally have a checklist they run through whenever we add a feature or fix a bug. If the feature/fix is consigned to one area they usually don't have to go down the entire checklist but sometimes you do a refactor that touches virtually everything. That's some PITA work that I, frankly, am not cut out for... which alone makes it at least IMO an opportunity for OOTPDev.

Where do you get the idea any beta tester has ever been asked to join the team under the influence of a promise to a job?

Why would they pay you? By that logic, anyone who creates game mods—whether it's stadiums, faces, sounds, or whatever—should be getting paid too. Come on…

I was contacted two or three years ago to beta test, but I didn’t have the time. Even if I had, the last thing that would've crossed my mind was expecting a paycheck or a job out of it. At least you're not paying for the game like you do when "beta testing" an early access title.